echo The following short story contains vivid descriptions of violence, gore, and unethical actions taken in the name of science. Its intensity and subject matter may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.
AUGUST 18TH, 1942
TIME: 23.58
The testing process is messy. It starts with pulling him out of the white room with the white walls and the white lights, placing a translucent mask over his face like a muzzled dog, strapping his hands down by his side, not leather, not velcro, not fabric because he’s already chewed through the restraints more than once. The saltiness of blood is in his mouth, the squelch of thin skin as it pulls apart like wet tissue between his teeth.
Cruelly quick is the dismantling of his past. There is the sting of metal as the links of the plain cross slip free, tarnished silver blue and brittle in the snow that had preserved him, the unsent letter to Marie, an iron set of clasped keys to the parish, the cassock being eased off his prone body after the first injection had sunk in. His tongue is a slug resting within the chamber of his mouth, slow and fat and vile. At some point, they’ll fold him like the spine of a birch bending and snapping in within itself, and the splinter of marrow whines inside of his bones, scratches, decays, undergoes rebirth all in the span of a breath that shudders inside of raw pink lungs. Splayed open, a pinned butterfly in a white case.
Eventually, the corpse realises that there is a small hole at the back of his skull. The puddle squelches when his sinew and tendons twitch.
He gargles through a cup of antiseptic that blisters his lips, bent over a sink, then with his thoughts a jumble of clanging pots, AND THE DUST RETURNS TO THE EARTH AS IT WAS. There is buried an archive inside his head, where grimy fingers can only strain to smear all over the crown of his thoughts, and he stands at the edge of the pulpit, the head of the faceless mass as they gaze in reverence at the greatness they yearn so desperately for the touch of. He lulls himself to tumultuous sleep after three mysteries worth of Latin tongue, ava Maria, Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae, and awakes with the desperate promise still fresh like crushed, undying rose petals plastered sweaty and trembling in his voice, AND THE SPIRIT RETURNS TO GOD WHO GAVE IT.
The corpse of clay and dust stares back in the reflection when he looks. He sees it in the gleam of the metal tools and overhead mirrors that stretch out into infinity, in the blue-green-brown eyes of the demons with covered white masks and white caps. His speech is slurred and pitiful, unravelled through the learnings of his mind as if he was a newborn once more, leaving him unable to do anything other than grunt and groan. His cross is the piercings of needles into skin, the purgatory of flashing lights that burns as bright as hellfire as it feasts itself on him. He exists simultaneously; dead, dying, and alive, and it irks them enough into vexation that they put him back into the white room.
There he stagnates, for the burst of another eternity.
The point in the time where he finally realises that they are not in fact demons, but men, is a Faustian revelation.
That’s the precise moment when he sheds his terror for an entirely different sort of fear. He remembers snatches of memories from the asylums he’d been called into in another life, standing on the other side of white walls and white sheets– the cloying choke of vomit, piss and bleach, the singular entity of medicine and death ensconced in the others; pale faces, grasping hands, howls of insanity. Pallid, lost, wretched souls. It beckons him to join the ranks of them. The tag embroidered across the not-fabric pressed against the hollow of his flesh reads only the number 234. It names him stranger and sojourner, and curses him with no resting place.
Ultimately though, all memory is fallible and he falls prey to the decay of time. He ends up losing certain things.
The first to go that’s important is the name of the cat that used to wander the corner of the brownstone where he’d lived. He’d loved that creature. It was a mangy thing, with orange and white fur intermingling in patches, both eyes startling rings of green that blended to ochre. It purred in a distinct way that he could always pick out from the crowd. It had passed the year before he had, but while the first had been from peaceful age, the other had been much more violent. He’d died from a sliver of a knife in the dark yet it was the snow that damned him. The second, third, fourth things that slip away in rapid succession continue to be distant memories of faith, hope, love.
