I thought of all the people who signed up for Alcor. Patient #124. The holocaust survivor. The eighty-one-year-old man who paid an extra $50,000 to sign his wife and mother up against their wishes after they had died. Kim Suozzi, who died of an inoperable brain tumor at the age of twenty-three. The new mother who signed her and her child up after a difficult childbirth. The spouses who say don’t wake me up without the other. The spouses who say do. Robert Ettinger, who froze both his first and second wife. The mother who sends her preserved son birthday cards.
The future Alcor promised was one that saved the past. It used cryonics as a way to rectify the ways we think life should have gone. Founder Fred Chamberlain severs his father’s head in order to preserve his life. Jay Lewis finds himself awake and realizes someone has cared enough to be there on the other side to bring him back to life and that now, clambering aboard the spaceship to take him and his friends to the outer solar systems and their unending starlight, he has become both pioneer of the future and curator of the past. Maybe the tenet behind cryonics isn’t that life is so grand one would never want to give it up. Maybe, just maybe, it’s that life hasn’t been grand enough.
I still dream of my father, years after his death, and when I do, I am always surprised to see him. He looks better—he walks, even talks, and I may put my arms around him. His brain is healed, his memory restored, the tumor miraculously shrunk and washed away. His skull bears no signs of the surgeries it endured: no scars, no burr holes, no sense of something incredibly hard cracked and given way to something incredibly soft. His hair has grown back. His speech has returned too, still slurred from paralysis, and in my dream I hear the gentle unexpected Brazilian accent.
I see him and I ask, “Where did you come from?” And sometimes he tells me he’s back and he’s better. Other times he tells me he was always here, that he never left. Afterward we struggle for things to say. We sit in our quiet home and wonder if we should heat up some bouillon and rice for dinner or turn on the TV. It’s my conception of heaven projected five minutes further. Something is not right; in the intervening years, we’ve forgotten who we are. There’s joy in the dream, the feeling that one could not ask for more from the world, but something else haunts it, an uncertainty or hesitation. He is and is not my father. I am and am not his son.
In the dream, I see signs of his illness’s past—momentarily, he will fall silent and I will think the seizure’s happening all over again, that now he will look into my eyes and crumple to the ground. I want to warn him that it will happen again. I want to warn him that my wish was a mistake, that I never should have hoped for this. I want to warn him to go away; I want to warn myself that too. He must leave again before the sickness appears and, this time, he must never return. Because if he kept coming back again, over and over, it would not be heaven but hell. Yet I also know that there’s not much point in my saying this. This dream and his return will come back for as long as I live, as long as I should live, which will hopefully be not a minute longer than my memory binds me to a body and a mind.
Coda, Codex
On our better days, we and the tree seem alike. Apollo chases Daphne and Daphne turns to laurel. Hades abducts Leuce and there she pops up again, a Populus alba in the Elysian Fields. Zeus gives his temple tenders, Baucis and Philemon, the gift of dying concurrently, and they shake green leaves and mossy lips until husband and wife become a linden and oak that stand so close together their branches twist from a single trunk.
This is not just tree transformation—Dante’s suicides reliving an eternal shrubbery—but tree storage. In Arthurian legend, the Lady of the Lake entombs poor, besotted Merlin in a tree trunk. In Scandinavia, the oak’s said to belong to the dead, not just because it was material for coffins, but because it was a coffin itself. Norsemen would search the woods until they crossed a suitable find, and there they’d bury their loved ones in the slingshot split of its trunk.
The Norse also said the gods whittled Eubla, the first woman, from oak. Virgil claimed oaks gave birth to the first men. When my mother likes to reference the Welsh in her, she will say, “I’m of druid stock.” She’s joking about that moony streak, the Merlin in her, but what she’s really saying (the word druid stemming from daur, the Celtic for oak) is that she’s made of wood.
So, a proposal: if you’re looking for ways to stick around, there are worse fates than coming back as a tree.
