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phantomrose96 · 7 years

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Artificial Heart

This is my Final for my creative writing class. It’s over 10,000 words long so not the lightest read. But heck man it’s done and I’m pretty proud of it :‘D

Matt never saw the whole body.

Most of it was too buried to see, or charred to a black unrecognizable. It was only the right arm he saw, slung across the cement ground with its fingers curled in, nails cracked and peeling back from the heat. The palm was scorched ashen, splits in the skin leaking fresh oily red beneath the pyre of flame and the sweeping blankets of dark black smoke. The heat cracks ran like veins down the forearm, until everything became buried at the elbow. The forearm was half-submerged in the slick, oily sludge that built up a sheen at the bottom of the pile--a viscous, separated fluid which smelled of death in its own right. An ochre trash bag rested on top and molded to it. Then more sat atop that. They built the whole inferno—sickly flesh-colored sacks that split from the heat and spilled their guts of rotted food and plastic containers and diapers, napkins, dinner plates. The ochre bags were designed specifically to be environmentally friendly, that’s why regular citizens were allowed to burn them once the landfills had overflowed in 2030. It said nothing for the contents of the bags.

Matt stood, his own ochre bag in hand filled with nothing but take-out containers and soiled paper plates. He stared until his eyes burned with the smoke, and his throat itched with the particulate matter not trapped in the cotton mask over his nose and mouth. He considered getting closer purely out of curiosity, but it was in the air now, the parts of it that had burned. He pictured the ashy, feather-light flakes of it settling on his sweatshirt, on his mask, on his brow unprotected. He could never scrub that off, not fully. So he shuffled over to the conveyer belt, and he dropped his own garbage bag there, and hung around just long enough to watch it topple over the precipice and onto the pyre below, its fabric already crinkling in the flames.

Matt turned around so the air hitting him was fresher, and he considered for a single moment calling the police. The thought lasted only a second, and it was banished. Matt had called the police only once in his life, and he had thought it was brave at the time. He’d been fifteen, sitting on the front steps of a dense and warm summer night listening to the yelling inside roll and ebb and crescendo again. It was back when his dad’s affair was new information and his mother, small as she was, had become something heinous when given access to alcohol and kitchenware. The police fixed nothing after he called them, as he sat there, arm curled around their dog Lucky. They only took his mother off for the night, and his older brother had to drive to the station to retrieve her in the morning. And her court date two weeks later to dismiss the charges had ran late, so she arrived thirty minutes after tennis practice ended to pick up Matt, dressed in her Sunday best and saying nothing the whole ride home.

Matt learned to keep things private after that. He did not want to thread himself with the affairs of the police again—as a victim, or a witness, or a suspect. He would not call them, not even for a dead body.

…

Gray storm clouds rolled in with the humidity. They drove a tension into the air that crackled against Matt’s skin and made his upper lip sweat against the air mask. He walked the concrete-lined path back to his apartment, a full half-mile from the communal trash pyre. He lived with his girlfriend Lena, and luckily they lived upwind from the pyre, but days like these sent hot, bloated pockets of wind in all direction. The standing water that lined the streets and rimmed the cracks in the sidewalk turned pungent. Air clung to the skin like sweat, and in the distance the lone few leafless trees howled, the wind stripping their branches and slicing through like hot breath. Matt quickened his pace. He didn’t care to feel the air linger on his skin any longer. It stuck to his throat too easily, shortening his breath, pushing his heart through hiccupy bursts that would stutter until he coughed. The air was bad for you, everyone knew, but Matt had a feeling it was worse for him than most anyone else.

Matt was wheezing slightly when he made it up the last of the four flights of stairs to his apartment door. He undid the deadbolt to get in, and redid it for good measure when he had shut the door behind him. The air inside was cleaner, thinner, but not pure enough to warrant removing the mask. Matt removed his shoes instead, and rubbed his heels. He set his eyes to the sink to wash his hands of the lingering feel of the trash bag. He’d shower too, to wash the ash from his hair.

“Any trouble?”

