SHORT STORIES

From Vices and Versas
From Plaintiffs and Pontiffs
CATACOMBS

I'm taking a stroll with a friend, to pass the time on a warm January morning. Not too warm, I should say—I still feel compelled to wear a light jacket, there's a scarf wrapped several times around my neck, and I can distinctly see my breath every time I exhale—but it's warmer than it has been in quite a while. I've been shut indoors for too long, reading too many books and driving myself steadily insane. So I called a friend, and he's agreed to set aside the worries of his life long enough for a walk through our city.
    I take these walks all the time—sometimes through the business district, where I immediately feel small in relation to all the enormous buildings and pervasive crowds of people, and sometimes through the older districts, where I feel like a lost child wandering amongst the historical parks and the monuments that somberly fill them. It depends entirely on my mood, on which type of inferiority I feel like subjecting myself to on a given day. There's nowhere in this city that I feel large and old (admittedly, I've never gone out of my way to tour a maternity ward, or a daycare—not every problem needs a logical solution). Today I feel like maybe being a child isn't so condemnable, and so we head south after getting coffee at a diner near the city park.
    It's a very old town, as I've somewhat alluded to. The Romans probably founded it, a couple millennia ago. I've read a lot of the supposed history, but most of it escapes me. The general picture is enough for me—that great, ephemeral race of conquerors spread themselves thinly across the barbaric west, in an attempt to assimilate the entire known world. And for that purpose they built a number of fortifications and walls in all the most strategic places. This city exists, and has existed for thousands of years, because of a large hill, because of a random piece of topographical trivia. But what's left of its founders, those noble Romans? Just an enormous shadow, really. And this romantic language.
    My friend says, seemingly out of nowhere, “So there's this girl I've been talking to...” and trails off into silence. We're in front of one of those monuments, commemorating a war that no one alive participated in. It's an enormous statue of a lion with its jaws fully open, spine arched dramatically, front-right claw extended, a dull grey stone that has turned an unhealthy green over time. It's situated on a large platform, with a wide staircase leading up to it. Trees surround, making it look almost natural. And at its base is an inscription, written in Latin. The Romans didn't build it.
    Me and my friend don't ever discuss emotional matters. We don't have that type of relationship. If we talk about anything at all as we walk, it's usually to complain about work or the cost of living. But he seems especially subdued today, as if he might actually be prone to introspection. I'm worried about where this might be going, but I ask anyway, “Talking to?”
    “Yes, just talking. Or not just talking. I've been thinking about her a lot, as well.”
    “That happens sometimes,” I say in a soft tone, trying to console him. Not because compulsive thoughts about the opposite sex by necessity need consoling, but because he genuinely seems distraught by whatever is going through his mind.
    I don't expect him to say, but he does, “It's just that she's got a wonderful face, you know? And when we talk about things, I'm actually interested in all of her responses. Is that supposed to happen? Like, I've never cared before, with other people. Whenever I've asked a question before, it was just to be polite and personable. They could answer either way, in the affirmative or the negative, or not answer at all, and it would be the same to me. It didn't make a difference as long as, at the end of the day, no one hated me. Have you ever had that feeling?”
    I'm not as prepared as he is to just delve into my feelings, so I keep my response brief and meaningless. “Once or twice, probably,”
    “So I'm not alone, then? Let me give you an example. She's got a very thin, delicate nose. Dark brown eyes. The corners of her mouth are naturally down-turned, so that she always looks like she's sad about nothing. Thin lips. Does any of that sound special to you? It shouldn't. It's just a face, after all. And yet I can't stop thinking about how in love I might be with it. And I'm so very much worried that she doesn't feel the same about me. Not about my face—who cares about my face, honestly—but about me.”
    I'm silent. We're walking at a slow pace, under trees that are older than most anything in the city. Their branches are entirely bare, in celebration of the season, which exposes just how warped so many of them are from gravity and the wind. I feel like climbing one of them, suddenly, but none of the branches are low enough to grab a hold of. I haven't climbed a tree since I was a child, anyway—I'd probably be defeated by the physical exertion in a matter of seconds. I tried sprinting the other day, for the first time in years, and I nearly died of an asthma attack after a few hundred feet. There's no reason climbing would be any different. It sounds so easy, reflecting back on how I used to do it all the time, but memories are deceptive. They don't acknowledge present conditions.
