Lee was already three drinks in when his supervisor called to tell him the cemetery was missing. It was three in the afternoon on Saturday, his only day off, and he tried to say no, it was all the way on the West side and he’d already made plans, and there was a weekend crew for a reason after all. But this was a real emergency, his supervisor said, one that demanded someone with Lee's expertise and track record. Besides, it was sure to bring out the news vans, and Lee always liked talking to the cameras, didn’t he?
The report came from a pallbearer at the head of a large procession which had set out from the temple around 2:15. They’d marched a few dozen yards and realized they were already at Fountain Blvd., well past the far end of the cemetery grounds. Lee rounded the corner of Fountain and Gospel Ave. and almost ran someone over. The crowd spilled over the sidewalk from here to the temple, some dressed in black and others in blazing white, all radiating grief and mounting confusion. Some sipped bottled waters in the shade of a live oak, some leaned on the hearse and shielded their eyes from the punishing sun. A couple of kids played catch with a tangerine. A sub-throng of aunts watched Lee park, teeth bared.
He opened his G-phone. It was the easiest verification he’d ever made. The cemetery on his digital map stretched nearly a half-mile from here to the temple, whereas outside his windshield the temple lawn simply ended at Fountain Blvd. He’d never seen anything like it. The typical slip amounted to a vanished parking space, a shed on the wrong lot, maybe an unpaved alley that decided to slither over onto the next block. Minor adjustments, the kind of thing people hardly noticed. This was on another level.
He turned to flip through the crate of diagnostic atlases in his backseat. These were heavily annotated street maps which identified and described areas known to have encountered slippage. Townships were ranked from 1 to 40 based on their apparent susceptibility. Lee's current location, Memorial Township, had a rank of 4. A deep unease came over him as he realized the largest slip in City history may have just occurred on a block his own department rated as totally secure.
Changing his focus, he ran a search on his G-phone for any prior cases involving cemeteries. The search turned up empty, as expected. Gravesites, along with grocery stores and hospitals and public parks, were thought to be the least vulnerable locations in the City. These areas were well-traveled and widely documented, which were reliable protective factors. He broadened his search, scouring the agency archives for some semblance of precedent, but the closest thing he could find was a museum whose men’s and women’s restrooms had allegedly switched places one night. And that case was never verified.
A knock interrupted Lee’s review. Outside, some uncle, black suit black shirt black tie, frowning and waving. Lee rolled down the window.
“You’re from the City?”
Lee nodded. “Just making some notes. Were you the one who called?”
The man shot an odd glance at the crowd. “You want to talk to my wife.”
The aunts started making their way over, a clear signal for Lee to get out of the car. In this line of work, managing public perception was top priority, even more crucial than the actual investigation. This would be one of those cases where there were lots of questions, lots of interest. Lee usually didn’t mind the questions. Over the past few months he’d come to be considered something of a local expert, which was a good feeling. But he’d never encountered anything on this scale. Certainly not during a funeral.
“How did this happen?” called the aunts as they descended upon him.
“Where is the cemetery now?”
“How do we get there?”
“No, it’s coming back here, isn’t it? I heard they go back. How long will it take?”
Lee raised his hands. “Ladies, let me first say I’m so sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine how challenging and confusing this is. Now, something to understand is that there is going to have to be an initial investigation before we can—”
One of the aunts, a thin woman with cropped hair and a white dress, waved her hand to shush him. “We need an estimate.”
Lee needed to deflect. He called his supervisor right in front of the aunts and requested a Citywide sweep to redetermine the position of the cemetery. He then interviewed the funeral director, who confirmed they were working with a skeleton crew due to budget constraints, and as far as anyone knew no one was actually on the cemetery block during the slip. This was not altogether surprising. For whatever reason, slips tended to occur in a way that was minimally impactful to the City’s residents. They mainly affected neglected and nondescript areas, with the greatest impact being that sometimes you drove somewhere to find the address was wrong, or all of a sudden it’s hard to find parking on that corner, or you could have sworn the bus stopped at 7th instead of 9th. Most slips were so low-profile it was hard to convince people anything had happened at all. But Lee had long feared the phenomena could accelerate.
He popped his trunk and collected his surveying equipment. On his way down the road he passed the hearse, pregnant with its casket. It was surrounded by all the funerary trappings the crowd had set down: a row of easels with brilliant flower arrangements, a spilled canister of incense sticks, a giant photo of the deceased with the uncanny sheen of digital de-aging. Lee hated funerals, he avoided them whenever he could. People said it was healing to be with your family, joined in communal grief. Lee didn’t buy it. For him healing only came with distance, and the slow psychic corrosion of the workday.
Along the border of the temple he captured temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, radio signatures, and soil samples on either side of the vanished plot. It was mostly all theater, Lee knew, empty gestures for the crowd. His agency was no closer to understanding the slips than they were when the first one was documented years ago.