Matt shut off the tap. He ran one dripping hand through his sandy hair and looked to the couch. Lena sat there, her legs curled beneath her, laptop propped against her knees. Her hair was wet, licking her collar bone with water beads like drops of sweat. The dryer parts of her hair had curled into a thick frizz, coiled by the humidity. Her cotton mask was pulled to the side. Matt wasn’t sure if she’d had it like that the whole time, or if she’d pulled it aside to speak to him unmuffled.

“No, no trouble,” Matt answered through his mask. His throat still felt smothered. He opened the cabinet in search of a clean glass.

“You took long today.” She stood, and carried her laptop over with one hand supporting it like a serving platter. Lena stretched to her toes to grab a different glass from the cabinet. She waited behind Matt, who quickly turned the tap back on to finish filling his glass.

“Did I?” Matt asked, benign in his pretend ignorance. He pulled aside his mask and tried not to cough as the water hit his throat. Lena filled her glass after him.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“3-D designs.” Lena tilted her laptop so he could view it. A three-dimensional grid sat superimposed on the general model of a heart whose surface was broken up into thousands of matte polygons that wove together into bevels and dips and hollows. The left ventricle was still one flat surface, not yet constructed.

Matt stared until he felt tired looking at it, imaging the work behind the intricacies of its details. He set his glass beneath the tap against and refilled it. “Are you going to get it 3-D printed?”

“Eventually. It’s not done yet. I’ve kinda hit a block working on it.”

Matt nodded, and it was about the best he could do in these conversations. He didn’t understand her work, at least not at a level to contribute to these discussions in any way that didn’t leave him feeling foolish. Lena had been a senior at Holyoke Tech when Matt had been a freshman. She’d graduated with her degree in biomedical engineering and accepted the offer to stick around and do her PhD under her senior thesis advisor. She’d claimed it was the best choice financially, but Matt knew she’d turned down at least two job offers in California in order to stay. She’d been excited about those offers; she’d tried to talk him into transferring to some tech institute near one place or the other. He didn’t remember what institute—he only remembered that he hadn’t had the energy to consider uprooting himself after a whole year at Holyoke. He’d managed to tell her that, and that if long distance wouldn’t work, he thought it would be best they break up. Lena stopped talking about the job offers. She started acting excited about staying at Holyoke for her Ph.D. It could have been coincidence, Matt told himself, but deep down he was almost certain she’d stayed just for him.

The details in his mind were hazy; that had been nearly three years back, and Matt’s memory was a cracked and hole-ridden thing anyway. He wasn’t sure. Maybe she has had a different reason.

By the end of this year, Matt would be graduating with a degree in computer science. Pursuing a Ph.D. afterward didn’t interest him—nothing much did. His future remained empty, so he mostly listened to Lena’s explanations of her work, feeling just a bit stung that he could understand nothing past the graphics interface her modeling software used, and even then at nothing more than an amateur level.

“Do you still have to do a lot of work on that before it’s printable, or what?” he asked.

Lena nodded, her lips tight. “Yeah, but Farhid only wants to see the wireframe structure by Monday. These filled-in regions can be tweaked later. They’re all resting on a wireframe and that’s the only part I really need done by Monday. Farhid’s current model has got too flimsy of a scaffold. It’s gotta hold its shaped but when he gets to the phase of growing the cells around it they get too eager to bind across the gaps. Instead of dividing enough times they just heal across the gaps—extracellular matrices find each other and bind—and they squeeze the scaffold until it warps. Farhid’s given up on his design and wants me to come up with something that won’t do that. Usually he’s a lot more hands-off with my work but he needs this favor…” Lena trailed off. Her top teeth lingered on her lip, eyes lost out the window in thought. Matt followed her gaze but found nothing. He saw only tall brick buildings just like theirs stretching into the air, separated from them just by the street below. The smog sat between their window panes like water vapor.

“Lena?”

Lena snapped back, dark eyes suddenly alight. She set her laptop on the counter and raised her glass to her lips. “Right, I was just thinking if maybe my scaffold--pretty much I should have this part done by noon. Do you wanna watch a movie after lunch?”

