Forever, in Pieces

by Fawver, Kurt

  She notices me watching.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi,” I murmur. It’s difficult to enunciate with a halved tongue.

  The clock sheds minutes.

  I hear a moan. It could be from a man or a woman. Its pitch resides in a pleasant middle ground.

  The woman beside me turns and stares at me.

  “How many does this make for you?” she asks.

  “Nineteen,” I say.

  She nods.

  “This is only my seventh.”

  A pause.

  “Do you ever wish you were at the end? At the stage of completion?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, not even thinking. “I plan to stop before I hit it. I’m in college. Almost finished, too. I’ll have a career-track job soon. I’ll be able to stop then.”

  She nods.

  “I went to college for a year,” she says. “That was when I did my first and second supplications. I didn’t finish. College, that is. I dropped out and devoted myself to my writing. Foolish, maybe. Probably.”

  “You’re a writer?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  Someone stifles a cough.

  “Crimson blades crushed underfoot,

  occluded by a spire’s shade,

  do dance and wave

  in future time

  sent to an early grave.”

  I have no idea what she said. The words make sense individually. Together, I’m not so sure. I don’t ask the meaning.

  “You’re a . . . poet?”

  “I try,” she says. “But I’ve never sold any of my poems. No one wants them. So I give them away. That one’s yours now.”

  I’m unsure what to say.

  “Thank you. It was . . . um . . . pretty.”

  An eyebrow shoots up, its point condemning my assessment.

  “Pretty?” she asks. “That wasn’t what I was going for, but okay.”

  I hate aesthetics. I don’t know how to wrap myself around them. They’re so organic, so unquantifiable.

  “Sorry. I’m terrible with words. I study physics. Theoretical physics. If that makes you feel any better.”

  She smiles, one side of her mouth raised higher than the other. Feline, perhaps.

  “It’s okay. Poetry isn’t for everyone. Some vore is probably out there using my supplements to write love sonnets to a girlfriend or boyfriend who doesn’t understand them, either. But at least someone’s listening. You listened, too. That’s all I can ask. Besides, I suck at math, so you’re ahead of me in that physics game.”

  I shrug.

  “Everyone’s good at something,” I say. “If we weren’t, we couldn’t give.”

  “Truer words, my friend. Truer words.”

  I think that’s an ancient colloquialism. I’m not sure. I’m not sure of much outside my own work anymore.

  A man is wheeled out of the extraction room. Full facial supplication. No eyes, no ears, no lips or nose, and most of his cheeks hollowed. I think he’s grinning.

  The poetess points at the stump of a woman across the room.

  “Do you think she’s here for her completion?”

  I shake my head.

  “No. Not yet. Not without someone accompanying her. A creditor or her next of kin. Someone to collect the final payment. Completionists always have someone with them.”

  The poetess nods.

  “So what are you giving today?” she asks.

  “Finger. Just one. Last one.”

  “Really? That’s what I’m giving, too. It’ll leave me with seven, and I don’t use my right hand to write, anyway, so I have at least two more to spare before I need to make any tough decisions.”

  Tough decisions. I’ve never thought about supplication as a tough decision. It’s just the means to an end. It’s how you pay the bills. Supps give, vores eat or inject, and the world turns. There’s no point in torturing yourself over it. I don’t understand some people.

  “Have you ever thought about just . . . running away from it all?” the poetess asks.

  “I can’t really run anywhere,” I say.

  She bursts into laughter, which I don’t understand, either. Some of the supps jump or shake at the disruption of stillness.

  “What? I can’t. Really. Look at me.”

  I pat the nubs of former legs.

  Her laughter dies somewhere deeper than her throat. She stares at me.

  This woman disturbs me. I just want to give my supplement and leave.

  “Nevermind,” she says.

  I can’t imagine what’s taking so long. Usually the wait isn’t this bad.

  “Do you ever wonder if some of the vores think they’re gods?” the poetess asks.

  I shake my head. Crazy question. A poet’s question, obviously.

  “No.”

  “Really? Even though they’re getting smarter and faster and stronger and more able to do everything? I mean, what are we doing here but offering up sacrifices? We’re god enablers. We’re worshiping what doesn’t even exist yet. Our faith is a system of slow destruction, and only the vores will end up in heaven.”

  “I could never worship the vores. They’re just people,” I say. “I’d hate them before I worshiped them.”

  Her eye narrows to a sliver.

  “You can hate your god, you know,” she says.

  I wave off her comment with my full, unextracted hand.

  “This is just a means to an end, a financial transaction, not a religion.”

  A moment of uneasy deliberation creeps in between us.

  “And you really don’t wish you could be at the stage of completion?” she asks. “Really?”

  She’s tried this line of inquiry already.

  “No,” I say again.

  “You’re too much like the rest, then,” she whispers, not really to me at all. “Sad.”

  Silence sweeps over the room.

  Sometimes I wish I could hide forever inside my apartment and work on my project. I’m so close. So close. No people, no distractions. No parsing broken conversations for hidden meanings and halved interpretations. No. None of that. Only me and my ideas. Me and my equations. Me and my computer models. All logical and calculable. Knowable. So much simpler.

