Waiting to be buried

03Nov07

The sky through the glass hung heavily with the promise of minus temperatures, bare trees silhouetted blackly against the stony grey. Next time I looked up, the world had flared up in vivid orange flames, and bled pink into plane trails and rain clouds. I stayed for a while after everyone else had gone, even the emaciated young man who had the air of someone prepared never to move again. He did nothing for half an hour but stand on his hands with his skinny legs sticking up from the water. He reminded me of a dead tree, in between surfacing for air. I waited for the blanket of indigo to take my breath away from the other side of the glass before leaving.

On the way home, I passed the graveyard. The man with the dead-tree legs sat shivering in his swimming trunks with his back lent against an oak tree. I approached him cautiously. A blood-red leaf let go lazily, another one and another one, and spiraled down slowly. Around him, other trees did the same. Leaf snow. The cold bit my toes. He sat with chlorine water soaking into the hard ground, and a little pile of leaves on his head. He didn’t seem to mind, and there they stayed.

I went to touch his sleeve, before realising he wore no sleeve for me to touch. He stared through me uncomprehendingly, lips turning blue.

What are you doing here, I asked, do you need help? He stared for a little while longer, just long enough for me to assume he couldn’t speak, and then he laughed. And what a laugh it was, phlegmatic and distanced as hell. His face did not laugh with him.

Waiting, he said, to be buried. A cluster of leaves gave up and fell from his head. His hair dripped with a cold insistence down his neck, ran in rivulets over his collarbone.

You’re not dead yet, I told him. An elderly man with a small dog walked past briskly. The man in the trunks and I were hidden between the blackness of gravestones, under the shadow of the oak. We waited in silence for the footsteps to recede. The only sound for a while was the chattering of teeth.

That’s okay, he answered at last, calmly. His eyes remained fixed on a point somewhere a few centimetres above my head and half a metre behind me, I will be soon. 

Oh, I said, at a loss. I guessed he would be, if he stayed sitting there in the cold, wet like that, for long enough. I wondered whether to stay and talk him out of it. As I thought, a few more leaves fell, and the sky darkened another shade.

It’s okay, he reassured me, as if having read my mind, you can go. I’ll be dead soon. I nodded. There remained nothing for me to do but leave this wet man to freeze, so I said goodbye awkwardly. I lingered for a few seconds, but he said nothing, so I continued on my way home.

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