The Book of Resting Places Read online

  praise for

  The Book of Resting Places

  “Each place in The Book of Resting Places is haunted. But the deeper we go into Thomas Mira y Lopez’s M. C. Escher painting of a collection, the more we realize that perhaps it is us, not the dead, who haunt the past. An excellent meditation on his father’s death and his mother’s preparations for her own, this book’s loneliness is more than matched by its curiosity and its beauty.”

  —ander monson, author of Vanishing Point

  “Mira y Lopez is a stunning writer, and his debut book, a tender and adventurous exploration of the intimate distances we share with the dead, deserves to be widely read. Artful sentences mirror, page after page, his artful mind. With formal intelligence and quiet wit, he has found death to be a spur to reflection and wholehearted embrace of life. This is a book to savor.”

  —alison hawthorne deming, author of

  Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit

  “The Book of Resting Places is admirable for the restlessness and fierceness of its need to work through both its own elegy and the nature of elegies in general. From defunct cemeteries to Canaletto’s genius for turning presence to absence to those museums of the self assembled by collectors or hoarders to the nature of parallax to cryonics, it’s wryly deft in its associative deployment of useful metaphors in its attempt to come to terms with loss, and shame: what is the safest way to preserve the dead, and to acknowledge the love we sometimes failed to reciprocate?”

  —jim shepard, author of The World to Come

  and The Book of Aron

  Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Mira y Lopez

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN: 978-1-61902-123-5

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Jacket designed by Kelly Winton

  Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  For JTRMYL

  Come down off the cross, we can use the wood.

  —tom waits

  contents

  Memory, Memorial

  Monument Valley

  A Plan for the Afterlife

  Overburden

  The Path to the Saints

  Capricci

  The Rock Shop

  Parallax

  The Eternal Comeback

  Coda, Codex

  Acknowledgments

  Memory, Memorial

  Whenever my mother and I drive to her house in Pennsylvania, she asks me to take a look at the Ohio buckeye. It’s a ritual I’m familiar with by now. I carry the bags inside and leave them on the counter, then move the food from cooler to refrigerator. She takes the black poodle out of his travel crate, praises him for being so patient, eyes him closely as he romps around the field, and when I have slid the ice packs into the freezer and the poodle has discovered for the hundredth time the hundredth smell at the base of the pine, she will call to me through the screen door. “Come, Tom, come see dad’s tree.”

  She doesn’t know how much I begrudge this ceremony. She doesn’t know that, after two hours in the car next to her, all I want to do is open a bag of tortilla chips, pop the seal of a jar of salsa con queso, and stand over the counter dipping a dozen or so chips into the cheese. Or she does know this; she’s my mother. If I eat too much, she knows the next thing I’ll do is take a nap. She times the poodle’s walk so she can call out to me before I become too involved in the process of dipping and chewing, before I feel full enough to grunt a refusal and shut the door to my room. She might even know that I do not care about the buckeye, that I attach no particular importance to it. She is my mother. She knows she has only to call my attention to it enough in order for me to care—like the way when I sit down to eat takeout with her on Monday nights, she has only to refuse to change channels and I will watch Dancing with the Stars.

  In Pennsylvania, I trudge outside and around the house and walk up to the tree. I circle it and give the trunk a hesitant pat, squeeze its circumference, unsure of how to touch it just as I’m unsure of how to pet the dog. “It’s beautiful,” she’ll beam, standing there, watching me. “It’s grown so much.”

  There are five rivers in the Greek underworld: the Styx, river of hate; Acheron, river of pain; Cocytus, river of lamentation; Phlegethon, river of rage; and Lethe, river of oblivion. I like to think that, taken together, these form a rough Kübler-Ross model for ghosts. In their enumeration, Lethe comes last, the final stage of grief. Its waters serve as a general anesthetic—all those who drink from them forget their former state, their joy and grief and pleasure and pain. This potential, this river of morphine and drowsiness and opiates, sounds quite tempting when poetized, when it becomes, as Ovid writes in the Metamorphoses, the place “where dream-haunted poppies grow, hanging their heads above wet ferns and grasses . . . and weighted eyelids close each day to darkness.”

  Arriving in English from Greek via Latin, Lethe is rendered as either oblivion or forgetfulness. To me, these words mean different things: oblivion is a permanent state, forgetfulness temporary. I would like Lethe to mean the latter—a soporific that acts nightly not just to erase all memories of pain and suffering, but to restore those memories upon arising and transform them into something acceptable, a new and peaceful being. But I suspect it’s really oblivion: that once you drink these waters there is no going back.

  My father planted the Ohio buckeye in 2004, the year my parents bought this second house in northeastern Pennsylvania, fifteen minutes south of the Delaware River. What makes the buckeye unique is that my father planted a seed and not a sapling or nursery tree. The seed, dark brown with a café au lait spot in its center, resembles the eye of a male deer and gives the buckeye its name. By 2006, it had grown to a four-foot sapling. By 2012, my mother estimated the tree at twenty feet tall. Buckeyes grow to a height of forty-five feet. Their diameter measures fifty centimeters. They live for eighty years, a human lifespan. That is, the lifespan of a lucky human.

