How Winter Feels in June

Yet again, I found myself roaming last night, digging up bodies in unlikely places. There’s some wicked biological refuse where you’d least expect. I’ve found a bread-loaf-sized dog with a smashed-in skull by the river, eye sockets full of clay; a horned goat in a shallow grave near an airport access road with the last scraps of hide clinging to its hooves; and, my personal favorite, a disembodied forearm with a silver ring gripping the index finger. Embossed on the ring are eleven images of Siddhartha sitting in meditation. I wear the ring on a tarnished silver chain around my neck now.

Digging calms me.

As I pushed into my fifties, and the pleasures of sleep faded like denim or tattoos inked in summer, late walks took me deeper down unfamiliar streets, a headlamp bobbing across the neighbors’ blank glass windows. At first, when I left my little cottage, I did so empty-handed – just picked out a star and followed it until my feet got sore, then returned for a few hours of rest and a warm Epsom salt soak.

The bodies present themselves as itchy spots of earth. I don’t know how else to put it. I walk and walk and every so often there is a tickle in between the hemispheres of my brain that whips itself into mental poison ivy as I approach. The feeling is both in me and there, on the ground: imperative, tinnitus whine.

The first time it happened I ran moaning through the woods, tripping over fallen branches, leaving tufts of my jacket’s goose down caught in the brambles. I collapsed to my knees that night, launching great clods of dirt into the air with my bare hands. Four inches down was a freshly buried canary. I cradled the poor thing for an hour, asking myself questions without answers: who buried you? How did you come to die? Did your cage feel like the whole world to you? You’re never too old to uncover a new hobby.

After that first time, I bought a shovel from the hardware store, short enough to sling over my shoulder without striking the naked tree branches above me and light enough to cradle for hours. Such a shiny blade. Now it’s dull and chipped around the edges.

Before last night, I’d never dug in a graveyard. The itch never drew me to one. No surprises to unearth, maybe. I think the itch only wanted me to discover, root out mysteries and puzzle over them. And I wasn’t so much in the graveyard as on its outskirts by a stand of sad pines – thin and random trees like a fifteen year-old’s stubble. I dug like a much younger man last night. I think I knew, even in the moment, that I’d never dig again. The overturned dirt smelled like gray November.

* * *

I knew a woman who lived by a graveyard – dated her for a month, when I was twenty-two, towards the end of my penultimate semester at a large Midwestern university. E and I took her two dogs (Maxwell and Casper) for walks in the fresh snow draping the graves by her house. The dogs loved it, leaping at tennis balls in explosions of white. And the humans were content enough: laughing at the dogs and anticipating our personal romp to come. The warm, bed-based kind of romp, between consenting adults.

“Adult” was a word I’d only just started applying to myself. E was definitely an adult: ten years older than I, a former geriatric nurse, in the middle of a career change and her second divorce. She first married at eighteen to a much older man – “you can imagine how that went,” she said with an eye roll. I could not. She claimed Cherokee blood some generations back, and I never had a reason to doubt her.

E and I encountered each other in a literature course, in which we read Baudelaire and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. We both got angry at uninteresting adverbs and characters “exclaiming” in dialogue tags. Our first extracurricular meeting didn’t go how either of us had planned.

We met for coffee. She came to my apartment where I was stoned and grinning, making unsettling eye contact but too high to engage in an actual conversation. E told me she’d grown up in a church where those who were in touch with god spoke in tongues or sacred-sounding fragments – Death, where is your sting. Flesh of light. Thy word.

“The whole town was there every Sunday. Once my dentist – Dr., umm, Kolash – collapsed in the aisle and started pumping his legs, like he was running to Jerusalem – or escaping just ahead of something serious.” E paused to plunk an ice cube into her coffee cup, “he tore his khakis on his keys or the pew, scratched his thigh up like a bastard. Didn’t stop him though.”

I bobbed my head like some red-eyed mystic and tried to think of a reply, “Mmm. Huh. What color was his underwear?”

