When the Blackbirds Sing

The quietest place in the world is a coffin. I’ve spent a lot of time in coffins. I climb in, the lid is sealed, and the world ebbs with a muffled sigh. It’s the sound of hope escaping before it’s too late.

The quietest coffins are in the cemetery, stacked in the shed next to Father’s shop behind the funeral home. He made them and sold them one by one, day by day. He made them carefully, often pausing to deliberate a saw cut or the fit of lid and container.

Father said coffins enclose the space of everlasting rest.

That’s why he built them with loving-kindness.

Father said coffins are good business. There are always cadavers wishing for a wooden box to sleep in. After food, clothing, and shelter, a man or woman needed a grave—or a crematorium. 

Sister and I played in the coffins when Father was busy elsewhere. We played funeral director and dearly departed.

“I’m the oldest,” Sister said. “I get to be the funeral director.”

“You always get to be the funeral director,” I said. I folded my arms and scowled up at her.

“But I have the hardest job. I have to cry and say goodbye to my beloved brother. And then I have to explain to Mother and Father that he’s left us at such a tender age.” Sister put her hands on her hips and thrust out her chin. She didn’t look sad.

“When do I get to be the funeral director?” I asked.

“You have to practice being the dearly departed for hours and hours,” Sister said. “So you’ll be ready.”

“But we’re not ever going to die,” I said.

“Who told you that?”

“Father and Mother run the cemetery,” I said. “We can’t die.” My voice was small in the dim, hollow shed.

Sister gleamed over me like a marble statue, her long hand resting on the rim of an empty coffin. She was like one of the breathless angels standing over the tombs beyond the shed.

“Climb into the coffin, Arthur,” Sister said. “After your eternal rest you can tell me what it’s like to be dead.”

“Okay. But next time I get to be the funeral director.”

It was a rough coffin, made of pine—the kind Father built for simpler people who didn’t need anything fancy. It was narrow and smelled of fresh cut wood. Sister slid the lid over me and it was dark in there. She hammered the lid down with nails while I pressed my hands over my ears. Father didn’t like it when we nailed the lids shut but Sister insisted we had to be authentic.

Sister sobbed deadened, wooden sobs. She mumbled a prayer. She said ashes to ashes and dust to dust. I stretched and put my hands behind my head, trying not to giggle.

“Be quiet! I can hear you,” Sister hissed. “You’re dead. You have to keep still.”

A long, ragged breath slipped away from me.

“Perfectly still!” Sister shouted.

#

Across the road, in the ancient cemetery, there’s a blackbird that sings in a thousand voices. I don’t know if it’s a grackle or a crow. The bird perches high atop a cypress as dark as its wings. It lifts its head and opens its beak and all the world’s tumult swells out across the heavens. The sound is a haunted thunder, a barely concealed ferocity. It’s the passing traffic, a chopping helicopter, and a thumping in my chest that presses into my throat and booms out of my ears. It’s everywhere but I never noticed it before.

I clamp my hands over my ears. The sounds of its singing hammer into my skull, pounding into recesses I imagined were safe.

I fall away from the bird, stumbling over my haste. Wind skips dry leaves across the gravel pathways between headstones thrust up like stone teeth.

The song curls around my leaden ankles, reaching up under my pants, flowing over the nakedness there. It’s so cold. My skin crawls over itself trying to escape.

At the edge of the cemetery the song whispers into the grass. I hustle back across the road to our house.

A robin carols from a white-blossomed apple tree in a neighbor’s yard. I rush into the empty house, bounding up the narrow stairs to the small room on the top floor and slamming the door. I dive into bed and pull the covers over me, shivering.

The robin has found an aria it likes.

It practices for hours.

#

I was stranded in Portland after losing my job as an optimist and then losing my apartment to a hungry landlord. He said it was nothing personal, but he had to eat. He was one of those people who always said it was nothing personal whenever it got personal.

I was one of those people who think they can live forever by practicing conscious consumerism. Immortality was only a click away and I clicked a lot. Surely, the gods of Olympus never had it better.

Besides, I reasoned, it was good for the planet too.

#

“Come home,” Mother says. “There’s work here.”

“Really? There’s nothing in Portland. I thought it was the same everywhere,” I say.

“Portland ain’t everywhere,” Mother says. Her voice scratches across the distance between our phones.

“What kind of jobs are there?”

“We need help in the graveyard,” Mother says.

“I thought you sold the business when Father died—because there was no more space.”

“Graveyards never go out of business,” Mother says.

