#7

the house at the end of the block is evil. there are several ways you can tell. one is the lawn. the grass, while always quite short, has overgrown itself in large patches, leaving matted grey areas where the stolons cross but no leaves emerge. the other is the house color, which is grey-- a color which reveals nothing. then there is the path to the front door, which is made of cement rectangles almost the size and shape of the segments of sidewalk in front of the house. the windows are each covered with blinds, each the same grey color as the outside of the house. and the backyard fence is chain link covered with tarp which flaps back at the joins to reveal bare ground broken up into small heaps and sparsely strewn with unidentifiable house detritus-- part of a sink, maybe?, a paint bucket?... at the edge of the yard is an outbuilding of some sort-- made of plywood, pressed up against the chain link fence, windowless.
across the alleyway, there is a pump station-- largely brick, largely abandoned. asphalt, heaped at the corners and ringed with weeds, laps at the edge of the building, hemmed in by an answering chain link fence. beyond this is the river, a dry riverbed this time of year with a trickle of a creek in it, lavished with strange migratory birds, patrolled endlessly by joggers and dog walkers like me.
i peer through the chinks in the tarp, trying to work out the objects in the back yard, trying to figure out where the side yard goes, all the time imagining the headlines, ten years from now, the police tape and the news crews and the coroner's van loading up the bodies from the shallow graves in that horrible back yard, the firemen draping blankets on the survivors and herding them into waiting ambulances, the neighbors huddled on the sidewalk trying to explain how they never knew, never suspected.

#6

i've never really been able to talk about being dead. words kind of stop at the threshold. i think that's important. i think it's because if i could talk about it i would be a prophet and i am not a prophet. my life is not the sort of road map you'd want to give to people who are trying to figure out how to be a person; it's more of a counterexample full of cul de sacs and wastelands and places better not discussed. let's leave it at that.

so when i tell you that i preferred being dead, that i was happier there than here, will you understand that there is no need to call the cops? i'm not telling you i'm planning to off myself or anything. that would be rude. i am here for a reason, i suppose, just like you are. and i can accept that the reason can be secret and i can accept that the reason can be small and i can accept that the reason can be a puzzle i don't ever solve. but it is hard to accept that i am still here.

the world is a prison to the believer. words like this are the reason i am muslim.

when you come back from something like that, when you've been dead and you can't explain where you were or what you felt and then you're slapped back into the world like a fish flapping on the deck of a boat let me tell you you go looking for other people, anyone who understands what you're feeling without you having to reach into yourself and pull out another tangle of words that sound stupider and stupider each time you say them-- like when you hand a firstborn child into the arms of its mother who thought she knew what love was when the child was in her belly but as she sees her baby for the first time she realizes that she had no idea what love was, but that is a person and this said be and made the universe, and like the universe were made of exploding white hot suns full of that love

and by that point you just sound like a crazy person. and everyone is backing away from the crazy person.

so you stop trying to tell people what it was like to be dead. because you're not a prophet. and you sound like a crazy person. God who loves you with the intensity of a universe full of expoding suns has placed a hand over your mouth and filled it with crazy so you can't tell anyone because you are no prophet. so you try to accept this and move on.

but prayer is hard. prayer is very, very hard. because you and God are not really getting along lately. praying feels like banging your fist against a door that won't open. it feels like shouting at a waterfall, like your mind trying to convince itself that the blackness of the sky is endless but seeing only blackness, only flat, only a nothing that is far too small for all that everything.

and God sends you butterflies and cool breezes and a cricket to sing to you while you're typing and you put these things in one hand and heaven in the other and it is impossible to draw the conclusion that they in any way balance one another out. so you pray, dutifully. you press your head against the ground and fill it with arabic and try not to hope that God will touch you in your prayer, will hold you in his everything, will knock the breath out of you and finally let you see Him again.

you can tell yourself that God is everywhere but it is the night sky again-- you know it is true but it can not and will not scrunch all that truth into your tiny, tiny mind.

#3

now i don't want you to get the idea that i'm the kind of person who goes to plays. here's the deal-- i'm the kind of person who wants to be the kind of person who goes to plays.

i used to have this nurse (when i was sick, but there's another story) who always went to plays. she and her friends would just pick them out of the newspaper and go. i don't remember much about them, other than that they were a little hit and miss, as you'd expect given that strategy. the only one i remember anything about is the one where they got all the props and costumes and things from the 99c store. who can resist?

so i kept telling myself that i was going to go, i was going to go, i was going to start going to plays, i was going to become the kind of person who goes to plays...

this was the first one.

it took weeks to pick the show and a couple of days to convince myself that i was really going to go. but we plan and we plan and God is the best of planners. i don't know why, will never know why, but my car just laid down and bled to death today and here i am with my cats and my pizza and a glass of iced tea half an hour too late to even think of going.

but my husband--kept updated at nanosecond intervals throughout my awful, awful day-- promised that tomorrow we'll try again.

