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The Monument Game:
Mary Beth and her playmates used to run these footpaths, the ones inscribed by round cement stepping stones twisting between the monuments, in their ludic cycle of play. A game--he never understood its rules or purpose--that seemed so important to Mary Beth and her friends, a game he routinely dismissed as trivial. Now that game seemed to him like the most important thing in the world. That somewhere in it, undisclosed, is buried a secret, the key to unlocking his misery.
As he goes over it once again in his mind it startles him to realize how little he noticed about the other children. He drags a net through his mind but can only recover snapshots of a pretty face with brown wavy hair blown across a mouth as it turns to look; images of round-faced boys with dimples or freckles; plastic-rimmed glasses that exaggerate big green, or blue, or brown eyes; faces that hover with no recognizable names to attach to them. He recalls worn sneakers, teeth that will soon need braces, growing into holes left from where baby teeth fell out (a dollar for each under the pillow), blurs of baseball caps and hockey jerseys of a favorite team (fandom inherited from their fathers, or mothers), which raced around in the solemnity of the challenge their game posed, and leaving half drank bottles of soda pop and fruit juice (momentarily forgotten) to disfigure and vandalize with sticky spills, in dissonance to the sanitary lines and figures (life’s commentary on death) of the monuments commemorating the dead.
Each of the images he could recall were separate moments in time and space. He struggles to organize all these images, pictures, snapshots in his mind, to recover these fragments and give them shape, to translate the faces, the game, its half-known rules, its unknown purpose into his adult terms, into his adult corollary of children’s logic, an act of recollection that falsifies as it organizes, a reasoned mind that has to ask where is the starting line, an adult logic that has to break the closed loop of play, to find a place to begin to remember.
He made a mental inventory of the game’s settings from what he could salvage from Mary Beth’s exuberant recounting: the Finway monument, the Kenworthy, Christerson, Salwert, Watling, Chatetz, Rowatt, Hedaway, Wilcox, Remmes and Leathamn memorials. They never went near Mr. Kensington or Anna. He wondered why.
The game started at the Finway girl’s grave (as far as he could see). A newly rich family wanted a classically chic monument for their daughter Susan, and so commissioned a minimalist amphitheater; not to be outdone in their grief they wanted to freeze dry her, place her in a glass coffin, and put their daughter’s body on continual display at center stage. The proprietors nixed that idea. So, instead, the Finways made a life-size bronze sculpture of Susan, asleep in her death pose, and laid it in state. The girl’s remains were placed discreetly in a vault constructed in the pedestal underneath. The family now held an annual memorial concert there (poorly attended) on Susan’s birthday, for who, by all accounts, was a spoiled undistinguished child.
The chosen one (It) was dared and taunted to touch the bronze girl. He recalled that Mary Beth, whenever she spoke of the sculpture, wrinkled up her face and pronounce it “Icky.” It didn’t surprise him that touching the bronze girl turned “it” into the “gooey monster.” Once transformed, the child in question had to hold up his or her arms, make his or her hands into claws and make a babbling “bla, bla, bla, bla bla...bla, bla, bla, bla bla” noise with his or her mouth. He almost laughed remembering how funny it was the first time he saw this on the few occasions he got to watch them play. This game didn’t seem invented, the kids just started playing it one day. Since Mary Beth’s death, he hadn’t seen it played again.
The gooey monster chases the other kids. If the gooey monster touched one, the child had to fall down and turn into a zombie. The whole idea of kids turning into zombies was distasteful to him, (the wrong way to live after death); it conjured up images of corpses scraping at the insides of the coffin lids they were entombed in, keeping them safely locked away from the living. This chilling thought hastened him along his journey.
The kid’s game chilled him in other ways. There was something sexist about it. Regardless of who was the gooey monster, it could be either a boy or a girl, it was the boys who let themselves be turned into zombies, and the girls would escape and hide, so all or most of the zombies were boys. There seemed to be some secret complicity about which of the boys would be allowed to escape (like girls) and which girls could be zombies. Mary Beth was never a zombie (that he knew of) and for some reason, this gave him a sense of relief.
