The Pallbearers' Club E-Book

Paul Tremblay

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 482

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

"Delightfully morbid and surprisingly emotional" —The New York Times A chilling and twisty horror of toxic friendships, punk rock and vampire parasites from the Bram Stoker award-winning modern master of horror and author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts. 1988, and puberty has hit Art Barbara hard - he's a painfully socially awkward teenager, underweight, acne-ridden, and bent crooked by scoliosis. Worse, he has no extra credits to get him into college. So Art starts the Pallbearers' Club, dedicated to mourning the homeless and lonely – the people with no one else to bury them. It might be a small club, unpopular and morbid, but it introduces Art to Mercy Brown, who is into bands, local history, folklore and digging up the dead. Decades later, Art is writing his memoir to try and make sense of it all, because nothing about Mercy is simple. It's all a matter of trust, right? Their friendship twists and coils around the pair of them, captured in Polaroid snapshots and sweaty gigs and the freaky, inexplicable flashes of nightmare that lurk in a folded jacket at night. Because Art is writing his memoir to make sense of it all, but Mercy is reading it too. Mercy thinks Art's novel – because this isn't a memoir – needs some work, and she's more than happy to set the record straight. What if Art didn't get everything right? Come on, Art, you can't tell just one side of the story… Seamlessly blurring the lines between fiction and memory, the supernatural and the mundane, The Pallbearers Club is an immersive, suspenseful portrait of an unforgettable and unsettling friendship.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Paul Tremblay and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

If I Told You

New Day Rising

Something I Learned Today

Books About Ufos

Flip Your Wig

Folklore

It’s Not Funny Anymore

59 Times the Pain

No Reservations / Back from Somewhere

Masochism World

Hardly Getting Over It

Acknowledgments

“Books can have teeth. A whole mouthful of them. The Pallbearers Club has a whole lifetime of them.”—Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians

“Any new book by Paul Tremblay makes me sit up straight. Part of the joy is not knowing what to expect from each new story.”—Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive

“The most beautiful and heartbreaking funeral I’ve been to in a long time, The funeral I’ve been to in a long time, The Pallbearers Club is melancholy, funny, and very cruel, but you won’t regret carrying this coffin.”—Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of The Final Girl Support Group

“Replete with the trademark brilliant characterisation, intricate switchback plotting and general weirdness you get with a Paul Tremblay novel, Art and Mercy’s friendship—and bickering over what may or may not be a vampire what may or may not be a vampire story—will haunt you long after the last page.”—A. G. Slatter, award-winning author of All the Murmuring Bones

“An extraordinary novel. This book is fun, warm, sad, and most of all, profoundly humane: it subverts horror tropes and real-life certainties in one go. I loved it and I need to shout it in the streets.”—Francesco Dimitri, author of The Book of Hidden Things and Never the Wind

“Brilliant, profound, moving and shocking, held together in a delightfully unique and intriguing narrative structure that will tell you truths… orlies… but probably both.”—Tim Lebbon, New York Times bestselling author of The Silence

“A uniquely devastating portrait of love, loss, family, and friendship that will equally enchant and terrify readers. Paul Tremblay reinvents the horror genre with this masterpiece of blurred fact and fiction—a story where we stare into the gaping, black maw of darkness and something quietly beckons us to look deeper.”—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes

“This is horror at its most heartfelt, horror that confirms our fears and flaws, the insecurities that we carry with us from our formative years.”—Priya Sharma, the award-winning author of Ormeshadow

“Tremblay at his most audacious best. It’s such a sneaky mindblower! It’ll burrow deep inside you, and by the end, you’ll be wondering if the room you’re sitting in, the people you’re talking with, or even your own memory, are real. This book is horror’s answer to Nabakov’s Pale Fire.”—Sarah Langan, acclaimed author of Good Neighbours

“The Pallbearers Club constructs a maze of uncanny ambiguity and disquiet—a Nabokovian labyrinth that sustains its mystery past the point few writers but Paul Tremblay would risk.”—Ramsey Campbell

“A new novel from Paul Tremblay is always cause for celebration. The Pallbearers Club has it all—growth and decay, metatextual playfulness and earnest terror, dark hilarity and deep melancholy.”—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia and Orange World

Also by Paul Tremblay and Available from Titan Books

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock

A Head Full of Ghosts

The Cabin at the End of the World

Growing Things and Other Stories

Survivor Song

The Little Sleep and No Sleep Til Wonderland Omnibus

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The Pallbearers Club

Print edition ISBN: 9781789099003

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789099010

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: July 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Bob Mould for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Thirty Dozen Roses” (written by Bob Mould), courtesy of Granary Music © 2019.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Paul Tremblay 2022. All rights reserved.

Paul Tremblay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Lisa, Cole, and Emma

Who are they?

Maybe out of everything I thought I knew, there was nothing I was more wrong about than my own life story.

—Sara Gran,Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

So some of him lived but the most of him died.

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Vampire”

The swollen hollow of my wobbly heart.

—Bob Mould, “Thirty Dozen Roses”

IF I TOLD YOU

(2007)

I am not Art Barbara.

That’s not my birth name. But at the risk of contradicting myself within the first few lines of a memoir, I am Art Barbara.

Imagine my personage, the whole of me (I prefer that phrase to “spirit” or “soul”) exists in Plato’s World of Forms. That me, the one slicked in the amber of Greek philosophy, is Art Barbara. Sorry, Mom and Dad, the name you assigned was a valiant effort, but it does not sum up who I was, who I am, or who I will become.

Art Barbara is bold, declarative, striking, and upon first hearing it spoken your brow furrows, head tilts, and mouth smirks. Admit it; your face is in thrall and acting on its own. You might know a Barbara or even an Art, but you haven’t met, nor do you know, Art Barbara.

