I thought getting away might help my focus, and that’s how I ended up alone in a hotel room on the other side of the city. I worked from the overly soft bed as much as I could, all four flimsy feather pillows stuffed behind my back as I leaned over my laptop.
These revisions on the next Dana Capone book have been giving me hell. Or maybe it’s not the revisions. Maybe it’s the state of the world. I can’t even listen to NPR anymore without rolling my eyes. They bite onto a topic and lock their jaws like a pit bull until everyone with genuine interest in helping is so goddamn sick of hearing about it, that they start rolling their eyes when it’s mentioned. ‘Nother Problem Radio. No news station is any better at this point, and most are worse.
Maybe that was what I trying to escape with my hotel stay, and maybe that’s why it was a train wreck. I couldn’t focus there any more than I could at home. I got a few hours of revisions done right off the bat, then it went downhill.
But on my second day, after a strategic OD on caffeine, I hit my rhythm at around midnight. I was in the zone. And when you’re a crime writer, the zone often includes some downright off-putting web searches.
That the FBI has not raided my home yet is either proof that they’re asleep on the job, or that they’ve already confirmed I’m a writer and have removed my name from the no-fly list. But at around one in the morning in that hotel room, as I found myself researching the smell of assorted turpentines to find if they could cover up the stench of decomposing remains, I felt like I might have crossed a line. If this doesn’t lead to my arrest, maybe nothing will.
In my research on the topic, alone in that quiet, I found myself looking at quite a few human bodies in various states of rot. Seeing that horror is the kind of mental disruption we (people in “civilized” society) don’t normally get. We go to such great lengths to never be exposed to images like that, which shine a light on the undignified reality of death. What might it do to our egos? To our sandcastles of grandiosity and purpose?
One sequence of images in particular caught my attention, and the sight was as appalling as it was pathetic. A human man, whose life was likely a Gordian knot of asinine concerns and self-importance (as everyone’s is), lying there for the internet’s gawking pleasure, frame after frame as time had its way with him. The eyes were censored to obscure his identity, which doesn’t require much scrutiny to appear a ludicrous measure. The protocol wasn’t to protect the deceased. He couldn’t care. Instead, it was obviously to reassure the living that our vanity will be preserved once Elvis has left the building.
Because I have zero control over my imagination, I found myself projecting other faces onto that rotting corpse. I imagined it was my face whose lips were pealed back like two dried apricots as a froth of maggots escaped my mouth, nose, and eyes. That will be me one day.
Ew. No it fucking will not. I made a mental note to specify in my will that I prefer to be cremated.
A parade of my loved ones marched into frame next. In the lead was my husband, the person I care about most in this world, whose absence from me in that hotel room was likely part of the reason I couldn’t focus. Flies would happily make a meal of him if given the chance.
Of course, they won’t get it. He’ll be cremated, too.
Maybe the process of rot, as irreverent as it is to our fragile egos, is the greatest gift we can give to this earth. It nourishes flies and worms. It enriches the soil. It keeps one more person from driving an SUV.
I often think about what I want to return as if reincarnation is the real deal. There’s nowhere I feel more peaceful than in the soft quiet of the woods, so being a tree might be nice. Not just any tree, obviously. It’s not a great century to be a tree, what with the logging and raging forest fires. I want to come back as a tree in an ancient forest, maybe somewhere in central Europe, or wherever isn’t a tinderbox at the time of my return. I want to grow into a giant over thousands of years, have little forest creatures call me home, commune via the wood wide web with the other trees I’ve come to know and trust over the millennia. When the wind blows and the rain pours, I want to know I have others to lean on and that others will lean on me, that we’ll all hold each other up.
But now? I’m not so sure. Bugs inside me? No, no, that’s not ideal. That’s what decomposition is, and I’m simply not a fan. I want to return to nature, but not in an icky way. Let me take my precious ego with me!
I finally shut down my computer at around 2:30 that morning, and fell asleep at 4. Various sleep aids might have been involved.
At 5:30am, through the oppressive fog of melatonin et al, it occurred to me that a woman was screaming. You might think that’s fairly clear cut and I should have jumped to attention, but unfortunately I have a history of hypnopompic hallucinations, both auditory and visual.
It’s not uncommon for me to awaken in the dead of night to the sound of someone speaking my name straight into my ear only to find that I’m entirely alone. I once spent an entire night waking up at intervals to see a woman floating in the corner of my room, screaming in agony and ordering an unknown force to get me, all while my body was paralyzed and unable to do a thing about it.
But this time, the screaming continued even after I was mostly awake. There was no ambiguity about it then. A woman was shouting incoherently in the courtyard of the hotel, right outside my room. I promptly called the cops and crawled back into bed, but sleep didn’t return after that.
I left the next morning with a migraine and vomited on the side of the highway. A fitting end to my hotel debacle. But the haunting images of the rotting man stayed with me. And you know what? In the days since, they’ve unlocked doors to living.
We will all die. It’s a concept that’s not foreign to anyone but psychologically kept at arm’s length. We fall prey to the gamified razzle-dazzle of modern society—the news cycle, skyrocketing costs of living, signals that our worth is tied up in our earning potential for richer men, the easy ways to numb our existential dread rather than confronting it.
It’s all made up. You know that, don’t you? We all do in those dark moments between fixes. We’re lumps of silly organic material with no inherent purpose or meaning. Creating one for ourselves is nice, but it’s not actually necessary to the organic world around us. We only remain warm bodies for a startlingly short amount of time. Even our hard-earned legacies will fade quickly once we’re ashes or dirt.
If you stood up and danced right where you are as you read this, it wouldn’t matter one lick. Oh, you’re waiting in line at the grocery store? Still doesn’t matter. You’re at a funeral? Especially doesn’t matter. Not in the scheme of things.
A few days after the hotel stay, I had dinner with someone who I have a long history with. Interactions with this person often leave me with migraines the next day, not to mention a lot of psychological unpacking to do. But as I sat there, listening to some of the same nonsense that usually makes my head hurt, I imagined this person as a rotting corpse. It made me sad. I don’t want them to be a rotting corpse.
A switch flipped, and I felt suddenly fortified. The conversation was easy. I felt freer to speak my mind, to contradict, but most importantly, to let things go. To not comment. To not let the words and emotional manipulations bother me. It all rolled right off. My usual need to correct the factual inaccuracies or point out the bigotry was gone. Poof! Let them be wrong. Magic. That’s all it could be. Pre-corpse magic.
I don’t mention any of this to encourage folks to be nihilistic assholes, only to point out that so much of what we believe we must do is completely pointless.
Incineration or maggots: which do you choose?
Oh, you chose fish? Clever girl.
The point is you’re free. You’re free and time is running out, and that need to maintain appearances with friends and family is pointless. That need to be right and have others know is pointless. We’re all heading toward an undignified finale, so maybe, if your life feels too heavy for you, stop attaching so much weight to things.
Let pride and envy and shame go. Have sex with someone warm (and consenting). Give that dream of yours a shot. Fail in it. Have sex with someone warm (and consenting) again. Eat chocolate with your eyes closed and moan as loudly as you want to. None of that is sin, if you even give two shits about all that. And all of it is yours for a limited time only!
I remembered all this from a man I don’t know whose eyes were censored with a silly black bar. But that doesn’t make any of it untrue.
Enjoy your body before the worms do. Why not?