Dead thoughts about death and dying

(This may or may not be a true story. Whatever you think it is, it isn’t.)

There it was: a human skull. A real one perched inside my bookcase. One look at it would be enough for visitors to launch into their own meditations on mortality.

I have this almost pathological urge to turn my apartment into a set from Hammer House of Horror or House of 1,000 Corpses. No idea as to why. I collect items that some people would find shocking or even revolting: Clive Barker toys, H.R. Giger sculptures, Bizarre magazines, as well as petrified remains of a real spider, a worm and a lizard. Also skulls in plastic, wood, fiberglass, resin, and other materials; skull beads, coin banks, ashtrays, party décor, shirts, candle-holders, incense-holders; anatomy handbooks, volumes on medical science and publications on assorted skullduggeries (from the Library of Curious and Unusual Facts series). You name it, I have loads. I buy them during trips abroad. (Beads from a stall near “Suicide Rock” in Busan, witch-pipes from a blind gypsy in Barcelona, a life-size resin skull from a store in Shibuya, more beads from Quiapo near the stalls of one-day-old-chicks and religious “relics.”)

I have animal skulls, mostly of monkeys, a pig and a cow that reeked of rotting meat for weeks. Rick, a guy who helps me prime my canvases, got the skull of a huge bull-cow from a butcher; its horns were left intact. He went to my apartment one Saturday, carrying the said item in a plastic bag, making the whole apartment smell like Central Market. Cleaning it was not a problem; taking the smell away was another thing. There is no liquid on the planet that could eliminate that odor, just as there is no way to get rid of the stench of corruption in our government.

I sprayed it with Lysol. Even the fumes of the disinfectant gave up and deemed it a lost cause. And there were maggots, lots of ghastly maggots. Rick doused them away with soap and water. The neighbor’s chickens watched the proceedings with interest — pasta perfection for those clucking gluttons.

One time, Rick and I talked about what’s missing in my collection: a human skull, a real one. Not the kind that’s for sale at Party City in LA or the Halloween section in SM Megamall’s Toy Kingdom, but the authentic thing. It’s my unholy grail, so to speak. But I never imagined Rick would turn up one day carrying one. Like freaking Hamlet. About it I never was — pardon the pun — dead serious.

“Where did you get that?” I asked. “And what’s it doing here?”

Rick told me, making a short story long, that he got it from the cemetery. He used to be neighbors with a gravedigger. After our talk about procuring a human skull, Rick went to the cemetery to ask the man to get him one. The gravedigger was no longer there. Well, he was no longer in this world. He died a few years ago. It was like a skit written by the guys from Regal Shocker. Cue hollow laughter here.

Reminded me of an episode of Tales from the Darkside (or was it The Hitchhiker?). A prisoner devises a plan of escape when he notices the prison mortician putting a dead inmate onto a cart, wheeling it outside the prison walls, and letting it roll downhill into the valley below (at least that’s how I remember it). So he makes a deal with the mortician that the next time someone dies, he’s going to creep inside the body bag, have himself sealed together with the corpse, taken out of prison, and rolled downhill. The prisoner will then wait for the mortician to set him free from the sealed body bag. What could possibly go wrong, muses the prisoner.

Several days later someone dies. The prisoner confidently creeps into the body bag. Everything proceeds as planned. After being rolled downhill, he then waits for the mortician to set him free. The wait gets longer and longer. The prisoner fidgets. He lights up a match and gets startled by whose corpse he sees.

I got startled by the human skull before me.

Its jaw was missing. It had two wide cracks on the sides of its head, probably got whacked by an axe or a very sharp object. Dust and grass across its spectral gray surface. The odor was indescribable. Rick began hypothesizing the cause of its death. I had to remind him he wasn’t a forensic expert. “Ano ka, C.S.I.?” I put it inside the bookcase with my books on Bacon, Balthus and Goya. The skull inside a glass-vitrine bookcase, shades of Damien Hirst.

I got the urge to deliver a soliloquy.

We will all be reduced to this. A skull stripped of flesh, hair, skin and identity. It could be anyone’s, or it could be anyone: Pedro, Maria or, alas, poor Yorick. What was a person before had eventually been converted into something generic and anonymous. Like an obligatory Halloween or horror-movie prop.