She left the apartment after ten minutes. I ate the banana bread she brought, alone.

God, but I was a cocky twenty-two year-old. I don’t know why E gave me a second chance. I don’t know why I took it.

The neck muscles of newborn babies are stringy and, as of yet, unable to carry a head. When I was born the doctors swaddled me in a blue-trimmed hospital blanket so only my amniotic fluid-sticky, puckered raisin-y face peeked out. My familial clan gathered around the clear plastic crib; grandparents, father and sister, uncles and aunts (pronounced like a ghost’s favorite third person indicative: haunts) all remarked on how calm I, baby-Connor, was. Little has changed.

“You just stared up at me,” my mother said, years later in a downtown coffee shop between errands, “looking around, drinking in everything you could, I guess. Pursing your little lips, using your eyelids for the first time. Do babies really perceive things or are they like puppies? Or moles? Blind, I mean.”

“I don’t know, mom.” A pop science magazine about connective tissue, which I used as a telescope, the legacy of coffee mugs ringed on the cover, unrolled by degrees on the table between us.

“Well, you seemed to be seeing me. Actually paying attention to, and understanding what I was feeling. Or at least ready to listen.” The magazine relaxes towards flat in spasmodic jerks.

“What were you feeling that I picked up on?” I said. She huffed a little and adjusted her chunky, geometrically neon wristwatch, ticking off seconds.

“I was exhausted – happy – but scooped out, thinly spread mustard. I had just gotten used to the idea of a boy – I wanted another girl.” My mother chuckled and patted my hand so I’d know she was teasing.

“Well, mother, I’m glad I could be so sympathetic for you, straight out of the blocks like that, and give comfort. Or whatever.” To end that sluggish unfurling, I thumbed the first few pages of the magazine. “Did you know that there are forty-three muscles in the human face?”

“Hmm. You might have been comforting, if you didn’t look so serious. Like, ‘whoa, baby-Connor, crack a smile and get comfy, because we haven’t even started.’ I worried that you’d already lost faith in me.”

I thought about that for a while as I chewed on an ice cube. “I’m content with being male. Plus, I’ve presented you a vastly different set of worries and parenting issues than Cory did,” Cory: my elder sister and rival – raft-buddy during the tumultuous parts of our overlapping childhoods – “I kept you on your toes. Evidently one quarter of a human’s bones are in the feet.”

Then my mother put her hand back on my forearm. Her brow flexed, pulled together. She looked at me like she knew that, one day, I’d dig up bodies instead of sleeping.

* * *

“Crush that butt, retard, or the gravekeeper will call the cops on us.”

And that’s when I knew the gravekeeper was going to show up.

Four slight shadows swooped right for me last night, out of the woods and toward the hole I’d dug – a mound nearby like a negative image. One shadow smoked a cigarette. I lay my shovel aside, deadened my headlamp, and sat by the lip in wet grass, folded my legs like the figures on my ring, and breathed.

In through the nose.

Out through the mouth.

The shadows sucked up light, taking shape. Four high school students, judging by the sweatshirts two of the boys wore. Three boys and a girl. The girl held a boy’s hand in each of her own; she swung their arms in tendon–creaking 120-degree arcs. The fourth shadow stood ten feet to the northeast, still smoking his cigarette despite his friends’ warning. What makes you think they’re friends?

But then they were on me. All four stopped at the exact same moment.

First voice: “Who the fuck is that?” Bold. Angry for no reason. I knew the hand not holding the girl’s was clenched into a fist. He seemed to think that swearing indicated sophistication. “Who the fuck is that?”

Second voice: “Gravekeeper, must be.” Nervous. Ready to run for no reason. “Come on, guys, let’s fuck off.” But nobody moved.

Third Voice: “He’s got a shovel.” Flat. Impartial as camera film.

First voice: “You the guy that runs this place? You digging a grave or something?”

“No,” I said. If I’ve learned anything in half a century of life, it’s that power comes from information withheld.