The action then moved across the plaza over to the Kenworthy site, where young Jonathan Kenworthy was interred--killed in a private airplane crash at the age of 12 while the boy was being chauffeured back to his family’s estate in Virginia from his Massachusetts boarding school.
Jonathan’s mausoleum was unoriginal. It often struck him that the rich had no taste, either they wanted uninspired copies of the standard issue, or if they strove for originality, it often managed to come out looking like a shabby pastiche. His parents strove for a fairytale quality for Johnny’s tomb, insisting it be covered with climbing rose bushes, with their beloved Prince Charming locked away inside, surrounded by red blooms and thorns.
At this point he slows his step, because the next part of the game needed the most concentration. The zombies would gather inside the door of Jonathan’s mausoleum, growling and walking on stiff legs. The girls now had to save the “zombie” boys. The girls take a nonchalant manner and casually walk by, some of the girls assume a stereotyped carriage of a prostitute, swinging imaginary purses and rocking their juvenile hips. He was shocked when he first saw his Mary Beth act like a common tramp. Then the zombies rushed out, their knees and ankles locked with the gooey monster babbling among them. The trampy girls lured the zombies over to the Chirsterson display, to capture and then liberate the boys with their womanly powers. Act three of the four-act drama began.
He sits down on a bench along the sidewalk and puts his head in his hands. The girls would lead the zombies to what he thought was a simple elegant monument, a ring of seven upright pillars, three on each side and one straight ahead, rising out of a cement circle, with a grassy area in the middle. At the base of the head pillar was Michael Chirsterson’s headstone, a flat slab of stone near the ground, where the gooey monster lay down to sleep. Seven pillars because Michael was lost to leukemia at age seven after being shuttled from expert to expert all across the country (parental love could not save him).
The girls placed their “power stones” at the base of each pillar to “trap” the zombie boys inside. The boys moan and groan in their enclosure, falling to the ground in death’s sleep.
The “power stones” were supposed to be a new cash cow for the Gardens--cashing in on peoples’ grief (or vanity). The management called them “remembrance stones,” from which mourners could pick from eight different colors in either round or oval shapes, that the less affluent parents could leave in the Gardens as a memorial, and took up little of the valuable plots sold off to the rich. Each was engraved with the name and dates of a dead child. They ended up being a money loser so the management stopped offering them, but the ones that were purchased, he thought, tended to turn up like ornamental rabbit turds under hibiscus bushes. The children were told not to play with them, but they were irresistible to young hands.
He tries to phantom the womanly powers that Mary Beth possessed or might have possessed if she had lived. Right now, all he could think about was her locked away in cold sterility, embalmed and entombed, when she should be blazing hot, not made into the little perfect sleeping angel that adorned Anna’s tomb, but a flaming demon of lust. This makes him wonder if his grief was polluting his mind, inflaming it with sacrilegious thoughts that should terrify him as a good father; thoughts that might be a symptom of pathology and his own mental demise. He tries to focus on the game the children played, the game he plays in his head, the game he carries in his briefcase.
When the zombies were trapped and sleeping, the girls would skip around the outside of the ring pillars and chant:
Zombies are not our friends.
We want our friends back.
We will save our friends from the Gooey Monster.
We will bring our friends back to us.
Shablamidi, Shablamida.
These magic words restored the zombies to life. The boys escaped their prison and fled away with the girls leaving the gooey monster to awaken stripped of its conquest. There was, he noticed, also an egalitarian quality to the game. It wasn’t finished, and couldn’t be completed until even the gooey monster was saved. None could be left behind to suffer the deathly touch of the bronze girl. So, a new stage was set to free the gooey monster from its babbling. The action moved over to the Salwert’s fountain, to the place where your mother told you not to put that dirty water into your mouth because it would make you sick […].
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