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I followed the old people’s advice and went to a funeral. If I were old, the last thing I would do is mingle with death. They were sitting behind me at the orchestra in almost-matching outfits, twenty minutes early just as I was. They offered me a stick of gum and somehow I got to telling them that I knew the manager and she died. They told me to go to the funeral; I said I was on bad terms with her daughter. According to them, nothing is more enlightening or invigorating than a funeral.
In front of me, they were beginning to tune up so I somewhat rudely looked away from them and slouched in my seat like a twelve-year-old in math class. They were dedicating this performance to their late manager and donating all the proceeds to her favorite charity. I was there because I felt obliged, not because I was an artist. The seats were hard and impossible to find a good position in. When they started up, I drifted off to a warm place and stayed there until the final applause, when I participated in the standing ovation out of peer pressure.
Afterwards, the banquet they held for the audience was full of what had to be stale food and the manager’s daughter, Alice, came up to me, crying. She told me she didn’t think I was going to show. I wanted to tell her that I was just there to pay my final respects because I wasn’t going to the funeral. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to the funeral because she had cheated on me. I wanted to tell her off for cheating on me, but she had done it in a “moment of weakness” a few hours after she’d found out her mother had died; and I couldn’t tell off a woman in mourning, no matter how much I wanted to.
“I cared about your mother,” was all I could say to her. She stared at me with dark incredulity and backed away. I smiled at her. It was time for me to leave.
The following morning I was looking at the obituary section trying to find a good funeral. I couldn’t deal with Alice at her mother’s funeral, but I was wondering what it would be like to go the funeral of someone I didn’t know, someone interesting, someone successful. One obituary in particular, with an article in another section in the paper, stood out; an artist had died. He, Skylark Alexander Dovetail, had apparently made a lot of money making distorted mirrors with intricate frames. His entire house had wall-to-wall mirrors and unfinished paintings (when he finished them, he put them in the basement). This seemed like the funeral to attend.
Surrounded by artists in stylish hand-made outfits, I was about ready to leave. Never before had I seen fabrics combined in such manners on such eccentric people. There were multiple hair colors, plus piercings, tattoos, and body types. I was a lanky twenty-six-year-old guy with dull blonde hair and smudgy glasses.
I had painted once. It hadn’t worked out. I got more on my body than on the canvas and what came out looked like something a three-year-old in art therapy would produce. My art teacher, a man who told me to “capture the essence with charcoal” before doing anything, including breathing, but especially painting, told me I was really starting to feel the subject. I didn’t look it now. I looked like a guy with a lot of uninteresting failed relationships who worked in a computer store. This wasn’t entirely true; I worked in a booth in the mall that sold cell phones and long-distance plans.
The entire group was ushered by white-clad black men with orange contacts into the mansion. Instead of being at a funeral home, the ceremony was being held inside the man’s home. My eyes scoured the interior for infamous mirrors but found none. The walls were covered in tile of every shape and description imaginable. The floor had its own false creek, a waving blue tile that led one from room to room. The walls had tiles with letters on them, forming abstract poetry. I involuntarily rolled my eyes; I could neither read nor write poetry and thought it was primarily for people who didn’t have the attention spans for fiction. I had trouble imagining the type of man who could live in such a place.
The funeral itself was being held in a ballroom with pillows strewn all over the floor. They were set up in a circle around a platform, on which stood a group of people who, like the ushers, looked like they were from the circus. I found a seat and wondered whether or not this was a part of some cult activity. I mentally drew a map of the place and traced a route in pink to the nearest exit. Beside me, a beautiful woman in a sari leaned over and asked me if I was who she thought I was.
“Probably not,” I joked.
“I’m so sorry about your loss,” she said sadly.
“It was rough,” I replied, trying not to blow my new cover. I probably would have tried to look down her shirt if she weren’t wearing the sari. She was black, not Indian, and the dark red and gold of the sari complimented her skin.
