It was quite a wait.

Well, I had known it would take a while. The burial had taken place as late in the afternoon as we had been able to arrange it, but the unburial could not possibly occur before nightfall. Cover of darkness and all, and absence of visitors to other graves. I was able to get my eye to the breathing tube, and while there was predictably little to see through six feet of narrowing tubing, I could tell that it was light up there at first, and later on I looked and it seemed to be a little darker, and later still I looked and it was black. That was as close as I came to knowing what time it was. I didn’t have a watch. I could have been buried with a watch – people get buried with watches all the time – but I hadn’t been wearing a watch to begin with, and it had never occurred to me to get one to be buried in.

“The important considerance is to relax,” Karp had said. “You’ll have some cheese, maybe a sandwich. Also a bottle of water. You will breathe through the tube. All the comforts. It will be dark. You could have a flashlight if you wanted to read, or for passing the time you could just stretch out and have a sleep.”

There was cheese concealed by my left foot and a ham sandwich by my right foot and a tiny flashlight in one pocket and a book in another pocket and a half pint of water between my knees. None of them seemed worth the trouble of trying to reach them. There just wasn’t that much mobility in the box, and I just wasn’t in the mood for eating or drinking or reading.

As for sleeping-

Hoo. Sleeping sickness. He ain’t dead, he’s only sleeping. You could just stretch out and have a sleep.

Hoo.

I haven’t slept since Korea. I was in the Army, and the Army was in Korea, and a North Korean shell exploded closer to me than I would have preferred it, and one of the fragments of the shell went into my head, which is no pleasanter than it sounds. Somewhere inside there it found its way into the sleep center.