"The Burial" from The Ecstasy of Michaela

Pittsburgh Gothic: a chapter from a novella

In addition to my regular Friday book review and Sunday weekly newsletter, I am introducing a Wednesday post for Fall 2022. Wednesday posts will contain the creative writing I’ve published elsewhere, whether in a now unused Medium account or in literary journals that have either vanished or that paywalled my work years ago.

[Michaela, my little orphan—the small press that published it in 2012 is no longer in business, though if you buy it the money should wend its way to me eventually since I still know the owners. I consider it, written at the end of my 20s, to be the elective beginning of my literary career, forgetting all the juvenilia, the graphic novels I wrote in middle school, the novels in high school and college, all the poems and stories. The very first work of fiction I can remember making, however, at the age of four or five, was my comic-book take on a local news report about the head of a drifter found in a dumpster. (“Was that when you knew I was a genius?” I once asked my father. “That’s when we knew we should get you looked at,” he replied.) Hence this brutal little novel’s inciting incident—a murder and dismemberment—which, I just remembered, takes place the day before Halloween.

I wrote the book in a few months in fall 2010, as creative relief between finishing my oral exam and beginning my dissertation in graduate school. I was dwelling academically on Aestheticism and Decadence; the novella’s peculiar tone comes from my confronting these aristocratic attitudes of gorgeous and blasé nihilation with the grittiest horrors of democratic wealth and poverty in my hometown: dear, dirty Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh: the perfect setting for a novel, the perfect American city for a writer to be from. In my lecture on August Wilson, I call it the nexus of American realities: at once Northeastern, Midwestern, and Southern. The latter most attracts the literary sensibility. Pittsburgh Gothic, which Michaela is, may just be Southern Gothic albeit with more Polish and Italian surnames attached to some of the poorer folk. I wrote this book to get my head out of academia. Now, over a decade later, I feel “The fascination of what’s difficult / Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent / Spontaneous joy and natural content / Out of my heart,” and would like only to write prose of such naïve beauty again. Here, for your Halloween season, is chapter one.]

The Ecstasy of Michaela

Chapter 1. The Burial

When Michaela’s father called to tell her that her mother had at best a few days to live, she hesitated over whether or not to go to the hospital to say good-bye. In the end, she went: it had been five years since she’d last been inside the hospital. Walking the long, white corridors that curved into still more corridors, listening to the beeps and whirrs of machines that breathed for people or fed them, inhaling the mingled odors of antiseptic and piss that lingered in the empty spaces, eavesdropping on the tired and cynical gossip exchanged from nurse to nurse in cigarette-straitened voices, Michaela nearly returned to her drugged, post-accident delusion that the hospital was a vast city, the size of the world almost, where she would have to spend the rest of her days, padding in a backless paper gown down chill, immaculate hallways, forever.

She found her mother’s room and peered into her gray, wasted, slack-lipped face. Had her father not been sitting at the bedside, she wouldn’t have believed that it was anyone she knew. This was her first meeting with her parents in three years. Her mother: a travel agent, a money-maker, always on the run, in the air, heading for another and a brighter destination. God wanted that life for us, as long as we worked for it. “Life is for the living,” she would say, “and you can’t spend your money in the grave. Do your job and enjoy the rewards. We’re all going to die someday.” And here was the day. At fifty-four years old, nowhere near death, she had gone with her husband to a white-sands, clear-water beach, with the sun like a sun-struck gold medal pinned to the bright blue flag of the sky, and she had fallen in the water, where a shell sliced her elbow, and she said it was nothing, she said she would be fine, and now she died slowly, chest heaving, face forty years older, of septicemia under the cloudy autumn drizzle of a city she had always been trying to leave. Thinking the whole thing more ghastly than sorrowful, Michaela stood in the hall outside the hospital room as her mother’s final breath groaned out. Across from Michaela, a painted boat paused on a painted ocean, its sail stiff against the brush- stroke air. Michaela’s gaze drifted down toward the gray, rubber wainscot, blackly scuffed from the rubber-wheeled conveyances of the sick. The halls weren’t as spotless as she’d remembered.

The viewing went on for two days. Michaela had pride of place alongside her silent father, facing a coffin that held a waxy and greenish doll distantly resembling her mother. She was subjected to the hearty condolences and consoling observations of relatives and family friends—“I never would have expected it.” “We couldn’t believe it when we heard.” “It was overwork that contributed to it.” “These American women: how much they work.” “She enjoyed life so much, poor thing, it’s hard to believe she’s gone.”—as well as to their wary scrutiny. Michaela was not a hard worker, and she did not enjoy life.

