Texas Pages

PROLOGUE

A rare sunny morning comes to Colma.

The sky brightens over San Bruno Mountain, bruised blues giving way to baby-cheek pinks and teases of gold. Navigation lights blink, red and resolute, atop the radio towers that scar the broad, rambling summit. Sunlight creeps across the green valley in which Colma is nestled, wicking away the dew from the lawns of the city's residents.

Twelve hundred of these residents are alive. They do what living people do: work jobs, sweat on treadmills, make love, incur debt, celebrate birthdays, worry about aging, watch prime-time TV, pray, complain about the weather. Another two million of these residents are already dead. No one knows for sure what they do--if they do anything but lie mute, immobile, decaying-- but some of the living have their suspicions.

As the sun makes its way across the valley, it shines first on the Cypress Golf Course. Underneath these seventeen acres of Bermuda grass and fescue is the potter's field where the beggars of cobblestoned San Francisco were buried in numbered graves and forgotten. Four golfers in primary-colored windbreakers take practice swings on the first tee, whipping metal-gleam arcs through the crisp morning air. A greenskeeper backs a long-bed golf cart out of the maintenance shed, and a lone golden-crowned sparrow answers the cart's reverse-warning beeps with a plaintive, unrequited song.
The first golfer tees up his ball and takes his stance with the light morning wind luffing his nylon sleeves. As he swings, his plastic spikes slip in the wet tee box, and he slices the ball dead right, a line drive into the pine trees and scrub. He mutters a curse, blaming himself for his first-tee jitters, but then the ball thwocks against something in the woods and caroms out, skidding ahead on the slick grass and rolling to a stop in the center of the fairway, just a choked-down 8-iron away from the green. He turns and grins as his friends moan their disbelief. Lucky sonofa[expletive]. Somebody's looking out for you today. And they continue their round: nine holes, played twice. It never occurs to him that the brownish scuff on his ball did not come from a tree or a rock or a log, but from a misshapen human skull coughed up by the shifting earth of the fault-lined valley.

The glow of morning spreads over the easternmost cemeteries of Colma:
Olivet Memorial Park; the Serbian Cemetery; Pet's Rest; and the two Chinese cemeteries, Hoy Sun Memorial and Golden Hills.
Across Hillside Boulevard.
Nocturnal gamblers emerge from the front doors of the Lucky Chances
24-Hour card house, slack and pale as fish in a bucket; they rub their eyes in the morning light, then collapse into their cars and drive away. All of them-- the winners, the losers, the breakers-even--will be gnawed at by the if onlys until the next time they rest their elbows on the soft green baize and ante up.
The day advances into Holy Cross Cemetery, Colma's oldest, a former potato field blessed in 1892 as a Catholic cemetery to serve San Francisco. Skyrocketing land values had convinced city dwellers that death was best dealt with elsewhere, and it was roundly agreed that a ten-mile trip southward was not an onerous journey for the dead to make--a mere step or two, in fact, compared to the great voyages on which their souls had already embarked.
The sun rises higher. Cypress Lawn East. Hills of Eternity. Eternal Home. Home of Peace. Salem Cemetery. The Italian Cemetery. The Japanese Benevolent Society Cemetery.
Lawn mowers sputter and cough out puffs of blue exhaust, then rumble to life and prowl the gentle slopes of the graveyards. In the lots of the car dealerships that clot Serramonte Boulevard, beads of dew glimmer on the polished hoods and roofs and trunks, while strings of red, white, and blue plastic pennants flick in the breeze, hopeful as America.
Across El Camino Real.
The overnight clerk at the Zes-T-Mart prepares to go home. He is a heavily tattooed young man whose pierced ear and nose are connected by a length of steel chain, and he wears the afternoon-shift girl's name tag because he likes to head-[expletive] naive customers into wondering if his name really might be Mindy. He notices that, once again, several cartons of Chesterfields have vanished on his watch. He blames their disappearance on ghosts. He will never inform his manager of his suspicions, and he will never ask to see the surveillance tape to test his theory. This coming afternoon, though, he will crawl out of bed and join his four roommates around the house bong (a complicated maze of Habitrail tubes that once housed a gerbil named Happy), and, while watching smoke plumes rise from the mouthpiece, he will dreamily remark, "Dudes. When we die, we'll all smoke Chesterfields." And although his friends will burst out laughing, thinking it's just stony talk, he'll find himself happy to believe in ghosts who jones for nicotine and remain brand-loyal. It's the one belief he has that is unique and private, and thus absolutely unassailable.

Reprinted from ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS by Doug Dorst by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright © 2008 Doug Dorst.