Praise

‘Smooth, precise, graceful prose, bright with wit and sparkling with imaginative phrases’

The New York Times

‘A marvelous fantasy … funny, gentle, tender, and profound’

Richard A. Lupoff

‘A truly timeless classic’

Gizmodo

‘A beautifully written novel, the sort of book that needs to be enjoyed and savoured slowly … it is truly incredible’

TheBookSmugglers.com

This first one
for my parents, Simon and Rebecca,
and for my brother Daniel,
and, as it must be,
Edwin Peterson

The Return of the Loving Dead:
An Introduction

I woke up this morning having dreamed this introduction. I remember being very pleased with it. The slow realisation, half-way through the morning, that I still needed to write it felt like waking up into another person entirely, like waking in a graveyard as a ghost, with the life one had before dying already half-forgotten.

This was one of the books I fell in love with as a boy, and one of the books that had me assuming that any hard-working writer of any merit whatsoever would have published, or at least sold to a publisher, at least one brilliant novel before their twentieth birthday. (I didn’t manage it. I suspected that I wasn’t a real writer, and worked harder.)

I first encountered Peter S. Beagle when I was about nine years old. His essay, “Tolkien’s Magic Ring” was the centerpiece of a book I ran across called The Tolkien Reader, initially attracted by the fact that Pauline Baynes, the illustrator of Narnia, had drawn the cover and illustrated it. In the essay Peter Beagle explained The Lord of the Rings to me in a way that made me certain that I needed to read it. I did, and fell in love, and kept an eye out for anything by Peter Beagle. It would be three years before I was to sight another book.

A Wholly Splendorous Novel of Love and Last Chances By the Author of The Last Unicorn, said the blurb on the cover of the copy of A Fine and Private Place that came into my possession when I was about twelve. The illustration on the cover showed, as I remember, a small mausoleum, with two ghosts, male and female, and an elderly living man playing chess together in front of it. A raven was on the cover too. (I had never read or heard of The Last Unicorn, and it would take me several years to find my own copy and discover the joys of that novel.) I started reading the book, and within pages I was in love. I had found a new favourite author. It was a book I would reread many times in the following decade. (And I would learn Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress”, from which the title was taken, as well.)

Peter Beagle is one of those authors who influenced me and what I wrote in ways that I am still discovering. I can point to obvious connections—the raven in A Fine and Private Place was definitely a progenitor of Matthew the Raven in Sandman, just as the young female Death in Beagle’s short story “Come, Lady Death”, was a forebear of the Death in Sandman—and to connections that I had never known or realised—the way that Yorkchester cemetery of A Fine and Private Place both resembles and doesn’t resemble the graveyard of my own The Graveyard Book, or the way we wrote books set in the worlds of the dead, for example: my book was in may ways a reply to Kipling’s Jungle Book, but so many of the graveyard rules I took for granted in the story were imagined and codified by Peter Beagle in A Fine and Private Place.

I had not reread this book in many years and went back to it recently with anticipation and with worry—what if it was not as good as I remembered? Any book you fall in love with is a collaboration between the reader and the text, and sometimes the reader who comes back to the text needs something very different from the words waiting for them: occasionally you realise with sorrow that the book you remember did not exist, and that you made it from words that said something very different. Sometimes I think that it should be made compulsory for us to revisit beloved books later in life. We learn so much—about the books and about ourselves.

Rereading A Fine and Private Place it was, I am relieved to say, still a revelation and a delight.

When I read and reread it as a young adult and as teenager I was interested primarily in the ghosts, and in the raven, and significantly less interested in the human beings. Gertrude Klapper was, to me, the least interesting person in the book, being both alive and not a denizen of the cemetery. Rereading the book half a century later, I found myself much more interested in Gertrude than I was in, say, Michael Morgan. Michael seemed transparent, constructed of conversation and ideas, but not much of a person really. She, on the other hand, feels gloriously solid, a person all the way, filled with foibles but fundamentally decent, and a woman from a bygone age. (I bought that she was a very old woman when I was twelve, though. People in their early forties and people in their eighties were all one to me then. They were so very old, and I was so very young.)

It’s a talkier book and a thinkier book (is that a word?) than I remembered. It is a novel of ideas, and the ideas are much less about death than I had believed, and much more about love.

It is a novel of people who learn better, and of people, some alive and some dead, who change their minds. Someone changing their mind, I was told, long ago, is more powerful in a story than a thrown punch or a kiss. And in this story each of the characters is forced to inspect their fears and their hopes and to change.

In this book you will meet Michael, who is dead, and who, perhaps mistakenly, thinks a lot of himself; you will meet Laura, a dead woman who does not think enough of herself; you will meet Rebeck, who is (pardon me, if you can call that living) alive, but has not left the graveyard in almost twenty years, and is happy where he is; you will meet Mrs Klapper, who comes to the graveyard to see her late husband Morris and who is a joy and a Jew from a bygone age; and you will meet a raven who has plenty of opinions.