His efforts to reconcile remembrance must have triggered a reaction; a nerve in his head short-circuits. He spasms, and ends up soiling the clothes. This time, they dawdle in returning to help him clean up and change through a fresh cycle. So he lies there, back against the mattress and muscles atrophied, a shudder ripping through his spine before he quiets because it’s becoming increasingly disgusting to move, and continues pretending that he can map the static bursts of white splotches in his vision to the constellations in the bruised night sky.
There is an ocean’s worth of nausea that forms the rocky edge of a shore inside the bones that could be vaguely called ‘ribs’, sloshing, chipping off old shards and gravelly chunks, but he doesn’t retch. In the dark there is absolution. In the dark he can pretend at death. Once, he seizes off the bed, dislocating the cuffed dominant arm, and tumbles to the cold floor. There he closes his eyes and plasters himself against the linoleum slates, and barely notices the slippery passage of time, viscously fleeting, a distant voice tinged with the faintest huff of laughter. In his dreams, he stumbles around in the comfort of his own home, the hearth in the fireplace crackling with warmth, as he dips bread into lentil soup and has a sticky dessert of canned peaches.
The mirrors of his eyes are stained-glass masterpieces, vibrantly dyed, nearly a cobblestone patch or perhaps quiltwork of the rainbow’s reflection splashed over the front and the back of the cathedral. In his memory, he walks up wooden steps and hears the fourth board creak beneath weight, skims his fingers across coarse oak bannisters, and lives an entire life in that imaginary box named ‘reprieve’. A christening awaits him upon the office door on the second floor– the one passed down from Brother Thomas after the senior had an unfortunate tumble and broke hip, clavicle, and jaw– bold and stencilled, ink drying, it tells him, OSCAR.
During the third stage of REM sleep, the corpse licks the dead translucent skin of his lips, thoughtlessly scraping it using his teeth until it peels free to fall away like fish scales, and he makes a noise akin to a long drawn-out oughhhs. He gives a small gasp in that state, barely imperceptible, but what washes over him is the euphoria exactly that of a blind man washed free of mud and seeing the world for the very first time in all its overwhelming glory. Kscrrrr, his throat clicks, raspy, but like the tap of heels against the ballroom floor, there’s the ghost of her warm smile. He’s spinning and laughing, wine sweet on his tongue, exchanging murmurs of words that mean nothing to the world but everything to them on that balcony, flower petals soft against his fingertips, the moist stalk of the bouquet, while inside the piano plays a sharp staccato before devolving to the most lovely rhythm–
The lights turn back on, and they are the charred nozzles of hell setting him ablaze once again.
The corpse shrieks back to reality.
APRIL 6TH, 2014
TIME: 23.55
(Outside, there is an email. The Brook and Breacon email is sent to only the handful of employees that work in the building who are authorised to venture to the lowest levels that the rest do not even know the existence of.
It reads simply, there has been a change in upper management. TERMINATE
Several factors come into play:
- It is a kinder time in the world, where things like HOPE and PEACE and LOVE are deeply romanticised.
- Human rights laws are such pesky things– especially should the wronged party decide to sue.
- The whistleblower– well… before this problem conveniently disappeared, a rather large mess was made with the press and the outraged media, which was surprising because one could never underestimate the propaganda of cheap zombie flicks and apocalyptic films.
- The bloodhounds of the global scientific community were sniffing. Nosy little shits, backed by state and government.)
MAY 7TH, 2014
TIME: 23.55
That particular cadaver that was labelled Number Two-Thirty-Four wasn’t the first nor the last in its intake of subjects. But during the shut-down protocol, Jimmy down at the control panel managed to convince the rest of his like-minded buddies of the poetic hilarity in using that one as the sole specimen to maintain. Just a fun little thought experiment that would have made a really great YouTube video if not for the many extensive contract clauses– Who Would Win? A Priest From The Early 1900s VS Scientifically-Derived Immortality.
Jimmy rides that high for a little over a month. He wants to crow to the face of the cadaver, see, I told you. You were wrong. The universe has never been deterministic nor was it created by the hands of an unseen God. Humanity has made itself eternal, and there is no limit on what can be achieved. Your God has not struck us down. Your God has not stopped our work. This is quantifiable proof that there has never been an afterlife, heaven, or hell.
