1. Last Rights..a Novel Way to End

1.
Jamaica morning and a smell of garbage burning as the taxi drives the twisting harbor road in from the airport. The Blue Mountains are still black in night. Rackety murmurs from windows and doorways jangle the latest song by the posterboy whose face is slap slap slapped along the length of a wall. It is too early for the dominoes players but there is an upended crate against the wall where they will station themselves soon. It all looks so different when you come to a place to die.

forever
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

Nonetheless it is a tune and not the flicker of ghost pain that has my attention. I ask the driver to crank up the bass. I like the way it changes mood, starting in a sexy snarl that laces in and out with a girl's whisper that somehow turns menace into promise. I am smiling and nodding, feeling happy. Oh happy. Here to happy out.

Into New Kingston, open green ceremonial park and kiosks with high fashion, the international hotels and agencies. I am handed out the door, feeling the buzz take hold. Happy happy.

I check in and they hand me a thick manila package. Admission is on Tuesday. Four days before I meet up with other terminal strangers and get handed onto the van. In the meantime, I will wander around. Don't have to be careful anymore. I don’t want to spend the long weekend in the resort they offer. It’s going to be last resorts, Tommy said when I showed him my ticket. No last resorts, I said, I want my last rights.

2.
The canonized Pope has begun to breathe again. From nine in the morning till nine at night the pilgrims file by. Most have never been to Red Square and would not notice how much the Polish Pope has come to resemble Lenin’s remains. Here in the blue-black crypt that has been built despite has final request to lie in the earth, his body is changing behind the glass casket lid. The crepey old-man skin is beginning to soften and fill out again. The candlelight waves his famous profiles up and down the walls behind the solemnly shuffling thanatourists. The shadows cast by each separate illumination layer papal profiles at different angles, pile on the wall like foothills , soft blue distant mountain ranges .

3.
Terri is breathing too. They have brought her into the living room and are sitting in a circle around her, hands clasped. The ashes on her husband's mantle are nothing but ashes. Here in the center of a home that looks out onto a freshly planted field she is lying in a hospital bed and she smiles her beautiful smile. They pet her hair and touch her hands. She smiles her smile and opens her eyes, black black with a pupil gone wide open. Her head turns from side to side and she breathes, and they hold hands and breathe with her. Outside a bird dips and rises tracing a spike like the one that glows and vanishes on her bedside monitor. Martha opens the Bible at random and begins to read.

4. And

ampersand
(c) 2005 R&K Now - Beautiful Dreamers

9."...vegetable love doth grow/ vaster than empires and more slow."
But Marvell

2. See Sea Saw

4.
I need to be helped to my room. This is one of the things I am not used to yet, may not have time to get used to. A nice young man...I hear my grandmother's voice saying that, I am not ready to be her...a man who is handsome as the hour before sunset, who is dressed nicely enough to make me smile moves efficiently and with dignity to move my burdens into my room. I hand him a tip big enough that his wife will be happy, not big enough to get his daughter back into school. He opens the slats, lifts my suitcase onto the luggage stand, asks me how I like my air conditioning and turns the vent to blow on the foot of the bed.

They have renovated the hotel since I was here last, before the hurricane that took off the roof. Tommy and I toasted breadfruit slices in the gas burner and ate it with brie. I'll bet the only other person on earth eating this breakfast today is Marlon Brando, I said.

Maybe I shouldn't have come alone. I sit on the edge of the bed and burst into tears.

silver raft
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers
5.
I can see through the slats to the man in uniform with a holstered gun standing at the guard stand by the gate. Before the hurricane the Jennifer Court wasn't grand enough for the guard to carry a gun, and the uniform worn by the gatekeeper, who mostly kept the kids with ganja from coming in the front way, was defined by being khaki, not by starch and epaullettes. I can see the dusty street outside and raggedy kids kicking a ball in a field a block away. Well, I can't tell, maybe not raggedy. At this distance they may all be in school uniforms with new Nikes for all I can tell. I can see the retreating back of a white habit, the telltale blue stripe of a Terry enough for me to imagine the photo of the saintly Mother T around her neck. Brown, that was the guard's name. I wonder if it is still Brown.

