Febreze Scented Corpse in a Tanning Booth

US Highway 31 runs flat and straight from Indianapolis to Plymouth. 100 miles of bald landscape transplanted with soybean fields and spotted with silos, farmhouses and gas stations, squat and faded, healed welts that won’t leave. Saturday morning, I drove north on 31 under a low grey sky to visit my 94-year-old grandma, in the town where she was born and has lived for nearly a century, a small town of 10,000 people, which sounds immense on a human scale, but on the scale of mass society could be flicked into oblivion without a tremble of an effect.  

She doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be around, she says every time we talk, in that ambiguous tone in which I hear gratitude for a long life, stoic resignation and mortal terror. Now, you’re my oldest grandson, she says, and then goes through the list in order. But then she still thinks I’m with an ex-girlfriend from years ago, even though she’s met my current girlfriend. (Of the ex she mentions, she likely retains no more than a name, but for myself, I’d have to exert Proustian effort to recall her face in detail. Remembrance: a grueling labor, abandoned for a repetitious present. I’d rather continue crumbling than recollect who I was.) 

I also spent time with my uncle, who’s 65 now and could live another 8 years, the doctors say after diagnosing him with Alzheimer's, two years after the Leukemia diagnosis, which is almost in remission. Cancer’s not so bad, he says.  

The trouble with surviving one thing is that it gives something else the chance to kill you. Civilization invests so heavily in the idea of progress as a collective affair because life on the individual level marches ineluctably in the opposite direction, prolongs itself for the sake of multiplying its disasters, gambling on more gruesome and elongated endings. Puritans of progress never miss a chance to remind you that life is better than it used to be, life in general, for the average person, by the standard of appliances and hygiene, and something to do with women and bank accounts, allegedly, to distract you from the fact that your life, you who are alive right now, no matter how much more frequently you bathe compared to a French Lord in the 17^th century, your life will inevitably get worse, so bad at some point you won’t be able to take any more progress. 

And the cataloguers of collapse train you to focus on collective degeneration with the same unconscious aim: to blunt the individual angst, the sense of your personal and non-dischargeable end.  

There’s no reason for me to visit Plymouth except that my mom was born there and then moved four hours south in her twenties, and parts of the surviving side of her family live there still. No reason for all these scattered small towns linked by concrete lineaments on land cleared by crosscut saws and dynamite, except for what was at one time a population expansion, a migration, a settlement or what some might call a conquest or genocide, or what others would call more dispassionately, from the high window of a bone white tower maybe, a flow of matter-energy in the great medium of geohistory, an amoral process under the same principles determining the slow crawl of earthcrust.  

According to Wikipedia, Plymouth, Indiana was the starting location of the Potawatomi trail of death, in which the US Government forcibly relocated some 800 Potowatomi to Osawatomie, Kansas. 48 Indians died on the trail, over half of them children. Those dispirited by these ugly episodes in our national history should take heart: Far beyond the horizon of a hopeful conqueror, manifest destiny eventually comes to a settled score. Not quite 200 years later, Plymouth is now rather like a reservation for dying and irrelevant whites, those portions of northern European populations in the United States undone by diseases and displacements of their own manufacture.  

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39-year-old Derek Sink died in the tanning booth of a Planet Fitness in southern Indianapolis. His body decomposed for three days, emitting the trademark stench of death. Employees sprayed Febreze and waved away the concerns of the still living members of the gym. I don’t know what finally compelled someone to investigate, but we can assume standard operating procedures hadn’t been followed. A needle was found in the booth, and it was disclosed that the man had struggled with substance abuse. I have to assume that, even now, if he wants to cancel his membership, he’ll have to visit the location in person from beyond the grave.  

A rare event, surely, not at all representative. But how common, really, is death by neglect, and just how dense is the atmosphere of inattention that pervades our lives, that fills public spaces and fogs private quarters? Thick enough to mask the scent and sight of a rotting corpse, it seems.  

The disregard of a drug addict coexists with the vain self-care of a hypochondriacal epicurean. A man who shoots heroin still thinks about getting a tan, he pays for a needle and a gym membership. Another man grows morbidly obese while covering himself in tattoos and going to his barber every two weeks to keep his fade ultra fresh. Even superficial interests clash without annulling each other. (An argument against dialectical movement, or at least its simplified image; oppositions don’t synthesize into a higher unity; they go on slugging each other and everything around them, adding antagonists and incongruent elements; opposition is never confined to two forces at a time in an orderly sequence, but presses from all angles in odd meter, herky-jerky, splits and divides and staples and smashes, lunges and ingests and expels without ever reaching the coherence and stability of a stage.)  

I can always say it’s not my problem, however close or far away. It could be children in the Middle East, the guy passed out in a gutter down the street, my mom and her osteoporotic hip, or even myself and my spoiled ambition. Forget about being my brother’s keeper, I don’t have a lock on myself, not the whole beast anyway. Thus I could, within the murky orb of my own person, tend solely to my verbal intelligence, feed my literary obsession, water the outermost crop of my frontal cortex, while ignoring all other organs, other folds. My own selfishness interferes with other forms of selfishness. Now a single-minded pursuit would qualify as heeding my passion, while qualifying as heedless in general. What have I been called on to do? Depends on who I ask, and I don’t even need to bother, I’ll hear from everyone regardless.  

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I didn’t think it a priority to spend time with my uncle until I learned of his terminal illness. So every good deed speaks of our guilt. Death is so faint, so remote, so illusory and easy to ignore, we need a formal invitation to register it. The passing life of a relative enters our view on a doctor’s diagnosis, even though all the while we’ve never stopped passing; each moment it’s been possible to pay tribute to mortality and what significance it affords.  

Freud said there’s no death in the unconscious. He’s only half right. There’s no death in the conscious either. Epicurus, in trying to cure us of the fear of death, said: while we exist, death is not, and when death occurs, we do not exist. This truth, rather than reassuring us, instead is the cause of the long trouble, the unlocatable source of the shadow on our lives. The only thing that happens is the one thing we can’t experience. Even when it happens to others.  

All my days have been wracked by an astonishingly fake haste over the most trivial matters. The car on my bumper each time I drive, the drinks and pastries I have to serve as quickly as possible, the wait at the doctor's office or the dentist or the license branch, the wait for a table at this restaurant, the movies and books and essays that need to be released, the responses and reviews still lagging, the attention and validation I need to receive, the next work I need to finish. While things of monumental status, of earthly legacy and eternal import, have been treated with preternatural nonchalance, by myself and everyone around me.