HIS SEVEN DEAD DAYS

I left the funeral home alone. I knew it wasn’t a good idea.

            As I drove and the night fell and got deeper and blacker, I played no songs in my car. My only company: the comfortable hum of the air conditioner and the occasional roar of a car passing by. The city lights went by. Buildings went by. Everything went by. And the lights cast their orange glow on everything, and people walking down sidewalks looked neon-orange. Junkies. High-school girls. Prostitutes. Everybody lives in the same city.

            I resisted many impulses. But I gave in to two.

            I threw my cell phone out the window.

And I went to a bar on the seashore. It had that red on blue OPEN sign. Inside, dusty speakers played a song I knew since childhood. “Todo Tiene Su Final,” Hector LaVoe. Behind the counter, Hector LaVoe stared at me through a portrait drawn more than forty years ago. Twelve years after Lo Mato, LaVoe, his mind full of suffering and his head full of heroin, jumped off a ninth floor hotel balcony. The hotel was in Condado, and Condado’s not that far from here.

He survived the fall with a limp. AIDS took him in 1993. Todo tiene su final.

The song was ending when I came in. Outside, sea waves lapped against the bar’s walls.

            One hour later I was sitting on the sand, looking at the night, thinking about the man in the casket, whom I’d earlier helped to bury. I’d known him for a long time. I let thoughts wander. On the beach at night, facing the black night like that, I felt more acquainted with it, like I was sitting across the table from it.

            Then a man emerged from the darkness. For a minute, he looked like a ghost from a pulp story. On the beach, at night, even a crab can look like a ghost. I thought it might be my friend, but the clothes on him were too shabby for that. Even as a ghost, my friend would always wear the best clothes, I knew.

At first I thought he was going to ask me for money. I flicked my hand at him, like he was a fly hovering over my face. When he did not move, I turned to look at him. The light of the moon let me see the colors on his face.

            Two yellow bags hung under his eyes. Bags, I imagined, from long sleepless nights. Below them wrinkles paved labyrinthine paths of old age. His sunken grey eyes gave me a tired stare. His beard had the pale yellow color of urine.

            And his neck.

            It was slashed—it looked like a smile had been tattooed there, a bulging, fresh and pink smile-like scar. So pink it was, it looked like a lip that ran across his neck.

            He began speaking.

“The night reminds you of death,” he said. “That’s the only reason you could be staring at it like that now.”

The deep bass of his voice hit the pit of my stomach. Then, smiling and like a father who mischievously says so you believe in Santa Claus, he said, “You’re thinking that death is a curse.” Then he chuckled, tracing that line across his neck with his index finger. “See this?” He gave me time to give it a good look, which I could not help but do even though all better judgment told me to avert my gaze and leave right away.

“I did it to myself,” he said. “Done it to myself over and over.”

            He sat down beside me. And perhaps it had something to do with my drunkenness, my grief, or my nausea—but I did not move.

            “When I did this here, I—” he said and stopped, pausing to find the right phrase: “I embraced the mystery, if you will. Or I didn’t mind the idea of embracing it. Must’ve been twenty or so, in my prime. Used a knife. Buried myself in a sewer when I did it, too. Right under a busy city street. The joke would have been that the smell would take over the street, and people walking down the street would think: where the hell is that smell of dead coming from? Of course, they would eventually find me, rotting underground, in the street’s intestines. But the point was for those questions to pop up. For them to think, maybe for just a second, that the smell of dead had taken over the city, inexplicably. Would’ve fit with the time, too. Lots of dying going on then, both overseas and at home.

            “So I did it. I crawled into the sewer and slit my own throat. I felt myself dying and I died. I know this like I know nothing else.”

            That’s a big claim, I thought. I didn’t know where I was then, but the man had a friendliness about him that I couldn’t avoid noticing. It’s like he was talking about his summer in college.

            “Many days went by before people found out,” he continued. “I was dead down there, being nothing for a whole week. I can imagine little kids, grandmothers, mothers, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs as they walked by. Businessmen cupping their mouths as they entered the bank. Anti-war protesters holding up signs with one hand, covering their mouth with the other. Even homeless men didn’t sleep near there. Least, that’s what I heard. Here was I, doing damage to the living while being dead. Of course, you see me here now, so you know I didn’t stay dead.

            “I woke up. My corpse was found amidst rats and filth, and when it was loaded onto the ambulance—boom. My dust-covered eyes opened to garish ambulence lights. Just like that. Paramedics changed the direction of their course because the corpse had begun wheezing in their ambulance. ‘Don’t go to the morgue,’ I heard one say. ‘Get me to the emergency room.’ I stayed at the hospital ten days.