“Yeah, but they can fill up,” I say.

“We still have plenty of room,” Mother says.

There is a long silence on the line. I remember playing in the cemetery when I was child. Sister and I made a collection of rubbings on large sheets of butcher paper, taken from the oldest headstones. We never could find those graves again.

It’s a big, flat place that disappears into a haze of headstones, shrubs, and trees in every direction. There’s nothing of modern life about the cemetery. There are no cutting edges except the backhoe and shovels used to dig graves. But it might be just what I need after all the damp optimism in Portland. Maybe I could work outdoors.

“Sure, Ma,” I say. “I’ll come home.”

The words dissolve into dead air.

“You there?” I ask.

“Yup.”

“What kind of help do you need at the cemetery?” I ask.

“Digging. Plenty of digging.”

#

I met the Buddha in a park near downtown Portland. I went to the park to escape the wholesomeness of my job for an hour. A shaft of sunlight lit a massive tree that I didn’t remember seeing before. The crown of dense leaves flared against the dingy skyline and crouching clouds.

The tree must have just moved in, slipping past my indifference.

I blinked. I looked around at the rest of the park, the vacant playground, the battered trash can next to the unoccupied bench, and the row of bright blue honey buckets. I walked toward the tree and there was a guy sitting under it in a full lotus position.

He was perfectly still.

He wore a gray hoodie over an orange t-shirt and faded jeans. His long black hair was tied up in a man bun. His earlobes sagged around wide holes stretched open by missing plugs.

His eyes were closed, and he looked like he was really deep into it, but he must have heard me because he smiled when I approached.

I should have minded my own business. But I was caught by that smile.

“Sorry to bother you,” I asked. “But I was wondering if you could tell me how to find happiness.”

He opened his eyes and they were blue horizons on the edge of an empty sea. The birds stopped calling. Traffic noise receded into the sound of leaves snapping in the breeze. A cloud shadow swept the sunlight away.

His gaze was steadfast. My eyes flicked sideways but the park had vanished. The city had vanished. There was only this tree, this man, and my transparency. I lifted my feet and put them back down, looking for better placement.

A soft rain began falling.

The Buddha held his seat beneath the wide reaching limbs. And I didn’t know where to turn.

Raindrops ran down my face.

“Why don’t you sit beside me and get out of the rain?” he asked.

#

“You’ll have the upstairs room. Your sister will show you,” Mother says.

The upstairs room was Mother’s sewing room when Sister and I were growing up. Its door was always shut and we were never permitted to enter it.

Sister strides up the wooden stairs to the landing. I trudge after her, hoisting my heavy suitcase step by step. I’m breathing hard at the top of the stairs. A bulb dangles from the ceiling and its light flutters like a moth’s wings. Sister holds the door while I half drag, half lift the suitcase into the dusty room with its bare wooden floor. A single bed is shoved against the wall. There’s an old three-drawer chest of heavy, dark wood and a matching nightstand with a lamp on it.

Sister pulls the lamp chain, letting a sickly yellow light leak into the room.

“Remember to put the toilet seat down when you’re done with it,” Sister says.

I sit on the bed, catching my breath.

Sister is tall and skinny with pale eyes. She’s the only person in the family like that. When we were little Mother always said that Sister took after her Aunt Hera whom no one has ever met. After Father died she stopped saying that.

I’m short, like Mother and Father. My dark eyes dart around the room, they dart around Sister’s legs. She looks down on me, her face as blank as an ageless icon. She’s always done that.

“Breakfast is at seven,” Sister says. “Be downstairs on time. We start at eight.”

“I thought I might rest a few days before starting work,” I say.

Sister folds her thin arms across her bony frame. “We expect you to work. There’s no freeloading here.”

“Gee. Can I finish my coffee first?”

“You think you have all the time in the world.” Sister stalks out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

#

My favorite place in Portland was a coffee shop overlooking the Willamette River. I used to go there to open my wallet and laptop, hoping to make the world a better place. If that could be done with a latte, a panini, or a scone, then all the better. Plus I got to smell the coffee all day.

One gray-eyed morning a goddess was working the counter, ringing up orders, chatting with customers, and shining so brightly I almost winced when she looked my way and smiled.

I stepped up to order and saw that her divine status was affirmed on her name tag in a sans serif font: Athena. She asked me what I was having and my mouth opened but nothing came out. My words would not sound before the goddess of war, the arts—and wisdom. Finally, a harsh croaking fell off my swollen tongue.