(There are a few other characters you will overhear and encounter, but you will not slip into their minds: I have no sense of Sandra, Michael’s wife—I know what Michael tells us and remembers, but his memories are untrustworthy and his opinions often unfair, and, perhaps intentionally, the author keeps us at arm’s length from her; and while I like Campos enormously he is an enigma.)

The strangest thing for me about this book now is that its author was nineteen when he wrote it. There’s nothing about it that feels like it was written by a teenager, even a gifted teenager (except, perhaps, how old Mrs Klapper is or is not). It feels like a first novel, but an assured first novel. One that is prepared to tackle the big subjects.

Long ago I knew a writer who had a quote typed out and pasted on the wall above where she wrote. Who wrote it I forget, but the substance of it was simple. That there are only two things that we write about, we who write, or that are worth our while writing about, anyway: death and love.

Peter Beagle understood that as a young man, and the message in this, his first book, still reverberates for us now.

Neil Gaiman

January 2023

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Andrew Marvell
“To His Coy Mistress”

1

The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door. Frantically he beat his wings to gain altitude, looking like a small black electric fan. An updraft caught him and threw him into the sky. He circled twice, to get his bearings, and began to fly north.

Below, the shopkeeper stood with his hands on his hips, looking up at the diminishing cinder in the sky. Presently he shrugged and went back into his delicatessen. He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn’t, and in either case there isn’t very much you can do about it.

The raven flew lazily over New York, letting the early sun warm his feathers. A water truck waddled along Jerome Avenue, leaving the street dark and glittering behind it. A few taxicabs cruised around Fordham like well-fed sharks. Two couples came out of the subway and walked slowly, the girls leaning against the men. The raven flew on.

It had been a hot night, and the raven saw people waking on the roofs of the city. The gray rats that come out just before dawn were all back in their cellars because the cats were out, stepping along the curbs. The morning pigeons had scattered to the rooftops and window ledges when the cats came, which the raven thought was a pity. He could have done with a few less pigeons.

The usual early fog was over Yorkchester, and the raven dropped under it. Yorkchester had been built largely by an insurance company, and it looked like one pink brick building reflected in a hundred mirrors. The houses of Yorkchester were all fourteen stories tall, and they all had stucco sailors playing accordions over the front entrances. The rear entrances all had sailors playing mandolins. The sailors were all left-handed, and they had stucco pom-poms on their hats. There was a shopping center, and there were three movie theaters, and there was a small square park.

There was also a cemetery, and it was over this that the raven swooped. It was a very large cemetery, about half the size of Central Park, and thick with trees. It was laid out carefully, with winding streets named Fairview Avenue, and Central Avenue, and Oakland Avenue, and Larch Street, and Chestnut Street, and Elm Street. One street led to the Italian section of the cemetery, another to the German section, a third to the Polish, and so on, for the Yorkchester Cemetery was nonsectarian but nervous.

The raven had come in the back way, and so he flew down Central Avenue, holding the baloney in his claws. The stretch of more or less simple headstones gradually began to give way to Old Rugged Crosses; the crosses in turn gave way to angels, the angels to weeping angels, and these finally to mausoleums. They reared like icy watchdogs over the family plots and said, “Look! Something of importance has left the world,” to one another. They were aggressively Greek, with white marble pillars and domed roofs. They might not have looked Greek to a Greek, but they looked Greek to Yorkchester.

One mausoleum was set away from the others by a short path. It was an old building, not as big as some of the others, nor as white. Its pillars were cracked and chipped at their bases, and the glass was gone from one of the barred grates over the front door. But the two heavy door-rings were held in the mouths of two lions, and if you looked through the window in front you could see the stained-glass angel on the back wall.

The front door itself was open, and on the steps there sat a small man in slippers. He waved at the raven as the bird swept down, and said, “Good morning, good morning,” as he landed in front of him. The raven dropped the baloney, and the small man reached forward eagerly and picked it up. “A whole baloney!” he said. “Thank you very much.”

The raven was puffing for breath a little and he looked at the small man rather bitterly. “Corn flakes weren’t good enough,” he said hoarsely. “Bernard Baruch eats corn flakes, but you have to have baloney.”

“Did you have trouble bringing it?” asked the small man, whose name was Jonathan Rebeck.

“Damn near ruptured myself.” The raven grunted. “Birds don’t get ruptured,” said Mr. Rebeck a little uncertainly.

“Hell of an ornithologist you’d make.”

Mr. Rebeck began to eat the baloney. “Delicious,” he said presently. “Very tender. Won’t you have some?”

“Don’t mind,” said the raven. He accepted a piece of baloney from Mr. Rebeck’s fingers.

“Is it nice out?” Mr. Rebeck asked after a moment. “Nice,” the raven said. “Blue sky, shining sun. The world stinks with summer.”

Mr. Rebeck smiled a little. “Don’t you like summer?” The raven lifted his wings slightly. “Why should I? It’s all right.”