“I shouldn’t—I’ve got work,” Matt answered. He did have work—three overdue labs and a fourth one on the horizon. Dread weighed his stomach down, to the point that failing seemed preferable to slogging through the programs he knew he’d not get completed before the end of term. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t graduate. And maybe that was fine. Maybe he’d take an extra semester here with Lena, and sort his life out…

He was too tired anyway. For work or a movie.

Or Lena.

“What about going out to dinner?” Lena followed up. She glanced to her laptop, a worried twisting of her brow, then shut her computer entirely. “There’s a new Thai place across the street from Bella’s apartment. She says it’s good. I’ve been looking for somewhere to go for my birthday.”

Matt’s lip curled slightly. He didn’t know Bella well. She was Lena’s friend, an ashen white girl of 22 with stringy blond hair and thin teeth. She talked too much and too long about nothing; her focus shifted too easily—between people and conversation topics and drivers on the road. He had been in the back seat, Lena in the passenger’s, three years ago when Bella T-boned another car through a red light. Matt had woken up in the hospital with a punctured lung and his breathing had never since been quite right. He hadn’t hung out with her since, and had no desire to.

“You don’t like Thai food,” Matt answered, because he knew that route would be easier.

“I don’t like the Thai take-out place. This one is new.” There was an edge to her words. It annoyed Matt just a bit, because it filled him with the sense that he wanted to reassure her, but his mind was too tired to come up with the words to do so.

“Maybe another night.” Matt passed from the kitchen to the livingroom—the two were separated only by a change in floor tiling, linoleum to wood. He settled on the couch, dragged his laptop across the coffee table, and glanced once more to the hazy gray sky through the window, pregnant with a threatened acid rainfall. Matt tried to remember just how many missing assignments had piled up. He couldn’t. His brain felt moth-eaten. He was tired.

“…Are you feeling okay?” Lena asked. She followed him, settled in beside him with her laptop angled away. There was something just too probing about her stare, clinical like a doctor’s. “Let me see your Fitbit,” she said, and reached for his arm.

“It’s fine. I’m tired,” Matt answered, shifting his arm out of reach. He was uncomfortable with becoming a specimen.

“You’ve been coughing. Your heart’s being weird again, yeah? You should maybe take a couple days off from classes to feel better.” Her worried face was ashen. Matt was reminded of staled chocolate bars that accrued gray, ashy dust on their surface from age.

“I told you I’ve got work to do. I need to go to campus tomorrow for class.” Matt paused, and he racked his brain. “…You’ve uh, you’ve got some kind of presentation tomorrow, don’t you?”

Lena pulled back, her cheeks filling with just a bit of color as she looked to her laptop. “Yeah… It’s a small thing. All the Ph.D. students have to present at the panel.”

A deep and low grumble shook through the house. The hot, humid air spiked, and the television-static hiss from the outside the windows followed the sudden deluge of rain from the choked skies.

“How about I come to that? For your birthday, instead of going out to dinner. And you can go out with Bella on your birthday instead.”

“You wanna hear me talk about my work?”

“Yeah, it’s cool stuff. I mean, making body parts? That’s cool.”

“It’s still—ah, there are a lot of failures in my work,” Lena answered, dismissive, though her cheeks flushed just a bit deeper, and she spoke through a suppressed smile. “It could be a long time before I’m able to make something sustainable.”

“Yeah but, eventually. And in the meantime I still want to hear about it. Even if I don’t get it.” He moved a hand out and reached around her back, placed it lightly on her shoulder, testing if it felt right. She eased into him, and Matt was reminded how soft she felt—her cheek against his shoulder, her arm wrapped to his chest. The tension inside him loosened. Shamefully, Matt wondered why he felt any tension toward her at all.