Fourth voice: “Please, can we go back, I don’t care about this anymore, I am a baby, I’ll admit it, let’s just go.” Earnest. The girl let one of the boys loose. Together, she and one of the voices turned and retreated, half dragging and half being dragged back into the dark. The smoker moved, as if to follow, plastic rustled and glass bottles clacked against his leg, but kept still, the freckle on fire winking out in uncut grass.

First Voice: “Well, what are you doing out here? Why are you sitting here like a goddamn freak?” His voice was rising.

“Practicing sitting meditation.”

In through the nose.

Out through the mouth.

Third voice: “Why do you have a shovel, then?”

First voice, loud: “Yeah, what’s with the shovel, man?” The third voice hushed the first, calling him Jake.

“Digging meditation.”

The voices let a quiet collect between us; together, we heard a truck engine cough and catch, headlights spattering on the rows of tombstones that popped out of the ground like summer stalks of corn.

* * *

E and I ran into each other at the Rabbit House Mansion, a house on Jefferson St. that threw parties, and the occasional punk show in the basement – cave paintings and nineties cartoon characters splashed on the stonewalls. That night a folk-type singer, who styled himself as HeavyPetting, bummed everybody out somewhere in the bowels of the house.

But before she tapped my shoulder while I waited in the line to the bathroom, my soul-buddy, JG Stretchman told me why he refused to contact his parents. This was only six months before JG had the first in a series of psychotic episodes and developed an obsession with the number forty-three. Back when I believed that this story might still have a happy ending.

“I don’t know. Really, Connor, I want to call, I know I should call, I just can’t. They’re trying to destroy me – get me zonked on lithium at the least.” We were smoking cigarettes in someone’s bedroom, trying not to ash on the rug or set a Tarantino film poster on fire, and waiting for several thousand milligrams of gabapentin capsules to hit our bloodstreams. Gaba is prescribed to epileptics and recovering cokeheads, but when taken in massive quantities, gives the user a euphoric sense of floating out the back of his own skull, if that makes any sense. Mouthfuls of whiskey helped.

“You really have to call them,” I said. “Your mom keeps texting me like I really am my brother’s fucking keeper and it’s my mortal mission to make you a good little JG Stretchman.” I crushed my cigarette and dropped the butt into an empty beer can on the desk. “I look pretty dumb when I tell her you’ll call and then you don’t call.”

“Connor, you don’t get what it’s like to talk to that woman. It’s all, ‘Earth is just a waypoint on the path to the greater glory of God’ and then she gets all pissy and judgmental when I’m like, ‘Hey, mom, maybe it’s not a good idea to tell your chemically unbalanced son that everything gets better after death.’”

JG ground his eyeballs deep into their sockets. He sighed and bit at his chapped lips. I’ve never had a friend who didn’t habitually think about killing him/herself during at least one chapter of his/her life. I had a standing suicide pact, signed and shaken on, in four or five different neighborhoods by my senior year.

“Then she brings my siblings up, how they miss me and shit. And I yell at her, ‘You’re the one who told me I couldn’t see them in the first place!’ Goddamn. I don’t want to call.”

JG’s sweater looked a lot fuzzier than it had five minutes before. My dumb fingers fumbled to unscrew the whiskey bottle. Gaba. I smiled, showing all the teeth I had.

“Did I tell you? That my mom waited a week to tell me that she put my dog down?” I said.

“Since when? Your dog is dead?”

“Week and a day, I guess. I loved that fucking animal, too. Skipper. The destroyer of tennis shoes and shedder of much hair in the backseat of my car.” Sometimes a good dog behaves like a bad dog. I lit another cigarette.

“My family sheds, too.” We were both grinning.

“No, I have a point, I mean, she didn’t tell me about Skipper because she didn’t want to have that conversation and upset me.”

“We never had a dog: Maddy and Christopher are allergic,” said JG.

“Listen, JG, listen, Skipper is just a symbol – now,” I said. A blue wave threatened to drown my lungs and burst through my ribs like barrel staves.

