The Infinite Vastness

Esteban looks at me and claps his little notebook shut with one hand. He walks over to the garage door and leans forward until his head hits the wall with a faint knock. He’s still standing there with his forehead pressed into the plaster when he begins:

“You remember the one with the shovel? The one where we had to use the shovel?”

“Of course,” I say. “It was quite the feast for the senses, wasn’t it.”

Esteban kind of rotates his head toward me without breaking contact with the wall and brandishes the little black notebook, shaking it at me like a wagged finger.

“And are you feeling hungry?”

*

Esteban guides the work van through the heat of mid-August. The grass has gone yellow and brown and lists in the wind coming upriver from the sea. The asphalt road winds toward our destination like a decaying black ribbon, chunks of asphalt broken at the edges by time and the elements. Oak trees dot the rolling hills, shading the waves of the dead fields. I fall into a sort of a trance, watching the landscape pass my window, lulled by the pitch and roll of the van’s suspension on the undulating rural lanes.

“That’s it,” Esteban announces as he jams on the brakes. I’m jolted away from my pastoral reflection.

“Whatsit?

“The house. We just blew past it. I’ve gotta flip around.”

The house sits down off of the road a quarter of a mile. A narrow, gravel driveway leads to a stand of oaks that ensconce a mid-century build. The county coroner is parked next to the house. He has been there for the better part of the morning. We step from the van, feeling the full brunt of the sun before passing in amongst the trees and into the house.

Inside we meet the coroner. He’s a portly man, probably in his mid-50’s. He looks nonplussed about the entire situation, which, I think, is why we were called out. While he talks with Esteban, I walk over to a nine-foot concert grand peeking out from the living room. Beyond the piano are plate glass windows that stretch from floor to ceiling. I sit down on the piano bench and look out through the glass, the view falling away below the house all the way to the valley floor. The twin stacks of a decommissioned nuclear power plant are just visible, the outline of the cement cylinders deliquescing in the haze. I stand and wipe my fingers across the lid of the old Bechstein, leaving parallel tracks in the dust. On the opposite wall are several framed photos and three paintings. I can’t tell whether they’re originals or prints. There’s a wedding picture in black and white. The man is in military dress, the woman in traditional bridal whites. In another, there are four children—two of each.

As I follow the photos out of the room, the family ages. In one, the children are older, and there are only three. One of the boys is missing. Toward the end of the wall, the children are all absent, leaving only the parents. They look well past retirement age. The woman is missing a finger on her right hand. I wonder if she was the pianist.

In the living room, the coroner is motioning towards the back of the house. Esteban nods toward me. “We’re up.” We both walk out and open the van where we keep our coveralls and gloves. We don the apparel and pull a large black body bag from the cargo space. I carry the vinyl bag, while Esteban carries a shovel and a sheet. For a moment, the heavy clothes shield us from the heat, but that passes. I begin to sweat and think about wrestlers who wear rubber suits to lose water weight before a weigh-in.

Around the back of the house, maybe a couple hundred meters afield, is a small out-building. A shed of some kind. It has a manual roll-up door that stands open half a foot. I hear the insects before I see them.

I reach down and grasp the handle of the roll-up door. I make a conscious effort to breathe through my mouth. The scent of rot and decay hangs around the building like a shroud. I tighten my grip on the door handle and do a little count-down in my head. Three, Two, One, lift. The door rolls up, grating against the metal tracks. Sunlight casts itself a foot past the threshold, illuminating an old lawnmower, a couple of red gas cans, and a set of metal shelves pushed against one wall. I take a step further, the fecund smell of neglected death still thick. Esteban goes back to the van for a flashlight. As he leaves, I see a switch on the wall and call after him. He’s already out of earshot. I flip the switch, and the remainder of the shed is revealed. A body, or what was once a body, is in the far corner of the room, slumped over against a tackle box. The cement floor is stained with fluid that has since dried. The light and my movement disturb the flies that are settled on the body, the hum of their wings rising into a cacophony that rises further into an abstract white noise of insect life. The body has probably been there for multiple weeks. Maybe longer. It wouldn’t be an easy pick-up. I look at the fingers, now devoid of life. There are nine altogether. I wonder if her husband preceded her in death or whether he might be somewhere anticipating the news.

