One day you're here; the next day, you're not.
We learned about the death from a nephew, who learned of it from a brother, who heard about it from the police, who'd been called by someone in the building. It was like being rammed in the gut by an offensive lineman who just wouldn't stop.
Could we come to the apartment, we were asked, to help go through the effects? There were things we'd want, the brother said. All the music, for instance. What would they do with it, he asked, all the way down there in South Jersey? We're driving up tomorrow, he said. Could you meet us there?
What else do dizzy people do, but say yes? Yes, we'll drive up the turnpike, and across the George Washington Bridge, over a bit of Manhattan (disguised as a swath of concrete and tar, soot and painted lines, smudged fat with wear) and into the Bronx. Left, right, right, left again. Hoping for a parking space. Hoping never to arrive. Hoping to find that it's all been some terrible mistake, that it was some other body lying in the sparely-furnished studio. Stunned by hoping, and by that stubborn ache in the belly.
We arrived. We parked too close to a fire hydrant. The brother called -- he and his sister had gone to the morgue, and then to the police station, and then to the court house, and then to the police station... Who is ever prepared for how this ultimate thing is handled, in one place or another? And how are these folks to fare, who've driven since 4 am, from a town where the tallest building has only four floors, into the dread, mythic home of muggings and all other evils, where their entire county's population, and all its infrastructure, could be swallowed up, and leave no evidence on the grid of one-way streets, avenues, blocks of apartments, subways, traffic snarls...
We would have to wait, for the brother and sister to arrive. They didn't know when that would be. They needed to touch many other pieces of paper, than the ones they'd already handled. Then they needed a police escort, to open what had been the last place their relative had seen, and to see that these, the living relatives, wouldn't steal anything.
So we waited. A beautiful, clear, picturesque day, with a biting wind and bright sun. One of us needed to use the bathroom -- nature being unmindful of gentility. We went in search of the most ordinary of things in New York City -- a diner, where for a cup of coffee and an order of toast, a call of nature could be answered.
But as it happened, we were out of our depth, or our reckoning. Certainly out of our comfort zone. Why didn't I bring my gloves? Why couldn't I get the zipper on my jacket to work? Why were all the businesses along the boulevard just little narrow, gated shops, where the proprietors keep themselves behind half-inch-thick plexiglass walls?
We walked three bone-chilling blocks, seeking the possibility of dignity. I stopped in one of the bodegas, operated by an sad-looking Arabic-speaking man. I bought a cup of coffee, and asked, confidentially, if we might use their facility. He stumbled in telling us that something was broken. I paid him, and said thank you in Arabic. He wished me peace. But we still needed a bathroom.
I was going to throw myself on the mercy of the hairdressers, but John suggested the dentist's office instead. They were quite cordial -- of course, please come in. The euphemism is right down the hall. I felt guilty, as though I should have a root canal, or an implant, if only to be polite. Instead, I made small talk about the receptionist's tee-shirt, from an exercise palace. People like to talk about their own lives.
When we got back to the car, the brother and sister had returned, and said that the police escort was on his way. We didn't know what to say. We moved our car to the other side of the street, away from the fire hydrant, but much closer to the burned-out vehicle lying in an open plot of grass. A little police scooter, the kind meter maids usually use, came putting up the hill, and the officer got out. 'We're telling him we're just taking out the things we need for the funeral,' the brother said. 'You both wait here. We'll see what happens.'
More waiting. We both tried to remember when we'd last spoken with the one who was now beyond reach. A recent Facebook exchange? A phone call I hadn't picked up? How brittle my own memory seemed to be, an unreliable surface on which to try to peg bits of time. John didn't seem to be doing much better.
After a long time inside, during which I tried to remember which floor the apartment was on, and then remembered too well the slow, creaking elevator ride, with other tenants looming over me (and me standing 6'2"), that time we brought in the new chair from Ikea -- the one that was going to do wonders for backaches, the brother came back out, with a handtruck and some boxes. "You look through these," he said, and took the rest of the 'funeral goods' to the rental van they'd driven in, from a much simpler place.
So we pawed through the box, and John and I both agreed, at the same time, that this felt more like the darker parts of 'A Christmas Carol', as though we were stripping the bedclothes and pulling off the nightgown. We separated, the things for which we would be responsible, from the things the rest of the family should have. More boxes arrived. More pawing and sorting, in the raw chill wind. Familiar faces popping up unexpectedly, as they'd looked in the past -- high school, college, early childhood. Bronzed baby shoes. Graduate school year books. Things for them, things for us. Gradually the trunk filled up. I shifted the long boxes sideways, jiggled this and that. I tried not to think about the policeman, up in the apartment, wondering how boxes of CDs and old hymnals would be useful at a funeral.
In a remarkably short period of time, the last boxes had emerged. The last bit of sorting we did in the back of the rental truck. "Now we've got to go to the courthouse again,' the brother said, "and we're not sure where that is from here." "But the policeman said he can show us," the sister said, while we pushed the boxes around in the van this time. We exchanged phone numbers. She said she'd let us know when there'd be a service. We all exchanged handshakes and condolences and weird, slippery smiles. The policeman came downstairs again, and got in his little cart. As John and I went back to our car, I tapped on the cart's window, and thanked the officer. He nodded, and then they all queued up and drove up the street. To go from one building to another, doing the hidden things about a death, that we never see on TV, or read about in novels -- the things that make an unbalancing reality just that much more dizzying and disorienting.
Somewhere I picked up a quote, from Marcel Proust: 'Dying is easy -- people do it every day. Thinking about dying is impossible.' (Although, when I tried to research it, I couldn't find it. Unless it was one of the ones in Russian, or Arabic)
But there we sat, in the Bronx, John and me, with the residue of an unexpectedly abbreviated life, in boxes behind us. What else would we think about?
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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