Killing Oligocene

by Faith Beck

At twenty-four I work as a funeral attendant at Bernheimer’s Funeral Emporium. We sell everything for a good funeral at wholesale prices—YOU CAN’T BEAT IT TO DEATH, UNLESS IT’S OUR PRICES—that’s the store’s motto. I wear black and white, because there really is hope, every day and mousse my hair. I work here because I like the idea that there is something different than having a regular job in retail. And I know I want to ask Miguel on a date.
…..Miguel.
…..A foreigner, illegal and dark.
…..Mr. Bernheimer told me he came to this country to free his family from oppression. He plans to work for four years and then buy a car. With this car he will pick up his family in Spain and then he, his mother, and younger twin brothers will leave for Italy. He only knows one word in English: Oligocene. I was there when he learned this word. It means referring to the third epoch of the Tertiary Period, which was marked by the rise of true carnivores. Oligocene…Oligocené, in his Spanish accent.
…..We met for the first time when I was restocking funeral facial powder, which makes dead people look like they died only minutes ago. Miguel caught me in the revolving door. I was bringing in new stock and he was going into the stock room. He pushed so fast that that my shoe got caught and then I smacked my head on the glass right behind him. And then I passed out. That’s how we met, just like that. “Lo siento!” was the first thing I heard out my left ear. He touched my thigh with his dark skin and rubbed his thumb back and forth back and forth—and it was soothing—and he was foreign and it was soothing.

. . . I was naked on a Thursday. When I was little, I would answer the door in just my skin. It was who I was, I guess. I was outgoing. I was five-years-old, tall enough to reach the door knob and so there was nothing really stopping me, nothing but pride. It was autumn and Uncle Steve rang the bell. I was so vulnerable at this age and didn’t know it. I guess if you don’t know that you’re vulnerable and you don’t feel vulnerable, then maybe you really aren’t. In the end, I think being vulnerable has been my reason for everything. . .

Miguel must have felt really bad that he knocked me unconscious because he took off his thin black sweater to rub the top of my head with, even though the rubbing made it hurt worse. For the rest of the day, he kept following me because he didn’t understand when I told him I was fine. He followed me to my car, where I always ate lunch. He sat on the lid of my neon cruiser and stared through the windshield as I ate sun-warmed tuna on rye. Then he followed me back to work and watched me help a customer select the right shade of almond for her mother-in-law’s finger nails. On a side note, the nail polish we sell here is awesome. It’s called HARD AS A HEADSTONE, and it never comes off. Some people come in just to buy our unbeatable beauty products.
…..After that incident we were inseparable because he wouldn’t leave me alone. I began teaching him English during the slow hours of the day so he could understand that I was fine and didn’t need him to follow me to the restroom—but we never made it that far. On the third Tuesday since we’d met, he brought me a second tuna on rye—matching everything about my favorite sandwich, from the brand of tuna and bread, to the dressing of mustard. After that, I started to take him to movies.
…..I figured they would be better teachers of American custom than I was. We saw eight movies in two weeks. About love and death and heavy girls wearing trendy clothes and skin-and-bone jocks and dead animals and war and ignorance and racism and amusement parks and couches and donkeys—all the things that America’s famous for. He loved all of them. He would stare at the screen like it wasn’t made of plastic by some sweatshop child in Indonesia—but rather like there wasn’t a screen in the way at all—he saw through to a world which could be his and every time he’d watch this intensely, I’d watch him. His eyes would fill with overstimulation and sometimes, he’d let it go.
. . .When I was fourteen, I didn’t have guy friends, but I did have a so-called best friend who had to get an abortion. I had curly pubic hair in lieu of head-hair. In a world of 267 varieties of hair-straightener, like Heinz products, I couldn’t wait to try them all. I went blonde, black, and even dark shades of gray-but nothing looked good and professional enough so I went back to wearing it red. I took an interest in collecting dead butterflies. I began to notice how fragile death was; the fact that something as monumental as death couldn’t even change the appearance of an insignificant butterfly, fascinated me. Dead butterflies looked the same as living butterflies except their antennae didn’t move. When death lost its power, it was fun to play with and I collected more butterflies. In fact, I still have their bodies in a cardboard box under my bed; they haven’t wrinkled. . .