“I like summer,” Mr. Rebeck said. He took a bite of his baloney and said with his mouth full, “It’s the only season you can taste when you breathe.”

“Jesus,” the raven said. “Not so early in the morning. Incidentally, you better get rid of all those old paper bags. I can see them from outside.”

“I’ll drop them in the wastebasket in the men’s room,” Mr. Rebeck said.

“No you won’t. I’ll fly them out. People start wondering, you know. They see paper bags in a cemetery, they don’t think the Girl Scouts are having a picnic. Besides, you hang around there too much. They’re going to start remembering you.”

“I like it,” Mr. Rebeck said. “I’m very fond of that lavatory. I wash my clothes there.” He locked his hands around his knees. “You know, people say the world is run by materialists and machines. It isn’t, though. New York isn’t, anyway. A city that would put a men’s room in a cemetery is a city of poets.” He liked the phrase. “A city of poets,” he said again.

“It’s for the children,” the raven said. “The mothers bring the kids to see the graves of their great-uncles. The mothers cry and put flowers on the grave. The kids gotta go. Sooner or later. So they put in a big can. What else could they do?”

Mr. Rebeck laughed. “You never change,” he said to the raven.

“How can I? You’ve changed, though. Nineteen years ago you’d have been sloppily thankful for a pretzel. Now you want me to bring you steaks. Give me another hunk of baloney.”

Mr. Rebeck gave him one. “I still think you could do it. A small steak doesn’t weigh so much.”

“It does,” said the raven, “when there’s a cop hanging on one end of it. I damn near didn’t get off the ground today. Besides, all the butchers on this last frontier of civilization know me now. I’m going to have to start raiding Washington Heights pretty soon. Another twenty years, if we live that long, I’ll have to ferry it across from Jersey.”

“You don’t have to bring me food, you know,” Mr. Rebeck said. He felt a little hurt, and oddly guilty. It was such a small raven, after all. “I can manage myself.”

“Balls,” said the raven. “You’d panic as soon as you got outside the gate. And the city’s changed a lot in nineteen years.”

“Pretty much?”

“Very damn much.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Rebeck. He put the rest of the baloney aside, wrapping it carefully. “Do you mind,” he said hesitantly, “bringing me food? I mean, is it inconvenient?” He felt silly asking, but he did want to know.

The raven stared at him out of eyes like frozen gold. “Once a year,” he said hoarsely. “Once a year you get worried. You start wondering how come the airborne Gristedes. You ask yourself, What’s he getting out of it? You say, ‘Nothing for nothing. Nobody does anybody any favors.’”

“That isn’t so,” Mr. Rebeck said. “That isn’t so at all.”

“Ha,” said the raven. “All right. Your conscience starts to bother you. Your cold cuts don’t taste right.” He looked straight at Mr. Rebeck. “Of course it’s a trouble. Of course it’s inconvenient. You’re damn right it’s out of my way. Feel better? Any other questions?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Rebeck. “Why do you do it, then?” The raven made a dive at a hurrying caterpillar and missed. He spoke slowly, without looking at Mr. Rebeck. “There are people,” he said, “who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don’t do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It’s born in you, whether you give or take, and that’s the way you are. Ravens bring things to people. We’re like that. It’s our nature. We don’t like it. We’d much rather be eagles, or swans, or even one of those moronic robins, but we’re ravens and there you are. Ravens don’t feel right without somebody to bring things to, and when we do find somebody we realize what a silly business it was in the first place.” He made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. “Ravens are pretty neurotic birds. We’re closer to people than any other bird, and we’re bound to them all our lives, but we don’t have to like them. You think we brought Elijah food because we liked him? He was an old man with a dirty beard.”

He fell silent, scratching aimlessly in the dust with his beak. Mr. Rebeck said nothing. Presently he reached out a tentative hand to smooth the raven’s plumage.

“Don’t do that,” said the bird.

“I’m sorry.”

“It makes me nervous.”

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Rebeck said again. He stared out over the neat family plots with their mossy headstones. “I hope some more people come soon,” he said. “It gets lonesome in the summer.”

“You wanted company,” the bird said, “you should have joined the Y.”

“I do have company, most of the time,” Mr. Rebeck said. “But they forget so soon, and so easily. It’s best when they’ve just arrived.” He got up and leaned against a pillar. “Sometimes I think I’m dead,” he said. The raven made a sputtering sound of derision. “I do. I forget things too. The sun shines in my eyes sometimes and I don’t even notice it. Once I sat with an old man, and we tried to remember how pistachio nuts tasted, and neither of us could.”

“I’ll bring you some,” the raven said. “There’s a candy store near Tremont that sells them. It’s a bookie joint too.”

“That would be nice,” Mr. Rebeck said. He turned to look at the stained-glass angel.

“They accept me more easily now,” he said with his back to the raven. “They used to be dreadfully frightened. Now we sit and talk and play games, and I think, Maybe now, maybe this time, maybe really. Then I ask them, and they say no.”

