Listen— heavy rain applauds on the roof of the sunroom. My alarm clock is ringing, and the morning sun throbs behind gray matter clouds. There is the miasma of sleep, sweat from my blankets, and the pulsing headache in my teeth from the wine last night. Usually I’d roll over and go back to sleep, but no; I need to wake up and get ready to smuggle Meredith's body across state lines.

            She wanted to go under beautifully, before decomposition, meaning I have only a day or two to get over to Sparks, Nevada, where her cousin Newt promised us a pro-bono funeral. She wanted to be buried on his ranch, the closest thing to family property we have. We’d planned this all in the weeks preceding her death. We had an accurate timeline as to when she’d finally succumb to pulmonary complications due to Cystic Fibrosis, and last night was the night we’d planned for her to die. We sat around a fire and drank a bottle of Chateau Blanc until her final sleep. The best bottle we’d ever had. A few Benzos to follow. I checked her pulse before bedtime. I attended to nothing, then slept.

            We’d run out of money a long time ago, as years of in-home care, experimental mRNA therapies, and failed gene editing added up. But we don’t regret it, because it was hope for a little while. Needless to say, there wasn’t any prospect of a Bay Area burial; I work as a technical writer for a luxury mattress company based out of San Francisco, and my salary is meager, my bonuses laughable. The only thing that saved my job from being entirely unbearable was the twenty-percent discount on backstock, which enabled me to get Meredith a six-thousand-dollar memory foam mattress for her deathbed. I wanted her last months to be comfortable and restful. We’d purchased numerous mattresses and placed them around our house for her to be able to relocate comfortably whenever she felt the need. I usually sleep on one in the dilapidated sunroom, per her request so the coughing wouldn’t bother me. Usually, at this time of morning, she’d be right back at it, but today my world is quiet. Today, the morning does not sing.

Getting clothes, I consider what pair of pants would be flexible enough not to rip when straining with the weight of a dead body. I struggle to match my assortment of patterned socks. It’s something I’ve seldom done on my own. One red and blue striped tube sock, the other pink with green polka dots.

The first thing after coffee is to get Mer’s body out of the Death Room. The door creaks as I push it open. The death room doesn’t smell like decomposition, but it is stale in a way that suggests death. The walls are painted yellow because it reminds her of sunshine. There are books piled up on the nightstand and ottoman: An unfinished volume of Proust, a collection of paintings by John French Sloan. The Bible, and on top of it, a half-drunk glass of water.

In bed beneath the covers lies Meredith tucked with an Amish quilt her mother had gifted us for Christmas twenty-some-odd years ago. Her hair is deep black, just like when we were teenagers. Given the general sadness of her departure, I would have expected at least a gray or two to have sprouted from her temple, but no— her hair is still dark as night. Her freckles are nice, buckshot spread across her cheeks. Her eyes closed. Probably still blue beneath the lids. I step over her to prepare to bundle her in the quilts, and I feel as though I am committing a crime, but I haven’t yet. I won’t have until I’ve crossed state lines with her body.

 It takes both hands to tip Meredith up on her side, tuck the blanket beneath her then burrito roll her like a baby into a bundle. I have to really shove the blankets around her and it takes all my strength. I feel like I am about to cry. I haven’t cried yet, but I quiver like a child who has just stepped on an ant. Time on earth doesn’t prepare you for this.

I grab the bundle. It feels impossibly heavy. She’d always been lithe, girlish. Even bordering on skeletal in her sickness. But nonetheless, her deadweight was something I couldn’t have anticipated. I have only ever known her, in more ways than one, to be almost weightless. Requiring no such strain.

I bend down to a squat. Pick the bundle up with my knees and back and lug it from the bed, pumping the load in my arms bridal style. I stumble back towards the door. Try to push it open with my shoulder, but it's fully closed and doesn't budge. My grip gives, and I drop Mer on the ground. Thumps like sandbags. I crumple and lie beside her for just a second. I think of all the times we could’ve been like this. Days wasted arguing or daydreaming of younger lovers, but it never much mattered when we learned to like each other for good out there at The End. I nestle my face in the small of her neck and take a deep breath. Stand up, open the door, and start all over again.

 

            Outside, all is blue. Dawn. I lean Mer’s body up against the truck and step back as I consider where to put her. She can’t go in the bed— couches go in the bed, boxes full of discarded books and VHS tapes go in the bed. Shit people get rid of. But to put her in the cab, well, she would be a lot more visible and have less room. But I guess she doesn’t care for legroom right now, and the clouds hanging above are getting heavier, beginning to billow out into the bay, so I elect to lay her comfortably in the cab to protect her from the possibility of weather. Or maybe from getting stolen. Or rattling all around, or, I don’t know. It just feels wrong.

            I haven’t packed any bags, and I don’t think I will. I have no interest in making this seem like it’s vacation. I put my thermos in the cupholder and pull up directions to Sparks on my phone. A half dozen hours or so depending on my pace. Not too bad. I’ll take Route 80 by El Cerrito pretty much the whole way to Newt’s. I look back to see how Meredith is doing; she seems comfortable enough, and surprisingly lax given the state of rigor mortis that will be setting in as we make our way out of the Golden State. We pull out of the driveway and start on East. I sincerely want to never return to this house. This place has ended for me, and as I pull away, the thought of coming back is almost equivalent to the thought of Mer's death. But there isn’t much traffic, which makes for easy driving, and the hills look like waves building up and crashing around us. I drive slow to ensure I won't blow a radar, cars pass me, but not even in a way that's all too aggressive. I consider putting on music. I wonder what Mer would want to hear, so I shout to the backseat, “Any ideas for tunes?”

            I stare at her for a second, almost identifying intimations of opinion behind the little peaks of nose and mouth, making both convexities and concavities out of the surface of the blanket. Like snowy mountains, or maybe René Magritte. The impressions say nothing, 

and Meredith is silent. Offended that she doesn’t answer, I give her a stink eye and say, “Have it your way.” Then quickly snap back around as the blaring of a car horn shrieks past, and I realize I’d nearly driven into the barrier.

            “Anything?” I ask once more, looking in the rearview mirror, listening and awaiting her response.

Bill Evans. We’re going to listen to Bill Evans. The album with “Skating in Central Park.” This was her soundtrack to most things: baking, reading, driving, dying. I pull up the album on my phone, and the moment it comes on, I feel something crack near my sternum. Gurgle then gush like the admission of nausea the body performs when finally ready to vomit up half-digested food that's been percolating in the stomach. Our life spills out as the album plays, and then I see her for the first time, standing beneath a sycamore tree on campus. She has bangs and thick tortoise shell glasses. She is notably tall and her clothes are all baggy.  Her backpack over one shoulder and an armful of books on Russian and Eurasian History. I call her a nerd for the Russian Major stuff, and she calls me an idiot for the English. We go to the bay and skip rocks. I bring fireworks because I think no other guy would ever even think to bring fireworks on a first date. When the sun goes down, we set the fireworks off over campus and watch as they crackle into trees. Inevitably, this starts a few small fires. She kisses me in the after light of their phosphorescent distance. I watch her reading in a Berkeley lecture hall, spitting out ten-letter words from her thesis to a crowd ignorant of her historical passions. I see her in the water, coming up the crest of a wave. I see her veiled on our wedding day. I see her painting the walls of a room with a pastoral scene of a sunrise. Painting a crib bright blue. I see her in the hospital, crying. I see her in the kitchen with an empty bottle of wine. I see her face flushed. Angry. I see her slumped in the chaise in front of the ice-blue light of the television every evening for years, not waking up when I look in the doorway and say her name. A lot changed for her in those years. Not too much for me. I see her the day she is told she hasn’t just been coughing. I see her change then and there for the better, at least for the next few months. I see her kind again, like I’d always known her to be.

The album plays through. The opening track is on again; it is fully morning. My coffee is running low and I decide to stop at the next rest stop. I pull off the highway into a populated strip of fast-food chains. I elect to go to McDonald’s. I struggle to find appropriate parking. I find myself growing irritated, and eventually, enraged as I floor it into the outermost spot of the lot. The golden arches glow dignified in front of the semi-distant hills of snowcapped green. They were brighter than anything in sight. I slam the car door and go in. At the urinal a man seems to be looking at my penis. It is the closest thing I’ve felt to connection since Meredith. I chose not to look over threateningly in a way that says, “If you keep looking at my cock I’ll fucking kill you,” but rather take in the homoerotic peripheral view of his not-so-discreet viewing of my cock. I shake off, zip up, and go get my coffee. In line I wonder if Mer wants anything, and subsequently remember she is dead, and that means gone, but she has a sweet tooth, and she’d want an ice cream, so I order vanilla and go back to the car.

Ice cream in hand, coffee and burger bag in the other, I pull on the door handle. Locked.

I set the bag on the hood of the truck and scan my pockets. My heart drops out my asshole. Nothing. I pat myself down like a sex-starved security guard. Nothing. I frantically check the ground, and I run back inside and check the bathroom. Nothing. I run back outside, retracing my steps to look for my keys. No. Nothing. Everything goes red. I’m still holding the ice cream in my hand, and it's starting to melt from the rain. Rage takes me. I bang my head against the driver's seat window, and there they are, in the cupholder in the center console. And I step back, and there I am, my face all bent up in the convexities of raindrops. I look at the face. I roll up my sleeve and bash the sharpest corner of my elbow against the window over and over until it finally cracks, and then smash the rest of it in with my shoulder. Glass gets everywhere. I reach inside and unlock the door, scraping my wrist up against the sill and tearing it open. I brush the glass carelessly in the parking lot. Blood from my wrist drips onto the ice cream; two specks of red on the stupidly white spiral. I look at Meredith in the back and shake my head. Drop the cone on the ground and get back in the car. Families are standing around looking at me in grave confusion. A police officer gives me The Stare. I smile at him. He continues staring. I creep back onto the highway towards the perpetually gray sky, wishing to dissipate the just-passed moment as it begins to enter the rearview. 

 

 

 The rain is coming down hard, filtering in through the broken window, drenching me from the waist down. Bill Evans plays on the radio through the shit-fidelity speakers. Grainy piano. About two hours until Sparks. I avoid thinking about the past. I sense an erection building as it always does when on the road but quickly shut it down, as with the occurrence of an Occurrence comes the reminder of sex with Mer, which brings up the question of how I will ever have sex again and with whom; I like Meredith and it doesn’t feel good to think about fucking others, but again, necrophilia seems both impractical and frankly immoral. I want to be hard and not think about death. I would prefer those two things separate. I focus on the road, and from here it looks endless; dumping into the steel wool clouds bloating the edge of the horizon.

The car has begun to smell like mildew, or maybe body. I chose to think it is merely the unwashed quilt. You just can’t wash handmades like that. They get a little dirty, it’s alright. Rain invigorates lost scent. That’s why nothing smells like wet dog except wet dog. That's why you only get certain thoughts in the rain. That's why people in rom-coms kiss in the downpour like that: it can only happen when evoked by basically extra-natural circumstances—it’s wet dog science. It doesn’t make sense; it just happens.

The mountains bulge from my periphery, snow-capped and frigid as they sideline the highway. We come to cross the Carquinez bridges. I shout at Meredith to hold her breath, knowing I don’t really have to ask, but I do anyway. In my head, we both laugh. In the car, there is dead silence. It's part of the joke, a new kind of conversation.

            The road winds around the mountain and passes through Tahoe. I feel myself growing nauseous. The album plays ad-infinitum. I feel as though I hear Mer calling my name through the rain drumming on the windshield. I speed up to try to outrun the rain, the scent, the everything. I wish for this time to pass quickly, and I stare back at Meredith waiting for her to say anything to make this better, but she doesn’t, so I keep on staring at her in the rearview mirror just hoping something happens, boiling in the anticipation of impossibility. She isn’t saying a word.  “CAN’T YOU FUCKING HEAR ME?” I yell back, twitching about and jolting the car. Feeling pulled all the way to the right, then to the left. The image of her wrapped up in the backseat is immediately re-colored by the halogen lights of a police siren. I pull off to the shoulder, the car all flooded with red and blue. For a moment, I decide to take an audit on the good that has occurred in my life, and know that I am grateful for having lived with any beauty at all. I am grateful for the last time I got to spend with Meredith. We never took a roadtrip until now. I am grateful for all that I learned from having spent any time at all beside the woman whom I spent my life learning to love. I wonder what they will do with the body. Hers or mine. I say one more thing as I hear the guy get out of his car, whether to be heard or not. “I’m sorry for yelling.”

A man walks over with a flashlight. There’s no need to put my window down. I brace myself for—well, whatever it is I’ve gotten myself into.

            “Good evening, sir. Know why I pulled you aside tonight?”

            “Evening. No.”

            The man had a square head and a big mustache. His voice was unusually high. His khaki get-up fit poorly, all boxy and such.

            “You swerved into the other lane there just a few minutes back. Almost nearly drove me off a cliff. Have you had anything to drink this afternoon, sir?”

            “Unfortunately not.”

            “Excuse me?”

             He shines the flashlight around the interior of my car, sees the soggy burger bag, the shattered glass, the directions glowing on my phone.

            “Where are you headed?”

            “Sparks.”

            “What’s out there?”

            “Nothing yet.”

            “Sir, I am going to need you to step out of the car.”

            “Why?”

            “Are you or have you been under the influence of any substances this evening?”

“No.”

“Your eyes are red, and you are driving like a maniac, sir. It seems as though you don’t have your head right on your shoulders.”

“I’m about to bury my wife.”

“Pardon?”

“My wife just died. And I am going to her cousin's house to bury her. I swerved because I was thinking about her.

            He furrows his brow. “Well, you don’t wanna join her, do you? I’m sure she was a lovely lady, but I don’t wanna jump the gun on my ticket to the pearly gates either. Swerving like that’ll send both of us there quicker than god himself.”

            He continues to interrogate the car with his stupid little flashlight. Squints as he silently, with a cheap seriousness, purses his lips. He shines it in the back, right on the bundle. He takes a deep breath and says.

            “What's this?” gesturing towards the bundle.