On the fourth Thursday that we’d known each other, I brought Miguel back to my apartment. I made dinner: rye with ranch for me and beans for him. Even though he didn’t speak, he was a very thoughtful person. Not thoughtful in the conventional sense, but in the more deliberate.
…..He looked around my home; walking on the balls of his loafers so lightly it seemed like he was hovering through the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom. He looked at everything. Pictures of me as a little girl with my father, boxes of matches I’d collected from various restaurants, singing hamburger wall ornaments. When he was satisfied, he sat across from me on my mattress, and looked in my eyes, my face, holding his so calm. Everything became yellow and hot. My cheeks swelled, eyes closing slightly at the corners. He laid his thumb on my forearm and rubbed it back and forth back and forth and then…he stopped. He hopped down on my black rug and waited for me there until I did the same. He looked at my hands. I reached under my bed for the preserved butterflies. He picked one out of its plastic baggy and held it up to his eyes. He looked down. He looked up at me. He set the red butterfly out on his leg; it tilted to the right. He tried to straighten it but it kept tilting—this went on for four rounds and then I let wet come from my right eye. He picked up his left arm, rubbing my cheek with his thumb. I leaned closer.…………………………………..And.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….I touched his arm.

After Miguel left, I felt uneasy. I hadn’t cried in a while since then.
…..Understanding Miguel was difficult, but I couldn’t even understand guys when they did speak English, so I didn’t see this as a particular loss. And who really even says what they mean all the time, anyway? Who can really say they have always expressed what they needed to, at the time when they needed to do it?
…..Spinning slowly, the blades of the ceiling fan dragged shadows around my room. I held the red butterfly to the light. Squinted. Everything became red.

. . . I made my first guy friend in school at age nine. We did everything together, he taught me magic tricks. I, by accident, said the word “penis” in front of him—because it rhymed it with the word “pizza”— and we never spoke again. Coincidently, I began seeing his mother everywhere after that, never saying hi, but never strictly ignoring one another either. Just long stares with curly smiles at the end if the stare lasted long enough. . .

Miguel and I saw the movie Flame and Flesh last Friday and Miguel learned the word Oligocene. It’s still the only word he can say. He said it again and again and he remembered it the next day, which was more progress than we ever had with “hello.” I knew he knew what it meant because he always said it with confusion and sadness and I wanted to hold him, but restrained myself.
…..After the movie, we walked around the theater and then up by the used-car-dealership. Then to the dumpsters.
…..“You know, Miguel, the people in movies aren’t real. Actors don’t die, and cannibalistic tribes have really dropped in number since the end of the Great Depression,” I said.
…..Miguel said nothing. But I knew he could hear me.
…..“I mean, when was the last time you saw a person eat another person…or themselves, for that matter?”
…..He looked in my eyes.
…..Miguel stopped walking and stood still, looking at me for awhile. I stopped, too. I felt like I might cry again. His wavy hair vibrated. I’d spent enough time with him to know when he was going to do something. He looked to the rusted dumpster. He put his right foot on the step-ladder. I breathed in, “MIGUEL! Get down!” I grabbed onto the back of his black sweater while he struggled to keep climbing.
…..I grabbed around his waist, then his knees, and loafers. When he made his way inside the dumpster, so deep I couldn’t see him anymore, he screamed, “OLIGOCENNNNNNNNNNÉ !” That was the second time I cried in front of him.

. . . I was ten when I started building the house with my dad. I went through a phase of speaking and wanting only dad–not mother. I would call him Bob and he didn’t mind. We’d play basketball and he’d teach me my fractions on long car rides through the city. I remember mixing cement, thick and lumpy in the basement with him. He’d tell me funny jokes, always jokes…in fact, if a sad song ever came on the radio, he’d switch the station.
He didn’t want the invitation to cry. . .

The next movie we saw together was called Love Paris, a quixotic vignette about a girl named Paris who moved to Paris, France and found true love there while battling feelings of inner resentment and self-hatred. After the movie, I tried to teach Miguel a new saying from Love Paris: “I get you.” He grabbed me. “No, not physically—
it means that you understand someone.
You get their juju…
It’s like…
searching and getting that shiver in the place between your brain and heart…
that no one seems to ever notice in you
when you get someone, the shaking gets so…
so cold and…
hot that you can’t help but see exactly who they are.”
…..Even though I knew he couldn’t understand me, I still wanted him to watch me say it, and to be in arm’s reach when I did.
…..But he did look at me. And I felt him.
…..What I didn’t say was that even if you get someone, it doesn’t mean that he gets you. But I didn’t tell him because I didn’t expect him to get me, since I really never expected that from anyone.

. . . I was twelve when dad left. And that was it for being twelve. . .

I got the call from Grandpa at 8:18 a.m. I was in my kitchen when he said he’d be coming over. Grandpa Marvin is a 92-year-old Catholic WWII veteran with 88 moles on his back, 2 plastic hips, 1 artificial lung, and 17 hairs on his head. He’s the only reason I came to this city, and once he’s gone, there really won’t be any reason to stay.
…..I had to take him to watch the pigeons because it was Thursday. Grandpa Marvin never fed the pigeons, he only ever watched them while stroking away at the thick clump of skin between his neck and collarbone. He always scared me when I was a little girl because of his weird pinkie-toes. They are so tiny it looks like he has raisin-lumps of skin and nail on the sides of his feet.
…..We sat together on the bench, watching the heads of those tiny chickens bob back and forth, to and fro, with every step. Grandpa asked me a question.
…..“When did you start feeling better?”
…..“What do you mean?” I said.
…..“You’re saying you don’t remember being depressed?”
…..“No,” I said.
…..“Well, it happened. Seven months after he left and then you stopped crying” he said.
…..“How can someone cry every day for seven months and not remember?” I asked.
…..“Maybe you didn’t want to” he said.