    “If you're in love with her, just tell her,” I say. It sounds like sound advice, sounds like something someone would say to a man that was falling apart over a woman.
    “Maybe my face is important, though,” he counters. “It's entirely within the realm of possibility. If her face is so important to me and my conception of her, why wouldn't mine be the same, conversely? Then it wouldn't be as simple as just telling her I love her. I can't change my face, James, I really can't.”
    “Have you considered plastic surgery?” I ask.
    It's a joke, but he says, “Thoroughly. Especially my chin. It's just a very large chin, right? I think anyone would agree. But say that I actually have it reduced—they cut out a piece of bone for that, and then reconnect everything with a steel plate, how gross is that? and then I wouldn't be able to eat solid foods for several weeks. Say I do all of that, and a month from now, after everything's mostly healed, I gather the courage to confront her with my new face—what will I say? Something like, 'How's my new face? I did it for you.' Or, more likely, 'I've been thinking about having this done for years now, finally saved enough money. Not that I care what your opinion is, but what do you think?'
    “And how will she respond? Probably something along the lines of, 'Whatever, looks alright.' Or, even worse, 'Honestly, I thought your face was fine the way it was before.' And then I would be haunted by the thought that I should go back to the surgeon, and have them dig my bone-chunk out of the trash and screw it back in. There's no possible way for that conversation with her to go well, is what I'm trying to say.”
    “You could just pretend like nothing changed,” I say. It's what I would probably do, in that situation. It could be the most obvious change in the world, I could have all my appendages replaced with farming implements, and I would deny it to anyone direct enough to ask.
    “That's why I'm talking to you about this,” he says. “You're a very practical man. That's the great thing about you, sometimes. Although, I'm not sure the practical answer will be the best one for me now. I thought so, up to just a few minutes ago, but I'm changing my mind now. What's so great about practical things? This is love I'm talking about, right? And more than that, it's about how I want to spend the rest of my life. That's a very important question, and I feel like the best answers are often impractical. I want to wake up on Sunday mornings, the sun streaming through the windows, and for her to always be there next to me, small and vulnerable.”
    “I'm at a loss,” I say.
    We've wandered very close to the entrance to the catacombs, a huge, underground burial site that the city commissioned after all of the local graveyards were filled to capacity, sometime in the nineteenth century. Everyone wants to be buried in a large box, seven feet long, two and a half feet wide, two feet tall. To be fair, there are some people that don't mind being burned until they're a fine powder, but I'm talking about a large majority of people, especially the old, superstitious ones that built all of these forgotten monuments and ancient churches that we feel so obligated to maintain, in their blessed memory.
    A cemetery literally means a dormitory, when translated from the Latin—a place to sleep, until the eventual reawakening. Like Jesus did. A body can't reawaken when it's been utterly destroyed. But a lot of people die. So, every now and then, a practical city has to break open all of those old caskets that take up so much space and sort all of the bones—skulls in one pile, femurs in another, and so on. Large, dehumanizing piles. A city can't be practical to the point of insult, though, so they often make art out of the piles—walls out of skulls, tapestries out of femurs, all placed in underground tunnels so that people have a choice about whether they really want to look at it as they go about their lives above ground.
    I've never been down into it. I'm not the kind of person that's comfortable with death, or dead things. But I want to change the subject that my friend has firmly placed us in, and I want to bring him down to earth a little bit. I can make a sacrifice for that. “Why don't we go in?” I ask.
    “I'm up for anything,” he says.
    It's just an innocuous doorway in the side of a Gothic church, with nothing to denote its presence but a phrase written in Latin along the curve of the door's arch. There's a staircase, worn smooth over time, although occasionally jagged in places where pieces have crumbled away. It's not too deep, really, and soon we're at the bottom of the stairs, but already it feels oppressively damp, like the air wasn't meant to be breathed. “You sure?” I ask him, ready to turn around.
    “I said yes, didn't I?” he replies.
    They've actually installed electrical lighting through all of the tunnels. And not just any lighting—in keeping with the aesthetic of the catacombs, they chose fake plastic sconces, with bulbs that look like a flame in tableau. I point it out to my friend. “Look at this nonsense, here.”
    “I think they're pretty,” he says.
    We are not immediately confronted with death and bones—the catacombs are kinder than that, gentler on the sensibilities. They begin with a wide tunnel supported by brick walls. To me, it feels like a waste of space. The whole point was to conserve, after all. But after a turn, we find the first artistic mass of death.
