6.1.2012 • usque ad mortem 2.0

usque ad mortem 2.0

Terrible thing, a death in the family, especially when you can't feel it, gut frozen like fucking R134a were coursing through the veins, words mixed up in rhyme and verse and tumbling in utter imbecility. You wake up to the phone wringing the sleep out of your mother, pick up the handset in a state of lukewarm alert to the trailing "...passed away" of the doctor-friend, the doctor-friend with the so-assured tone and deep, vaguely confident voice.

Then in the car. Drive with moderate haste to the hospital. (There intrigue awaits, but that's another story to be told by another me.)

The cool dread of the empty room; nurses are folding sheets ever so casually, a few bags filled to bursting with personal effects (what dread imagination conjured up this phrase) surrounded by those unfortunate enough to be close enough to be fortunate enough to be able to feel and hurt suffer and cry out O God, O God!

But I am none of them. A terrible thing, death in the family; especially when you can’t feel it. You and I, we’ve waltzed through many a text and many a speech, you hiding behind I, I behind you; and who’s to say I shouldn’t couldn’t hide when everyone hides behind you? And what is hid if not myself in this horrid game…

I meet some relatives I’d seen before and forgot. Or you do. You’re glad, excited to have such a person in your blood, wish to see them again, it’s all warm family reunion and death certificates and transport of human remains drenched in blood but to be washed and cleaned and painted to their true likeness by a real pro, real jolly times. The worms are kept at bay, we have the fucking R134a to thank for that (or probably more advanced stuff, the larvae are so keen these days).

Real jolly times, a death in the family, terrible thing. Especially when you won’t feel it; that day you awake disturbed, your body is objecting your senselessness or your early rousement or to the expectancy of microbes lying in wait at the hospital. A slight annoyance in the stomach, like an undecided gambler, doesn’t know what to bet on whom, whether to bet after all, and in the fever and excitement makes to bet the wrong sum on the wrong half-dead horse, the stomach seems to ache with eagerness but pastry is not exactly consonant with death in the family, especially when you don’t feel it, and anyway the stomach is unsure whether it’s eagerness or sickness, and slowly it dissolves into a sea of maggots. You look around and there is only silence, listen for the maggots but they’re all there staring at you with that blank black stare that only maggots have in the morning, terrible thing, terrible, especially when you don’t feel it.

Back in the car. You drive home in a sort of generic moodlessness; it’s as if your brain were in an ice-box in the back seat, connected to you via those blurry vibrating subatomic strings. The illness that had been lying in wait since last night takes advantage of the hospital visit to justify itself: tiredness, a mild back-ache, general physical fatigue and something less than fever; grave symptoms, terrible thing, especially when you can feel them, but not death.