However, the initial “Oh” upon the shores of appellatory discovery soon gives way to incredulousness, to there-must-be-some-mistake. Let’s be honest, here (and you have my promise I will always be painfully honest) the name tries too hard. It is more than a little ridiculous, shading toward pathetic (a word derived from the Greek pathos, of course), particularly when spoken with a Boston or Rhode Island accent as the coterie of r’s disappear into obnoxiously long ah’s. Even without the accent, there’s a slant-rhyme clunkiness to the first two syllables, or three if you insist upon pronouncing Barbara as Bar-bar-ah as opposed to the shortened Bar’bra. Regardless, the combination of the first two syllables, the Art-Bar, forces the speaker to comply, to slow down and enunciate the harsh coupling before dumping an auditory body into the dark water of r’s and a’s. I make no claim to be an expert of phonesthetics (the study of inherent pleasantness of the sound of words, according to Wikipedia), but clearly Art Barbara is no cellar door.

I saw the name written on the bathroom wall of Club Babyhead, spring of 1991. The letters were capitalized, angular slashes of neon-green ink; a cave painting glowing in the lovely darkness of the early 1990s. I have never forgotten it. And by the end of this memoir, neither will you.

Isn’t time strange? Time is not linear but a deck of cards that is continuously shuffled.

I will change all names to protect the innocent and not-so. I will take great care to choose the names appropriately. As astounding and beyond-belief the goings-on to be detailed are, the names will be the only fictions.

Beyond the act of communication, sharing my story and experience and life, exploring fear and fate and the supernatural (for lack of a better word) and the unknown universe big and small, vulnerable confessions, and base gossip (Truman Capote and the nonfiction novel this is not), perhaps a lame excuse or two for lifelong disappointments and why I am and where I will be, the purpose is hope. Hope that one reader or one thousand and one readers might empathize with the “why” behind the poor decisions I made, make, and most certainly will make.

I assume you intended for me to find this. Maybe that’s a lot for me to assume. Maybe it’s not. I mean, you left it on your cluttered desk with a literal yellow bow tied around the manuscript. Holy shit, I bet I’ll have a lot to say about this book based on the opening chapter.

Art Barbara. Jesus, dude.

I promise my commentary will be as honest as you are claiming to be. That sentence by itself makes it sound like I am already accusing you of lying. I don’t mean to. We’ve had our ups and downs, but I’ve always considered you to be one of my dearest, oldest friends, and I hope you feel similarly.

Frankly, I’m a little scared to read more, to find out what you really think of me.

Based on the title, I don’t think it’s vanity to assume I’ll play a large role in this, um, memoir.

Memory is a fucked-up thing, especially as time passes, stretches, and yawns. Your comparison of time to a shuffled deck of cards comes close to the truth, or a truth. I think time is better represented as a house of cards, an unimaginably large castle of cards, one in which rooms and entire wings collapse and are endlessly rebuilt. Those collapsed rooms and wings hold memories, both personal and collective. That card house is forever haunted by the lost memories and by the ones that are retained but changed.

Sorry, I know this is your book, not mine.

It occurs to me if our memories of certain events differ, that doesn’t necessarily mean one or both of us are lying, certainly not lying on purpose.

I’ll attempt to keep my comments solely to after each chapter. I will read and comment as I go without skipping ahead. I can’t promise that I won’t mark stuff up within the manuscript though. As you know, I’ve always been a bit impulsive.

Looking forward to reading what name you’ll give me, Mr. Art Barbara.

NEW DAY RISING

(October 1988)

A chapter in which a club’s hero rises, or at the very least, raises a shaky hand.

A-House was one of three wings attached to the main building of Beverly High School and it telescoped out, as vast and empty as the cold universe. A yellow hall pass clutched in my sweaty adolescent hand granted permission to go to the AV room so I could assist with the morning announcements broadcast on our closed-circuit Panther TV. As a senior who regularly achieved honor roll, I’d earned “senior privileges,” which included the ability to traverse the campus during homeroom and free periods without need of a pass. My asking for a pass from my calculus teacher, Mr. Langan (a kind if not awkward middle-aged man who wore sweater vests and an Abraham Lincoln–style beard) represented the kind of student I was; skittish, afraid, desperate for approval of any kind.

I ghosted past rows of lockers dangling their bulbous locks. Most of me ached to turn around, to return to homeroom, to give up on this foolish idea, to forget it ever occurred to me. There was another part that realized this was a Robert Frost path-choosing moment. If I went through with my plan, this smallest AV step for humankind, my life would be irrevocably changed. By the time I swung open the creaking metal door of the AV room, my resolve leaked away, literalized as flop sweat.

Ian, one of two Panthers newscasters, he of the swimmer’s shoulders and beer-keg leer, greeted me with “Hey, it’s Artie the one-man party.”

[Note: Ian did not say that. As we’ve discussed, my name was not Art. I will not break in like this again to point out other, minor factual name discrepancies. It’s enough for you to know Ian was the kind of chud who would’ve said that if my name were Art. What he did call me wasn’t my real name either. He called me Bones. I had always been the skinniest, most slight kid in my class, and at that AV moment in time I weighed a scant one hundred and forty pounds. Most of my male classmates called me by that nickname, which I never had the option of approving when it was pinned to me at age eleven along with another kid’s fist to my big nose. (I fought back, but all that earned was another, bigger kid’s fist to the stomach.) At ages seventeen and eighteen, the nickname was uttered with tradition if not endearment, certainly with less intentional cruelty, but it was there in the name’s history, so I will not use nor refer to it again. We will stick with Art to the end.]

The other newscaster, Shauna, gave me a wave and a slightly puzzled tilt of the head as she buzzed around the small studio, handing out photocopies of the morning’s announcements to the producers, to Ian (slouched behind the news desk, a combo of James Dean and a pile of dirty laundry) and the camera operator. She wore the high-school equivalent of a business suit, her black blazer with shoulder pads of a size somewhere between a football player and David Byrne’s Stop Making Sense suit. Shauna and I were in the same calculus, English, and French classes and she had always been cordial if not coolly competitive. She had the third-highest grade point average in our graduating class of three hundred and twenty-four. I was number nineteen, one of only two boys in the top twenty, which told you all you needed to know about my male classmates.

