As soon as we got home, I said, "I'm going into my room." Then I went to take a shower instead.

"Yeah, welcome home," Mom said. At that point, I knew exactly how it was going to be.

I took a three hour long shower, put on a t-shirt, some pajama pants and my favorite brown robe, all left in exactly the same places. My parents had never really liked to change things (except for their cars, apparently). I went into my room and slept through the next day. When I finally woke up, I went into the bathroom and urinated for several minutes. Then I went back into my room and lay on my bed. I ran my hand over my face and contemplated the nature of beards. I was, I guessed, already about three days into what I had a.s.sumed as my new purpose in life.

A beard, I figured, was power. Grown properly, a beard was like a mask. The man beneath the beard looked out at a world with clarity but that same world could not necessarily see into him. The beard rendered a plain man into a mystery, at least from the eyes down, and I never really believed all that stuff about the eyes being mirrors to the soul anyway. A beard left so much of the bearded's face unexplained. How big was his mouth? Did he have a weak chin? Perhaps he had a cleft in his chin or a harelip. Was his jaw line rounded or chiseled? Did he have a double chin? All of these questions would go unanswered until the beard was removed.

And what about the nature of a person who grows a beard? Was it vanity? Did he think he looked better with the beard? Was the beard there to hide some sort of physical flaw? Was the beard meant to convey a folksy sensibility? Was it there to make him seem more at one with nature, more comforting? Perhaps the person who grows a beard was simply too lazy to shave. Or maybe it hurt to shave. Maybe shaving was more excruciating than the bearded could take. In that case, he definitely would not be a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t. Or maybe he had better things to do. Maybe he just didn't want to take the time to shave because there were so many other things he could do. This, ultimately, was the reaction I strove for. I wanted the beard to be a sign to the world. I was too preoccupied with finding my purpose in life to shave. I spent too much time wrapped in deep thought and, besides, what was the point in shaving anyway? Furthermore, what was the point in cutting one's hair? It was just vanity. Why not enjoy all this hair while I had it?

Maybe I was just depressed but I stayed there for three months, rubbing my hand across my cheeks and chin, feeling my beard grow thick and full. I hardly ever left my room. I had a stereo and a lot of records. I tried to find the most depressing stuff imaginable. I didn't like it when the singer or even the music sounded remotely happy. When that happened, I would pull the record from the player and break it in half. It made me angry to hear happiness. I couldn't run the risk of listening to that same one again. It gradually occurred to me that I might not have been so much depressed as working on my sense of anger. I went through all the alb.u.m covers and liner notes and drew big frowny faces on all the band members. I didn't want them sounding happy and I most definitely didn't want them looking happy. Which wasn't a big problem. Most of them looked pretty pouty and brooding anyway but I couldn't get it out of my head that all the pictures were still taken at some photo shoot somewhere and that photo shoot wouldn't have existed if they hadn't just recorded an alb.u.m that was going to prove at least moderately successful. Therefore, even though they were pouting and broody they were still happy. Even worse, they were very happy people pretending to be very sad people. The world was just full of poseurs. After I got bored with the frowning faces I decided to draw beards on all of them. Big black beards made with a thick black marker. I covered their mouths and everything. Even the girls. All those bearded ladies made me happy. My being happy made me mad. I shouldn't be happy because I had failed in my life pursuit.

I had to comfort myself by stroking my beard. That made things all right, at least for a little while.

My father worked at the factory all day and slept all night. My mother ran errands all day and slept all night. My sister was modeling in California. I only left my room at night so I didn't have to talk to my parents. It wasn't that I hated them or anything. We just didn't have a lot to talk about so we just said the same things we'd said a hundred times before and all of that made me pretty bored. I also had the feeling they were hiding something from me. I had never really had that feeling until I watched my grandfather disappear in the front yard but, after that, the feeling became a little more palpable. Like there was some big family curse they weren't telling me about. Like they knew, no matter how hard I tried at whatever endeavor, I was going to fail. My sister, Ca.s.sie, didn't have this problem, but I had come to suspect that she was adopted and, therefore, exempt from the curse.

Action came over a few times and asked if I wanted to play but I told him to go away. Actually, I never really told him to go away. I just locked my door and pretended I wasn't there.

One morning, shortly after masturbating, I heard a knock on my door. Thinking it might be Action, I silently slid my pajama pants up over myself and tried to remain as quiet as I could. Again, there was a knock on the door.

