Cemetery Gates

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A woodblock magician calls a ghost to the world of the living. He raises a rod in one hand, a censer in the other, a look of grim concentration etched on his face. His ghost, meanwhile, is rendered transparent, as if fading into existence. Surrounding both figures is a magic circle, a barrier between worlds. 

I first saw this untitled work by the German artist Sigmar Polke at SFMoMA in 2015. I’ve never been able to explain why it affected me so much. Superficially, I liked the contrast between the medieval characters and the yellow, resinous background. But I liked a lot of paintings superficially. Only this one stayed fixed in my mind. I would remember it and think, This is about me. 

That was when I was first getting tattoos. I emailed a woodblock specialist in Oakland, who was excited to do the Polke. We put it above my right knee. He did the ghost in grey ink: when healed, she was only ever half-visible compared to the dark outline of her summoner. Ten years passed. I saw the figures upside-down in the shower, in bed, on the toilet. I forgot they were on my body. 

…

One night, my friends and I snuck into Greenwood Cemetery to drink beer on the steps of a mausoleum. I felt two burning pinpricks on the back of my neck; the sensation of being watched. I waited to see if the feeling would fade, and when it didn’t, I turned. A doe disappeared behind a box hedge.

…

Celeste and I sat on the Central Park lawn, smoking menthol cigarettes and talking about writing. She seemed in every way more perfect than I was: younger, more stylish, better tattoos, features better proportioned, teeth better arranged. Her father owned a chain of banks in the Midwest and paid her rent (mine was an Episcopal minister and did not). I suspected she was smarter, too: her Hinge messages had forced me to look up words like etiological and hermeneutics. 

She said, “My MFA cohort are concerned with plot over feeling and craft over experimentation. They write traditionally American stories. Fine for them, but not for me.”

I’d had my first stories published that year. Worryingly, both had plots. 

We sat on wet grass until I noticed the earth had left a dark brown stain on the seat of my new pants; I crouched on my heels while she remained sitting; I imagined her thinking, This guy is obsessed with his pants. The cigarettes made me cough. When I get nervous, I overshare, and I found myself talking about my mother, how she had nourished my interest in books by reading to me, how her dying when I was eight forced me to seek refuge in reading, and how my commitment to my practice was indebted to both my relationship with her and my lack of one.  

“You poor creature,” Celeste said. 

I didn’t like that response, nor that I’d told her. I didn’t want her to think I was using my mom’s death to generate pathos. Pathos = pathetic. Celeste kept her own disclosures to a minimum. She asked, “Have you dated many writers?”

Never, I said, crouching above her like a gargoyle, but wasn’t that the dream? To share both a romantic and a creative life with someone? Past girlfriends had never understood my artistic side. As I said the words, artistic side, I simultaneously thought, I do not deserve love. 

“But what about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath? Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell?” 

I had to admit there weren’t many positive examples. 

“What if we don’t like each other’s writing?” 

“It’s fine if we don’t,” I said, terrified. “I don’t like most of my friends’ work.” 

“I have to be with someone whose work I respect. It’s important. Reading someone, writing about them, these are vital acts, like giving out a second life.” 

I said, “Whose work do you respect?”

She pursed her lips into a smile, but said nothing, as if the entire conversation was painful and embarrassing. 

“Come on,” I pleaded. “There have to be a few.”

She named a long-dead catholic nun, a French writer I’d never heard of, and her thesis advisor, an experimental writer famous for incorporating images into her work.  

The sun had fallen behind the trees, and it was suddenly cold. I knew that I’d disappointed her, but I didn’t know how. I asked if she wanted to get dinner. She said no. “Let’s be intentional.” Was getting dinner unintentional? I didn’t argue. As I walked her to the train, I apologized for being neurotic. She said, “I think it’s cute.” Confirming that she thought I was neurotic. 

In my East Village apartment I boiled frozen dumplings and watched Bloodborne lore videos on YouTube. I imagined Celeste reading my stories, tilting her perfect nose up at my traditionally American sentences. If I wanted her to like my writing, and therefore me, it’d have to be completely different: experimental, feelings-forward, and even mystical. The idea landed like a falling piano. I’d write my cemetery essay. 

As a preteen I’d lived on the grounds of a cemetery in the corn-growing region of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Ever since, I had liked being near the dead. There was a time when I would go to Greenwood often, and I even lived above a cemetery now. I looked out my window at the small, grassy triangle, the moon casting liquid gray light on the stones. St. Lazarus’s. This cemetery was historic and protected: nobody could enter through its wrought-iron gates. I had thought about that forbidden quality many times. Now, I’d write about it, comparing its forbiddenness to all cemeteries, how you could never really enter them; not while alive, anyway. I would make it my quest to access the cemetery (to visit the world of the dead, like Orpheus), a quest that would likely fail, and I would write about that failure, comparing it to our species’ failure to understand death while living. It was perfect: a heady topic for a haughty girl. 

