The Graveyard Story
December 8, 2022
I remember the first time I told the Graveyard Story. I was in the back of a metropolitan bus in the city of Mito, Ibaraki, Japan. Outside the windows, the city was dark. We were heading down a long, never-ending street, the location of which I was never able later to ascertain. I told the story to a friend who was sat next to me, and two more friends who were sat backwards on the chairs in front of us, their chins resting on the back of their seats.
We were going on an adventure. We were always going on adventures. We went on so many adventures that adventure became commonplace. During each adventure, we learned a little more about each other. When I told the Graveyard Story, I was providing my new friends with the key that would allow them to piece together every disparate aspect of my personality and history that I had revealed to them so far. I could see in their eyes as they listened to the Graveyard Story, in their laughter as I relished self-deprecatorily in the folly of the Graveyard Story, that they were beginning to understand who I was. It was joyful, in a way, to watch this happen. In another way, it was strange to realize, myself, what the Graveyard Story said about me.
I had never told the Graveyard Story to anyone before, because everyone I had known back home who would have cared to hear the Graveyard Story had lived the Graveyard Story. Now, I was in a different country. The largest ocean in the world separated that graveyard, and all the people who had joined me in that graveyard, from these new friends I had just recently met. In this new country, the graveyards looked very different from the graveyard of my story. The Graveyard Story wouldn't have worked in this new country. It would've had to have taken place in some other location. If it had taken place in some other location, it would have no longer been the Graveyard Story.
The Graveyard Story took place nine months prior to my first telling of the Graveyard Story. I stayed in Canada for six months after that night, and never once did anyone bring up the Graveyard Story in my presence. It wasn't funny back there. It was weird and uncomfortable. The repercussions of that night in the graveyard were right there in our faces, but we didn't want to look at them. It was shameful. We had every right to be ashamed. I, more than anyone, had every right to be ashamed. The Graveyard Story was my story; from the beginning to the end, the graveyard had been my fault. In fact, I was responsible from before the beginning, and long after the end.
In Japan, I took on a new persona. More accurately, perhaps, I realized exactly who I was, and I found people who, immediately upon meeting me, knew exactly who I was as well. This is not to say that my friends back home did not know me. They knew me well. They had known me for a long time. I think they had known me too long and too closely to realize exactly who I had become. My new friends took one look at me, and understood. We had all come to Japan to run away from something. Some of us knew exactly what that something was; some of us may never quite find out. We looked in each other's hearts and saw that there was something strange in them: something that we all shared, and yet could never quite share.
Upon realizing exactly who I was, I had a good laugh about it. It felt ridiculous that someone such as I could exist. My new friends and I gave each other shit constantly; we were all just as stupid as each other, and we relished in this fact. I didn't mind that I was who I was. It didn't matter over there. We were a collection of clowns transplanted to a world where we were guaranteed to be treated as such. Each of our lives was a sad, cold, lonely sort of joke, but at least we could sit around, whether in the back of a bus, in the kitchen of a dorm, or at a table in a Saizeriya, and share this lonely joke together. In this way, our circus rolled on.
It was in this spirit that the Graveyard Story finally came up. I can't remember exactly what prompted this first telling, at least in the normal narrative sense of cause and effect. We were always talking, and in our talking we were always looking for ways to impress each other with the sheer ridiculousness of the paths our lives had taken prior to their convergence. As time passed, the level escalated; we had to dig deeper and deeper in order to unearth the most shining and wondrous jewels. It came to the point where I could not help but tell the Graveyard Story; to tell anything else would be only delaying the inevitable. The Graveyard Story was the final culmination of all these tales; it was the high-point that we could never quite top. With the telling of the Graveyard Story, I cemented my place as the most desperate and unworthy man among desperate and unworthy men.
The Graveyard Story rolled from my lips, unrehearsed, as if someone had pressed play on a recording. I recognized which details were the funniest; I saved these for when people would inevitably ask about them. I recognized which details were the slightly less funny; these, I told immediately. I made sure, at all times, to not express any notion that would make my actions during the Graveyard Story seem reasonable to any human being. Thankfully, such notions were few. I had, during the night of the Graveyard Story, not been a normal man. I had been a sick sort of creature. I had not been capable of having the sort of thoughts that anyone would consider "thoughts" at all; I had been electric, and I had operated on electric impulses.
As I told it, the Graveyard Story almost felt like something that had happened to someone else, something I had read in a story and then miscategorized within my own memories. This has happened to me before. Once, while writing an essay about my first night in Japan, midway through describing an episode I had experienced on a charter bus on the way into Tokyo, I paused. During that pause, I reckoned with the sensations within my memory. I spotted a contradiction. This is normal for memories, when memory upon memory are heaped one atop the other in an unstable pile. However, this contradiction felt different. I felt as I typed the words that this memory was not made of sensations at all, but made of words. I realized: this memory had not happened to me. I had read about it in a book.