“Fuck your symbols,” said JG. We crushed our cigarettes. My argument died with the cigarette’s red nose.

“What I’m saying,” I said, “is that you’ve got this dead dog of a bipolar funk hanging in between you and your mother –”

He broke in, “Not to mention Thanksgiving and all the rest.” JG would spend next year’s Thanksgiving and a large part of December in a psychiatric ward, his mental health decomposing like all organic systems, going from bad to so much worse.

“Not to mention what happened at Thanksgiving,” I repeated, “which I don’t recall the specifics of right now, but all these unspoken issues hanging between you two just rotting away. The longer you leave it dangling there un-dealt with, the more rancid and corrupt the eventual reveal will be. It could retroactively ruin some respectable memories – Did I ever tell you that once Skipper dragged a dead coyote out of the woods while my aunt was taking prom pictures? Blue tie. It was wicked. Hated proms, though. Anyways, I gotta piss.”

My fingertips sweated and tingled. I stood up. My heels felt like they were floating on airstream stilettos.

Rabbit House Mansion was packed. The hallways and living room swarmed and buzzing. But I didn’t bump into anybody; nobody bumped into me. Spilled beer deviated from its trajectory and splashed up someone else’s red pumps. I was isolated, warm inside a pocket atmosphere.

That was a good year for coke dealers. The line for the bathroom reflected that. Single dudes, couples and gaggles of women in unseasonable skirts staggered out of the door, wall-eyed, stuffing keys into back pockets or tiny purses. The wall leaned in on me, kissing my shoulder while the line crawled on. Zoning was easy.

Until someone tapped my shoulder. E.

“You owe me, mister.”

“Oh? Why do you think that?” I focused on keeping my face pleasant-neutral, like a pebble tossed by the current onto the riverbank.

“For last time. The awkward giggling, vague, dodgy answers to personal questions – like a freaking CIA agent getting grilled by a senate subcommittee, the overall queasy feeling. Coffee, remember?”

“E, if you have a problem with my behavior, then that is your problem. From my perspective, I don’t owe you a thing.” E lost her quarter-smile real fast. Her nostrils yawned like blunderbuss muzzles.

“Prick.”

“Yeah, some people are of that opinion,” I pulled from the whiskey bottle without breaking eye contact.

E bunched the muscles of her neck, withdrawing her head up and away to better assess me. “How do you expect to maintain our friendship?” Recent divorce proceedings and long billable hours spent with lawyers had warped her language towards formal distances and verbal combat; if she fired any sudden insult or unkind word towards me, I did not take it personally, assuming that the anger she was forced to repress during legal mediation was just being excised on me, a nearby target, rather than her faithless second husband. It never occurred to me that I might deserve her frustration.

“Who says we’re friends?”

“Connor, abrasive and dispassionate do not create an endearing façade, as you seem to think.”

“Who says it’s a façade? And just because I don’t jump at the opportunity to stroke your wounded ego, doesn’t mean I’m totally dispassionate. I care about things.”

“What do you care about?” E’s lips were pursed, her smoky eyes already disbelieving.

“Tortured metaphors, oral sex, dogs,” I paused and searched for other things I could claim to care about, “aging and incremental decay are pretty fascinating. As, like, a biological process.”

E, my soon-to-be romantic and sex partner, gave me the look I would give Skipper right after he flopped down in a mud puddle. Back in the days when he was a young lab not yet bowlegged from calcified hip joints, he took delight in running from me, off the path into the woods near our house toward the same, immortal, never-drying puddle. The mud like clay after a rainstorm – thick and clinging, full of the ropey skeletons of fallen maple leaves. Before I could even tense my vocal cords to curse him, he’d be standing in it, four little legs black with the stuff, and he’d look back at me over his shoulder – knowing, impish doggy eyes – then bathe in the filth. I loved that fucking animal.

* * *

The glass bottles in Third Voice’s dropped plastic bag clattered against one another and the frozen ground. One must have broken. I could smell beer. Heard the lowest fizz. The boys ran, sank into darkness.