I texted Celeste the next morning. Deciding what to send was difficult. I wanted to learn more about her, but I was afraid she wouldn’t respond to an open-ended question. I remembered the grimace she’d made when we talked about our work. I’d disappointed her once. I couldn’t risk doing it again before our second date. I needed to go simple, direct. For some reason (probably because she’d refused at first), I fixated on getting dinner. I said: i had so much fun in the park. dinner next week? 

Next, I found an article on the St. Lazarus’s Cemetery, written by David Appel, member of the New York Historical. If anyone could get me into the cemetery, it’d be him.

Dear Mr. Appel,

I’m writing a piece on cemeteries for The New Yorker. The cemetery is of personal importance to me. I wonder if you might know how I can gain access to St. Lazarus’s? It’s totally closed to the public. 

Thank you so much,

Andrew Braun

The New Yorker would never publish my essay, but Appel didn’t need to know that. I had a smaller outlet in mind, a journal run by my friend’s friend, featuring quasi-religious, mystical writing. Celeste hadn’t responded to my text. She had, however, posted a story to Instagram, a coffeeshop selfie captioned, working on my novel :p. She wore a scoop-neck top that revealed a dark, abstract tattoo on her sternum. The visible portion of the tattoo resembled a gate, with spidery pits of black abstraction obscuring the design. Who was this woman who despised plot so much that she even rejected narrative in her tattoos? In comparison, the designs on my body all had faces. I clicked “like” on the story. I navigated to her profile, where I found a link to her Substack. I clicked through the four posts, staring at blocks of text, unwilling to read them, to let her voice enter my head. What if her work was bad? Or—good? (Much later, I’d read the essays she’d published there, the short, lapidary passages on hurt and loneliness. It was information that would’ve been useful to someone attempting to know Celeste, if that, after all, had been my goal). 

Apophatic theology: approaching the divine by negation. 

Nothing happened for a few days. I ate more frozen dumplings. I put dirty dishes on top of other dirty dishes in my sink. I thought about my essay as a finished product, but I didn’t start writing. Celeste responded after 48 hours: sure thing. This was the most delicious time in a courtship, though I would never admit it to my friends, and rarely to myself: the time when it became clear that the interest was one-sided. It was a perfect torment. I could abase myself with kind texts and smiley faces and agonize over my counterpart’s slow, inadequate responses. Life’s regular distractions—my many incomplete projects, my low-income coffee shop job—fell away before this, the best distraction. I went about my routine thrumming with pleasurable anxiety. I knew I only had a week or so until Celeste lost interest completely. In her mind, I was flat, a phantom who could only speak the words, “dinner soon?” I had to prove my humanity. I had to write and publish the essay in a week. An impossible task, but impossible in a mythic sense—again, I thought of Orpheus.

I passed St. Lazarus’s as I hurried to and from my apartment. A stone retaining wall sloped into the iron gates. Fallen leaves carpeted the mossy stones. A tomb near the street had been cracked, perhaps by an earthquake, or 9/11. I knew these details well, but when I passed, I paid them no attention. I was too preoccupied with the cemetery in my head.

Mr. Braun,

I’m happy to hear from you, though I’m a bit confused. Your message implies that you have a personal relationship with someone buried in the cemetery, which is impossible, as the last burial took place in 1854.

Best Regards,

David Appel

Appel’s response arrived right as I had swallowed half of an Adderall. The pill was for my essay, but the email distracted me, and I spent the evening crafting my response:

Dear Mr. Appel,

Hoo boy. My apologies for the miscommunication. When I speak of a “personal relationship,” I mean with cemeteries in general. Allow me to explain: 

My father is an Episcopal minister. After graduating from seminary in Tennessee, he found employment at St. Paul’s in Chestertown, Maryland, an historic church with a rectory situated in the geographic center of a thirty-acre graveyard. I was seven when we moved, and the cemetery became my playground. I scampered across mausoleums and markers without a notion of what they represented. 

The oldest graves at St. Paul’s date back to the 1620’s. Did you know people have been burying their dead since before evolving into homo sapiens? Of course you know, you’re a member of the historical society. But humor me. Why do we bury, other than to protect ourselves from disease? Burial is the ritual that draws “the first veil of decency and solemnity over death,” per Georges Bataille. This implies that death is indecent, and I would go further, I would call it unbearable. Let me put it like this: Most of humankind’s behavior fits within the boundaries of logic, to the point where we even begin to think of the universe as logical. But the universe is not logical. Death is not logical. The complete cessation of existence—how can a human even imagine it? Burials, tombs, cemeteries, mausoleums, urns; they function as tools to impose logic and reason on the unbearable non-logic of death. When someone dies, our ritual-impulse gets ratcheted up a notch, and we have devised all sorts of systems to—well, to keep ourselves from going insane. 

