Bermuda Grass

I.

I’ve died a thousand deaths. More, maybe.

I’ve been hanged from the gallows in Salem and been stabbed with the gleaming blade of an enemy’s samurai sword and have taken a bullet in the gut in the shadow of a stone cathedral during the Mexican Revolution. I’ve fallen out of windows and slipped on ice, eaten the wrong mushroom, and felt the miraculous electric cord of lightning ripple through my bones as a purple storm raged around me on a cedar-thick hillside above the Mediterranean.

I’ve been strangled by a boa constrictor in the steaming Amazon jungle. I’ve been bitten by a territorial hippopotamus in the muddy churn of the flooded Mara River. I’ve been gored by an enraged bull in the center of the Campo Pequeno before ten thousand bloodthirsty countrymen. Once, in a barn on a nameless, windswept Norwegian fjord, a restless cow crushed my skull with its rear hooves as I squatted to milk its swollen udders. I lay on the cold ground as it inhaled the life out of me, and above, through a gap in the roof, I could see the aurora dancing like a formless, technicolor angel escorting me to whatever waited beyond.

However, those are just the highlights, a few scattered flecks of gold that stand out from the pebbled riverbed. A vast majority of the deaths have been ordinary. I’ve had dozens of heart attacks, in opium dens and Parisian nightclubs and Dust Bowl flophouses. I’ve died in my sleep and of old age. Diseases and infections have felled me most often, especially in the broad swath of human history before our brightest minds realized germs existed.

All my deaths—the violent and terrifying, the strange and dramatic, the completely unremarkable—were preceded by lives worth living. Lives that were rewarding, even exhilarating, filled with love and joy and wonder (it’s amazing what happens when you aren’t paralyzed by fear of the end). Sure, they contained their fair share of tragedy, but nobody escapes that or can rightfully expect to. I recognized the moments of pain and sadness as additional stitches in the tapestry of the human condition, far outnumbered by the moments of beauty, and I endured them, secure in the knowledge that they were fleeting. What’s a moment in the context of assumed eternity?

Maybe it’s just dumb luck that I’ve avoided trench warfare and the Middle Passage, napalm and the Third Reich. I shudder when I imagine myself wilting from leprosy in a Roman plaza or hauling baskets of dirt to build an earthen mound along the Mississippi to honor a tyrannical god-king. Or maybe the first rule of reincarnation, if that’s what you want to call it, is simply that no miserable lives are allowed.

Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve been bouncing around for centuries, yet I still don’t understand how this works. I can’t trace its beginning or locate the force that keeps it going. I can’t fathom the reason I remember some things and forget others, the reason I end up in some places and not others. I can’t identify what exactly I am besides the husk of skin I find myself in at a given moment. I spent lifetimes failing to figure it out, my thoughts looping like a biplane writing messages across the azure horizon. Was I being punished for some great wrong? Rewarded for a shattering act of grace? Was I alone in this experience, or was the whole world a colossal game of musical chairs, souls hunting bodies in the canyons between death and birth? After a while, I made peace with the not understanding, with the frictionless, ever-spinning wheel of my existence.

At least I thought I had, until now.

II.

Now, here, it’s 1999 in the United States of America, and I’m Cathleen Zeigler. I work as a cashier at a supermarket, part of a regional chain renowned for its consistent mediocrity, located in a shopping center next to a freeway next to a concrete plant whose parking lot is full of those trucks whose bodies spin like drill bits boring into nothing. I live twenty miles away in a one-bedroom apartment next to a different shopping center and a different freeway.

This is all on the outer, outer outskirts of Orlando, a centerless city in the center of the dredged swamp known as the Sunshine State. Did you know that, for hundreds of years, this appendage dangling from the continent remained a sparsely populated wilderness where conquistadors in their goofy helmets battled mosquitoes and homesickness, where Seminoles and runaway slaves hid from government agents in the mangroves? Did you know that into the twentieth century, the state was a sweltering, mostly empty backwater until air conditioning and a cartoon mouse redeemed it, bringing the masses all searching for their slice of paradise?

The thing is, they’re still coming, even as the slices get smaller and more expensive. Less Edenic, for sure. I see them every day, flowing through my checkout line, their skin freshly orange from the tanning bed, their carts loaded with beer for the husband and boxes of sugar-encrusted cereal for the kids. Some have this look of barely concealed frenzy, like they’re closer to the edge of something than they want to admit. Others, though, seem to have truly found their little pocket of bliss. The ease oozes off them like odorless perfume. Their foreheads are pressed cotton linens, unlined, and they move through the world with the confidence that it will bend to them.

