This column is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. Subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here. Read the previous instalment of The Graveyard Shift here.
The week begins with a realization that the poetic idealism initially inspired by my new employment in the field of cemetery grounds maintenance was over. No more sentimentality and pathos catalyzed by spending my days surrounded by the deceased (except for the children’s graves, which still have the power to overwhelm). I now look upon the monuments as an impediment to proper lawn maintenance. I decide to down tools having been on site for not more than half an hour, and do a bit of writing. Skulking in the corner of the cemetery under a tree, between burials and interred cremations. Wasting the ratepayers’ hard-earned.
My colleague strims in the distance. This man would strim the entire Amazon basin if you let him loose on it, I’m absolutely certain, stopping occasionally only to spit and swear. Over to my left is the unmarked grave that I find deeply repugnant. Its tumulus is grossly out of proportion with its neighbors’, its unknown contents feed the silver birch beside it. I just can’t fathom why it’s so big. I go back to the truck for a drink of water and, as though my thoughts have summoned a demon, my colleague ambushes me on the driver’s side, launching into a full-throttle, cyclonic exposition on government cloning programs, time-traveling Nazis, and how he’d go back and help Hitler win just to “fuck things up.” A dizzying thesis, delivered with the verve of a dysenteric bowel movement.
I ask him how he’d help Hitler win. I want to tell him what I think, which is that, deep down, Hitler was driven by the abyss, and wanted to lose all along. But I keep this to myself. The complexity of the ideas he puts forward is matched only by his imagination, as elucidated by his claim that the files of Nikola Tesla were seized by Donald Trump’s uncle in the 18th century.
He asks me if I believe in such things, and I explain that while I do believe that these days the sources and methods of national and international power are increasingly opaque, it isn’t necessarily helpful to indulge in overly baroque theorization, and that we should be more parsimonious when peering behind the veil. He ignores me, so I smile and nod. Terence McKenna often spoke of the “Balkanization of epistemology”—is this what he meant? The fractal begins to shudder, vibrate, and then fragment.
“The complexity of the ideas he puts forward is matched only by his imagination, as elucidated by his claim that the files of Nikola Tesla were seized by Donald Trump’s uncle in the 18th century”
Eventually, I make a break for it, going for a piss down by the disused cabin, still dazed from the onslaught. As I glimpse up, I see two or three random leaves on the limb of a plain tree swaying about wildly as if someone is tugging them by a thread, while the rest of the branch remains motionless. Throughout the day, strimming and mowing around the perimeter of the cemetery, I notice scraps of clothing that have the appearance of being disinterred (colleagues have said badgers have brought up remains here), a mysterious note written in cursive and torn into fragments, and some pregnant-looking gray plastic bags that I choose to ignore.
To make me feel more unhinged, my colleague, on at least a twice-weekly basis, says that it doesn’t “feel like” whatever the actual day is. To him, Mondays feel like Fridays, Fridays like Mondays, Tuesdays like Wednesdays, and so on. I disassociate, as I often do, so that for extended periods while mowing I feel as though I wear the manacles of time as loosely as my workmate claims to, escaping from him into different days of the week. I look up, a bin lorry passes, and the binman in the passenger seat sniffs gear off the back of his hand.
I recently heard the corpse described as “the excrement of the soul.” Two of my grandparents have a grave, the other two don’t. (I visited the graves recently, and felt nothing in particular.) I spend inordinate periods of time thinking about how my loved ones will be disposed of. Yesterday, we stopped for half an hour or so while an elderly lady and her two sons scattered some ashes at the bottom of the hill. We looked afterwards, it was pathetic, the sight—a white patch of dust a meter or so wide, unceremoniously dumped by the hedge.
“Throughout the day, strimming and mowing around the perimeter of the cemetery, I notice scraps of clothing that have the appearance of being disinterred”
A woman I speak to asks if I believe the spirits of the dead populate the place. I tell her that, to my mind, if people die of natural causes then their transmigration begins at the locus of disease, and the spookiness attached to graveyards is therefore romantic and erroneous. We eventually concur that only in cases involving particularly monstrous personages, such as the one I speculate may be inhumed at the oversized unmarked grave, or sudden violent death would the entrapment of the soul in between plains take place.
She scrapes earth with the nozzle of a plastic petrol can so she can toss it onto a grave—a German relative of hers. She laments that Britain and Germany ever fought, and the discrimination that it caused her ancestor. She then says that she prays for the souls of the English dead to start a war in heaven, to help end the recent mass immigration into the country. We need war here on the earthly plain as well, she says, adding that Putin is welcome to take over because of Russia’s strong religious convictions. She says other things too that would probably upset politically correct sensibilities. It was the first time a total stranger had laid out their vision of a kind of esoteric, Christian nationalism to me, but the second time that day I had found myself talking to people about murderous dictators in a graveyard.
We say goodbye and I carry on working.
During the Vietnam war, American spooks recorded special tapes to mimic the disembodied voices of Vietcong and NVA war dead left without proper rites. They blasted these out from helicopter-borne sound systems to exploit the deeply held beliefs of the Vietnamese in a cruel form of spiritual bombardment. The idea that the dying, unless properly trained during life to navigate the lower lights, need to be marshaled through the veil has a potent universality.
My colleague claims to have once died during his sleep as a result of an alcohol binge. His girlfriend found him blue and unresponsive in the night, choking on his own vomit, and managed to revive him. This experience has gifted him with a sensitivity to the spirit realm, heightened in the presence of Anglican churches, he says, and he often hears his name being called above the din of the strimmer. I usually take the position of skeptic within our dyad, and I put forward the possibility that the brain doesn’t like dealing with undifferentiated sensual input and will often create its own meaning by running it through preexisting neural pathways, a common outcome of this being that you can sometimes hear your name emerging clearly from white noise.
He again dismisses my observations.
This column is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. Subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here. Read the previous instalment of The Graveyard Shift here.
The post My Colleague at the Cemetery—and His Strange Ideas About Hitler appeared first on VICE.
