Nightcrawling(5)

We pause in front of Joy’s, watch people in various shades of black, gray, blue, jeans, dresses, joggers, move sluggish through the doors, their heads slightly bent. The door to the funeral parlor is double-sided and dark, probably bullet-proof glass, and, when Alé looks at me, there’s something that mimics guilt in her eyes. “Buffet or closet?” she asks, her mouth still close enough to me that I can see the way her tongue darts around in her mouth when she talks.

“Closet.”

We both nod, copying all the others: heads down.

Alé squeezes my hand once and then walks inside ahead of me, disappearing behind the glass. I wait a few seconds and pull open the door.

The moment I enter the building, I’m met with two sets of eyes. A staple of most funerals, the blown-up photo of the bodies that lie in coffins some small number of feet away stares at me. There are two of them, but only one picture, like a miniature billboard. One is a woman, her eyelashes short ghosts framing her eyes as she stares at the child in her arms.

The child is not even large enough to be given the title of child. She is an infant, a small person bundled in what looks like a tablecloth but is actually a onesie: red and checkered. Neither of them smiles, drooling in the intoxication of a bond too intimate for me, a stranger, to watch. I want to look away, but the infant’s nose keeps calling me back; it is small and pointed, brown but slightly red, like the baby has been outside for too long. I want to warm her, make her return to her color, but she is so far behind this cardboard and you cannot resurrect the dead, even when they have so much life left over.

I taste my tears before I feel them and this is funeral day: touching death and eating lunch. Pretending to cry until we are truly sobbing. Until we have shook hands with every ghost of this building and they have given us permission to wear their clothes like walking relics of their lives, or at least I would like to believe that those are the whispers that creep up my spine as the tears fall.

A hand touches my shoulder and I squirm.

“They were too young.” The man behind me is maybe seventy or so, the silver in his beard appearing too bright in this room.

He is wearing a suit and tie while I shrink into my shirt.

“Yes.” This is all I can think to say back, not knowing them past their faces and their names, which I don’t even know how to pronounce.

I’m about to ask how it happened, how these beings got swept into a casket, but it doesn’t matter. Some of us got restaurants and full-grown children and some of us got babies who won’t never outgrow their onesies. The man leaves, his tie swinging, his handprint a cold spot on my shoulder.

I continue past the photo, through the corridor to the last door in the hallway, which opens up to racks of clothes and the scent of bleach and perfume.

It is a closet of death, welcoming me like it knows we are kindred. I weave through the line of fabric, dragging my hand across the clothes, moving toward the back row. A blazer has fallen off the hanger and sits on the floor, gathering dust. I pick it up, shake it a little, slip it on over my shirt. It’s oversized in that way that makes you feel like the fabric is holding you, like two arms creeping around your chest, warm. I don’t take it off.

Somewhere in this building, Alé is standing in a chapel for the public viewing, staring at the bodies, watching the service, crying. She’s probably already in the back of the room with the food spread, grabbing a plate, some napkins, and beginning to pile it up, discreetly of course, masking her pain in a full belly. Soon she will slip out the back, exit Joy’s, and wait for me at San Antonio Park.

I keep sifting through the racks, trying to find something that reminds me of her. I can’t imagine Alé in nothing this formal, until I find a men’s black sweater. There is a single hole in the wrist, an invitation for its taking, and it is softer than anything I have ever owned, plain in the way that everything Alé accessorizes herself with is plain. She doesn’t need anything extra, with her ink and the intricacies of her face.

I’ve done my part now, gotten us the clothing I should’ve worn to my own father’s funeral, but I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to walk out that door and pass by people with large hands who will touch me briefly and hum a sigh like we are sharing our own internal earthquakes, braving them together. I slide down to the floor, burrow into the racks of black where I’m encased in darkness. It is a relief to be removed from sight. Funeral day is a reckoning, when we mimic thieves and really just find excuses for our tears, then light up, eat until we have never felt fuller, and find somewhere to dance. Funeral day is the culmination of all our past selves, when we hold our own memorials for people we never buried right. The funeral always ends, though, and we all gotta get back to the hustle, so I breathe in one last whiff of this room, and get up.

When I make it outside, the sky is blinding. Everything is moving fast, cars and motorcycles stirring wind and dirt like they have forgotten how to stand still. Sometimes I don’t remember how to move my legs, but my body always surprises me, moving anyway, moving without my permission. I start walking down the street toward the park that sits there, in the middle of the freeway and stop signs and small condos that house more people than they can fit.

Alé is sitting on one of the swings, a paper plate balancing on top of her knees, but she isn’t eating. She’s looking up at the sky, which is more of a fog than a cloud now, and I think she’s smiling.