The main thing I remember is that she liked my name. She said it was a kingly name. She said it suited me. She repeated it, enunciating each syllable as if it were a revelation. My face burned as the next customer came up. Somehow I found a table and got my computer booted up while I waited for her to call my name again.

I found myself going back there more often just to be close to her. I pretended to gaze at the menu on the wall behind the counter. She was Asian, probably Filipino-American. Her eyes sparkled and her mouth took on playful shapes when she listened to people. Her presence was clear and bright—as if all the grime of this stained world had to stand apart from her.

She made me feel special the way she looked at me and said hello each time I came in. But she was that way with everyone.

Sometimes she asked me how it was going. I told her I was fine but it never felt like enough.

Once she asked me what I did on the weekend.

I shrugged. “Nothing much.”

“What? You mean you didn’t kayak the Columbia from the mountains to the sea, climb Mount Hood, and end world hunger?” She grinned.

“No. Sorry. I slept in and then went for a walk. But there’s always next weekend.”

“That must be some job if you’re wiped out on the weekends,” she said.

I nodded, pulling my wallet from the back pocket of my skinny jeans. I couldn’t tell her I did marketing for a company that sold overpriced tea picked by underpaid women in India. Or that we called the tea organic but the grower once said that in Assam ‘organic’ might mean something else.

The queue was shifting on its feet behind me so we concluded our transaction.

It was the longest conversation we had.

I spent even more time there after that. But there was no obvious opening, no way to casually move into her life. If I asked her out and she said no, I wouldn’t be able to show my face there anymore. Anyway, she had to be seeing someone.

Around that time I lost my job. And then I lost my apartment. I started coming to the coffee shop earlier than usual, to search for job postings on the internet between sips of acidic black coffee. I updated my resume and tweaked my LinkedIn profile. In the corner by the window, I tapped on my keyboard to the accompaniment of her voice. All I wanted to do was look at her, but I could only steal glances.

One day, she brought my order to my table instead of calling my name. “Here you go, Arthur.” She set the tray down. “I’m Athena, by the way, but you probably know that already.” She glanced down at her name tag and then smiled at me.

I smiled back at her stupidly. I extended my hand and she shook it.

“Would you like to get some coffee with me sometime this week?” Athena asked.

My mouth dropped open. I looked around the empty coffee shop. No woman who looked that good had ever asked me out before. Come to think of it, no woman had ever asked me out, period.

“Not here, of course. Somewhere else!” She laughed.

My mouth just wouldn’t close. The parts were not lining up right. My tongue was choking on its coiled weight. This couldn’t be happening. This can’t happen. I was sleeping on an ex-girlfriend’s couch, for god’s sake. A vague image of the woman I broke up with a year-and-a-half ago loomed in my mind.

“Uh, thanks. But I have a girlfriend,” I said.

“Oh. I’m sorry, my mistake.” Athena let go of her smile. She set my sandwich on the table.

“No, no. It’s okay,” I said. I glanced out the window at the gray river. Raindrops spattered the glass.

“Enjoy your lunch.” She took the empty tray back behind the counter before disappearing into a back room.

The next day Mother offered me the job at the cemetery.

I never went back to that coffee shop.

#

I like quiet places. If I can’t hear my heartbeat it’s too noisy. If I can’t hear my breathing I may be dead already and not know it.

It’s when I’m in bed, in the room at the top of the landing, and the line of light shining under the door is extinguished, that I’m most alive. My heart beats softly, I hear the floorboards creak as Sister walks down the hall downstairs to her bedroom. And I stare into the dimensionless darkness, unbound by the shape of the world.

When this darkness wraps me up, I think of all the graves across the road. I think of all the people, each buried in their own hole, each with a name carved into a stone, floating on the soft earth above them. I’m sure all the names are false. They are aliases. Who knows who they really are, and why they’re so alone?

I never heard of anyone named Athena before. It couldn’t have been her real name. It had to be a handle. Maybe it was her online avatar, nothing more than a phantom from cyberspace. Her face is a pixelated presence in the darkness drifting away from resolution.

One thing’s for sure: when you grow up playing in a cemetery, you give up on ghosts.

#

“So what do you do all day, sitting here?” I asked.

“Knowing,” the Buddha said.

“What do you know?”

“Not knowing.”

“Why are mystics and avatars so evasive?”

“What are you trying to pin down?”

“Happiness,” I said.

