Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

When her mother fell to her early death Selena at first believed she had been horribly wrong, deluded in her sense of herself, but in prayer that day and following she came to understand she had seen this about to occur, had felt its presence in the hand her mother used to stroke her head as she lay falling asleep in bed in recent evenings. And if she were not some kind of Christ, a notion that had begun to slip from her presence of mind after all in the way that the awareness of breathing slips away from those who have their health, that was okay. It was not necessary to save the world or mankind in order to practice her obsessions.

She knew Parnell to be someone in touch with God, in his own way, a person through whose hands people passed on their way to God. She saw him as an instrument whose own powers he didn’t understand, and therefore an innocent. He was the last person to see her mother in her natural earthly form, before the preparation for burial and the soothing of the living souls. When she held his hand there in the funeral parlor she could first feel its presence and then she could see the divine glow in him as a faint blue aura about his oddly beautiful body. She could see something soulful in him that had come, she knew, from his having been so intimate with so much death. He had his hands on death, and wasn’t afraid. He understood something about it that other people did not. After they married, when people were brought into the funeral home to be embalmed and buried, she absolved them all of all their sins, quietly, to herself. They would all enter heaven, to keep her mother company, and she would send them all with a message, that when her work on earth was done she would join her in paradise.

SHE KNEW OF Parnell’s sickness, something she had divined anyway, through various things he said to her which first implied it and later confirmed it for her in the months of their courtship. When she had first taken his hand in the funeral parlor she had sensed something strong in terms of his relation to the dead, but had not included sexual passion in what she sensed until he told her of the girl who’d been in the farming accident and how she had changed him. A general anxiety had to that point given him such problems he thought they would undermine his chosen career: sweaty palms, a nervous pallor, a popeyed uncertainty in his speech. His father barred him from working the parlors. This continued until one day when the body of a girl in his high school class, mortally wounded in a hay baling accident, was brought from the hospital to the Grimes embalming table — naked, flayed, pale, and cold. Her child’s face mauled by indifferent machinery. It had been a face, Parnell recalled, upon which none of her peers’ eyes had rested in admiration. She’d been as plain, even homely, as a day-old drop biscuit. And now he looked upon her remains (beyond the corruption of his confused imagination, Selena would come to understand), disfigured with slices and gashes from the baler, and he saw beyond them more clearly than anyone had ever been able to see just what her perfection had been, and realized that he loved her and mourned her loss. That day, he began to understand something of his mission, and the experience was liberating. His grief filled him with a bouyant joy, and immediately he arrived at a deeper understanding of all that he’d felt and feared. Later, when they had no such secrets between them, after he had further confessed the nature of these fears, telling her what had happened with the Littleton girl, she comforted him, absolved him. Together they giggled like children over the fact that the messenger of such a mission had been unspeakable lust.

From the time they married and she moved into the second floor of the funeral home with Parnell, this place that had been his lonely habitation since his parents had died when he was only sixteen, when he had taken over the business at that young age and done quite well with it, she had felt more at home than she had since the day her mother died. Her own home, since then, had been such a lonely place, even with her father and brother living there with her. She had felt more comforted by her cat, Rosebud, than she had with her family, though they loved her and she loved them. The cat, Rosebud, had a way of looking at her that was so unguarded, so frankly a look into who she really was and what she felt, that she knew no living human being could match it. And the week she’d been at the Gulf with Parnell on their honeymoon, Rosebud had disappeared, and she knew this was because Rosebud’s role in her life had come to an end. That her life with Parnell in the funeral home would now supplant it in ways she would come to understand. So she grieved for Rosebud, but not unconsolably.

In only that first week she had asked Parnell to let her assist him in the embalming downstairs in the basement. He hesitated only a moment, and then she could see settle into his features the knowledge that this was her destiny as much as it was his own. He gave his regular assistant, Mr. Peach, a two-week vacation, and she worked with him on every body that came to the home during that time. The greater her experience at handling the dead, the greater her desire for communion with them.

It had been entirely a risk, an experiment, that first time she had drifted herself to near-death to be revived by Parnell on their honeymoon. As a child, and soon after her mother’s death, she’d discovered the ability quite on her own. She’d walked away from the house on a cool and overcast day when low gray clouds carried over with a breeze from the front that pushed them. She walked to an old pecan grove a couple of blocks away and lay down in the tall grass that had grown up around them, an old crop of nuts from the now sterile trees knobby on the earth beneath her back and legs. She could see the clouds pass as if through the gnarled and flay-barked limbs and ragged narrow leaves of the pecans. She closed her eyes and pushed herself in her mind toward where her mother had gone. She saw a nebulous blue glow aswirl in the spot just between her closed eyes and put her concentration into it. And passed into it and through it. She felt herself traveling somehow in this direction, not through the limbs of the trees and the billowy clouds above them but beyond them in some other-dimensional way. As if sucked in upon herself the weight of her body seemed released, she herself was weightless. She traveled as if flying in a dream but without the sense of moving through the world, or of there even being a world. Through time, perhaps, but not thinking that, either. And after some time of very swift but relative travel in this way she slowed, something like slowing, or came into herself, what that was she couldn’t say, and seemed to float there, and had the sense she was waiting. Some harmonious and distant, untraceable musical sound. And she began to fill with a kind of happiness. She was content to be just there, and was not disturbed for a time with the expectation of there being anything else. But something began to nudge its way into this state, and gradually she became aware of it as a presence, and something physical in the world, and there was a heaviness on her as well as a warm wetness about her face. She opened her eyes. There sat Rosebud two inches from her eyes, sitting on her chest, licking her face. Rosebud mewed, a question, Mggrrrow? As her sense of being in the world again curled into her body, she roused, petted Rosebud. How did you follow me way down here? she said. Rosebud wound her way around her legs, her tail straight up, stopped and looked up at her words. They walked back home together.

In time, with Parnell, she began to love thinking of the new places and the new ways. At first she had merely lain in their bed waiting for Parnell to come upstairs to find her there, to speak to her as he removed his business clothes, to stop and turn his head slightly toward her when she did not respond, to creep over and touch her here and there. And she was in that state she had somehow perfected, of being there but not there, in her body but out of it too, somehow breathing though her lungs all but still, all but dormant, and she seemed to see him through her closed lids, which in those moments seemed to her as thin a membrane as the protective covering on the eye of a fish, she could see right through them, the image before her pulsing almost imperceptibly behind the tiny, spidery veins.