The Roof

The first thing I want to say is this: I did not mean to fall from the roof. I had done a lot of talking that winter about doing bad things to myself. But that was all just talk. Besides, I was feeling better by then. It was just a patch of moss that I slipped on. An ordinary, grassy pile of green things growing on the roof. I didn’t think hard enough about stepping on the patch of moss that was growing on the north side of our house and I did and I slipped and fell. The last thought that went through my head was that I really should have moved the wheelbarrow from the side of the house. I had meant to do it all winter long. Then, poof, it was over.

I was on the roof looking for birds. Yes birds. It was the kind of thing that made sense during the brief time between rain storms. All that winter weather in the bones would just burst out in ways like that. It is easy to do dangerous things when the sun shines.

I went up there to sit in the sun, no trees blocking the way, and maybe see some geese. Even a few stray gulls would have sufficed. Instead, a young bald eagle was flying up from over the slough. I got careless watching it glide up over the oak trees across the street. That’s when I stepped on the moss. I'd like to say the sun got in my eyes but like I said I as on the north side of the house so that wouldn't make any sense.

Being dead is not what I expected. I never gave it any thought at all so I shouldn’t say that really. Sometimes I think that before I had just been dreaming and this is being awake. Remembering what I was is the only vivid sensation I have. It is like waking up and being disturbed by how real an absurd dream has been.

All that Jesus stuff turns out to be fake, at least I haven’t run into him. I think he is just dead.

At my funeral, many people asked my wife if she thought I had jumped. She would shrug and say, “Who knows?” and walk away with my son’s hand in hers. Then people started to move on and forget me. I was glad for them.

I wandered at first among my family and friends. I could hear them only distantly but I found that sound was the one sensation I did not miss. I lay at night next to my son trying to the feel his warm feet on my stomach. I watched my wife undress and tried to feel the taste of her mouth. I snuck into the house of a friend, a potter, and watched him intently throwing clay pots on a wheel.

I was never tempted to intrude upon others I had not known. No hiding in the bedrooms of beautiful strangers or peeking into the stalls of women's bathrooms. Somehow I resisted invasion though I knew that no one could be invaded by my presence.

I don't need to eat anymore. I miss the crunch of a good pear, chewing a piece of gum and all that. I don’t miss sweating or pissing. On the other hand I don’t have much else to do so it wouldn't bother me to have little things like that to do. I miss smelling, not the obvious things like flowers in bloom or fresh bread in the oven. I miss the smell of grass and the random things on the air like diesel fumes or someone's too strong perfume. It's not that I miss beautiful things, rather that I miss the ability to absorb things. It's hard to explain. Everything now is bouncy, just bounces off of everything else, never really comes into me or me into it.

Some of the other things I miss in no particular order:

the bright red of a stop sign

the crunchy salt taste of potato chips

the white white of a full moon

the smell of rain

wood smoke from a chimney

new pairs of wool socks

the stink of the ocean

Pretty simple things really. Like I said, I don't really much miss the sound of anything. The quiet is good.

Eventually I became aware of the others in my condition. We all shuffle down the streets, pretending not to see one another. The sounds of our passing are louder than anything else, the dragging of feet on pavement, the dry coughing of the old.

The first person I met was an old man with thick glasses. His teeth were gone and his words were gummy, choked, impossible to understand. He waved his hands around, pointed at the sky. I ran away.

Then I met DeLinda. She came walking down the street with her eyes rolled into the back of her head. She was short, a little girl really, so at least you don’t have to look straight into the whites of her eyes. I found out later she had had epilepsy, died during a seizure and had never really figured out how to unroll her eyes.

“Have you noticed,” she asked me, “how few of us are around here?”

I hadn’t.

“You mean it never occurred to you that of all the bazillions of people died on the planet that the streets ain’t stuffed with bodies? You really haven’t thought about this?

Or what about this...where are all those other people? The ones who died but ain’t here? Hmm?”

It was a lot to think about. I had not considered much besides the pale watery condition of everything. DeLinda, though, had obviously put some effort into the metaphysics of the situation. She planted her idea in me and it stuck.

“These other people. These people who died but aren’t here. What do you think happened to them?”

“I got no idea,” she said, “but it has to be better than this.”

It turned out though, that she did have an idea about how to get there, wherever there was. A pretty good idea too. She had met a man who knew a man who saw a man make the transition. She called it The Transition in capital letters like that. It made me uncomfortable, like the way Bible-thumpers refer to Him. Him this, Him that; DeLinda's Transition had that sound too. A little too full of something.

What had done it, she said, was that you had to die again.

“Die again? But we’re already dead.”

“Exactly. Say, you’re not too bright are you? We got to die again. Because we didn't do it right the first time. Guy I met said it generally takes a very long time.”



“So this guy. The one who knew someone who did this..”



“Knew a man who saw a man.”

“Right. Well the obvious thing is. How did he do it?”

“Didn’t say. He just didn’t tell me.”

“Hmm.”



“Yes indeed, hmm.”

