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.