    It's a skull mural. From a distance, I can almost make out the scene—it looks like the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon is sulking on a hill, off to the left, overlooking a field of French corpses, dead horses, and heavy artillery. The enemy is on the other side, triumphant but heavily damaged. You can sense that, in another few weeks or so, the proud general will have to concede his war. It's all rather depressing, really.
    My friend sees something else in it. He says, “This one here,” as he approaches one of the individual skulls.
    I join him, and we stand far too close for my taste to the yellowed, desiccated wall.
    “This one has a jaw very much like my own, I should think. They'd cut out a piece of it like this,” he makes the incision with his forefinger, “and suddenly your chin is that much smaller. It's crazy to think, isn't it? We can be any shape we want to be, as long as we're desperate enough to get over our squeamishness.”
    “That's what this reminds you of?” I ask. “Your chin?”
    “Well, what does it remind you of?”
    Instead of just saying Waterloo, as I should have done, I actually think about it. I look at all of the individual skulls, one by one, and think about it. A lot of them are damaged in some way—a broken eye socket, or a missing jaw, and other holes that look suspiciously like lobotomy wounds. But more than that, I'm struck by how similar they all look to me. The wall could have been a massacre of the first clone village, for all I could tell. That's what I end up answering with, after reflection. “I think your large-chin preoccupation is just a delusion. Here's a thousand dead people, and I don't think any of their jaws are offensively large. Not even the one that you singled out. They all look the same.”
    He's taken somewhat aback. “A delusion?” He doesn't say anything else. He's stuck deep in thought.
    We continue onward, to other morbid spectacles. I actually start to feel hungry after looking at a colossus made out of ribs, and it makes me question my humanity. We're both impressed by what seems to be an opera house, many miles and turns later. The stage is a composite of skulls and arms, the chairs are rows and rows of upright pelvises. The two sections are separated by an ominous orchestra pit, which I try not to look too closely at. Above, there's balconies and individual boxes, like the one that Abraham Lincoln was shot in. I insist that we leave before the play starts—I don't want to see it.
    Moving further, there's more fine art. There are paintings, mostly in the Impressionist style. I can easily identify a few Monet's, even though I am by no means an art expert, and I'm particularly impressed by a version of Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It takes a certain, bold insanity to commit to painting a seven by ten foot canvas with one colored dot at a time. I couldn't have done it. And here, in this place, each dot is an entire corpse, and each corpse is just a dot. All of which makes me wonder what will happen to my body when I'm done with it. It's a thought I don't feel like truly addressing, so it just hangs above me, weighty and suffocating.
    My friend finally asks, “How long do you intend to walk through here? Should we turn around? Or is there an entrance ahead?”
    I don't actually know any of those answers. I tell him that I assume there's a way out ahead, which would probably be the best course of action. Backtracking several miles is not appealing to me when there has to be some sort of exit close ahead.
    It doesn't look promising, though. The further we go, the darker it gets—there's just as many fake sconces lining the walls, but a majority of the bulbs have burnt out and haven't been replaced, as if no one's been this far in for a very long time. I'm doubting myself every second, and meanwhile the art has become more and more terrifying. We're deep into German Expressionism, by the look of it, and I just want out. I begin to panic, when I hear the sound of water.
    “You hear that?” I ask, making sure that my fear isn't causing me to hallucinate. He says that he does. The path diverges ahead of us, and he says he thinks it's coming from the right. I hurry along, and he follows behind me at a more measured pace.
    There's a section of the dead wall that has collapsed, exposing what appears to be a sewer behind it. The smell is truly deplorable—it's just more human waste, I tell myself, and furthermore a kind of waste I'm more familiar and comfortable with, but still the smell is appalling. And yet I'd rather go through it, then turn back—when I bend over to inspect the other side of the hole, I can see a faint light at the far end of the sewer's tunnel, which I recognize as real daylight.
    I tell my friend how I feel—that I'd prefer the sewer, and that he's not obligated to follow me, by any means, but that I would also feel bad about leaving him behind to find his own way back. He's still in a daze from before, from when I told him he was delusional, for some reason. It's with a vacant stare that he agrees to follow me—he's indifferent.
    It's almost with relief that I submerge myself in the sewer, and leave the catacombs behind. It's difficult work, wading through the sludge, but I seem to immediately be making progress—already the light is intensifying, and making my surroundings all too clear. Soon enough, I find the source of the light—there's a door with a window on it, to the right side the tunnel. It doesn't seem to belong there, but I don't judge it. I open the door without considering the consequences.
