Archie Dunn didn’t cry when they buried his wife. His stomach did ache, though — a raw pulsing pain — and this pain weakened his legs and made him unsteady. Rain fell. Archie stood there in the rain; he wobbled slightly in its soft gray wetness. One by one, his friends and family — Laura’s friends and family — threw handfuls of dirt and white roses into the pit. He looked down at the pale roses and the shale-colored mud and the polished mahogany of the coffin lid. He thought, oddly enough, of pigeons.
Archie imagined a flock of pigeons, white and gray and brown, rising like a cloud from the box that held his wife’s body. He imagined them rising into the sky and spelling out a message with their wings. What would they say to him? Would their message be in English? Could the dead communicate through the bones of birds — perhaps because these bones were hollow? Archie wondered if this was why birds always seemed so secretive. The damn things are secretive, he decided, because they’re carrying the words of the dead. He shook his head. Jesus. I’m going insane.
He straightened his back. His spine popped; he’d been slouching. Every breath sent spirals of pain through his chest and his shoulders. He rubbed the back of his neck. He straightened the cuffs of his shirt. Then, without any warning, he turned to the side and fell to his knees and gently began to vomit.
“Somebody help him,” his mother said. “Somebody get him a towel.”
“I have a moist towelette,” his grandmother said. She began rummaging in her purse. “Last night,” she said confidentially to the man beside her, “I ate barbecued ribs.”
But Archie stood and waved them off.
“I’m fine,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist and struggling to stand. “I’ll get cleaned up in just a second.”
Four weeks later, Archie found himself buying a cup of coffee from a beautiful woman. He was shocked when he noticed that she was beautiful; it was the first thing he’d noticed in a month. She wore a black velvet shirt. It exposed the pale stretch of her shoulders, the smooth rise where her muscle separated itself from the bone. She was also wearing a broach — an elegant crystalline broach in the shape of a butterfly. It glittered with an unusual intensity. It seemed, actually, to sparkle.
“I like your broach,” Archie said, looking down at his cup of coffee. He added a packet of Equal to the milky, steaming liquid. When he looked up the woman was smiling.
“Thank you,” she said. “It was my mother’s.” She paused and narrowed her eyes slightly. She brushed the hair back from her forehead. She started to say something but then she stopped. She cleared her throat instead.
Archie looked at the woman. What was she about to say? Was she about to tell him that the broach was a gift, given to her in her mother’s will, in those long and difficult weeks, those weeks last August after her mother’s death? Was she about to tell him that her mother had bought it many years ago, in a flea market somewhere upstate, and that it had once belonged — the vendor had told her — to a first cousin of Nelson Rockefeller? Or that it was an antique, a family heirloom from the nineteenth century? That those were real diamonds? Or that it had been her mother’s wedding gift, given to her by her husband as they rode away from the wedding reception in a midnight blue 1949 Buick Riviera? So much of life, Archie speculated, was about disclosure, about the things that you said and didn’t say, about the secrets in every pause for breath, in the traces of language that you left behind, unspoken.
He wanted, so desperately, to say something to her, to let her know that he understood — that he knew, too, what it was like to lose someone. Not a mother, no. But a wife. He yearned to tell this woman about the way that he felt when he went to sleep every night, alone and cold and lost in his queen-sized bed. He wanted to tell her how it felt to wake up in the morning, feeling absolutely nothing, feeling less than nothing, feeling like nothingness would be a pleasant change from the endless queasy ache. He wanted to tell her what he’d eaten in the past three days — six grapes and a sleeve of saltine crackers — and to explain that they’d tasted identical, the crackers and the grapes, and that this had made him feel terribly alone. But instead he nodded. He tipped the woman a dollar and he walked out the door.
The street was noisy. A delivery truck idled nearby, its engine clattering beneath its metal hood. Archie began moving towards the noise, unsure of anything except the fact that he was walking and sipping at the coffee. Soon he’d walked through the noise and beyond it, and the street was a mass of cars and pedestrians. It was a spring day in Manhattan. Dew still lingered in the corners of the shop windows.
That morning — a Monday — Archie had expected to return to work. He’d taken a shower at six-thirty. He’d shaved for the first time in days. He’d brushed his teeth with care and attention. He’d caught an early, empty train from Brooklyn into the city. He’d walked to the door of his office building and he’d paused there, standing on the street, poised to go inside and take the elevator to the tenth floor. But something had stopped him. He’d just stopped moving, flat-footed in the middle of the sidewalk, and lost himself in speculation.