Our colonial brick rectory was comfortably sized, with white wood crosses separating the windowpanes, and three dormer windows protruding from a slope of grey shingling. Standing at the front door, you saw graves to your left and your right. The house existed within the cemetery. It both was and was not a part of it. 

“The border between life and death is less impermeable than we commonly think.” That’s Sebald, though it might as well be Bataille, or Lerner, or St. Augustine. Describing that border is like trying to add weight and texture to a ribbon snapping in the wind. The rectory in a graveyard is a helpful metaphor. But as my mother proved, the border is weightless, textureless, it can be crossed in an instant, and no ritual, logic system, or metaphor can prevent that. That it happened in the rectory, after a complicated reaction to medication, following surgery to relieve pain from her chronic nerve disease, I find cruelly ironic. Despite dying in a graveyard, she was cremated. No tombstone. The vital part of her disappeared, but her remains… remained… in a polished urn on the shelf in our T.V. room, a construction of blue marble with branching veins, all the more dead for trying to resemble something living. I sat there with what was left of my family, watching images from “West Wing” and “River Monsters” bounce off the stone. I challenge you to better define the word “Profane.” 

The rectory both was and wasn’t part of the cemetery. But after the rupture, didn’t the “wasn’t” fall away? Quiet domesticity no longer separated us from the dead. Maybe it was because of where we kept her ashes. They corrupted the house, made it less a dwelling place than a resting place, less house than columbarium. 

I still find cemeteries calming, despite my personal tragedy. There is something so peaceful about nonexistence. I love living above St. Lazarus’s. I see metaphorical similarities between the rectory in the Maryland graveyard and the locked gates below my window in New York. Borders, limits. I want to write about how the inaccessibility of this death-space mirrors the inaccessibility of death itself. Though it’s not all that inaccessible, is it? “Common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” per Nabokov, but the darkness doesn’t simply disappear while we live: Death is always present. Within and without. I live above the cemetery and I can’t go in. Please respond ASAP. It’s become very important to me. 

Andrew Braun

What a thrill! I had felt these concepts as truth for twenty-three years, but I’d never articulated them, in fact I’d wondered if they could be articulated at all, if translating them to words would rob them of their profundity. But I liked what I’d written. Of course, I couldn’t actually use these paragraphs for my essay. I’d have to be more oblique to impress Celeste. I foresaw a braided, fragmented narrative. A snappy lede to capture the reader’s attention. My piece would go viral. People would come up to me at parties to ask, “Aren’t you the cemetery guy?” I’d look aloof and hot with Celeste’s arm wrapped around my waist. She’d brag about my hermeneutic approach. 

I finally fell asleep as the sun rose. I dreamed I was in the attic of the Maryland rectory, a dusty garret littered with toys, ornaments, books. The floorboards rumbled under my feet. A viper with a body as wide as our doorframe had twisted itself into the house. I could feel it working its way upstairs. The door opened. I saw curved, wrought-iron fangs, hollow slits glistening with venom. As above, so below: I fell into the gum-colored tunnel of its mouth. All sound disappeared. I felt the snake’s beating heart. Behind that was my father’s voice, plaintive, calling my mother’s name like he had on the day that she died. 

The Polke painting is foregrounded by what look like prison bars. Only a curtain on the painting’s left side reveals them to be windows, or rather muntin bars, the sticks of wood that hold windowpanes together, the rectory’s white crosses. They fade behind the summoner, but not his ghost. I wonder what that’s supposed to convey. Both figures are trapped in the circle, but only the ghost is pinned behind the muntin. You would think the ghost has more freedom of mobility. After all, she’s halfway between worlds. 

When I first saw the painting, I thought she was fading into view. Assuming form. But the painting doesn’t suggest a direction. 

She never responded to my message, and really, I never expected her to. I’m not saying I would never find love; rather, that I purposefully sought love from people unlikely to give it to me. I knew there was something Freudian at work, that my mother had rendered herself unavailable by dying, and that I now obsessed over unavailable women. I got much more enjoyment out of being ghosted than in the rare instances when a relationship developed. And anyway, I told myself, clearly coping, it was better for the essay if Celeste faded away. I could fold her into the narrative, turn it into a “ghost” story.

I thought about blocking her but decided against it. I wanted my essay to appear on her feed. Maybe it could bring her back from the world of the dead. 

Mr. Braun,

You paint an interesting picture. I am sure you will be able to write your essay perfectly well without access to the St. Lazarus’s Cemetery, which is closed to the public for reasons of preservation and safety. Surely you of all people can appreciate the need to protect such an historical site. The gates will open on Memorial Day for a service honoring the Revolutionary War veterans buried there. I hope to see you next Spring. 

