It took him a while to realize that he had left his grave, and when he did it didn't seem very important. I'm out, he said to himself, and I can talk again and move around, and I'm no better off than I was. Alive, he could at least have kept up the pretense of having somewhere important to go; but now apparently he could just sit by the roadside for the next few million years, if he felt like it. And he did feel like it. He wanted only to sit in the grass and watch the ants running and not think about anything. I want my mind to be white and clean and unmarked, he thought, like my bones. That was the answer to everything, and he hadn't seen it. "You can have my skull," he said politely to the ants. "I won't be needing it." But they kept running in the grass, and he became angry with them. "All right," he said. "And the hell with you too." And he got up and went over to look at his grave.
There was no stone yet, only a small metal marker. It said: "Michael Morgan, March 7, 1924-June 10, 1958," and he felt very pleased with its conciseness. Like a Times headline, he thought, and he looked at it for a long time.
My body is there, he thought. All my chicken dinners and head-scratching and sneezing and fornication and hot baths and sunburns and beer and shaving—all buried and forgotten. All the little pettinesses washed away. I feel clean and light and pure. He thought about book-hunting on Fourth Avenue and decided that he felt like a smashed light bulb.
"Good-by," he said to his body and walked away down the paved road. He wanted to whistle and felt cheated when he found he could not.
Michael Morgan walked through the graveyard and his feet made no sound. The sun shone hot on him and he did not feel it, nor did he feel the tiny winds that chuckled between the stones. He saw a ring of Greek pillars that held up nothing, and near it a concrete birdbath. He saw fountains and flowers and a wheelbarrow half full of earth. Once a car rushed past him as he walked along the side of the road, but nobody in it looked at him.
He saw family plots, with the little headstones bunched together like frightened cattle; and he saw a great mausoleum four stories high, with an angel on marble guard. He saw a clump of cherry trees, and their boughs were thick and swollen with the red fruit. Spaced at regular intervals, twenty-foot spires pointed the way to Heaven, for the benefit, Michael decided, of lost souls and tourists.
He felt as if he were walking in a slightly leaky vacuum. He could see the sun, and he assumed it was still burning, but he personally felt neither hot nor cold. He knew there was a breeze, for he saw leaves wander across his path, but he felt no air on his skin. Faintly but clearly, he heard birds singing and water flowing, but the sounds meant nothing to him, and he never even thought of trying to pick a cherry. It wasn't that he didn't give a damn—Michael had been trying very hard not to give a damn for most of his life—but that giving or not giving damns never entered the question. "I feel mediocre," he experimented. "Lukewarm"—but the words were meaningless.
He walked for a long time. The black paved road became dirt, and then gravel, and then pavement again, and other roads ran away from it; sometimes it was broad, and other times as narrow as the cold bed of Barbara Allen; but it did not end, and Michael walked on and never grew tired.
Maybe there is no end, he thought. Maybe I just go on walking—and felt nothing but a whispery amusement at the prospect.
Then he came over a low hill and saw the mausoleum and the small man sitting in front of it. The man had his knees drawn up and his chin on his folded forearms and was looking at nothing.
Sensation seemed to return to Michaeclass="underline" curiosity, interest, a little fear, pleasure, and a spoonful of hope came slowly back, saying to one another, What is this? How is this? Is the house not empty yet? And Michael Morgan called gladly, "Hello!"
The small man blinked, looked around, and smiled at Michael. "Hello," he called back. "Come on down."
Michael came slowly down the hill, and the man got up to meet him. He looked to be in his early fifties, for his shoulders were a little rounded and his hair was gray-white. But the smile he gave Michael was warm and youthful, and his eyes were the color of the earth. "How do you do?" he asked. "My name is Jonathan Rebeck."
"Michael Morgan," said Michael, and suddenly he was so happy to see this small man, and so happy to realize he was happy, that he grabbed for Mr. Rebeck's brown hand—and watched in dull horror as it went completely through his own.
Then he remembered, and for the first time he saw life as the dead see it. He backed off from Mr. Rebeck, and would have turned to run if the small man's eyes had not been full of brown sadness. So he sat down on the steps that led up to the mausoleum and tried to cry; but he didn't know where to begin.
"All right," he said finally, "I'm dead."
"I know," said Mr. Rebeck gently. He paused and then added, "I saw your funeral procession."
"Did you?" Michael looked up. "How did it look from the outside?"
"Very nice," said Mr. Rebeck. "Very quiet and tasteful."
"That's good," Michael said. "Man comes into the world with a maximum of fuss, as it is. Let him—"
Mr. Rebeck began to laugh. "A maximum of fuss." He chuckled softly. "Very true. Very funny and very true."
"Could I finish?" Michael asked coldly.
"What? Oh, certainly. I'm awfully sorry. I thought you were through."
"Let him leave with the minimum," Michael finished, but he trailed off disgustedly at the end. Mr. Rebeck laughed politely, and Michael scowled at him. In the middle of the scowl he began to laugh, hiccuping, machine-gun laughs, and when he stopped he knuckled at his eyes. But there were no tears to wipe away, and he looked soberly at Mr. Rebeck.
"I don't feel dead," he said slowly. "Would I still be making those lousy epigrams if I were dead? I feel as alive as anyone. As alive as you."
"I'm not a very good standard," Mr. Rebeck said softly.
"I don't feel dead," Michael said firmly. "I feel my body on me like an anchor." The simile pleased him. "An anchor. A nice, comforting anchor holding me to earth. If I'm dead, how come I don't just go billowing off into the beyond like a sheet blown off a clothesline?" He felt a vague regret that Mooney, head of the Classics Department, couldn't hear him now. They had stayed up late together, Mooney and he.
"I know a good metaphor," Mr. Rebeck said thoughtfully. "Don't people who have had their arms or legs amputated always say they can feel them still? They say they itch at night."
Michael was silent for a long time.
"I know a better one," he said finally. "It's an old superstition. Some people believe that if you kill a snake in the daytime its tail won't stop wiggling till sundown." He looked at Mr. Rebeck. "All right. I'm dead. How long till sundown?"
"A while yet," Mr. Rebeck said. He sat down beside Michael. "You see, Michael, nobody dies just like that. The body dies quickly, but the soul hangs on to life as long as it can because living is all it knows."
"Soul?" Michael felt faintly worried. "I do have a soul, then?"
"I don't know if that's the right word. Memory might be better. Living is a big thing, and it's pretty hard to forget. To the dead, everything connected with life becomes important—striking a match, clipping your toenails. Not only does your own life pass before you; everybody else's does.
You find yourself becoming greedy of people; whenever they come to visit here you watch every movement they make, trying to remember the way you used to do that. And when they leave you follow them all the way to the entrance, and you stop there because you can't go any further." He paused. "They had it all backwards, you see, those old ghost stories about the dead haunting the living. It's not that way at all."