All of a sudden, I could make out Miguel walking towards us. I’d drawn him a map of exciting places to go to, so I wasn’t surprised to see him there.
…..“Oh Grandpa, this is my friend, Miguel.” Grandpa looked up from his pigeons, shaking Miguel’s hand with his eyes. Miguel smiled without teeth and reached out to pet the pigeons. They scattered.
…..“I see you have a new friend. Is he homeless? Or Jewish?” Grandpa said.
…..“Grandpa…” I said.
…..“He looks Jewish,” Grandpa said.
…..“I’m not Adam’s Eve, Pop-Pop. I can like someone who doesn’t look like me…or you…or dad” I said.
…..“Sure you can, String Bean…but you never have.”

. . . I was twenty-three when I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Communications, which was ironic because shouldn’t everyone be able to “communicate” when they graduate? I lost my virginity to a guy that acted just like my father, called Hey-Come-Meet-My-Mom-Guy. After he left, I remembered dad leaving. I was standing on the front porch. A buddy of his brought over a pickup truck. Dad struggled to pull a metal door out of the garage. He slid it into the truck. And that was the last time he was home. And so my ex probably met some hussy in Burbank and actually introduced her to his mother, who’s really a slut herself. . .

In November, Mr. Bernheimer died. All employees were required to attend the funeral on company grounds. Grandpa Marvin was staying at my place for the week and so I had to bring a guest with me to the funeral of the fiscal year. Miguel, of course, would be coming too. I decided that I would make our relationship official. I would ask Miguel on a date. At the funeral. A celebration of fragility seemed an appropriate place to do it.
…..I slipped into a black and white pantsuit and tucked grandpa’s white shirt into his black sweatpants. With his bony hand on my shoulder, we made it to the cemetery. There was a refreshments table and I dropped grandpa off while I looked for Miguel. It was autumn and he stood by the wilting shrubs along the pathway. I looked down at a mess of dead caterpillars with him. I’d never seen such a tangled slop of them before.
…..“Hello” I said.
…..He looked horrified. He reached down and grabbed a clump of clustered caterpillar. They were as lifeless as lettuce left in dressing too long. I struggled to pick them out of his fingers. He held on too tight and some caterpillars died again between his thumbs. He ran past me and toward Mr. Bernheimer’s open grave. He threw the caterpillars down six feet while screaming Oligocene’s name.

The week after, work was usual.
…..I still hadn’t told Miguel I was in love with him. I hadn’t told him because it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would change. And I was too old for that…for being fragile.
…..I’d had time to think about death and butterflies and things that were real and things that weren’t since the funeral. Mr. Bernheimer was dead…and he was as solid as a rock…still taking up space and air and mass and fluid and bone. Maybe I just didn’t get it, but death seemed…affectionate… and I wasn’t afraid of turning into death…
…..But once you die, you have no control, no breath, no costume to take off. And that was why I did what I did that one day in late November.
…..I was helping a 15-year-old pick out her mother’s funeral wig when I saw Miguel over at the register. He was getting screamed at by a 50-year-old with a headset.
…..Apparently, Miguel only gave that guy $6.15 back in change. He needed $6.38.
…..“I need an American over here! Somebody get this kid’s ass back to the monkeys and chimps and bamboo shrubs and idiot village where he’s from!”
…..I rushed over.
…..“I’m sorry Sir. I’ll be right back to help you.”
…..I pulled Miguel out from the register. I lead him to the dumpster behind our building, his eyes spilling with tears.
…..I pulled him into my arms. I felt wet on the back of my neck.
…..He was trembling. In his own, on his own.
…..I needed to get vulnerable. To get real, fast.
…..I pushed him in front of me.
…..I unbuttoned my sweater. I un-flipped my shoes. Un-clasped the black blazer. The black trousers. The white top.
…..I didn’t want to eat these feelings-the person- the living breath-the thought-the blood-and nail-and wing-and heart-and me. Fuck the self inflicted eating. Fuck carnivore-ism. Fuck it superbly.
…..I took out my hair pin. Off with my watch.
…..He looked toward me.
…..At my face, smiling with eyes.
…..Un-snapped the underclothes.
…..He climbed in first. Lifted me down.
…..We screamed, killing Oligocene.
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