In another life, Archie had been an accountant at a small brokerage in midtown. Now — he wasn’t sure what he was. His job seemed like another lost life, a lost skin, something he’d discarded in the forgotten past. He couldn’t go back. There was no way he could go back — not on a Monday morning, not on a Monday morning that was so similar to all the other Monday mornings that he’d lived over the past four years, all of the other Monday mornings he’d awakened in bed with Laura, kissed her softly on the cheek, and gone to take a shower in the dark.
So he’d bought a cup of coffee, noticed the beautiful woman, and now he was wandering through the city, moving from block to block without paying any real attention to where he was going. After a while his drink was cold. He discarded it in a trash can. Joggers bobbed everywhere. They were fit and athletic and young and hopeful. He waited at a crosswalk. He watched the yellow cabs veer wildly through the intersection. Every third person, it seemed, was talking on a cell phone.
Archie shook his head. He felt like a voyeur, sure, listening to the conversations of others. But in some ways it was soothing. People were moving through the world, walking and talking. They were speaking to their friends, their families, their lovers. He’d barely spoken with anyone since the funeral. What could he say to them? That he was thirty-three years old and it took him two hours to get dressed each day? That he would start tying his shoes and then notice, fifteen minutes later, that he’d never finished the knot and that in fact the lace was still in his fingertips, waiting for some sort of further instruction? Who wanted to hear this sort of thing? No one.
Archie walked down Varick. He passed Spring Street. He took a right on Dominick. As soon as he turned the corner he saw a small group of people — a knot of well-dressed individuals — assembled outside of a what seemed to be a church. They wore tasteful, dark colors. For some reason, Archie was drawn to the crowd. He stood on its margins. When it moved into the building, he also moved into the building, sucked along like debris in the wake of a wave. As he entered he read the sign to the left of the stone-carved archway:
ST. VILNIUS LITHUANIAN CATHOLIC PARISH
It said.
ALL ARE WELCOME
Archie shuddered. Why was that word — that word welcome – so shocking? He wanted to be welcomed; he yearned to be enfolded and comforted and soothed. He crossed himself as he entered the vestibule. He bowed his head as he’d learned to do so many years ago, walking into church with his father. He remembered a tumble of childhood Sundays. He recalled a roster of off-key hymns and brittle communion wafers and musky drafts of incense.
The church was dim. He squinted and took a funeral program and made his way to a seat in the back row. The coffin was already there, squat and soldierly on the altar, and Archie felt himself staring at it, transfixed. He shook his head and looked down at the program in his hands. This was a celebration of the life of Darius Reksnys, March 19, 1923 — April 2, 2005. Darius had just celebrated his eighty-second birthday and for some reason this fact was tremendously moving. The text of the program was written in both Lithuanian and English — though the English was problematic: Darius, also a farmer in Lithuania, worked for many years in the public school. He was a janitor. Many student, have fondly remembered this man who is to, them, like father.
The priest swooped in from the wings. He took his place on the altar and began the funeral mass. He spoke in Lithuanian. Even though the words were foreign, Archie still recognized the different parts of the liturgy. He knew when to stand, when to sit, when to kneel. He knew when to make the sign of the cross over his forehead and his lips and his heart.
Sitting there in the church, listening to the familiar-but-foreign vocabulary of the service, Archie felt a certain sense of peace, a comfort that was deeper than anything he’d felt in the past four weeks. He relaxed and molded his spine against the solid wooden back of the pew. He looked at the people gathered in the body of the church. They shared a sorrow; some of them were more sad than others; some seemed to be here as a formality. These were the ones that Archie was most interested in — the ones who looked inattentive or shifted uncomfortably in their seats. They were the lucky ones, in a way, the ones who could be here and not feel the sadness of the morning so palpably.
Before he knew it, though, the service had ended and the priest administered the final blessing. The pallbearers came forward. They were mostly fat. The coffin wobbled slightly as they lifted it; Archie worried for a moment that it might fall. But it didn’t. Poor Darius Reksnys made his steady way towards his place of eternal rest.
After the mass, the priest lingered on the steps, shaking the hands of the funeral goers as they streamed out of the building. When it was his turn to shake hands, Archie looked the priest in the eyes. The priest’s hand was cold and wet and unusually soft. Archie thought of oysters.