“They’d know,” the raven said.

“Yes,” Mr. Rebeck said, turning back, “but if life is the only distinction between the living and the dead—I don’t think I’m alive. Not really.”

“You’re alive,” the raven said. “You hide behind gravestones, but it follows you. You ran away from it nineteen years ago, and it follows you like a skip-tracer.” He cackled softly. “Life must love you very much.”

“I don’t want to be loved,” Mr. Rebeck cried. “It’s a burden on me.”

“Well, that’s your affair,” the raven said. “I got my own problems.” His black wings beat in a small thunder. “I gotta get moving. Let’s have the bags and stuff.”

Mr. Rebeck went into the mausoleum and came out a few moments later with five empty paper bags and an empty milk container. The raven took the bags in his claws and waved aside the container. “I’ll pick that up later. Carry it now and I’ll have to walk home.” He sprang into the air and flapped slowly away over Central Avenue.

“Good-bye,” Mr. Rebeck called after him.

“See you,” the raven croaked and disappeared behind a huge elm. Mr. Rebeck stretched himself, sat down again on the steps, and watched the sun climb. He felt a bit disconcerted. Usually, the raven brought him food twice a day, they exchanged some backchat, and that was that. Sometimes they didn’t even talk. I don’t know that bird at all, he thought, and it’s been all these years. I know ghosts better than I know that small bird. He drew his knees up to his chin and thought about that. It was a new thought, and Mr. Rebeck treasured new thoughts. He hadn’t had too many lately, and he knew it was his fault. The cemetery wasn’t conducive to new thoughts; the environment wasn’t right. It was a place for counting over the old, stored thoughts, stroking them lovingly and carefully, as if they were fine glassware, wondering if they could be thought any other way, and knowing deeply and securely that this way was the best. So he examined the new thought closely but gingerly, stood close to it to get the details and then away from it for perspective; he stretched it, thinned it, patted it into different shapes, gradually molding it to fit the contours of his mind.

A rush of wings made him look up. The raven was circling ten or fifteen feet above him, calling to him. “Forget something?” Mr. Rebeck called up to him.

“Saw something on the way out,” the bird said. “There’s a funeral procession coming in the front gate—not a very big one, but it’s coming this way. You better either hide in a hurry or change your pants, either one. They may think you’re a reception committee.”

“Oh, my goodness!” Mr. Rebeck exclaimed. He sprang to his feet. “Thank you, thank you very much. Can’t afford to get careless. Thank you for telling me.”

“Don’t I always?” the raven said wearily. He flew away again with easy, powerful wing strokes. And Mr. Rebeck hurried inside the mausoleum, closed the door, and lay down on the floor, listening to his heart beat in the sudden darkness.

2

It was a rather small funeral procession, but it had dignity. A priest walked in front, with two young boys at his right and left. The coffin came next, carried by five pallbearers. Four of them were each carrying a corner of the coffin, and the fifth was looking slightly embarrassed. Behind them, dressed in somber and oddly graceful black, came Sandra Morgan, who had been the wife of Michael Morgan. Bringing up the rear came three variously sad people. One of them had roomed with Michael Morgan in college. Another had taught history with him at Ingersoll University. The third had drunk and played cards with him and rather liked him.

Michael would have liked his own funeral if he could have seen it. It was small and quiet, and really not at all pompous, as Michael had feared it might be. “The dead,” he had said once, “need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead.” At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away the trappings of romance, although he had loved them deeply and never known.

The procession wound its quiet way through Yorkchester Cemetery, and the priest mused upon the transience of the world, and Sandra Morgan wept for her husband and looked hauntingly lovely, and the friends made the little necessary readjustments in their lives, and the boys’ feet hurt. And in the coffin, Michael Morgan beat on the lid and howled.

Michael had died rather suddenly and very definitely, and when consciousness came back to him he knew where he was. The coffin swayed and tilted on four shoulders, and his body banged against the narrow walls. He lay quietly at first, because there was always the possibility that he might be dreaming. But he heard the priest chanting close by and the gravel slipping under the feet of the pallbearers, and a tinkling sound that must have been Sandra weeping, and he knew better.

Either he really was dead, he thought, or he had been pronounced so by mistake. That had happened to other people, he knew, and it was entirely possible—not to say fitting—that it had happened to Michael Morgan. Then a great fear of the choking earth seized him, and he pounded on the coffin lid with his fists and screamed. But no sound came from his lips, and the lid was silent under his hammering.

Frantically he called his wife’s name and cursed her when she continued her ivory weeping. The priest intoned his liturgy and looked warningly at the boys when they dragged their feet; the pallbearers shifted the coffin on their shoulders; and Michael Morgan wept silently for his silence.

And then suddenly he was calm. Frenzy spent, he lay quietly in his coffin and knew himself dead.

