The Future Of Cemeteries IS NOW!
“We’re in a fight.” I tell Sam. I’m gasping, taking sharp gulps of air, choking on the thing I need, and my blood is a bounce house. This hill is forever. This is the all-hill. All other hills aspire to become this hill.
“No, we’re not.” Sam says. He is loving this. A challenge he’s well equipped for. Behind him the Mountain View Cemetery slopes ever downward into the city and further on to the bay. We’ve passed millionaires row, a strip of grandiose crypts housing the remains of the wealthy. Stone houses for Samual Merritt, the Folgers, and the borax king. I remember that Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia” is interred here and Glenn Burke, queer baseball legend and inventor of the “high-five.”
The buildings in the town below are positioned in perfect rows, homes and offices aligned like so many tombstones. Crypts of the living, 2/1 mausoleums. $3200 a month. Somewhere in the city someone is dying and when they are done, when they are dead, maybe they will be brought here.
I’m still not able to catch my breath as I stomp up the steep grassy incline. I know I am out of shape but this is embarrassing. But then again we are on the all-hill, so perhaps it’s reasonable to be out of breath. I know Sam will keep going and I refuse to be left behind. I wease a curse and push my feet hard against the earth. The air keeps getting caught in the top part of my lungs. I’m suddenly convinced that it’s lung cancer. I smoked for years. It stands to reason that my cells would revolt, the system, collapse. I can’t afford to have cancer, so I convince myself I’ll never have cancer. I’m sure this has been tried by millions of other people. Invent immunities. Craft a superpower.
“Isn’t this beautiful though? Aren’t you glad we came up here?” Sam is admiring the view of the East Bay like a late explorer. Discovering a country discovered and rediscovered hundreds of times. How many people stood on the same hill and saw something new. “Wow.” Somewhere in the North a siren breaks the silence and I’m trying to remember if ambulances and firetrucks make different sounds. I think that's an ambulance. A firetruck wails while in an ambulance moans. I think I have perfect siren. It’s like perfect pitch but very specialized.
“Yeah,” I’m still barely breathing or breathing too much. I’m not sure which is happening. “Totally worth it.” It is beautiful, really, I just wasn’t planning on traversing a multi-tiered metropolis of the dead today. The view does the job, I get it. I am enjoying this but my mouth won’t shift out of it’s grimace so I just look sick. I squint my eyes and let my lashes erase the city. My perspective is a time machine. Through the black baleen I can just make out the shape of the land with none of our mess. Undeveloped blank canvas hills.
A new siren. Or maybe it’s a car alarm. No, this one is police. They definitely have a different sound, more aggressive, needle dick, threatening. I watch as two people set up a picnic on the hilltop just below us. Their movements satisfied. Someone pulls their car over to the side of the road, gets out to take a picture of the view, and then gets back in and drives away. For a moment I envy them, and then the next moment I resent their tourism.
A helicopter hummingbirds across the horizon. The sound makes my retinas vibrate. The freeway yawns and gasps with rush hour. Its sound, an industrial orgasm. Cemetery birds gossip in the bushes and a far away train calls out to iron. The air is cleaner up here and smells of turned earth and cut grass. Fecund. I whisper the word over and over under my breath, fecund fecund fecund and I get an erection.
“Look,” Sam points ahead of us at what appears to be more cemetery grounds in development. “I guess this is a future cemetery. This is where we’ll be buried.” The concentric half circles of dull grey bricks and wooden scaffolding cover the hill top like an unambitious Stonehenge. Behind the construction, hundreds of houses extend into the distance. We won't be buried here, I think. We’re not from here. We don’t even officially live in our sublet. We’re a secret. People tend to get buried where they’re from or at least where their people are. Maybe, we won't be buried at all. Perhaps there won't be anyone around to bury us when the time comes.
Both my parents have separately asked for viking funerals, and they don’t speak to each other. A Viking Funeral is where your body is put on a raft and your people fire flaming arrows at it while it drifts off to sea. My parents have both requested this style of funeral because they don’t want to be a financial burden. Who can afford to die in this economy? Maybe the sea will rise on our burning cities and we'll all get viking funerals whether we like it or not.
I start to tell Sam that I used to believe in God but I stop because I don’t have the energy to sound stupid. When I was a kid I saw other kids speaking in tongues at a youth retreat and so I tried to mimic their language and movements. I wanted to fit in. I writhed and whipped my body around and sputtered my version of God’s tongue until my pastor pulled me aside and explained to me that I wasn’t “touched.” He asked me why I would pretend to be inhabited by the holy spirit, and I said “isn’t that what everyone is doing?”
We wait at the top for the sun to bisect the sky. As we descend and walk back to our car, the temperature drops, and we watch as the sun goes down on the city.
“Have you ever had sex in a graveyard?” I ask.
“I was just thinking the same thing.” Sam says.
We laugh but we don’t have sex. We walk back to the car and go home to our sublet apartment and make a modest dinner.
Later that night, I dream of a cemetery the size of Alaska. Sam and I start running together down cemetery rows, yelling and hooting and trilling. All the graves open up and Harry Belafonte sings shake shake shake señora. Shake your body line- and my god those bodies start to shake and spit, wild and sputtering. Every siren on the planet rises up at once in harmony, the cemetery birds are speaking, and I realize that I’m not scared for once.
I look at Sam and I tell him exactly what I mean with a clarity that’s eluded me my entire life and he looks at me with eyes of fire, and calmly says “I understand.”