Best Wishes, 

David Appel

p.s. I am sorry for your loss.

p.p.s. Perhaps you’d find this book interesting? It’s called, The Interior Castle, by a Carmelite nun named Teresa…

I stopped reading. I lay on my bed experiencing the kind of full-body sluggishness that made me feel like I had no free will, that there had never been such a thing as “free will,” that my laziness and my failures had been predetermined by an outside force. I stared at my wall. It was white and blank, but the longer I stared, the less white and less blank it became. There were pocks where new paint folded over old, and discolorations from my half-decade of residence, coffee stains and oily fingerstreaks. My gaze snagged on a tiny brown smudge beneath the windowsill. It was the corpse of a mosquito I’d flattened over the summer. I could make out its little legs, its rod-shaped proboscis, and a rust-red splotch of what was likely my blood. Every single night I went to sleep, staring at my wall, not seeing what was right in front of me. Was that the kind of person I was? I looked through the window, out into the night sky, and down to the cemetery.

Cemetery, from the Greek koimeterion, or “sleeping place.” 

I pulled on my hoodie. I shoved my keys into my pocket. I walked downstairs, outside, and around the corner, all while narrating my actions as if they were taking place in my essay: I decided that, actually, I did have free will, that I didn’t have to wait for a faceless computer-man’s permission to do what I should have done a long time ago. 

There was the cemetery. Its elevated grass platform was surrounded on three sides by tenement buildings, one of them mine, and I could see my bedroom window, a pale yellow rectangle, the only one lit this late. I climbed onto the retaining wall. The wind rustled heart-shaped leaves off of a dignified old catalpa by where the wall cornered into a section leading toward my building: as I shimmied down this ledge, the fence grew shorter. Rust flaked onto my hands. I found it easy to lift myself, but difficult to shift my weight over the fenceposts’ fanglike tips; at the top I lost balance and fell into the cemetery; the right leg of my pants caught above the knee and ripped as I fell. I landed with a thud. I nearly lost my breath, but didn’t, and when I realized what had happened, I laughed. These were the same pants I’d been so protective of on my date with Celeste. It was as if God was telling me: “This is what you’ll have to sacrifice if you want to live honestly.” 

I sat against a vertical tombstone with two hands etched near the top, plus the years, 1789-1842. I couldn’t make out the weather-worn name in the dark. I was struck by a sense of specificity, that there were real, specific people buried underneath me, that I was bringing in my own ghosts. I made a plea to the nameless dead, a plea that, embarrassingly, took the form of a Smiths lyric: Please, please, please let me get what I want.

As my breathing steadied I remembered playing hide and seek with my mother in the month before her disease relegated her permanently to a wheelchair. The Maryland cemetery was filled with box hedges, the kind gardeners cultivate into topiaries and mazes, and these too were cultivated, carved into rudimentary walls between sections of graveyard. She counted down from twenty with her hands clapped over her eyes. I struggled under a hedge, thinking I would hide below its sharp, green leaves, but after a quick wiggle I found myself under a wide canopy, the garden equivalent to a children’s play parachute. I could crawl around completely unseen. My mom never found me. I heard her call my name. Andrew, Andrew. Her voice went away, then came closer. Through a mesh of foliage I saw her acid-wash jeans. She’d complained at a recent dinner about having to size up. It was rare for us to play outside: usually her illness kept her chained to the couch, where the most fun we could have was her reading aloud, voice low and calming, an incantation that swept me across borders and through time. Again she called my name. I scampered out, though, sitting there in the cemetery in 2025, I began to wonder why I did. The thought occurred, free of causation but strangely logical, that if I had never left the hedge, she might not have died. 

I tried picturing Celeste, asleep in a pit of abstraction, but the image failed to appear. 

Nothing else happened. I thought about how nothing was always happening, how nothing would continue to happen, senselessly and ceaselessly, until my body stopped working, and I was reunited with my mother. Then I felt two pricks on the back of my neck. Gooseflesh; or, the feeling of being watched. Was it—? Immediately my logic-brain supplied a retort: There was no way this symbolic gesture had yielded anything real. If anything lurked behind me, it was a stray cat, or a scavenging rat, or my wishfulness. I waited for the feeling to fade, but instead, it intensified, until the pressure on my neck felt like fangs.  I could’ve turned around and proved that the whole thing was false. But Orpheus had been warned not to turn. I stood up, wiped the dirt from my pants, and walked home. I wouldn’t kill what was behind me by looking.      I told myself: If someone is back there, I have to leave her back there, and if it’s nothing, I have to accept that nothing has shapes I still haven’t seen