Winter 2007 (4 page)

Me: It’s not that glorious.
It’s been done before, according to the book.

Lucius: Yes, but not for
hundreds of years.

Peter: Seriously, you
wonder why not.

Richard: I wonder why my
beer mug’s empty.

Peter: Barbarian.

Richard: Cretin.

Me: It seems easy enough.
It seems as if it is possible.

One night, Lucius and I so
very very drunk, trying too hard to impress, I boasted that with my secret knowledge
of reanimation, my Preservationist background, and my two years of medical
school, I could resurrect the dead, create a golem from flesh and blood. Human,
with a human being’s natural life span.

“And I will assist him,”
Lucius announced, finger pointed at the ceiling. “Onward!”

We stumbled out of the
tavern’s soft light, accompanied by the applause of friends who no doubt
thought I was taking a piss—into the darkness of the street, and carried
by drunkenness and the animating spirit of our youth, stopping only to vomit
into the gutter once or maybe twice, we lurched our debauched way up the hill
to the medical school, and in the shadows stole past the snoring old guard,
into the cadaver room.

I remember the spark to the
night, cold as it was. I remember the extravagant stars strewn across the sky.
I remember the euphoria, being not just on a quest, but on a drunken quest, and
together, best of friends in that moment.

If only we had stayed in
that moment.

***

“Preservation is a neutral
thing,” my mother told me once. “It prolongs a state that already exists. It
honors the essence of something.”

She stood in the back room
surrounded by buckets of pungent water when she said this to me. I think I was
twelve or thirteen. She had a ladle and was stirring some buckets, sipping from
others. Glints and sparkles came from one. Others were dark and heavy and dull.
The floor, once white tile, had become discolored from decades of water
storage. The bloody rust circles of the buckets. The hemorrhaging green-blue stains.

“But the essence of
preservation,” my mother said, “is that it doesn’t last. You can only preserve
something for so long, and then it is gone. And that’s all right.”

My father had entered the
room just before she said this. The look of love and sadness she gave the two
of us, me sitting, my father standing behind me, was so stark, so revelatory,
that I could not meet her gaze.

Looking back at that
moment, I’ve often wondered if she already knew our futures.

***

In the cadaver room, we
picked a newly dead woman who had drowned in the sea. Probably the daughter of
a fisherman. She lay exposed on the slab, all strong shoulders and solid
breasts and sturdy thighs. Her ankles were delicate, though, as were the
features of her face. She had frozen blue eyes and pale skin and an odd smile
that made me frown and hesitate for a moment.

It will come as no surprise
we chose her in part because her body excited me. Although Lucius’ presence had
helped me in this regard, women, for all our boasting, are not drawn to
impoverished medical students. Even on those rare occasions, it had been in the
dark and I had only had glimpses of a woman’s naked form. The dissections of
the classroom did not count; they would drive most men to celibacy if not for
the resilience of the human mind.

“This one?” Lucius asked.

I don’t know if he still
thought this was a lark, or if he knew how serious I was.

“I think so,” I said. “I
think this is the one.”

And, although I didn’t know
it, I did mean the words.

We stood there and stared
at her. The woman reminded me of someone the more I stared.

It was uncanny, and yet I
could not think of who she looked like. So taken was I by her that I pushed her
hair from her face.

Lucius nudged my shoulder,
whispered, “Stop gawking. That guard might wake up or his replacement come by
at any minute.”

Together, we bundled her in
canvas like a rug, stole past the guard, and, by means of a wagon Lucius had
arranged—from a friend used to Lucius’ pranks—we took her, after a
brief stop at my apartment to pick up some supplies, to a secluded cove well
away from the city. For you see, I meant to preserve her tethered in the water,
in the sargassum near the rockline. It was a variation on an old preservation
trick my mother had once shown a client.

The physical exertion was
intense. I remember being exhausted by the time we hauled her out of the cart.
Her body would not cooperate; there was no way for her not to flop and become
unwound from the canvas at times. It added to the unreality of it all, and
several times we collapsed into giggles. Perhaps we would have sobered up
sooner if not for that.

Luckily the moon was out
and Lucius had brought a lantern. By then, my disorganized thoughts had
settled, and although I was still drunk I had begun to have doubts. But this is
the problem with having an accomplice. If Lucius hadn’t been there, I would
like to think I’d have put a stop to it all. But I couldn’t, not with Lucius
there, not with the bond between us now. As for what kept Lucius beside me, I
believe he would have abandoned me long before if not for a kind of jaded
hedonism—the curiosity of the perpetually bored.

It was hard. I had to think
of the woman as a receptacle, a vehicle, for resurrection, not the end result.
We laid her out atop the canvas and I drew symbols on her skin with ink I’d
daubed onto my fingers. Holding her right hand, I said the words I had found on
the books, knowing neither their meaning nor their correct pronunciation. I
rubbed preservatives into her skin that would not just protect her flesh while
she lay amongst the sargassum but actually bring it back to health. I had to do
some cutting, some surgery, near the end. An odd autopsy, looking for signs of
the “mechanical defect” as one of my instructors used to say, that would
preclude her reanimation. I cleared the last fluid from her lungs with a
syringe.

By this time I could not
tell you exactly what I was doing. I felt imbued with preternatural,
instinctual knowledge and power, although I had neither. What I had were
delusions of grandeur spurred on by alcohol and the words of my friends,
tempered perhaps by memories of my parents’ art.

Lucius held the lantern and
kept muttering, “Oh my God” under his breath. But his tone was not so much one
of horror as, again, morbid fascination. I have seen the phenomenon since. It
is as if a mental list is being checked off on a list of unique experiences.

