Green River Cemetery

Green River Cemetery is where Rabo Karabekian expects to be buried beside Edith, and where he attends her burial near his friends Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen. The cemetery’s repeated appearances make it more than a setting for remembrance: it links the deaths that have marked Rabo’s life to his imagining of souls released from the body, while his own planned burial gives that reflection a personal endpoint.

Burial Place and Personal Ties

Rabo says that Edith is buried at Green River Cemetery, only a few yards from the graves of Pollock and Kitchen. He, too, expects to be buried there. The proximity makes the cemetery a shared resting place for his second wife and two fellow painters, connecting the intimate fact of marriage to the losses within his artistic circle.

Rabo’s intended grave is specified in his will. He is to be buried next to Edith wearing his dark blue, made-to-order suit, whose label identifies it as made for him by Isadore Finkelstein. The suit is a concrete detail in an otherwise future event: Rabo describes the plan while acknowledging that its execution still lies ahead. The cemetery therefore holds not only memories of the dead but also the written terms of Rabo’s anticipated burial.

The Artists Remembered There

The cemetery acquires meaning through the deaths of the painters Rabo remembers. Pollock died in 1956 in a car crash while drunk. Rabo places that death just before the moment when his first wife and children left him. Three weeks later, Kitchen died by suicide. Earlier, when the three men lived in New York City and drank heavily, Pollock, Kitchen, and Rabo had been known at the Cedar Tavern as the Three Musketeers. Rabo’s joke that he is the only one of the three still alive makes the cemetery’s nearby graves the physical counterpart to a friendship reduced to its surviving member.

Rabo’s account extends beyond these two friends. He also recalls that Arshile Gorky died by suicide in 1948 and that Mark Rothko died by suicide in 1970. By naming artists whose achievements were already substantial or still emerging, he places the losses of Pollock and Kitchen within a wider catalogue of painter friends’ deaths. Green River Cemetery is not said to contain all of them; rather, its particular cluster of graves anchors Rabo’s attempt to reckon with a larger pattern.

Souls, Bodies, and the Radio Image

The cemetery also becomes the setting for Rabo’s evolving idea that people may receive signals from another station. He tries this theory out on Paul Slazinger, who extends the analogy by imagining the dead buried at Green River as broken radios whose transmitters continue. The image joins a familiar place of graves to the possibility of persistence beyond bodily life, without resolving whether the theory is true.

At Edith’s burial, Rabo describes his strongest vision yet of human souls unencumbered by the body. Around the rectangular grave, he imagines pure, innocent neon tubes. He immediately calls himself crazy, leaving the vision suspended between conviction and self-mockery. The cemetery gives that uncertainty a definite form: a grave in the ground becomes the setting for a vision of what might stand free of the body.

A Future Grave and an Unfinished Farewell

Edith’s burial brings Rabo’s personal plan into view. He expects to occupy a place beside her, dressed in the suit preserved in his will; yet the narrative presents this as a future obligation, not an event already completed. The distance between the burial he witnesses and the one he anticipates keeps the cemetery poised between mourning and expectation.

The cemetery’s force comes from this double role. It marks particular relationships and losses—the wife beside whom Rabo intends to rest, and the two fellow artists buried nearby—while also providing the ground on which his thoughts about death reach their most vivid, openly uncertain expression. Its significance rests not on a settled account of the afterlife, but on the meeting of specific graves, remembered friendships, and a living man’s imagined future burial.