“No need for the light in the end, eh?”

“I yelled, but you were already gone.”

“We gonna be able to get her - it’s a her isn’t it?”

“Looks like it.”

“We gonna be able to move her, or do you think it’s another shovel situation?”

“Lets roll her on the sheet if we can.”

I associate the sound of the body bag zipper with ultimate closure. I imagine if the corpse could still see how the sliver of light disappears as plastic teeth mesh together, the last bit of earthly light extinguished to the sound of the zip.

We return to the mortuary with our passenger strapped down in the back of the van. I think of the family photos on the wall. I wonder where her children are. Where the one missing son went. I think about the piano. I wonder how she lost her finger and whether she played after it was gone. I wonder why she was in the shed when she died. The coroner postulated a heart attack. An autopsy seemed unlikely given the state of decay and no foul play was suspected.

*

Esteban and I leave the mortuary at the same time. We generally close up together, and he drives to his girlfriend’s apartment. I go to my sister’s one-bedroom, where up until recently, I had been installed on the couch. She moved out three weeks ago and let me take over the lease. The night creeps down, falling from the mountains to the east, engulfing the foothills and spreading across the valley. I drive back into the countryside. I won’t verbalize the pull that the house and the photos and the shed have on me, but there is something ineffable that guides my pick-up truck east into the rolling heathland. The moon is full overhead, and the oaks cast nocturnal shadows on the grasses that still shift in the gentle wind.

I stop on the road. To my right lies the house, and beyond it, the shed. Beyond that are more oaks and more grassland. More rolling hills, and probably some rattlesnake dens. I pull down the driveway, the gravel compressing and grinding beneath the tires of my truck. The place is dark, the coroner long since departed. When I step out onto the end of the driveway, I pause and listen. What at first presents as silence begins to show some dimension. A coyote yelps in the distance. I can make out the sound of the stalks of the dead, dry grass moving against itself.

The front door of the house is locked. Still, I stand before it as though it has something to offer. The door is painted red, some of the finish flaking at the edges of the paneling. I brush the handle with my fingertips and try it once, just to reaffirm that the house is unavailable to me. The wind gusts and swirls around the porch, moving my hair. I push it back in place and walk toward the shed.

The door is rolled closed, but as before, it is not locked. I reach for the handle and slowly roll it up until the entry to the shed gapes open before me. The moonlight doesn’t penetrate past the threshold, leaving the interior in darkness. I entertain a brief notion that I’m here as a burglar.

I shuffle to find the light switch. I kick the tire of the lawnmower and swear under my breath. And then the shed is illuminated. I step past the lawnmower and the gas cans. I return to the place where we found the nine-fingered woman earlier that day, the cement still bearing the stains that had formed over the previous weeks. I look at the tackle box that served as an ersatz pillow for the deceased. The latch laid open as if in invitation.

Inside, where one may have expected fishing lures and bait, are several antique coins arranged in their own compartments in the box: twenty-four silver dollars, all dated between 1860 and 1867. I look further. Below the coins in the body of the box is a worn, black and white photograph of a man and a woman standing together in a concert hall. The back of the photo bears a brief pencil inscription; only, “Moscow, 1958, VC.” I reorganize the coins in their spaces, close and latch the lid, and place the photograph in my pocket.

Beyond the shed, several paces downhill is a rocky promontory, perhaps fifteen feet high. I begin to climb, finding handholds in the seams of the granite. The plateau, left standing alone through the work of wind and rain, offers a view of the valley to the west. I can see the lights of suburbia stretching into the indefinite vastness. Somewhere beyond is the city, the river, and eventually, the Pacific Ocean, heaving itself upon the shore time and time again, never ceasing. I lay my head back on the stone and look up at the full August moon. I thumb the edges of the photo in my pocket and think about her again, about her life. About the child. I wonder how long ago she last sat at her piano. And could she know that the last time was indeed the last? I think of her now, laid decomposing in a vinyl sack in the mortuary where I work. Perhaps if I were to lay still, the earth could come reclaim me, the grass and the moss and the rock might swallow me up, might take me in whatever way is justified by the interconnectedness of all things.