By the time I had finished,
I knew the dead woman as intimately as any lover. We took her down to the
sargassum bed and we laid her there, floating, tethered by one foot using some
rope. I knew that cove. I’d swum in it since I was a child. People hardly ever
came there. The sargassum was trapped; the tide only went out in the spring,
when the path of the currents changed. The combination of the salt water, the
preservatives I’d applied to her, and the natural properties of the sargassum
would sustain her as she made her slow way back to life.

Except for the sutures, she
looked as if she were asleep, still with that slight smile, floating on the
thick sargassum, glowing from the emerald tincture that would keep the small
crabs and other scavengers from her. She looked otherworldly and beautiful.

Lucius gave a nervous
laugh. He had begun to sober up.

“Any suggestions on what we
do next?” he said. His voice held disbelief.

“We wait.”

“Wait? For how long? We’ve
got classes in the morning. I mean, it’s already morning.”

“We wait for a day.”

“Here? For a whole day?”

“We come back. At night.
She’ll still be here.”

***

There’s nothing in the
nature of a confession that makes it any more or less believable. I know this,
and my shadow on the beach knows it, or he would have talked to me by now. Or I
would have talked to him, despite my misgivings.

I haven’t seen Lucius in
forty years. My shadow could be Lucius. It could be, but I doubt it.

Part II

In the morning, for a time,
neither Lucius nor I knew whether the night’s events had been real or a dream.
But the cart outside of our rooms, the deep fatigue in our muscles, and the
blood and skin under our fingernails—this evidence convinced us. We
looked at each other as if engaged in some uneasy truce, unwilling to speak of
it, still thinking, I believe, that it would turn out to have been a
hallucination.

We went to classes like normal.
Our friends teased us about the bet, and I shrugged, gave a sheepish grin while
Lucius immediately talked about something else. The world seemed to have
changed not at all because of our actions and yet I felt completely different.
I kept seeing the woman’s face. I kept thinking about her eyes

Did the medical school miss
the corpse? If so, they ignored it for fear of scandal. How many times a year
did it happen, I’ve always wondered, and for what variety of reasons?

That night we returned to
the cove, and for three nights more. She remained preserved but she was still
dead. Nothing had happened. It appeared I could not bring her back to life, not
even for a moment. The softly hushing water that rocked her sargassum bed had
more life to it than she. Each time I entered a more depressed and numbed
state.

“What’s her name, do you
think?” Lucius asked me on the third night.

He was sitting on the
rocks, staring at her. The moonlight made her pale skin luminous against the
dark green.

“She’s dead,” I said. “She
doesn’t have a name.”

“But she had a name. And
parents. And maybe a husband. And now she’s here. Floating.”

He laughed. It was a raw
laugh. I didn’t like what it contained.

On the afternoon of the
first day, Lucius had been good-natured and joking. By the second, he had
become silent. Now he seemed to have lost something vital, some sense of
perspective. He sat on the rocks drawn in on himself, huddled for warmth. I
hated his questions. I hated his attitude.

Even though it was I who
pined for the woman, who so desperately wanted her to come to gasping life, to
rise from the sargassum, reborn.

Everywhere I went, I saw
those frozen blue eyes.

***

Once, before I left home,
in that time when I was arguing with my parents almost every day, restless with
their world and my place in it, there was a pause because each of us regretted
something we had said.

Into this silence, my
mother said, “You’ve got to know who you are, and even when you think you’ve
been treated unfairly still
be
that person.”

I said something sarcastic
and stormed out of the cottage—to feel the salt air on my face, to look
across the water toward distant, unseen shores.

I didn’t know that I would
one day find so much more so close to home.

***

The fourth night Lucius
refused to go with me.

“It’s pointless,” he said.
“Not only that, it’s dangerous. We shouldn’t have done it in the first place.
It’s still a crime, to steal a body. Let it go. She’ll be taken out to sea or
rotting soon enough. Or put her out to sea yourself. Just don’t mention it to
me again.”

In his face I saw fear,
yes, but mostly awareness of a need for self-preservation. This scared me. The
dead woman might have enthralled me, but Lucius had become my anchor at medical
school.

“You’re right,” I told him.
“I’ll go one last time and put her out to sea.”

Lucius smiled, but there
was something wrong. I could feel it.

“We’ll chalk it up to
youthful foolishness,” he said, putting his arm over my shoulders. “A tale to
tell the grandchildren in thirty years.”

She was still there, perfectly
preserved, on that fourth night. But this time, rising from the sargassum, I
saw what I thought was a pale serpent, swaying. In the next second, breath
frozen in my throat, I realized I was staring at her right arm—and that
it was moving.

I dashed into the water and
to her side, hoping for what? I still don’t know. Those frozen blue eyes. That
skin, imperfect yet perfect. Her smile.

She wasn’t moving. Her body
still had the staunch solidity, the draining heaviness, of the dead. What I had
taken to be a general awakening was just the water’s gentle motion. Only the
arm moved with any purpose—and it moved toward me. It sought me out,
reaching. It touched my cheek as I stood in the water there beside her, and I
felt that touch everywhere.

I spent almost an hour
trying to wake her. I thought that perhaps she was close to full recovery, that
I just needed to push things a little bit. But nothing worked. There was just
the twining arm, the hand against my cheek, my shoulder, seeking out my own
hand as if wanting comfort.

Finally, exhausted,
breathing heavily, I gave up. I refreshed the preservation powders, made sure
she was in no danger of sinking, and left her there, the arm still twisting and
searching and alive.