Marc Anthony Richardson
Lacus Mortis
I am halfway through. I have just passed the candelabra and you are growing larger. You are embedded inside an encrustation of undyed linen, impeccably white in contrast with the pure darkness of your skin, the grayness of your bargain-basement suit, the blood red slit of the silk tie and the black shiny shape of the open casket, ruffle-brimmed, with lid interior lined impeccably white as well; I see a titanium-colored bar along the length of it and where your feet are there is a white sheet hanging over the side at a right angle like the drape of a tablecloth or a dinner shirt untucked. No: you are blackberry pie filling a raven a personification stuffed inside a dough-frilled pan and waiting to be covered with more of the same, waiting to be pushed inside flame and hellish Fahrenheit—and yet on the threshold of this long bright room I first noticed the eleven chairs, six on one side and five on the other, how they’re spaced to support the walls and no one else: the walls would’ve followed me without them, I know, come closing in like a compactor of condolences with every step I took towards you. There were only four provisional lights on, two electric candelabra in the middle of the room, rising from opposing walls, and two tall standing lamps at the far end, sentries or doormen you could say, one on either side of him who has already passed through. The elderly man the pink-white man who prepared you, the director, had asked me his patron for his pardon as he moved to turn on more lights, two fluorescent overhead lights and two more lamps between the candelabra and the doormen, no doubt thinking that one should have more lights when viewing the beloved—as if a flood of wattage can lighten the load of the weeper who is also the consumer. Don’t, I tried to say, don’t turn on any more lights—my god, I don’t want to feel like I’m in aisle five with flour and pie filling with sugar and spices and panic attacks; yet already he had and this makes me resent the old faggot. Although I know in my heart of hearts he isn’t severe he’s effeminate, mottled with rosacea and aging and kind with clean cuticles of conscience, with almost a half a century of soil in his blood in this business—and yet also I sense upon his fall of silence fresh cries crushed by the tight-lipped mouth. For what? for whom? who knows? But it is for this reason and this reason alone that I’m purchasing his services. I am the weeper. I am the consumer.
Standing over you I turn: sitting beside the entrance is the director in the twelfth chair, separate from the eleven, and this too makes me resent—no pisses me off: I want to be alone with the body, you fuck. You should know. Forty-five years of accommodating customers, you should know. But I don’t say it because there are already those ten pristine fingertips shaping a form in the back of my mind, harboring a heart, and then the white snowcapped skull I see and Saturn Devouring His Son so avariciously that I long to scream into the white sheet and to swallow myself with sleep. I return to you. Other than for the faux nose, fired clay persuasively painted, it is how it is always imagined, isn’t it? The whole body lies in impeccable taste: suit and tie, (lift the sheet) shoes shined for the shoeshine boy at heart, a skillfully trimmed mustache and—wait? What? I asked for the goatee, you were growing a goatee, you never grew one; I have one—why didn’t he keep the goatee? He asked me if I wanted to keep it and I told him to; the firstborn was sitting across from us at the restaurant table; he heard me. But of course: the firstborn. That was why he walked the director out into the parking lot while I stayed behind waiting at the table, the lastborn waiting for the banker firstborn to return and settle the estate. What estate? He walked him out into the parking lot to tell him to take off the goatee; he had no right—he’s jealous; everyone wants the dead to look like them. Although face to face, mirror to mirror, I am recognizing the resemblance: I am looking down into that face (without its glasses and without mine) at my face (not the firstborn’s face) mirrored a million mirrors away—and I find it hard looking into the face of the dead when the face of the dead looks like me. Your eyes are going to open up and grab me, I just know. Yet deep down down deep, elicited from this facial tranquility, there is an utterance in me, a word an unpronounceable word which I can only here pronounce: Papa?
Your leg is so hard I start crying. Stop. Turn: the director is gone, removed from his seat, and this makes me respect him even more. Respect? Resent? The difference is the same. I don’t know why I touched your leg—whim? magnetism? force of nature? Never even touched your legs in my life, never even thought to. No. I touched one once before, way back in our house, grabbed it really from the side while I was down there on my knees, frantic: I was bawling with snot seeping out of my nose, crawling around on all fours, naked from nap to toe with swells on my back swelling, my arms my legs my face, puffy strips of leavened flesh the width and breadth of a man’s belt and you wearing as always your white V-neck T-shirt—naked from the waist down—with your manhood showing. You were wild. While you were ripping into me with leather I seized the leg closest to me to get closer with your savage uncircumcised sex dangling overhead as if it were the Sword of Damocles on a string of horsehair, and hugged it tight real tight, hoping you would keep beating me, hoping you would breathe harder so that in crazed exhaustion you might make a miss and sting yourself instead. Or retire. It is so hard, the leg, like a block of wood. I knock dully and cry again, choking sobs; it is so hard. Once more I move to lift the sheet. Look at your shoes. I need shoes. I think of taking your shoes.