The Buddha nodded and zipped up his hoodie. He held his hands in front of his heart. “There was a fish who lived in a crystal lake high among the mountain peaks. From its friends the fish learned of a miraculous substance called water which would bring infinite joy to anyone who possessed it. From that day on the fish swam around the lake, darting into every corner and crevice, desperately searching for this miracle.” The Buddha’s hands undulated like a restless fish while he looked from side to side.

“I get it,” I said. “What you’re saying is that I’m already swimming in happiness.”

He laughed. “No. Not quite.” He sighed. “But it’s okay.”

#

When we were children the cemetery was several blocks away. Now it’s right across the road. Grand trees march right up to its borders, and how they got so big, so fast, I’ll never know. It’s as if the rows of houses in the neighborhood have been slowly advancing over the course of an epoch, creeping closer inch by inch until they face the serried ranks of headstones. Like plate tectonics.

“You’re not remembering things,” Sister says at breakfast.

“I think I would’ve remembered if we lived across the street from it,” I say, spearing the last piece of bacon off my plate with the fork.

“We needed more room, is all.” Sister says.

#

I go looking for Father’s grave but I don’t know where to begin. The paths all look the same. The granite and marble gravestones spread like a vast city in the slanting sunlight. Birds chirp from the brambles and shrubs. A sparrow’s song breezes on the fresh morning air. Father has to be here somewhere.

Mother tells me, “Look in the middle. We laid him to rest in the center, where the cypress tree is. Don’t you remember?”

And I spiral inward past heroes and heroines, past the greatest generation, and more than a few contemporary losses. Winners, losers, grandparents, and grandchildren lie shoulder to shoulder under the damp grass. The earth has never been particular.

There are other, newer cemeteries around the city. Some of them extend behind strip malls and one has a view of an eight-lane freeway, where the roar of traffic drowns out the sobs of visitors. Maybe they want it that way.

But here in the Fields of Elysium, birds sing as spring blossoms flit and glide down onto the waiting ground. I search everywhere, around every corner, down one path and the next. Father’s marble headstone is nowhere to be seen.

My eyes cast about, restless in their disregard. Ahead is a tall cypress, a spiky black triangle thrust into the pale season. A sound like water muttering over stones comes from that direction. My feet approach the tree. A life-sized statue of the Buddha sits at the base of its broad trunk.

#

If I had to do it over again I wouldn’t have taken everything so seriously. I wouldn’t have believed I was a failure before I even started. I wouldn’t have used drugs or hung out with people who hated their lives. I wouldn’t have wasted one precious minute blaming politicians—or anyone. I wouldn’t have joined the establishment or the rebellion. I wouldn’t have worked for people who pretended to care.

I would have read more books and watched less television. I would have spent more time with mountains, trees, and the pebbles strewn across the desert floor. I would have listened to the surf and the faint frizzling of the stars. I would have sang duets with wrens and danced with the wind.

I would have been kinder. Because it doesn’t cost anything but pays interest. And it matters after all, in the end.

I would have had the courage to say yes to Athena.

#

My heart lurches into my throat. My feet are rooted to the ground before the cypress. The Buddha is frozen in cold, white marble. The blackbird sings and its song is an icy keening hushing the grass. The song chants upward, careening into the sky, funneling dead leaves and dead voices aloft. I am a weakness in the tide.

The Buddha opens his eyes, fixing me with his blazing gaze, and the marble fractures into a thousand jagged, delicate lines.

The blackbird lifts its head and opens its beak.

#

“What’s the most important thing to understand?” I asked.

“Death is a song on the wind,” the Buddha said.

#

I shake. I spit out gasps and heave for air. I spin away, stumble, running hard. Wind buffets me, pressing into my back, lending me its cool fury, lending me speed.

I leap.

#

In the morning I open the blinds and the road is gone. Acres of graves, most of them sunken, dimple the bedewed grass. The headstones parade right up to the yard beneath my window. I push open the pane and peer to either side. The neighboring houses have disappeared, replaced by sepulchers graced with stone angels.

At breakfast, Mother fries bacon and Sister serves scrambled eggs from a dish onto our plates. Sister’s hair is damp from the shower. She says nothing when I thank her.

“Did anyone notice that the road between our house and the cemetery disappeared?” I ask.

Sister looks down at her plate, taking a small bite of eggs.

Mother faces the stove. She grasps the black frying pan with an oven mitt. “Who wants bacon?”

Sister holds up her plate and I hold up mine. Mother shoves sizzling strips of bacon onto my plate after serving Sister.

I try a different approach. “Where’s Father’s grave?”

