Yesterday, I retrieved a dead bat.
On cloudless days, as the sun begins its slow westward descent, an inscription -- a name -- materializes, as if fashioned by some spectral hand, at the bottom of the pool. It reads HILLARY AN. I would later learn that Hillary An, a former tenant, had drowned in the pool. Some say it was suicide. The wind, they surmise, had driven her mad.
Early this morning, my old friend Guy died of leukemia. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered, as he had instructed, from the top of a mountain where eagles nest. Guy thought birds are the reincarnated souls of men freed from their earthly shackles.
I turn my gaze heavenward at a searing, implacable sun. Then I look at my shoes, caked with brown desert dust. I remember the damp slippery clay by my mother’s grave.
TIME FLIES
Time is what hinders everything from
being given all at once.
Henry Bergson
It began with a premise, a subtle hypothesis of stunning magnitude: When positive and negative gravitational forces are set on a collision course at retrograde absolute speed, the theory asserts, the impact creates a void inside which time can be frozen -- life extended, you hear -- perhaps forever.
So the Foundation approved the grant and a team of biophysicists and geneticists from the Theoretical Physics Research Institute and two eager Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit flies -- a male and a female -- went to work to test this astonishing concept.
The flies were placed in a biotronic accelerator, a state-of-the-art synchrotron developed by the Institute’s Entomo-Ontological Laboratory.
Temperature constants and reverse wavelength spectral illumination were maintained throughout the project.
Three seconds later, the fruit flies mated with great eagerness. The first pupae hatched forty seconds later.
On the fourth day, or three hundred thousand fruit-fly generations later, fifteen offspring matured and exceeded their natural life expectancy by twelve hours, the equivalent of four human years.
Early on the twelfth night, sixty-six flies outlived their earliest progenitors by five hundred and eighteen fly-years.
A male and a female were removed from the accelerator and released outdoors on the seventeenth day. Six thousand fly-years had elapsed and all memory of an earlier life, of a once uncontrolled and free existence, had since been erased.
Disoriented, dazed by the sudden foreboding vastness around them, the flies climbed erratically toward the limitless expanse. Feeling the sun’s breath upon their wings, aroused by some anomalous threat, they flew toward each other, met and clasped briefly in mid-air before imploding and vanishing without a trace.
The rest, having lived six million years in human-equivalent age, were destroyed on the twenty-first day with massive isotopic concentrations. Their potential life span can only be expressed in astronomical terms.
Immortality? Easy. It’s all neatly packaged in a self-nullifying theorem. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would have been proud. But involuntary confinement and loss of selfhood is a high price to pay for immortality.
And so, Project Fruit Fly was scrubbed. The Institute issued a carefully worded summary report that no one bothered to read and which was subsequently consigned to a dark and dusty vault at the National Archives.
Invoking the Freedom of Information Act, I requested a copy. The request was denied, first on “administrative grounds,” then for reasons of “national security.” I appealed. The appeal was rejected. I was cautioned not to insist. The warning had the bureaucratic incivility accorded a pesky nobody or a dangerous agitator.
And then one day, not far in the future, the few who could afford their own biotronic accelerator granted themselves life eternal; the many who could not, lived and died serving them.
DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION
You can’t be free to become what you want when you’re starving, sorely oppressed or stunted in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery [in a society] where the free development of the few is bought at the cost of the shackling of the many.
Terry Eagleton
Across town, two derelicts identified by police as Floyd Horton, 39, and Cecil Glenville, 42, froze to death overnight in their dreams. They were found huddled on a bench at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on East 47th Street, a stone’s-throw away from the United Nations building. They’d wrapped themselves in newsprint and plastic sheeting to ward off the cold but New York’s bitter winter night claimed them just the same. Their bodies had stiffened and turned blue when they were carted away.
Horton’s remains were cremated free of charge by the City. His ashes, as are those unclaimed by family or friend, now fatten the soil at an upstate experimental horticultural farm.
Glenville, who had a cousin in Connecticut, was buried in a pine box with a plain metal marker at the local potter’s field.
A week later, requesting anonymity, Glenville’s cousin had the body exhumed for reburial at the family crypt in Darien. When the coffin was unsealed, Glenville was found lying face down, his knuckles caked with blood, his fingernails torn off. His eyes were wide open, his mouth agape in silent horror. A crimson crust coated his nostrils and lips.
Cryogenics Unlimited, the outfit that keeps utopians on ice until the elusive Lazarus Factor is synthesized, was called in to inspect Glenville’s remains. Hard at work on the development of an enzyme that offers the dead another lease on life, technicians at Cryogenics Unlimited theorized that Glenville had somehow thawed and slowly stirred back to consciousness like a hibernating toad.
“Realizing he’d been entombed alive, [Glencille] must have suffered a massive heart attack,” read the coroner’s report. Glenville was cremated and not even the Lazarus Factor can help him now.
Floyd Horton, his misery reduced to phosphate-rich sublimates, endows long-stem pink roses with a very special blush.
PAST IMPERFECT
Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
and then gone back quickly whence we came.
Sophocles
If the latest theoretical physics fad has any merit, a moment recorded in time, it purports, is a moment exhausted. What this axiom suggests is that impermanence is reality’s only constant. Only what remains uncreated escapes the shift from potentiality to actuality, from imminence to nothingness. To be, for all intents and purposes, is prelude to the unavoidable end of being.
For “Otto,” betrayed by the laws of probability, mocked by fate and spurned by his maker, being was unavoidably the essence of his finality. Unloved, deprived of a memory and short on dreams, Otto, poor Otto, is no sooner conjured from the dregs of an ancient genesis than undone, nullified and jettisoned into the abyss of oblivion. Were it not for some insightful and long-since forgotten astropaleobiologist, his living nightmare -- set at the beginning of time -- might never have been chronicled.
Unschooled and tentative, tolerated but never tamed, nature turned its back on itself and sanctioned -- some say, “with a vengeance” -- the spontaneous advent of a bizarre and unique life form. Ponder, if you can, an organism so vile, so grotesque, so pathetic in countenance, so tortured and twisted, and so utterly purposeless that it lived less than one Earth spin around its axis. Otto’s sudden emergence and abrupt demise defies the canons of evolution; it has no antecedent, it fits no known paradigm. The very