"SMILE! You are on voice and video cameras!" reads a new sign at the ticket shack outside the Temple. I look in on the woman we used to talk to as she fed the cats or prepared to sell tickets. She was vaping. We waved as I said something cheery about the surveillance state and she smiled crookedly at me. At the cemetery exit, Lilith insisted on sniffing where the cats (now kept from under the shack with plywood barriers) and chickens wander through the rows of flowers for sale. "She's inspecting," I say to my friend, the conspiracy theorist. "Always," he says.
Up the hill, a woman and man approached us from "the heart," or the steep circle at the top of the cemetery. "Are you the lady who walks here every day and wrote a book about it?" the woman asked. Her friend, Joan, had told her about us. Are you the woman who hears fireworks? I asked. She lives behind the Temple's gift shop; hears cars racing through the cemetery some nights. She tells Rex (the boss) these things, but he blames them on the Karaoke place across the highway.
After I take their picture, the man says maybe they'll be in my next book. The walkers are still free from cameras and microphones; theirs is a free speech zone. But workers now inhabit zones of silence, a place of gestures divorced from words. Their hourly wages cannot afford the luxury of speaking.
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