"David?"

It was Dad.

I didn't really want to talk to him either. Of course, he knew I was in my room but maybe if I didn't say anything he would think I was asleep.

"David?"

He knocked louder this time.

"What!" I shouted. "What the h.e.l.l do you want!"

"It's your mother..."

"What about her!"

"She's dead."

"What!"

"She's dead. She died this morning."

"She wasn't even sick!" I yelled, not really believing him.

"I'm sorry, Son. Sometimes these things happen. Are you going to come out of your room?"

I knew I should have left the room, to comfort my father if nothing else, but I didn't want to. The inertia was too strong. It had welled up so deeply inside of me I didn't really know if I could feel anything except anger.

"Later!" I shouted before going about trashing everything in my room. I smashed the stereo, broke all the alb.u.ms, ripped all the books and anything else made of paper. And then I collapsed in the rubble in my sweaty bearded stink.

Nine.

A note about my father: He was a large, robust man, about twice my size. Growing up, I didn't see him a whole lot. He worked in a factory that made hot air balloon baskets. Mostly, while growing up, he worked second shift, from about five in the evening until about five in the morning, and my sister and I always held the a.s.sumption these hours were kept to minimize his contact with us. Not that we minded. Mom was a very sweet lady. A little headstrong. A little sterile. A little crazy and a lot depressed, but my father seemed to actively hate life and was not greedy with his worldview. He hated life and he wanted you to know how bad life really was. Life was going to work for twelve hours a day in some factory you didn't want to be in so you could put a roof over your unappreciative kids' heads. His father, my grandfather, the one who had disappeared in a storm of elephants, had been an anthropologist. Much like my father, he was away from his family most of the time. My father probably felt like a disappointment. He did not go to college. He had no interest in going to college. He had no interest in making the world a better place. His world was his family and when it came to keeping families happy, to my father, it came down to money. He didn't need to go to school to make money. He only had to work long, grueling hours creating hot air balloon baskets for rich hobbyists who made more in a year than he probably would in his lifetime. Sometimes, I felt like he and my mother had separated a long time ago and partic.i.p.ated in something like shared custody of us kids. Except we were usually out of the house when he had his visitation.

When I arose from my stupor and dazedly trudged into the living room it was to find my father standing in the middle of the room, holding a mug of coffee in his right hand and looking down at my mother sprawled on the floor.

"I thought you said she was dead," I said.

"I'm pretty sure she is." He didn't cry. He didn't really seem shaken up or sad. He just stood there, took a sip of his coffee (always black) and stared down at the unmoving corpse.

"Did you call the ambulance?"

"I called somebody."

"An ambulance?"

"They said they were." He took a deep, shaky breath. "But that was hours ago."

"And you've just been standing here since then?"

"Pretty much."

I sat down in a chair and stared at my father staring at my mother. "Did you call Ca.s.sie yet?" I asked.

"Tried."

"And?"

"Couldn't get a hold of her."

"What happened?"

"She said, *I think I'm dying,' and then she fell there on the floor." He pointed. "Right there where she is now."

"This is horrible." I ran my hands through my greasy hair.

"She'd been ill for quite some time."

"I didn't know that. What was it? Cancer?" Most people in my family died of cancer. We were lucky if we saw seventy.

"No. I'd rather not go into it."

"Was she like a closet alcoholic or something?"

My father turned slowly. He took a sip from his cup, staring over the rim at me with his icy blue eyes. "I said I'd rather not go into it just yet."

"Fine," I threw up my hands. "When did this family get so f.u.c.ked up anyway?"

"Excuse me?" he asked, still staring at me.

"You heard me."

"I think you need to go to your room."

"Yeah, well, I like it better there anyway. Call me out for the funeral."

"It's tomorrow."

"Don't you have to make arrangements or anything?" I asked.

"Already did."

"So you've managed to make arrangements while standing here for the past three hours."

"Made them before."

"You made arrangements before she died? Don't you have to put things in the paper and reserve a time for the funeral and all that?"

"Yeah. I did that. I told you, she had suffered for quite a while. In fact, we both knew the exact minute she was going to die."

"And you didn't think to tell anyone?"

"I think I told you to go to your room."

"I'm not a child anymore."

"Then get out of my house."

"Maybe I will." My father was acting like a ghoul.