My face tells a story, too. It’s one I read in the bathroom mirror every morning as I let the faucet warm up, one dozens of people a day read as they hand over money and tuck receipts into their purses. It says: I don’t want to be here any longer. In these store-mandated black sneakers with bad ankle support, in this fluorescent-lit cornucopia, in this sagging, lumpy, middle-aged body. In this life.

In this life, you see, I never had many options, not in love, education, employment, or anything else that mattered. Like a river channeled between ridges, my future was narrowed from the beginning. (By my parents? By theirs? How far do you unspool your blame—back to the first slimy creature that clambered out of the primordial muck?) I’ve been pulled by that current ever since, drifting downstream at the speed of a littered tire. Don’t think I didn’t try to change course, to open the aperture of possibilities. I tried all the tricks at my disposal. I waited patiently (through sermons, detention periods, counseling sessions, interviews). I took chances (tattoos, blind dates, nursing school, drugs). But nothing worked.

And why would it? How can you be content with a muted gray canvas when you’ve seen so much color? How can you be sated by late-night TV and fast food and the borderless expanse of the World Wide Web when you’ve slept under a hundred bejeweled night skies, tasted fire-charred reindeer meat during a blizzard, confronted the shimmering Sahara from a camel’s wobbling spine?

III.

It’s a Tuesday morning when the thought of killing myself reappears like a blue jay hopping onto the ledge of a feeder. Curious. Hungry. I’m on the bus because my Camry, a relic of the Reagan Administration, is once again stranded at the shop, this time with a yet-undiagnosed rattle that will surely devour my meager savings. I flip through the previous month’s edition of People that someone orphaned on the seat next to me. I don’t read the captions or what passes for articles. I just let my eyes scan the glossy photos of tuxedoed hunks and Hollywood mansions, the gossip-stirring headlines, drinking in the unreality of it all.

The bus hisses to a stop, then lurches back into traffic. I glance up from the glow of a pregnant Cindy Crawford and watch an elderly Black woman sit down and remove knitting needles from her purse and go to work on something that looks far too warm for this climate: a headband, maybe, for her daughter in Milwaukee, or a hat for her son in Denver. Past her, a young Cuban guy stands in the aisle, one hand gripping the railing above and the other clenching a duffel bag, his forearms swimming with tattoos. I see a skull spangled by a woman’s name in cursive script.

Between us are a few pairs of empty seats covered in the distinctive Orlando municipal-chic fabric, an abstract, vaguely cosmic pattern of blues and greens and oranges, like the designer was trying to depict a game of laser tag. I watch the woman knit until she scares me off with a look, then turn my gaze out the window. A row of palms slides past, stationary as prison bars, as a haze-choked dawn drifts over the concrete skin of the world. Then it’s liquor store, low-slung apartment block, dentist, Baptist church, gas station, coin laundry, taqueria.

I find myself wishing for someone to break into song or argue out loud with the voices in their head or pull a gun. Anything to dislodge the monotony, the sameness. But my few compatriots on this bus are well-behaved, absorbed in their private joys or sorrows, and we roll on in unbearable silence.

The idea of suicide has been appearing a lot lately. I know it sounds morbid, but don’t think of it as blood and gore. Don’t even think of it as death. Think of it as merely pressing fast-forward on the VCR, as closing your tab and walking to a different bar down the street.

Hard as it may be to believe, the idea is a novel one. I never seriously considered ending any of my previous lives, I suppose because each of them was promising, textured, or unpredictable enough that I worried I might miss something if I exited prematurely. And even in this life, I’ve persisted for years, out of habit and a dash of dumb, stubborn hope. But I’m coming to see that hope as hollow. Naive. I feel like a gorilla in the zoo realizing that the cage won’t disappear, that the tourist photos won’t cease, that he’ll never roam the jungle homeland of his ancestors.

So, say I did it. What would happen?

This is what I ponder as the bus reaches my stop, as I disembark, as I walk the last quarter mile and punch my timesheet and relieve pimple-scarred high school dropout Chelsea at checkout seven.

I want to believe that I’d skip ahead, shunted into the next, more-interesting life. I’ve never been a pilot or a polar explorer or a Kalahari bushman. Never been a king or astronaut either. But I have nagging questions. Seeds of doubt sprout in my mind as I scan the barcodes of pasta peas Pop-Tarts prime rib peaches, my arm a robotic lever and my face a mask of friendly endurance. The seeds grow as I take my mid-morning smoke break in the alley behind the store, exhaling long chemtrails into a sky already bruised with clouds.

What if there aren’t more interesting lives ahead, if a gear in the mechanism has slipped and I’m doomed to a descending spiral of soul-crushing existences? What if my senses, after absorbing so much, are going numb to the world?

