|
|
What lots of people don't realize is that your cells
don't need you. They just need you to help them take a crap. They turn to autolysis-cannibalism. Digesting themselves
and digesting their neighbors. Your cells can continue to respire without oxygen and secrete large amounts of lactic
acid. That'll cause your muscles to contract and stiffen. Rigor mortis should commence after about three hours
and last another day and a half. With Olaf's wife and child, it begins immediately and lasts two weeks.
For two weeks, Olaf watches his wife gradually tighten her fists and draw them to her. For two weeks, he only leaves
his post to fetch soup or an onion from the house. He doesn't sleep, doesn't wash, doesn't touch. For two weeks,
Olaf sits and watches. He doesn't know that what's happening is out of place. He just really, really hopes that
it is.
About ten days in, with the tenacity of the mortis fading, the cells run out of stuff to eat and die. They're all
bloated by now, acrid and gassy. All of this floating around in your body, you're just a smelly, sloshy bag of
liquid. The body can't get rid of gas, either, so it builds up inside. Makes you look fat. Air from the lungs diffuses
up and forces people to loll out their tongues sometimes.
Parts of your skin loosen their ties to your tendons and literally start sliding down, folding in over themselves
as they fall to the floor in layers and sheets. Bacteria and enzymes grow mold in your liver and your lungs and
your brain and eat through the walls. A flow of acid and dead cells and pus and mold and plasma pours out, the
bacteria riding a wave of their own abundant food supply. All of these things leak out of you-through your eye
sockets, your nostrils, your mouth. They ooze and froth their way out and spread in a puddle around you.
Olaf wonders when the flies will come.
Flies are supposed to come right away.
Flies, they love dead people. Dead people leak. Dead people are salty and sweaty. They drool and drip their snot
wherever they've fallen. Maybe they'll have pissed themselves if they were really old or scared. The flies love
this. They get in there and suck it all up. Eye goop. Ear wax. The juice inside the pimples on your back. They
love the stuff.
They lay eggs, the flies. Usually near the moister areas. In the mouth, in the ears. In the navel. Hundreds and
hundreds of rice-shaped, rice-colored little eggs in and around. Maggots hatch. They'll usually burrow under the
skin, but not get much deeper. You can see their networks and highways, crawling around in there, juicy white bumps
fidgeting and foraging just beneath the surface.
Beetles arrive, though they are more interested in feasting on the larvae than trying to chew through the tough,
leathery ribbons of skin you've got. Wasps come and lay their eggs in the beetle carcasses. Moths come to devour
the clothing.
Olaf doesn't know about the beetles and wasps and the maggots, but he knows, at least, about the flies. He knows
that, normally, his wife should by now be a gastronomical wonderland for insects. A rotten, musty, sticky paradise.
And yet, they're nowhere to be found. Olaf watches. Olaf videotapes. Olaf hopes to God this isn't normal.
The bugs never do come for his wife, or his little kid. Olaf sits there for two years and watches their stomachs
explode from the pressure of the gas inside. He watches their bodies collapse in on themselves. He watches the
bacteria having their way, slowly decomposing the bodies.
Olaf watches his cows. He watches them keel over from starvation, their calves bleating helplessly without their
mothers. He watches their skin shrink and their eyeballs dry out and their stomachs get gassy and their tongues
stick out. He finds it odd, suddenly, that there aren't any flies. There were always flies on his cows, dead or
alive, and now there are none. He takes note on the absence of flies on his wife and his kid and he tapes and he
hopes to God that this isn't normal.
Three more years of watching, and Olaf is twenty-five years old. He has no money because no one will buy his onions
because he's abandoned the farm. He hasn't looked in a mirror or shaven or washed since he laid out his family
in the woods. He's just watched. He's watched them mummify and decomposed with them, only much slower.
Five years later, and he can feel a lump in his throat, Olaf. He can feel his face widening at the bottom, like
an onion. He can smell it. He doesn't just smell like a dirty person, but like a sick person, too. He can smell
all the extra, dead cells at his neck. He can scratch them off so they hang in strips like garlands.
Olaf knows he won't ever be able to pay for the operation. Not here. He goes to the U.S. embassy and he gives them
the key to his shed of video tapes of his wife and his kid. He tells them about the flies, how the flies never
came because of the radioactivity, and, through a translator, he says, "the same thing that did that to them,
it's doing this to me," and points at his throat.
"Take it out," says the translator to the embassy.
"Please," says the translator.
Now Olaf's on an airplane bound for San Francisco. Shaved and scrubbed, but still reeking of the dead, Olaf sits
in his First Class leather seat and shivers and coughs and sneezes and decomposes. Just like you and me, only much,
much slower.
THE END
|
|
Print
Email Author
|