I left through the front door, slamming it loudly behind me. I stood out there on the porch, barefooted and robed. It was a clear day. The sun was bright. Too bright. It gave me a headache. People should die on overcast, gray days, when the beginnings of depression are already beginning to sink their little black hooks into your soul. I turned and went back in, crossing the living room, exactly as it was a moment ago, entering my room and slamming the door.

I went to my stereo to play the saddest music I could find as loud as I possibly could and then remembered I had smashed the stereo to bits only moments before. I lay back down on the bed, listening for sirens, listening for anything resembling something close to normalcy. Hearing nothing, I drifted off into yet another nap.

Ten.

I overslept the morning of the funeral. My alarm clock was broken. Actually, I didn't have an alarm clock. I didn't have an alarm clock or a watch so I guess I really had no way of knowing I overslept. I always just a.s.sumed, upon waking, that I had overslept something or the other. Usually, living without any timekeeping devices, this was the case.

I rushed to my closet and rifled through my old clothes until I came to my charcoal funeral/wedding/special occasion suit. I had had this suit since I was fourteen. I stripped off my clothes that had grown thin and stretched and felt like they were almost a part of me and stroked my beard. It had a calming effect, stroking the beard. It told me that life moved slowly and there was no reason to rush anything. The beard did not rush. It flowed from my skin at a steady rate. I didn't know exactly what that rate was but I knew it was slow. Glacial. A glacial rate.

I put the suit on and realized either the suit had shrunk or I had grown. Or maybe that was just what happened when the dry cleaning instructions were ruthlessly disregarded over such a long period of time. Regardless, it was very ill-fitting. The hems of the pants came up well above my ankles and I couldn't even b.u.t.ton the jacket. I felt like a fat ape. Not that I really cared. On my best day I wasn't very concerned about appearances and I found myself even less so now. I was the grieving son. No one was going to criticize me for my slovenly dressing habits. I tore around the room, looking for a pair of shoes but couldn't find any. I couldn't even find any socks. When was the last time I had even worn shoes and socks? I figured it was probably the day I had returned home. What felt like so many months ago now.

I went out into the rest of the house. No one was there. I half-expected to see mother still lying there on the floor but the house was still and dark and empty and the only sound was the rain pelting on the windows. Outside, heavy dark clouds hung in the sky, too high to be elephants. A perfect day for a funeral. I didn't know how I was going to get there. I didn't even really know where the funeral was. I felt lost.

I searched the kitchen for keys. That was where the parents always kept their keys. But I couldn't find anything. It looked like I would have to walk. Where was Action? Why hadn't he picked today to creepily stalk around the house and ask if I could come out and play? Maybe he was at the funeral. Like a good neighbor. He probably didn't really have anything else to do. He would probably go just to see if there was someone there he could take advantage of which, at a funeral, there almost always was. Funerals and weddings. Joy and grief, two polar opposite emotions that end up sharing a lot of the same fallouts.

I went outside and looked at Mom's El Camino. Did it even need keys? Probably not. It seemed to run off some kind of magical power but I was too late to try and harness that magical power and magical power, like good luck, was something I would probably never have.

I took off walking toward town. If my dad had anything to do with the burial, then the funeral would be at Baruk's Discount Memorial Garden and Crematorium. The commercials had always said it was a no frills kind of place for a no frills kind of budget, or something like that. I'm sure they had some sort of seductive adman way of saying it. "Why pay for something you're going to bury?" I sloshed along the gra.s.s on the side of the road, the rain beating down on me. At least it was a warm day so the rain didn't seem as cold.

Why the h.e.l.l didn't Dad wake me up for the funeral? It wasn't like I needed my sleep or anything. Since returning home, it seemed like all I did was sleep.

A car filled with teenagers pa.s.sed me. Two of them had their a.s.ses stuck out the windows, mooning me. They shouted and screamed something that sounded like "f.a.g!" They were gone before I could come up with any kind of retort. I was never very good at that sort of thing anyway. I stroked my dripping beard and realized yet another function of the increasingly utilitarian beard-it kept a lot of the rain off my face. If only my head could have been made of this coa.r.s.e, oily, wiry hair, I wouldn't have been nearly as uncomfortable. Only, the hair on my head was very thin and left my scalp almost completely exposed to the elements. My suit was nearly soaked through and I was still quite a way from town and the cemetery was on the far side.