Shauna asked, not unkindly, why I was there. I told her I had an announcement about a new club.

She said “Okay” about ten times while scribbling on her announcements sheet, and said (to herself, I assumed), “I can talk about it between the student council and powderpuff football sign-up.” Then, to me: “Got it, Art.”

“Oh. Thanks, but, well, because it’s a new club and as the founder and president I think I need to make the announcement myself, and, um, Mr. Tobin said that I could do it.”

Shauna smiled but her eyes moistened, as though on the verge of you-can’t-do-this-to-me tears. Before I could say sorry, she said, “We have five minutes to air, do you know what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it, and when it might be best suited for airing?”

I shrugged, offered something mostly committal. She shoved me into the adjacent secondary studio, an isolation chamber encased in thick windows so no one could hear me scream.

The announcements began when they were supposed to. They were piped through a small box of a speaker perched above the door of my studio. Ian and Shauna sounded trapped in a tin can, but I was the one sardined in here with barely enough room for me (standing, no chair), a tripod, and a bored underclassman lurking behind a camera.

Instead of practicing what I was going to say while awaiting the go signal, I uttered a silent mantra in my head: This is so you can get into college. My guidance counselor, Mr. Brugués (he of the novelty fish ties, walrus-thick ’70s mustache, overstarched dress shirts, and brown-bag lunches that were always open and left half-eaten on his desk), said my grades were great but I didn’t have any extracurricular activities. No sports, no student council, no clubs, no volunteer work outside of school. My lack of well-roundedness as a student was, well, a lack, and, to quote, “lessened my college acceptance prospects.” Panic set in as soon as he said it. Now that my chance to finally flee these people and this town was within sight, I was desperate to get into a school that wasn’t Salem State or North Shore Community College (not that anything was wrong with those schools—well, their proximity to my house was wrong with those schools).

I stood in front of the camera, trapped under a mini spotlight that might as well have been a heat lamp from the cafeteria. This was the last place in the world I wanted to be, and I normally spent most of my school days trying to not be seen.

See me:

I was six feet tall, having grown six inches in the prior eighteen months. The rapid height gain exacerbated my scoliosis. The condition had been discovered later than it should’ve, as I somehow slipped through the cracks of the embarrassing annual scoliosis checks during gym class. The checks consisted of a line of boys with their shirts off (my head down, wishing I were invisible, my arms matchsticking across my chest), and after a properly lengthy time of mortification I was in front of a disinterested school nurse holding a school-issued clipboard. I bent over to touch my toes, so skinny that my vertebrae stuck up through my skin like the back plates of Godzilla, and the nurse’s cold hand fish-slapped onto my right shoulder blade, her audible “hmmm” and “you look a little off” (me being a little off was her diagnosis) and then she told me to switch to carrying my bookbag with my left shoulder. Since being diagnosed eighteen months prior, I attended physical therapy sessions and slept in a hard-plastic-and-metal-framed back brace at night (the doctor had never insisted I wear it to school, knowing I would not), which improved the curvature in my lower spine, but not in the upper region between my shoulder blades where scoliosis was most difficult to correct, where the curve to the right measured thirty-five degrees. The prospect of spinal fusion surgery loomed if the curvature increased in my upper spine. I wore baggy enough clothes so other people wouldn’t notice the encroaching kyphosis, my curling into myself. No one at school commented on my back, and I never told any of them about it. Maybe no one noticed the burgeoning hunchback because of my other unpleasant physical attributes. We’ve already discussed my ectomorphic build (or lack of build). Additionally, my skin was a raw and angry map of acne. Archipelagos of pimple volcanoes regularly erupted on my face and my back and chest. That no one would ever see my back and chest was a small consolation. Of course, now, on announcement morning, I had a new Mount Washington red nodule, its craggy peak above my right nostril.

In the secondary studio, I sweated under the interrogation lamp. The kid behind the camera breathed too loudly, sucking up all the air. Where was the goddamn go signal? Was Shauna going to purposefully dump me from the announcements, like I was a never-been Z-list celebrity in the talk-show green room, bumped for an animal act that went too long? I’d be trapped standing in this tiny soundproof room forever.

The speaker above the door cut out. The light on the front of the camera pointed at my head finally burned red. I took a deep breath. And I spoke.

“Hi, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Art Barbara, I’m a senior, and I’m starting a new club. It’s called the Pallbearers Club. We’ll volunteer at local funeral homes to be attendees and pallbearers at funerary services for homeless people or for elderly who have outlived family members and won’t have many or any mourners show up. I’ve already called Stephens Funeral Home on Cabot Street and they would love to have our, um, help.”

I glanced to my right, out the studio window. Ian looked smug, bemused, and disgusted, or smusegusted. Shauna manically spun her hands in front of her, which I assumed was a wrap-it-up gesture. But I was not ready to wrap it up. I’d just started talking.

“I know it sounds a little scary or weird, but we’d be doing a great service for the community, and um, for the people who died, of course, even if they don’t know it. It’s still a very nice thing to do. It would look good on a college application too. Mr. Brugués told me it would. We’d mainly attend services on the weekends. And um—”

Shauna was at the window and banging on it with hammer fists. A crack spidered through the soundproof glass.

“Yeah, I guess that’s it. If you’re interested, keep an eye out for flyers I’ll post around school, or just find me to learn more. My homeroom is A-113, or you can leave a message for me in the front office, or if you forget my name, leave a note addressed to the Pallbearers Club. Thank you. Back to you, Shauna and Ian. Um, go Panthers.”

I like your use of “chud” though an editor or copyeditor might be confused.