My eyes follow the boys, the sister, Brown, and forget to tear up. It is like fixing on the horizon to beat back seasickness. The room smells like burning, I think, before I realize it is an aura and I lie back and brace for the seizure.

dapple
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers
6.
The nice young man knows Brown. Brown went back north and has a business with roots and teas. He'll tell him I am coming and Brown will visit me. No visitors I say. Don't worry, the nice young man says. Brown will come see you. He has returned while I was riding my fizzy silver magic surfboard and apparently took off my shoes and put my glasses on a table and generally loosened what was tight and tightened what was loose and placed me on a safe liferaft in the middle of the black sea. I know it is a black sea because of the waves that are less than black, they are black holes and when I look at them all the light in my eyes is trapped and spins dizzily down. They push at my fizzy dizzy busy silver patch of safety. The nice young man is holding my hand. His fingers feels warm and tough. So kind. So I come back again and we talk about Brown again.

7.
She was talking about Carmen, Alexander the niceyoungman tells Carroll the guardwiththegun. Remember Carmen, Tianna's sister who had to go home after Hurricane Farnum? She says Carmen always left mangos in her room for her. She thought it might be mango season but I told her it was too soon. Soon come I said. Soon come too gone, she said.

3. Over All

see sea saw
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

7.
Vivian cleans the outer room where they keep people who faint while waiting to visit the Pope. The dead-not-dead Pope. It is a holyplace, but they still come in with all that shit on their feet, pigeon dirt, old gum, they drop wrappers and leave newspapers. She finds things you would expect and things you wouldn't expect. Earrings. Lots of women come in and they put on the veil, take off the veil, earrings come off. Gloves in the winter, hats umbrellas, all the things you would find in a train station. Rosaries of course. Plastic throwaway ones that glow in the dark, beautiful ones bought as if jewels to tell prayers raised their honor. Old ones with beads smoothed and a little gummy from being used. Books, and not just holy ones. Sometimes she wonders if they bring them on purpose to tempt her. Romance novels, magazines with the silly skinny clothes only a young girl would try to wear. Science books. Comics that the children read and leave. People come here after they have been shopping and they set down bags and forget them. Mostly tourist things, they give them to the old Jewess on the steps who sells them again. But once she found a beautiful soft blue sweater, as light as sea foam and the same color. Father Betran said, never mind dear, and winked at her and she took it home. It was the first time she had taken anything for herself.


urns
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

8.
The Pope's chamber is cleaned by members of the Pope's own order, they work quickly and efficiently in teams of three, dusting, sweeping, then scrubbing the walls and the floor. They put lemon oil on the door and lavendar and rosemary oil on the rail around the bier. They rub a myrrh paste where the glass lid seals into a cradle of purple heartwood and ebony.

Later Bertran comes in to see him. To see Him? He talks to him when he comes in, Hello dear Father. How is Your Holiness tonight? The light by the platform reflects up from lamps underneath the glass-bricked panel behind the rail where the pilgrims kneel, and the body glows like snow in starlight. They keep light away, it would damage that skin.

The bier is very cold. Instead of air, under the glass, oxygen has been replaced with a gas that is gentler on his cells. The final Pontiff breathes once or twice an hour. If breath is the right word. There is very little metabolic activity but chemicals still exchange into the torpid fluid that runs through him, through the cleansing machines below him, in the chilling chambers.

Bertran polishes the glass. He is the only one allowed to do that this year. There would be arrangements if he couldn't, of course. It is normal that for everything there should be more than one. Except of course the Pope. But for this he is like a part of the Pope, his agent active on the outside. Like a body, tending the flesh so the spirit has a place to call home. We are all part of His body, Bertran says aloud in the inhabited chamber.


breathe
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers