The Synapse
Synopsis:
(forthcoming)
Book Excerpt:
Chapter One:
The most famous photos of Mapleton are those taken years into its slow, steady decline, somewhere between optimistic origins and the eventual hole it became. Thumb through a textbook and the faces of Mapleton residents, though eager for a lens and happy to accept direction, aren’t the faces I remember. I knew Mapleton before the cameras did.
What Mapleton lacked in electricity it made up for in religion, any religion; this being the main tourist draw for both the spiritually devout and the financially independent. The latter being predominantly retirees wanting to experience the majesty of “quaint” life. The prior, those never burdened by moral baggage, migrated to Mapleton for this same “quaint” life, free from the temptations they’ve lived entire lives avoiding or destroying. For the final years, when the urge to “sin just once” is the strongest, they would adopt Mapleton as a refuge for its well contained views and supportive citizenry.
Mapleton, given the right eyes, was perfect: a nursing home for the pious or twenty-four hour-a-day hospice care for the sanctimonious, and for any of these unique designations our small community attracted attention. I don’t believe the late generation, as they were often referred, were predators despite the eventual devastation they ushered in. They were innocents. They were people with simple intentions and simple wishes. They wanted to die in Mapleton. They wanted to see the better side of a cold grave. Mapleton could do that—if one were to believe word of mouth, early news articles, and broadcasted testimonials, Mapleton could do that.
We were a commune of sorts, catering to a niche need for end-of-life-empathy, and being a commune as large as we were the government had to recognize us. We were given land, and were allowed to stretch common law just enough as long as we didn’t bother anybody. And as long as we didn’t turn a profit the IRS stayed out of our business. Other than reporting our numbers, which we did once a year via census, we had no restrictive connections with the outside world to keep us from providing the services our clientele needed. People come to Mapleton to die in Mapleton.
__________
By the time Emily Stevens died Mapleton had nearly reached its saturation point. Because space wasn’t limitless—the government allotted us only so much and back then, when Mapleton was first established, nobody on the executive board knew much about Land Expansion clauses—we were forced to be creative when it came to adapting to the normal stages of a person’s life. Birth was easy enough. Children take up little room, share a bed with their parents, and generally keep to their age specific regimen which included, among other things, staying out of the way when they weren’t needed.
But more than birth, more than childhood, what stopped the town quickest was death. Without any measurable contribution to our small town a dead body was just a dead body.
The cemeteries, these were the first landfill. Mapleton squeezed what it could between plots, voted to abolish mausoleums and wide tombstones, and finally began stacking bodies below the ground two, sometimes three high. Eventually, the cemeteries spilled out into bordering fields. The town voted to scar the fairgrounds next. When those filled it moved on to the fountain parks, the bird parks, the Grey Gardens, and finally the stage grounds—the only place Mapleton residents are ever really active. Then went the hazy area of ownership between downtown buildings. Then to private land. Yards. Flowerbeds.
The town thought of burning the bodies, but too late. Mapleton had, by that time, neither enough room for an incinerator nor earth with enough integrity to support the massive machine. The decomposing bodies beneath the earth caused the ground to give like a sponge. It wasn’t uncommon for the weight of a resident to force a cane or a walker deep into the earth. These punctures often blanketed the town with a “terrible” smell. “Terrible,” that’s the reporters’ and archivists’ word. To me that smell was simply Mapleton.
So many people blame immigration, the late generation, for Mapleton’s shrinking boundaries. There is some truth to that, but deeper than the problem of space is the problem of impending death. We, even at our most crowded, allowed anyone seeking an intimate connection for their final years residence. A reputation destroys any truth and one thing Mapleton had developed over the years of was a reputation. People came, people came, and people continued to come with hopes of a single end: a final vacation and a peaceful departure. The truth is, or so I’ve been told, that the majority of the outraged were once immigrants themselves. Natural citizens—me—were quite rare. In fact, I was the last.
We didn’t focus too much on the bodies below us, and admittedly this perhaps was the main destructor. Our rationale: we could do nothing about it so why waste final years anchored by worry? If there was one thing Mapleton preached above all else it was the obliteration of worry. Suggestions for destroying the bodies were made but nothing worth implementing. Some suggested feeding the bodies to pigs, but we kept no pigs. Some suggested exporting the bodies outside the commune boundaries, but nobody wanted our dead. Lionel Breecher, being the eldest and most admired member of the executive board—referred to variously as Lieutenant Breecher, Breechie, Pastor Breecher, Mr. Breecher, and any number of other titles depending on the history of the addressor—hesitated to make any radical change to the routine of Mapleton, often despite majority demand in favor of it.