    And I find myself in the middle of a hospital. A hospital that, as a matter of fact, I'm actually quite familiar with.
    I turn to my friend, and say, “This is where they're keeping Celeste. You've visited her, haven't you? You wouldn't be a good friend, if you haven't.”
    In the light of the hospital, he's a completely different person now from the person he was in the catacombs. He's regained all of his confidence—he doesn't even seem to be bothered by the romantic concerns that were plaguing him before. He's the person I know. He says, “I've visited her many times, of course.”
    “While we're here,” I say, “we must surely make a call.”
    I know the way around, so I continue to lead. She's on the fourth floor, along the west side of the building. There's a lot of windows on that side, overlooking a grand lake. The sun's already setting on the other side of it—it's been a long walk, much longer than I intended.
    I knock on her door, and she tells us to come in.
    She's got one of those genetic diseases, the kind that will always kill a person and always have, until that day, whenever it happens, that people know enough about themselves to fundamentally change who they are. That's why she's here. It's already been decided, though, that no one will cure her—she will die. I've visited her once every few months for a very long time, in remembrance of the childhood that we spent together, but our interactions have felt especially forced, of late. I'm glad to have my friend with me, this time. Perhaps his presence will make things feel more natural.
    She's surprised to see us. She asks us to take a seat, and we graciously accept the invitation. I ask her how she's doing, not expecting the answer to be as depressing as it is—she says the doctors, the professionals of what it really is to be alive, say that they don't expect her to live through the month.
    We sit in silence for a while, and my friend does nothing to help abate the oppressive atmosphere. She says, after a while, “Really, I'm fine with it. I've been expecting it to happen for a long time, now. I wasn't supposed to live as long as I have. Have I told you that I already have a plot reservation at the cemetery? My father got it for me, for Christmas. Isn't that the strangest thing you've ever heard? For Christmas.”
    It seems like too much of a coincidence—her dying, soon to be buried in a cemetery. I've just come through the catacombs—I feel like I was meant to be here, to change her mind. I say, “You can't just be buried like that. Alone, taking up so much space. Don't do it.”
    “What else would I do?” she asks, confused.
    “When you die, let us take you to the catacombs. There's a door just down the hall—it wouldn't be a burden to us. If you're buried alone, isolated in a coffin, then for the next couple hundred years or so you'll just be a corpse, just a solitary dot without context. And after that, your body will be at the artistic mercy of whoever eventually digs you up when they need to make more room for the living. Do you really think that's best?
    “If we take you, on the other hand, then we can put you somewhere you'll always stay—deep in the catacombs. As part of whatever piece of art you want to be. What's your favorite piece? La Pieta? Nude Descending a Staircase? Starry Night? Just give me a title, and we'll make it happen. It's all down there—everything.”
    My friend nods his head—he understands what I'm saying. He followed me through it. I just want to do one last thing for this woman, before she dies and long after.
    She doesn't seem to understand, though. “My father already paid.”
    “I'm sure they must do refunds. People don't always die when they expect to.”
    “I just feel like I'd rather not,” she says. “I want a nice tombstone with my name on it, and flowers above me on my birthday. Is that so wrong? Tell me it's wrong, and I'll change my mind. I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”
    I'm standing again, now, and leaning over her sickbed. I finally notice just how wasted away she is—she's practically already the corpse that she'll forever be. A deep sympathy pervades my soul, and I can easily forgive her for being uncertain about what should happen to her remains.
    “Just do what you want,” I say.
    “Thank you.” She seems genuinely relieved, as if I've removed a weight from her soul.
    “I hope I'm invited to the funeral, still,” I add.
    “Why wouldn't you be?” she replies, and smiles a wan, dying smile.
    “I don't know. Because I disagree with your choice? I won't like to see you buried that way, but still I couldn't just abandon you.”
    “What kind of person would I be, if I told you that you couldn't be there.”
    Impulsively, I lean over and kiss her on the forehead. It's a far more intimate gesture than any I've ever shared with her, but for some reason it feels right. And I say, “If you change your mind, write me a letter. You don't have to tell anyone else. Even if you're already buried, I'll save your body.”
    I mean it, I really do.
    I sense that our conversation, our interaction in this world, is over. So I say, “Goodbye.”
    She doesn't reply.