  For my mother, it’s crucial this buckeye not just live, but flourish. She’ll scoff at the afterlife, yet all the same, animism and reincarnation grow within this tree. She’s assigned it a spirit and wished it a narrative to fulfill these beliefs.

  That spirit, of course, belongs to my father. The body is his as well: the hands that scooped out the pocket of earth and laid the seed to rest are now the buckeye’s leaves, his limbs the branches, the mind that decided to plant the tree exactly there are its roots, stretching ten feet downhill from the squat evergreen the poodle likes, thirty feet from the house so that my mother may gaze at it from the window above the kitchen sink.

  One does not need to pay for passage across Lethe. Charon the toll collector ferries the dead only across the Styx or Acheron, and each must give Charon an obol, or he will not allow them to cross. An obol holds little value; it’s equivalent, roughly speaking, to a worker’s daily wage in Ancient Greece. If Charon does not receive his payment, the soul cannot cross and is fated to spend eternity in limbo between
the world of the living and the world of the dead. To prevent this, families would place obols in the deceased’s mouth, under the tongue or on the lips. This became Charon’s obol: a viaticum, bus fare and a bag lunch, provision for a journey. The otherworldly narrative one can conjure from a small circular object, seed or coin, grasped in a hand.

  My father’s seizures began in 2003, the year before he planted the buckeye. They were minor, except when they were not, and my mother and I would spend the night next to him in a bed at Mount Sinai. Medication could treat them, except when it could not. The seizures kept recurring and, by the summer of 2006, my father, a cell biologist to whom the word culture meant not art but tissue cultivation, no longer worked in the garden or the field. He complained of his right hand cramping, of losing dexterity in his fingers. He no longer drank black coffee in Duralex glasses, the way he had growing up in Brazil, nor did he have a glass of Sandeman port after dinner, the way his mother had. He did not drive and this frustrated him. When I visited from college, I drove him from New York to Pennsylvania and he remained silent the whole way, watching the speedometer.

  I wasn’t around that summer—I worked on a farm, weeding by hand, complaining of the straw that would scratch up my arms—and so I didn’t witness the regressions. I could hear them, however, if I chose to. His voice had started to slur by then, his lip a little twisted, and so he sounded over the phone as if he had just woken up from a nap, disoriented, not entirely in his present state. I wasn’t around that fall either: I went to study abroad in Rome.

  In September of 2006, my father suffered a massive seizure while visiting his mother in Rio de Janeiro. Two craniectomies later, the right side of his body was paralyzed and he could no longer speak. By October, he was back in New York, flown twenty-four hours in a medevac plane alongside my mother. He raised his fist in victory when they landed; he did not want to die in Brazil. She told him, when she was planning the evacuation, that he would be able to recover in the country, that they could watch the mother-of-pearl sunsets together and count sheep on the opposite hill. My father did not say anything. In November, after a little over two months of silence, he died.

  Unlike other memories, the buckeye does not decay or fade, but gains in strength over time. My mother can mark its progress and measure its height as if it were a growing boy. She perceives its existence as remarkable, just as she perceives mine as such—her only child, born to her at the age of forty-two, an unlikely life after a previous miscarriage. She nurtures the memory of my father before his illness—the scientist who loved trees, who loved experiments like burying seeds in the ground or sifting through bear shit he found on the road, oblivious to the implication that the bear might lurk nearby. She sees this tree and envisions a new, sturdier body, one that grows skyward without shaking or collapsing.

  Despite the buckeye’s heartiness, she worries. She thinks of razing the trees around it, the squat evergreen and the weeping willow, holdovers from the previous owners, even though they don’t steal the buckeye’s light, even though the buckeye, in fact, robs theirs. She fears she won’t be able to keep it healthy, that it owes its vitality to whatever magic my father’s hands held that could create a living thing.

  My mother worries, in particular, because she believes herself a hopeless gardener. “Not just hopeless, I’m cursed,” she’ll say. I don’t want to believe her (how could the woman who swaddles the poodle in a towel after his bath fail at nurturing?), but the evidence exists. The plot I weeded the year before is overgrown as ever, the sole success a transplanted peony bush. When strangers politely inquire what she grows, she snaps back, “I grow weeds.” It’s not immediately clear that she’s serious. Rumors of her inadequacy apparently spread. The gardener who lives down the road does not return her calls and she does not know why. “I’m cursed, I’m doomed,” she’ll say. She has left several messages, asking for his services, offering him to name his price, but he has not called back.

  To keep the tree alive, she’s enlisted my help. I weed the base of the buckeye, lay down mulch and wood chips. I build a wire fence around its perimeter to keep out rabbits. We both have no idea what we’re doing, but these acts are of utmost importance—if I refuse or complain, the tree’s life hangs in the balance, we could lose my father all over again—and so we walk out and admire it each visit, as if we were visiting a living tomb, as if we were trying to grow the thing on good karma alone.