Or the biggest question: Would suicide cut the magical spider’s thread suspending my existence above the bottomless void?

Would there be no next life at all?

It’s a busy day. People are stocking up for weekend barbecues and soccer tournaments, buying hot dogs, watermelon, red plastic cups, liters upon liters of soda. So much soda. And so many lives swirling around mine, full of activity and commitments and relationships. I have no backyard parties to attend with a cheap six-pack of lager in hand, no kids to lug around in a minivan, no spouse to shop for.

I wish that I did. In other lives, I’ve had wives and husbands, lovers and flings. Children too, silent and boisterous and free-spirited and named after ghosts. I’ve known how it feels to cleave yourself to someone else, to entwine your fate with theirs. It feels like your body is a sky capable of holding an entire thunderstorm. In this life, though, I never met anyone to share myself with. I could describe the attempts, the failures, the unrequited crushes. All the people who never knew I existed. All the people who thought wrongly that they understood the truth of me. But that won’t do any good now.

By noon, the soles of my feet bark every time I shift my weight. The Muzak piped in through speakers above melds with the ambient static inside my brain to form an ouroboros melody so relentlessly present that it ceases to be a song the way the air ceases to be molecules of oxygen. A woman insists on writing a check to pay for a carton of eggs and deals a frosty glare to the groaning critics in line behind her. Timmy, a thirty-something man whose Down syndrome elicits either disgust or paternal politeness from people, helps me bag until his shift ends.

“Bye, Cathy,” he says as he waves to me. I’ve never had the heart to tell him that I hate when people call me that.

So now it’s just me loading these plastic bags. (We offer paper, but hardly anyone opts for it.) I feel myself flagging. When can I take my lunch break? This didn’t happen—the slowing down—when I started working here a decade ago. I could power through a whole shift without any drop-off in speed or dexterity. But I’m older now. I can hear my body asking me how much longer I plan to depend on it in this way to keep food in my belly and a roof over my head.

I try and fail to catch the eye of my manager, Dan. He’s too busy handling complaints, scurrying around with that stern expression like he’s coordinating a space shuttle launch over at Kennedy instead of tracking down a can of lima beans. He’s much younger than most of us, and his lightning-quick ascension is a common theme of grousing among the employees. People speculate about a father-in-law at corporate, or, in their wilder fantasies, a late-night parking lot bribe. I have no idea if that’s true. All I know is that he takes the job seriously and will reprimand us if we go on break without checking with him.

It takes another hour, but eventually Dan gives me the go-ahead, tapping his watch with a pale index finger. He’s strict about the thirty-minute thing. No more, no less. I flip the switch to extinguish the light above my checkout aisle, disappointing a gray-haired woman who had just approached with her cart, and walk to the rear of the store through the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. It’s like backstage here: poorly lit, utilitarian. Forklifts sit idle, their steel tongues lolling, and shrink-wrapped boxes of crackers and cookies wait on pallets like understudies for their chance to step into the light. A heavyset man wipes sweat from his brow and nods at me as I walk past, out the door into the afternoon.

I unpack my lunch at the picnic table under the corrugated aluminum awning next to the row of blue dumpsters where they throw the stale bread and spotted bananas each night. It’s what counts for our break room. A few years ago, before the news story about working conditions at a store in Gainesville, we had just a semi-circle of upturned plastic milk crates. I take a couple bites of my turkey sandwich, a couple sips of Diet Coke. My molars crunch through a baby carrot, snapping it clean in half like deadfall beneath a predator’s paws.

Rain begins to fall. It’s gentle at first but soon, with adolescent impatience, becomes a torrent. The door opens. A coworker emerges, shielding her head with ten slender, sun-spotted fingers as she trots over to the awning and sits down across from me.

It’s Ethel. She’s old enough to be retired but works here, I assume, to supplement her meager Social Security checks. The only thing I know about her is that she loves her pet dachshund as if it were five sons.

“Wow, can you believe this rain?” She says it with the wonder of a desert dweller, looking into the sheet of water as if it contains a novelty I can’t fathom.

My muscles feel void of the energy to pretend, but still I try to dam the annoyance seeping over my face.

“Yeah, it’s crazy,” I manage.

I want to tell her to go somewhere else, that I was looking forward to a few minutes of solitude. I want to tell her that it rains like this all the time because it’s fucking Florida. Instead, perhaps out of sympathy for whatever circumstances have brought her to this place instead of The Villages, perhaps because of the lonely sparkle in her amber eyes, I ask a stupid question. I ask about her dog.