A few summers ago, I worked as a wood splitter for a man named Angelo Romeo. This was Tucson, one hundred degrees, and I’d show up to Angelo’s backyard at six thirty or so and work till noon. When the heat became too much to bear, I biked my way back over the pavement built by the WPA until I reached the closest air-conditioned space with energy drinks and a Panda Express.
My job was simple: to break down the rounds of wood Angelo collected from his tree service details around Tucson and stack them against a corrugated shed. We were essentially recycling, turning what was going to the dump into ethically sourced, locally harvested firewood to be bundled and sold at marked-up prices to Whole Foods. I used a machine splitter and built a wall of wood: mesquite, pine, pepper, china berry, birch.
Angelo’s backyard was a cluttered place—a wood chipper hitched to a truck, a flatbed for hauling rounds, two splitters, a tarped-over workstation. Arborists’ tools hung homicidally from the shed’s walls: pole saws, chain saws, loppers, alarmingly large pruning shears. Red Baron pizza and flank steak in the freezer, OSHA regulations stapled to the wall. And throughout the yard, there were piles and piles of wood, wood strewn everywhere, wood that I, Sisyphus, would eventually split into smaller and smaller pieces. In one corner, Angelo even kept a pile for the “funny” shapes: the knots and gnarls and human faces in the warp of the trunk, the totem carved out of a round of mesquite, its face placid and content as it watched over me and my wall, protecting us from harm.
When he didn’t work trees, Angelo was a firefighter. His looks matched his soap opera name: tan, dark hair, eyes like lakes. Two indentations sat on either temple, like dimples, as if a very small and very round hammer had pocked them there.
As far as bosses go, Angelo was a good one. He set up a fan to blow the exhaust away from where I worked. He climbed a ladder and stretched a blue tarp out back of the shed where I’d take unscheduled breaks to eat Lärabars in the shade. When I threw out my back because I lifted rounds the wrong way, he left me a brace and a blanket on which to rest my knees. He shooed away the tabby that liked to sidle up and scratch. When he saw me sweeping up palm fronds, he said, quite kindly, “Well, you see, Thomas, the trick is not to sweep like a pussy.” I made ten dollars an hour and the mini-fridge, plastered with custom magnets reading Romeo Tree Service, Baby!, was always well-stocked with Powerade.
To help pass the time, I thought of my wall of wood as like the wall of the Grand Canyon: the different varieties of trees formed a vast and magnificent patchwork, all layered on top of one another like the strata of rocks inside the canyon rim, the pre-Anthropocene layers you’d gaze at after slotting a quarter into parking-meter binoculars. Paleozoic, Precambrian, Vishnu. The Great Unconformity. The downside was that I became so carried away with seeing my wall as something else that I failed to create a stable structure. It sagged and split apart, under siege from its own weight. I quickly learned the structural limitations of a trapezoid as opposed to a rectangle. I had stacked so high and so dangerously that Angelo forbade his wife and daughter from walking underneath. He made me lug the splitter back another foot so that if the wall fell, it would not fall on me. Even the cat didn’t saunter back there.
My job, if you were being generous, was a kind of architecture. Here I was, to break up the discarded and find a new and useful arrangement.
Whenever a tree trunk is chainsawed down, certain features surface. Rub a thumb over each ring and you can spot the rainy year, the dry year, the year of rot or fire or flood. The ever-higher carbon ratios, the contaminants in
the water, the year a mesquite owner finally noticed the termite infestation and called a firefighter to perform cosmetics. The year a god tried to pluck all a girl’s leaves. Wood absorbs a portion of everything we exhale (lungs, chimney smoke, a car’s exhaust) and so stores it away in that year’s ring. Cut it open and you butterfly its history. As far as memory goes, trees possess one to be trusted. If we ever want an objective record of the way things might have been, all we have to do is palm open our switchblades and find a leafy neighbor.
As it turned out, my wall never did fall. The most dangerous part of my job was the wood splitter: a machine made up of a small diesel engine, a cylindrical piston to latch onto the wood, and a sharp wedged blade. The closest comparison I can come up with is a medieval torture device with the horsepower of a lawnmower.