“Thank you, father,” he said. “That meant a lot to me.”
Spit back into the day, Archie felt a momentary surge of confusion. He noticed that a group of the old Lithuanians were filing off towards an adjacent bar. Walking behind the Lithuanians, Archie saw that they were all rather large; they waddled in a way that was profoundly endearing. This was what he’d do, then. He’d follow the portly Lithuanians to the tavern and he’d have a drink. Though he didn’t want any food, beer did seem like a good plan.
Laura had never liked this idea — drinking in the afternoon. But sometimes on the weekends he’d do it, and she would quietly excuse herself and go somewhere, anywhere, to be away from him and out in the world. She’d walk to the public library and read a detective novel, lingering in the reading room until it closed, or she would take the subway into the city and see a foreign-language film by herself. She would return late in the evening, and Archie would be on the couch, a bottle of wine uncorked and nearly empty, nestled between the cushions. Sometimes they would have sloppy, awkward sex, with him pretending to be sober but still fumbling with her clothes, with the clasps and buttons and zippers that were suddenly so difficult to negotiate.
On one of these nights in the first year of their marriage, Archie had passed out, still inside of her, his body on top of hers, pinning her to the mattress. She’d fallen asleep, too, and they’d awakened in the middle of the night, tangled and damp and reeking of sex and alcohol. Archie had disentangled himself and eased away to the other side of the bed. But then Laura was above him, her face large and serious. His head hurt.
“You know,” she said, “I wanted to tell you this joke — this joke I read today online.”
“Fine,” he said. “Tell me.”
“It’s about birds, about a mother pigeon and a baby pigeon. They’re competing in a pigeon race.”
Archie rolled away from her, onto his stomach. He felt nauseous. The room was spinning. “A pigeon race?”
“A pigeon race. And the baby bird is worried. He’s worried that he won’t be able to keep up.” Laura started crying then — Archie could hear her voice crack in the darkness. He knew what she looked like, knew the way that her lips were starting to tremble, knew the way that the tears would collect, in small pockets of brightness, at the corners of her eyes. He knew that he should roll over again and put his arms around her. But he couldn’t move; his body hurt too much. She continued.
“And so the mother says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tie a rope to your feet. I can pull you along. I’ll help you keep up.’ But this just makes the baby pigeon more upset. And so the mother is surprised. She asks him what’s wrong.” Laura rested her head between Archie’s naked shoulder blades. “And he says to her. ‘Oh, mom. I don’t — I don’t want to be pigeon-towed.’”
Archie could feel Laura crying, could feel the sadness moving through his wife’s body, and he felt a profoundly hollow feeling — a feeling that he couldn’t quite name. He didn’t say anything. She cried for a while and then grew quiet. After some time he could tell that she’d fallen back asleep. And now, walking towards the bar, Archie could feel the texture of that memory. He couldn’t escape it. He felt like if he reached out and tried to touch it, he could. It would feel rough in his hands. It would, he guessed, have a texture almost like burlap.
Part Two
The tavern was also dim — dim as the church. It was mostly empty, although the little knot of Lithuanians had added some amount of life and energy. The room smelled of mildew and spilled beer and lemons. The bartender, Archie saw, had been cutting lemons, quartering them into wedges of yellow light. He’d filled most of a large white bucket with quartered lemons, and as he poured drinks for the Lithuanians he wiped his hands on his apron. After a few minutes, Archie made his way to the bar.
“What can I get you?”
Archie shrugged. “Whatever’s on special,” he said.
The bartender rested his hand on the taps. “We’ve got Bud Light and PBR,” he said. “Which one you want?”
“Surprise me,” Archie said. He lit a cigarette. The bartender stopped pouring.
“You can’t smoke in here,” he said.
“Leave me alone,” Archie said. “I just went to a funeral.”
The bartender looked at him, trying to make up his mind as to what to say. Finally he shook his head and finished pouring the beer. He removed an ashtray from somewhere behind the bar.
“Mind if I join you?” he said.
Archie sat at the bar and talked with the bartender about the weather and the Mets and New York City’s anti-smoking laws. After some time, the bartender pointed at Archie’s left hand, on which he still wore his wedding ring.
“Married?” the bartender asked.
