I was on the eleven thirty bus. It was turning out to be a cold spring; the days featured changeable weather, skies laddered with clouds and windy gusts that felt like cold breath on the back of your neck. From my window seat, I watched as the bus passed through the Lincoln Tunnel and headed through the swampy outlands that surrounded the interstate roads connecting New Jersey to New York. Occasionally, I’d see a heron wading through an algae-covered pond or a hawk circling above the marshes. Later, as the bus headed deeper into Jersey, the scenery became more commerciaclass="underline" we passed a giant blue-walled Ikea, then endless outlet stores for shoes and carpeting and lawn furniture.
I had asked the bus driver to announce the stop for the cemetery and he did. A few moments later, I was standing alone at the edge of the far lane of a busy highway that swept through a landscape of blank, grassy hills. In the near distance, though, I spotted the entrance to the cemetery: an elaborate stone archway above a tall, wrought iron gate. After reaching the gate and passing through, I walked up a wide pathway toward an office building with smoked glass windows. The building itself was a modest structure, long and low, and fronted by a circular driveway from which a network of small, gravel roads and pathways led out into the vast green fields beyond. The graveyards.
I crossed a flagstone porch and entered the building, finding myself in a kind of hushed visitors’ center. Forest green carpeting and walnut paneling dominated the space, though at its center was a counter, also of dark wood, with maps and pamphlets arranged along the top in small, discreet piles. The room seemed to be empty, but my arrival must have set off some bell in a distant office, because very soon a woman with carefully coiffed hair, wearing a white blouse and a gray skirt, appeared from somewhere down a side hallway to ask if she could help me.
I explained that I was looking for a particular grave, but wasn’t sure exactly where it was located. “Avram Perzin.” I said. “He’s buried in a family plot, with his parents, Muriel and Louis Perzin.”
The woman told me she’d have to consult the cemetery’s records. She disappeared again, back down the hallway, but returned in just a few minutes. Picking up one of the maps on the counter, she unfolded it and showed me that it depicted how the major areas of the cemetery were laid out.
“Is your car parked outside?” she asked, with a pen poised above the map.
“I came on the bus,” I told her.
She frowned, as if I had presented her with a problem she wasn’t used to dealing with. “Then you’re going to have a long walk,” she warned me, but lowered the pen to the map and made a mark. Turning the map around to face me, she said, “Avram Perzin is interred in the Jerusalem Memorial Mausoleum. You follow this path—Monument Avenue—all the way past these burial society sections and then make a left when you reach King David Avenue. Go down the hill and that’s where you’ll find the mausoleum.”
I found this information perplexing. “A mausoleum? You mean like . . . a crypt?” I didn’t know how else to explain what I was thinking of, though even to me, it sounded like I was describing the location of a scene from a bad horror movie.
The coiffed head turned from side to side indicating a very clear no. “It’s a beautiful space. There are niches for cremated remains. Avram Perzin is here,” she said, pulling out another map that showed a grid divided into rows and rows of small squares. She made a mark on a square that was a few rows down from the top.
“You’re sure?”
“Oh, yes,” she told me.
Well, maybe this was just another one of Avi’s eccentricities. There was something to be said, I supposed, for choosing to spend eternity inside where it was warm instead of outside, in all kinds of weather.
It occurred to me that I was thinking about the cemetery as a kind of hotel instead of the resting place for the dead when the woman who was helping me got my attention again. She made another mark on the map and said, “Muriel and Louis Perzin are buried on the other side of the cemetery,” she told me. “In one of the memorial garden areas.”
Though I didn’t think I’d spend the time to hike over to another part of the cemetery today to visit my grandparents’ graves, I thanked her and then left the quiet building, heading out on the path that she had indicated. It was actually a narrow, unpaved road, just wide enough for one car to drive down, and it led me through a landscape that was nearly silent, except for the occasional bird call or a gust of wind carrying with it the sound of the metallic growl of traffic on the distant highway. I proceeded down the path under a brisk sky that threw down more long shadows than shafts of sunlight, making the fields of graves marked by uneven headstones look lumpy and ungroomed.
I finally found the mausoleum, a tall structure of sand-colored marble fronted by monumental glass doors. Once inside, I had the momentary sense that I was in some stark marble temple that had been transported to New Jersey and reconstructed here to stand and brood in stoic silence through the centuries ahead. But of course, as soon as I remembered to consult my map and find my way down the marble halls, it was clear that the walls around me contained burial niches and the carved words on each niche were not ancient injunctions but the names of the deceased.
When I came to the south wall, I located Avi’s name just where it had been marked on my map of grid lines and squares. There was a bench in the middle of the floor, and once I sat down, I was aware that there was some faint, somber music being piped in from speakers hidden somewhere in the ceiling. That was okay; in fact, it helped a little bit—it made me feel just a little less like I was in some distant outpost of the vast cemetery, all alone but for the remains of the departed. Except, of course, that’s exactly where I was.
And with Avi. So now that I was here I had to ask myself, why? Really, why? Maybe the reason was simply that I was feeling guilty. I had probably thought more about Avi in the past few weeks than I had in years, and he deserved better than that from me, didn’t he? He had loved me, he had been kind to me, and more than that, he had made time for me when nobody else had, or could. Maybe I had come here to honor his memory, to assure him, or some vestige of him—whatever atoms or essence of his spirit might still be hanging around—that he wasn’t forgotten.
Or maybe it was something else. Sitting in the quiet, marble hall, staring at the rows of marble boxes, I forced myself to do a little personal inventory and had to admit that what I really wanted was for time and space to collaborate on a magic trick that would allow Avi to appear before me for a few moments—as a ghost or hallucination; either one would have been just fine with me—and explain to me what was going on. All this craziness about radiomen and aliens and mysterious broadcast signals. Cult leaders sending me threatening messages. Blue letters, blue paint, what was I supposed to do about all these things? All that they represented? And I had another question, too: what kind of a normal person had problems like this in their life? Probably no one—which wasn’t all that surprising. Normal was something I had to admit I simply was not, at least by the general definition I would have applied to most other people I knew. And whose fault was it—maybe, besides mine—that I was not normal? Well, who else could I assign some of the blame for that to but Avi? After all, it was Avi who, night after night, tuned in the mysterious sounds of distant places and let me listen, who pointed to the infinite sky and said, more or less, Who knows what goes on out there? I had always thought that the source of my dissatisfaction with the life that I had been brought up to lead—finish school, get a job, start a family—had something to do with the loose, rootless wandering tribe of hippies I had attached myself to at a young age, and to the era itself, when revolution was in the wind, change was coming and who cared what the past had been because tomorrow was going to be different, new, with new rules or maybe no rules at all. But maybe that wasn’t the problem with me, or not all of the problem. Maybe it was the fact that, intentionally or not, Avi had led me to believe that there was something really, really interesting going on somewhere just beyond the edges of what our eyes could see and that we should look for it, whatever it was, if we could. But I had no idea how to do that without him. I hadn’t known when I was a kid and I certainly didn’t think I was any better prepared now.