“I think you’ll be a bit disappointed. I won’t be pulling any fully-formed organs out of a vat at the podium. My slides are just going to be a lot of pictures of slimy half-formed organs and some charts about their constitution. The slides with the virtual models will look nicer.” Her wet hair soaked into his shirt, leaving paintbrush streaks and small damp blots. Matt was reminded of the charred flesh still likely clinging to the fabric. Lena’s hand tightened against his chest, and she lifted her head to look him in the eyes. “Oh, there’s going to be images of cadavers on some of the slides too. They’re donated to science so you don’t have to…feel bad, but if you’re uncomfortable seeing them.”

Matt swallowed once. Curled charred hand in the pyre. “…Cadavers?”

“Dead bodies. Like they use in teaching hospitals, med school. Farhid has a colleague at Holyoke General so he can file requests for cadavers that the hospital is finished with—that wording sounds harsh. Um, to put them to further use, I mean, is the better way to put it.”

Matt nodded. His chest felt heavy, his head just a bit light, like he was breathing in his own air. He thought about dead bodies, dead flesh, charred skin, how it burned black and peeled and split. He felt like it was in his lungs, and doubled over coughing.

“Matt!” Lena pushed off from him. She crouched on the floor in front of him, grabbed his chin, and worry was all he saw in her eyes, more worry than actual person. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Matt—“

“I’m fine.”

“Tell me.”

“I saw something in the garbage pyre.” Matt blinked, straightening, though he now stared only at the ground as she spoke, racking his memories. “There was a dead body in the garbage pyre. I saw it burning there, all buried underneath—just an arm but, it was a human arm. The body was somewhere. It was burning. Right in the garbage pyre.” He steadied his breath. He grabbed his mask and pulled it aside so he could suck air deep into his lungs—it felt better like that, clearer, and for a single moment his head cleared as well. “That’s ridiculous, right? There can’t be—there’s no way—I was seeing things. There’s no dead body in the garbage pyre.”

Matt locked eyes with Lena.

“That is ridiculous,” she said, and each syllable was well-enunciated. Her face had closed off, a dark and blank slate, with a piercing directness behind her eyes.

“That…is ridiculous,” Matt said again, as if to test the words. He looked at his hands which he had already washed, and felt he could see the residue of burnt flesh, scattered up in the wind, clinging to his slick and sweaty skin. He felt it on his shirt, dense around the collar and tight as if restricting airflow to his lungs. His heart hiccupped through a beat, and only caught its normal rhythm again when he coughed.

“Yes, it is ridiculous,” Lena echoed after him. “Crime around here doesn’t happen. It’s only other Holyoke students who share that pyre. If someone had been murdered and vanished then we would know about it.”

Matt rubbed his hands against his pants, until the sweat glistening in the lines of his palms vanished. He would wash this outfit. He would burn it in the garbage pyre, maybe. “Then what did I see in the pyre?”

“Anything. A lot of things can look like body parts.” Lena dropped her hands to Matt’s shoulders, grounding him. “I look at body parts and organs so much I start seeing them everywhere. It happens. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“What if it was there?”

“It wasn’t.” Lena paused. Then her grip loosened, and she leaned back against the coffee table. She lowered herself from her crouch, sitting now on the floor, her knees up and wrapped against her chest. “…But even if it was, it doesn’t affect us, Matt. It’s not either of us. It’s not our problem…”

“Okay… Okay.” Matt stood. He offered her a hand, and he pulled her up. The light that leaked through the pelting rain robbed the room of color, desaturated it. Everything had tinted gray, and just a bit yellow. The sensation still clung to Matt’s clothes, and he offered Lena a smile. “You’re right… You’re right. I’m uh… I still want to shower. Want to do take out? Afterward? Or in a few hours maybe.”

Lena nodded, though Matt still felt like a specimen beneath her eyes—worse, a specimen to be handled carefully. “Sure. Sure. Want to do the Chinese place?”

Matt waved a dismissive hand as he stepped around her. “Whichever. I’m not all that hungry today.”

Matt shut the bathroom door behind him, and he stripped his clothes and dropped them in the pocket of space behind the hamper so they would not mingle with the others. He showered too long, then fell asleep still-damp and in pajamas on the couch when he only meant to nap for an hour or so. Lena did not wake him, even for dinner, so he rose only to the sound of pre-sunrise birdsong some 14 hours later.