So there you are, Morgan, he said to himself. Thirty-four years of one thing and another, and here is where it ends. Back to the earth—or back to the sea, he added, because he could never remember where it was that all protoplasm eventually wound up. His consciousness did not startle him too much. He had always been willing to concede the faint possibility of an afterlife, and this, he supposed, was the first stage. Lie back, Morgan, he thought, and take it easy. Sing a spiritual or something. He wondered again if there might not have been some mistake, but he didn’t really believe it.

A pallbearer slipped and nearly dropped his end of the coffin, but Michael did not feel the jolt. “I don’t feel particularly dead,” he said to the coffin lid, “but I’m just a layman. My opinion would be valueless in any court in the land. Don’t butt in, Morgan. It was a perfectly nice funeral till you started causing trouble.” He closed his eyes and lay still, wondering absently about rigor mortis.

The procession stopped suddenly, and the priest’s voice became louder and firmer. He was chanting in Latin, and Michael listened appreciatively. He had always detested funerals and avoided them as much as possible. But it’s different, he thought, when it’s your own funeral. You feel it’s one of those occasions that shouldn’t be missed.

He knew no Latin, but he clung to the falling words of the chant, knowing them to be the last human words he would ever hear. “Ashes to ashes,” I suppose it means, he thought, “and dust to dust.” That’s all you are now, Morgan—a cup of dust scattered to the wolves of night. He considered the phrase and rejected it reluctantly. What, after all, would wolves want with dust?

The first clods fell on the coffin lid, sounding for all the world like a knock on the door. Michael laughed inside his head. Come in, he thought, come right in. The house is in a bit of a mess right now, but I’m always glad of company. Walk right in, friend. This is Open House.

Sandra was crying loudly and quite thoroughly now, but her sobs were beginning to sound like yawns. Poor Sandy, Michael thought. They probably got you up early for this, too. I’m sorry, lass. Just a minute or so—then you can go home and go back to sleep.

The earth-sounds became fainter. Presently they stopped.

Well, here we are, said Michael Morgan to himself. He realized the absurdity of the words and defiantly thought them again. Here we are. Here we are. Here we are. Here we all are. Here we go around the prickly pear. Prickly pear. Here we are, prickly pear. Over here. He stopped that finally, and thought about Heaven and Hell and Sandra.

He had never believed in either of the first two during his life, and he saw no reason to start now. I’m in this worm Automat for the duration, he thought, and in a few minutes I will turn over and draw eternity up around my neck and go to sleep. If he was wrong, one of two Old Gentlemen would be around to see him shortly, and a number of things might finally become clear. In the meantime, he decided to think about Sandra.

He had loved Sandra. Thinking about it in a detached fashion, he dared anybody not to love Sandra. She was all the world’s loved objects in one, and she showed them off slowly and lazily, like a revolving dish of diamonds in a jeweler’s window. Besides, she looked needing, and she had a sad mouth.

They had met at the small reception that had been given for him when he joined the Ingersoll faculty. She had come with her uncle, who taught geology. Their glances had crossed, and he had put down his drink and gone to her. Within fifteen minutes he had been quoting Rimbaud for her, and Dowson, and Swinburne, and his own secret songs. And she had heard and understood: Michael wanted to go to bed with her. So they were mature and civilized, and she took him into her huge, warm bed, in which she managed to look quite affectingly lost.

Michael loved that lost quality of hers. It made him feel necessary and useful. He discovered a strong protective streak in himself, and was in turn irritated by it, amused by it, and vastly delighted with it. He was all the more captured by her moments of cool brilliance and lazy wit; it made her three-dimensional. And Michael had ridden in search of the third dimension for a long time.

So they were married, and Michael received what the president called “a bit of a raise.” It was just that, but it enabled Michael and Sandra Morgan to move into an apartment in Yorkchester and Sandra to quit her art-gallery job. They had been married for four years, and much of it had been happy.

And now he was dead, Michael thought. Dead and buried, humus for the hungry earth. And he would never see Sandra again. The thought hurt him, even through the numbness that had stroked him with its witch-fingers. His body was nothing to him now, but a deal of his soul seemed to have been left where Sandra was, and dead, he felt naked and somehow incomplete.

He prayed for sleep, and when it did not come he invented ways of passing the time. He broke down his life into periods marked Youth, Harvard, Europe, Korea, Ingersoll, and Sandra, and examined them carefully and objectively. First he decided that his life had not been wasted, and shortly after, he decided that it had. He thought of all the tiny factors that had gone to make up the mortal existence of Michael Morgan, enumerated them, weighed them, and decided that they had individual meaning but no collective significance; and then he thought it might be the other way round. With death, he had discovered, there came the power of disinterested scrutiny of the way he had come. Along with it, however, came a peculiar lack of interest in much of what had once been a very important world. Only Sandra seemed real now—Sandra and perhaps the good New York springs and finding the one student in his class who understood the lonely steel mill that was Bismarck and the ice emperor Bonaparte.

