Lawrence Block - Me Tanner, You Jane

Actually I was as close to dead as I could manage. There’s this yogic relaxation technique that I do when I want to rest, involving a regimen of tensing and relaxing all one’s muscles and making one’s mind as blank as possible and slowing various bodily functions, and I was doing this. I kept my breathing as shallow as I could, and a rig Hammacher had contrived kept my suit jacket and shirt front in place and concealed any rise and fall of my chest.

“Such a young man! The prime of life. What did he die of?”

“They said encephalitis-”

Encephalitis. Sleeping sickness. The corpse considered this and had trouble keeping a straight face. It was indeed to laugh.

And a woman’s voice, slow, halting, thickly accented: “You know, he doesn’t look dead. To look at him, you would think he was alive. You would look at him and you would say, hoo, he ain’t dead, hoo, he’s only sleeping.”

Hoo.

Well, you get the idea. It went on from there, and I suppose the service was shorter than usual, and I know it seemed longer. Tom Sawyer, I seem to remember, had a grand time at his own funeral. De gustibus and all that. I had a rotten time myself.

When the service ended, Hammacher and his assistant closed the casket and nailed down the lid, and it was like all those dim dark nightmares. There were air holes in the box, and I had rehearsed this part of it before and knew it was possible to breathe, but when they hammered those nails home the air inside there suddenly seemed inadequate in the extreme.

Then six good men and true bore my pall to the rickety old hearse. They might have carried me more carefully. The hearse bounced and jounced over a terrible old road out to the cemetery, and there was a mercifully short graveside service that I, mercifully, couldn’t hear very clearly through the coffin lid. And then there was a hell of a wrench and the coffin was abruptly lowered six feet to the bottom of the fresh grave. I suppose it was imagination at work, but at once the air in the box seemed to turn cold and clammy and tainted with the odors of embalming fluid and formaldehyde.

Then a pause, during which I suppose the mourners and curiosity seekers went away, and then conversation I could not make out, and then the first horrible thud of the first horrible shovelful of earth on the coffin lid.

This was the part I hated. The funeral was bad enough, and the coffin and the grave were worse, but the idea of having them fill in the hole was too much. Since I was going to be disinterred in an hour or two, I couldn’t see why they had to fill in the hole and then dig it up all over again. It reminded me of a WPA project and made about as much sense.

But there was no way around it. Three alcoholics had the grave-digging concession in Griggstown, and it was inconceivable that anyone else could play their part in the drama, and it was at least as inconceivable that they be trusted with the knowledge of my undead state. In the interests of security they had to be allowed to fill in the hole, and later on some of the MMM comrades would unfill it, and rescue me, and fill it again, and that, presumably, would be that.

They were a long time filling that grave, and if I hadn’t been breathing very shallowly, very economically, I might have run out of air before they ran out of dirt. But finally they seemed to be done, and I took the six foot-long lengths of aluminum tubing from beside me, and I dislodged the little inch-wide plug in the coffin lid, and I pushed the lengths of tubing up through the lid and through the earth above it, fitting them through one by one, screwing them together, and eventually creating a breathing tube reaching just to the surface.

This process probably sounds incredibly awkward. It should, because it was. I had practiced it over and over beforehand, and I had become as good at it as it was possible to be, and it was still awkward. But it worked. It honestly worked. The end of my breathing tube broke the earth’s surface, and I blew the dirt out of its tip, and I drew air through it. It was damp air, warm air, muggy air, but it was very goddamned fresh air compared to the air in the box with me, and I took deep breaths in and out, in and out, in and out, and began waiting for them to dig me up.

It was quite a wait.

Well, I had known it would take a while. The burial had taken place as late in the afternoon as we had been able to arrange it, but the unburial could not possibly occur before nightfall. Cover of darkness and all, and absence of visitors to other graves. I was able to get my eye to the breathing tube, and while there was predictably little to see through six feet of narrowing tubing, I could tell that it was light up there at first, and later on I looked and it seemed to be a little darker, and later still I looked and it was black. That was as close as I came to knowing what time it was. I didn’t have a watch. I could have been buried with a watch – people get buried with watches all the time – but I hadn’t been wearing a watch to begin with, and it had never occurred to me to get one to be buried in.

“The important considerance is to relax,” Karp had said. “You’ll have some cheese, maybe a sandwich. Also a bottle of water. You will breathe through the tube. All the comforts. It will be dark. You could have a flashlight if you wanted to read, or for passing the time you could just stretch out and have a sleep.”

There was cheese concealed by my left foot and a ham sandwich by my right foot and a tiny flashlight in one pocket and a book in another pocket and a half pint of water between my knees. None of them seemed worth the trouble of trying to reach them. There just wasn’t that much mobility in the box, and I just wasn’t in the mood for eating or drinking or reading.

As for sleeping-

Hoo. Sleeping sickness. He ain’t dead, he’s only sleeping. You could just stretch out and have a sleep.

Hoo.

I haven’t slept since Korea. I was in the Army, and the Army was in Korea, and a North Korean shell exploded closer to me than I would have preferred it, and one of the fragments of the shell went into my head, which is no pleasanter than it sounds. Somewhere inside there it found its way into the sleep center.

The sleep center is a clever little rascal that makes you sleep. Doctors don’t know much about it, except that this is what it does, and that everyone has one. Except me, that is. I don’t have one, and consequently I don’t sleep.

This is mostly good, I think. I get a disability pension from the government in the amount of $112 a month. (I don’t know where they got the figure, or how.) And I have time to do all the things that people don’t have time for. Like learning languages (once you’ve learned eight or ten, the rest get very easy) and getting involved with political causes (like the return of the House of Stuart to the English throne, or the restoration of Cilician Armenia, or the propagation of the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society, or the destruction of the white supremacist government of Modonoland, or, oh, lots of things). When you stop to think about it, eight hours out of twenty-four is a lot of time to waste on nothing more interesting than unconsciousness.

But there are times when being awake is not that much of a joy. There are times, in truth, when the raveled sleeve of care could use a little knitting up.

This was one of them.

And it went on and on and on, until I felt that time simply could not be passing this slowly. Obviously I had lost my sense of time. I had also lost my sense of humor, and I only wished I could lose my sense of smell in the bargain, because the air holes in the casket facilitated a certain amount of seepage, and, not to put too fine a point on it, that casket was no bed of roses.