            “I had been dead for seven days, but it only took me three days to recover. By my third afternoon in the hospital, I didn’t even need the crutches. I remember the look on my nurse’s face. A nice, wholesome lady. Spoke to me of God and Jesus and redemption through the three days, gripping that metal Jesus that hung from her necklace. I let her talk. Didn’t say much in return, except, ‘more juice, please;’ ‘less meat, ma’am;’ ‘thanks for the story, ma’am.’ On account of the sickness, she imagined. Drowsiness, post-traumatic something or other—grief. So she went on and on, neglecting her other duties because she thought I was some kind of prophet. And I nodded here and there, to keep her satisfied. And even when I both pretended to be asleep and when I was asleep, she spoke and prayed on. She liked to talk about Paul. ‘Paul fell off a horse,’ she said, ‘but you fell off death.’ Only one thing there was that she wanted to hear from me—one thing that she didn’t want to preach me about. She asked me, ‘what did you see?’”

            He stopped, looked at me, and repeated, making an arc-gesture with his hands, like a circus man introducing the next big act, “What did I see, do you think?”

            I imagined it was a rhetorical question, because he kept going.

            “When she asked me that, I saw her eyes and ears open, like clouds that part to reveal the sun. Only it wasn’t a sun I saw in her eyes, but more like an eclipse. See, as miraculous as my situation was, she’d been reading off a script in her mind. Imitating homilies that she’d heard time and time again from her preacher, I supposed. But when it came to actually knowing what came afterwards—then she fell silent and her jaw dropped. ‘What did you see?’

            “I said I couldn’t say. And I couldn’t. Throughout my hospital stay, I had been too busy looking at the gash in my throat to think on the blackness. But it was there. I knew it then.”

I didn’t believe it yet at this point, but I still wondered about the idea. Earlier today, I had been crying over the death of my friend. I had been complaining against death. Here was a man who could not have it.

            “She attributed it to the mystery or to the Holy Spirit. And she told me to pray for the vision. That if I prayed hard enough, I’d be able to see the place I’d visited during my seven dead days. Gave me a rosary on my last day, to send me off. Kissed my hand, said, ‘Go with God.’

            “And when I left the hospital, I knew just what I wanted to do. I wanted to visit that place again, but not by praying.

            “I went back home, watched television, ate dinner, and tried to feel life around me like it was all new. I went back to the city street that I had stunk up for a week. Nobody looked up at the building, nobody looked down at the sewer. Everybody walked ahead. The sky was grey and the concrete was, too, and I didn’t know how it could be any other way. Like the smell of your mother’s perfume brings you back to your mother, years across time—so did the street bring back the pain in my throat. It hurt. But the memory of absence from this world—that is, the memory of not remembering anything, of not possessing a soul that whole time—it delighted me. So if there was a God in that street, He wasn’t telling me to be the world’s second Paul, to live and spread His word. He was telling me to die again, to taste it again. Now what kind of God would do that? Tempt you to do something that’ll never come through?”

            It could just as well have been the devil, I thought and did not say.

But maybe he saw the thought on my face, because he paused and sighed, as if he was remembering an affair with a long-lost woman. The kind of thing where one bad decision led to a morass of conflict. Had it not been for that one thing, I saw him thinking. That one thing.

            Something in the beach had fallen still. At night, the sand looks like a grey sheet and the ocean, save for the wave froth, like an extension of the night’s darkness.

            “That day, I went to a kitchen store and got myself another carving knife. Then I did it again, this time on the balcony of my fourth-floor apartment. The last thing I saw before welcoming back the darkness was the city skyline, simmering with the white light of the sun. Some kids in the street played a LaVoe song. Mind you, this was Hector in his prime: 1969. A cheerful song that faded away as the blackness returned.

            “This time, I woke up in the morgue. Imagine the scare I gave those folks, holding their autopsy blades and scalpels. They knew about me, they knew I’d been the man who died twice. What kind of organs does a man like that have? What kind of cells?

            “Of course, I was shuffled away to the hospital in a hurry. But this time I didn’t even need the three days. By the afternoon of the second day, I was walking down the hospital aisle, passing by all the rooms, waving my hand at all the nurses. And of course, the Jesus lady came to my room again. She was disappointed. Told me that at first she thought I had a gift, but that now maybe it was something else. Something pagan. When I was about to leave my room, she rushed over to me and squeezed my arm and asked me, what had I seen this time? And then, without letting me say anything, she tacked on another question to that one: was it the devil I saw? Is that why I didn’t want to mention it? Was I protecting her and everyone else from something horrible? I saw that eclipse in her eyes again.