That story had been fairly innocuous. It could've happened to anybody. The Graveyard Story, on the other hand, probably only could've happened to me. Yes, it required an unthinking version of myself to carry it out, but this is often the case with our most characteristic moments. My actions during the night at the graveyard made so much intuitive sense to me that I didn't even need to think them. That, perhaps, is the scariest part of it all.
I should mention that the Graveyard Story is not a horror story, unless you consider the emotions of twenty year-old boys to be terrifying — for which, to be honest, I couldn't blame you. The fact that it happened in a graveyard is integral to the story; however, the fact that a graveyard is a place where we bury human bodies is not. Like I said before, if the story had not taken place in a graveyard, it would not be the Graveyard Story. That being said, it could very easily have taken place anywhere else. It just so happened that I ended up at a graveyard. This was an unthinking decision. I was next to the graveyard when I finally caught up with myself, grew tired, and felt the need to sit down. The graveyard was between where I had been and where I was trying to get back to. It was closer to where I had been than where I was trying to get back to, but that is neither here nor there. It was while I was sat down at the graveyard, that I received a phone call. The person on the phone asked where I was. I told them I was at the graveyard. There was a pause. "What?"
I dragged everyone down to the graveyard with me. In hindsight, this is somewhat embarrassing. At the time, I felt this was only natural. In further hindsight, this is very funny. They were trying to have a good time; I was trying to have a bad time. If I could be said to be trying to accomplish anything that night — which, at times, is a difficult argument to make — it was to add an element of bewildering uncertainty to an already confusing situation. We had that habit, back then. We didn't live for the petty drama that flowed around us. We enacted our drama on a cosmic and deeply uncomfortable plane. We enacted our drama in a way that was unfathomable, and we enjoyed it that way. No one could offer advice to us, because we didn't even listen to ourselves. We didn't say what we meant. We didn't mean what we meant, either. To this day, I'm still not quite sure what was going on.
It was impossible, in the back of that bus, to explain this part of the situation. I could only tell them the events as they took place on the physical Earth. It was like describing a game of football using only a GPS. Actually, that wouldn't be very entertaining at all. Let's try this: It would be like describing the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion to someone who had only ever seen the trailer for Pacific Rim.
Thus, my actions could be conceived only as ridiculous. I will not say that they were not ridiculous. They were ridiculous because they were the product of a ridiculous mind, within a ridiculous context, and carried out without a single thought toward the concept of ridiculousness and the rubrics by which the world judges it. They were ridiculous because a man is a ridiculous creature, and a 20 year-old man is at the height of his power to express this fact.
By telling the Graveyard Story, I declared: "I will not be made ridiculous! I will make myself ridiculous! I will tell you exactly the sort of creature that I have been, and am, and will always be! And you will laugh, and I will laugh with you! Because when a man finds himself in a graveyard, what else can he do!?"
When I had finished telling the Graveyard Story, the friend beside me said, "A lot of things make sense to me now." This was a poignant statement hidden within an innocuous one. The Graveyard Story does not explain anything. It does not show why anything happened. It is itself entirely an effect; from its very outset, it gestures toward a long history that no one can ever fully know. Like all great stories, it leaves far more questions than answers.
Consider, if you will, Captain Ahab. The events of Moby-Dick do not explain why Captain Ahab came to be the way he is. His story did not begin when his leg was gnawed off by the white whale. That, itself, is only an effect. We see Ahab's monomania in all its terror and glory; we see his deity-defying pride drive him to ruthless acts; and we see, as well, certain glimpses of humanity hidden deep within. We see all this, and we feel at the end like we have come to understand Ahab. But never once are we told why. Never once is it indicated why Ahab's tribulations prompted such an outrageous reaction. Many people have lost their legs at sea. Many people have seen first-hand the horrors of unbridled nature. And yet, there is but one Ahab.
There have been many strange and emotional young men. There were three of them with me on that clean, emerald bus. Yes, there have been many strange and emotional young men, but there has only been one strange and emotional young man, who, when confronted with the world-circumstance that I was confronted with, would end up in a graveyard. And that man is me. And I must carry that mantle with me wherever I go, whether that's across the ocean or across the street. I must drag that graveyard behind me, as a remnant of my crooked and curious past, and as a symbol of what lies deep within me. It sleeps long hibernatory sleeps; it lies half-dead in the cool crystal cryopreservatory that is my heart; but it does not die. And I must beware of the day when that graveyard awakes, for what may emerge will not be understood by human minds.
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