The Passage

by Christopher Cunningham

We were in a hurry; the cemetery was closing. There'd been heavy water for hours but now all that was fading. We waited on the signal and then turned into the tunnel under the train yard. After a hard rain it would fill up pretty good because the street dipped in the middle at the darkest point through the passage. Some people got a nervous look in their eyes before they plunged into those strange depths. We barely slowed as we moved through the dirty pool. The wake from our tires leapt onto the row of cars on the other side of the support pillars then slid back down into the black wetness. Every inch of concrete crawled with thick layers of graffiti, from Orwellian declarations to crude tags to elaborate mural pieces alive with alien color, but they dissolved into one another as each layer became more and more distant, with old work slowly covered by new.

The dog jumped onto the damp ground and ran up a hill between a tall obelisk and a group of headstones. I got out and stretched, then followed into the cold air. A few scraps of clear blue streaked through the rolling grey sky. Torches, lilies and all-seeing eyes adorned the markers. There were urns, weeping angels and notes for the dead. One of the graves had part of a name obscured by three deep scratches: a first name.

"What do you make of this?" I pointed to the marble.

She came around the old car, zipping up her pink jacket in the fresh chill. She looked.

"I've never seen that before." This place was huge, old. "I don't know. It could've been anyone or anything." Her eyes were already beginning to wander. She scanned the other spots of pale white glowing in the fall evening.

I stood there and stared at the name. I checked the year: 1906.

"Probably just some vandal. Some punk." Then I thought a bit longer about what I was seeing. "But I guess it could've been someone they knew." I looked closer. "Those gouges are pretty precise." I reached out and traced the middle line, back and forth. The edges of the deep groove were smooth and worn. "I mean, just the first name is scratched out. Why would some random asshole do that?"

"I really don't know. There's no telling."

She turned her head and walked away. It was almost too dark to see but she knew where she was going. The dog had a squirrel up one of the ancient oaks and in the filtered blue light stood perfectly still, carved into the dusk on the cemetery hillside.

The sounds of Memorial Drive poured in and mixed with one last mockingbird's song from the top of a magnolia. We stood for a while in the middle and listened as cars moved past and a police helicopter darted around above us like a dragonfly. We smelled fried catfish as it mixed with the perfume of musty earth and asphalt. We heard the hard steel bang of shipping containers being loaded and unloaded while air brakes exhaled in a rush. Sharp notes of metal on metal protested as endless gears turned beyond that high wall protecting the dead. We called the dog and walked towards the car across wet pine straw and broken grasses, with the slight crunch of acorns echoing between the stones.

We drove through the cemetery gates. The city rose up in front of us.

She said:

"It's like an ugly dream."

I looked over at her for a moment, and then back out into the street.

"All those cranes, the tall buildings. . .all that glass reflecting other glass." Her voice flattened. "It's unreal." She stared at the city. "I can't even imagine how this land once looked, you know?"

I looked at the skyline pressing into the purple-black sky. I looked at that glow and was quiet.

"I don't know, I guess it's all this way. There are things that happen, things that change no matter what we do. The unavoidable. Like that storm, like the night..." She searched for the words. "Like those fires out west, how they're inevitable. How destruction clears the way for something else, something new, and suddenly there is a city where there were flowers. Glass instead of sand. You're left looking exactly the same but the world has a new face." She blew a circle of hot breath on the cold glass next to her face. "There's always another thing we can't save but we still have to go on. It's hard to find the strength when everything and nothing changes."

I pressed in the clutch and coasted.

Then, I said:

"Well, it's miserable, but there's not much for it. The inevitable arrives and there's a slipping away, you know? We do what we can."

She didn't say anything.

We drove over rough road that groaned like old men. I twisted the wheel to avoid sudden potholes. The night chirped through a crack in the window. I closed it and the music stopped. We moved through the vacuum.

Finally, after a while, she said:

"Everything is fire."

I reached out and shifted gears.

We went for coffee. We pulled in and sat there. The dog was asleep in a tight ball of fur. We sat with the city and the silhouettes of trees and the grimy puddles of long gone rain. I thought about what would drive someone to make a mark doomed to fade. To climb the wall. To navigate the broken slabs of marble and the rows of confederate dead, the ghosts of slave owners, all the unknown and unremembered. To locate that grave in the cascading darkness and begin working the stone, digging into the name. Why would anyone do it?

And then, sitting there next to her in the damp southern night, I thought I knew. Almost, for sure.

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