Sunday night. They have this 3 for $10 deal at the Blockbuster. We
went on Friday needed a five day movie as the others were two day
so we got this foreign flick, Japanese called "Afterlife."
Death like life has a governmental process. You enter a room, are
interviewed, officially told you are dead. It takes a week, you have
to pick your most precious memory then it gets acted out and videotaped.
This is the only memory you take with you when you go on. Those that
can't or won't pick stay behind and work as facilitators for the others.
One old lady is already living her memory so she gets sent on.
An interesting concept but a dull movie Randy falls out quick. She
goes to bed. I try to watch but too bleary-eyed to read the subtitles
I start to drift off lulled by murmurs of Japanese. To be awakened
by a commotion outside. Her dogs are in their little cages in the
corner going nuts. Randy comes running in. Something is yowling outside
in the yard, an area of planted trees & bushes then a dirt lane
then open desert. Sounds like something is caught in the chicken wire
Randy has strung to keep rabbits from her tender young plants. Things
always caught - those same rabbits, a rattlesnake now this ... a coyote?
Making a wild yowl then these grunting sounds. I shine a flashlight.
We stand on the porch, the thing is close. Two red shining eyes -
a coyote. Not caught but acting very strange. The light moves it back
into the desert. We go inside. It moves around to the other side of
the house, close in and starts yowling again. "What do you want?"
Randy yells. Or what does she want? For some reason we are sure it's
female, maybe in heat. After what? Her little dachshunds are fixed,
a tasty meal. Me? I'm not ready for coyote love. Or is she maddened
by the full moon rising over the house, the dry acid air as far away
a mountain burns? Randy sez that the Navaho think it is good luck
when a coyote acts strange. Good, could always use good luck.
I sit on the porch as she returns to bed & the desert quiets
down then back inside the movie still on they are taping the dead
memories one old guy can't make a choice they bring in tapes of his
life to help him out each year reduced to a two hour tape, seventy-one
years all carefully numbered in Japanese script ... I turn it off,
shuffle to bed.
Next evening we see her again, up the road a few hundred yards near
the boundary of Saguaro National Park. She sees us too, turns her
back & pees in the dirt, trots away. Trickster, flipping off the
slow dim dangerous humans. I hope this makes my video tape. The one
marked 53 ...
