A Fine and Private Place

by Peter S. Beagle

  He knew no Latin, but he clung to the falling words of the chant, knowing them to be the last human words he would ever hear. "Ashes to ashes," I suppose it means, he thought, "and dust to dust." That's all you are now, Morgan—a cup of dust scattered to the wolves of night. He considered the phrase and rejected it reluctantly. What, after all, would wolves want with dust?

  The first clods fell on the coffin lid, sounding for all the world like a knock on the door. Michael laughed inside his head. Come in, he thought, come right in. The house is in a bit of a mess right now, but I'm always glad of company. Walk right in, friend. This is Open House.

  Sandra was crying loudly and quite thoroughly now, but her sobs were beginning to sound like yawns. Poor Sandy, Michael thought. They probably got you up early for this, too. I'm sorry, lass. Just a minute or so—then you can go home and go back to sleep.

  The earth-sounds became fainter. Presently they stopped.

  Well, here we are, said Michael Morgan to himself. He realized the absurdity of the words and defiantly thought them again. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are. Here we all are. Here we go around the prickly pear. Prickly pear. Here we are, prickly pear. Over here. He stopped that finally, and thought about Heaven and Hell and Sandra.

  He had never believed in either of the first two during his life, and he saw no reason to start now. I'm in this worm Automat for the duration, he thought, and in a few minutes I will turn over and draw eternity up around my neck and go to sleep. If he was wrong, one of two Old Gentlemen would be around to see him shortly, and a number of things might finally become clear. In the meantime, he decided to think about Sandra.

  He had loved Sandra. Thinking about it in a detached fashion, he dared anybody not to love Sandra. She was all the world's loved objects in one, and she showed them off slowly and lazily, like a revolving dish of diamonds in a jeweler's window. Besides, she looked needing, and she had a sad mouth.

  They had met at the small reception that had been given for him when he joined the Ingersoll faculty. She had come with her uncle, who taught geology. Their glances had crossed, and he had put down his drink and gone to her. Within fifteen minutes he had been quoting Rimbaud for her, and Dowson, and Swinburne, and his own secret songs. And she had heard and understood: Michael wanted to go to bed with her. So they were mature and civilized, and she took him into her huge, warm bed, in which she managed to look quite affectingly lost.

  Michael loved that lost quality of hers. It made him feel necessary and useful. He discovered a strong protective streak in himself, and was in turn irritated by it, amused by it, and vastly delighted with it. He was all the more captured by her moments of cool brilliance and lazy wit; it made her three-dimensional. And Michael had ridden in search of the third dimension for a long time.

  So they were married, and Michael received what the president called "a bit of a raise." It was just that, but it enabled Michael and Sandra Morgan to move into an apartment in Yorkchester and Sandra to quit her art-gallery job. They had been married for four years, and much of it had been happy.

  And now he was dead, Michael thought. Dead and buried, humus for the hungry earth. And he would never see Sandra again. The thought hurt him, even through the numbness that had stroked him with its witch-fingers. His body was nothing to him now, but a deal of his soul seemed to have been left where Sandra was, and dead, he felt naked and somehow incomplete.

  He prayed for sleep, and when it did not come he invented ways of passing the time. He broke down his life into periods marked Youth, Harvard, Europe, Korea, Ingersoll, and Sandra, and examined them carefully and objectively. First he decided that his life had not been wasted, and shortly after, he decided that it had. He thought of all the tiny factors that had gone to make up the mortal existence of Michael Morgan, enumerated them, weighed them, and decided that they had individual meaning but no collective significance; and then he thought it might be the other way round. With death, he had discovered, there came the power of disinterested scrutiny of the way he had come. Along with it, however, came a peculiar lack of interest in much of what had once been a very important world. Only Sandra seemed real now—Sandra and perhaps the good New York springs and finding the one student in his class who understood the lonely steel mill that was Bismarck and the ice emperor Bonaparte.

