second chances
In the basement of the Salt Lake City temple, Mormon faithful baptize the dead. Living people stand in for the deceased ones, hoping to bring spirits into the fold. Mormons believe dead people’s spirits can learn the Mormon gospel, but without a physical body, they can never be baptized; hence the proxies in the temple basement.
Although I am not Mormon, this ritual appeals to me. It is the ultimate second chance. More than once, I have walked past the temple and wondered if anyone was down inside the baptistry, submerged under the water in the giant elliptical tub. I have wondered what it would be like to do that for someone–to believe that you could do that for someone. I wished that I believed in it–not the religious doctrine, but the faith that I could send a telegraph to the heavens, show a lost loved one he is wanted back in the fold.
This is also why Mormons obsess over genealogy. They need to know the names of lost relatives so they can baptize them. They need addresses, as it were, for those telegraphs to the spirit world.
Once, when I toured the Salt Lake Temple visitor center, I logged onto the genealogy computers and searched for my oldest brother, dead for two years at that time, killed by a heart attack. I got a hit complete with his social security number, and I felt an irrational thrill: I could run a background check. I could find out things he never told me in life. I could learn enough to write his story–stand in for him. Resurrect him.
But I never ran the check. Computer databases, I thought, cannot communicate with the dead. What I really meant was I could not.
A few months later, I was searching online for an underground bowling alley where I spent many a weekend night as a child, watching my parents bowl in leagues. I was desperate to remember its name or even find a photograph of the interior. All I could remember was that it was underground, it had a daycare center adjacent to a video arcade, and it was the only place I ever saw the youngest of my older brothers before he committed suicide some thirty years before. I wanted to visit the alley on a trip home to Iowa. Maybe descending those steps again or touching the dingy wallpaper would help me remember more about this brother, the first one I lost. Maybe sipping a fountain soda at the same table where I shook his hand–just that once, “hi, nice to meet you,” not yet knowing he was my brother–would bring me some kind of closure.
But the alley closed years ago, and the owners sealed the stairwell with cement, like a tomb.
In an online forum, some people from my hometown claimed the alley was still fully operational. One just needed to break into the back service entrance and flip a switch for private underground bowling. One man claimed he had done it.
In my mind, my brother existed only inside that alley, and now it was his tomb. Endless proxies for his friends and family broke inside for illicit bowling tournaments with a ghost. If I had to break in to see the alley again, so be it. I would find a way. I would even bowl down there alone.
And then I found out the truth: someone stripped the guts of the alley long ago. The graphics on the side walls are all that is left. No pin setters. No lanes. Just an empty hole.
