Stanley Elkin - The Living End

“Hello?” Ladlehaus called. “Sir?” (“Be off,” God had said.) He saw a way out. If he could just get the fellow’s attention— “I’m Jay Ladlehaus,” he shouted, “and through a grievous error I’ve been buried alive. Inadvertently interred. There wasn’t any foul play, you needn’t be alarmed. You couldn’t get in trouble. ‘Honor bright.’ We say ‘Honor bright’ in our family when the truth’s involved and we take a holy oath. You got a shovel?”

“Oatcakes,” Quiz said.

So, Ladlehaus thought gloomily, it’s my incorporeality. No more voice than a giraffe. And settled down with his thoughts for eternity with not even pain left to stimulate him. Not seeing how he could make it and wishing that God had closed down his consciousness too. “Well it isn’t picturesque,” he said. His hope had been for a peaceful afterlife, something valetudinarian, terminally recuperative, like his last years in the Home perhaps, routinized, doing the small, limited exercises of the old, leaving him with his two bits worth of choice, asking of death’s nurses that his pillows be fluffed, his bed raised inches or lowered, and on nice mornings taking the sun, watching game shows on television in the common room, kibitzing bridge, hooked rugs, the occupational therapies, the innocuous teases and flirtations of the privileged doomed. And hearing the marvelous gossip of his powerless fellows, his own ego—though he’d never been big in that line—sedated, sedate, nival, taking an interest in the wily characters of others, in their visitors and their visitors’ calm embarrassments. He could have made an afterlife of that, not even arrogating to himself wisdom, some avuncular status of elder statesman, content to while away the centuries and millennia as, well, a sort of ghost. It would have been, on a diminishing scale, like hearing the news on the radio, reading the papers. A sort of ghost indeed. Dybbuk’d into other peoples’ lives, their gripes and confidences a sort of popular music. What could be better? Death like an endless haircut. “Forget it, Ladlehaus,” he said, “forget it, old fellow.” And resigned himself in what he continued to think of as a cemetery, a wide, deep barracks of death.

Later—it might have been minutes, it could have been days—he heard the voice again. “Oatcakes,” it said, diminished this time, softened, and Ladlehaus tried again, his heart not in it.

“Excuse me,” he said, “I have been inadvertently interred. Dig where the stone says ‘Ladlehaus.’ He was my cousin. We were very close.”

Quiz heard him. He had heard him yesterday when he had come to eat his lunch on the bench near Ladlehaus’s stone and had discovered that Irene had packed oatcakes for him. Quiz had recently been told by his doctor that he had excessively high blood pressure, hypertension, and, in addition to his diuretics, had been commanded to go on a strict low-fat, low-salt, sugar-free diet. He had been told that he must eat natural foods only.

He did not terribly mind the restriction of sweets and seasonings, but he found the health foods extremely distasteful. Unnatural, if you asked him. The sunflower cakes and shrimp-flavored rice wafers, the infinite soybean variations tricked out in the consistency of meats, the greens and queer vegetables, their odd shapes and colors like mock- ups of the private parts of flowers. The little pudding cups of honey with their garnish of wheat germ and lecithin. “He can live a normal life,” the doctor told Irene. “I live a normal life,” Quiz had said. “Your pressure’s dangerously elevated,” the doctor said. “Irene, tell him. Am I hypertense?” “He’s cool as a cucumber, Doctor. He don’t ever brood or get angry.” “Trust me, Mrs. Quiz,” the doctor said, “Mr. Quiz’s triglycerides are off the charts and he has engine room pressure. If you want him around you’ll have to put him on the diet.” “Ain’t that stuff expensive?” “What’s your life worth to you, Mr. Quiz?” So he went obediently on the diet.

So he had heard the fellow Ladlehaus. Buried alive. Inadvertently interred. Did Ladlehaus think he was a fool? There were his dates plain as day right there on his tombstone. Dead eleven years. Now how did the fellow expect him to believe a cock-and-bull story like that? Quiz was no spooney. Locked in the ground eleven years and still alive? Impossible. Not worth the bother of a reply really.

Quiz finished his lunch, wiped bits of oatcake from the corner of his mouth with a napkin. Silly, he thought. Lips like a horse’s. Then the diuretics took effect. He’d read that the human body was about 70 percent water. If he kept getting the urge his would be a lot less than that in no time. “I’ll be landlocked, a Sahara of a man.” He stood up but saw that he was going to be caught short. Hurriedly the groundskeeper unzipped and relieved himself.

“Can you hear me?” Ladlehaus asked. “There’s been a terrible mistake. If you’d just get a shovel, sir. Or come back with your mates. Can you hear me?”

Of course Quiz heard him. I’ve got high blood pressure, he wanted to say, I’m not deaf. But he held his tongue, wouldn’t give Ladlehaus the satisfaction, insulting his intelligence like that. He was only a groundskeeper in the new high school’s stadium, Quiz knew, no genius certainly, but no damn fool either. That was one of the things that got the passively hypertense groundskeeper down. Everybody was always trying to fool you, tell you a tale, make you believe things that weren’t so. Politicians with their promises, the military, the papers, the gorgeous commercials on television. A fellow worked hard and scraped just to keep body and soul together, and right away he was a target for the first man who came along with something to sell. Sometimes, when you didn’t know, you had to go along. Now he might have high blood and he might not and it just wasn’t worth it to him to defy the doctor to find out. But when even the dead lied to you that was something else. That was something he could do something about. He told Irene.

“There’s this dead man near the bleachers,” he said. “Fellow named Ladlehaus.”

“Oh? Yes?”

“Keeps nagging at me with a cock-and-bull story about being buried alive. Wants me to dig him out. Calls me ’sir,’ and wants to know do I have a shovel. Dead as a doornail but you should hear some of the stuff he comes up with. I give him high marks for invention.”

“Just ignore him,” Irene said, “don’t let him upset you. Tell him you’ve got high blood, engine room pressure. Tell him your triglycerides are off the charts and he should leave you alone.”

“Wouldn’t give him the satisfaction,” Quiz said.

“That’s how to deal with him,” the wife agreed.

“Insulting my intelligence.”

“Called it a name, did he?”

“But I fixed him,” Quiz confided.

“How’s that, my darling?”

“I peed on him.”

Through a kind of sortilege, Ladlehaus’s was the only grave allowed to remain where it was when the city fathers closed down the new section of the municipal cemetery under its right of eminent domain. They picked the site for the new high school after several feasibility studies had been made. Ladlehaus would have been surprised to learn that he lay between the track and the bleachers-like grandstand in a plot of consecrated ground no larger than a child’s bedroom. He would have been astonished to learn that for a time there had been serious talk of naming the new school in his honor. A feasibility study was made. He had no record so that was in his favor, and he had outlived everyone whom he had ever served as an accomplice. The difficulty was that he had no surviving relatives to speak up for him, and the people in the Home whose gossip and small talk had been the comfort of his last years either did not remember him at all or recalled his appreciative silences and attention as the symptoms of a man far gone in senility. The upshot was that the school was named for the contractor who had purchased the honor with a kickback to the chairman of the committee which had done all the feasibility studies. Thus it was that Nick Capiapo High School had gained its name and was not called after a man who had not only had actual conversation with God and who had the distinction, like a player of Monopoly who gets a “Bank Error in Your Favor” card, of receiving the courtesy of His holy “Oops,” but who was the only man in the long sad history of time ever to die.