  After that he tried to recall all the great music he had ever heard, and quickly discovered that his education had not been nearly so complete, his interest so great, and his memory so retentive as he had hoped. Only the Chopin Preludes that he had learned as a boy stayed with him, along with some Rimsky-Korsakov, a few passages from the Ninth, and a plaintive, wandering strain he decided was Weill. The rest was gone, or he was gone from it, and he was sorry because it would have been nice to have music.

  You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

  Suddenly he remembered an early morning with Sandra before they had been married. They had sat at her little kitchen table, eating bread-and-jelly sandwiches. She had gone to the icebox for a bottle of milk, and he had sat and watched her move. Her feet made a very small, among-friends sound on the linoleum. As he thought of it now, the pain seemed to snap him like an icicle. He cried out, hearing it as a great animal yawp of terror—and then he was standing beside his own grave, calling, "Sandy! Sandy!"

  She did not come, and he knew she would not, and still he called, thinking, I will close my eyes and count a hundred, and when I look up she will be there—the way he did when he was waiting for a bus. But he could not close his eyes, and the numbers rattled in his head like dice. Finally he forced himself to stop calling, and after a while he sat down in the grass.

  It took him a while to realize that he had left his grave, and when he did it didn't seem very important. I'm out, he said to himself, and I can talk again and move around, and I'm no better off than I was. Alive, he could at least have kept up the pretense of having somewhere important to go; but now apparently he could just sit by the roadside for the next few million years, if he felt like it. And he did feel like it. He wanted only to sit in the grass and watch the ants running and not think about anything. I want my mind to be white and clean and unmarked, he thought, like my bones. That was the answer to everything, and he hadn't seen it. "You can have my skull," he said politely to the ants. "I won't be needing it." But they kept running in the grass, and he became angry with them. "All right," he said. "And the hell with you too." And he got up and went over to look at his grave.

  There was no stone yet, only a small metal marker. It said: "Michael Morgan, March 7, 1924-June 10, 1958," and he felt very pleased with its conciseness. Like a Times headline, he thought, and he looked at it for a long time.

  My body is there, he thought. All my chicken dinners and head-scratching and sneezing and fornication and hot baths and sunburns and beer and shaving—all buried and forgotten. All the little pettinesses washed away. I feel clean and light and pure. He thought about book-hunting on Fourth Avenue and decided that he felt like a smashed light bulb.

  "Good-by," he said to his body and walked away down the paved road. He wanted to whistle and felt cheated when he found he could not.

  Michael Morgan walked through the graveyard and his feet made no sound. The sun shone hot on him and he did not feel it, nor did he feel the tiny winds that chuckled between the stones. He saw a ring of Greek pillars that held up nothing, and near it a concrete birdbath. He saw fountains and flowers and a wheelbarrow half full of earth. Once a car rushed past him as he walked along the side of the road, but nobody in it looked at him.

  He saw family plots, with the little headstones bunched together like frightened cattle; and he saw a great mausoleum four stories high, with an angel on marble guard. He saw a clump of cherry trees, and their boughs were thick and swollen with t
he red fruit. Spaced at regular intervals, twenty-foot spires pointed the way to Heaven, for the benefit, Michael decided, of lost souls and tourists.

  He felt as if he were walking in a slightly leaky vacuum. He could see the sun, and he assumed it was still burning, but he personally felt neither hot nor cold. He knew there was a breeze, for he saw leaves wander across his path, but he felt no air on his skin. Faintly but clearly, he heard birds singing and water flowing, but the sounds meant nothing to him, and he never even thought of trying to pick a cherry. It wasn't that he didn't give a damn—Michael had been trying very hard not to give a damn for most of his life—but that giving or not giving damns never entered the question. "I feel mediocre," he experimented. "Lukewarm"—but the words were meaningless.

  He walked for a long time. The black paved road became dirt, and then gravel, and then pavement again, and other roads ran away from it; sometimes it was broad, and other times as narrow as the cold bed of Barbara Allen; but it did not end, and Michael walked on and never grew tired.

  Maybe there is no end, he thought. Maybe I just go on walking—and felt nothing but a whispery amusement at the prospect.