I was alone again. The headlights and the engine dropped and swelled over the graveyard’s hills, along those sad little concrete streets – Why do they name those streets? Do mourners feel closer to the dead if they are buried on Elm or Sycamore? There was a rock in my boot, wedged under the knuckle of my big left toe. I focused on the rock and breathing.

Over the noise of the engine I heard fragments from the radio, a late night political argument. The truck stopped behind me, idling.

“And you’re trying to convince me that the senate Democrats aren’t clearly, clearly, Jim, overstepping –“

“I’m going to stop you there. Your personal failures at midterms should not color this isolated, localized, case of alleged misappropriations – but we’ve got a few callers on the line anxious to hear themselves talk. What’s your take, Caller Sean?”

The radio cut out. Driver’s side door opened. Feet hit pavement. Door slammed shut. Engine idled. The rock in my boot hadn’t moved.

In through the nose.

Out through the mouth.

“What’s the big idea, son? You punks know you’re not allowed up here after eight o’clock. Vice Principle Sedgwick said she’d personally make an example of the next fool I seen nosing around up here. And what’s that I smell?” The gravekeeper had been tracing a wide circle behind me as I sat. A flashlight in my face, I felt my pupils shriek and flee. “Well, just what in the hell are you? Cool dad or some sort of perv? Buying beer for these kids to god knows what ends – where did those others go? I saw them, don’t tell me I didn’t.”

The headlights, that had poured over us both, shut off while the guts inside the truck ticked and cooled. I shaded myself from the flashlight. The gravekeeper was a century shy of ancient. White hair spilled out from the edges of a stained green baseball cap. He held a framing hammer as well as a flashlight; the veins in his hands looked like telephone cables, humming with the life of remembered voices.

I stood up. Boots scraped against the grass and fresh turned dirt, the crotch of my jeans had ridden way high up, and my back popped like the San Andreas Fault line. I leaned way back, hands on hips, shook out both legs.

The gravekeeper asked about my business again. His voice was still even, full of authority. I respected that tone. I respected the way he held the flashlight – steady. I wondered how wiry his muscles must be, stuffed as they were with veins and years of manual labor.

His voice changed, though. It picked up a stutter and a quaver when I bent, reaching for the shovel handle, that worn thing, darkened, now, from months of sweat. One liquid motion put the old man down. Blood from his temple.

Still, twitching on the ground, the cords in his throat and lips pushed a stream of W’s into the night: “W –, w –. w –,” and so on. He dropped the flashlight, though. It went out; I heard the bulb crack.

That was good. I didn’t much care to see his face. I’d just figured out why I spent the proceeding hours digging that hole. That tricky itch in my head didn’t want me to ask, but to inspire questions. Not to discover, but to hide. To bury.

* * *

E’s dogs took to me right away. All dogs do. We have a lot in common. E liked me because I don’t talk much, but when I did speak my words annoyed and abraded her so I kept quiet as much as possible. Humans despise silence, filling every lull or pause in conversation with ‘umm’ or small talk. I waited; she spoke. She told me secret after secret and projected herself onto me. And isn’t that the basis of suffering? When expectations and reality do not look at all alike?

E carried most of her tension in her lower back, specifically the multifidus muscle group, vital in stabilizing the lumbar vertebrae; I found that out as soon as possible. Anybody can use words to communicate – or lie – about their feelings; words were – and are – hollow. I expressed my affections through painstaking back massages, fingertips conveying an attention to detail more doting than sonnets.

I started at the shoulders: trapezius to supraspinatus to infraspinatus, making sure to dig my thumbs in where the teres major and latissimus dorsi overlapped below her skin. I worked down her backbone, ticking off every vertebrae like an IRS auditor. At the base of the spine, I reversed course, up to the nape of her neck, even slower, giving special care to trouble areas. Even pressure. Never rushed. With my left hand I worked her splenius and semisplenius, the right buried in her long hair, kneading the scalp.

