Dead Express

In 1854, the London Necropolis Railway started running. It provided the opportunity for grievers to ride with corpses to the Brookwood Cemetery, which was the largest cemetery in the world at the time. In the stations, there were bars with signs that read: “Spirits served here.”

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I became transfixed by Ian Curtis when my ex-boyfriend showed me the film Control. I cried toward the end, after the Joy Divison singer’s suicide. For the whole movie, I felt embarrassed by his stage presence. The jerks and jolts of his body disturbed me. It wasn’t even him; it was the actor Sam Riley, but his thick jawline, his empty eyes, and his pitch-black hair made him indistinguishable from Curtis to me. Even after the breakup, my adoration for the enigmatic musician continued. I wanted darkness. There is something profound in utter despair.

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I imagine sitting alongside passengers on the London Necropolis Railway—which you and I jokingly refer to as the Dead Express—and the sense of unity with other mourners who are looking out the windows, watching the world whirl by us with all of its life while we descend down the bottomlessness of grief.

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There is a consistent mythologizing and fetishizing of deceased musicians—this much we know, though there is not much to say. I cannot stop participating. I understand just checking it out and moving on, you tell me, like with a car crash, but lately I have been bingeing songs of the dead, even though they are misaligned with my usual taste. It frustrates you, especially when you think the music is bad. You shut down the conversation and say you want to show me something else. It’s almost as morbid as your obsession with dead Soundcloud rappers, you tell me.

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When I was little, I would always volunteer to join a parent on a car ride, no matter the destination. I was enamored with the feeling of being in motion; it satiated my curiosity and my need for feeling productive. It temporarily lifted me out of my default state of sadness. Once, I went with my dad on a trip to the bank and slid a CD into the car’s slot. I was a teenager then, completely clueless of the fact that a few nights later he would die. You just wanted to come with me so you could play your music, he said. The pulsating rock song reverberated through the speakers with a screamed hook: Die young and save yourself!

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Aside from Ian Curtis or dead Soundcloud rappers, I idolize the eccentric artist who was cancelled last year, whose synth-filled songs make me feel as if I am floating through space, untethered and in awe. He rambles ecstatically in interviews to the point of incoherence, and he mimics Curtis’ erratic movement on stage. He refers to the latter as practicing “the hysterical body.” I am so often embarrassed—embarrassed when I talk, walk, exist. My fear of being perceived worsens each day, feeding into my growing agoraphobia. What would it be like, I wonder, to succumb to the hysterical, to the fullness of feeling? To stand on a pedestal in front of a crowd and close my eyes and jump and whip around my head and limbs?

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When a man is playing violin in the parking lot, I ask Haley if she ever visits her mom’s grave alone when she’s home. She says she doesn’t. I say I don’t visit my dad’s either, despite my frequent fantasy of laying in the grass of the cemetery, cocooned in nature, reading a book, watching planes fly away from the private airport across the street. She says she has similar daydreams. But neither of us can bring ourselves to do it. There is something deeply humiliating in the act of admitting grief. It feels cliché, I tell Haley. I don’t want to fit into a cliché—to live it out, fall victim to the typical definition of mourning. I want to prove I am something more, even though I am not, because there is nothing to be more than in the first place.

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I imagine myself sitting on the Dead Express, riding back and forth all day, comforted by the constant movement, almost sedated and soothed by the act of existing within a space specifically dedicated for grief. Maybe I would step off to get drunk at the bar—the kind of absurdly wasted that would make people worry about me and friends never talk to me again. What is intoxication if not a way of giving in to our hysterical selves? As soon as I get to your place, I pour myself wine, protected by the excuse of alcohol in case I get too hysterical, too embarrassing.

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The London Necropolis Railway’s last day of service was in 1941. They expected to carry 10,000 to 50,000 bodies per year, but they averaged only 2,300. But grief, I suspect, does not need to be materialized by something as tangible as a train; we can move within our mourning in our own bodies, reckoning and thrashing until we decompose.