Some early mornings I could almost hear the echo of the last gears of the stage clicking into place as the swoosh of the first sunlight ignited across the fairways and rushed down toward me at the outskirts of the golf course on the near side of the cemetery. I had the feeling of some familiar soul having just fled out of sight, that I had just caught a glimpse of the back of someone’s heel as she dashed offstage. It unsettled me, and I even had the notion that all the dead in the cemetery had just closed their eyes again, as they were compelled to do, but that they were telegraphing their irritation at a breach of address I had committed and at the indignity they felt at so nearly being caught up and about. I dreaded the notion that to the dead being awake was perfectly normal. I even began to feel not so much that the dead disapproved of me nearly catching them about on their own accounts — such a predicament might delight them, even inspire them to mischief — but on the behalf of just one of their members, whose hurried flight they may have even protected by distracting me by tumbling back into their bunks, and their stagy, tight-lidded feigning of sleep. I sometimes had the sense that, in the instant before I caught sight of them, all the winged skulls on the headstones and all the statues of angels throughout the cemetery had had their eyes shut, too, as if their usual, unblinking vigilance over the dead was something from which even they, slate and marble that they were, needed rest, that the dead and the stone carvings on their headboards all rested hardly in peace and in truth led lives more hectic than those of the living.
I had cast Enon’s dead in the vignettes I made up for Kate, but as I became more and more unbalanced, they seemed to act of their own accord. Certainly, it was the drugs and my exhaustion and my sorrow producing these phantasms, but they haunted me nonetheless, and with increasing frequency and vividness. I understood how dire such hallucinations were becoming late one early summer night when I sat down to rest at the edge of one of the putting greens on the Enon Golf Club, near the street. I sat on the grass, put my legs out in front of me, leaned back against the stone wall, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. I opened my eyes and felt suddenly as if I were awaiting the beginning of a performance of some kind. The grass was wet and smelled vegetal for the first time in weeks, not like hay, not like thatch. Wind swelled and ebbed like a surf, and broke against the foliage in the rows of trees running up the hill between the golf course and the cemetery, sizzling through it and rushing across the open fairway in front of me. The green slope of the hill was only just still green, lowering into black. A low, dark, nearly green band of thunderheads, in front of a scrim of solid, lighter gray clouding that held the very last of the day’s light, a suffused luminescence that seemed without source, not even light, not even a sight, receded behind the hill, so swiftly it made the hill appear to loom up above me, ready to topple onto my head. I rubbed the tops of my arms, chilled. The streetlamp in the parking lot of the golf course clubhouse flickered on, halfway up the hill, to my left, behind a break of beech trees, figuring their branches and leaves into a hive of citrine light. Ocean fog poured across fairways from the cemetery, salting everything in a cold mist. Caverns under the hill and granite shelves and the water in the water table vibrated beneath me, voicing an unnerving basso profundo. The wind funneling through the stone walls sounded a strange descant in the hollows. My bones and bowels and breathing slowed and fell into cycle with this dark solfège and I whispered the note “La.”
The heel bones of a pilgrim or cobbler ran across my flanks from beneath, and an arpeggio of ribs, and the smooth curve of someone’s skull.
Places, everyone. Please take your seats. If you please.
The key of the overture is disturbing. I shift on my haunches and shiver at a coldness that has descended across the landscape, and feel a little nauseated. I have a sense that there is something telescopic about this production, as if I am actually on a stage, in the foreground, and not in the audience. The music I hear is not for me but for an audience on the far side of a proscenium, watching me watch for the entrance of other actors deeper in the stage. I put my head between my knees and breathe deeply. My stomach is sour and my vision fizzy.
There is a cavernous open space behind me, stalls and vertically stacked galleries and state boxes filled with rowdy old phantoms and spooky pilgrims, elbowing one another and leaning over and whispering, Look, he doesn’t feel so good now!
Mockery and laughter ripple through the audience, across the orchestra, all the way from the grand circle to the loge to the gods near the cloud ceiling. I look behind me and see only the empty street. This elicits a frank, unabashed guffaw from the hidden spectators, who find my inability to see them hysterical. This is at my expense; their laughter is delight not at how well I play the fool, but at the fact that I am one.
Then the hill does loom up, blotting out everything behind it. It teeters, splits down the middle, like a curtain, and crumples into two heaps on either side of a dim gray pillar glazed in the faintest yellow light and set in relief against a background of sable darkness. Bones rise from the dark earth. There are clavicles and ribs, femurs and tibias, hands and feet. There are claws and great spines as thick as tree trunks that taper into tails, and rings of vertebrae that once encased marrow the size of pot roasts, and heavy garlands made from the gut-strung skulls of tens of thousands of rodents, draped over horses’ skulls that have been fused onto the delicate skeletons of human infants. The riot of interlocking bones turns and forms a towering girandole. I try to concentrate on the writhing, clicking, tapping, grinding, clunking monument, to get a clear view of individual bones, especially skulls, because when I look at it as a whole, it increasingly seems composed of animals that could not possibly have ever existed, and that it is assembling into some horrific machine dedicated to manufacturing my deepest terrors. But then the middle of the machine spirals open like the aperture of a camera shutter, and Kate steps out.
She is fitted into an outrageous, gigantic emerald green polonaise. The dress is verdant and oceanic, mossy and Atlantic green. The bodice is constructed of willow branches, stripped to the green wood, girthed tight with eelgrass. Will-o’-the-wisps halo Kate’s head. Her hair is suffused and golden, flaring, solar.
Well, well, now.