  In 2008, as the buckeye made its ascent, my mother bought a tree in Central Park in memory of my father. A horse chestnut, specifically. It stands in the North Meadow, along the path my father walked each morning to and from work. Standing beside this tree, you can see Mount Sinai to the east. The hospital’s medical center, a large black building, fills the skyline. My father worked in this building and was transferred there as a patient after my mother flew him out of Brazil. This was where he died. Adjacent to the horse chestnut lie the fields where he watched me play soccer growing up—I was the goalkeeper, he the assistant coach by virtue of being Brazilian. Nearby, a five-minute walk away, are the trees where he buried the pet hamster and cockatiel on his way to work, after we found them at the bottom of their cages.

  The New York Times is profiling the dangers of the city’s trees. Like my father, Elmaz Qyra liked to walk in the park after work. When he had finished his shift as a busboy, he walked a few blocks north to the 59th Street entrance and headed to Poet’s Walk. One time in late February 2010, he went for a walk after a heavy snow had fallen. At 3:00 p.m., the Times wrote, if there was any sunlight, Poet’s Walk must have been wondrous. The park, Qyra’s wife said, reminded him of the farm where he grew up in Albania. What Qyra did not know, as he walked alone along the promenade, was that one of the trees above him was due to be removed. The year before, a limb had fallen from it and damaged another tree. A five-foot cavity swelled within its trunk. A fatal fungus infested it. When Elmaz Qyra passed beneath the tree, a fifteen-foot limb as heavy as a refrigerator fell, split his head open, and killed him.

  After my father was hospitalized in Rio, I visited him there. I flew from Rome and stayed for two weeks. My mother was already there. Over those two weeks, my father in and then out of the ICU, I gained ten pounds. I liked the food in the hospital cafeteria and it killed time. There wasn’t much to do: hold my father’s hand, read Graham Greene, watch soccer or CNN, masturbate in the shower, nap, wipe the sweat from my father’s forehead, play solitaire on my iPod. Staying overnight in the hospital room, I would sleep from eight in the evening till ten the next morning. I told my mother on a taxicab ride back to my grandmother’s that I wanted to go back to Rome. I told her I was upset I was missing out on life. She asked me whether I wanted to be part of a family or not. She lost fifteen pounds and started smoking again, exhaling a lot, smoke or sighs. She sighed so audibly and so out of the blue that I thought she did so on purpose, to catch my attention or await my comment, but she said she didn’t even know she was doing it.

  My father lost even more weight, nearly thirty pounds if I had to guess. Half a pound came from his skull. A human skull weighs a little over two pounds, and doctors removed a quarter of my father’s to perform their second craniectomy. They did not install a plate and so the left side of my father’s head looked deflated. There seemed nothing separating brain from skin. The scalp, hair shaved to a stubble, flapped and breathed of its own accord. If I pressed hard enough with my finger, I thought I would touch brain.

  My father didn’t have much of an appetite. I began to eat the soft, warm foods off his tray: macaroni and cheese, applesauce, mashed potatoes, flan. The nurses who brought in the meals would do a song and dance each time about how delicious the food looked, how hungry my father must be, how he needed sustenance to get his strength back up. I looked on while they did this, picking out which food I would eat first, the nurses not knowing they were performing for me.

  To eat and sleep, of course, is its own form of forgetting. If you wer
e not awake for it, it’s hard to say it really happened.

  I cannot see the buckeye the way my mother sees it. My father does not stand tall within it, this ugly thing choking the water and stealing sunlight away from the evergreen. Its growth is not representative of his spirit. There are few memories for me of my father in the country, none of his working the land. When my parents first bought this house, during the visit when my father planted this seed, I stayed in New York. I was still in high school and their overnight trips meant that I could have friends over and hotbox the bathroom.

  Still, I yearn to see it with my mother’s eyes. Now he rises balanced, where before there was asymmetry and paralysis. Now he grows and feeds on water, where before he shrank, withered from the inability to retain fluid. Now bark armors the pith within his trunk, where before nothing encased his cerebral tissue or separated it from his skin. The wind rustles through his leaves and sometimes it even howls, where before there was only silence.

  This is all, I suspect, just another way of forgetting. Or of remembering only what we want to remember. The river of Lethe runs underground and feeds the buckeye. By placing my father in this tree, my mother chooses to remember him as she prefers: as strong and healthy, flourishing instead of decaying. I do not fault her for that—it dulls the pain.

  Form, however, collapses. My father’s body, my mother’s superstitions. And what happens when the surface can no longer hide the structural frailty underneath? Trees rot, desiccate, become infested, drink too deeply from poisonous waters. Oblivion lasts until a branch snaps and falls with the anger of being forgotten.

  Within her own memory, my mother has begun to mix up names. She calls me Rafael for my father. She calls the dog Tom. She calls my father Tom or Celso, the poodle’s name. Sometimes she says your dad, when she means your grandfather. What’s more, she no longer catches the slip. I used to correct her every time, jumping on the chance of being right. Now I let it slide.