THREE DAYS AFTER HE WAS MURDERED, RICHARD PRATT BEGAN TO FEEL MUCH BETTER...
A seemingly random act of violence propels Professor Richard Pratt into The Hereafter. It is a strange, muted, netherworld of the dead-a world in which he is forced to bear...
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They heard that he took a train to the city...
They heard that he stepped blinking into a crowd at the station, where he promptly mingled and was lost.
They say that he hasn't been seen since, and that dust is settling on his books.
For a few years there were false sightings.
A visitor to the city thought they saw him from a passing bus window or across a busy city street.
And for a time they looked and squinted and tried to see.
In the City of the Dead they say you must wait until the last person on earth forgets your name.
And every year in the city those with horns, and tails, and fins, step from buses or emerge blinking from taxicabs.
The city opens its arms and they fade into the cavernous streets.
In the City of the Dead you can wander forever and never tread the same street twice.
There is always slow piano music drifting through an open window.
And sadness, always sadness.
In the City of the Dead they are always watching the gray sky roll by.
Waiting for the last person they knew to forget their names.
Listening on street corners for their new names to be spoken.
—Excerpt from "Epitaph" by Keith Woo, as it appears in "The Heavy Work of Vanishing: The Collected Poetry of Keith Woo," edited by Pi'ilani Kilani, page 260.
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