Matt checked the bedroom, and Lena was asleep in bed. He considered moving to join her, but he doubted he would fall back asleep. Instead he shrugged on a coat, and laced up his shoes, and grabbed an umbrella as he headed out.

The garbage pyre was muted under heavy rain. Its tall licking flames were reduced to wisps, smothered and buffeted about under a sheet of water the danced with the hot gusts of wind. Matt’s cotton face mask grew damp, the breath in his throat wet. He squinted through the sheets of rain to the bottom of the pyre.

There was no hand there.

Nothing sat where it had been. To its right, Matt was certain he saw the light imprints of boots in the sludge, shimmering visible because the rain water filled them in.

…

Lena drove them both to campus that day, her wipers churning through the slates of rain that washed her windshield. The black skies were blacker now. Thunder rumbled; pieces of the cloud cover flashed with light. The shallow sewer grates bubbled over so that the water flushing through the streets turned murky. The air tasted hot and sour against the back of Matt’s throat. His head ached with the lightness he hadn’t been able to sleep off.

She pulled into her parking spot in the lot just outside the biomedical building. It was rare for Ph.D. students to have their own spot, rarer still to have one right beside the building. As Matt understood it, it had been part of Dr. Farhid’s bribe to get Lena to stay for her Ph.D.

Lena did not switch off the exhaust. She did not unbuckle her seatbelt, so Matt did not either. He followed her eyes, distantly focused in the pelting sheets of rain against the windshield, the wipers that cut watery arcs over the glass that filled back in after each pass, incessantly, forever. She drummed her fingers along the steering wheel instead.

“…Lena?” Matt asked.

“I can still take you home,” Lena said. “I know you’re not feeling well.”

“I’ve been feeling weird for a couple weeks. It’s normal now.” He studied her, the tension in her body, the tightness of her fingers wrapped to the wheel as she only stared forward. “I can like, schedule a doctor’s appointment, or something.”

“You don’t need to come to my talk just to support me. It’s okay,” Lena said. She looked to him, smile pained, and Matt could tell saying so was a sacrifice. She wanted him here.

“I want to,” Matt answered. He looked away, because he felt that tension again clamping on his chest. He hated not knowing what about Lena made him so tense. “You do all this amazing stuff that uh, I think it’s like I forget. Or like, I forget that it is amazing, because I’m like ‘yeah, that’s what Lena does, creates body parts from nothing, like always.’ I should uh, I should see you talk about it and impress people. I wanna remember all over why it’s so impressive.”

Matt heard nothing but the sweep of the windshield wipers, the firm pelting of the rain. He finally glanced her way when the silence unnerved him.

She was just smiling.

It was a smile that brought out the little crook of dimples along her cheeks, and squeezed softly around her eyes, and brought a warm brightness to her face that lit what the smothered sun could not.

She used to smile like that a lot more, Matt realized. Years back when they first met. Most days now, she only seemed stressed.

Matt could say the same of himself, he supposed.

“Okay… Okay. Do you need to stay for your class after? If you’re not feeling well, I can just drive you home after my presentation. How about that?”

Matt shrugged. “I’ll let you know how I’m feeling.”

Lena nodded, satisfied. She twisted around in her seat to grab her backpack that had been tossed into the back. She unzipped it and pulled a pocket-sized umbrella from its depths, and she handed it to Matt. “Here.”

Matt grabbed it, then looked to Lena; she was significantly better dressed than he was: a stark and crisp blazer overtop a ruffled white button-up, a black pencil skirt and stockings, heels on her velvety dark shoes. She’d straightened her hair, and whisked her lashes with mascara, and touted a faint red artificial blush on her cheeks. He then looked out the window, at the torrential rain, and the thirty feet at least to the door.

“You need that way more,” Matt remarked.

“It’s fine. I’ll run. You need this way more. This weather is bad for you.”

