It’s trendy and aspirational to have your body flung down a hole. Six feet down. Rotting there, you’ll know you’ve really made it.
Of course, everyone wants the best. The market has made it so that designer burials don’t come cheap in Brooklyn. Cemetery space is limited, almost all used up. Now, if you want to save money, some places offer stacking, but I don’t like crowds. So today, I meeting with funeral director Tim Pink at Harmony Funeral Home to talk about their innovative alternatives.
“We’re basically in the burning business at this point,” he says pushing his shaggy blonde hair back behind his ears. “We got other options, but they haven’t really caught on yet.”
“Like what?” I ask. I try to act like I’m scribbling something important down on my notepad, but I’m very hungover and paranoid being here and it comes out as: beware the hippy, he burns people.
“Well.” Tim leans back in his chair and puts his arms behind his head. He’s got a tattoo of Hare Krishna on his forearm. “The plots out here are worth more than gold, so if you really want to be below ground, we can ship you somewhere the dirt is cheaper. We got planes that are built to transport bodies over to the Caribbean. We call them our ‘flying freezers.’”
I nod. “Nice. But what if you can’t afford anything?”
“Hmmm. The potter’s field used to take people, but now they turned it into some kind of Karaoke place. I could tell you about something new we’ve been cooking up.” His lazy hippy eyes get sharp for a moment. “But you have to promise to keep it secret.”
I put three fingers in the air. “You can count on me.”
He leans in. “If you can’t afford to die, we can rig you up so you live forever.”
“Wouldn’t everyone want that?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Have you seen it out there? Dying is a luxury for the rich now. Forty thousand—sixty. Those are cheap funeral numbers. Not having that kind of money and having to live forever with no rest in sight? No, sir—that’s no life at all.”
All of a sudden, Tim’s face lights up like he’s just remembered something. “I can see you’re not totally getting it yet,” he says. “Let me show you.”
He bends down and disappears behind his desk. I can hear him going through a metal drawer like he’s wrestling some sort of mean little animal. Clanging. When he comes back up, he’s smiling and he’s got a little gold cigarette case in his hand.
“They’re special,” he says.
“What’s makes them, uh, special?” I ask plucking one up and examining it from all angles.
“Embalming fluid. I dipped ‘em”
We smoke our cigarettes and I feel a dark purple fill my lungs. The room breathes a bit, but it’s only wheezing so I don’t worry. Then Tim starts mumbling something about eternity over and over again. I think I scream, what the hell are you saying, man!, but he does not reply, so I let it go. I sink down in my chair.
Above Tim’s head is a little Death with the hood and scythe and everything. He’s dancing up there on his head. Tim’s mumbling goes faster and faster and it melts into one mono-hum. Little death stops dancing and gets serious. He looks right and me.
“Too bad,” he says in a snake-like Louisiana accent. “You boys is gonna be ’round for a while. Checked my list an’ I didn’t even see you on the first billion pages. 40 billion deaths a page. Whew!”
He starts dancing again.
I look above him and I see heaven there, shining down. A window to it. It looks almost empty. There’s just a few guys with sweaters tied around their necks and women holding long-stem wine glasses. They’re playing Bocce Ball. With no one able to afford to die, heaven has become a country club. The poor live on down here. In the muck and hard, hard work. We work pulling out our pharaoh’s organs, wrapping them up in holy papyrus. We mummify the governors so they can cross over in style. We’re praying. One day, we hope we can get a high enough credit limit to modestly burn ourselves up. Our skin fluting like over-printed paper. Wobbly folds and curling toenails sent up to God.
