The visiting professor came over and said, “Excuse me, is she with you?”
“Yes.”
“In some societies, special individuals are selected to enter alternate states of consciousness and ritually explore the spirit realm. Most of the people in that conga line merely imagine themselves as animals, but she’s actually become her animal. I’ve seen it before. It’s rare. She’s a natural. She has a gift.”
“Really?”
“I’d like to spend time with her, monitor her rhythms, observe entry conditions, coach her in the methodology of closure. The novice can easily become lost between worlds and, in rare cases, suffer psychotic episodes. Trance experience is something our culture doesn’t prepare us for.”
From the conga line: grunts and hoots rising above the rumbling of many feet. Meredith in the vortex danced. The professor said, “She’s learning to swim.”
“I was learning to swim,” Meredith said later. Sweaty businessmen and their wives gathered around. All eyes were on my wife, who told the crowd, “Water held me. I was able to accept myself as a fish, and to feel the pain of living. I didn’t need assurances that I was worthy of love.”
And at home that night, she told me, “As a person, I always needed someone to hold me, but as a fish I was buoyant, able to hold myself. Now I’m a little buoyant, but I also need to be held, because I feel heavy inside. I miss the friends I made in the ocean.”
We were lying in bed with the covers pulled up. We held cups of hot milk with honey.
“Friends?”
“Other coelacanths. More than friends, actually. One was my mother and one was my father, and I had schools of brothers and sisters. I knew them, and they knew me. They didn’t wonder where I’d come from, because I’d always been there with them. As I am now. Even while lying with you, here, in our house, in our bed, I’m down there in cold water, swimming upside down, brushing against another coelacanth, making my presence felt and feeling the presence of another, before going off to a deep place to look for something precious.”
“Something precious?”
“A rock or a piece of coral. Something smooth, something shiny, something black.”
Her breaths grew slow and deep, her breasts rose and fell. Katydids made scratchy noises in the pollenating mango outside our window. Wind blew a tree branch scraping claw-like against the house. A small time passed. I gave my sleeping wife a peck on the cheek, then threw off the covers, got up and dressed, and padded downstairs to the night-light-lit kitchen, where I sipped instant decaf and peered into the freezer at vaporescent packages of food piled in a heap atop the collected remains of Jim Kunkel.
I dug my hand beneath Tupperware containers and alligator baggies. I touched a cold baseball that must’ve been the heart, and a small item that was probably a gland, and next to that a larger thing. The liver? I grabbed the extra-big package and heaved it out. It wasn’t Jim’s liver, it was his foot — a substantial piece of flesh, 12 DD or E at least. It felt good to hold. It weighed a lot. I tossed it in the air and it flipped neatly end over end and fell back into my hand. Nice. The foot, not being an organ, did not seem momentous in the way Jim’s frozen heart, liver, adrenal glands, lung tissue, and genitals seemed momentous. To be sure, the Foot has its place in myth and legend; it carries psychohistoric weight. In our culture, the Foot as Symbol is not unimportant. Nevertheless, for me, at that point in time (hours, only, since Meredith’s initiatory ichthyomorphic trance experience with its insomnia-inducing implications concerning self-identity and marital compatibility—“It’s like sex, Pete. Once you’ve entered that other body, you’re always there, even when you’re not. I’m not a coelacanth, I’m a person and I’m here, this is where I am, this is who I am. I’m Meredith. But I’m a coelacanth, too.”
“Can I become one, can I come with you?”
“That’s the thing, Pete, you have to be there already, and you weren’t. I’m sorry, honey.”) — at that point in time, as I was saying, Jim’s frozen foot seemed perfect for an inaugural burial excursion. I could figure out how to do things right, and not rush. I could work out the funerary process, the digging and lowering into the earth and chanting of sacred texts, in a more relaxed way with a foot than with probably, say, a heart. Yes. With the foot I had an opportunity to get comfortable with the ritual aspect of nighttime burial. Later I could progress to Jim’s frozen hand and the more difficult (symbolically speaking) internal parts. The viscera.