Before being moved through this long bright room by some postmortem magnetism, while in the lobby of the parlor, I had asked the director to take me to the room where the body was prepared, for after hearing about your adornment I was a little resentful that he had ignored my original request: the day before at the restaurant table, as a student of anatomy, I had specifically asked the dotard to let me see my father unadorned undone denuded: I’ve drawn from dead bodies before. Well, I almost drew from one once. I was set up in front of it and everything, easel out supplies splayed paper prepared, and with the overhead light on full blast to help lighten the load with the stark commonness of a grocery aisle when it dawned on me: I’m supposed to be somewhere else. I was supposed to be over in this really finicky faggot’s apartment, a real flamer a painter, we were supposed to be posing each other in the nude and already I was five minutes late and across town. Let me see. It is June. It was last December—during the end of my future—when after studying the works of Tisnikar, an alcoholic empath, a deceased Slovene mortician (the Painter of Death he was dubbed, for he had only painted the people he prepared as he imagined them in life or in afterlife and with the murky aqua and earth tones of his drab slab room), as a first-year student, I was able to pull some strings based off my talent to visit the medical research ward associated with the Academy—a privilege reserved for third- and fourth-year students; and after wheeling out the cold cuts of a cadaver and peeling back the pale leathery skin to study the inner mechanics of a thigh and a leg I found myself sitting down there in a basement with a winter jacket long johns and a ski cap on, ready for the long haul, but as I was trying to make my appointment, as I was pushing this body back, a woman’s a pale Boricua with an algae-colored ring rounding her neck, the crime of passion, as I was trying to push this big curvaceous body back into this big rectangular container of broth this female attendant came in—and I don’t know whether it was the fear or the formaldehyde but I had to pull myself together because I was crying. I didn’t say this at the table of course. All I said was that I’d drawn from dead bodies before. For this is something we have in common, I wanted to say, but didn’t, to the director: I’m a draftsman of the human form and you’re a restorative artist, a man trained and skilled at molding human features from wetted clay to be fired in a kiln and then cooled and painted with proper pigmentation, for use as a nose that had been bashed in or a hand or an ear that had been snatched off to console the inconsolable, to forever embed an unblemished image into the hearts and souls of them, for your finely crafted faux noses and ears and hands will be more than capable of weathering the underground or the vaults as bone pottery, or simply given back to flame—although never annihilated: either or your exhibitions will always be for one viewing only. Instead of mentioning this common interest I just said that I was a student of anatomy, because after asking if I could see my father unclothed undone denuded the director’s facial features appeared quite quirky to me. There was no food on the table, I was proper about that, although the director wouldn’t be eating anything anyway—even so his stomach must be extraordinary—and I don’t really care about the firstborn: all I knew was that I needed to see it unclothed untouched unaltered in order to properly work the craft. Were you very close to your father? the director asked me, right in front of the firstborn who just kept his hands folded atop the table with an impertinent face, and I said yes. I was. Close enough to choke him. So no I did not mind being frank, nor did I think it inappropriate, my father was my father and you would have never minded me seeing you naked in death, for I had seen you exposed in life.
I am stroking the human hair. The only human on you. It is as soft as a babe’s and yet was wooly once, stubborn with nigger knots, naps in the kitchen, and stroking it I know you must be smiling: You are the only man, you once said to me, who I ever let stroke my hair. We weren’t fighting we weren’t drinking we were just sitting and talking and smoking cannabis dipped into embalming fluid inside one of your many shitty apartments, and on your bed over scattered textbooks and an open holy book (you were studying at Geneva then, a seminary) you talked about god and life and loneliness, about your fear of being misunderstood, about how your dream was to have your grandchildren cry and throw up on your breast and how you wanted to die while changing your clothes and dart for the sun like a diamond; and before I left you asked about this drawing of mine, this densely cross-hatched drawing of a bull elephant head with a graven image of a calf lodged in his forehead, but since it was a drawing I had made for the mother, instead of saying that I couldn’t offer it to you or offering another, I just stroked your hair in the doorway and we embraced. We kissed. It was a holy kiss. Full of what may be betrayal, but what may also be blood. I let go and the next time I would hear from you would be over a year later with a background of screaming on my end of the phone and a background of screaming on yours, both bedlams bickering across our conversation, for I was on that island of a city that monstrous American city in the one of the five boroughs, working in a residence for the retarded, while you were a resident at a sanitarium for the insane: it all had something to do with a girlfriend and her son and you arguing with him, a live-in in his mid-twenties then, and the son running out after you with a blade and you getting hit by a car and the cops showing up with a nigger or two on their tongues and with you being you and the cops being cops you were beaten and detained; yet instead of jail your biblical rants had enrolled you in a laughing academy where you were crucified and twisted back into shape—at least for a time—by the sleek boneless words of the nubile nurses, by the unprofessional humaneness of the young black doctor who reminded you of your second son, by the flying acrobatic tears of the old white man on the bed beside yours with lice in his beard and dandruff on his pillow, by your bi-polar counterpart who had just lost his daughter to salvation which led to starvation during a religious retreat out there in the desert wilderness of the Mojave, a fanatical purging for forty days and forty nights, which reminded you of your baby sister Omega who had died of malnutrition when you were in the ninth grade, of how you cut class and cried, wandering down north Broad Street until an aging preacher, a white man, caught up and decided to wander with you.