Archie debated for a moment what to say. What could he say? No? Yes, but she just died in a car accident? Yes, but she was driving in the rain on the BQE and the car had rolled and she hadn’t — of all things — been wearing a seatbelt? How could he even begin? He looked down at his drink.
“No,” he said. “It was my dad’s.”
The bartender nodded. He finished his cigarette and walked back to his lemons. How could one bar, Archie debated after watching the man cut for a while, need this many wedges of any citrus fruit?
So, for the rest of the afternoon, Archie said nothing else. He sat on the barstool and listened to the foreign voices of the Lithuanians. He watched them buy round after round of vodka — and drank round after round of beer, himself. By nightfall he was deeply intoxicated. He took the subway home, swaying as he waited for the train. At the door to his building, Archie struggled with the key; he dropped the ring on the ground. As he reached down to retrieve it, he stumbled to the left and toppled and fell to the pavement. He sat there for a while, the pavement cool and soothing to the touch. Then he struggled to stand once more; his hand shook as he slipped the key back into the lock.
The next morning Archie awoke hungover but filled with a sense of purpose. He called the office early — before he anticipated anyone would be there — and punched in his manager’s extension.
“Hello, this is Joel Kennedy.”
Archie was standing at the sink in his boxers. His breath stuttered from his chest. Joel Kennedy was the kind of boss that made you nervous. He made you nervous because he wanted so badly to soothe you, to ensure that all was well in his office. He was tall and thin and spoke in a melodious, artificial baritone. Above all, he detested unhappiness. He wanted his employees to love their work, no matter how boring. He wanted every day to be full of a certain, indefinable, workplace bliss.
And now, unfortunately, Joel was unhappy. He’d been expecting Archie in the office yesterday; Archie hadn’t shown up. Though this seemed minor, to Archie, given the circumstance, Joel would not relent. Archie explained that he wasn’t ready for work, that he still needed more time to get things straightened out.
“Work,” Joel said, “is the best way to take your mind off things.” He indicated that work would be restorative; he insisted that Archie needed to come into the office so that they could touch base.
Archie thought, for a moment, of baseball. He remembered liking baseball at some point in the distant past; he remembered going to Mets games with Laura and buying hot dogs and popcorn and oversized five-dollar sodas. Why are you using this tired baseball metaphor with me, Joel? Touch base? Don’t you know that clichés are dead language? Instead, he promised that he’d be in on Friday and that, while there, he’d swing by Joel’s office. He emphasized the word swing. One bad turn of phrase, he considered, deserved another.
Archie hung up the phone and showered and put on his best formal suit. He looped a thin black tie around his neck. He combed his hair and brushed his teeth and put Visine in his bloodshot eyes. He paused, only for one moment, to look in the mirror beside the door. He was curious if the mirror would retain his reflection — his reflection receding endlessly into its depths — long after he left the hallway of the apartment. In his imagination, Archie saw thousands of reflections he’d left in mirrors. Were they all still out there, somewhere, impossibly thin and diminishing, becoming so narrow that human eyes could no longer see them? And what about the reflections of Laura? What about all the times that she’d walked past department store display windows — or cars parked on the street? Were these moments still visible, too?
Archie sighed and tried to clear his head. He needed to focus. He had a plan, now; all that remained was the implementation. He took his cell phone to the Lebanese restaurant on the corner. He ordered a Coke and asked to borrow the yellow pages. He opened the phone book to C. He scanned the listing of churches. He was amazed at the manifold varieties of religious belief available in New York City. Anything you wanted was here: Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Unitarian. And that was just Christianity. There were other faiths represented, as well, every denomination you could imagine. There were many he’d never heard of. The Church of Life and the Holy Blessed Light, for example, seemed particularly interesting. As did the Temple of the Broken Cord.
What was, exactly, the Broken Cord?
Language, he realized, was important. It would be vital for him to be submerged in a foreign language, in words he didn’t understand. For some reason this had been the most comforting part of the Lithuanian service. The language had flowed up and around him, a ceaselessly shifting beauty. It had become a river of words, immersing him — almost like a second baptism.
Archie picked a denomination. One after another, he dialed the Buddhist temples in the city. After many awkward phone conversations with peaceable but confused Buddhists, Archie found what he was looking for. It was at the Eastern States Buddhist Temple in Manhattan, a temple whose location — the phone book indicated — was 64 Mott Street. Yes, the man answering the phone had said, yes, there is a funeral today. Was Archie, the man asked, a family member of the deceased?