This chapter is a little “woe is me,” don’t you think? I’m not judging and I’m not belittling your school-aged experience nor your state of mental health, but by way of perspective, you have white cis-male privilege, did not grow up in poverty, and you did not suffer tragedies during childhood, none that I’m aware of anyway. Apologies if there are revelations to come regarding the latter.

I get it, though. Kids/teens are confused and cruel and then they generally become confused and cruel adults. The emotional scars you described, the type so many of us wear and conceal, are the crucible in which we are formed, especially if we dwell on such things. I hope the act of writing this finally purged some of this poison. However, given everything that happened since you wrote this chapter, I guess that it did not.

For what it’s worth, I do not remember the you from that age as being a hopelessly ugly duckling. If you were, your appalling lack of self-confidence and self-awareness did not help. I do not blame you, but it’s a point of fact.

I’m not saying this very well, but the person who is cruelest/hardest on you is almost always the person looking into the mirror. We never see a reflection of ourselves in the mirror, do we?

Sorry, I sound like a self-help guru. I always wanted to help you. I tried to help you. I truly did.

None of what I’ve read so far is a surprise. I recognized what you needed the first time I saw you and your hunched back.

Sorry, bad joke.

SOMETHING I LEARNED TODAY

(November 1988)

A chapter in which we introduce the dead.

The Pallbearers Club Meeting Minutes

Did you really write up minutes? I hope you’re joking . . .

Opening: The meeting was called to order by Art Barbara. Wednesday, November 5th, 2:37 P.M. It was held outside of Mr. Brugués’s office. He offered us a sandwich bag half-filled with pretzel sticks.

Present: All current/initial members. Art Barbara, Cayla Friedman, Eddie Patrick.

Approval of Agenda, Approval of Minutes: Two votes to zero. Eddie Patrick abstained from voting. He said it was dumb.

Business from Previous Meeting: None. This is our first meeting.

New Business: We will be pallbearers/attendees at a small service for a homeless woman. Her name hasn’t been shared with the club yet.

Additions to Agenda: After a brief period allowing for motions (none were brought forth), Art Barbara was elected president, vice president, and secretary. One person probably shouldn’t hold all three offices at once, but as pointed out by Cayla Friedman there are no bylaws preventing such a result. Perhaps a topic for future meetings.

Adjournment: Meeting ended when Eddie Patrick pretended to choke on pretzel sticks and insisted Cayla Friedman perform the Heimlich Maneuver on him. She declined. Next meeting is at the Stephens Funeral Home, Saturday, 9:00 A.M., which is thirty minutes prior to the start of the 9:30 A.M. service to be held within the funeral home.

Minutes submitted by: Art Barbara

Minutes approved by: Art Barbara

[I submitted the minutes along with my college applications to Bates and Middlebury Colleges as an attempt to appear both creative and disciplined. I did not get into either school. The 2007 me is still salty about it.]

You deserved not to get in

* * *

I pulled my parents’ beat-up blue station wagon into Stephens Funeral Home at 8:45 A.M. I hated being late. As vast as the night ocean, the parking lot funneled me toward a hearse parked under a trellis-lined awning shading the home’s main entrance. Set back a considerable distance from busy Cabot Street, the converted colonial house was painted white with black trim, the official colors of a New England funeral home. I do not know anything about architecture, but let’s call it Colonial Gothic. At three-stories in height, the mournful manor lurched and sprawled at the edges of the well-manicured lot.

The funeral director, Mr. Stephens, stood outside the entrance smoking a cigarette. He was my height but easily outweighed me by one hundred pounds. A balding, middle-aged Black man, Mr. Stephens wore an immaculate navy-blue pinstripe suit adorned with a maroon tie. His wide glasses, each lens could be used as a birdbath, claimed most of his face.

“That is a fine suit you have on, young man.” His voice was a growl in a puff of smoke, yet each syllable carefully enunciated, as though he’d practiced what he was going to say. “Did you wear it to your first communion?”

“Um, no?” My white dress-shirt cuffs mushroomed out of the too-short, blue blazer sleeves. I covered my right wrist with my left hand, but that exposed the left cuff. I tugged and fussed at the sleeves.

Mr. Stephens laughed warmly, and I couldn’t help but join him. (There’s a difference between a bully’s laugh and one that offers commiseration, one that recognizes if not shared experience, then a common frailty. Detecting that difference is instinctual for some, while others learn it only after repeated hard lessons.)

He said, “Don’t mind me, you are dressed handsomely. Art Barbara, I presume?” He stubbed out his cigarette on the bottom of a shoe and wrapped the remnant into a kerchief, which he pocketed. “I’m Philip Stephens. I’m grateful for your volunteering and hope this is the beginning of a continued community-service partnership.”

He ushered me inside and gave a tour of the first floor. The rooms were impeccable but static. Not the same static of a museum, where one at least could imagine the exhibits representing the living, breathing past and present. This place’s static was entropic. Closed coffins surrounded by brightly colored flowers and wreaths occupied half the rooms.

The floors were a dark-stained hardwood and the walls an off-white, shading toward a melancholy sunrise color. That phrase stuck with me as Mr. Stephens said the name of one of the rooms was in fact Melancholy Sunrise. Other named rooms included Moonlight Forest and the more abstract Midnight Wish.

I asked, “Do you tell the guests the names of the rooms?”

“No, the guests are dead.”

“Oh, I meant the visitors, then.”

We returned to the front entrance, went outside, and waited under the awning for the arrival of my fellow clubmates. I smiled inwardly at the thought of having clubmates.

Mr. Stephens fished out his cigarette stub from his pocket, quickly restored its cylindrical shape, and lit it again. “You don’t smoke, do you, Art? A wonderful, terrible habit. Don’t start unless you intend to see it through to the end.”