After that he tried to recall all the great music he had ever heard, and quickly discovered that his education had not been nearly so complete, his interest so great, and his memory so retentive as he had hoped. Only the Chopin Preludes that he had learned as a boy stayed with him, along with some Rimsky-Korsakov, a few passages from the Ninth, and a plaintive, wandering strain he decided was Weill. The rest was gone, or he was gone from it, and he was sorry because it would have been nice to have music.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I’m not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

Suddenly he remembered an early morning with Sandra before they had been married. They had sat at her little kitchen table, eating bread-and-jelly sandwiches. She had gone to the icebox for a bottle of milk, and he had sat and watched her move. Her feet made a very small, among-friends sound on the linoleum. As he thought of it now, the pain seemed to snap him like an icicle. He cried out, hearing it as a great animal yawp of terror—and then he was standing beside his own grave, calling, “Sandy! Sandy!”

She did not come, and he knew she would not, and still he called, thinking, I will close my eyes and count a hundred, and when I look up she will be there—the way he did when he was waiting for a bus. But he could not close his eyes, and the numbers rattled in his head like dice. Finally he forced himself to stop calling, and after a while he sat down in the grass.

It took him a while to realize that he had left his grave, and when he did it didn’t seem very important. I’m out, he said to himself, and I can talk again and move around, and I’m no better off than I was. Alive, he could at least have kept up the pretense of having somewhere important to go; but now apparently he could just sit by the roadside for the next few million years, if he felt like it. And he did feel like it. He wanted only to sit in the grass and watch the ants running and not think about anything. I want my mind to be white and clean and unmarked, he thought, like my bones. That was the answer to everything, and he hadn’t seen it. “You can have my skull,” he said politely to the ants. “I won’t be needing it.” But they kept running in the grass, and he became angry with them. “All right,” he said. “And to hell with you too.” And he got up and went over to look at his grave.

There was no stone yet, only a small metal marker. It said: “Michael Morgan, March 7, 1924-June 10, 1958,” and he felt very pleased with its conciseness. Like a Times headline, he thought, and he looked at it for a long time.

My body is there, he thought. All my chicken dinners and head-scratching and sneezing and fornication and hot baths and sunburns and beer and shaving—all buried and forgotten. All the little pettinesses washed away. I feel clean and light and pure. He thought about book-hunting on Fourth Avenue and decided that he felt like a smashed light bulb.

“Good-bye,” he said to his body and walked away down the paved road. He wanted to whistle and felt cheated when he found he could not.

Michael Morgan walked through the graveyard and his feet made no sound. The sun shone hot on him and he did not feel it, nor did he feel the tiny winds that chuckled between the stones. He saw a ring of Greek pillars that held up nothing, and near it a concrete birdbath. He saw fountains and flowers and a wheelbarrow half full of earth. Once a car rushed past him as he walked along the side of the road, but nobody in it looked at him.

He saw family plots, with the little headstones bunched together like frightened cattle; and he saw a great mausoleum four stories high, with an angel on marble guard. He saw a clump of cherry trees, and their boughs were thick and swollen with the red fruit. Spaced at regular intervals, twenty-foot spires pointed the way to Heaven, for the benefit, Michael decided, of lost souls and tourists.

He felt as if he were walking in a slightly leaky vacuum. He could see the sun, and he assumed it was still burning, but he personally felt neither hot nor cold. He knew there was a breeze, for he saw leaves wander across his path, but he felt no air on his skin. Faintly but clearly, he heard birds singing and water flowing, but the sounds meant nothing to him, and he never even thought of trying to pick a cherry. It wasn’t that he didn’t give a damn—Michael had been trying very hard not to give a damn for most of his life—but that giving or not giving damns never entered the question. “I feel mediocre,” he experimented. “Lukewarm”—but the words were meaningless.

He walked for a long time. The black paved road became dirt, and then gravel, and then pavement again, and other roads ran away from it; sometimes it was broad, and other times as narrow as the cold bed of Barbara Allen; but it did not end, and Michael walked on and never grew tired.

Maybe there is no end, he thought. Maybe I just go on walking—and felt nothing but a whispery amusement at the prospect.

Then he came over a low hill and saw the mausoleum and the small man sitting in front of it. The man had his knees drawn up and his chin on his folded forearms and was looking at nothing.

Sensation seemed to return to Michael: curiosity, interest, a little fear, pleasure, and a spoonful of hope came slowly back, saying to one another, What is this? How is this? Is the house not empty yet? And Michael Morgan called gladly, “Hello!”

The small man blinked, looked around, and smiled at Michael. “Hello,” he called back. “Come on down.” Michael came slowly down the hill, and the man got up to meet him. He looked to be in his early fifties, for his shoulders were a little rounded and his hair was gray-white. But the smile he gave Michael was warm and youthful, and his eyes were the color of the earth. “How do you do?” he asked. “My name is Jonathan Rebeck.”

“Michael Morgan,” said Michael, and suddenly he was so happy to see this small man, and so happy to realize he was happy, that he grabbed for Mr. Rebeck’s brown hand—and watched in dull horror as it went completely through his own.

