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By Root 6230 0

to lie cramped forever. The disrespect is ferocious. But you know what politics and rackets are. High and low, everybody is on the take. One of these days there’ll be a grand-jury investigation and a scandal. Guys will go to jail. But it’ll be too late for the dead. They aren’t going to open your grave and rebury you. So you’ll lie there short-sheeted. Frogged. As kids do to each other in summer camp. And there you are with hundreds of thousands of bodies in a flattened-out death-tenement, with your knees up. Aren’t you entitled to a full stretch? And in these cemeteries they don’t allow you a headstone. You have to settle for a brass plate with your name and your dates. Then machines come to cut the grass. They use a gang-mower. You might as well be buried in a public golf course. The blades nick away the brass letters. Pretty soon they’re obliterated. Then you can’t even be located. Your kids can’t find the place. You’re lost forever—”

“Stop!” Myron said. The fellow continued:

Now in a mausoleum it’s different. It doesn’t cost as much as you think. These new jobs are prefabricated but they’re copies from the best models, starting with Etruscan tombs, up through Bernini and finally there’s Louis Sullivan, art nouveau. People are mad now for art nouveau. They’ll pay thousands for a Tiffany lamp or ceiling fixture. By comparison, an art nouveau prefab tomb is cheap. And then you’re out of the crowd. You’re on your own property. You don’t want to get caught for eternity in a kind of expressway traffic jam or subway rush.

Father Swiebel said that Koffritz looked very sincere and that he saw in the steam only a respectful sympathetic troubled bearded face—an expert, a specialist, fair-minded, sensible. But the by-intimations were devastating. The vision got me, too—death seething under the treeless fairway, and the glitter-less brass of nameless name plates. This Koffritz with his devilish sales-poetry clutched the heart of Father Swiebel. He grabbed mine as well. For at the time this was reported to me I was suffering intense death-anxieties. I wouldn’t even attend funerals. I couldn’t bear to see the coffin shut and the thought of being screwed into a box made me frantic. This was aggravated when I read a newspaper account of some Chicago children who found a heap of empty caskets near the crematory of a cemetery. They dragged them down to a pond and boated in them. Because they were reading Ivanhoe at school they tilted like knights, with poles. One kid was capsized and caught in the silk lining. They saved him. But there gaped in my mind a display of coffins lined with puffy rose taffeta and pale green satin, all open like crocodiles’ jaws. I saw myself put down to suffocate and rot under the weight of clay and stones—no, under sand; Chicago is built on Ice Age beaches and marshes (Late Pleistocene). For relief, I tried to convert this into serious intellectual subject matter. I believe I did this kind of thing rather well—thinking how the death problem is the bourgeois problem, relating to material prosperity and the conception of life as pleasant and comfortable, and what Max Weber had written about the modern conception of life as an infinite series of segments, gainful advantageous and “pleasant,” failing to provide the feeling of a life cycle, so that one couldn’t die “full of years.” But these learned high-class exercises didn’t take the death-curse off for me. I could only conclude how bourgeois it was that I should be so neurotic about stifling in the grave. And I was furious with Edgar Allan Poe for writing so accurately about this. His tales of catalepsy and live burial poisoned my childhood, and still killed me. I couldn’t even bear to have the sheet over my face at night or my feet tucked in. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to be dead. Burial at sea might be the answer.

The samples that had worn a hole in Renata’s Pontiac were, then, models of crypts and tombs. When I met her I not only had been brooding over death (would it help to have a wooden partition in the grave, a floor just above the coffin