I laughed politely, and itchingly eager to share something personal, I confessed that I’d never been inside a funeral home before and the only funeral mass I ever attended was when I was four years old, for a great-uncle. Uncle Heck. Short for Hector of course. I had no memory of his funeral, but I remembered him letting me grab his nose with my tiny hands. My parents and other family members frequently told me that was what I always did to Uncle Heck when he was alive, so it was possible my memory was a staged, mental reenactment of what they told me. How could I know the difference?

Mr. Stephens ignored my weighty contemplation of the nature of memory and said, “To have never been in a funeral home, I don’t know if you are fortunate or not. The law of averages tends to catch up with us all.”

* * *

Mr. Stephens wasn’t nearly as friendly with Cayla and Eddie as he was with me. (Perhaps he sensed I needed kindness more than they did. Perhaps he was annoyed by how loosely Eddie’s skinny black tie hung around his neck, and that Cayla—while wearing a respectful black dress—loudly chewed bubble gum.)

He led the Pallbearers Club up a set of wide stairs to a viewing room on the second floor. The room was much smaller than the ones downstairs. I wanted to ask if this room had a name, or perhaps suggest one (Mourners’ Pantry, given its smallness?) but the proper moment had passed. An open casket was set against the far wall.

The club moved as one as we entered and flowed left, tracing the perimeter, sticking to the wall opposite the coffin. Speaking as president of the club, we were having second, third, and fourth thoughts about our being here and about our club’s charter and mission statement.

Mr. Stephens told us the woman’s name was Kathleen Blanchet and she had died from complications associated with untreated tuberculosis. She was a former resident of the Shore House (a local homeless shelter), and an anonymous donor paid for her viewing and service. He didn’t know if shelter residents would be attending, though an invitation had been extended. We might be the only attendees. We were to wait for Father Wanderly to arrive and lead a brief prayer service. Mr. Stephens did not ask if we had any questions. He told us he was going downstairs to make a few phone calls, but he would return shortly. He pointed out where the restrooms were on the second floor, “if you must use them.” His footfalls echoed as though he descended a staircase of infinite depth.

Eddie exhaled, didn’t look anyone in the face, and said, “Guy’s a Chester” (as in, Chester the Molester). During the first month of my freshman year, Eddie sat behind me in English and kicked my thighs and jammed a foot in my lower back. He threat-whispered about how he was going to kick my ass using typically ’80s homo-phobic vocabulary. My defense was that of a baby rabbit in tall grass: I didn’t turn around, didn’t say anything, didn’t move. One day, unrelated to his tormenting of me, the teacher threw him out of class for swearing at her and sent him to the principal’s office. I honestly don’t remember if he swore or not. The next day in class I spun around to face him as he sat down, him and his big stupid face and perma-flushed cheeks, and before he could snarl something at me, I babbled that I would tell the principal he didn’t swear if he needed me to. His weaselly eyes dilated (not softened, there was never to be any softening), he nodded, and the flush in his cheeks tuned a few hues lighter from war red. A peace achieved, but at what cost to my soul?

You have always been a soul spendthrift.

“This is so weird,” Cayla said. She was in one of my honors classes, ran cross-country, was a cashier at Star Market (where I worked too), and liked to draw and paint. She was friendly to all at school, but her comfortableness within her own skin made her off-putting to the rest of us maladjusted teenagers. She often joked she was from the Jewish family of Beverly.

Eddie and Cayla had yet to confide in me why they had joined our esoteric club, beyond expressing a similar desire to accrue extracurricular activities that would most assuredly lead to future successes in life. It really didn’t matter to me why they joined. Because of our shared honorable endeavor I hoped we would be friends forever (cue an ’80s-movie montage of carefree madcap adventures while we learned to accept each other’s differences).

[Note: We would not do any of that. But I did think so in that instant.]

Eddie turned and walked backward toward the casket. His smirk was too eager to mask his social ineptitude with cruelty. He said, “Five bucks and I’ll stick my pinky up her nose.”

Cayla dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out a five, calling his bluff. Eddie declined with a shrug and a brief collapse of his shoulders.

The three of us stood before the padded kneeler set by the coffin. We were close enough to each other to hold hands. We were holding hands, metaphorically speaking. We psychically supported each other as we prepared to participate in a time-honored, vital social ritual. And we stared at the body of Kathleen Blanchet.

One half of the coffin lid was open, and her torso was visible from the waist up. Her skin stretched tightly across her brow and wide forehead, which tapered into a dried-out, autumn field of brown stalks of hair. Her cheeks had caved in, and her eyelids spanned precariously across sinkholes. She was desiccated, a dried-out insect. How long had she been dead? The heavy-handed application of foundation makeup did not add health, weight, or life to her face. She did not look like someone sleeping peacefully, nor did she look like an uncanny, waxy mannequin. The coffin was too big for her, and she receded into the plush lining. She wore a prim, long-sleeved navy-blue dress. Her hands were folded over her stomach, and her fingers and wrists were skinnier than mine. I hid my hands behind my back, afraid I was seeing a future snapshot of my own grotesquely thin corpse. My initial spark of discovery at witnessing life’s most final, physical mystery was extinguished. I wondered how old she was. Twenties? Early thirties? What had it felt like when her heart stopped beating? Did she register the last thump? Did consciousness cease with a final darkness or was there darkness first, then a sensation of ebbing away, of falling, or was it a lessening into becoming nothing, which wasn’t a becoming, then? You couldn’t become nothing, could you? Whatever the nature of the transition (from living to dead), it was something no one could describe because there was no one around who had fully experienced it. I knew that was trite, but why didn’t we talk about this more? How was it not part of our constant, daily discourse? How was this a natural thing? How was this allowed and tolerated, never mind celebrated? I wanted to know what had happened to her and I wanted to know her story even though the ending had been spoiled. How could any of our stories mean anything when we knew the inevitable end? I didn’t want to be there anymore and didn’t want to look at her anymore. But I still looked. I memorized her face, the whorls and folds in her right ear, the lines that were there in her skin and the lines that weren’t there but should’ve been. The longer I stared the more I expected her eyes to open. Her eyelids would audibly and dustily creak and crinkle open. I saw it happening, and they revealed two empty sockets, or maybe her eyes had gone white, a terrible white like the rolled eyes of an attacking shark or swollen spider eggs ready to hatch, and the worst part was I’d feel them seeing me. They’d always see me. And I was the baby rabbit again, and if I didn’t move maybe I’d avoid the gaze. I was barely breathing, holding my breath, trying to save it, like a miser hoarding coins. I looked left and right to my clubmates, trying to break out of the spell, but spells could only be broken with the right words. Should I ask if either of them had seen a dead body before? For as awful as seeing her body was, there remained an I’m-getting-away-with-something feeling, a not-quite-schadenfreude sense of Thank God I’m not you and you are not meand when we leave this building we’ll talk louder and laugh harder and run faster and whistle past all the graveyards.