His argument doesn’t raise the paradox of limbo.
If Jimmy went out to the bar tomorrow night, as was his typical habit after the divorce, and was subsequently killed in a hit-and-run, what are the questions you would ask? Was it because he was spectacularly drunk at that time and stepped out into the speeding traffic before anyone could stop him, eyes glazed and hiccuping his own saliva the entire way? Or would you simply name it an act of God in turn?
If Jimmy dies and is never resuscitated, then where does he go? Does he die with his body, or is his soul raised to someplace else? Does starlight claim him? Does dust? Does God?
Schroedinger’s corpse.
(Still trying to peek into the box, huh?)
JUNE 15th, 2014
TIME: 23.52
Now, swivel that spotlight back to the cadaver:
The observation process is significantly less messy.
Hello, says the man with the doe-brown eyes and the dark curls of hair brushed back neatly upon his scalp. He is wearing a coat like the others but he is out of place, like an ill-fitting sleeve or bone or angle. The black threads of his suit peek out from the collar, framing him in the shadow of a halo at the neck, the only thing stark and mesmerizingly vivid in the white room. He has a notebook relaxed at his side, a pen resting in the crook of his ear, and a blank smile that puts most of the customer-service employees to shame.
The man’s name is David and if you ask him why he’s even there in the first place, he won’t tell you why exactly. Instead, he’ll smile back with just the right amount of teeth and niceness, and change the subject just as fluidly. Perhaps the telecommunications company that bugs his house will tell you that he received a call from a very important higher-up that exact morning, and an hour and fifteen minutes later, the traffic camera catches him speeding down the interstate highway in that lovely dark Camaro of his. His neighbour– who thinks David is a swell guy– will gamble at a breakfast emergency. His employer is restricted by legalities, but he will turn the computer to show you the hundreds of thousands of pounds transferred to an untraceable offshore account. So really, it depends on who you ask. Everyone agrees that truth is generally a bit convoluted like that.
David happens to be an Oxford graduate with a PhD in psychology. By the time the personnel of Elysian Co. come around to asking the question of when is a dead man still a man, the company is already neck-deep in multiple law-suits and arrests on the charges of corpse theft and desecration. The sole survivor, however, is a person of interest– corpse-of-interest?– to certain crowds of people, and by extension, David. He is already being healthily reimbursed for his efforts and has plans to keep it that way for a good long time.
It’s remarkable though, the lucidity that he catches glimpses of through the one-way mirror as he takes the time to slick back his hair and adjust the spectacles on the bridge of his nose. Not quite a fractured psyche, not entirely at least.
Two gaunt eyes swivel and blink.
Gurhhhh, the cadaver says. Ourghssss… skcharrrr.
David makes a mental note to refer to a good speech therapist.
FEBRUARY 8TH, 2017
TIME: 23.46
The first person who taught Oscar how to write was his mother. Sat aloft upon the wooden dinner table, the candlelight flickering warm and darting as it permeated the air inside of that small room, and the waft of rafters and soot were the sensations he remembers the most concisely. He starts with his name. He ends with it too. Now, he grips the pen with aching joints and painstakingly begins to relearn what was lost.
Names were fickle things. Oscar. Old Norse roots. God spear, champion warrior.
You are making remarkable progress, says David– Hebrew origin, meaning beloved. A man long ago after God’s own heart. He sits comfortably against the seat, the two of them facing each other. There is the sound of a fireplace crackling in the background, but there is no wood, no soot or ash. It is entirely a farce of intent. He leans forward, and Oscar wonders if the expression in his eyes is envy or pity, or perhaps a certain measure of both. He asks, why do you persistently insist that this is a curse?
Hatefully, he answers, because I can never find rest by wandering Gehenna.
I can never return home.
JUNE 7th, 2018
TIME: 23.45
When David was in elementary school, he burnt an ant.
