The problem with Funeral Grade flowers is they only look good for one day. A day later, they start to rot. Then with flowers hanging from the bronze vase attached to each crypt, hanging there dark and withered, dripping their stink water on the marble floor and furry with mold, it's too easy to imagine what's happening to the beloved sealed inside.
The day after Memorial Day, the janitor throws them out. The wilting flowers.
Left behind is a new crop of fake peonies, dark magenta and soaked with dye to make their silk almost black. This year there are artificially perfumed sprays of plastic orchids. The long poly-silk vines of blue and white huge morning glories are worth the trouble to steal.
The oldest old specimens include flowers made of chiffon, organza, velvet, velveteen georgette, crepe de chine, and wide satin ribbon. Heaped in my arms are snapdragons, sweet peas, and salvia. Hollyhocks, four-o'clocks, and forget-me-nots. Fake and beautiful but stiff and scratchy, this year the new flowers are spritzed with clear droplets of polystyrene plastic dew.
This year, this girl is here a day late with a nothing-special assortment of polyester tulips and anemone, the classic Victorian flower of sorrow and death, of sickness and desertion, and watching her from my ladder, at the far end of the west gallery, on the sixth floor of Contentment, making notes in my little field guide, is me.
The flower in front of me is Specimen 237, a postwar rayon chrysanthemum, postwar because there wasn't silk enough or rayon or wire enough to make flowers during World War Two. Wartime flowers are crepe paper or rice paper, and even in the constant dry fifty degrees of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum, these flowers have all crumbled to dust.
In front of me is Crypt Number 678, Trevor Hollis, age twenty-four, survived by his mother and father and his sister. Much Beloved. Loving Son. In Loving Remembrance. My latest victim. I've found him.
Crypt Number 678 is in a tier high up in the gallery wall. The only way to get a closer look is with a stepladder or a casket lift, and even from the top of a stepladder, two steps higher than is safe, I can see something is different about the girl. It's something European. Something malnourished. It isn't the daily recommended allowance of food and sunshine that make you beautiful by any North American standard. There's something waxy about how her arms and legs come out of her dress looking raw and white. You could see her living behind barbed wire. And coming up inside me is the desperate hope that maybe she's dead. This is how I feel watching old movies at home where vampires and zombies come back from the grave, hungry for human flesh. Inside me is the same desperate hope I have watching the ravenous undead and thinking, Oh please, oh please, oh please.
The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and be hearing nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I'm only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.
From up here in the sixth tier of crypts, her black dress looks ironed to a high gloss. The thin white arms and legs of her look covered tight in a newer low-quality kind of human skin. Even from up high, her face looks mass-produced.
Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse One:"How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels ... "
Even with the sun on everything outside, everything inside is still cold to the touch. The light is through stained glass. The smell is rain soaked into the walls made of cement. The feel of everything is polished marble. The sound is somewhere, the drip of old rain sliding along rebar, the drip of rain through the cracked skylights, the drip of rain inside unsold crypts.
Rolled airy shapes of collected dust and dander and hair wander around the floor. Ghost turds, people call those.
The girl looks up and has to see me, and then she's coming soundless in her black felt kind of shoes across the marble floor.
You can get lost easy enough here. Hallways run into hallways at odd angles. Finding the right crypt takes a map. Galleries open into galleries in telescope vistas so long the carved sofa or the marble statue at the far end could be something you'd never imagine. The repeating pastel soft shades of marble are so after you're lost you don't panic.
The girl walks up to the ladder, and I'm trapped at the top, halfway between her at my feet and the heaven of angels painted on the ceiling. The wall of polished marble crypts reflects me full-length among the epitaphs.
This Stone Erected in the Honor.
Erected on This Spot.
Erected in Loving Tribute.
I am all of the above.
My cold fingers feel crabbed around my pen. Specimen Number 98 is a pink camellia of china silk. The absolute pink proves the cultivated silk was boiled in soapy water to remove all sericin***. The primary stem is a wire cast in green polypropylene typical of shrubs of the period. A camellia is supposed to mean unmatched excellence.
The girl's plain round mask of a face looks up at me from the foot of the ladder. How to tell if she's alive or a ghost, I don't know. There's too much of her dress for me to see any rise and fall of her chest. The air is too warm for her breathing to show.
Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse Two:"Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies."
The Bible collapses sex and food a lot.
Here with Specimen Number 136, little conch shells painted pink to look like rosebuds, and Specimen Number 78, the Bakelite daffodil, I want to be hugged in her cold, dead arms and told that life has no absolute end. My life is not some Funeral Grade bit of compost that will rot tomorrow and be outlived by my name in an obituary.
The feeling in those miles of marble walls with people sealed inside, you get the sense we're in a crowded building dense with thousands of people, but at the same time, we're alone. A year could pass between her asking a question and my answer.
My breath fogs the carved dates that bracket the short life of Trevor Hollis. The epitaph reads:
To the World He Was a Loser, But to Me He Was the World.
Trevor Hollis, do your worst. I dare you, come and seek your revenge.
Her head thrown back, the girl smiles up at me standing above her. Against the gray of everything stone, her red hair blazes, and up at me, she says, "You brought flowers."
My arms shift and some flowers, violas, daisies, dahlias, float down around her.
She catches a hydrangea and says, "Nobody's been here to visit since the funeral."
Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse Three:"Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins."
Her mouth with its too-thin red-red lips looks cut open with a knife. She says, "Hi. I'm Fertility."
She hands the flower up and holds it in the air as if I'm not impossibly out of her reach, and she asks, "So, how did you know my brother, Trevor?"
Her name was Fertility Hollis. That's her full name, no kidding, and she's what I really want to share about the next day with my caseworker.
It's part of my terms of observation, I have to meet with my caseworker for one hour, once a week. In exchange, I keep getting housing vouchers. The program makes me eligible for subsidized housing. Free government cheese, powdered milk, honey, and butter. Free job placement. These are just a few of the perks you get in the Federal Survivor Retention Program. My dodgy little apartment and surplus cheese. My dodgy little job with all the veal I can smuggle home on the bus. You get just enough to make ends meet.
You don't get anything really choice, you don't get handicapped parking, but once a week for one hour, you get a caseworker. Every Tuesday, mine drives up to the house where I'm working in her plain-colored government pool car with her professional compassion and case history folders and her mileage log for keeping track of the miles between each client visit. This week, she has twenty-four clients. Last week, she had twenty-six.