Then he remembered, and for the first time he saw life as the dead see it. He backed off from Mr. Rebeck, and would have turned to run if the small man’s eyes had not been full of brown sadness. So he sat down on the steps that led up to the mausoleum and tried to cry; but he didn’t know where to begin.

“All right,” he said finally, “I’m dead.”

“I know,” said Mr. Rebeck gently. He paused and then added, “I saw your funeral procession.”

“Did you?” Michael looked up. “How did it look from the outside?”

“Very nice,” said Mr. Rebeck. “Very quiet and tasteful.” “That’s good,” Michael said. “Man comes into the world with a maximum of fuss, as it is. Let him—”

Mr. Rebeck began to laugh. “A maximum of fuss.” He chuckled softly. “Very true. Very funny and very true.” “Could I finish?” Michael asked coldly.

“What? Oh, certainly. I’m awfully sorry. I thought you were through.”

“Let him leave with the minimum,” Michael finished, but he trailed off disgustedly at the end. Mr. Rebeck laughed politely, and Michael scowled at him. In the middle of the scowl he began to laugh, hiccuping, machine-gun laughs, and when he stopped he knuckled at his eyes. But there were no tears to wipe away, and he looked soberly at Mr. Rebeck.

“I don’t feel dead,” he said slowly. “Would I still be making those lousy epigrams if I were dead? I feel as alive as anyone. As alive as you.”

“I’m not a very good standard,” Mr. Rebeck said softly. “I don’t feel dead,” Michael said firmly. “I feel my body on me like an anchor.” The simile pleased him. “An anchor. A nice, comforting anchor holding me to earth. If I’m dead, how come I don’t just go billowing off into the beyond like a sheet blown off a clothesline?” He felt a vague regret that Mooney, head of the Classics Department, couldn’t hear him now. They had stayed up late together, Mooney and he.

‘‘I know a good metaphor,” Mr. Rebeck said thoughtfully. “Don’t people who have had their arms or legs amputated always say they can feel them still? They say they itch at night.”

Michael was silent for a long time.

“I know a better one,” he said finally. “It’s an old superstition. Some people believe that if you kill a snake in the daytime its tail won’t stop wiggling till sundown.” He looked at Mr. Rebeck. “All right. I’m dead. How long till sundown?”

“A while yet,” Mr. Rebeck said. He sat down beside Michael. “You see, Michael, nobody dies just like that. The body dies quickly, but the soul hangs on to life as long as it can because living is all it knows.”

“Soul?” Michael felt faintly worried. “I do have a soul, then?”

“I don’t know if that’s the right word. Memory might be better. Living is a big thing, and it’s pretty hard to forget. To the dead, everything connected with life becomes important—striking a match, clipping your toenails. Not only does your own life pass before you; everybody else’s does. You find yourself becoming greedy of people; whenever they come to visit here you watch every movement they make, trying to remember the way you used to do that. And when they leave you follow them all the way to the entrance, and you stop there because you can’t go any farther.” He paused. “They had it all backwards, you see, those old ghost stories about the dead haunting the living. It’s not that way at all.”

Michael smiled faintly. “You know more about death than I do.”

“I’ve lived here a long time,” Mr. Rebeck said. “Death is something that has to be learned. Just like life, only you don’t have to learn so fast because you’ve got more time.”

“Will it be like this—forever? I mean, so far it’s just like being alive, only less rushed.”

Mr. Rebeck didn’t laugh. “It’s different,” he said, “but I can’t really tell you how. I could if I were dead, I think—only then I wouldn’t want to.” He saw Michael blink puzzledly and went on. “This much I can tell you: you forget things. A week from now you’ll have forgotten a few things—what music you liked, what games you used to play, little things. In two weeks a few bigger things may go—where you worked, where you studied—in three weeks you won’t remember that you ever loved or hated anybody. In four weeks—I can’t exactly put it into words. You just forget things.”

“I forget everything?” Mr. Rebeck could barely hear Michael’s voice. He nodded.

“Everything? Talking—thinking?”

“They become unnecessary,” Mr. Rebeck said, “like breathing. You don’t really forget them, you just don’t have any use for them or any need. They atrophy, like the appendix. You aren’t really talking right now. How can you? You haven’t got a larynx, you haven’t got vocal cords, you haven’t got a diaphragm. But you’re so used to talking and you want to talk so badly that I hear you as clearly as if you could make sounds. Nothing’s going to stop you from talking as long as you want to. You just won’t want to after a while.”

“It is Hell, then,” Michael said slowly. “It really is Hell.”

“Funny you should say that,” Mr. Rebeck said. “I always thought of it as a little like being an angel. You can’t be touched any more, or jarred, or hurt. All the little hypocrisies that hold life together drop away from you. You become a sort of closed circle with no end and no beginning. I think it’s the purest state of existence.”

“Like an amoeba,” Michael said. “They don’t get traumas either.”

“Not like an amoeba. I’ll show you. Look up, Michael. Look at the sun.”