I figured I’d just chuck the slightly freezer-burned foot in a knapsack and walk around town until I came to a place that felt right for burial.
I left the house at around midnight and crept up the driveway to the road. I wore canvas sneakers, athletic socks, safari shorts, a tee-shirt, and the bright purple knapsack containing Jim’s cold, hard foot, a garden trowel, a box of candles and matches to light them, a library copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and some fig bars for a snack. The darkness that night was total; clouds obscured the stars and moon; the only light descended from streetlamps spilling pools of white over damp leaves of roadside shrubs, shiny parked cars, and the road itself, where I walked alone over gravel that crunched underfoot.
At Wisteria I turned left toward town. I passed a vacant lot, which I rejected because of a chain-link fence I’d have to scale, and because several lamplit windows in surrounding houses gave easy viewer access to that neglected, overgrown locale. After a while I came to the Chamber of Commerce. Here I turned right onto Water Street, which is where Meredith’s mother lives. No lights on at Helen’s bungalow. I hurried past Meredith’s mother’s Oldsmobile, and continued on to where Water dead-ends into Osprey. Right on Osprey would lead me to Jerry Henderson’s. I went left. A sea breeze was blowing up the road. Osprey Avenue runs all the way to the ocean, about a mile, but I didn’t want to go to the ocean; I desired dark soil for this virgin implantation, not grainy wet sand overrun with fiddler crabs. So at the next intersection I veered right off Osprey and walked along Pompano Place. Here were more and more elaborate pits; every householder along this moderately wealthy drive had installed one. And there were walls bordering Pompano too: cinder block, coral rock, and timbers solidly rising, garnished with barbed wire and alarm-system warning decals.
At the end of the street sat the home of a former pupil, a boy named Ben Webster who, years before, had distinguished himself with a science fair essay on Annual Coastal Erosion Due to Global Temperature Shifts and Resultant Polar Ice Cap Meltdown Contributing to Rising Sea Levels.
No light shone from the Websters’ palm-shrouded house girded in electric fencing. I passed by and entered the gumbo-limbo hammock known as Turtle Pond Park.
But let me briefly pause. Let me take a moment before starting on what happened that night with the foot, the candles, and the book, to reflect on the many things that had brought me to this point, this nocturnal action. As, in fact, I did that very night, standing at the dark entrance to the impenetrable-seeming public glade — I paused a moment, there at the stone gate marking the park’s western perimeter, to let my eyes adjust to the primordial dark beneath the hammock canopy; but also to consider the meanings of things, and to experience, if I could, wrapped in gloom, a few realizations about the consciousness of personality. It was something I’d been thinking about ever since the night of the ex-mayor’s death. Now, standing outside Turtle Pond Park, getting ready to go in and carry out the promise hastily made to the doomed man, I discovered inside my heart a radiant sensation of connectedness: to Jim Kunkel, and to his, and my, and all our ancestors going back to the first voyagers in the realm of the psyche: the pre-Christian fertility cults of the Nile, of the Danube Basin, of Asia and Africa. It was subtle at first, a tingling kind of mild appreciation of my relationship to others, of ambitions and acts determining not only my own destiny but the destinies of people requiring care and compassion from me: Meredith, the kids of the third grade, the townspeople who might one day cast their ballots in support of Pete Robinson for mayor. The foot — which was thawing, incidentally, at a rapid rate, leaking onto my fig bars, though I didn’t know this until later — the foot seemed suddenly symbolically freighted with all our aspirations and dreams, the collective dreams of a community. Indeed, it was as if it were not Jim Kunkel’s foot being buried, not Jim’s foot at all, but a flesh-and-blood vessel containing the Hopes of Men — Jim, me, anybody and everybody — for a better, wiser world that might spring from soil made fertile by blood and bone. Such were my thoughts. Imagine my chagrin when, immediately upon stepping past the stone threshold to the dark and misty park, I heard the husky voice of my former star pupil, Ben Webster himself, calling out to me in a stage whisper, “Hey, Mr. Robinson, is that you? What are you doing here? Get away from there. You’re going to step on a mine.”