Only the elderly women, who still lived in the indelicate ways of the old country, told her to her face what everyone thought of her: “You crazy.” “What are you do with yourself?” “You need husband.” “No, you need job—you think you money always be there?” Michaela smiled and cocked her head and betrayed no feeling. Only the oldest of the old, old-country women, without English, without husband, without job, without teeth, pressed Michaela’s fingers in her dry grasp and thickly whispered in her peasant dialect, “Corag’!”

“Yes,” Michaela said.

At night, after the mourners went home and the funeral parlor locked up, Michaela and her father sat in the now very empty living room where she had spent her childhood, and they watched the eleven o’clock news. The top story was a beheading that had taken place on Halloween Eve. A vagrant found the head in a dumpster behind the supermarket near Riverfront Park on the South Side. “The victim,” intoned the gray-haired, red-nosed local news anchor, through lips pursed with studied seriousness, “has now been identified as twenty-year-old Tony Zabelsky of Whitehall in the south suburbs. He dropped out of St. Mark’s High School halfway through his senior year and was reportedly estranged from his family, who hadn’t had any contact with him since he left school. Apparently unemployed, he was last seen in Commoners café on the South Side on the afternoon of October thirtieth. Other café patrons described Mr. Zabelsky as a ‘drifter’ who kept to himself. A private funeral service will be held this Friday. Police urge anyone with any information to come forward.”

Michaela’s father, who rarely said a bad word, said, “What a fucking world.”

The co-anchor, a forty-something blonde woman with a necklace that glared distractingly under the studio lights, shook her head and remarked, “It’s a tragedy, Don. In other news, the city council is gambling on a plan to attract investment downtown by building casinos—”

“It’s not a tragedy,” Michaela said. “Tragedies mean something.”

Her father stood up to go to bed, stooped, creaking, and old. “You always want things to mean something, Michaela,” he told her, “but you just have to get on with life.” He said it, for once, without judgment: it was a plea, phrased like advice, offered in sympathy. But Michaela didn’t know what to do.

During the funeral, rain fell in blurry planes of water that passed successively across the sky. On the slope of the hill where her mother would be buried, Michaela stood at the foot of the grave. Her father held an umbrella over her head, and, shadowed in its black wings, she looked over the uneven lines of headstones—some flat slabs, some monumental blocks, some topped with sculptures of the suffering Christ, the redeeming cross, the compassionating Virgin, or the sorrowful angels—random gray pocks in an expanse of grass, daubed too with color where grieving relatives, most likely elders still mindful of the continuity of the dead with the living and its attendant duties, had left floral bouquets in remembrance or propitiation.

Michaela flung her spadeful of earth down onto the shiny varnish of the casket and then went back to her place under the umbrella. The rain turned the dirt on the coffin lid to mud. She thought of Tony Zabelsky, the beheaded boy, the drifter. The picture of him they showed on the news reminded her of her skinny and bird-boned first lover, a body so fragile that she had always worried, with a tremor of excitement, that she’d break it. In instinctive defiance of the massed dead, her whole body blinked and tingled with the memory of pleasure. Her father looked into her face and, with his rough thumb, wiped away a raindrop he had mistaken for a tear. His hand hesitated alongside her face, but he dropped it. He couldn’t find the person he thought she used to be.

Eventually, the service ended, and everyone left the gravediggers to their work. Without knowledge, she imagined them, trundling along in their mud-spattered pickup truck to fill the hole, chewing tobacco, making deathful puns, as pragmatic as the worms. She saw yellow vapors slipping out of the crematorium chimney, and, even over the rain, a faint odor of sour smoke hung in the air. “Must be burning a big one!” quipped an uncle, not himself a small one. They all shuffled back to their cars and then drove down the twisting paths through the cemetery hills, where the tombstone statuary scorned the hubris of the living with stone eyes. Finally, the mourning party, each car bearing the little standard of their bereavement, re-emerged into the living city. Barely living, Michaela thought as they drove over the bridge and she cast her eye on the half-abandoned skyline, the post-industrial husk of a failed utopia, only partly rebuilt by the glossy new industries of biotechnology and telecommunications, with black and pitted buildings at intervals like carious teeth in an aged mouth.