The corners of her lips pinch in excitement. Her irises blaze. She puts down her bag of potato chips and places one hand over the other on the table, as if she’d prepared her testimony many years ago and Congress is now, finally, ready to hear it. Then she talks. For how long, I can’t say. The words tumble out. They scatter and churn and regroup and scatter again. They’re birds alighting from a live oak at dusk. They’re waves breaking on a jetty.

I sit there, pretending to listen to her. She’s telling the story of a recent vet visit, chuckling about a funny encounter with a neighbor’s cat. My eyes glaze. My head bobs at steady intervals in a half-assed pantomime of interest. The rain falls outside our pathetic little shelter as my sandwich waits before me, barely touched.

I am so very tired of this life.

The surety and finality of this knowledge surge through me like that spear of lightning once did. I feel it in my tissue, my organs, my bleached-white bones. Quickly on its heels is the realization that, yes, I should end it. Of course I should. Even if that could mean the final exit from this chain of birth and death, I believe now it might be okay. I’ve seen and done a thousand times more than those limited to a few meager decades in one place, in one time, on this marbled planet drifting along its elliptical orbit. I have no right to expect more. What I’ve been given has been enough.

She continues talking, unaware or unconcerned that annoyance has long since flooded my features and frozen to disinterest. Yet it doesn’t matter. I’m leaving my body now, soaring like a condor through my pasts. They unfurl as unified fragments, hitched together by some invisible connecting force. I see the parquet pattern of the floorboards in the London flat I shared with three roommates at the turn of the twentieth century and the Mars-red expanse of the Australian outback and a teeming bazaar in an Ottoman plaza and a woman walking into the sunset, a basket balanced on her head. I see a rocking chair on a front porch. I hear a dining car at mealtime. I taste a freshly picked apple. I feel a breeze through the curtains on an August night.

Of these past few decades, of my life as Cathleen, no images are conjured. There are only the imprints of emotions and sensations—the longing, the boredom, the aching emptiness—but already they’re shearing away as if in anticipation.

Drops of rain strike the canopy above like a blacksmith’s hammer blows.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes. It has been enough.

IV.

My shift ends at four o’clock. I hand off my register and punch my time card, then enter the late afternoon through a side door. It takes a few steps for it to sink in that this was the last time, that I’ll never walk through that door again. I didn’t tell Dan I was quitting because I don’t like lying and because the truth, in this case, isn’t an option.

The world is glistening. The sun, having burned away the rain clouds, blazes on the still-wet asphalt. It grins off the metallic hoods of SUVs sown in neat rows throughout the parking lot. I think of dewy terraces I saw lifetimes ago in southern India, the seeds poised to sprout with sun and moisture. How can an organism’s entire future be contained in it from the beginning? How can something so small form all that exists?

I wait at the bus stop, tranquil in the new reality I’ve carved for myself, in the knowledge that I won’t have to endure much longer. The world continues around me—brakes squealing, a haggard man asking for a light, a squirrel nibbling a french fry—but I’m already receding from it. It’s as if I’ve stepped out of the film in which I was only ever an extra, another body to fill a crowd scene, and I’m backing away from the screen down the aisle, toward the theater exit. The plot races forward (as it must), captivating the minds and hearts of the audience. But its tether to me has snapped, and the screen is only a shrinking rectangle of color and shadow. I hear the actors’ practiced lines as nothing more than jumbled noises, mere vibrations in the air. Maybe I’ll star in the next film, or maybe the screen will fade to black and remain that way.

I haven’t yet decided how I’ll do it. As I sit on the bus, I weigh the merits of various options. The main thing is that I don’t want to cause trouble for anyone or myself. No mess, no investigation, no pain. I want to leave cleanly, quietly.

My stomach snarls at me. The fridge at home contains a sad collection of odds and ends, unappetizing stuff like wilted lettuce and ketchup and olives, and my mind recoils against the prospect of trying to assemble them into a meal. I look out the window to read the next cross street. There are still a good fifteen minutes before my stop.

Coming up in a few blocks is that strip mall with a taco place I’ve passed a hundred times on my commute but never eaten at. Why not today? Money—or, more precisely, my lack of it—no longer matters. Nor does the twenty pounds of pudge around my waist that’s stubbornly remained through all the infomercial diet supplements and New Year’s resolutions.

I pull the cord to alert the driver and stand as the bus slows. The doors hiss open. I step onto the sidewalk, the cartilage in my knee fizzling like Rice Krispies in milk.