Her solution was that we try to kill each other. We had only our bodies to work with so it would take some ingenuity. When I think back on it, I can't really see how someone who died by choking on her own tongue could have done something wrong. I just don't get it.

First we tried fists, swinging at each other but it was like smacking bean bag chairs. I could almost feel her face but it just stretched around my hands. We would beat each other as hard as we could, stumbling around like drunken boxers. We parried and pummeled around the park while kids played basketball, dodge ball. We banged on each other's heads while derelicts sucked on malt liquor bottles. While snow fell, while sun shined, while dogs ran right passed us barking and yapping. Somehow, we kept at it. Futility was a concept that just did not really come into it.

It went on like this for a long time. We tried shoving. We tried kicking. We tried tackling. It went on and on. If there was some kind of Olympics for dead people we would have qualified.

We tried throwing and jumping. We tried bridges and buildings, houses, boats, power poles, antenna towers. It was a thing to see; DeLinda falling off of bridges, arms flailing, the muffled sound of shouting. Then she would hit something and just stick there the way gum thrown at an acoustic ceiling does.

We jumped into cement mixers, vats of roofing tar. We stuck our heads in boiling pots of soup, gasoline tanks.

I jumped into the Columbia and started to sink. But instead of water filling my lungs, it just kind of made way for me until I fell to the bottom. I looked for sturgeon. Didn’t see any and got bored.

Cars and trains were promising for awhile. DeLinda managed to get stuck under the wheels of a Freightliner and dragged for miles. She said that she could almost feel her legs getting worn off. It was an exciting discovery. “What we need is a train!” she yelled.

But when we tied ourselves to cattle catchers we just got dragged from town to town without anything more happening. We crisscrossed the country towed along in front of or behind anything that would move. Come to think of it, I can't explain why the trains pushed us along instead of just passing through us or leaving us behind. Hmm.

One day we both crawled out from a slow moving freight train and there was a man wearing a straw hat and suspenders, a pair of green pants, and carrying a suitcase. A dark stain covered his white shirt. Where did he get a suitcase, and what did he need with it?

“You must have heard about the dying trick,” he said. He smiled and stuck out his hand. “My name is Jeremy Tate. Just like Sharon Tate, except we’re not related.

“It won’t work you know. Think about it: you’re already dead. Trying to die again, it’s like adding a negative number to another negative number. It will never equal anything positive.”

“Then what’s your suggestion, Mr. Tate?” asked DeLinda.

“Well let me redact what I just said. It can be done, I have seen it. But it’s not really worth it and besides it’s got nothing to do with what you’re up to here. It’s a little more subtle.”

“If you saw it, how come you haven’t done it yourself?”

“Do you know where they go? The ones who manage to get out of here?”


We shook our heads.

“They just get shoved back into that other place. Re-in-car-nation, like the Buddhists said. Guy I saw who did it, he just ended up in another womb spit back into the world wailing and bleeding. No thanks.”

“What else is there?” I asked. “What else can we do?”

“It’s a beautiful world with or without you.” He laughed and started walking toward the moving train with suitcase in hand. “Take care.”

“Did you notice....” I asked.

“Yeah. He had more color than we do. He looked almost...I don’t know.”

The man with the suitcase waved goodbye from the ladder of the box car. Happy, I thought. He looked almost happy.

We went our separate ways after that, DeLinda and me. We could not really agree on what the man had meant or whether he had been right about the consequences of rebirth. Perhaps it is my natural laziness but something about doing nothing instead of something was a better idea to me. Years later I passed back through Portland and heard she was up to the same old tricks. She had a promising new idea involving gears and levers, rotors.

I hit the road. I travelled all over the place, north, south, east, west. I went round and round the world. Motion settled the uneasy feeling I had about being dead. Moving blindly was better than striving.

Then one day in South Dakota I really saw something. I was standing outside the train station and a huge lightning storm was moving north over the prairie. I could see for hundreds of miles all around. The lightning flashed like bombs, more strikes at once than I had ever seen. It came right toward me, passed over and striking so hard that the ground rumbled and the station, an old brick building, shook to its foundation. In the brief flashes of light I could see patches of grass, brick, clouds, all frozen for a moment and then gone. I’d like to think the air stank of ozone but I don’t know. It was like muscle memory, the senses coming back a little after so long of remembering their importance without having them. I stood there for days but the feeling subsided, the storm passed. Poof.

The world is beautiful with or without you.

I keep moving now, and I have come to kind of like this existence. I think I am learning to smell again. The other day it was the faint odor of a fir tree on the air. Just a little bit. It reminded me of Pavlov's dog, how you can train yourself to react to the idea of something that you know is not really there.

The truth is there was no eagle that day, on the roof, just four circling gulls. Under rated birds, gulls. Resilient, adaptable, stoic, with that ugly little patch of red on their beaks. The eagle is majestic but really quite dense. I saw one almost drown once. When it finally reached dry land, it shook its feathers and looked around to make sure nothing else had seen its stupidity. Four gulls gliding from tree to tree, steam coming off the ground and a big orange sun. It had nothing to do with a patch of moss or anything else. I had always wanted to die.