            “Quilts. Family heirloom. The wife was Amish. They love their quilts. Like gold to ‘em.”

            He laughs. “Quilts?”

            “Yeah— it’s their pride and joy. My wife was from Pennsylvania. Amish country, you know? Trust me. I heard about this shit non-stop for twenty years.” I don’t know where the lie came from. Maybe secondhand podcast knowledge. Maybe a YouTube documentary. Maybe not.

            The officer looks at me, then at the ‘quilts,’ and says, “Well then, you'd better get them there safely. I’m sorry for your loss.”

            He walks back toward the cruiser into the cover of palsied lights flickering along the highway, stops for a minute. Then comes back over.

            Looking down at me with his small button eyes, he says, “I saw you at the rest stop. I followed you because I thought you were trouble. I didn’t know why you’d smash up the window like that.”

Instead of saying anything about the keys, I look him in the eye and say, “Grief, officer.”

            He shakes his head and walks away.

The mountains diminish to desert in no time, big stretches of wet sand that seem to extend to the edges of the earth. And it’s getting darker, the rain clouds grow heavier than ever, disallowing any light from perforating their seams; but there was no sun to begin with, so there is no need to comment upon the arrival of evening. It’s been here all day long. 

The rest of the drive is a blur. The desert is a second to itself; blank enough to enable the passage of time, as if the whole empty thing was one thin second pulled out and stretched over a period of place. This is grief, I say to myself silently. Like Meredith, words unsounding on my lips.

And then I'm pulling into a long driveway, serpentine and sidelined with big rocks. Everything is this wet brick red, and as I follow the spiral, I can see a break along the edge of the horizon where what little sun is there to give is shimmering between the clouds and the sand.

 It leads up to a little plateau with a dimly lit bungalow. Truck parked out front. Pink mailbox. This is the place. The end.

I park off to the side and wait for a bit, then Newt comes outside smoking a cigarette. Pauline follows suit. Newt is tall, wearing a denim shirt. Big glasses, time-tonsured hair. Pauline is almost taller and rather plump. Wearing a white cable-knit sweater. Big blonde curly mop on her head. I get out of the car and walk towards them. I reach out my hand for a handshake, but Newt intercepts me. Take me in. Hugs me tight. Pauline does the same.

Pauline pulls away, says, “We’re delighted to meet you. Hon. Mer always spoke fondly of you. Shame this occasion’s our first meeting.”

Newt nods, smiles at Pauline. “He doesn’t say much, don’t mind his silence.”

Standing outside smoking, we talk about the drive. I don’t remember it as it happens, and it is pretty foggy. After we finish smoking, Pauline asks if I’m ready. I shrug my shoulders and say, “I don’t know.”

Newt opens the door and starts sliding Meredith out of the back. I go and grab her head as he gets a hold of her feet. Pauline says, “Follow me,” and we carry the body out past the back of the house toward a vista of red rocks and a large bed of California poppies. They appear almost circumflex, like an arrow pointing toward the horizon. There is already a hole in the ground, somehow about the perfect size for Meredith. The rain isn’t falling, but the flowers are wet. I can smell the citrus kicked up by the water on the flowers, and I feel their pollen begin to tickle my nose. I recall the sound of Meredith sneezing.

We lower her into the hole, then drop her at the bottom. Like a child slamming his fist on the kitchen table, saying “No, more, more!” And there she lies beneath the ground in a casket of wet sand. The blanket has unraveled, and there is her face, beautiful but pale. Expressionless in a good way. The sun opens up a little bit wider, and the light is briefly golden. The wind blows back the mane of flowers around us, and I go and tear a handful from the ground, and throw them into Meredith's grave. Now with flowers, we each grab a shovel and alternate dumping piles of dirt as gently as possible upon Meredith's face. I don’t know how close she was with either of these people, but they are family. I think she’d only seen them once or twice in her adult life at various gatherings I always declined to attend. I knew they were very Christian and very weird. But now, being here beside them, everything that once seemed weird not only seems normal but completely necessary. Given the obscenity of the crime, nothing about my or Meredith's being here feels wrong. The desert air is cool and alive. A very new way of being real becomes apparent as we cover the last of Meredith with the strong-smelling soil. And it isn't like a dream; those don’t go like this. It is like living, really living. Living with death. Knowing its closeness. Knowing its closeness, as when in freefall one knows the inevitability of the ground, but savors each moment away from gravity nonetheless. This is the beginning of a happier life for Meredith; one in which she will have known what it was like to be alive, sad and suffering but ultimately always loved. Here begins a time wherein she is distanced from all that, and like a fire we’ll huddle around until its embers extinguish; the past has no other option but to keep us warm.

            The feeling of a hand upon my shoulder, and a new, unfamiliar voice, says, “Ready?”

            And without needing to know what for, I respond, “Ready.”