The job came without health insurance and so Angelo would lecture me very carefully on the importance of positioning my hands with regards to the splitter. I was to keep them on top of the log at all times and never on its sides. If I put my hands directly in line with the splitter’s blade or cylinder, an errant glove-thread might snag or my hand might slip and mangle. A tree never fully heals and so its rings never fully forget—they grow around their wounds and scars, incorporating them into their past as imperfections and blemishes. One never knows when one of these would catch and cause a hand to fall in line with the blade. One must be respectful, Angelo motioned toward the log, of the things that were more powerful than us.
When Angelo took to the splitter, he moved quickly. He’d bend down toward a log twice the thickness of his thigh, embrace it, then heave against it for momentum. Once the log rolled onto the bar, he held its weight against his leg and yanked the lever. He split the wood down the middle and let one half fall to the ground. In short, expert strokes, he pushed the other half back and yanked the lever again, rotating the trunk to shave off individual pieces of firewood.
When the blade split the stump in two, the wood would make any number of sounds. Each log had its own personality, depending on its density, dryness, and age. Eucalyptus crumbled. Mesquite quartered into symmetrical chunks. Dry pine popped; wet pine pasted. Some pieces split silently and some cracked like a pistol shot. Some hissed or wheezed or shattered. Sometimes I’d find termite larvae burrowed into the pockets of wood, columbaria stacked throughout the striations and rings, and I’d gather the squishy little things in my glove and toss them over my shoulder like rice at a wedding, to clear the wall and land a treat for the starlings in the alleyway behind me.
Then there were the rule breakers, the anomalies. The logs that, for whatever reason—a hidden knot, an unseen tumorous growth—snapped back at my face, as if acting out some old grudge between us. At times, stripping a round off the blade was like flaying open veins and arteries, the edges of a quartered mesquite just like the marbled fat of flesh.
Other times, a log would groan something ancient and primordial, battered and hurt. I don’t know much about the last sounds people make before they die, but I can tell you the sound of that wood being split was a distinctly human sound. I would look at the log after—the fan whirring, the starlings chirping on their wire—and it seemed I was making a sacrifice. It was the sound you’d make if you weren’t fully aware of being human, if you had turned over in your sleep and, in your half-state, groaned about your very bad back. For a brief instant, Angelo yanking the lever, me hugging the next round for dear life, the wall growing ever higher, the sound wasn’t the wood being split but the years themselves.
Occasionally, my girlfriend and I will argue about feng shui. I have no eye for it, it seems. Lamps in the corners. Sun on the desk. Don’t sit with your back to the door. At least one leg of each chair should touch the rug. Clear pathways to all exits.
I say things should go anywhere. I stack my library willy-nilly in the built-in bookshelves. Pile my coffee table books not just on the coffee table. Together we’ve laid siege to the mantelpiece: a page from an illuminated manuscript, a black-and-white photo of swaying palm trees, a daguerreotype of her great-great-grandparents, a postcard of Titian, a book on New York City’s trees, a photo of her and her sister, a mounted butterfly, my grandmother and her crossed legs, a cactus, a shell, a very large pinecone, some bones, a montage: my father, my father holding the dog, my father and me fishing in the Adirondacks, my father and me rowing a boat, my father and mother, whittled from oak, standing on a dock at sunset, my father alive.
Of course, feng shui encompasses more than just potpourri and hanging plants. It’s the science of siting, a system of laws used to orient and arrange space, a practice that includes the search for the correct location for a tomb. This is, the pun goes, a grave matter: an auspicious or inauspiciously placed tomb could affect the deceased’s family’s fortunes for generations. When it comes down to it, what we argue about is the safest way to preserve the dead.
For instance, if you’re burying a body in a cemetery, what is the best way to let a corpse decompose? If left to their own devices, bacteria will digest our cells at the meeting of the small and large intestines. A greenish patch will blister on our belly, and putrefaction will spread across our stomach, up our chest, and down our thighs. Autolysis occurs, first in the liver and brain, and enzymes break down our cells. Soft tissues melt into gases and liquids. Our body might push our intestines out our rectum. Our skin blackens. We bloat and ferment.
