The Funeral Goer: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

         It was midnight, but all of the lights were on in Chris’s bedroom. He had to be up early for school, but he was still awake. Whenever he found himself wanting to go to bed at night, he ritualistically came into the room, shut the door quietly, for his mother always went to bed early, and turned all the lights on. He indulged in the light emanating from the small lamp in the corner and the radiance of his computer monitor’s backlight. He lifted his arm high above his head to pull on the string that dangled from the ceiling light. He pulled the curtains open and found himself, night after night, surprised at the sight of his transparent reflection, ghostly in the dark.

         He undressed, first using his right big toe to paw at his left heel until the sock came off, then the opposite, and then he removed his pants and briefs. The window conveyed to him a pair of hairless legs and meaty thighs, but his extra-long shirt served to conceal his genitals. He would not have cared to present his whole self, though, however shameful he found his body to be, because his bedroom window faced a dark, wooded area. So he took off his shirt. The outside world was not even a nebulous curiosity or the frightening unknown, but rather a black void, as the thick canopies of the forest blocked any moonlight or specks of light from stars that may have been visible. He saw nothing aside from his body, the fleshy and powerful mass which he knew so well.

         There was no reason for his naked display, at least not that he knew of. It was almost as if he was challenging anything that may have lurked in what he convinced himself to be a black hole. It is likely he very occasionally saw the glare of a raccoon’s eyes that disproved his content loneliness, and thought to ward it off with his nudity.



         Chris stumbled ponderously down the stairs, picking at the crust in his eyes. He advanced towards the hissing of the frying pan and sat down at the kitchen table, sniffing at the odor of bacon in the air. His mother stood at the stove without turning to greet him.

         “Good morning. Breakfast is ready, Fatass,” Alma sneered. Chris was used to this menacingly playful attitude. His mother constantly insulted him under the guise of facetiousness, but he still cringed as his mind registered the veracity of the words that left her mouth. He picked up his fork and knife with his pudgy fingers and chose to ignore his mother’s unconventional term of endearment as Alma plopped the greasy bacon onto his plate.

         “Mom, if you think I’m so fat then stop shoving bacon in front of my face.”

         “What can I say?” Alma shrugged. “I’m an enabler.”

         In reality, Chris was not, in fact, obese or even significantly overweight. The doctor told him he could benefit from exercising a bit more, though. Alma was quick to latch onto any slight deficiency in her son and amplify it, harping on it, worsening it, like picking at a scab. But Chris recognized that a mother making bacon and eggs for her son on a weekday before school was unusual, a spontaneous act of kindness. This irreconcilable hostility and generosity spoke of her personality. She was distant and hard to relate to, and generally a difficult person. It made it hard to form a relationship with her, to trust that her actions would follow some sort of rational pattern.

         “Do you have a funeral this morning?” Chris asked, noticing how incongruous his mother looked with her elegant black dress covered by a matronly apron.

         “Yup, this’ll be my fourth one,” she replied, smiling. “Don’t forget to go to the motel after school since I won’t be there.” She was referring to the Cerberus Inn, the motel on the outskirts of the city which she managed. Chris had started working there when he began high school.

         Chris sneered at his mother’s back as he cut his egg in half. How easy it was for her to take advantage of the bereavement of other people and attend strangers’ funerals as if they were nothing more than a job. The way that she was able to mock and diminish a person’s grief was both impressive and sickening to Chris. It only heightened his cynicism, making him reflect on her behavior at her husband’s funeral and questioning its sincerity.

         It had been a little more than a year since Chris’s father had died. He remembered coming home to his mother sitting at the kitchen table, staring vacantly out the window. She seemed not to recognize his presence. She was holding a cup full of cold coffee, picking at a chip in the mug with the nail of her thumb. After what seemed like a minute of silence, during which a nearly infinite amount of tragic situations ran through Chris’s mind, Alma finally turned to him with red eyes and told him about the car accident. Her voice was stable and she struggled not to emote, implicitly telling Chris that she was unavailable to offer condolences and unwilling to be condoled. Chris stood silently for a moment, reconciling the image of her unattractive, sad face and her inability to allow her voice to reflect her emotional desolation through a quavering voice or a difficulty in producing the words “Your father is dead.”

         It was this senseless pride at maintaining equanimity that never allowed Chris to fully accept the authenticity of his mother’s grief. Surely her tears were real. Surely she had not been sitting at the kitchen table, producing an inhuman amount of specious tears in anticipation of her son’s return from school. But he always remembered watching the rivulets of mascara running down her cheeks in a showy display of loss, wondering why she had even been wearing makeup in the first place.

         All of be his paranoid musings and his irrational need to harshly discriminate between his mother’s every action seemed at least somewhat justified during his father’s funeral, though.          

He remembered standing outside on the cold winter day. Walking to the burial site, he slipped on a patch of black ice and laughed inwardly. Was what killed his father ready to claim him as well? An image from the 6 o’clock news flashed in his mind. A gruesome display of a car, on its side and trailed by debris, not quite whole after having run through a sign post. The anchor used words like this; gruesome, horrible, fatal. It was very sensational, and served as Chris’s only memory of the scene, having not seen it himself. He would always associate the images with the youtube video of the baby that laughed when his mother sneezed, which somehow found its way onto the news program at 6:25, at that awkward time when all significant events had been related but the Seinfeld rerun had not yet begun.