“Losing your uncle like that, all of a sudden. Know that our community will always hold your family dear to us.” I remembered something in the article about a nephew who was going to inherit the estate and had already had gallery openings. Did she think that was me?
I nodded. “Good old Uncle Skylark. Always a kidder.”
She examined me. “He was a manic-depressive.”
Wincing, I replied, “Well, I suppose that was me then. But I’m still working on my shtick.”
Shocked, she turned to look at what was happening on the platform. In the center of the platform was a giant black casket with copper lining. It was closed because apparently Uncle Skylark died in an accident involving a rake and a wood shredder. Milling around the casket were two intricately tattooed Asian men in dark blue pants, three women in dark red leotards, and a heavily-muscled man with a sword attached to his belt.
I touched the woman on the shoulder. “Uncle Skylark never mentioned his funeral proceedings to me. What’s happening here?”
She was starting to suspect that perhaps I wasn’t actually Nephew Timmy. “He talked about it all the time, what would happen if he died.”
I blinked. “I didn’t visit often.”
“You aren’t really Samuel, are you?”
“Not really,” I admitted.
She looked at me for a while with something between pity and disgust, slowly shaking her head. She pursed her lips and turned them down at the corners. “Samuel lived with Skylark.”
“Oh,” I whispered. There was a moment of silence. “So what’s the deal?” I motion at the insanity transpiring around me.
“He wanted all of us to focus on life at his funeral, not his death. Those six clowns - literally - are going to be conducting the ceremony. Sky traveled with the circus for a while.”
I tried not to laugh.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” yelled sword-man, pulling it out of its sheath and waving it around dangerously. All the brightly-clad artisans looked up. “We are here to honor Skylark Alexander Dovetail’s memory in the wake of his untimely death, as well as… drumroll please…” He waited for the drumroll, but none came. “… As well as… his reincarnation!”
The crowd went wild. The woman in the sari pulled out a bell and jingled it. I was giggling under my breath. This would be a story to tell people at bars.
The three girls began to sing an a capella song while the man with the sword slowly swallowed it. I sighed.
“What are they going to reincarnate him as?”
“A bird, of course,” the sari woman snapped.
I winced and squashed my mouth into one corner of my face. Obviously. I wondered with inner sarcasm how I could’ve missed that blatant piece of information.
“I apologize. I keep forgetting you are not Samuel.”
I glanced around, looking for the real Samuel. I didn’t see any long-lost twin brothers.
“If you don’t mind my asking, if you’re not Samuel, then why are you here?”
“Believe it or not, I’m here for fun,” I said uneasily. I was amused, but unsure as to whether or not I was actually enjoying myself yet. I missed Alice a little. I should have gone to her mother’s funeral yesterday, instead of this weird thing. I fit in rather well, especially since I looked like this Samuel guy, but Alice would’ve blown the cover, laughing and pointing blatantly at the man’s casket and all the whacks gathered round. She would have loudly talked about how she tried alternative medicine and how it hadn’t worked.
I stared back at center stage, where the coffin was on fire.
“Is his corpse in there?” I asked.
“Yes, we are going to breathe in the ashes and take him home with us.” I stared at her, and then realized that she was pulling my proverbial leg. She must have thought I was a total asshole by that point.
The three girls were sprinkling glitter over the coffin to put out the fire.
Man, did I have to pee. I stood up and walked out the way I came in, looking for a bathroom. The hallway was wood-paneled and the ceiling arched overhead. Along the walls were abstract paintings of a mother and child, perhaps the Virgin Mary and Jesus. I examined them closely but could not find a signature anywhere. They appeared to be the unfinished paintings mentioned in the obituaries. I didn’t see any of the famed mirrors, however. One door looked promising; I knocked and waited for a response.
“Just a minute,” a soft voice called out. I had found the Promised Land.