No matter how much makeup Hollywood and local actresses put on, or cosmetic surgery procedures they go through to end up looking like Janice Dickinson (nose-lifts, eyelifts, facelifts, Botox and collagen injections — pretty soon they’ll be injecting themselves with formaldehyde to make themselves immune from entropy) they will all be reduced to a skull and a clutter of crossed bones. That’s how democratic death is. It spares no one (unless you’re Duncan “Highlander” MacLeod). We’re all in this together.

What we have beneath our facial skins is basically the same: a human skull. A skull that Rick got from a shady sepulturero for P300. Imagine that. Three hundred bucks for your skull and my skull. Not that we would have any more use for it after we die. I often see large piles of skulls rotting quietly in different corners of the cemetery during All Souls’ Day anyway. They got “evicted” from their “apartments.” Rent goes on even after you’re dead. But if we believe in the afterlife and all that jazz, the skull becomes merely an object, a used and useless cluster of calcium. Nothing more. Nothing to be scared about.

My girlfriend disagreed. She looked aghast when she saw that thing perched inside my bookcase. She’s the type who believes in positive and negative energies, in the power of crystals and incense, of good and evil and the whole enchilada. The skull made her uneasy, weirded out.

“I could take animal skulls, but I think you’ve gone too far,” she told me.

I shook my head. “You’ll get used to it, and in a couple of days it will become part of the whole necrophiliac appeal of this place.”

I saw an episode of House of Clues where the guests try to profile the owners of a house based on its rooms, furniture and décor. It felt a bit queer for me to watch something on a lifestyle channel, but I felt intrigued when I saw that particular house. The bedroom has turn-of-the-century dolls (a nun and a devil) hanging near the bedside wall. There are two mounted white goat-heads as symbols of lust and virility in the library. There is a vitrine-like case filled with curiosities: the head of a monkey floating in a bottle of formaldehyde, MAD toys, vampire portraits, strange toys, dolls and magazines, etc. The skeleton of a certain “Twiggy” bought from eBay sits on a chair. Medical apparatus and contraptions are all around. There is even a “Day of the Dead” room filled with skull items bought in Mexico. (My dream trip is to go to Mexico City on El Día de los Muertos.)

The homeowners, it turns out, dabble in art. The wife works as a manager and the husband is a self-confessed “amateur mortician” (which is as scary as it sounds). And they have this big secret. It seems they’ve been trying to have a baby for years and nothing works. The host of the show, Reef Karim, surmised that the Day of the Dead commemorates not only the absence of those who have passed away, but also the non-presence of those who are yet to be. There is a missing child in the couple’s life, and the skull collection is their way of coming to grips with this. What a saddening thought. Horror has turned into something human, all too human.

There was such a thing as the “Jericho Skulls,” as shown in an episode about death in How Art Made the World, wherein the people of Jericho 9,000 years ago were discovered to have decorated human skulls as portraits of the deceased that they kept in houses. The noses were reconstructed with plaster, and placed inside the eye sockets were pairs of eyes made of shells from the nearby Red Sea. (Red eye, get it?) The undersides were smoothened out: to make them stand upright on the floor on a specially made alcove in a home, sort of like a Ming vase sprucing up home sweet home. The skull, for the people of Jericho, was a reassuring symbol.

One of the resource persons on How Art Made the World does not contradict that. He says, “The knowledge that we are going to die and that there is nothing we can do about it is terrifying. But psychologists theorize that through the use of art, there is a way of easing this fear, and coming to terms with our own death.”

Damien Hirst said that the skull has become a clichéd symbol for mortality, and to successfully appropriate it for art one has to give it an element of slapstick. In his case posh diamonds, or ping-pong balls for eyes.

Makes a lot of sense. I steeled myself into not worrying about a human skull in my living room while I slept in the bedroom.

That night, at around 3 in the morning, a cold and clammy wind heaved into my room, cold as hell. Passing slightly over the back of my neck and into both ears. I couldn’t sleep. My mind whirred with strange imaginings. Poe, Lovecraft, Clive Barker, Wes Craven, Takashi Miike, Lionsgate Films — all the horrors they conjured threw a party inside my head with DJs Vincent Price and Christopher Lee spinning a Bauhaus single. When I finally slept I had a dream where I was like that Sam Neill character trapped in In the Mouth of Madness. I had the skull returned the next morning to reunite with other skulls in the apartments of the departed.

And they all stayed dead happily ever after.