Growing up I saw corpses in movies and video games, mainly as things to be possessed by demons or to yield up ghosts. I saw Dora’s mother painted and presented in her coffin in a franchised funeral parlour in a suburban shopping plaza. And I realize this betrays my immense privilege — twenty-eight years of privilege and counting! — to have only seen cinematic corpses and that of my great-grandmother, not loved ones pulped by explosion or shredded by gunfire. And yet my limited exposure to death somehow never prevented me from dying onstage or writing plays in which death was the subject, in which death was debated, deconstructed, aestheticized, and politicized, in which death was something I thought I understood well enough to turn into art, to move and to persuade people through my evocation of it. But I did not know death. I’ve only ever treaded above the dark waters of death. Now it feels unfathomable the way an ocean is not only inscrutable but heavy, something which crushes the deeper you plunge into it.

VI

VI

Will once told me, “We come to know our bodies through those of others.” The bodies of friends and lovers. Strangers. And in time his came to feel like an extension of my own. A body I mapped every inch of for the purposes of better losing myself within it. His was a body inscribed in literature. The waifish rogue. Huck Finn. Loki. Puck. The trickster. The vagabond. In fact, it was as a character that Ana first introduced him to me.

In the fall of 2011, Ana lost her phone and figured she’d try going without one for a few months to save some money. People know where to find me. Which meant I spent a lot of time pilgrimaging to the diner she served at, and to the Occupy camp in St. James Park.

One evening, near the end of October, I walked through the park looking for her. By then, a media tent, a large mobile kitchen, a stand of porta-potties, and several generators had been donated to the effort. Most of the tents were wrapped in plastic tarps to guard against the rain and chill. A number of Occupiers were gathered on the park’s central bandstand, setting up some kind of sound system. A few others were sitting outside their tents on folding camping chairs. I walked past a couple of men breaking up a mound of wooden skiffs with a machete, and further along two women sorting through several portable solar panels. Hung from two nearby trees was a large black banner emblazoned with the words Anti Capitalist, Anti Colonist in red-painted block letters. Other laminated signs were propped up throughout the camp — Free Palestine; When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty; We Are Not Your ATM.