He still remembers the grin of the sun against his back, overwhelmingly hot and sticky, as he crouched against the pavement, tenuously balanced, and held out a pint-sized right arm to hover the magnifying glass like an all-seeing eye over the tiny creature scuttling on the gravel. There was a bright little white spot as if he’d summoned his very own hellfire to shine down, crackling like the rustling paper before igniting into small flames. He watched the charred beady appendages twitch and then stop entirely.
There is a blackboard in his mind with only one question scrawled small in chalk – DEFINE DEATH
The theologist says, it is a consequence of sin, it is the severance of soul and body, but it is not the end.
The scholar says, it is a complete cessation of life that eventually occurs in all living organisms.
The deluded say, and yet I will kill death.
David is, coincidentally, agnostic. His beliefs have never defined him once in life and they won’t. He prods thoughtfully at that uncertainty of which category he falls into, and keeps it vaulted away in the deepest recesses of his mind where he will later take it out and examine it again much like a child continues to fiddle with an old toy. It simply isn’t important. He fixates himself on what really matters– the home renovations, the upcoming court appearance starring his ex-wife, and the thesis paper he was in the midst of writing regarding the no-longer-classified cadaver, morality, and a live study of categorical desires.
Eventually, you just learn to pick your battles.
OCTOBER 16TH, 2034
TIME: 23.51
There will come an inevitable point when time will have been made into loose change– an apt metaphor like that sad, forgotten penny in your pocket. During which, the once-cadaver has had his liver cells regenerate sixfold, red blood cells 130 times over, skin cells cycled through 2434 lifespans, a colon 1460 times-removed from its organic ancestor, and a second brand new set of skeletal bones. It’s like that chapter of rediscovery everyone goes through in life, except with less yoga mats, spa retreats, or bottles of Jack Daniels.
While Oscar remains at the ripe age of 29, David hadn’t once pumped the brakes. He was well past his prime, having suffered a stroke that left him permanently using a cane, silvery wisps of hair licking past his face like the silhouette of grey flames, slight muscle and skin sagging that pulled at the corner of his eyes and mouth. It’s surprising that they still remain in touch, outside of a professional capacity.
The whole experimental study had died out a long time ago after some little upstart down in the States had gotten his hands on the confidential material and sold it to the highest bidder. That window of opportunity before government regulations had come slamming down meant that an eighth of the population now walked around smugly with that stupid IMMORTAL ME tattoo that the company had sold alongside eternity as a product.
(Not that it made being scraped off the floor of the Grand Canyon any less fun. Some people really should have read the fine print that clearly stated NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH INVINCIBILITY)
Yesterday, Oscar walked out with his freedom and a newly established bank account after suing with the help of a lawyer that David may or may not have introduced, and subsequently found himself at the bus stop one early August morning, squinting against the sun for the first time. He clutched a bag with his negligible belongings, a copy of the NKJV bible, and a dead glaze to his eyes that could only be related to decades-suffered dissociation. The noise made his head hurt. The sights made his head spin. As a consequence– not a great time.
He also would have nearly tripped into an open manhole cover, if not for the flyer stuck in the glass window of the cafe.
It made him stop in his tracks.
See, something about that scene affected him. If he was more self-aware, he could have named it as that need to return to a constructed sense of normality. It seemed as good a place as any to pretend, with the bustle of life squeezed around tables, clusters of people laughing, talking, working, and simply existing for that one beautiful moment in time. The invisible vice that squeezed his stomach wasn’t only hunger.
Perhaps it was the reason that he was drawn back, that he ended up returning the very next day. The thoughts that ran through his mind were a tangled mess that none living could ever be privy to, but the expressions on his face were a delightful journey in sadness, doubt, then indifference to determination. He read the words as if they were infinitely precious– splashed in Poppins Bold, font size 87– as it declared WE’RE HIRING.
He made a choice. He stepped into the cafe.
Enter Oscar no-last-name, barista.
And life goes on.
Written By: Trishta