  The bell thuds.

  “Gearhardt. Gearhardt, digit, right hand.”

  That’s me.

  “That’s me,” I say.

  The poetess gouges me with a cyclopean needle.

  “Go on then,” she says.

  I nod and slide into my powerchair. It’s always linked to my particular brainwave patterns. I think toward the nurse and the chair moves off in the direction of the nurse, who’s standing by the door to the prep rooms, holding a clipboard with all my pertinent health and financial information.

  I look back.

  The poetess is watching me, her mouth held in a purse of what might be disappointment or what might be anger. It’s too hard to tell which is more likely. I don’t have time to weight the options and, in all honesty, I don’t really care.

  The nurse holds the door open for me and I buzz through. She follows.

  “Room 5, Mr. Gearhardt,” she says from a place over my head.

  I roll along until I reach Room 5.

  The nurse opens the door to the small waiting space and holds out one hand.

  “Your listing, please.”

  I place the paper in her palm and accidentally brush her fingers. They’re icy and rough. I don’t like that I’ve touched them. Tactile loathing.

  “Please wait in the room for the next available technician.”

  I roll past her, into the room. The door snaps shut.

  I wait. Again.

  I survey the room’s décor: stainless steel examination table, stainless steel skin, stainless steel cabinet upon which rests a row of empty test tubes, and a poster that lists the current exchange rates for various grades and supplement types. It’s an unsettled space, a space that could change in use or form at any moment because it’s so e
mpty.

  A technician knocks on the door and enters before I even have time to consider whether I should answer. Not that I would want to prevent him from entering, anyway.

  “Mr. Gearhardt?” he says, reading off the tablet he’s carrying.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “You’re here for a digit extraction, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve already had extensive extraction done before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Good. Have you ever taken supplements, yourself? Are you a known carrier of any genetic diseases or suffer from any serious psychological infirmities?”

  “No. None of those.”

  His eye remains glued to the tablet. My eye remains glued to his tablet. I wonder what secrets they’ve disencoded from my DNA. It’s all right there on the screen, but only technicians can read a supplicant’s personal information. He could be divining my destiny for all I know.

  “Excellent,” the technician says. “Then you’re ready for extraction. You are aware of the current exchange rate for your grade and base modification qualities?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Any questions, Mr. Gearhardt?”

  “No. I’ve done it before. This is minor.”

  “That it is, Mr. Gearhardt. Please follow me.”

  Time to go. The technician leads me through overly lit hallways. The extraction room isn’t far ahead.

  Before we even reach it, I hear the surgical laser inside, humming a monotone concerto to itself. If it wasn’t so unerring, someone might call it beautiful. But not me.

  I roll past the blinding halogen of the halls and enter the room. A bank of anesthetics and syringes glitters to my left. The laser glows to my right; the technician strolls to its control panel.

  “Please move in front of the L.E.T.,” the technician says.

  Light Extraction Tool, he means. I roll up to its cool, calming snout.

  “Okay. Let me give you a shot of chloroprocaine and we’ll begin.”

  The technician moves to the bank of anesthetics and rifles through some syringes. I simply stare at the tip of the laser.

  This will be the last. One more phalange for the rest of my life. Yes, this will definitely be the last. My work is too important. It has to be completed. I have a future beyond this room and a vore’s stomach. I know it. I will not reach the stage of completion. Yes, I still have debt. I will always have debt. But this has to be the last. This will be the last. I have faith.

  [back to Table of Contents]

  Take All Your Troubles

  The first time she died, she was five years old. A television commercial—one of those “Save the Starving Children” misery collages—rang clear and true with her budding sense of empathy. There, on the screen, she saw a boy of roughly her age squatting in a mud hole, flies swarming his eyes and mouth. As he breathed, his ribs drew taut against his skin, threatening to tear free from his body and the agony it had been ordained to endure.

  She asked her mother “Why does that boy look like that but I don’t?” and her mother, more focused on a household chore than the suffering of a world that had always suffered, answered quietly “Because he’s starving and you’re not.”

  She locked eyes with the boy and, sensing a kinship with him, searched him out, though she didn’t know how. Her mind roamed over the earth until she found him lying in the shadow of the reaper’s ebon wings in an arid mission hospital. She felt the hollow spaces, the fear, the certainty of nothingness that resided inside him, and she pulled it all away, into herself. The hunger, the fever, the hopeless tomorrows, she took it all and crushed it up into a ball and buried it within her stomach or somewhere deeper. She felt hot, hotter than she ever had, and cold, colder than any day she’d spent in the snow without mittens or a jacket. She felt something like loneliness and something like falling, something like anger and something like flying.

  And then, in a way, she died.

  When she came to, in a hospital days later, her parents talked in circles around a “mystery condition” that mimicked severe starvation and dehydration. They didn’t know, couldn’t know, that on the opposite side of the planet an emaciated boy had, suddenly and without reason, leaped from his deathbed and run laughing through his village, miraculously nourished and vital for the first time in his life. They couldn’t know that their daughter had taken his death and stored it away in herself, had experienced his dying and his piteous end so that he wouldn’t have to. They only knew that their daughter was sick and they only knew what medicine could explain.