The sun crept across the sky while he worked. Gold turned to orange turned to pink. The mourners’ behavior grew frazzled, more erratic as the day went on. Those least invested in the burial started making excuses to leave. A few restless uncles decided to take it upon themselves to hunt down the missing graveyard, and they jumped in their cars and drove off. Occasionally someone would approach the hearse and cry for a while. This happened with decreasing frequency as the afternoon dragged on. When the news vans pulled up he gave them the usual treatment. Keep things light. Manage the narrative. We have everything under control, there’s just a little bit of process to work through. Around sunset the lead aunt came to explain the gravity of the situation, which was obviously lost on him. “We finished all the prayers,” she said. “Now we have to bury her or she won’t know she’s dead. She’ll try to stay here with us instead of moving on. Do you get it? Her grave is sitting open somewhere.” Lee responded that he understood and was doing his best.
“This fucking City,” she said as she turned away.
Lee buried his face in his optical level, confirming there was no irregularity in the landscape (slips were, without exception, completely seamless in a geological sense). He couldn’t believe there was still no word from the sweep team. It didn’t make sense. Slips were rearrangements of the City, not disappearances. Matter couldn’t be created or destroyed, the cemetery had to be somewhere. How could a quarter-square-mile plot go unnoticed for hours?
He started a text to his supervisor, demanding an update. Then something pulled him away. One of the tangerine kids, tugging on his pant leg.
“Hello.”
The kid, maybe 5 years old, held up a plastic bag containing a few tiny green seeds. Lee reached down to take the offering, but the kid jerked his hand back, suddenly indignant.
“These are for Grandma.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“When we set her down, we’ll throw the beans in, too. Then they can be a door.”
“A door?”
The kid made a jerky vertical motion with his finger. “When they grow. Up and down.” And he turned and plodded back into the crowd.
Lee finished the rest of his measurements. The sun was nearly gone now, the sky a dull brown. The whole crowd looked defeated. As he packed up the car the uncle from before approached, offering a cigarette. Lee had his own, but accepted anyway.
“You look tired, man.”
“Thanks. I mean yeah, no, I’m good.”
“So is this the worst one you’ve seen?”
“It’s all under control,” he lied. “We usually get fresh coordinates in an hour or two. So just a slight delay this time.”
“I’m feeling like everything is not super under control bro.”
“We’re on the case.” Lee felt a crazy urge to talk to this uncle, really get into it with him. He could unload about the severe knowledge gaps in his agency’s research program, the staffing challenges, the increasingly distressing nature of the work, the deepening divisions between Materialists who thought there was some scientific, rational explanation, and people like Lee who knew their best guess was a pitiful mischaracterization of quantum tunneling and multiverse theory—then his phone buzzed.
It was a text from his supervisor. His first instruction was that he was not to discuss anything further with anyone at the scene. He was to disassemble all equipment and tell the crowd to disperse. He was to report immediately to City Hall. Apparently the cemetery had been located, but not by his agency. A memo had come in from the office of the mayor of another city, a distant but not altogether dissimilar city to Lee’s own, a city on a river in the jungle on the other side of the world, where around 75 acres of headstone-laden green space had appeared between two previously-adjacent thoroughfares of the central business district.
“What’s up? You guys find something?” The uncle stomped out his cigarette. Lee could see the pleading in his eyes, that tribalistic desire to know his City had a handle on things, that need to believe there were systems in place to ensure things would work out, or at least make sense. Maybe it was time to come clean. He could break rank, drop the omniscient act and tell the truth: that the City was slipping away from itself, decoupling from its administration, shirking its agreements with physical laws and manmade covenants alike, that in all likelihood it would continue to rezone itself, little by little, obsoleting its history and redistributing its legacies, shedding its bureaucratic pupa and becoming something that could no longer be governed, or described, or contained. Lee could dive into all this and then some. He wanted to.
“Nothing yet,” he said. “I gotta get going. Thanks.”
“Seriously? My Mom’s just lying in there, man!”
Lee got in his car and shut the door.
On his drive to City Hall he counted the blocks, read the names of street signs aloud, checked his G-phone to make sure they were all supposed to be there. At a long red light he read the full memo from his supervisor. The report was poorly translated and hard to follow, but there were pictures attached. The other city was so far away the sun had just risen there. As Lee flipped through the images he hardly noticed the lone open pit, the backhoe ready with six feet of dirt, the canopy and makeshift altar indicating a burial waiting to take place. What he did notice was how bright the headstones looked in the morning sun, how they glimmered with dew like a network of diamonds, or like rows of teeth.
-- Karter Mycroft is a writer, musician, and fisheries scientist. Karter is grateful for the comprehensive social and environmental services provided by the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks. You can find Karter on Twitter and IG @karterAKA.