THE RIBCAGE OF DEATH

Siracusa, Sicily. \"Biglietto D’Ingresso Alle Catacombe, Di S. Giovanni\", the ticket read. \"Ticket Of Income To The Catacombe, S. Giovanni\".
I paid my lira, and entered the remains of an ancient stone cathedral, passing through a heavy creaking door, and descending two flights of stairs which opened into a cold and musty antechamber; the gateway to an underground metropolis. This was a city of the dead, and everywhere I looked I found shallow indentations in the cavern walls, evidence of the former tenants. Each trough carved in the musty stone was a human-sized apartment where the bodies of the dead once resided. There was nothing now but dust; so long ago had these bodies decomposed, there was not even the scent of decay.
I could feel the sensation of cool rock encircling me from just beyond the conical glare of the light on the video camera, my singular source of illumination. I played the beam along the corridors as I walked, speechless. I could hear three distinct sounds in the darkness; the \"record\" feature of the camera, my heartbeat, and the high-pitched whine of my nervous system, deafening in the close, cavernous black.
I looked behind me to visually mark the exit, and plunged ahead cautiously into the gloom. I counted each of my turns, and kept the pattern simple. Left. Right. Left. When in doubt, I scuffed a crude arrow on the dusty floor with the toe of my boot, aware that if I lost my bearings and got turned around somehow, I could be lost for days, maybe longer, and that’s where the next awestruck visitor would find me; alone among miles and miles of crypts, my leather belt half-devoured in desperation, my Last Will and Testament etched into the walls by jagged shards of my smashed video camera. Would they bother to even play the tape? Who knows? The man I purchased the ticket from was elderly, and half-asleep in the warm sunshine. Could he be depended upon to remember each and every face coming and going? Again, who knows? I made another arrow in the dust to be safe, and moved further in.
Upon closer inspection of one of the caverns, I discovered the remains of a vertebrae and what looked like a half-disintegrated finger bone. I mean, I guess it was a finger, but I don’t know which one. It lay at the place a finger would be if the hands had been folded over the chest in the customary position, and had simply fallen through with the passing of time. Out of respect, I thumbed the \"record\" button to the \"off\" position, and stood there for some time, my mind reeling at the sight. A human being had died and been laid to rest in this spot so long ago, it had turned to dust. How long does that take? One hundred years? Two hundred years? What was the world like then? I tried to think of something to say, something about the passage of time and the brevity of life, but what was there to say, and to whom would I address my worthless remarks? Finally, it came to me: \"A wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks when he feels he has to say something.\" Whew. I was off the hook.
Hours later, in the bright safety of the noonday sun as I sat sipping my espresso at a sidewalk cafe, I thought about all the people in the world I would never meet, but whose lives I came in contact with in some form or another. The elderly gent I\'d purchased my ticket from had a family, probably children, and, by the looks of him, grandchildren. Each of them knew at least ten people, and ten more for each of their ten meant ten and ten more. It was like playing a global game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
I backed up the footage and froze the frame, studying the scene I had filmed just before I\'d recovered my manners and stopped recording; there they were, the piecemeal parts of a dead body. Someone who had a favorite food, a favorite book, good friends and enemies; someone who had marveled momentarily at the celestial vibrations of sex and love and life, struggling to discover their true meaning before it was too late. Ultimately, they had died, centuries before I was but a gleam in the milkman’s eye.
It made sense for a moment to think about the world being so closely interconnected, through twists and turns and families and stories we don’t have time enough to hear. What was it H.P. Lovecraft had said? \"The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.\"
I wonder what the former inhabitants of the catacombs would think of the modern concept of \"progress\" in my own country. We are infected with IBIS, also known as \"info-biological inadequacy syndrome\"; a form of anxiety brought on when a person tries to absorb information faster than the rate that was hard-wired into human DNA back in the Paleolithic Era. Every day, we drown in seas of data, and asphyxiate under the crushing weight of hundreds of email messages, pages, voicemail messages, and spam; but no one really seems to be saying much. At the end of the workday, we are content to flop in front of a box and observe artificial people living scripted lives. Americans value their privacy, but are scared shitless of being alone. We place our jobs ahead of our family, and our quest for material possession before all else. We work longer hours for less money, and get less done in a workday than our ancestors of only 50 years ago did. Every day in my country, hundreds of thousands of people take hundreds of handfuls of dangerous pills with unknown side effects in order to cope with their reality. I see them at stoplights sometimes, alone in their cars and talking to themselves, because there is no one else to talk to. My countrymen are mocked openly for the poor decisions of their leaders, hated on sight the world round for the standard of living they maintain at the cost of the world\'s resources, and are genuinely dumfounded when the poor and unfortunate at the bottom of the pile get fed up and lash out.
In a way, I envy that pile of dust I left back in the catacombs. I finished my drink, and headed down the street.