  But the girl knew differently. She realized what she’d done and she understood the gift she had been granted. She held the power to strip death off its victims provided that she wore a weakened version of that very same death herself. She could save anyone. She could save everyone. As long as she was willing to suffer.

  And so she began her great project, what she would later call “The Amelioration.” At first, she thought of herself as a saint in miniature, volunteering in nursing homes, tearing away infirmities from the elderly so that they might have a few more years of creaking consciousness. As she aged and grew, she candy-striped in cancer wards and ICUs, she spent weekends at drug addiction clinics and soup kitchens, and all the while she died and died again, hoarding death upon death that was not her own.

  She began to imagine herself not as a saint but as a martyr, a messiah. So often was she rushed to doctors’ offices and emergency rooms, pulse nearing flatline; so many textures of destruction did she feel, so many contours of death’s hand. And while she became ever more familiar with the wide variety of pain that formed the foundation of the universe, she became a woman.

  Years passed, and the woman kept herself close to decay so that she could, at least for a time, arrest its inexorable progress. She found work as a nurse and, in the role of haloed Nightingale, imbibed of diseases mundane and exotic. She licked cancer’s sour, black tentacles and hugged the crushing tread of heart failure to her chest; she spun wildly in the throes of Parkinson’s and drifted into Alzheimer’s impenetrable fog. And she endured it all as one who wants nothing more than to cultivate light in dark places.

  The woman watched the improbable smiles of loved ones as their dearly almost-departed rushed back from the brink, and those smiles, the gleeful absurdity of those smiles appearing in a time in which happiness should have been banished, were reward enough for her pain.

  So she lived and she died for decades, her face hidden behind curtains and in shadows, just out of reach of the miracles she had cast. For sixty years, she nursed, saving those beyond salvation, cheating death of its victories.

  Then, one day long after her hands turned venous and her skin wrinkled and sagged, a weight clamped down upon her breast and would not let go. Her breath came up short and an existential fatigue brought her to her knees. In her chest, a heart that had wished nothing on the universe but good will sputtered and failed. The one death she could not prevent had reached her.

  As her heart beat its last, the woman’s eyes went wide, for there, before her, she saw not a dazzling tunnel or a warm embrace as she had anticipated, but hundreds of thousands of obsidian needles spewing from a fissure within herself. In that moment, she screamed silently and realized that, despite all her effort, she had never destroyed death; rather, she had simply collected it and compressed it inside some unseen space. Miracles are the theft of fate, and fate—that Janus-faced sibling of death—will always have its recompense for what has been stolen. For decades, the woman had tipped a set of scales that had never meant to be tipped. Now, it was finally due to be balanced.

  Like an ethereal bomb, the woman burst and the abyssal needles all exploded forth, shooting outward, into the world, into people whose deaths they were never meant to be but, for kindness, they would have to suffer nonetheless.

  [back to Table of Contents]

  Bolt

  A crack echoes across the underside of the dome. Though it’s dif
ficult to pick out in the blaze of white lights, a baseball is screaming through the air somewhere close to the ceiling. Staring toward the beams high above, an imagined audience takes pause and draws in a collective breath that sucks the oxygen from the building and creates a vacuum around this moment, this tiny streaking hope. The occupants of empty seats tense forward, ready to leap to their feet and cheer.

  Rapidly, the ball begins to descend, as must all things which reach great heights. It drops with the weight of the world strapped about its circumference and lands, quiet and spent, in an aisle just beneath the giant orange that hangs over the right field seats.

  The crowd of no one erupts in raucous, silent cheering. Cowbells clang but do not clang. Airhorns blow but do not blow. Fireworks shoot into the eyes of those who are willing and able to imagine them.

  And all the while, standing on home plate, gazing into a space that only the romantic and the narcissistic can see, is a lanky young man with rugged stubble and purposefully wild, teased-out hair. He pumps his fist once in the air, drops his bat, and begins to trot toward first base. He’s wearing a uniform with the name “LONGORIA” stitched across the back, but that’s not his name. It was the name of someone else, someone who achieved something of note, something of merit, something that bestowed upon him the right to have random onlookers not just guess at who they might be watching but know, undeniably, incontrovertibly know who was under the shirt. No, “LONGORIA” is not his name. His name is Derrick McCoy, and you’ve never heard of him.

  But you should have.

  His face should have graced Wheaties boxes and video game covers. He should have dated starlets and supermodels. His name should have been whispered reverently in the same sentences as Ruth and Williams, Mays and Aaron. You should know who he is. But you never will. His face won’t be etched on any gold plaques or marble busts in hallowed halls; it won’t adorn thousands of advertisements or be plastered on the walls of any steel coliseums. No one will remember what could have been. They’ll only remember what was. And Derrick McCoy almost was. He almost made it into history. Almost. But for the plague.