Sunday, January 01, 2006

58 :

It was an undignified end, but all ends are undignified. No matter how much dignity one tries to achieve, good or bad, foe or friend, we are all the same in the end.

And here I was. For the first – and the only time – in my life, in my death, I was the centre of attention. I was never going to be a groom or a bride. Never going to have my day in the sun, bar this. Never going to be photographed smiling on grassy reception areas, a bride in hymen white draped over me, my friends around me, never going to be holding my first child, or be the father of the groom, or anything. This was it. The end. There was no more. This was my first and last day in the spotlight.

Flashbulbs popped around me. My cadaver was analysed, dissected, photographed, sketched, measured from every angle. Tonight Matthew, I was going to be famous. For all the wrong reasons. I might even be a headline. See my picture in the papers. I am a specimen, an exhibit, a special effect endlessly caught in the frozen moment of a camera aperture.

The flash of the camera left burn marks on my retinas. Road maps of my Iris, all red A Roads and country lanes shadowed my vision. Blue squares left permanent shadows in my unwilling vision. And of course, I couldn’t close my eyes.

They stood over me. Men in white suits, chemical retardant, sterile outfits, their mouths covered by dust masks, eyes covered in clear plastic goggles, their hands sterile, rubber, powdered for easy application in white gloves. Their hands, cold, sterile, inhuman, touched me, pawed me, covered me in plastic sheeting, zipped me up inside green bags, lifted me after a comprehensive set of tests. The last time I saw daylight it disappeared between the teeth of a zip. No human skin would ever touch mine again. I would never feel the warmth of contact.

Lifted onto a dolly, wheeled to a van. Stored on a shelf. Catalogued and numbered. Driven to an office in Vauxhall. Diagnosed. Dissected. As if somehow they could analyse me to glory, as if I could be a Prime Case, a highlight of a dreary CV of a coroner or a scientist.

And the last time I saw her face, it was in tears. I was pulled out of the dark, I was unzipped, exposed, and a morose, set, composed face, disintegrated in tears. The last time I saw my mother was in tears, her lips curling with tragedy.

Fuck. I hated being dead. People would talk to me. As if I wasn’t there, as if I couldn’t hear. As if I were deaf, dumb, and mute. They talked about me whilst I was still there, mocked my rigor mortis erection, my shrinking skin pulling forth a beard a few short millimetres at a time, they arranged my fingers, dressed my hair, sealed me, unsealed me, penetrated me with needles, with swabs up my nostrils, down my urethra, fuck that hurt, a carcass I was, dressed, moulded, a puppet. I had my own name : “The stiff.” “The meat”. “The poor bastard”. They poured over my skin, looking for distinguishing marks, tattoos. The stale odour of Plaster of Paris as it was poured in my mouth, as it set, as casts were made of my teeth to extract my identity.

I wish I’d gone to the dentist more often. Not that it would’ve done me much good then, only now. That was all. I was crucified on science, waiting my moment, my ascension.

They knew I didn’t want to go. Deep down in their hearts they knew I wanted to stay, because life was so beautiful, because I saw my grandfather fight against leaving this life for so long, he fought so hard, that I would never want to let go.

Because life is cruel. Fuck that Life isn’t cruel, it’s just there. Like the sea, it doesn’t care if you’re in the way or not – it’s going on regardless of if you’re there or not. The tidal wave. The hurricane. The avalanche. I’m not afraid. I’ve seen my fears, I’ve lived through them, I’ve died through them. I carried on regardless, because it doesn’t stop. Experience ploughs on. Whatever happens next is just another thing that happens. Just another thing to deal with. Just some more bullshit to get over.

They snipped my hair : analysed the dead keratin cells. Identified the 98 strands of DNA, broke me down, compartmentalised me, entered my life on a slide into a computer. They lifted my eyelids, swabbed under my eyeballs, picked out the dirt from under my fingernails, scoured my clothes with infrared scanners, identified alien hairs, strands of fibres from other peoples clothes, the dried sweat on my shirt, the saliva and flakes of skin from my lovers, my friends, the man who murdered me. Flecks of paint from old, tired cars driven by small time criminals who wanted to go straight, but not as much as they wanted to get by. And if someone else was in the way, well, that was their problem. Get out of the way. Or don’t. Your choice. They were going to get by – one way or another.

They put things in me. Swabs and slides in my mouth, scraped my teeth, my tongue furred with undigested alcohol, down my urethra, up my anus, looking for signs of ejaculation, alien bodies, traces of latex, muscle rips and tears from penetration.

I was a specimen. An experiment. A circus freakshow. An exhibit. But never would I make the Black Museum. I’m just an ordinary murder. I’m not even a special murder. Just another corpse. Today’s Corpse of the day. Today’s mystery to be solved, the puzzle to be unravelled, the lock to be unpicked. Already I was becoming a memory. Already I was being swept aside, footnoted, relegated to paper soon to be shredded after an allotted number of years, so that there would be nothing left of me, not even a memory. My emails would disappear into some silicon amnesia, all of my life an old man’s memory.

One day I would be something more than a footnote, a fading yellow newspaper article. In another life. I will be reincarnated as a butterfly, or a dolphin, or something, anything more than this. Maybe a rabbit, and I could be pampered and fed and taken in by a family. That would be a life I could live.

Any life, offered to me, even that of a predator, a distended, albino crab walking sideways on an ocean floor, subject to thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch, pressure so intense I would explode as I would surface, burst like a pricked ballon, even I would take that life rather than nothing.

Life. Any life is better than nothing.

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