works by william pham, 2005-present
Gravedigger's Tale
Dozens of times a day, I fall in love. I imagine stories that unravel like nacho cheese ladled onto greasy tortilla chips, drawn from the collective of debris called Pop Culture. I watch the way a girl walks and I think about what would happen if she tripped, skinned her knee, dropped her purse, and I were there to offer a helping hand, pull her up, look into her brown eyes shyly peering up at me from under a few stray bangs of caramel hair, and say a one-liner culled from the mind of a busboy or valet attendant or late-night security guard:
"Did you need some help, or were you just practicing your yoga?"
I watch the way a girl walks and the sadness is in the way the heels of her shoes press against the grass and dirt, the way she faces the priest but her eyes are looking at nothing, the way she clutches the leather handle of purse with hands that weren't wrinkled before but they most certainly are now. And I imagine her, crying silently, mouth slightly open because she's remembering something he used to say or do and she's playing a memory over and over in her head to try to push out the sadness, her like that and me, standing over here, and I'm walking over to her.
"Did you need some help, or were you just practicing your yoga?"
Cue the number one single, the crashing guitar rhythms that have girls like her, but less sad, quivering in their pink bedrooms, thinking of fucking the lead singer.
And I laugh, out loud, and she looks over at me.
Those sad brown eyes, those caramel bangs; I bet she hates me with every part of her being, all the way down to the heels of her shoes. The grass probably hates me a little too, some run-off, some residual loathing seeping down like motor oil.
She doesn't say anything, doesn't show any sign of being fazed. She turns back to whatever the priest was saying, but then he finishes, Amen, and they lower the guy, whoever he was, into the ground, and they embrace her, that nameless crowd, one by one, trying to bleed away her sadness with the warmth of human flesh. But bleeding didn't really work when the plague was dropping people by the hundreds of thousands and it sure as hell wasn't working now.
When the crowd disappears, retreating into their shells of lives, away from the loss of this girl, this twenty-something woman who is still a girl in my eyes keeps on staring at the grave of whoever, and I see the single frame images of me making love to her; our sweat falls onto pink sheets in successive cuts.
We play exhibitionist to a crowd of stuffed animals.
Mr. Cummington, the stuffed bear with the top hat and beady little black eye. Levonorgestrel or norethindrone, ethinyl estradiol to close off that garden and drown my sperm, strangle them in the recesses of her vagina. Red alert, red alert, sound the alarms, there are trespassers on this sacred ground -- imprison them forever here until they waste away; they want to make babies and we will not have babies here.
I salute you, arcane drugs with arcane names.
I walk toward her.
"Hey," I say. I leave out the whole imagining-copulation-in-front-of-stuffed-animals thing. For now.
But she doesn't reply; she doesn't even look up at me.
"I'm sorry for your loss," I say. I'm not really sorry.
"Look, I'm not really in the mood for this," she says.
"For what?"
"For you hitting on me or trying to get my number or whatever. I'm not in the mood."
She won't look me in the eyes.
"You won't look me in the eyes," I say. I hope she isn't expecting another death among those close to her, because if she were, I'm almost positive she wouldn't choose this place again as the eternal resting area of a loved one.
"Leave me alone," she says, and turns her back to me.
"So who was the guy?"
She turns around to face me again. I think she's crying, but I'm not sure.
Then she slaps me, hard. I can feel the shape of her hand impacting the side of my face as if in slow-motion; my skin memorizes the length of her fingers.
She's definitely crying now.
The problem with making room for the dead every single day is that when it's time to deal with the living, all I can think about is proving that I'm still alive.
She's walking away now at a pretty good clip.
"Hey!" I shout, cupping my hands around my mouth.
She stops, turns, stares at me.
"Can I get your number?"
She storms off.
Well, it was worth a shot.
---
Four days later, she calls. She wants coffee, and to apologize. To me. She, the girl who just attended the funeral of some guy, with whom she may or may not have been in love, calls the graveyard and asks for me. The guy who did Plot A-37. The jackass who wouldn't leave her alone. She apologizes for referring to me as a jackass to the receptionist; I tell her I don't care.
Where, when.
The coffee house that I fucking hate, in the morning, which I also hate.
But it's worth it.
Mr. Cummington, you lucky bear, you may just get an eyeful yet.
---
She apologizes, I accept.
She cries, I comfort.
She places her hands on the table, I touch them.
She sniffles, I smile.
She talks, I listen. Barely.
She stands, I stand; she stares at the ground, I stare at her; she leans forward, I wrap my arms around her.
She finally looks into my eyes, and all she sees is death, and it's the one thing she doesn't understand right now; she gets biochemistry, because that's what she got her degree in, and she gets the jokes in the sitcoms she watches all the time, and she gets Kant and Nietzsche and Camus. For the most part. Or, at least, she can pretend to get them, just like everyone else. But death, no, she doesn't get that.
And she thinks I do.
So I let her.
---
In the end, she did have pink sheets, and stuffed animals, and I told her I had guessed as much. She laughed, a tragic sort of laugh, the kind of laugh I figured a virgin waiting to be sacrificed to the gods would have, a virgin waiting to be melted alive in the furnaces of a mountain, if she were told a really, really funny joke.
Some guy tells a retard he can get any girl he wants to ask him for sex for a hundred bucks. Retard says, okay, what's he gotta do? The guy whispers it to him and sends him into the closest bar. The retard walks in, sees a pretty girl sitting all by her lonesome. He slips the bartender a fifty and says to him, spill a drink on her lap. Bartender does it, the girl jumps up, shrieks, goes to the bathroom to clean herself up. She comes back, the retard slips the bartender another fifty, says to him, spill another drink on her lap. The bartender does it; the girl is crazy mad now. "Fuck me!" she screams, and everyone wins except for the bartender, who gets knocked out cold by the girl.
Moral of the story is, don't be a bartender.
Gravedigging is where it's really at.
copyright (c) 2005 by william pham