         Chris consciously fought to emulate the somber, funereal atmosphere that the guests around him had so effortlessly maintained. He did not feel guilty for feeling as though he wanted to laugh. It was a comfort mechanism, a knee-jerk reaction to dealing with these confusing and unwelcome pangs of abject sadness. To Chris, laughter was a resignation to the variables of life and the brief recognition of the general insignificance of our existence, though when asked to articulate the reason for his inappropriate behavior he would be more inclined to say, “Sorry, I can’t help it.”

         These were the thoughts that ran through his mind to justify his emotions and grasp at some sort of rational, stable consciousness. His mother, on the other hand, dealt with her grief through a series of over-the-top gestures of anguish and despondency. She clawed at the dry earth, alternating between moaning like a dying cow and screaming with the ungodly shriek of a banshee. Chris tried at first to grab her arm and lift her to her feet in an offer for help, but quickly realized that she was intent on remaining as close to the ground as she possibly could without laying herself down.

         She spent more time wallowing in the dirt than she did standing. Her face was a picture of blotchy and unpleasant bereavement, as though it disinvited any guest who may have the intention of consoling her. Chris didn’t think she needed to worry about interacting with others, though. He watched his father’s work friends and relatives he barely knew, all cringing and glancing sideways at his mother, faintly disturbed by her outrageous display and uncomfortable with their own difficulty in empathizing with such a pathetic, craven woman. Chris tried to catch the eyes of these near-strangers, attempting to convey some sort of understanding that his mother was like an actor in a high school theatre production, instructed to deliver some lugubrious version of hysteria to the audience.

         Among the incredulity and the discomfort, one man seemed to not only understand Alma’s outrageous display, but to revel in it, smiling at her from afar, finding a beauty in her grief that nobody else was willing or able to see. He was an Asian man, short but handsome, his face lined with age but virile. Chris wondered who this man was and why he was attending the funeral, knowing that his father was not known for embracing diversity in his personal relationships. The man approached her after the funeral and, as Chris later learned, offered his mother a job as a professional mourner.

         The man was apparently independently wealthy, a son of poor but educated immigrants who fled to America after communism spread through China and the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. Chris asked very few questions about this man and as a result knew very little. All he knew was that his mother spent an inordinate amount of time with him, despite the fact that she had attended only a handful of funerals so far. However it had started, it seemed to have blossomed into more than a working relationship.

         One of the few questions Chris asked his mother was where this man – he was called Nick, no doubt having adopted an American name for purposes of either assimilation or frustration at the American inability to pronounce Chinese names, trying to cluster consonants together in a syllabic impossibility or growing confused as they are barraged with vocal tones – got his money. Her prevarications left him wondering if he was part of something like a Chinese mafia, and her attempt to strategically disregard the question usually ended in her assertion that “he practically runs Chinatown.” Chris couldn’t decide whether to treat this response as being either his mother’s attempt at a racially insensitive joke or a corroboration of his initial suspicions.

But Chris wondered if he did, in fact, acquire his money through immoral conduits. After all, he seemed to be sort of a modern-day Chinese folk hero. Any time a member of the Chinatown community passed away, he would give them a funeral, free of charge. In this way, it seemed that he did run Chinatown – or at least, he was some kind of saint to its inhabitants. Even the homeless inhabitants of Chinatown were granted these elaborate burials. Chris had often wondered at the proliferation of homelessness in Chinatown, knowing of the Chinese peoples’ strong values of community. There was not one time that he went for dim sum during which he did not see the same dirty, unkempt men huddling in the same exact positions in the same exact locations. And when he did notice that one had gone missing, he could reasonably expect that his mother had a new assignment from her Asian beau.

         “So am I ever going to meet this mysterious man of yours?” Chris asked teasingly.

         “What’s so mysterious about him? You met him at the funeral.” She hastily added: “There’s nothing going on between us, anyway.”

         “I saw him at the funeral, but I certainly didn’t meet him. I was too busy talking to the guests. Someone had to entertain them.”

         Alma took off her apron and threw it over the back of a kitchen chair. “I can hardly think of anything more entertaining for them to do than gawk at me like some kind of zoo animal on the worst day of my life. Unfeeling monsters, every last one of them. Except for Nick, of course. He was the only person who actually gave a shit, and he didn’t even know me. What does that tell you?”

         It didn’t tell him much, but he wondered why the worst day of her life would be her husband’s funeral rather than the day he died. He thought it best not to contradict her when she was angry, though, knowing that he was the only person nearby towards whom she could (and would) direct her anger.

         “Anyway, quit stuffing your face and brush your teeth.” She ended the conversation indelicately, as usual. “It’s getting late.”

         Chris threw his dish in the sink and went upstairs, brushed his teeth, and put on a wrinkled t-shirt. As high school progressed, he had not only become lazy about school work, turning in half-assed attempts at papers written in chicken scratch, but he had begun to care less about his appearance as well. He traded freshly ironed button-downs for t-shirts crumpled at the foot of his bed and plastered with band names and logos. As he watched his classmates effortlessly form relationships and listened to whispers of who had recently lost their virginity at what party after how many drinks, he started to wonder who he was trying to impress. Certainly he would never be part of this crowd. He couldn’t imagine doing something on a Friday night that didn’t end with him jacking off to online porn. He couldn’t imagine what sort of slovenly turd he would become next year when he was a senior.

         He scanned his bedroom to ensure he hadn’t forgotten anything, then ran downstairs. He offered his mother a perfunctory goodbye, but she had already left.