            “I can’t say what I saw,’ I said. ‘It can’t fit all the books in the world.’ Her mouth remained half-open, her eyes innocent with understanding. She let go of my arm. My answer hadn’t comforted her. It plunged her into a foggy, gray place. I knew—I felt it then—she would never return from it.

            “That time, I didn’t even go home. I got another knife and got in my car and drove away. I went to a forest, the deepest part, where I knew I wouldn’t be discovered. I stopped the car in the forest and then I walked a long way into a clearing. No human sound entered there. Only anonymous chirps, tree-creaks. Leaves on the ground. I lay myself down there and I did it again. The knife hurt a little more.

            “I woke up alone on a bed of dead leaves, a halo of festive flies hovering over my neck. I was face-up and the sun was staring me down. I put my hand on my neck, felt the dry blood, the fresh scar. I couldn’t bend my neck. I couldn’t swallow. I thought maybe I’d become numb to the pain if I did myself in enough times. Maybe I could try doing myself in different places: the wrists, the arms... All of those I did, in my many years in the forest, thinking I’d find the perfect place in my body where I could grow numb. All my efforts gave me were seven-day deaths and scars.

            “I thought about somehow crushing my head, incinerating my body. But I realized I would wake up anyway, in whatever form that death would leave me in. Even if I did crush my head, I would wake up and would have to make do with it. Can you imagine me, walking around with a broken head? Or waking up as the scattered ashes of an incinerated body, drifting across the world?”

            “I understood then. I had my habit, and I had my methods of going through with that habit, and I would have both forever. It’s more than what anybody in this world has. It’s mine.

            “All I wish is that I could grow numb.”

            He looked at his hands, and my eyes looked at them too.

            All kinds of tracks paved his skin—red tracks mingled and intersected the tracks of his wrinkles. It was everywhere.

            “I feel it all,” he said.

            I thought then: Did you ever cry? But I couldn’t muster the courage to ask . Somehow I thought that doing that would break whatever spell had been cast, whatever clockwork the world had worked so that this man could tell me his story. So I simply said to myself that maybe that was the way the world forgave him. Gave him bare physical pain without tears.

            “I don’t know what I was born with,” he said. “I don’t know what condition it is. But, my friend, I cannot die. I don’t know how many days have passed since that first time, in that busy city street, but you see the age in my face. And sure as you can see that, you can see how fresh my throat is. I tried it so many times. I lost count. And always, all it took was seven days, and I would come back. Slashed myself so much, knife went blunt and my neck turned yellow. And now I am here, but I am not here.

“I’ve never remembered the gap between my death and my waking. When I tried to think about what it actually was, only a pleasant blackness shone forth in my mind. A warmly-greeted emptiness, a desirable hole. No experience, no seeing, no sensing, no smells. No pain nor pleasure—something lacking so much in substance that it even lacked silence. That’s what kept me coming back, especially as my physical pain worsened. I don’t know if I wanted to return to see if the experience had some kind of thingness to it—if somehow, if I dug deep enough into death, I could actually start feeling something within it—or if I was simply attracted to the complete lack of everything. Or if I was simply running away from the hurt the scars caused.”

He clenched his fists and opened his hands again. He did this a couple of times, as if testing the life that coursed through him.

“I remember that moment when I first woke up. A dazed feeling, like when you wake up from a nap at night. How many days had I been freed from ‘something’-ness? Who had descended into the sewers to find my body, and in what shape did this person find me? What had been happening in all the corners of this world while I’d been dead? How many people walked above me as I dumbly stared up with a limp mouth and an open neck? It pleased me. It tickled me as the thought of a birthday present tickles a little boy. To think that while the earth orbited the sun and all the universe’s levers and hinges clockworked through their busy days, I was in a happy unawareness, a cool trance. Not there.”

He looked at me with his gray, tired eyes. He let a silence drift between us, let the night go on.

He produced a knife from his pocket and showed it to me. The parts of the blade that weren’t overrun with rust or dried blood reflected the moonlight. I did not feel any fear then.

He put the knife in my lap. I grabbed it. “How old are you?” I asked.

He shook his head. Don’t even go there, I imagined him thinking.

He stood up and left.

I returned to the beach some days later, at the same time, with the same songs playing at the bar. But the man was gone. I’ve never seen him again.

I put the knife in the glove box of my car. It’s been there ever since.