Which is why I didn’t see New Year’s Day coming. Though I should have.

It was maybe a month after Rabbit House Mansion. We were lying in her bed, post-coital glow, the dogs (Maxwell and Casper) whining at the door. I felt wide like a homemade quilt, in a mood to share myself and give comfort. This was before I learned to keep my answers short, that nobody wants to listen to you unless you are saying exactly what they want to hear. People liked me more when I was a white bed sheet rather than a quilt. E taught me to stitch an incomplete picture and let people fill in the gaps.

“What are you thinking about?” I said.

“Oh, warm blankets, buttermilk pancakes, you. Why? What are you thinking about?”

“Have you ever heard the term ‘soul toupee’?” E said she had not. “It’s the idea that every human-animal is self-conscious of one aspect about him-slash-herself above all others – like a secret neurosis – that we all think we’re doing a great job of hiding from others, but, in actual fact, it’s one of the first things others perceive in us – like a shitty toupee that some middle-aged shlub thinks he’s rocking. That’s the soul toupee and we’re all supposed to have one.” I rearranged E’s body so her head was positioned like a violin under my chin.

“Why would you be thinking about that?” E’s hand felt cold on my chest.

“Fucked if I know. What should I be thinking about?”

“Us. Maybe positive thoughts about 2015, resolutions and the sharing of feelings.” E looked at me; the lines around her mouth never looked deeper. “At the very least some after-sex douchery: ‘Hey, baby, way to rock my world.’ That would be better than thinking about some bullshit about hidden neuroses. Jesus, Connor.” She pushed away, off my chest. “What if I started seeing other people, I mean I’m not, but would you be mad?”

“How should I know? I don’t know the future, I just respond to the present. And I don’t control your actions. Do what you want; we’ll see how it all shakes out.”

E got out of the bed. We dressed in silence – almost silence, as I felt compelled to greet Maxwell and Casper and rub their tummies a bit. She drove me home then. No buttermilk pancakes.

We sat a while in the parking lot behind my building. E asked me if I gave a shit. I asked her to elaborate. She asked me if I cared at all about her. I said yes. She scoffed.

“What do you want from me, E? I thought we went into this without high expectations for where this was going. You are in the middle of a divorce. Your second divorce.”

“Yeah, I am. From a goddamn, truck stop cheater, but we’re not talking about him right now. I want you to act like I mean anything to you. I want you to be present when we’re together. I want to spend more time together. That’s all.”

“Am I not present when we’re together?” Face forward, I started rhythmically beating my left hand and forearm against the center console. I couldn’t stop myself.

“No! Drifting off all the time. I can see you doing it right now. You already want to be somewhere else, away from me. What the fuck?” I kept thwacking the center console. 

“Do you want to spend more time together? Can you pretend to be with me when you’re with me, or is that too much to ask?”

It was too much to ask. Unable to explain myself with words, I tried to massage her hand but she wasn’t having it. I tapped a few more notes out on the console while I constructed a goodbye. I turned to her, making sure our faces were parallel to one another.

“I hope you’re happy for an extended period of time and I’m glad you exist in this universe.”

I don’t think we hugged. I don’t remember.

* * *

That was a long time gone. Last night seems like a long time gone, but the dirt is still gritted under my toenails, the battery of my headlamp still warm to the touch. My back aches in this chipped kitchen chair.

The earth swallowed the gravekeeper. In the dark I pat, pat, patted the ground flat as I could with the shovel’s blade. The shovel was no longer mine. I left it across the new grave, the man’s green baseball cap hooked around the handle. That’s for the police to find and make sense of. Imbue it with meaning. I don’t want to make sense. I don’t want to mean anything.

I can’t stop fiddling with my Siddhartha ring, turning it over and over, stroking the grooves and ridges with the thick pad of my thumb. Through the window, over the sink and just beyond the calico curtains, is all the lying daylight that exists in this universe, exposing the trees, glinting off broken glass on the sidewalk, and refracting through glaciers, but blinding us to the worlds that turn above our heads.