Eddie flipped the padded kneeler up and down with the toe of his scuffed shoe. He nudged me and said, “How’d you come up with the idea for this freak club? You wanna be an undertaker or something? You look like you could be one. All you need is a creepy hat.”

“There’s a club like this near San Francisco. I saw it on the news.” I didn’t admit to watching teen news on the kids’ cable network, Nickelodeon.

“And you thought, ‘Wow, that sounds fucking neato.’ ”

I looked to Cayla, like she was going to answer for me. She walked away from us and the coffin. I said, “I wanted something that would stand out on a college application.” I left out So I can get into a school far away from here and far away from you, Eddie, and all the other fucking Eddies.

Cayla removed her black banana clip and adjusted her hair. She said, “Oh, this is going to stand out.” She laughed and covered her mouth, which made her laugh harder.

I wondered if Cayla was here because she decided to make me her social charity case. Upon seeing the morning announcement, she figured no one would join my club and I would be embarrassed/crushed/hurt and so she attended the first meeting and when Eddie was the only other kid who showed up, she had to stick it out (because, come on, Eddie) as an unspoken favor to poor, outcast me. If any of that was a mitochondrion in one cell of the truth organism, I loved her and hated me for it.

* * *

Father Wanderly (white, early middle-aged, and as short, svelte, and fastidious as a plastic groom atop a wedding cake; he told us to call him “Father W.”) and Mr. Stephens were all business as they entered the room along with two other men in black suits, presumably employees at the funeral home, who did not introduce themselves.

After we signed a blank page of a guest book, Father W. took his place at the head of the coffin. We moved back and formed a semicircle facing the priest. He read a prayer from his leather-bound book. We said “Amen” when instructed to do so. Mr. Stephens said his amens the loudest. Cayla was second loudest. Yes, I inventoried the volumes. I mumbled, which was more than what Eddie was doing, or not doing. Maybe Eddie had suffered abuse or tragedy and the anger oozing from his pores was how he coped, and he had joined the club to confront the pain and emotions he’d never been able to properly process. Or maybe he was an unrepentant dick with nothing better to do.

Father W. sprinkled holy water on Kathleen and the coffin. We said “Amen” one last time. Mr. Stephens closed the lid. There was one lonely wreath of flowers hanging via a metal stand by the foot of the coffin. A yellow sash across the donut-hole middle silently demanded peace.

Mr. Stephens ascended to the center of the semicircle and addressed the gathered as though there were dozens more of us in the room. “Thank you for the good word, Father W., and for your implacable grace.” The father was already halfway out of the room, strutting like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He acknowledged receipt of thanks with a little bow and a jaunty salute of his left hand. He was halfway down the stairs before Mr. Stephens continued. “Thus concludes this morning’s service for Kathleen Blanchet. Thank you for being a part of our intimate gathering. Though we are few, the grief shared is divided, and the joy of celebrating her life is multiplied. May she finally be at peace and may you go in peace.” He bowed his head, holding the pose.

The two men in black suits left the room, one following closely behind the other. The Pallbearers Club was confused. We looked at one another. The president, of course, should speak for the group. I was reluctant to bother Mr. Stephens, who appeared to be having some sort of moment, but better I asked than Eddie, so I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Stephens. Those were, um, beautiful words, but is that it? Are we done?”

Mr. Stephens animated and clapped me on the back hard enough that I stumbled a few steps away to disperse the transferal of energy and momentum. He said, “Not quite, my friend. It’s time you three bear the pall, as it were.”

“Huh?” Eddie said. At least he was succinct and to the point.

“We need to you help haul her to the hearse.”

* * *

“I’m stronger than I look.”

I didn’t say that, but I shouted it in my head.

The two men in suits were at the foot of the coffin, taking the brunt of the weight, leading us slowly downstairs, while holding their end up higher in an attempt to keep the coffin as level as possible. Cayla and I were in the middle, with Mr. Stephens and Eddie the anchors by the head.

Eddie said, “Is she gonna slosh around inside if we tilt too much?”

Cayla leaked a small, involuntary “Yuck.”

Mr. Stephens named the parts of the casket as we huffed and groaned our way down the stairs. “You saw the pillow box, of course. The interior frame of the lid is called the flange. The cover is the bridge. The apron on the inside, when viewing, the part folded over the crown is the overlay—”

The coffin was heavy but not unmanageable. I tried to catch Cayla’s eye and act like this was no big deal, that I could do it one-handed if I wanted to. She puffed out her cheeks, blowing out a spout of air, in what I assumed was a this-is-hard-work gesture. I nodded and shrugged. Well, I couldn’t shrug, as my shoulders were bearing a considerable load.

“At the far end, or the foot-end, is the fishtail, the ogee, corner, and tip—”

It was more than a little bizarre to think that I’d got up this morning, showered, eaten a bowl of Honeycomb cereal, put on my “best” clothes, and now I helped carry an ornate box containing a body, or a person, or an unperson. I thought about Eddie’s question regarding her possible movement inside the coffin and I listened and felt for little thuds or thumps, a light but longing tapping. I tried not to think about her opening her eyes again. More than halfway down the stairs and the silver-colored handle was getting slick, but I couldn’t let go and wipe my hands. As though in panic response, my temperature spiked and every inch of clothing on my body dampened. My chest was heavy and tight.