The eyes stray and I see the size of you when full of blood, your membrum virile, and how sensitive a prepuce might’ve made you and I wonder about this, being circumcised myself: if I could’ve been more sensitive. I want to touch you I want to hold you but I’m afraid you might’ve been petrified. There is no smell to you and your hands are ashen, crossed over each other over the belly, and when I place a hand over them they are the same average size: on the white-hand side of these dark philosophers these gardeners of thought there are the dark-lined fortunetellers who after a foreseeable slap would turn the color of sunburn on the palest of whites; but the body has been evacuated of blood and the fingers are wrinkled in contemplation, still centupling some tender touch: The sun rises and falls on your mother, you once said, during a time of low, and yet as softly and swiftly as you said this you made a sincere accusation against her fidelity. I accept the similarities but our scars vary—and look: the nails are uncut. Dirt has crawled underneath. As if already you are trying to find a way out before you are even in. So: even in death you’re dense. You’re not going into the ground. I’ll make sure. My father is going to burn.
There are two rings, one on each ring finger as though you were wedded to two opposing personalities: the right ring is from Geneva, encrusted with a sparkling sapphire, a deep purplish blue eye surrounded by an island of pure silver, and the other is from the College of Bible, the first seminary, fourteen karat gold and encrusted with an unidentifiable scarlet stone—over twenty-five years ago my mother earned you that ring. You were working a lot. You were a foreman in production control at Meddle Tool & Model Company an all-black company owned by a white who had lifted you from a blue collar to a white, from a machine shop to an office chair, for you were humble he had said. And so your wife had to study for the both of you because the two of you were enrolled together—and yet you denied it. Men rarely say the truth, she said to you, unless it’s to back up a lie, and as I’m pressing a cheek against your chest I can still hear the same dead silence in response. Such a good heart a feral heart a wild organ of play, until it had to undergo a surgical procedure and was attached to an artificial pacemaker, and almost at the precise moment—the very high point of the obsequies—when your own father was being lowered into the earth: the two events occurring only an hour apart. You never got to see your father’s funeral; you were too busy dying. It would be several days after the fact while sharing a hospital room with a saved suicide that you would break down to call your stepmother only to hear that your father was already rooming in the earth, but then she would tell the firstborn and he would tell the ex-wife and the ex-wife would tell the second son and me—and yet at separate times the ex-wife and the second son were the only ones who went to see you. After years of being crippled and alone that woman had hobbled down there to see the only man she has ever loved, but you were sleeping and when she came back the next day you were gone. The sun rises and falls on your mother, you said, during this time of low, for you were convalescing in a transitional home for addicts and homeless men and after years of living in a house with a spouse in separate rooms, bound by mortgage not marriage, years after its foreclosure, you had finally yielded to my request to ask her out, but then you backed out. Yet before we found you in the hospital we didn’t know where you were. You were missing. When we wanted to find you you were nowhere to be found; we feared you were being stubborn or bi-polar or dead. For it’s easy to miss someone when they’re missing. It’s hard to miss them when they’re not gone.
How heavy are you? I am thinking you were about five-ten and two hundred and forty-five pounds in life, but in death you must weigh a ton. The director told me back in the preparation room, a large glaucous shower stall postered with exclamatory signs and equipped with wall tiles exhaust fans and drains (I was preparing to see you), that for every high index of formaldehyde, for every sixteen ounces of that noxious gas mixed with a cocktail of arterial fluids, preservatives germicides anticoagulants dyes and perfumes, it took a good portion of water to work them throughout your entirety via veins and arteries and then expelled through the jugular by use of a heart pump and embalmer, a Crockpot set on a black cement base with a round white gauge and dark starlike dials and a long rubber tube attached to a needle—or something like a needle—hollowed out like a viper’s fang for easy insertion inside the neck’s carotid; and since sixty-four ounces of these eternal fluids were required it took a good four gallons of water to complete the feat. Your system is completely depleted. The inflexibility of the body is perfect. Not all the water in the world can save you now, nothing in you is unduly rotting, nothing in the body or the lining of the belly itself is harboring even the tiniest of organisms, not a single solitary drop of fluid exists: everything has been flushed out sucked out siphoned exsanguinated. Not even a leftover fart. Only the weight of the empty. He weighs a ton, the director explained, his skin is as tough as a leather belt and every muscle and tissue is firm and hard and over time would become even firmer and harder. Your leathery hide would cheat and retard decomposition for a good number of years and the worms would have to wait, but you’re not going into the ground, in spite of what the family might say, in spite of what the firstborn has said. You left me in charge. Not him. And the second son’s away so he’ll just be happy to see the body—if we can pay for him to see the body. Our earthly father will go up in smoke and there’s not a goddamn thing they can do about it. They can call me a heathen or a bastard all they want. But I am a heathen and I am a bastard.