The door clicked and I watched it swing open to slowly reveal myself. At first I thought it was one of those mirrors, but then the little smart voice in my head mentioned that he and I weren’t wearing the same outfit. Slowly, other discrepancies filtered in; his hair was longer and his glasses were black instead of silver. However, I was basically looking at myself. Maybe I wasn’t so special after all. I wondered if he was a tech geek, too; but no, judging by his upbringing, he was probably some sort of a philosophical artist.
“Hi Samuel,” I said cheerfully.
He had no idea who I was or what was happening. He hadn’t been forewarned about me the way I had him. I almost wanted to laugh in his face and tell him I was Sammy2 and about to take over his life, like in a horror movie. Instead, I just slipped past him into the bathroom and shut the door.
The bathroom was like being in the house of mirrors in a freak show. There were mirrors all over the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. Interestingly enough - perhaps it was Skylark’s personal sense of irony - there was no mirror above the sink. That was the only spot on the wall bare.
Taking a piss there was an extremely discomforting experience. I saw myself from angles I hoped no past girlfriend had ever seen. For a moment, I contemplated getting entirely naked and seeing myself, maybe getting the full experience, but I was too weirded out by the infinity of me peeing to go any farther. When I was finished, I went outside; Samuel was still there, apparently still stunned by my appearance.
“More than three shakes is pleasure,” I said, trying to break up the silence. He did not crack a grin. He stared at me dully like a child who does not understand his math problem. In his case, he had missed the preceding lesson altogether.
“So, anyway, can you show me the way out?” I knew the way out, but I figured maybe it would spark some conversation.
“Are you Joseph?” he asked me.
“Nope. Though some of us thought I was Samuel.” I nudged him, but he apparently wasn’t seeing the humor of the situation. I was kind of good-looking, in that way that only appeals to women who want stable relationships with nice guys who won’t cheat on them. Maybe I could pay him money to go have a heart-to-heart with Alice for me.
Samuel slowly backed away. “Are you a relation?”
Wary little critter, he was. I told him I was a reporter and he smiled. “Please, tell them that Skylark wasn’t an eccentric like everyone says he was. He wasn’t a pervert for those mirrors in the bathroom. He just loved the beauty of the human body, even his own. And the hundreds of paintings he did after his wife and daughter died were to honor them, not to obsess. He loved them, and so did I, and will use them as my inspiration in my own work.”
I was getting into a minor situation. I didn’t even have a notebook in which I could pretend to take notes. “I see,” I said.
He looked at me like I was Quasimodo. “Forget it,” he said huffily. I imagined him like puffer fish, about to go on the attack. He’d been through a lot more, and probably would become a lot more, than a guy who sold cell phones in the mall. I had to fix my life somehow, make something of myself. I shook my head slowly.
“Yeah, well, I think I have my story now. Bye,” I said quickly, accidentally running in the wrong direction. He was following after me slowly, and I had to pass him again in order to get to the real exit.
Alice called me that night, asked me why I wasn’t at her mother’s funeral. “I had to go to another one. Skylark Alexander Dovetail?”
“That freak? I hear that they lit his corpse on fire and breathed in his ashes so they could take him home with them.”
I laughed. “Maybe that’s just a rumor.”
After a silence, she asked me if I wanted us to give it another go. The idea made me crunch up my back in disgust.
“I just can’t.”
“I know I wasn’t loving enough, but I can change.” Her voice slowly grated on my short nerves. I felt like I wasn’t getting enough coffee, or perhaps too much. The thought of being with her again, listening to stories about how she was getting her period and thought her breasts were too small and how her friends had cuter hair… I couldn’t deal. She had cheated on me with her boss; and though I knew she wasn’t any worse than normal girls, just more honest, I was still the one that got screwed over.
“No.”
“I’ll be better.”
“Not interested.”
“Tim - ”
“You know, I have someone on the other line. I’ll see you around, okay?” I hung up the phone before she could respond, then turned the ringer off. Later, as I drifted off to sleep, I imagined myself becoming a bird and flying away. Even though the ringer was off, I could still hear the phone faintly singing in the distance. Tomorrow I was going to learn to paint again.