The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

To Sleep

7 We come only to sleep, only to dream. It is not true, it is not true that we come to live on the earth. Netzahualcoyotl, poet-king of Texcoco the walls of our Euthanasia Room are light blue, recommended to us by some people at a local hospice. The color is supposed to soothe the animals and I suppose it does, even if it annoys me. Light blue has always been my least favorite color. My mother used to call it “polack blue.” Interesting , considering my mother was the all-time biggest, polyester pants suit, deese and dose, plastic-on-the-crushed-velvet furniture from Lasky’s, Hamtramck polack. But I hate that color for different reasons. It’s a silly color, insubstantial, frivolous. Yes, yes, I know it’s the color of the sky and I could attach all sorts of glorious meanings to it, the animals are floating skyward to heaven, to a better place, blah, blah, blah. But come on. I’m killing these animals here. It’s for a good reason, but I’m still killing them. Let’s not forget that. I can’t do this anymore I can’t do this anymore I can’t do this anymore I can’t do this anymore . . . This is your litany while you lie awake at night. But you get up every morning, feeling worse and worse, and keep on doing it, until you start to to sleep 8 The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit wonder about yourself. Crazy things, like maybe you enjoy it, or maybe if you weren’t doing it, you’d be packing an AK-47, the first woman to pull one of those fast food massacres. You can’t understand why you don’t just quit. You tell yourself you’re doing it for the animals, but you can only tell yourself this so much before it just sounds trite and empty and meaningless. It sounds light blue. Gilbert, my assistant, who suffers from dreams, knows what I’m talking about. He feels the same way. Except he likes light blue. At least it is a familiar color to the animals, he says. Out on the street, they look up and see blue. There in the Euth Room, they look up and see blue. It makes it easier for them. I tell him that dogs are color blind. He says it doesn’t matter, they see their own version of blue. This is where I stop arguing. If you saw Gilbert, you’d stop arguing, too. The Man Mountain, we call him around the shelter. Gilbert’s the one who carries the dogs and cats to the furnace room and lines them up in an orderly row in front of the door. A pile would be disrespectful, he says, and I would have to agree with him on that. In Oaxaca, they have blocked off the streets. There are makeshift stands everywhere: small tented tables covered with bright flowered oilcloth, Mexican women rolling and baking tortillas behind them; men tending carts filled with huge loaves of bread blazoned with bones. The streets around the zócalo are crowded with people celebrating, but I’m heading for the grocery store. I have shopping to do. When I walk up to the woman at the cash register with my phrase book and clumsily say,“Donde esta los perros y gatos?” she looks a little confused. I repeat, phrasing it a little differently. Still nothing. Finally, I give up and just walk around the store until I stumble onto what I am looking for. I fill my handbasket with cans. When I get to the cash register, the woman behind it smiles now, finally understanding what it was that I wanted. “Tiene usted 9 To Sleep muchos animales?” she says to me. I nod eagerly, and say “sí,” not so sure of what it is that I just agreed to. I drop off the cans at my hotel room and immediately set out again, this time for flowers. Marigolds and cockscomb, the traditional flores de muerto, are for sale everywhere, mounds of them, gathered against the stone walls of the marketplace, overseen by leathery, slope-shouldered old women. I have read that marigolds and incense approximate the smell of bones. Do bones have a smell? I don’t bother to ask the old woman from whom I buy the brilliant gold and...