Paper Lasts Longer Than Human Flesh

Someone died unexpectedly.

It’s a heavy blow for all of us—for me and for a group of other people I can’t quite see, even though my vision is perfectly fine. I don’t see them, yet I feel them constantly around me, behind me, beside me. I hear them breathing and whispering to each other. It even seems like they might be praying—but it’s hard to say. I can’t extract a single coherent word from the wall of hushed noise that surrounds me.

We’re standing in an open landscape—maybe a desert, maybe a wasteland of dry earth, probably on the edge of some settlement. It’s not easy to tell. It’s night, and many of the defining details are swallowed by the dark. We all mourn the dead one lying on his back in the dust at our feet. His body is stiff, arms straight at his sides. His head is severed from the torso with a clean, bloodless cut, like something out of a fairy tale. The exposed neck is twice as long as it should be.

The head itself is covered in purplish lizard skin and has piercing yellow eyes. At times, it seems fully conscious, and then suddenly it’s just a lifeless prop again. When it is conscious, it tries to say something, but either some physical constraint stops it or it simply doesn’t know our language—only a blend of mumbling and muted screeches escapes its throat.

I grab a shovel—I’m not even sure how it got into my hands—and I start digging a grave. At the same time, I’ve got a compact camera on me, which isn’t unusual. I’m constantly ambushed by the need to document scenes, to preserve. I alternate between clawing at the earth and snapping pictures—of the purple head lying on the ground, the dust catching yellow light from the settlement in the distance, the bare feet of the dead man. Photography is a ritual to me. A photograph is a sacrament. Memory is a sacrament… and the photographer is a desperate soul afraid of loss, fighting back against all-consuming oblivion.

I even spot a sphynx, crouching in a narrow space, lit only by a combination of purple and toxic green. In his case, I take my time—those lighting conditions are just too perfect—and I aim for the best possible shot. There’s no question where the sphynx came from—he looks exactly like my wife’s cat, who’s lived with us for the past ten years. His naked skin is covered in freckles and age spots. That curious little bastard has a habit of appearing in the most unexpected places—even in someone’s dreams. He probably showed up just to kill some time during the ongoing ritual, to amuse himself with the confusion of humankind.

As I dig, it hits me: not long ago, I buried Iggy Pop somewhere around here.

Yes—that Iggy Pop.

Panic creeps in. What if I dig up his not-yet-decomposed body? Every patch of earth in this wasteland looks exactly like the next.

I can’t be sure I’m not reopening an existing grave.

Caution takes over. I ditch the shovel and start using my bare hands, digging like an animal that’s picked up a scent. I scrape the soil aside until—after some time that feels unmeasurable—I hit fragments of paper. They’re vibrant, richly saturated—like confetti from some explosive birthday party.

Scraps of memory, I assume.

Fragments of my subconscious.

They’re torn, so there’s no way to read anything coherent.

Eventually, I really do find what’s left of Iggy—his head, or what remains of it.

It’s perfectly decomposed: nothing left but a skull, the nasal bones gone, teeth fallen out. I hold it in my hands, dirt spilling down from the sockets and cracks—and I feel a sudden wave of emotion.

I want to take a photo—capture this image—because I know I’ll have to return him to the earth.

I’m surprised he’s decomposed this quickly—weeks, maybe just days.

And that’s when it hits me:

Paper lasts longer than human flesh.

Memory outlives the body.

Someone in the crowd explains that the one we’re burying tonight—despite having died—must be buried alive. It makes no sense to me. It doesn’t even seem ethical.

But the same voice nudges another idea into my head: that I buried Iggy alive too, back then—because he wanted it that way. He simply lay on his back, fully conscious, and let the earth cover him.

I try to imagine what it feels like to suffocate in dirt.

And suddenly, we’re all thinking it together.

We can see into each other’s minds, and what we find there is exactly the same.

I keep digging—deeper and deeper—until I uncover a small tin box, worn red paint flaking off. The kind of box movie heroes hide childhood treasures in, only to stumble upon it years later and get swept up in a tidal wave of cheap, tear-jerking nostalgia.

Especially if they open it…

I brush off the box with my palm, but it’s so worn it’s hard to make out the original image on the lid.

It might have been a bright orange comic-book-style “BANG” outlined in black, set in a jagged yellow explosion bubble—that’s what came to mind first.

I open the box, and inside I find something that belonged to Iggy—his teeth.

All of them.

As I crouch beside the grave, staring into the box, someone reaches past me and picks out the largest tooth.

It’s an unnaturally large fang—like something from an animal.

The purple-scaled head lies on the ground again, then suddenly watches everything from someone’s arms—possibly even the arms of its own body.

The villagers gaze at Iggy’s skull with reverence and awe. It’s a relic.

Remains of a prophet.

An icon that has already been absorbed into the collective consciousness.

We completely forget about the one we’re supposed to bury tonight.

The lizard head vanishes, and in its place, someone is now holding the skull of the punk legend.

Somewhere far back in my mind, in a fog near the nape of my neck, I understand that this moment marks the ritual’s completion.

Flesh has finally broken down.

The bones have been cleaned.

A fleeting human existence has been transformed into a totem, into an idea, or an evocative symbol that has infected the collective mind and become immortal.

All those photographs I took during the ritual are poor substitutes for what has truly happened here.

We buried a human body so that an icon could be born—and that icon filled our hearts with terror at our own impermanence.

And in the moment I finally open my eyes and night turns to day, it dawns on me:

The lizard head had been tethered to my own shadow all along.

It had been speaking the archaic language of my subconscious.

And I was never able to understand it.

Maybe I never even tried.