by Sharmin Ahammad

They tell him to meet them at 1 o’clock; they go through the usual formalities – good afternoon, please sit down, make yourself comfortable – then they take out his file and say, ‘We are not going to review your life lease, Mr. Gray. You will die without any further medical intervention.’ They are all very cordial, all very courteous about it: five identical smiles stapling five, wide identical faces. ‘Do you have any questions, Mr. Gray?’

‘Why?’

‘You are a valuable citizen, Mr. Gray. We are all valuable as you no doubt already know. Unfortunately, you are less valuable than our requirements. Our judgment is informed by highly complex and specialized data. But, we assure you, our judgment is entirely necessary, entirely correct.’

So it is entirely necessary for him to die. He is no professional; in what position is he to disagree? But he is disappointed. They haven’t quite answered his question. He can’t imagine what Death is like: it blooms before him in a fog.

Before he can stop himself, he asks, ‘What is Death?’

‘It is a permanent sleep.’

‘It is when your organs stop functioning.’

‘It is when you stop thinking and feeling.’

‘It is when you never move again. Your body temperature falls.’

‘It is when time stops.’

‘Ah, thank you,’ he replies, ‘That’s very informative.’

They smile. ‘Is that all, Mr. Gray?’

‘Yes. That’s all.’

He is shivering despite the heat as he makes his way home. Autumn is waning towards winter. The steel gates glint under the sun’s glare. Death is something that belongs to the past, surely, there is no such thing as reversion; reversion is unscientific – that’s what They say – and now Death, in its gloomy, colourless way was rousing itself after a millennium of dormancy. The time had arrived, predicted well before the possibility of Indeterminate Life Extension, that one day there would be too much life; there would not be enough resources to circulate; that they would have to make hard decisions; who to live; who to die. And now, after centuries of being careful, being measured with life, it weighs upon him, in a few clean words, ‘We will not be reviewing your life lease Mr. Gray.’ He stares into the low, orange sun, he rubs his forefinger, he smiles without pleasure. He is grated with failure. He never fails any examination; he fulfills his function as precisely as he can, as is possible; it is encrypted in his blood, after all. But, he isn’t good enough: there is a fault in his mechanism (is it because he conforms too much or too little?) and he isn’t sure what to blame.

It is 2 o’clock in the morning. He is unable to sleep. Three minutes pass before he checks the clock again. He has been lying on his bed for the past three hours awake and aching, thinking to himself each time he almost drops off, ‘this is what it will be like to die…’ They say sleep is a rehearsal for death, a space between living and obliteration: but what if death isn’t warm and dark? When he shuts his eyes, he doesn’t see black, but orange. It is bright and searing and pulsing. When he opens his eyes, he is hugged by darkness and feels relief. But sleep isn’t coming. Sleep is no longer a form of passive suspension but a physical force that he must call upon. Sleep, sleep…

‘I’m going to die,’ he says to her.

‘It’s 4 o’clock in the morning. Couldn’t you have contacted me another way?’

‘Someone decided I am not good enough and so I’m going to die.’

She doesn’t seem to be listening, or understanding. She invites him in for a drink, calm as a moon on a cloudless night, asks him to sit down. She says, ‘Oh, that can’t be true, can it?’

‘They never lie.’ He senses her unease.

‘Don’t they say reversion is unscientific? Aren’t they asking for reversion? It’s illogical.’

A million times, he has heard the answer a million times given to other people, other failures. ‘You are a historian, not a scientist. Death is no longer science. It is history. What do you know about death?’

She sits him down. She stands, feet together, arms folded. She begins with poise: “Debates in history often centred on what happened after death: is it the end of the mind? Would that thing they call the ‘soul’, so often coined by the ‘I’, float higher and higher into a realm of eternity? But, of course, there is nothing particularly special about the prospect of ‘living forever’: we are, by their standards, gods– the highest evolutionary form a human can reach: immortality. And once we gained immortality, it was inevitable that their version of “Heaven” followed suit. Peace, Justice, Freedom is only possible because our ancestors sacrificed death. With the death of Death, the abolition of physical pain and emotional deficiencies (what can’t we diagnose – physical or emotional?), the greatest moral depravities were obliterated. A most terrible thing they had, War, ended. In 2078 the abolition of war act was passed. If there was no longer any need to fight for life, there was no need for war. There is a mathematical neatness about it. Medication became a universal right. Life could be lived for life’s sake. Death was the ultimate disease they erased from the papers of history.” Pause. “But we are higher beings now, post-humans. They were barbarous.”