  Then he came over a low hill and saw the mausoleum and the small man sitting in front of it. The man had his knees drawn up and his chin on his folded forearms and was looking at nothing.

  Sensation seemed to return to Michael: curiosity, interest, a little fear, pleasure, and a spoonful of hope came slowly back, saying to one another, What is this? How is this? Is the house not empty yet? And Michael Morgan called gladly, "Hello!"

  The small man blinked, looked around, and smiled at Michael. "Hello," he called back. "Come on down."

  Michael came slowly down the hill, and the man got up to meet him. He looked to be in his early fifties, for his shoulders were a little rounded and his hair was gray-white. But the smile he gave Michael was warm and youthful, and his eyes were the color of the earth. "How do you do?" he asked. "My name is Jonathan Rebeck."

  "Michael Morgan," said Michael, and suddenly he was so happy to see this small man, and so happy to realize he was happy, that he grabbed for Mr. Rebeck's brown hand—and watched in dull horror as it went completely through his own.

  Then he remembered, and for the first time he saw life as the dead see it. He backed off from Mr. Rebeck, and would have turned to run if the small man's eyes had not been full of brown sadness. So he sat down on the steps that led up to the mausoleum and tried to cry; but he didn't know where to begin.

  "All right," he said finally, "I'm dead."

  "I know," said Mr. Rebeck gently. He paused and then added, "I saw your funeral procession."

  "Did you?" Michael looked up. "How did it look from the outside?"

  "Very nice," said Mr. Rebeck. "Very quiet and tasteful."

  "That's good," Michael said. "Man comes into the world with a maximum of fuss, as it is. Let him—"

  Mr. Rebeck began to laugh. "A maximum of fuss." He chuckled softly. "Very true. Very funny and very true."

  "Could I finish?" Michael asked coldly.

  "What? Oh, certainly. I'm awfully sorry. I thought you were through."

  "Let him leave with the minimum," Michael finished, but he trailed off disgustedly at the end. Mr. Rebeck laughed politely, and Michael scowled at him. In the middle of the scowl he began to laugh, hiccuping, machine-gun laughs, and when he stopped he knuckled at his eyes. But there were no tears to wipe away, and he looked soberly at Mr. Rebeck.

  "I don't feel dead," he said slowly. "Would I still be making those lousy epigrams if I were dead? I feel as alive as anyone. As alive as you."

  "I'm not a very good standard," Mr. Rebeck said softly.

  "I don't feel dead," Michael said firmly. "I feel my body on me like an anchor." The simile pleased him. "An anchor. A nice, comforting anchor holding me to earth. If I'm dead, how come I don't just go billowing off into the beyond like a sheet blown off a clothesline?" He felt a vague regret that Mooney, head of the Classics Department, couldn't hear him now. They had stayed up late together, Mooney and he.

  "I know a good metaphor," Mr. Rebeck said thoughtfully. "Don't people who have had their arms or legs amputated always say they can feel them still? They say they itch at night."

  Michael was silent for a long time.

  "I know a better one," he said finally. "It's an old superstition. Some people believe that if you kill a snake in the daytime its tail won't stop wiggling till sundown." He looked at Mr. Rebeck. "All right. I'm dead. How long till sundown?"

  "A while yet," Mr. Rebeck said. He sat down beside Michael. "You see, Michael, nobody dies just like that. The body dies quickly, but the soul hangs on to life as long as it can because living is all it knows."

  "Soul?" Michael felt faintly worried. "I do have a soul, then?"

  "I don't know if that's the right word. Memory might be better. Living is a big thing, and it's pretty hard to forget. To the dead, everything connected with life becomes important—striking a match, clipping your toenails. Not only does your own life pass before you; everybody else's does.

  You find yourself becoming greedy of people; whenever they come to visit here you watch every movement they make, trying to remember the way you used to do that. And when they leave you follow them all the way to the entrance, and you stop there because you can't go any further." He paused. "They had it all backwards, you see, those old ghost stories about the dead haunting the living. It's not that way at all."

  Michael smiled faintly. "You know more about death than I do."