Michael raised his eyes and saw the sun. It was red and swollen in the late afternoon, and its heat had become vengeful and vindictive. Mr. Rebeck blinked rapidly as he looked at it and turned his head quickly away. But Michael stared hard at it and saw only a shriveled orange hanging in a crumpled tree. He felt a great pity in him, and a corner-of-the-mouth scorn.

“You see?” Mr. Rebeck asked when Michael finally turned undazzled eyes on him.

“God,” said Michael.

“That may be,” said Mr. Rebeck. “If I had looked at the sun that long I’d be blind now. You can look at it all day. You can watch it move, if you care to. Nobody can blind you now, Michael. You will see more clearly than you ever saw in life. Nobody can lie to you now, because three-fourths of a lie is wanting to believe it, and believing makes no difference to you any more. I envy you a great deal, Michael.”

He sighed and juggled two small pebbles in the palm of his hand. “Whenever I get to thinking I’m dead too,” he said softly, “I look at the sun.”

Michael wanted to look at the sun again, but he looked at Mr. Rebeck instead and said, “Who are you?”

“I live here,” Mr. Rebeck said.

“Why? What do you do?” A thought—“Are you the caretaker?”

“In a way.” Mr. Rebeck got up and went inside the mausoleum. He came out a moment later, holding half a baloney and a small container of milk. “Supper,” he explained, “or a very late lunch. An old friend of mine brought it.” He leaned against a cracked pillar and smiled at Michael, who had not moved.

“Death is like life in a lot of ways,” he said thoughtfully. “The power to see clearly doesn’t always change people. The wise in life sometimes become wiser in death. The petty in life remain petty. The dead change their addresses, you see, not their souls.

“I’ve always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues—you’ve seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and small palaces. They give visitors cards at the entrance, you know, with their relatives’ streets and house numbers. It’s the only way they can find them. That’s like a city, too.

“A dark city, Michael, and a crowded one. And it has most of the qualities of the other cities: companionship, coldness, argument. There is no love, of course, no love at all, but there isn’t so much of that floating around outside either.

“There is loneliness, though. The dead are very lonely for a while, very bewildered, very frightened. The gap that separates them from the living is as wide as the gap that separates the living from each other; wider, I think. They wander as helplessly through the dark city as they did through the cities of stone, and finally they find a quiet bed and try to sleep.

“I like to help them. I like to be here when they come, to calm them and ease their spirits. Someone to talk to, you might say. People have gone mad looking for someone to talk to. We talk, or we sit and play chess—I hope you play—or I read to them. Very little things, Michael, and only for a little while. Soon they drift away, and where they go I cannot follow. They don’t need me then; they don’t need anyone, and this pleases me because most of them spent their lives trying not to need.

“So I keep them company for a while, these friends of mine. I sometimes tell them that I am the mayor of the dark city, because the word at least is familiar to them, but I think of it more in the nature of being a night light, a lantern down a dark street.”

“Charon,” Michael said. “Charon and coins on the tongues of the dead.”

Mr. Rebeck smiled. “I used to think so,” he said. “But Charon was a god, or a demi-god. I’m a man.” He chuckled softly. “I used to be a druggist.”

“I was a teacher,” Michael said. “A history teacher. I liked it very much.” He thought of something and asked, a little awkwardly, “Can you see me? I mean, am I visible?”

“I see you,” Mr. Rebeck said. “You look like a man, but you cast no shadow and I can see the sun behind you.”

“A kind of tracing of a man,” Michael said bitterly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Rebeck said. “In three weeks or a month you won’t even need to take the human form any more.”

“I won’t remember it, you mean.”

“You won’t want to remember it.”

“I will!” Michael cried out fiercely.

Mr. Rebeck spoke slowly. “I make you the same promise I make everyone, Michael. As long as you cling to being alive, as long as you care to be a man, I’ll be here. We’ll be two men together in this place. I’ll like it, because I get lonesome here and I like company; and you’ll like it too, until it becomes a game, a pointless ritual. Then you’ll leave.”

“I’ll stay,” Michael said quietly. “I may not be a man, but I’ll look as much like one as possible.”

Mr. Rebeck spread his hand and shrugged slightly. “I said it wasn’t so different from life.” He hesitated and then asked, “Tell me, Michael, how did you die?”

The question startled Michael. “I beg your pardon?”

“You look very young,” Mr. Rebeck said. “I was wondering.”

Michael grinned widely at him. “How about premature old age?”

Mr. Rebeck said nothing.

“I have a wife,” Michael said. “I mean, I had a wife.”

“I saw her,” Mr. Rebeck said. “A beautiful woman.”

“Lovely,” said Michael. He was silent.

“Well?”

“Well what? My lovely wife killed me. Poisoned me, like salting the soup.”

He saw the shock on Mr. Rebeck’s face and enjoyed it. He felt very human. He smiled at Mr. Rebeck again.

“I would like to play chess,” he said, “before sundown.”