Part Three
The broad yellow façade of the Eastern States Buddhist Temple of America was framed by intricate turquoise and red woodwork. The overall effect was mesmerizing; Archie stood across the street and stared at the bright colors. Immediately above the temple was a billboard advertising the Mitsubishi Gallant. Archie saw himself driving to services every week at this temple, driving a silver Mitsubishi with leather seats. He would drive to services and he would park his car illegally in front of the temple. Who would tow him? Who would tow someone for their acts of religious devotion?
He crossed the street. Several young men squatted in front of the temple, playing some sort of a game with dice. Money changed hands. He listened to the dice clatter on the pavement. The men’s hands moved quickly, barely pausing long enough to let the dice rest on the ground. They’d evidently played this game for years. The motions of it were almost mechanical. He watched and watched. Gradually, his presence became obtrusive. He felt like he had to say something.
“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to keep his voice soft. He wanted to stress that he was just curious. He was just interested. The men looked up at him. Two of them exchanged a few words in a foreign dialect.
“This is a funeral,” one of them finally said, looking over his shoulder at something distant down the street. “We’re gambling to keep the evil spirits away.” The game resumed. Archie felt his cheeks burn in embarrassment. He took a few steps towards the temple doorway. If they stared at him as he entered the building, Archie didn’t know it. He kept his eyes focused on the space ahead of him.
Why are churches always so poorly lit? Archie adjusted his eyes to the soft meager light. He felt disoriented. There were broad, opened, double doors — again bright red wood – and they led to a little interior garden. At the center of the garden was a fountain. Archie listened to the peaceful sound of running water. The air filled with the scent of incense. Archie breathed it in. His palms were bathed in sweat. He tried to calm down, to steady his trembling knees. He tried to center himself. No luck.
Still shaking, Archie walked through the garden. He opened another set of doors and entered an assembly hall. Immediately, he was confronted by a new sound. It was the sound of music and chanting — low eerie chanting — a drone of sound that seemed to echo through him. There were a large number of people gathered here, seated on folding chairs, and an altar of sorts at one end of the room. Several monks stood on the altar, chanting with closed eyes. Incense burned beside them — row upon row of smoking silver decanters — and there was also a single white candle. To one side of the altar, Archie now saw, stood several musicians. They were playing an accompaniment to the monks on flute and trumpet. From time to time, with no apparent rhythmic intention, one of the musicians tapped a bright golden gong.
He made his way to a table located at the back of the main room. Propped against the wall was a framed photograph of the deceased: Li Yun Bo, 1934-2005. Another old man, this one smiling, his teeth crooked and lit with narrow pink gaps. It was a joyous face. Archie didn’t think that he would be remembered this way at his funeral — exuberant and full of life, happy. Beside the photograph were small sticks of incense. Archie lit one and put a few coins in the donation box.
He meandered to the back of the assembled crowd and took a seat on one of the chairs. The chanting continued for a while, and then, quite suddenly, silence descended on the room. Archie felt his curiosity grow as the silence lengthened. What was happening? No one seemed nervous or disconcerted. Finally, a young man near the front of the room stood up and started speaking. Though Archie understood nothing of what the man said, the speech was still moving. This was a testimonial about Li Yun Bo — undoubtedly — and the man was speaking with a tremendous, gut-wrenching amount of emotion. One after another, the testimonials came about this smiling old man, and Archie could feel the community rising together to honor one of their own. The last one to speak was a small old woman, a woman who must have been, Archie imagined, Li Yun Bo’s widow.
Then, there was silence. The testimonials were done. Nearly everyone was weeping, openly weeping, and Archie felt a surge of emotion move through him. He found himself standing up; he was clearing his throat and gesturing with his right hand to the framed photograph at the back of the room.
“Li Yun Bo,” Archie said in a loud and confident voice, “Li Yun Bo was a good man.” Heads swiveled. Hundreds of eyes stared directly at him. A few people murmured. Archie’s mind searched furiously for a suitable lie. “He was my good friend,” Archie said, his voice wavering. “He was like a brother to me. A very old brother.”
A murmur moved through the assembled guests. Archie crashed back into his chair. He stared at his hands. After a few moments, the monks began chanting once more. Archie sat in the audience, stunned by his own outburst; he remembered, for the hundredth time, the last afternoon he’d seen Laura — a Saturday. He’d opened a beer as he read the morning paper; she’d been furious.