#2

pulling into court today i noticed a gas smell which was emanating from a line trailing behind my car and ending in a puddle under the engine which, thankfully, wasn't on fire (yet...) so it is fair to say i was preoccupied. did i mention i had theater tickets?

i'd gotten the call a little over an hour ago, which is apparently fair by the rules of the court. last time i was in court, i asked the judge to explain what "on call" meant on my subpoena and she told me that i had a choice: either sit in the hallway while they go through jury selection and every witness before me every day until my turn came or agree to show up at court all scrubbed and ready to go an hour after getting a call from the DA. not a great deal but rather better than the alternative. hard to hold down a job under such circumstances, especially now that i've left the coroner's office, now that i'm starting over, but it beats the alternative.

the trick is the iPod. mine's full of audiobooks, which is a great way to pass the time in the hallway, avoiding the jurors (whom i'm not supposed to talk to at all and, believe me, it's very, very hard for me to just shut up for any amount of time). so iPod it is.

the other trick is the hijab. (hides the headphones pretty well). also throws people off. not that that's why i wear it. you know why i wear it; i don't have to tell you, right? i mean sometimes i feel like everybody is staring at me but i don't think that's true at all. i think they take one glance, think "muslim woman", add a whole bunch of assumptions (can i speak english? what war-ravaged country am i from anyway? have i heard of jesus?, and would i mind accepting him as my personal lord and savior?) and move on.

which brings me to enterprise rent a car.

so after two hours on the stand during which i swear that woman was going to make me explain each and every photograph taken of this poor dead woman ever taken (and, as a murder victim, there were slews of them) and i was--no kidding, folks-- on number 49 before we broke for the day with the worst news i could ever recieve-- be here tomorrow at 10AM-- i head back to the leaking wreck that was until today a perfectly reliable car (i think maybe it has cancer) to call triple a. i kept having to rewind the nine, my court-themed audiobook for the day, as my mind kept wandering along the general them of "today really sucks" but as we pulled into the enormous dealership that somehow wasn't closed for the day already and the nice man pointed me to the enterprise rent a car right there in the next building things started looking up.

the rent a car lady was up to her armpits in us and having none of our charm, humor, patience... she was a blur of clear clipboards and funky/chunky earrings and we were huddled masses yearning for cheap, scuffed up compacts. imagine how long it took for me to spill my rotten lousy wreck of a day to the pleasant-looking woman my age ahead of me in line. finally getting around to caring who she was and what her life was life, i got a whisper back that she was a cop. we do a little cop bonding (my dad was a criminalist! i used to work for the coroner! we're all on the same side...) and i get a couple of really good tips on plays.

but the cars were almost ready and my new best friend and i drove off into our respective lives.

#1

so the first thing i noticed about court was how bored everyone is. after the google map treasure hunt to find the place, after the waiting for the metal detector, after the panicky scramble to figure out what floor the courtroom is on, after the elevator ride where you're trying to figure out who are the jurors, who are the secretaries, who are the families you arrive in the hushed, wood-paneled space where everyone knows what they're doing but you.

it took me forever to figure out that the woman with the big desk was the judge's secretary and even longer to figure out that if you're getting asked a bunch of there-is-no-way-to-answer-this-question questions you just look up at the judge and tell him "there is no way to answer that question" and he will make the lawyer ask you something that makes sense. and after a while you start to hope that the lawyers are smart, that the cross examination is thorough, that things get clearer and clearer for the jury as you go, but i've only seen that once before.

the jury are fun to talk to. they're attentive, particularly to the CSI-style background information you have to teach them in order to make your point-- gunshot residue, soot and stippling, time of death... they eat that stuff up.

the other thing it took a while to get used to was the absence of people who don't work there. i mean, there are all the jurors, there's the bailiff and the judge and the defendant and the prosecutor and the defence, a witness or two milling around in the hallway and, most of the time, no one else. well, almost no one. sometimes there are women; usually two. i think they're the mothers-- the mother of the defendant and the mother of the victim. (i'm a coroner-- or at least i used to be, more on that later-- so these are all murders...)

generally i'm called by the prosecution; usually so that they can put up pictures of the decedent (the dead person, the victim) and make the mom cry. usually, the cause of death is not at issue; there's a bullet hole in the guy, a bullet in the guy, a bunch of people who saw him get shot, a big pool of blood on the ground... most people can put that together. almost never are they trying to tell me that somehow i screwed up the autopsy, that they somehow know people's insides better than i do or what happens to them after they die better than me or how to tell how sick they were or how long they were going to live. these are never the questions.

when there are questions, real questions, things that really would make a difference, they tend to sit in the category of unknowable, like what was she thinking as she died? or why didn't she hit him back? or the more concrete issues such as when exactly did she die (because the science behind figuring that out is so imprecise that the only true answer is i can't narrow it down any more than i already did).

i always want to tell them that death is a mystery. i always want to tell them that i do natural deaths, too, and that when you open them up there are usually at least three (or four or five) things wrong with the body that in and of themselves could have killed the decedent and that i'll never really know which one pushed him over the edge. or that i've taken care of living people who are sicker than some of the dead people i've seen and i've dissected people who died naturally who were far less sick than the body in front of me. i always want to tell them that death is one of those things that if you look harder at it it makes less sense.

but i sit up straight in the witness chair, pull the microphone close so they can hear me, spell every medical word i say and slide the mystery back behind me. they don't need to know.