Me Tanner, You Jane

Page 2

It was quite a wait.

Well, I had known it would take a while. The burial had taken place as late in the afternoon as we had been able to arrange it, but the unburial could not possibly occur before nightfall. Cover of darkness and all, and absence of visitors to other graves. I was able to get my eye to the breathing tube, and while there was predictably little to see through six feet of narrowing tubing, I could tell that it was light up there at first, and later on I looked and it seemed to be a little darker, and later still I looked and it was black. That was as close as I came to knowing what time it was. I didn’t have a watch. I could have been buried with a watch – people get buried with watches all the time – but I hadn’t been wearing a watch to begin with, and it had never occurred to me to get one to be buried in.

“The important considerance is to relax,” Karp had said. “You’ll have some cheese, maybe a sandwich. Also a bottle of water. You will breathe through the tube. All the comforts. It will be dark. You could have a flashlight if you wanted to read, or for passing the time you could just stretch out and have a sleep.”

There was cheese concealed by my left foot and a ham sandwich by my right foot and a tiny flashlight in one pocket and a book in another pocket and a half pint of water between my knees. None of them seemed worth the trouble of trying to reach them. There just wasn’t that much mobility in the box, and I just wasn’t in the mood for eating or drinking or reading.

As for sleeping-

Hoo. Sleeping sickness. He ain’t dead, he’s only sleeping. You could just stretch out and have a sleep.

Hoo.

I haven’t slept since Korea. I was in the Army, and the Army was in Korea, and a North Korean shell exploded closer to me than I would have preferred it, and one of the fragments of the shell went into my head, which is no pleasanter than it sounds. Somewhere inside there it found its way into the sleep center.

The sleep center is a clever little rascal that makes you sleep. Doctors don’t know much about it, except that this is what it does, and that everyone has one. Except me, that is. I don’t have one, and consequently I don’t sleep.

This is mostly good, I think. I get a disability pension from the government in the amount of $112 a month. (I don’t know where they got the figure, or how.) And I have time to do all the things that people don’t have time for. Like learning languages (once you’ve learned eight or ten, the rest get very easy) and getting involved with political causes (like the return of the House of Stuart to the English throne, or the restoration of Cilician Armenia, or the propagation of the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society, or the destruction of the white supremacist government of Modonoland, or, oh, lots of things). When you stop to think about it, eight hours out of twenty-four is a lot of time to waste on nothing more interesting than unconsciousness.

But there are times when being awake is not that much of a joy. There are times, in truth, when the raveled sleeve of care could use a little knitting up.

This was one of them.

And it went on and on and on, until I felt that time simply could not be passing this slowly. Obviously I had lost my sense of time. I had also lost my sense of humor, and I only wished I could lose my sense of smell in the bargain, because the air holes in the casket facilitated a certain amount of seepage, and, not to put too fine a point on it, that casket was no bed of roses.

Until finally I heard footsteps, heard them very clearly through all that earth, and they came closer and closer, just a single set of footsteps, and a voice shouted out my name.

“Evan!”

My skull started vibrating. The earth was a much better conductor of sound than I would have guessed. It was like a loud noise under water, only worse. I called back through the breathing tube, saying things like “Not so loud.”

More gently: “Evan?” It was Plum. “It’s Plum,” she said, unnecessarily. “I’m here,” she said, pointlessly. “ Plum,” she said, redundantly.

“Where is everybody?”

“They’re not here. Evan-”

“What time is it?”

“A little after eleven. Evan-”

“Eleven! What the hell happened? Where did everybody go? Why am I still here?”

Silence.

“ Plum?”

Sounds of a girl crying.

“ Plum -”

“You won’t let me tell you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They can’t, they aren’t, they can’t come for you.”

“They what?”

“The wake,” she said, and sobbed again. “There was a wake. For you. Your wake. A party after the funeral. At Armand’s house. A wake.”

“So?”

“There was a lot to drink. There was, oh, there were other people besides the MMM people, and it had to be authentic, you know, and some people got very drunk. Because of having too much to drink.”

“That’ll do it.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing. Go on. What happened?”

“I guess it was very noisy there.”

“Oh.”

“Singing and carrying on, you know.”

“Oh.”

“And someone – you know Armand doesn’t get on with his neighbors – and some neighbor called the police, and you know how the police feel about us all. And they came, and of course there were black and white together at the party, as a matter of fact that was the song they were all singing, Black and White Together, We Shall Not Be Moved, and the police came in.”

“Oh, God.”

“And arrested everybody.”