As she speaks, he knows he is going to become a different species: he is going to be ‘human’. Only, what he can’t really get his mind around when it comes to death is not the so-called ‘spiritual’ dilemmas that the ancients faced (he is certain there is no such thing as an after-life; he doesn’t even desire one if will differ from his usual experience) but the sheer physicality of it all. He runs his fingers across the ring of wrinkles around his wrist. She asks him if he is alright; apologises for going on too long, it must have come off as a bit of a lecture, right? She assures him, uncertainly, that everything will be okay, that death will not be like it was in the past. He leaves.

He stands in front of the mirror naked: his long, grim body stares back at him; there is a taut geometrical tightness about his construction, his skin smoothing over the elaborate detail of his strong, sturdy structure: the deeper one looks, the more intricate the patterns are – the half-raised hairs planted on miniscule dots on his skin, the tiny, swirling contour lines of his fingertips. The human body is admirably crafted. Nature should be proud! He reads his body of health for salient symbols of death. He looks at the eyes of the body; the tiny, telescopic portals that make the act possible. His eyes will rot. Turn to water-jelly. There will be no distinction between the sharp, black circlet of his pupil and wide, white sclera. Soon after death, his capillaries will thicken with congealed blood, purpling his skin a deep plum colour; then the muscles of his carcass will stiffen; then, one degree after another, his body temperature will fall. Livor mortis. Rigor mortis. Algor mortis. The three springy steps of death.

People used to embalm bodies. But there are no embalmers left: it is unlikely that professionals will break from their set routines to do it for him. He composes a thought to The Scientists, ‘If possible, please embalm my body’. There is no mention of preparation post-death; the information he gleans about death is stolen from history archives — the grim sources that people read only out of a dull superiority complex — back then there was too much killing, too much disease, too many disasters. The longer people lived, the more people died. There was something cruel about the maths. Now the numbers are right. Now people live long, and many people live – only a few people have to die – and that is a neat equation worth preserving. There is a mathematical neatness about it: the only ethical solution.

But without being embalmed, his body will go through the odious parade of putrefaction; his abdomen will glow with green mould, his flesh will curdle with decay. The bacteria in his colon crucial for digesting his comfort foods – olives, oranges, walnut ice cream — will, in turn, digest his bodily tissues. The gases of his intestines will push his intestines through his rectum. His tongue and eyes will bulge out of his face leaving empty, black bowls. Bloody fluid will pour out of his un-tasting mouth and un-smelling nose and other orifices in streaks of sulphur and iron. His skin will loosen and wrinkle, his bones will protrude from his face like arcs beneath thin fabric, and, after about a week, his lax skin will lift off in sheets. His organs will liquefy – he imagines the pulps of blood, the pasty puss and the slack, empty sack of his heart. After a few years, perhaps, his skull will be a fractured eggshell. Time will sand his bones until there is nothing left of him – not a single imprint on the world – like a sound fading forever into silence.

His paranoia laces traces of death into ordinary objects as he moves from one indistinct day to the next: he sees bits of bone in his coffee cup; skin lining his pillow; a blot of blood here and there; knotty sinews fusing walls. Everything is muscled with death. He can no longer tell what is inside of him and what is out. He mediates between death and life. He hasn’t been able to sleep for three days. His irises in the mirror are rimmed red, a red ring of blood. His windows are open, all of them, inviting in any air that might cool his white rooms – but there is only more heat, more hot breaths sucked inwards: his home a pair of constricted lungs. The open windows cut slots into his body, wafting in more infection. He is infected. He is human. The impatient tapping of the ticking clock replaces his heartbeat; the metal hands of time opening and closing his aortic valves.

The human in him is emerging. Emerging like a skeleton beneath his skin…He draws in insects, he snags and singes their little bodies on flames. He listens to the delicate crackle of death. He is fascinated by that tiny, frazzled instance where life meets death. A soft moth crumbles in the fire and powders the table. Another one gone! Into expiration, into air and exhalation, the breath that blows out life and puts an end to all of light (he almost sings it to himself). He studies the remains of the moth’s anatomy, a lovely, no – empty, deadly, deathly – dead thing. He makes a note to research more and more and more on Death, but is there the time?

Time becomes a soldier in orange uniform. It injects a virus into his hot blood. Time forces a gun to his head: ‘I want to live forever’, It makes him say: and he will repeat it to everyone; he will spread Time’s message, in a mantra, in a prayer, to all living things: ‘I refuse to die. I refuse to die. I refuse to die.’ He will not fade into the past tense. Even if it means burning every body alive, even if it means causing pain, even if it means going to war — he will not die. He will fight for life until his very last heartstring twists and snaps. He will live. Live!