“Why are you drinking, Archie? Let’s just go somewhere. Let’s drive up the coast. It’s beautiful right now in New England. We don’t have plans. Let’s spend the weekend in Vermont.”
But he’d just ignored her, and continued reading, and she’d dressed quickly, hurried wordlessly out the door. Archie pictured her getting in their car — an old, slightly rusted Nissan Sentra. She’d been angry, obviously, and she’d rushed out into traffic. She hadn’t put on the seatbelt. Archie shook his head. This was what he dreamed about, almost every night. This was what he couldn’t shake: The image of her putting the car into gear, the image of her easing the Nissan out of its parking space, the image of the way she must have lurched, unsteady, onto the roadway.
Part Four
Wednesday and Thursday were quiet. Archie tried to find a funeral but he came up empty. He spent the days in his apartment, watching cable television and sleeping. At one point, his alarm went off. He stared at it until it stopped. Archie wondered if, with great practice, he could learn to control the alarm with his mind. Off, he’d think, and it would stop. On, he’d suggest, and the clinical, high-pitched buzzer would resound through the room.
When Friday morning came, Archie dressed for work. It was the same procedure: The white shirt, the tie, the blazer. The aftershave. He smoked a cigarette at the window of his apartment. Archie noticed the thin white bands of cirrus clouds hanging like gauze in the pale morning sky. He noticed the sound of the traffic — intense despite the early hour — and the sound of the birds, pigeons perhaps, that had nested in the eaves of his apartment building. He noticed the scent of truck exhaust.
The office was antiseptic. He managed to get there early, before everyone else, and situate himself comfortably at his cubicle. He checked his email. Five hundred and seventy messages. He read them one by one, clicking through them methodically, conscious of the fact that the office was coming alive around him as he did this.
After checking his email, Archie began to draw. He sketched a series of hearts — small, crooked, greeting-card hearts — and filled some of them with elaborate designs, with spirals or checkerboards or stripes.
The phone rang. Caller ID indicated that it was Joel. Archie picked up the receiver and sighed.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Archie. Glad you’re back. Can you come see me in my office right now?”
Archie looked down at his sketchpad. He’d just added birds’ wings to the heart:
“Not right now,” he said. “I’m a little busy.”
They scheduled an appointment for the afternoon.
Archie considered about the nature of appointments. Wasn’t time an illusory substance, anyway? It came from the future, which didn’t exist. It contained the past, which had no substance. And the present moment was always disappearing. How could Joel even begin to talk about time? Why was he so concerned with the difference between twelve o’clock and twelve-fifteen?
But at twelve-fifteen Archie slumped his way to Joel’s office. He sat in the offered chair. He stared at the wall directly behind his manager’s head. A conversation commenced. What kind of conversation, exactly, Archie couldn’t guess; though he was speaking, though his mouth was moving and responding to Joel’s questions, he had no idea what he was saying. Finally, he focused on Joel’s melody of a voice.
“I mean,” Joel appeared to be saying, “We believe in you, Archie. We know you’ve had some tough circumstances. But we want you to be a productive member of the team. We need you to be productive. It would be good for you.” He paused. He touched his skinny fingertips together in a gesture that passed for a thoughtful pause. Archie knew that this was an artificial mannerism. Joel had never had an authentic thoughtful pause in his life. “So,” Joel concluded, “what do you think about that?”
Archie looked around him. The office was decorated mostly in light blue and taupe. It seemed calculated to soothe. There was a potted fern on a marble pedestal in one corner of the room. Poor fern. Poor dear. Stuck here in this office. Something about the fern — which was yellowing at its tips and drooping slightly towards the floor — made Archie sad and angry. It deserved to be somewhere else, in a forest or a garden, at least. It deserved to live, to live a wild life, something appropriate for its species. It didn’t deserve Joel Kennedy and his cold, uncaring, actuarial mind. Archie lost it.
“What do I think?” he said. “What do you think I think? I’m cut adrift. I’m loose in the current. I have no mooring. I’m alone. I’m miserable. I don’t have any fucking clue what to do.”
“Archie, calm down.”
“No, Joel, you calm down. And stop using my damn name in conversation, Joel. Do you like it when I use yours? Do you, Joel? Because, Joel, I could use your name a lot. I could say your name in every sentence, Joel, if you’d like that. If that would make you feel like I was being more earnest, Joel. If that would make you happy.”
