13 But the moon is a cliche.
The moon is whatever you make it. In French, a “cliche” is the typographic plate that makes it possible to print pages in batches, as well as the photographic negative.
What surprised me when I returned to the room was how nothing had changed in my absence. The children hadn’t woken; the walls had not fallen—and this is a facet of my undeserving good fortune. A mother in Gaza or Ukraine may leave the room and return to find its walls crumbled on top of her children. We assume the walls will stay standing because we live in a country that manufactures walls and security and borders in order to distract us from the hauntological.
But the world is a case in which the unthinkable often happens.
The unthinkable makes our ghosts both local and global.
As I crawled into the sleeping bag that smelled faintly of mosquito repellent, I focused on moving very slowly to keep from waking the toddler who was still little enough to share the bag with me. After laying my head on the pillow next to hers, the “unthoughts” returned.
The unthoughts are the ones that the ghosted X’s refuse to relinquish. The ghosted must have a living mind in which to bury those thoughts. The minds of the living serve as graveyards for the unthoughts we refuse to speak, as articulated by the ghosts who cannot rest until those thoughts are properly honored and spoken aloud.
An “improper burial” is one in which the dead cannot rest because the living failed to enact the rituals that make forgetting possible. A grave without a name is a grave that holds no one. A mass grave is a pile of screams and bones crawling over each other, trying to find someone that will recognize them and speak them into the existence of the eternal.
I stared at the ceiling, sought sleep in the angles of light that poured across the walls from the window. The warm discord of breathing, the scattered beats through which each child rode the night: I chased the music into an interlude. And then turned my attention to placating the insomnia that emerges victorious in every battle, no matter how many sheep I bring to the fold—insomnia wins.
It was then, between the sheep and the shaft of light and the trio of snore-puffs, that I remembered an adage my mother once told me, an adage that amounted to a warning.
“Any animal you kill will howl on your grave for eternity,” my mother said.
The animal’s spirit will rob your bones of peace and rest by making it impossible for those who love you to find you. This is how we, the living, create our own grave-robbers. This is how we secure the unrest that plagues our houses and kin.
Eternity is horrible under such circumstances. Infinitude is miserable—unless your loved ones know your hunger—unless they, too, have inherited it—in which case the spirit of the animal you killed will help them find their way back to you in the dark.
One must learn to do many things in the dark— if the hunger is your favorite part.