One more afternoon sacrificed to this death, and then Michaela could return to her hermetic life. Her old house now had its mother-absence filled up by the guests at the funeral reception. Her great-aunts and aunts and cousins had spread a feast on plastic picnic tablecloths in the kitchen. Michaela could eat nothing. She stood aside to let the black-clad multitude feed—they chided her for her abstention, the old women patting, pinching, rubbing, appraising her belly—and she shook with rage as she watched them pile their red plastic plates. The trim, aging priest who had performed the service delicately placed a small bit of salad on his plate with clumsy plastic tongs, his hands restrained and precise in their movements as a craftsman’s. He looked at her out of eyes drawn down at the corners and wordlessly laid a hand of surprising warmth on her own before he left the kitchen with the rest of the mourners. She listened to them all chew and chatter their way all through the house. Bracing her hands against the counter, she steadied her body and surveyed the aftermath. Serving platters, intricate five minutes ago with stained-glass patterns of cheese, lunchmeats, and olives, now sat almost empty, slicked with warm grease, the few remaining fronds of prosciutto sliming in the close air, while the last square of cheese beaded with sweat. An aluminum tub that had brimmed with a tangle of sausages in red sauce now looked like a congealed sludge of bloody oil, a few tubes of meat breaching the surface, their lumped heads glistening with melted fat. The whole table was a wreck, and Michaela felt no regret that she had shunned the duty of preparing this feast. Every feast, hours and hours and sometimes days in the making, ended up, after a moment’s hungry swarm, as a pile of lubricious platters that drew flies and bred maggots. Once she had wanted to make something more durable, maybe even permanent. Now she only wanted to live the rest of her life as quietly as possible, taking whatever pleasures she could before the pain inevitably came back to claim her.

She took her funereal handbag from the back of the kitchen chair where she’d hung it. She carried a book inside, as she always carried a book during events she couldn’t bear to attend, and she opened to her bookmark—her mother’s prayer card. She read.

Too great affliction places a human being beneath pity: it arouses disgust, horror and scorn.

Pity goes down to a certain level and not below it. What does charity do in order to descend further?

A small child, five or so, ambled into the kitchen, plate clutched vertically in his fat, sauce-stained fingers. Michaela recognized him as her second cousin, named Peter or Paul or Mark or John or something lazily Biblical, whom she hadn’t seen since he was an infant. She directed him toward the garbage can maneuvering him by the tips of his shoulders as if he were a mannequin or a doll.

“Who are you?” he said, his tongue not quite reaching far back enough to sound the R.

“I’m your cousin Michaela.”

He stared at her with the angrily puzzled look children get when they grow tired of always running into mysteriously new things. “Did you know my great-aunt Eva?” he asked, putting equal emphasis on each word, uncertain which might be the most important one.

“She was my mother.”

“Then your mother is dead,” he said, happy to have got his hands on a sure fact.

“Yes.”

“Are you sad?” he asked with a turn of his head to the side: a small colonizer from another world, running test after test to establish what these savage and unpredictable beings were like. She thought of confounding him with strange answers to disconfirm the hypothesis he had probably formed from books and teachers and television if not from experience—that people tend to be sad when their mothers die. No, she would say, I’m a bit relieved, because when she was alive she thought everything I did was wrong, and now we’re both free of that problem, she and I. Deal with that, kid.

“Yes, I’m sad.”

He nodded triumphantly.

Michaela stared out the window over the rain-logged yard where she had played as a girl, at the dripping dogwood in the cleft of whose split trunk, four feet off the ground, she would laze for whole summer days reading about the adventures of pirates, astronauts and girl queens, only her mosquito-bitten arms and bark-scored knees pinning her down to the world. Her cousin distracted himself at the table, peeling cheese-slices from the trays, aesthetically delighting in the sound they made, which was like the sticky insides of lips coming apart.

“When you have babies?” the old women from the old country would ask Michaela, each in her turn. She would only smile. After the accident, when her parents took her in, when her mother became an infant’s mother again, wiping her ass and reading her to sleep, Michaela decided forever what she had once only intuited: that she would never be hostage to life. “If you let me out of this,” she would whisper to no one, because, though she didn’t believe in God, she needed someone to curse and cajole at the agony-hour of four in the morning, “if you let me out of this, I will be absolutely free. I will take no freedom for granted. People will look at me and say, ‘How made she is,’ because they will see that I haven’t let nature or fate or time do more to change me than the minimum they are able to do.” This was around the first and last time she’d seen her second cousin—then a newborn—before today. His mother had brought him for a visit when Michaela was convalescing, bandaged, stitched, casted, sagging in a wheelchair in a painkiller haze. Her mother and her cousin turned from her to coo and trill over the baby. Her cousin had always been lean and tomboyish, with sharp features and plain brown hair pulled back in a severe and perpetual ponytail, but as she joined her aunt in bending over the child, Michaela could see that she was already taking on an older woman’s body at the age of twenty- five, expanding into the shapelessness of middle age. Michaela had a vision—no doubt from the drugs—of nature pulling the women slowly back down into the earth, melting them like putty into mass without form until they were puddles, and all because they’d let nature have his way with them: now they were his concubines forever. While watching the women tend the baby boy, she decided in a fogged frenzy that when she got out of the chair, out of the drug-stupor, out of her parents’ house, she would never willingly submit her whole self to nature. His forces—gravity, mass, velocity—had almost killed her when the van ran her down, and she would never surrender to them again, even if they presented themselves to her in some beguiling new guise, such as husband or child. When it came time to leave her body, she would throw it away deliberately, in accord with some unseen spiritual goal, some dream. She would make her life. The child had stopped coaxing music out of the cheese and now stared at Michaela’s pensive face as she continued to daydream through the screen of rain droplets latticed chaotically on the windowpane.