“We feel you’re a valuable employee, Archie.”
“Valuable? Oh, really? That’s wonderful. I’m so very glad, Joel, that I’m valuable.”
Archie stood and knocked over his chair. He looked around the room. He seized the stapler from Joel’s desk. He raised the stapler in the air, cocking his arm as if he was about to throw it at his manager. Joel froze, unable to move. Archie paused. He looked up at his hand. His hand amused him. He laughed a little. Then he reached over the desk, grabbed Joel’s tie, and stapled it.
“Take that,” he said.
Archie ran from Joel’s office and onto the main office floor. He took his chair from his cubicle and wheeled it into the center of the room. He stood on it. He started yelling. Everyone looked up at him, at the spectacle of his red-faced body, gesturing wildly with open hands.
“My wife died. Do you understand me? She’s dead. Gone. Hey, you.” Archie pointed at the mail room delivery boy — an acne-covered eighteen-year-old — who’d had the bad luck to wander into the office as Archie had started speaking.
“Me?” the boy said. He seemed to be shaking.
“Yeah, you. The one with the ugly haircut. Do you understand what I’m saying? My wife — the woman who I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with — is dead.”
He jumped off the chair and walked to his desk. He tore the phone book from his drawer. He sprinted to the elevator. He pushed the button. It didn’t come. He walked over to the stairwell, muttering to himself and shuffling through the yellow pages. He hit the door and didn’t look back. This was the way in which Archie Dunn quit his job.
Part Five
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Archie was late, of course, but he was happy that he’d managed to find anything on such short notice. He took the 7 to Long Island City and St. George’s Coptic Orthodox Church. He made his way into the church with confidence, this time. He didn’t hesitate. He was a veteran, after all, of this whole process. He knew the rules. Or at least he’d invented the rules, and so there was no real way that he could break them.
This church was bright, unusually bright, perhaps because every mourner had a candle. Late afternoon sunlight streamed through the stained glass windows of the church and added to the candlelight; the effect was stunning.
Archie felt a little like he was standing in the presence of divinity, divinity bathed in pure white light. As Archie entered, the priest was singing something — his Coptic voice rising up towards the roof of the building. It was a sad melody. Archie remembered the Buddhist chant and marveled at how different this song was.
Archie took a seat in the last row. This was an open casket funeral — he saw — a fact that he found, for some reason, to be rather shocking. He stared at the body in the coffin. It was a woman, middle-aged, it seemed. Archie listened to the singing of the funeral mass and lost himself in sad contemplation of this woman’s figure. When he’d finally found this funeral, he hadn’t bothered to ask for any details. Now, he didn’t even know the woman’s name. There didn’t appear to be a program.
After some time a man came forward from the first row. This must be the husband. The man was perhaps sixty years old. He was slightly stooped and his hair was gray. Crying, he placed a painting of some sort in his wife’s hand. Archie squinted. Was that an icon of Christ — the traditional image of Jesus with a flowing beard and white robes and a halo around his head? Then, the priest handed the man a wreath. Gently, so tenderly and gently, the man reached over and placed the wreath on his wife’s forehead. Throughout this process, the priest continued his plaintive song. At times, the audience sang, too. Archie moved his lips and tried to fake a familiarity with the foreign words. He hoped that he did a decent job. No one stared at him, anyway, and his suit blended well with the other suits of the mourners.
After about an hour of singing — and at some unseen cue from the priest, perhaps — the mourners all began to move forward. Where are they going? Is there communion? Instead — he saw with a certain amount of horror — the mourners were all pausing at the coffin. They stopped at the open lid and leaned forward. They appeared to be kissing something inside of it.
When Archie’s row started moving, he moved with them. What else could he do? He was caught up in the flow of the funeral, and as he moved closer and closer to the nameless dead woman, he was filled with a greater sense of panic. What was he going to do? He watched intently as the people immediately ahead of him performed this rite. They were, he saw, kissing one of two things. They could kiss the icon in the woman’s hands, or the crucifix that had been placed above her head. A few people were having conversations with the dead woman — brief, wistful conversations, but conversations nonetheless.
When his turn came, Archie paused above the casket. He looked down. He stopped breathing. There — her head resting peacefully on an arrangement of milky satin pillows — was Laura. But how can it be Laura? She’d been buried for four weeks, hadn’t she?