It became mechanical, my walking. I tried to walk along at a steady clip and not think about being late at all. I would probably end up at the wrong cemetery anyway and then what? I mean, not attending your mother's funeral is a pretty heinous act, right? I think if I missed it completely, I would just have to keep on walking. Maybe back to Dayton to see if my apartment full of homeless guys was still there. That was one of the beauties of being around the homeless guys. They lacked a home and all that it implied, mainly family. Sure, some of them had family but they were the mean ones who had written them off and the b.u.ms, in turn, had written them off. So it was like if they had any living family then that family was already dead. I've often thought family can be the source for more sorrow than one can find anywhere else.

The carload of teenagers came back by. This time, one of them was strapped to the roof of the car, completely naked. He brandished his sizable genitals at me as the car sped past, kicking up a mist of disgusting road water. If they came back by, I was worried they would just throw me down, strip off my clothes, and a.n.a.lly rape me. After all, that was the kind of day it was turning out to be. But I managed to successfully zone out and after my legs felt like rubber and my feet were so sore I didn't think I would be able to walk anymore, I looked up and saw the neon lights at the cemetery gate.

A group of people stood at the top of the hill and I went toward it.

Eleven.

Baruk's beckoned me into its realm. Here, death was cheap. Because, outside the gates, life was cheap. Why celebrate a cheap life with an expensive death? We are only people to ourselves and some of the people who know us. To the people who make money from us we are not people. We are dollar signs, hash marks in their ledgers. We are the fabled, lauded, and sometimes dreaded bottom line. No fuller of life than the corpses they put into the ground. If anyone, it's these people, champions of commerce, who are aware there is no heaven and there is no h.e.l.l. There are no countries and there are no religions. Unless they can make a buck off it. If they can make a buck off it then they'll tell you the sky p.i.s.ses lemonade and your car will make a perfectly satisfying s.e.xual partner.

The inside of Baruk's contained, as the half-remembered commercial from long ago said, no frills. The markers were little more than laminated paper, held into the ground with wooden stakes. There were no trees. The gra.s.s was brown in some places and missing altogether in others. And this was where my mother's corpse would be spending the rest of its life. At least until some developer came and decided they would pay more than the ground was worth so they could install their McMansion developments or upscale strip mall.

The rain continued to fall from the leaden sky. I finally reached the group of people at the top of the hill panting and out of breath. I looked for my father but I didn't see him. I almost thought I might have been at the wrong funeral except I noticed my sister from across the grave. Action stood next to her and I was pretty sure he was feeling her up. I made eye contact with her and expected some sort of acknowledgement but didn't receive anything in the way of a long distance greeting. Maybe she didn't recognize me because of the beard. Maybe she was too distracted by Action's groping. Maybe she was out of her head with grief.

I stayed on the outer perimeter. There were more people there than I thought there would be. It was interesting how they were all dressed in very somber clothes but each of them held a brightly colored umbrella. A couple of them were black but most of them were bright green or red or yellow or rainbow striped. I almost wanted to laugh. Yes, a funeral is a very serious occasion but not serious enough to buy a new umbrella for and definitely not serious enough to stand out in the f.u.c.king rain without an umbrella. Besides, the deceased wouldn't want everything to be all doom and gloom, would they? No! They'd want happiness! A party! They would want those left behind to know they had moved on to a better place in a better bargain afterlife!

A minister stood at the head of the grave and read from something that sounded like the newspaper. Behind me, a man was digging in a grave and shouting, "Maria! Maria!" I looked back at him, sternly. He was being rude and disruptive.

He looked up at me and said, "She forgot her pills! If she takes her pills she won't be so dead!" Now I noticed he was only digging in the dirt with his left hand while using his right fist, undoubtedly filled with pills, to punch at the loose dirt.

I turned back to my mother's grave, trying to tune out his ravings.

The minister held up his thick book, took a swig from a flask he kept in this thick book. It wasn't actually a book at all. It was one of those faux books teenagers use to stash their drugs in. He put the flask back in the book and closed it.

"And that, ladies and gentlemen," he began, "concludes this life of conclusions and something and good night. You've been great!" He held the book up and began walking down the other side of the hill, staggering only slightly. Even the minister was had at a deep discount.

I now approached the grave and looked down. It wasn't very deep. Maybe three or four feet at most. At the bottom was a knotty pine coffin, the kind I imagine prisoners got. I found it impossible to believe my mother was actually in there.