Mother loosens her apron and sits down at the table with Sister and me. She pours a cup of coffee from the carafe and tops up my cup. Sister doesn’t drink coffee. She says coffee leads to an early death. Mother sips hers and then butters a slice of toast.

“I went looking for Father’s grave yesterday but I couldn’t find it.”

“You still want the job?” Mother asks.

“Well, that is why I came here,” I say. “I don’t want to be a burden.”

“None of my babies are burdens,” Mother says. “You’re all lighter than feathers.”

Mother’s eyes dart like hungry fish. They lack color and a certain luster. She really has gotten old while I was away. I’m not really sure how long it’s been. Her face is a web of lines radiating from around her sunken eye sockets.

“Well, if you’re sure, you can have it,” Mother says.

I don’t know quite what this means. I put my fork down, tilting my head away from her, looking at her sideways.

“You want the job or not?” Mother asks.

“Yes, of course,” I say.

“Then finish your breakfast. You’re going to need it.” Mother eats her scrambled eggs between bites of toast.

When we finish Mother hangs her apron on a hook behind the door. “There’s a shovel out back, beside the steps. Find a place with no markers and dig a hole. Make it deep.”

“But that could take all day,” I say.

“It ain’t as hard as you think.”

#

“No really—what’s the most important thing?”

“The tide of your longing is death itself,” the Buddha said.

#

The house stands alone, surrounded by Elysium and its legions of headstones marking the places of the fallen. I cannot see the other houses of the neighborhood, only graves and trees and the clouds sailing past the morning. A wren trills from blackberry brambles that were not this close to the house yesterday.

I’m unused to manual labor but the shovel digs with a will of its own. I dig the hole at the edge of the yard. I dig it deep and the shovel delves it deeper in no time. Before the sun has ascended its zenith, the hole is a black doorway with sides falling straight off into eternity.

It smells like a cemetery, and I’m sure it’s the fresh earth heaped next to the hole like a new barrow on a moorland. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and the smell is stronger, a honeysuckle decay permeating my skin and clothes.

The digging is done. The turf-lined edge of the hole is just over my head and I realize I forgot a ladder. I brace the shovel across the opening, jam my foot against the earthen wall, and muscle my way up. Dirt falls into my face as I claw myself out of the grave onto the lawn.

I brush away stinging tears, and the wind dries my face. It swishes past, looping back, ruffling my hair as if it forgot to tell me something. But I don’t want to hear it. I lean the shovel beside the door and go inside to make coffee.

I wash my face and hands at the white enameled sink in the kitchen. There’s not a blister on my hands—not one.

#

“I’m afraid to die,” I said.

The Buddha inclined his head toward me. Even in this motion he was unwavering. But I was falling to pieces while sitting still.

His expression was gentle. His eyes were clear, cloudless—there was nothing hidden there. He laid a hand on my arm. “A feeling is only a feeling.”

#

Mother and Sister stand next to the grave inspecting my work.

I stand lightly between them, buoyed by pride.

“It’s a good hole,” Mother says. The lines on her face are a map of Mars. Her eyes are dark dots and they fall on me with an absence of anything I can call recognition. She adjusts her kerchief. “Well, you can take your place now.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“You want to find Father?” Mother asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Then get in this hole and your sister will bury you with kindness,” Mother says. “She will lay the dirt upon you so gently.”

A chill prickles my damp skin. “But I’m not ready to die!”

Mother’s face engulfs me, her shadow swallows my protests. From the corner of my eye I see Sister reaching for the shovel.

I shift to escape but stagger sideways and fall in.

And the blackness rains on me in sweet clods, its weight soothes me into the earth. Sister heaps shovel loads of dirt upon me, packing me down, making me snug. For a moment I flail, but my limbs are held fast in the numbness of dissolution.

A dark shroud of damp earth covers my face and I am high above the world, borne upon black wings as dreaming overtakes me.

I dream of all the things I wanted to be and all the things I wanted to do. I dream of Athena, who wanted to know me, but I let myself be parried away by fears. My dream is a song and it bursts forth from beneath the burden of the earth, churning, rolling, living over me, making life out of lost hopes.

At the edge, I ride with Athena along the missing paths, racing across the sky to beaches, pyramids, and ruined cities. We sparkle at dawn in temporary encampments, a tangle of arms and legs, blissful in small satisfactions. Our children sleep in our arms as we wing over continents and take tea in the high hills, floating above the heat and thunder.

I can never see enough. And I can never get enough of her—and never get away from her.

Here, at the edge of sleep, I live a lifetime.

I have long since stopped breathing.