“Those plates where the handles are attached are lugs or ears, and the handle itself held in place by the arms. Odd, or perhaps fitting, the exterior has so much body nomenclature.”

We made it off the stairs and walked through the front door, but the cargo mass had somehow increased. Maybe my leverage position in the middle had meant the people in front and back shouldered most of the lifting burden while going down the stairs, but now that the weight was evenly distributed my arms and legs quivered and I was not getting enough air.

Cayla asked, “Are you okay?”

I didn’t look at her or at anyone else. “I’m fine.”

I was not fine. My vision blurred and uninterpretable inkblots encroached at the edges. My head filled with damp peat and moss, and my ears rang as I sank into the bog of myself. Was I going to faint? I tried to blink everything away and I took deep, noisy breaths as my feet shuffled through the swampy blacktop to the hearse, finally the hearse.

The two men loaded their end in the back and onto rollers, and the coffin glided into place, its length receding into the interior darkness of the shrouded vehicle.

No longer clutching the coffin handle, I backed away and was instantly revivified. My vision cleared and chest wasn’t heavy anymore. I clapped my hands once and giggled, relieved that I was not going to pass out, or die. At least, not in that moment.

Everyone else stared at me. I said, “Piece of cake, right? What?”

One of men in black suits said, “You look blue,” and the other added, “More greenish. Like he’s seasick.”

Mr. Stephens wrapped an arm around my shoulder, engulfing me, and I wanted to cry.

Eddie said, “It wasn’t that heavy. Eat a fucking sandwich sometime, you rail.”

I wriggled out from Mr. Stephens’s embrace. “It wasn’t too heavy for me. I don’t know what happened. I was fine, it was easy, and then, I don’t know, I just got light-headed. Or more like, heavy-headed.”

Mr. Stephens said, “You did perfectly well. It was an emotional ceremony and upon seeing a body for the first time some people have delayed physiological responses. I’ve seen it many times.”

[Note: 2007 me knows Mr. Stephens’s “delayed physiological responses” was an unknowing (on his part) clue to what had happened to me and to what would happen, the type of clue the universe mockingly provides.]

One of the men in black suits apparated at my side with a plastic cup of water. I begrudgingly accepted it. As I sipped, everyone’s focus and attention shifted away from me.

Cayla asked Mr. Stephens if he would write her a college recommendation and handed him an envelope (no idea where she had kept it hidden) with her academic record and list of extracurricular activities.

Eddie ripped off his tie, wrapped it around his forehead like he was a parking-lot Rambo, and skulked off toward his car chuckling to himself. Even though I knew he was chuckling at me, there was nothing sadder than a person laughing by themselves.

The other man in a black suit rooted through a brown paper bag and offered me half of his ham sandwich, slathered in radioactive yellow mustard. I hated mustard.

I wished I had passed out or died.

I don’t remember the first dead person I saw. Is that strange? Has it been so long that I can’t remember? That memory wing in my house of cards must’ve collapsed and been replaced ages ago. I think whoever it was I saw was very old. I can summon faces of elderly family members who passed, but not of them in their caskets. I’m thankful for that, frankly. I must’ve seen a dead person when I was quite young, and I’m sure it made an impression on me. I’d be a monster otherwise, right? Although, our Western culture’s reaction to death and dying is totally fucked up. There are other countries—so I hear—where death isn’t taboo, isn’t something to hide or send shuffling off into the bleak, white corridors of hospitals and nursing homes. I say that and it sounds nice, but like you I am but a widget and cog within our capitalist, consumerist, puritanical culture. I’ll admit it: death freaks me out.

I do vividly remember the first wake I ever attended. I don’t think I ever told you and I don’t like talking about it. My mom died when I was young. She doesn’t count as my first viewed dead person because her casket was kept mercifully closed—at least, it was closed when I was around. How she died was a cruel whisper passed among congregants, as though fearful what had happened to Mom would happen to them soon. An older cousin told me Mom dried up and blew away, so I imagined she was a pile of dust in her coffin. I didn’t like that at all. I tried to replace the gray, ash-like dust with a pile of fallen but brightly colored leaves instead. I still have nightmares of being at her wake. Nothing overtly frightening happens, but the horror is in simply being there again, feeling the renewed feeling of wrongness; a sad, angry, powerless feeling as I stare at her small coffin buried in bright, shining flowers because horror is a full-color thing.

It is wonderful hearing the voice of “Mr. Stephens” again. I’ve always had a soft spot for him in my heart.

I do not understand what you are getting at with your almost fainting while carrying the casket and Mr. Stephens’s comment as a supposed clue from the universe.

BOOKS ABOUT UFOS

(November 1988)

A chapter in which I make a strange friend.

You’re strange

Ten days after the club’s maiden voyage and it was Tuesday afternoon. Mom was home from the bank (she was a part-time teller), Dad was still at work (he supervised the mail room at the United Shoe factory), and I was in the TV room. That was what we called it—not a living room, family room, sitting room, or even a parlor. (Names are important. You’ll see.) Like every and any other day after school I watched MTV alone, hoping they played older Def Leppard videos and not the lame “Pour Some Sugar on Me” for the billionth time, and I played my Walkman cassette player until a better video came on. Or I watched a movie on HBO I’d already seen. Or I watched M*A*S*H reruns or Cheers, and if it was Cheers, I took odd local pride in the show set in Boston as Mom had been born there, raised in public housing the government arranged for World War II veterans and their families. Or I wasn’t embedded in the TV room and, instead, I was in the dining room, lying on the floor, flat on my back, my head tented between the stereo speakers, listening to Scorpions and Creedence Clearwater Revival records and I imagined I was onstage, singing and playing the guitar, and everyone in the audience was there to see me, and frankly, they were all very impressed and thought I was an important, admirable person.