When Emily Stevens died her mother asked Lionel not to tell anyone. “We can bury her at night,” she said.
“Where?” Lionel asked.
The secret of Emily’s death didn’t last long and before the wake, up until the moment Lionel spoke at her funeral, every one of the town’s one thousand two hundred and seventy-six citizens approached him with varying degrees of worry. One thousand two hundred and seventy-seven if you count Amy Vickers’s eight-month fetus in-utero. Of those one thousand two hundred and seventy-six or –seven people, fifteen were family, six friends, and eight work associates. The remaining citizens flooded Lionel’s office, his mail box, and stopped him in the streets because of Mapleton’s finally-realized collective dilemma.
“We should not look upon Emily’s body as the final stake,”—Lionel at Emily’s funeral, yelling above the rain. “We should not see her through glazed eyes, tired though they may be. We should see her with open eyes. We should keep them open despite the crowding below us. We will use our eyes to search out ways to take care of the next inevitable fall.”
A woman in the back falls. The congregation panics for a moment before a voice sounds high over the rain: “she only fainted.” The crowd exhales.
“Do not think of Emily’s passing as our greatest burden,” Lionel continues over the rain, the tears. “Think of her passing as the end to our excuses.”
Emily Stevens, she didn’t ask to die. She knew of the animosities Mapleton had developed toward the dead, as she shared in them during her own life. When Rodger McLennan died, when Adriane Groue died and so many before her, when Larissa Studen fell from the scaffolding while cleaning the community building’s windows Emily Stevens was one of the many who despised the fallen body. A last breath often seemed to pull a collective breath from the living, this gesture accepted as a small way to enjoy the space while it lasted.
These final funerals motivated the residents to take more vitamins; eat less red meat, to organize survival awareness parades and bring in speakers from the city to teach them how to live the longest lives possible, which would be helped—the speakers assumed—by the cloistered existence. “Miles from the crowded city,” the speakers would say with implied envy. “Away from the smog and the disease and the traffic and the…” If only they knew how close the crowd really was.
From his perch, up front, lifted by a small stage, Lionel yells into the falling rain. “We loved her.”
Emily’s mother cries, dries the tears from her face, lets rain fill their place. Behind her, strangers do the same. Some for a lost friend; others for the lost space.
“Don’t pity her pain,” Lionel yells. “She died peacefully in her sleep.”
Not true. She fell from Myer Bridge while implementing the town’s newly adopted structural reinforcement program. Emily’s head; I’ve seen pictures of it from the dig site—let me just say the mortician deserves a raise for the plaster work he did to get her looking that good.
“She wanted me to beg on her behalf for all of you to take care of yourselves. ‘Be persistent with your health,…’”
The autopsy shows she went mute as soon as she hit the river bed. Her neck snapped, her voice and heart stopped. She couldn’t have said a single word to Lionel.
“‘…exercise, share your love, watch every step, take care at every turn.’”
Emily’s mother bawls, yells above the rain splashing to the rising puddles.
“‘Keep the town from spilling out of the ground’, Emily told me. ‘Get rid of your caskets. Get rid of your burial shrouds’.”
As a gesture of her own fear for the Mapleton ground Emily’s mother displayed her daughter naked. No clothes. No casket. But she insisted on the layers of makeup. “I want to remember my daughter the beauty, not my daughter the burden,” she said in an interview for the Glorified Litter documentary. The camera zooms on her tears.
The citizens crowd around a small hole where Emily’s body is fastened onto a flimsy board. This vertical method was employed about three years too late. Later, when the basement for the new Mapleton complex is dug the profile of the earth is all bones. Some magazine took photos, won awards for them I think.
Everywhere the residents walked after that moment, the moment when Emily Stevens’ body was lowered into the last cavity of earth, they walked above forgotten generations. Every step crushed a face or collapsed a lung or depressed a chest cavity. All was hallowed ground.
This is when Lionel eliminated Mapleton’s structural reinforcement laws, citing the stress even one more accident would bring. He advised everyone to stay indoors, exercise moderately, take in fresh air, and eat only from window gardens. He said to touch nothing growing from the contaminated earth.
This couldn’t last long. Every resident knew this. Another person would die; more immigrants would heed the call of our reputation, would swell the town. Mapleton had nothing left to do but wait.
When the final mound of dirt is pushed over Emily Stevens’ head a woman yells from the back row, way back, so far back the cameraman has to run while zooming his lens. The gasps start close to the fallen woman, radiate in whispers. When the camera gets to her she is on the ground, panicked. A man looks to the camera, not a smile, only sweat and rain, and says, “Amy Vickers, her water just broke.”
And here is where I come in.
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