But how fast we do decompose depends on conditions. A body left exposed decays twice as fast as a body in water, eight times as fast as a body underground. Maggots can consume an exposed body so ferociously that their migration paths to and from the corpse leave divots in the soil. A body buried underground will take longer to decompose depending on whether it’s embalmed or on what type of wood is used to make the coffin; an oak coffin, for example, is said to keep a corpse intact for fifty years. Inevitably, though, liquefied tissue will move from body to soil, and leach mercury, nitrogen, and other nutrients into its immediate surroundings. Lead and zinc from the casket lining will poach the earth as well; so too does the arsenic in the coffin wood’s preservatives, the formaldehyde in embalming fluids. We become part of what a 2015 Guardian article on the science of decomposition terms “the cadaveric ecosystem,” releasing, on average, the 64 percent of us that’s water, the 20 percent that’s protein, the 10 percent that’s fat, the 5 percent that’s mineral, and the 1 percent that’s carbohydrate into our nearby plants and vegetation and trees.
Much of this we can’t help. In short, we stink. Our bodies pollute not through any inherent toxicity, but through the simple virtue of our being human, of the airs we give off when our matter stops mattering.
We’ve long feared the idea that the dead might seep into the living. The ancient Romans banished their bodies outside their city walls; so did Napoleon. In the 1850s, London residents blamed cemeteries for a cholera outbreak and in Berlin, typhoid fever. A cemetery’s gases tarnish silver, it’s said, and, in warm summers, Parisians in Père-Lachaise and Montmartre will sample their arsenic-laced water and say it tastes slightly sweet, as if infected.
To counteract the body’s pollutants, the World Health Organization recommends that cemetery keepers plant deep-rooted trees throughout their grounds. These soak up the body’s byproducts and incorporate them into their vascular tissues. Their roots prevent the flow and seepage of contaminated groundwater. The trees are cheap and practical, “a natural filtration system,” a wall that stands up long enough to be of some use.
Take the yew, for example, a tree so common in churchyard cemeteries it was known as “the tree of the dead.” Robert Turner, the “strange, learned” seventeenth-century translator of mystical texts, praised it for drawing and imbibing “the gross and oleaginous Vapours exhaled out of the graves by the setting Sun.” Monks believed the yew drove away devils, and Turner thought its roots must be poisonous because they “run and suck nourishment” from corpses, “the rankest poison that could be.”
With this idea in mind, the Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel have proposed a form of burial that will turn our bodies into trees. Their Capsula Mundi envisions placing bodies curled into the fetal position within biodegradable burial pods, which will then be interred directly beneath a tree or seed that grows upon the nutrients provided. Their design is just that, a design, but the inclination has stuck around for much longer. If you visit, for example, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery on a cold winter afternoon and see at the base of certain headstones a London planetree In Loving Memory of Sergey Kats or a Japanese cherry In Honor of James J. Lian, know that you are also looking, thermodynamically speaking, at Sergey Kats and James J. Lian themselves. We could say just a little more literally that we leave our bodies in trees, that if a tree becomes human in its splitting apart, then so too do humans become trees.
Since its founding in the 1830s, Green-Wood was renowned not just as a cemetery, but as one of New York City’s finest arboretums—a home to 7,800 trees, a place where the air quality proved so rich that lichen carpeted the bark and the views so pleasing people picnicked there on weekends before the city outlawed it. In the early 1860s, only Niagara Falls drew more visitors per year. When Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted planned their design for Central Park in the 1850s, they modeled it off Green-Wood.
The park I knew as a child then came from a city of the dead: the ginkgos whose leaves fell all at once, a superintendent’s delight; the chestnut where my father buried the family hamster on his walk to work. And the American elm in the North Meadow that my mother memorialized my father within after he died, its ghost branches creeping over the chain-link of a baseball field where we used to play, the tree whose trunk I must have pissed on when I was drunk in high school and there was nowhere else to go. All those years I passed it without knowing what it would one day become.
The Book of Resting Places Page 14