When the phone rang, I was doing any one of the things described above. Mom answered and after a hushed exchange she curled around from the kitchen into the TV room, or if I was lost between the stereo speakers, she glided through the dining room and kicked my splayed feet.

“What?”

Mom was tall, a scant twenty-one years older than me, and had dark short hair (not Annie Lennox “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” short, but close). The stretched-out phone cord trailed behind her with plenty of slack. One hand cupped the receiver. Her eyes were windows thrown open on the first warm spring day and her smile was a porch door.

“Art, it’s for you”—a pause because it was never for me—“and it’s a girl.”

I tried to play it off like I expected the call.

Mom repeatedly asked “Who is she?,” and perhaps in her head she sounded like a supportive friend or peer, not a mother yearning for her son to have friends, never mind a girlfriend. Instead of nonchalant cool my shrugs communicated I have no clue, what do I say, what do I do? judging by Mom’s avalanching smile and her “You want me to ask her name?”

I grabbed the phone. Mom receded into the kitchen as though a wave swept her out with the tide. She buoyed in the periphery.

“Hi. Hello?” I groaned, as yes, I said both “hi” and “hello.”

“Hey there. Is this Art Barbara?”

Whomever she was, she was not a classmate; it was less I didn’t recognize her voice in five words than what it was she said. Would a teen who didn’t know me and wasn’t making fun of me use my first and last name like that?

I said, “Yeah. This is him, or, um, me. Can I ask who’s calling?”

“Sure.”

Silence.

She added, “I said you can ask.”

“Oh, okay. Um, who’s calling?”

“Jesus. My name is Mercy and I saw the flyer about your club at the library.”

Mercy. Seriously?

My flyer had ensnared a potential member and would surely accrue more to the service of the dead! Prior to the call, the club had one (me) or maybe two members. Cayla had been noncommittal about attending a second service this coming weekend. Eddie had been demonstrably committal about his never going again. Whenever he saw me in school, he called me the Undertaker and pretended to faint under the weight of his book bag. I understood that he caricatured my coffin carry, but at least, if the non-reaction reaction of bystanders could be interpreted, no one else knew what the hell he was prattling on about. Regardless, with the betterment of the club in mind, I gestaltedly removed him from our masthead.

Mercy continued. “I also saw the flyer on the front windows of the White Hen Pantry, Beverly House of Pizza, Super Sub, the post office, stapled to telephone poles on Rantoul Street, taped to mailboxes—I don’t think that’s legal, by the way—a tornado of them swirled around the Burger King parking lot, and I watched seagulls fight over one at Dane Street Beach.”

She was definitely not in high school. Maybe a college student. Maybe someone’s mom? I no longer anticipated her becoming a future club member. She had likely anger-dialed to lodge a complaint about my carpet-bombing the town with flyers.

I said, “Yeah, sorry, I put up one hundred and twenty-three of them yesterday.”

“How precise. So, is this club legit?”

“Legit?”

“Is the club and the flyer for real or is it a joke? I honestly can’t tell.”

“Yes, the club is real. It’s, like, so real. We attended a service not this Saturday but the one before, and Mr. Stephens wants us back this—”

“I ask because the Pallbearers Club stencil on the flyer looks like the logo of a cheesy hair metal band, like something a bored kid doodles in their algebra class.”

I chafed at the comparison to a doodle. I had spent more than an hour on design, getting it just right. I had used slash-drawn power letters. Like a mountaineer’s flag planted on an impossible peak, a small but unimpeachable “the” perched atop of the Pallbearers “P.” “Club,” not an afterthought but the uppercut punch after a left-right combo, dangled off the end of the word and it didn’t care what you thought of its reckless boldness.

I said, “I wanted the flyer to be cool and attention-grabbing.”

“You’re one for two. At best. But I’m in. Let me know where and when.”

* * *

Mr. Stephens admitted to being pleased Eddie was no longer a member of the club, saying, “He was a cloud that hung over your honorable venture.” He was not pleased, however, that our newest member was late. He declared the service would begin in fifteen minutes with or without her. He, Cayla, and I continued our vigil in the funeral home’s front foyer.

Mr. Stephens asked, “Can you be a club if you number only two members?”

“Art is still working on the bylaws,” Cayla said. I couldn’t tell if she was being commiserative with me or conspiratorial with him. Either or any of the ways, I didn’t care and was thankful she was here, even if this service was to be her last.

“I do love a thorough set of bylaws—” An unlit cigarette stuck to Mr. Stephens’s lower lip. It bobbed in rhythm with his jaw, the baton of a symphony conductor. “Though you cease being a club at two. You’re a partnership. The Pallbearers Partnership.”

Cayla snorted a hard laugh at this.

I stopped myself from asking if either of them thought college admissions boards would look less favorably upon an extracurricular partnership. I said, “No. We’re a club. Mercy will be here.”

“One can hope.”

Outside, a click and a low-volume, high-pitched whine of a small mechanism, its whirr ended with a second click. Mr. Stephens yanked open the front door. A rush of air filled the vacuum, swiping the cigarette off his lip, but he caught it deftly.

Mercy Brown had her back to us as she faced the hearse. She turned leisurely, revealing a cubic Polaroid instant camera held in one hand and a developing photo with the other. She asked, “Do we get to ride in that later?”

Mr. Stephens said, “If we’re fortunate, we all will eventually.”

Mercy walked inside (Mr. Stephens holding the door open), breezing between us to the staircase. She placed the photo on one of the stairs and said, “It’s still developing.”

“You must be Mercy. Thank you for coming, but I would’ve preferred you arrived more than twenty minutes ago.”

She idly adjusted her shouldered canvas bag. “I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again.”