Then a pause, during which I suppose the mourners and curiosity seekers went away, and then conversation I could not make out, and then the first horrible thud of the first horrible shovelful of earth on the coffin lid.

This was the part I hated. The funeral was bad enough, and the coffin and the grave were worse, but the idea of having them fill in the hole was too much. Since I was going to be disinterred in an hour or two, I couldn’t see why they had to fill in the hole and then dig it up all over again. It reminded me of a WPA project and made about as much sense.

But there was no way around it. Three alcoholics had the grave-digging concession in Griggstown, and it was inconceivable that anyone else could play their part in the drama, and it was at least as inconceivable that they be trusted with the knowledge of my undead state. In the interests of security they had to be allowed to fill in the hole, and later on some of the MMM comrades would unfill it, and rescue me, and fill it again, and that, presumably, would be that.

They were a long time filling that grave, and if I hadn’t been breathing very shallowly, very economically, I might have run out of air before they ran out of dirt. But finally they seemed to be done, and I took the six foot-long lengths of aluminum tubing from beside me, and I dislodged the little inch-wide plug in the coffin lid, and I pushed the lengths of tubing up through the lid and through the earth above it, fitting them through one by one, screwing them together, and eventually creating a breathing tube reaching just to the surface.

This process probably sounds incredibly awkward. It should, because it was. I had practiced it over and over beforehand, and I had become as good at it as it was possible to be, and it was still awkward. But it worked. It honestly worked. The end of my breathing tube broke the earth’s surface, and I blew the dirt out of its tip, and I drew air through it. It was damp air, warm air, muggy air, but it was very goddamned fresh air compared to the air in the box with me, and I took deep breaths in and out, in and out, in and out, and began waiting for them to dig me up.