“I’ve lost my mind, darling,” he whispered. He reached over and stroked her face, lingering on her cheek with his fingertips. He sighed and bent down and kissed the icon of Christ, placing his lips carefully on the edge of the painting, not wanting to touch the image, itself. Then, on a momentary impulse, he leaned over and kissed Laura on the cheek. “One last kiss,” he said. But then he shook his head and blinked his eyes. It wasn’t Laura, at all, he saw. It was some stranger. In fact, it was nearly a repulsive face, a slightly swollen face that was caked in yellow make-up. It was someone he didn’t know, and so he walked politely away, letting the woman behind him have her time with the body.
Instead of returning to his pew, Archie staggered out into the late afternoon. It was almost 3:30, and the sun was well past its highest point. He made his way back to the train. He rode into Brooklyn, transferring to the G at Court House Square, unsure exactly why, but certain that this was what he was supposed to do. He got off the G at Bergen Street, and before he knew it, he’d wandered down towards the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Watchtower loomed behind him, a bright neon reminder that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were here, in New York City, and that indeed they were watching. What were the parameters of a Jehovah’s Witness funeral?
Archie sat on a swatch of grass near the river and rested his back against a tree. He took out a cigarette and lit it with a match. He inhaled the smoke and watched the water. There was something soothing about being here at the bridge. There was something comforting about watching the traffic move across its span. Archie thought of all the people — famous or otherwise — who’d sat on this very spot in the past one hundred and twenty years.
He smoked and reflected on kissing the dead woman in her coffin. He’d seen Laura — there was no doubt that he’d hallucinated her face — and for a moment he’d been filled with a certain peace, filled with the idea that now he’d get to say goodbye. He remembered all the times he’d kissed her. He remembered kissing her on the altar when they were married, touching his lips against hers in that strangely intimate — but public — gesture.
Archie opened his eyes and looked at the water. A seagull circled nearby. As Archie watched, the gull dove down to the surface of the river and speared a fish. Then it rose back into the air and flew towards him — landing just a few feet away. It dropped the fish on the grass.
The fish was larger than Archie had expected — perhaps this was why the gull hadn’t swallowed it mid-flight. Was it some kind of trout? Did trout live in the East River? It lurched uncontrollably, flailing wildly as it suffocated. The gull circled its prey, then, strutting in a way that almost seemed cruel. From time to time it pecked at the miserable creature; Archie could see the viciousness of the bird’s beak. He felt sorry for the trout. A moment ago it had been swimming in the river, unaware of its impending fate.
Archie stood up and waved his arms. “Go on,” he yelled at the bird. “Get out of here.” He flicked his cigarette towards it. It seemed startled — but what could it do? It skittered warily away.
Archie walked over and looked down at the fish. Its gills still opened and closed, and he could see the bright pink cartilage beneath its silvery skin. There were pencil-sized punctures all along its body; one of its eyes was missing. He picked it up — startled by the dry feeling of its scales against his palm — and tossed it back into the water.
But the bird was still loitering nearby. “Leave, damnit,” Archie said. “Leave!” He ran madly towards the bird. He chased it along the ground of the riverbank. He was angry — suddenly furious — and he was screaming as loud as he could. Anger coursed through his body, a formless, burning anger at the cruelty and stupidity of the world. He knew that he looked like a lunatic, screaming at a seagull, pursuing it along the edge of the river, but he didn’t care. When the bird finally left — protesting loudly as it flew into the distance — Archie fell to one knee. His heart echoed through his chest. He was conscious of something — some feeling inside of himself that was messy and ragged and seemingly limitless. He sat down. His throat felt raw. Where are my cigarettes? He coughed. Then, with the sound of the bridge traffic falling down towards him like rain, Archie began to cry.
It felt strange and self-indulgent, but the tears streaked his face, burned along the planes of his cheeks, streamed from both of his eyes. He was sobbing — thick, rattling sobs — and he could barely breathe. The sun had sunk behind the buildings of the city; it would be dark soon, and Archie felt as if he were in something of a canyon. The day was elsewhere, high above him in the sky, and he was in some other place, some hidden pocket of time. What do I do now? he wondered. He looked up and suddenly the sky seemed to be full of birds. Messengers, sure. But they’re also carnivores. Archie watched the birds move along the edge of the river, spinning in lazy circles. He watched the birds spin and he imagined, for a moment, the taste of raw trout.
