Putting up with the bard in the bardo.
“Be quiet! He stalks . . .”
“O’ sinner, he has listened to praise all his afterlife. This kind of modest abuse—it’s a way to balance it all out.”
“You best be quiet. You hear that? He’s reciting one of his plays! That narcissist. Don’t say another word, he might see us. Or, worse, talk to us.”
“There’s no locking my lips! I’ll say what I want when I want, for he deserves to hear every word—”
“Who goes there?” carries a voice from across the yard.
The sinners duck below their tombs. Their ghastly knuckles carve into the headstones, and their translucent blue bodies sink back into the dirt, cowering beneath the protection of their unkempt graves. With their faint fingers they shovel soft holes through the mold, watching as another blue figure dances across the graveyard, dressed in a colorful doublet, a daring jerkin, and noisy bells attached to high wool stockings. His untied bootlaces fall carefully onto the grassy path. Stitched to his hand waves a transparent scroll scribbled with sundry notes and drawings.
“Not his best work,” mutters the first sinner.
“Get down!” whispers the other urgently, though whisper is too generous a word, for even the frightened birds scramble about the blue skies of Stratford with his command.
But as William Shakespeare turns toward the noise, all his wide eyes find are the dancing leaves of a disturbed brush, chipped grave markers, a diseased tree growing into the side of a gravesite, disturbing the mound. He furrows his brow, studying the intricate movement of the rotted tree beneath the sunlight. The male spirit, who in life had been (oh, what does it matter?), hides directly beneath the skinny trunk, taking on the cartoonish shape of the branches and biting through his lip.
“Our life finds tongues in trees and books in the running brooks!” Shakespeare shouts. He skips on over to the headstones, priming his scroll and pinning it against one of the tombs. There, he doodles across the page, an act interrupted by his periodic glances back at the tree. The forgotten female spirit beneath the marker in front of him, who in life had been (who even remembered?), watches his genius from under the dirt, finding that each previous entry in his spirit journal fades to make room for this new revelation. At once, Shakespeare lifts the scroll from the tomb and holds it against the sun, exclaiming: “How perfect! I must show the visitors.”
He leaps across the overgrown cemetery, bouncing his way back into the cathedral. An assembly of tourists file into the structure, ushered in by an underpaid employee.
“It’s not fair,” speaks the sinner again, returning to the surface of her grave, setting her empty head against the tombstone. “They don’t even remember us. Only him, that lunatic. What are we? Just some names to fill the area? Some lucky dead people who stepped where William stepped, or died where he lived? I don’t want to be just some name anymore. How can I ask them to remember me if they can no longer hear my voice?”
“I think we carry a burden far less than he,” replies the other, crossing his arms and leaning against the tree. “We know they can’t hear us. His greatest failure is still thinking they can.”
“I have a new creation!” shouts a voice from inside the cathedral. There’s no doubt in the sinners’ minds to whom the voice belongs. “Listen! Listen all! I bring a new play!”
“I still find the idea of being remembered quite . . . I don’t know, warming,” she mutters. Her legs swing off from the tombstone. Flies swarm about the vines that consume her grave. “It breaks my heart seeing all these people come in here holding their cameras, their maps, their flowers and wearing those awful eager faces. And each time I think they’re coming to see me. But they just walk on by, asking the front usher Where is Shakespeare? Never where am I. Those were never flowers meant for me, and I’m always the fool to think they were.”
“That is the question.”
“What?”
“Like I said before—to be or not to be mourned. To have a life so boring and detached from everything that you have nobody to visit you or take care of your headstone when you’re gone. But I don’t think William likes it either. The special treatment. The constant visitors snapping a photo of his casket, or the little toddlers screaming at their bookworm parents to go get ice cream. All he wants is for someone to hear what he says from this afterlife, and all the open ears are just a harsh reminder that no one is listening.”
“It’s almost like he lives in his own eternal tragedy.”
“I think a fairer question would be—would you rather all the meaningless flowers, or none at all?”