Matt wasn’t sure what she quite meant, so he only nodded, and took the umbrella. Lena leaned across the divider between them a left a single, light kiss on his cheek. When she pulled away, it was the old Lena again, with the bright smile and the eyes like warm chocolate that Matt remembered falling in love with.

“Love you,” Lena said, and she killed the ignition, and popped the driver’s side door open.

“Love you…” Matt whispered back, and he watched her race through the rain, heels clacking, her backpack held just above her head for shelter.

…

The auditorium was a room he’d never seen. It was a brightly lit room whose seating rose a step at each row back, so that the very last row watched from the highest vantage point. The seats were plush green, and each had a small fold-out desk for taking notes. Dark wooden paneling lined the very back of the room, just behind the very last row of seats. The podium and presenter would seem small from back there, low to the ground and dwarfed beneath the enormous projector warming up against the lowered white screen at the very front.

The room was already about a third filled, and from the scattered number of audience members in well-ironed blazers and professional dark dresses, Matt assumed the presenters sat among the crowd while awaiting their turn. So he scanned the audience, and found Lena sitting in one of the backmost rows, all the way to the left, just against one of the rear exits. Bella sat next to her, one seat closer to the center of the row. Bella pointed to Matt, and Lena turned to follow the line. She waved when she spotted him.

Matt sidled in beside Lena, the last seat of the row, and set the wet, collapsed umbrella down at his feet. Up close he could see how the rain had thoroughly soaked her hair. Streaks from her fingers ran through it, where she’d clearly attempted to comb it back into submission. It had mostly worked, though a few loose coils spun free. Her make up remained mostly intact.

“Hi,” Bella said first, and the tight discomfort of her lips seemed to suggest she was no more happy to speak with Matt than he was to speak with her.

“Hey,” Matt offered back. He looked her over once; her corn silk hair had been pulled back into a tight bun. A floral patterned dress hung loose around her stocky frame. Her shoulders were covered by her halfway-buttoned cardigan, a muted pink against the vibrant violets and reds of her dress. She wore dark stockings and dark shoes not at all distinguishable from Lena’s

“How are you?” Bella asked.

“Good. How are you?” Matt returned.

“Lena says you haven’t been feeling that well. Um, I hope you get better.” Her eyes flickered around, either disinterested or uncomfortable, Matt could not tell.

“Yeah I’m sure I will. This thing comes and goes.”

Lena leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees so that she cut Bella from Matt’s sight. “So you found the room okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m here. There were signs. You sure you didn’t want the umbrella? I mean too late now but uh, you’re all wet.”

“It’s fine. Best you don’t stress yourself too much,” Lena answered. Matt leaned away just a bit on instinct.

“I’m fine…” he answered. The insinuation that he wasn’t had worked its way beneath his skin. It ignited that tension in him all over, fumbled his emotions until he settled on annoyance. He realized Bella had worn the same look too—some kind of anxious discomfort or pity that Lena now appraised him with. He wondered what Lena must have told her. He wondered more why Lena was so insistent upon him being unwell.

He said nothing about it. He only let it simmer while Bella and Lena restarted their conversation from earlier. Matt didn’t care to listen. He sunk into his plush seat, his breath just a bit too uncomfortably hot and damp beneath the face mask. So he loosened it from his mouth and nose. He shifted it to the side to just block the two girls out, and pulled himself up into his own mind.

The body… The body the body. Or the arm, just an arm, in the pyre, burning until someone had pulled it out sometime last night. It would have been easy enough to do, given some caution and a pair of thick gloves, since the rain dampened the fire to near non-existence. But to trudge through the oilslick underneath, through the miscellaneous soup of rotting and putrid and fetid garbage. Matt shivered, thinking how long a shower it would take to rid yourself of that taint.

The lights above dimmed. Some man in a suit stepped up to the platform. Applause met him; the audience stirred and shuffled. Matt blinked, adjusting to the new dimness, squinting at the harsh white glow as the projector caught, and displayed the Holyoke crest across the whole screen.