A skinny teenager looks up from behind the counter when I enter, a bell on the door celebrating my arrival with a pomp that feels almost satirical since the place is utterly empty. The bold, mournful eighth notes of a ballad in Spanish freight the air, which is warm and stale despite the AC unit chugging away in a window. (I spoke that language once, but Cathleen doesn’t understand it.) Pictures in cheap wooden frames line the walls, some in color and others in black and white. There are photos that look like low-resolution prints of computer screensavers. There’s a motivational poster with BELIEVE in all caps below a man silhouetted against an ocean. The tiled floor is grouted with years of never-swept dirt.

I second-guess my decision. Slim chance the food here is any good, and I don’t want to spend my final hours retching from food poisoning. But I’m already here, and I’m hungry, and I suppose it would be rude to just leave, so I step up to peer at the menu plastered on the wall. As I scan it, the boy smiles at me. His bottom teeth are jumbled like saplings fighting for shards of light in a forest.

“What can I get you?” His face unfolds with an earnestness, a kindness, that’s novel despite the hundreds of faces I’ve seen today. Improbably, considering the darker tone of his skin, his eyes are the color of a lake held by the cupped hand of high mountains. For an instant, there’s a flicker of knowing in them. Recognition, even. Like he sees all of me, reads the almanacs of my history in a single glance.

Is he…? Could he…?

Then it’s gone.

He wipes dewdrops of sweat from his forehead with a white rag. I order three chicken tacos and hand him a ten-dollar bill.

“You can keep the change,” I say.

“Thank you.” He smiles again, but the recognition, which I find myself straining to see, has fled for good. Or it was never there at all.

I take my foil-wrapped tacos in a paper bag and head outside to eat because somehow it feels less lonely that way. Mindlessly, I walk, vaguely in the direction of home but with no desire to be there. I have no desire to be anywhere.

I pass the shaded storefronts filling out the rest of the low-slung building, my reflection walking parallel in my periphery. What would it be like to have someone always by your side, mirroring every movement, never leaving?

Ravenous now, but not yet ready to eat, I walk across the crack-veined asphalt of the parking lot, through a ditch littered with plastic bottles and an upturned shopping cart. I cross another parking lot for another strip mall, then turn onto a side street and follow it toward a neighborhood of squat one-story homes with small, square yards guarded by chain-link fences. I hear a dog bark in staccato bursts. I hear a lawnmower heave into motion and begin sawing the space between us. The sounds of rush hour traffic from the main road shrink as I walk away from it.

Mercifully, the heat seems to be easing off as the earth gyrates the sun toward its resting place beyond the horizon. A slight breeze kicks up out of the west. To my right, there’s a small man-made retention pond rimmed by Bermuda grass. It’s full of rainwater collected from the sky of countless afternoons, riffled by the breeze, and I think it’s as good a place as any to eat one of my last meals.

Sitting on the concrete embankment, my pale legs stretched before me, I unwrap the first taco. I ferry it to my mouth and bite into it, expecting nothing. Less than nothing.

But.

Holy shit. It’s…it’s incredible. It’s by far the best taco I’ve ever had. Maybe the best bite of any food I’ve ever had. That sounds crazy, I know. But the flavors! The flavors! They’re fireworks tearing open the universe. They’re an orchestra reaching crescendo, urged on by a conductor moving the earth with her violently swinging arms. They’re a peloton of cyclists surging to glory in a cobbled medieval town. They’re boiling whitewater at the base of a gigantic waterfall. They’re a herd of galloping bison, ten thousand strong, shaking the prairie to its roots.

I gaze in wonder at the humble taco, juice bleeding down the knob of my thumb knuckle, as if there’s a secret to be seen. But there are no secrets. There’s no magic. Just shredded meat, cubed tomatoes, minced onions, and some half-melted cheese.

I take another bite, then another, then another. I devour all three tacos in a matter of minutes with a ferocity I didn’t know I possessed. Then I wipe my lips with a napkin from the bag and sit back, supporting my weight with locked elbows and hands planted in the grass.

They’re small things, sunlight freckling the surface of a pond and the acidic echo of fresh-squeezed lime juice lingering on my taste buds. I know that. Still, I can’t help but wonder at the physics of light careening through the cones and rods in my eyes, the chemistry of molecules waltzing on the lunar surface of my tongue.

Even here—in this aching body in this plastic world, against the narrowing pinhole of probability, against the cold logic of reason—I find myself burrowing inward toward the cavernous, anchorless center I still can’t fathom where, deep down, there’s a glimmer of curiosity about what possibility rests in the folds of tomorrow, what transcendent gift of beauty might be lying in wait in this life and whichever may come after.

I realize, a cleansing wind of something like relief billowing my lungs as I inhale, that I’m not yet ready to refuse it. Someday, perhaps, but not yet.