  "I've lived here a long time," Mr. Rebeck said. "Death is something that has to be learned. Just like life, only you don't have to learn so fast because you've got more time."

  "Will it be like this—forever? I mean, so far it's just like being alive, only less rushed."

  Mr. Rebeck didn't laugh. "It's different," he said, "but I can't really tell you how. I could if I were dead, I think—only then I wouldn't want to." He saw Michael blink puzzledly and went on. "This much I can tell you: you forget things. A week from now you'll have forgotten a few things—what music you liked, what games you used to play, little things. In two weeks a few bigger things may go—where you worked, where you studied—in three weeks you won't remember that you ever loved or hated anybody. In four weeks—I can't exactly put it into words. You just forget things."

  "I forget everything?" Mr. Rebeck could barely hear Michael's voice. He nodded.

  "Everything? Talking—thinking?"

  "They become unnecessary," Mr. Rebeck said, "like breathing. You don't really forget them, you just don't have any use for them or any need. They atrophy, like the appendix. You aren't really talking right now. How can you? You haven't got a larynx, you haven't got vocal chords, you haven't got a diaphragm. But you're so used to talking and you want to talk so badly that I hear you as clearly as if you could make sounds. Nothing's going to stop you from talking as long as you want to. You just won't want to after a while."

  "It is Hell, then," Michael said slowly. "It really is Hell."

  "Funny you should say that," Mr. Rebeck said. "I always thought of it as a little like being an angel. You can't be touched any more, or jarred, or hurt. All the little hypocrisies that hold life together drop away from you. You become a sort of closed circle with no end and no beginning. I think it's the purest state of existence."

  "Like an amoeba," Michael said. "They don't get traumas either."

  "Not like an amoeba. I'll show you. Look up, Michael. Look at the sun."

  Michael raised his eyes and saw the sun. It was red and swollen in the late afternoon, and its heat had become vengeful and vindictive. Mr. Rebeck blinked rapidly as he looked at it and turned his head quickly away. But Michael stared hard at it and saw only a shriveled orange hanging in a crumpled tree. He felt a great pity in him, and a corner-of-the-mouth scorn.

  "You see?" Mr. Rebeck asked when Michael finally turned undazzled eyes on him.

  "God," said Michael.

 
"That may be," said Mr. Rebeck. "If I had looked at the sun that long I'd be blind now. You can look at it all day. You can watch it move, if you care to. Nobody can blind you now, Michael. You will see more clearly than you ever saw in life. Nobody can lie to you now, because three-fourths of a lie is wanting to believe it, and believing makes no difference to you any more. I envy you a great deal, Michael."

  He sighed and juggled two small pebbles in the palm of his hand. "Whenever I get to thinking I'm dead too," he said softly, "I look at the sun."

  Michael wanted to look at the sun again, but he looked at Mr. Rebeck instead and said, "Who are you?"

  "I live here," Mr. Rebeck said.

  "Why? What do you do?" A thought— "Are you the caretaker?"

  "In a way." Mr. Rebeck got up and went inside the mausoleum. He came out a moment later, holding half a baloney and a small container of milk. "Supper," he explained, "or a very late lunch. An old friend of mine brought it." He leaned against a cracked pillar and smiled at Michael, who had not moved.

  "Death is like life in a lot of ways," he said thoughtfully. "The power to see clearly doesn't always change people. The wise in life sometimes become wiser in death. The petty in life remain petty. The dead change their addresses, you see, not their souls.

  "I've always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues—you've seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and small palaces. They give visitors cards at the entrance, you know, with their relatives' streets and house numbers. It's the only way they can find them. That's like a city, too.

  "A dark city, Michael, and a crowded one. And it has most of the qualities of the other cities: companionship, coldness, argument. There is no love, of course, no love at all, but there isn't so much of that floating around outside either.

  "There is loneliness, though. The dead are very lonely for a while, very bewildered, very frightened. The gap that separates them from the living is as wide as the gap that separates the living from each other; wider, I think. They wander as helplessly through the dark city as they did through the cities of stone, and finally they find a quiet bed and try to sleep.