Or he's going to find me. That's what I always hope.
Up at the top of a ladder, I must be twenty, twenty-five, thirty feet above the gallery floor while I pretend to catalog another artificial flower, my glasses pinching at the end of my nose. My pen leaves words in my notebook. Specimen Number 786, I'm writing, is a red rose around a hundred years old.
What I hope is everybody else here is dead.
Part of my job is I have to arrange fresh flowers around the house where I work. I have to pick flowers out of the garden I'm supposed to tend.
What you need to understand is I'm not a ghoul.
The petals and calyx (sepals) of the rose are red celluloid. First created in 1863, celluloid is the oldest and least stable form of plastic. I'm writing in my notebook, the leaves of the rose are green-tinted celluloid.
I stop writing and look over my glasses. Down at the end of the gallery and so far away she's just a tiny black outline against a huge stained-glass window is somebody. The stained glass is a picture of somewhere, Sodom or Jericho or the Temple of Solomon being destroyed by fire in the Old Testament, silent and blazing. Twisted feathers of orange and red flame twist around falling blocks of stone, pillars, friezes, and out of this walks a figure in a little black dress getting bigger as she gets close.
And what I hope is she's dead. My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy.
The lie I tell people is I'm doing research into the evolution of artificial flowers during the Industrial Revolution. All this is supposed to be my thesis for Nature and Design 456. Why I'm so old is I'm a graduate student.
The girl has long red hair that women only have these days if it's part of some orthodox religion. From up so high on my ladder, the thin bendable little arms and legs of the girl make me look again and again and wonder if someday I could be a pedophile.
Although not the oldest specimen in my study, this rose I pretend to examine is the most fragile. The female sex organ, the Pistil, including the Stigma, the Style, and the Ovary, are cast jet. The male sex organs, the Stamen, include a wire Filament topped with a tiny glass Anther.
Part of my job is I have to grow fresh flowers in the garden, but I can't. I can't grow a weed.
The lie I tell myself is I'm here to gather flowers, fresh ones for inside the house. I steal the fake flowers for sticking out in the garden. The people I work for only look at their garden from inside so I stick the bare dirt full of fake greenery, ferns or needlepoint ivy, then I stick in fake seasonal flowers. The landscaping is beautiful as long as you don't look too close.
The flowers look so lifelike. So natural. So peaceful.
The best place to find bulbs for forcing is in the Dumpster behind the mausoleum. Thrown away are plastic pots of dormant bulbs, hyacinths and tulips, tiger and stargazer lilies, daffodils and crocus ready to take home and bring back to life.
Specimen Number 786, I write, occurs in the vase of Crypt 2387, in the highest tier of Crypts, in the lesser south gallery, on the seventh floor of the Serenity wing. This location, I write, thirty feet above the floor of the gallery, might account for the almost perfect condition of this rose, found on one of the oldest crypts in one of the original wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum.
Then I steal the rose.
What I tell people who see me here is another story.
The official version for why I'm here is this mausoleum provides the best examples of artificial flowers dating back into the mid nineteenth century. Each of the six main wings, the Serenity wing, the Contentment wing, the Eternity, Tranquillity, Harmony, and New Hope wings, is five to eighteen stories tall. The concrete honeycomb of every wall is nine feet thick so it can accommodate even the longest casket inserted lengthwise. Air doesn't circulate in the miles of galleries. Visitors seldom visit. Their typical visit is short. The average year-round temperature and humidity are low and constant.
The oldest specimens derive from the culture of Victorian flower language. Based on the 1840 classic Le langage des fleurs by Madame de la Tour, purple lilacs meant death. White lilacs, the genus Syringa, meant the first discovery of love.
The geranium meant gentility.
The buttercup, childishness.
Because most artificial flowers were made to decorate hats, a mausoleum provides the best specimens that still exist.
That's what I tell people. My official version of the truth.
During the day, if people see me with my notebook and my pen, most times I'm at the top of a ladder swiping some bunch of fake pansies left at a crypt high in the wall. It's for a college class is what I cup my hand around my mouth and whisper down to them.
I'm conducting a study.
Sometimes I'll be here late at night. This is after everyone's gone. Then I'll be walking around alone after midnight and my dream is that some night around the next corner will be an open crypt in the wall and near it will be a desiccated cadaver, the skin wilted on its face and its dress suit stiff and blotched with the fluids dripping and leaked out of its body. I'll come across this carcass in some dim gallery, silent except for the buzz of a single fluorescent tube flashing strobes of lightning in the last few moments before it will leave me in the dark, forever, with this dead monster.
The cadaver eyes should be collapsed into dark sockets, and I want it to stumble blind and clutching the cold marble walls with smears of rotted paste that expose the bones inside each hand. The tired mouth of it hanging open, the lost nose of it just two dark holes, the loose shirt of it resting low on the exposed collarbones.
I'll be looking for names I know from the obituaries. Carved here forever are the names of people who took my advice.
Go ahead. Kill yourself.
Beloved Son. Gentle Daughter. Devoted Friend.
Pull the trigger.
Exalted soul.
Here I am. It's payback time. I dare you to.
Come and get me.
I want to be chased by flesh-eating zombies.
I want to be walking past the marble slab covering a crypt and hear something scratching and struggling inside. At night, I flatten my ear cold against the marble and wait. This is why I'm really here.
Specimen Number 786, I write in my notebook, has a main stem of green cotton-covered 30-gauge millinery wire. Each leaf stem appears to be 20-gauge.
Not that I'm crazy or anything, I just want some proof that death isn't the end. Even if crazed zombies grabbed me in some dark hall one night, even if they tore me apart, at least that wouldn't be the absolute end. There would be some comfort in that.
It would prove some kind of life after death, and I would die happy. So I wait. So I watch. I listen. I put my ear to each cold crypt. I write, No activity within Crypt 7896.
No activity within Crypt 7897.
No activity within Crypt 7898.
I write, Specimen Number 45 is a white Bakelite rose. The oldest synthetic plastic, Bakelite was invented in 1907 when a chemist heated a mixture of phenol and formaldehyde. In the language of Victorian flower culture, a white rose means silence.
The day I meet the girl is the best day to document new flowers. It's the day after Memorial Day weekend when the crowds are gone for another year. It's with everyone gone that I first see this girl I hope will be dead.
The day after Memorial Day, the janitor comes along with a rolling garbage bin and collects all the fresh flowers. The lowest grade of fresh flowers is what florists call "Funeral Grade."
The janitor and I have crossed paths, but we've never spoken. Him in his blue coveralls, he caught me one time with my ear to a crypt. The circle of his flashlight spotlighting me there, even that time he only looked the other way. With the heel of one shoe in my hand, I was knocking and saying, Hello. In Morse code I was asking, could anybody hear me?