“Cousin Kay La? What’s wrong with your eye?”

He must have spied some subtle difference in the browns of the true iris and the false one or saw the glare of the kitchen light smoothly and inhumanly reflected off the convex of glass fixed in her right socket.

“I lost it in an accident. This one isn’t real. It’s made of glass.”

He made an O with his mouth and rifled through his small knowledge for some analogy. She could see that he didn’t want to seem shocked or unworldly: a visitor to this wild place should try to fit in, gain the confidences of the natives.

He finally said, “My mom and dad know somebody who lost something in an accident.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“His head.”

Michaela could barely stifle her chortling gasp as the boy’s mother bustled into the kitchen. “Matthew!” she shouted at her son. “We didn’t know where you were! Are you trying to give mommy a heart attack? And look at your hands! Get over here!” She pulled him hands-first to the sink and rubbed scurfs of plastic-looking blue dish soap over his greasy fingers under the steaming faucet, ignoring his cries that the water was too hot. She looked up and said, “Oh, hi, Michaela!” with only the faintest undertone of reproach: why didn’t you wash his hands? To the boy: “Were you playing with your aunt Michaela?”

Matthew nodded dispassionately. Necessarily attentive to the particulars of the massive hierarchy ranged above him, he corrected her: “Kay La is my cousin.”

His mother gently nudged him out of the kitchen. “Go find daddy,” she said. “He’s in the living room. And don’t get lost again.” He tilted into a hapless run out through the doorway. Michaela had turned again toward the gray rain, the gray sky, and the graying land. The weather had grown cold enough to put out the autumn fires in the bushes and the treetops. Leaves scattered themselves across the lawn, liquefied under the rain to a brownish smudge. The dogwood, whose branches a month ago had been hung with red tongues, now stood bare. Michaela dug her fingernails into her palm.

“Michaela!” said her cousin, swiftly embracing her. “I’m so sorry we couldn’t make it to the viewing. You know, daycare and work and babysitters and everything. And I’m sorry for your loss. It’s such a shock.”

“Yes,” Michaela said. “I didn’t think she would ever die.”

“I know, right? You just never think it’ll happen! And the worst thing for us is that Danny and me have to do this again in two days. We can’t bring Matthew for that one, though.”

“Another funeral?”

“Yeah. Listen: you know that kid on the news, the murder case, Tony Zabelsky? Well, he went to St. Mark’s, where Danny teaches, and they’re asking the teachers and the families to go to the funeral if they can—as a show of community support, you know? It’s just so awful, though, to think about. A head in a dumpster! We’ve really been trying not to let Matthew hear anything about it. Can you imagine a five-year-old carrying that around?”

Michaela tried not to seem too fascinated by this conversation. She stared with studied absence at the blood-flushed crescent moons her nails had left in the flesh of her palm. “Did Danny know Tony Zabelsky?” she asked with what sounded like a normal person’s prurient nonchalance.

“He had him in study hall for half a year, that’s all. You know, right before he dropped out. He was quiet and polite, Danny said, but not all there. One of those kids you just sense isn’t going to go to the prom, even though he’s good-looking. Or graduate, even though he’s smart. What did they call him on the news? A drifter? That’s what Danny said: the kid was drifting. Into some bad stuff, right? Ugh, I can’t stand to think about it. When you have kids...”

She trailed off to allow Michaela to imagine the enormity. Michaela didn’t say anything.

“Well, listen, girl,” her cousin concluded, hugging her once again, “we have to hit the road, but it was great seeing you!” With that, and a parting squeeze of Michaela’s hand, she left the room.

A few minutes later, Michaela herself walked out of the kitchen toward the main stairway at the front of the house. Her father stopped her and searched her face: “Are you okay?”

“I just have this headache. I’m going to rest in my room for a little while. I’ll be back down soon.”

He made a regretful failed smile, the corners of his lips drooping. He seemed somehow unwilling to let her go. But he said, “Sure, sure.”

Michaela paused on the deep-carpeted steps to the upstairs and looked over the living room, where the mourners moved their mouths with talk or food. Two of her uncles shook their jowls in laughter as they told a gay joke to the old priest. He chuckled politely and quietly reminded them to hate the sin, not the sinner. He looked away, out the window, into the blackening, late-afternoon sky. One uncle pointed at the priest and made a fey, limp-wristed gesture. They tried to muffle their snorts and snickers. The priest kept his head turned, his eyes on the runny blank of the window, and Michaela ran up the stairs as she used to do when she was a girl, half-playfully and half-sincerely terrified that something monstrous pursued her.

[If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider purchasing The Ecstasy of Michaela today.]