The Grave on the Wall. Brandon Shimoda
Helen and William McAlpine, Japanese Tales and Legends (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).
THE NIGHT OF THE DAY MY GRANDFATHER DIED
The night of the day my grandfather died, I went for a walk in the woods. I was in my freshman year of college, upstate New York. Train tracks ran through the woods to Canada. A ditch ran alongside the tracks. I was walking in the ditch when a train appeared, moving very slowly. It sounded like it was going to grind to a halt or fall apart. It was a freight train, but I saw faces, heard breathing. The walls of the train were constellated with thousands of eyes and as many haloes of breath, respiring, through horizontal slits, an emerald light.
The train was interminable. It took the moon traversing night for it to pass. After it passed, small lights flickered on the tracks. Reflections of the eyes or sparks off the wheels. Then people appeared, a procession, carrying lights, swinging them like censers. I could see their faces in half-illuminated fragments. What I could see was young. I was young too but felt old and unreal. They did not seem to see me in the ditch. They did not lift their eyes from the tracks.
After they passed, the woods grew lighter, and I became aware of where I was standing. The trees arching over the tracks, the stream in the ditch, the light of dawn in the stream. In the wake of the train and the procession, the woods seemed static, silent and still. The grinding of the train gave way to the sound of insects turning down.
The events of that evening into morning became my first image of my grandfather’s afterlife. It was the first thing, obscure and overflowing, onto which I projected what I did not yet know was grieving.
DEATH VALLEY
Midori wanted to return, after death, to the desert. He wanted his ashes scattered in Death Valley. On November 9, 1996, we gathered on a hill on the road to Stovepipe Wells. Midori’s ashes traveled, in a clear cellophane bag in a wooden box, by car from Denver, North Carolina, to the airport in Charlotte, by plane to Las Vegas, and by car to Death Valley.
We chose a hill and walked up. I had the feeling we had gathered as strangers, that each of us was walking alone. That with Midori’s death we had been particularized by our relationships with him, each of us compelled by what we shared with him, what we did not share with each other. We each found a rock that reminded us of Midori. We built a monument. The monument amounted to a prototypical effigy. The sun was high. June was wearing a white turtleneck and jeans. There was a purple cactus with luminous spines. Midori’s ashes were gray, a puzzle cut into one trillion pieces. June scattered his ashes with a spoon. Scattered is not the right word. June dressed the rocks with Midori’s ashes. She planted his ashes, while walking in a circle around them. She released them.
My aunt Risa read a letter. She sat beside the monument. The letter was addressed directly to Midori. Plaintive, almost pleading. Her voice shook. She was the only person who spoke. She became a child. The nakedness of her becoming a child amplified our lack of courage, our silence. We might have thought our emotions were bound up in silent observance and not, as they were, petrifying. I felt embarrassed. I thought I was embarrassed by Risa becoming a child, but I was actually embarrassed by my inability to grieve. To speak plainly, uninhibitedly, to Midori. That I was, in the company of my family, my grandfather’s ashes, and the magnanimous indifference of the desert, self-conscious. I wanted to join Risa in childhood. But I could not get there. I was even more childish than a child. My childhood had not yet been consummated by the sensation of having been left. I was stunted, with no way yet to move on.
Fifteen years later, November 2011, we returned. On the way to the hill, Kelly and I gave June a camera and told her to take a picture of anything she wanted to remember. Despite being married to a photographer, she rarely, if ever, took pictures, rarely, if ever, touched Midori’s cameras. We were standing on the front porch of a jerky shack in Beatty, Nevada. We showed her how to take a picture. We wanted to see what she was seeing, what she found interesting, in the desert, where Midori was. Where, she said, she would join him.
She held the camera in her lap. We turned into Death Valley. We drove toward the dunes. The landscape looked familiar. Its familiarity was an illusion, a ruse. What looked familiar, to our desert-less eyes, was repetition. We might have thought we were driving against it. We were being enfolded, were already part of it.
When someone chooses the site of their burial, the place where they want their ashes to be scattered (dressed, planted, released), are they imagining the relationship that will form between the place and their family? Within and beyond the desires of the dead, the living set down the order, the rituals, of death, and follow it, or not. They are deferential until, unable to bear the desires of the dead any longer, or forgetting them, or thinking, mistakenly, that they are not being watched, they become defiant.
Following Midori to the site of his desire was to follow him nowhere. The desert was the end. Or the opening onto a new existence, on this side of which we were halted. Not being dead, we did not know that. We were proud, arrogant, yet stricken, suddenly, with uncertainty.
A memorial exists in the present, must exist and be attended to and maintained in the present, therefore must constantly be renewed. In the intervening years, the hill moved. There was disagreement. Risa and my uncle Sano scrambled up two different hills. (My father was not with us. Did his absence constitute a third, maybe even the most accurate hill?) We walked June up several hills. She held onto us as if we were leading her to a baptismal spring. Then we walked her back down. Rested among the straw-colored brush. Our inability to find the hill, and the monument, was, to me, consoling. It reinforced not only the privacy of death, but the privacy of memorialization. I did not say that out loud. June was eighty-five. Her feet were killing her. What is the relationship between a woman nearing the end of her life and a pile of rocks in the desert meant to mark the memory of her dead husband?
The phone rang. June was out. Midori answered the phone. Hello? It’s your daughter. Who? Tell Mom I’ll be there on Friday. When? Write it down. The doorbell rang. Midori looked at the phone. The phone was on a small table with a bowl of glass eggs next to a porcelain doll.
Midori pretended he did not know who we were. Kelly and I held the phone to our ears, and he would say, Nice to meet you, and we laughed. A better game would have been if he had said, I know exactly who you are, and I am going to tell you, in which he would tell us exactly who we were and who we were going to be, even describing where we would die, what we would be wearing, who we would be with, the weather, the hour, the minute, the expression on our faces.
Kelly and I were in the garden. Midori pointed at the mountain across the valley from where he and June lived in El Cajon, California—where they lived before moving to North Carolina—and said: See that mountain? Close your eyes. Count to fifty. When you reach forty-nine, open your eyes. I will be standing on the top of the mountain, waving at you. Then he disappeared. We counted to fifty but could not stand it past thirty. Everything on the mountain was Midori. Every shadow, every cloud passing.
Soon, you will not see a mountain. You will not see, on the face of the mountain, the shadow of a gargantuan spider. You will not see the shadow of the gargantuan spider rushing down the face of the mountain.
A wooden eagle hung on the garage wall. The eagle held a stars-and-stripes sash in its talons. The garage had white carpet. That’s how clean the streets are, June said.
I remember the sun. Glassy, white. I remember a red tomato in the garden. I remember a shirtless man with a rope over his shoulder, a bee hovering above a pink flower, a tall desert landscape with sandstone buttes, a snake-like map inside a circle, a young woman holding a basket on her head.
Midori’s ability to cross the valley and climb the mountain in the distance was possible, permissible, because everything in the desert was,