Matt didn’t catch the name of the man speaking. He was a bald and dark-skinned man whose voice was low and smooth enough to distract Matt from what he was actually saying. The man’s speech began with some remark about the advent of human discovery in medicine, and anything past that Matt did not hear. He only clapped when everyone else clapped, and stared on as the first Ph.D. student approached the podium to present.

He was a mousy little boy who introduced himself as Dylan something. Nerves seemed to raise the pitch of his voice, and he spoke too quickly as he flipped through slides detailing the design of some chip to capture circulating tumor cells out of blood draws. Or maybe he spoke at a perfectly fine pace, as everyone else seemed to follow along—Lena and Bella watched on, calm, looking neither lost nor confused. Maybe Matt himself was just too dumb to follow.

Spitefully, Matt elected to stop listening. He let the mousy boy Dylan-something keep on talking, and lost himself instead in his own mind again. Bella lived in the same designation of apartment buildings. She shared their garbage pyre. It was a slim chance, but she might know something. She could have taken her trash out the previous night. She could have seen something to explain what Matt himself could not.

He glanced past Lena, who was washed pale in the residual light from the projector, and she stared at Bella instead. He investigated her face as if he might be able to read off it if she’d seen a dead body or not. He had no such luck.

Lena felt his eyes, and she glanced over to him. Her smile was thin. Quietly she whispered. “Anything wrong?”

“No…” Matt answered.

“Okay. If you’re not feeling well…”

“I’m fine,” Matt asserted. He stared forward again, breathing deep so that he could stomp down his own squirming frustration. The presenters had switched in the meantime. The new girl was a redhead who opened her presentation with a slide filled with gratuitous shots of what seemed to be an eviscerated rat. Matt shuddered. He elected to zone out again. He racked his memories so that he could permanently stamp the image of the hand to his mind. He wouldn’t let this become another punctured hole in his memory. He thought about the way the skin shined, like pork skin on a spit roast, leathery and tight except for where it split to reveal the squishy pinkish oozing mess beneath. He thought about the splits in the fingernails, and the torn-away flesh at the wrist where bone was exposed, and how little blood seemed to coat it, and if—

“I’m up next. Let me scoot past you Matt so I can get to the front.”

Matt leaned back against his seat, and silently he let Lena step over him. Only her backpack remained in the foot-space of her seat.

--and if someone he knew really was a killer.

Applause echoed from all sides of Matt. Rat girl drew her presentation to a close, and bowed with a deep toothy smile. She unplugged her laptop from the projector, which fizzled out to a stark blue screen while Lena propped her laptop on top and plugged it in.

The empty gap between him and Lena felt suddenly loud.

“Are you uh…Are you excited to see Lena present?” Bella asked.

“Yeah,” Matt answered.

It was strange, experiencing a silence with Bella that was not immediately filled with her prattling voice. It had been three years since he’d spoken with her at length. He’d anticipated an apology for the accident and never quite got one, so he’d made no real effort to reconnect with her again. Maybe she’d just gotten quiet in that time.

“She does really cool stuff. We’re all jealous of her, you know. Okay not like we hate her, but we all know she’s doing the best work. She acts like it’s not but it is. She doesn’t even talk about most of it. You should be really impressed with her. And not in a mean way but you should probably be feeling really lucky to have her.”

Matt stared forward. He decided again that he didn’t like Bella. “Yeah, it’s impressive.”

“Some people think it’s just setting down cells in the shape of some organ, but no. It’s way way more complicated. That’s the reason scientists can’t make 3-D organs yet it’s because they fail right away, there’s too much complexity to a body. Lena’s on track to crack that. You should feel real grateful to her and not stress her out, okay? She’s doing so much.”

“Are you saying that I am stressing her out?”

“I’m not saying you’re doing it intentionally. Just please be nice to her.”

Matt shot her a withering glare, but she offered no response. She sat there, bony and lanky and wispy and like half a living human herself. He disliked her more than the carefree talker that lived in his memories before the crash, before his memory got bad.

“There was a dead body in our garbage pyre yesterday, did you know? Lena says nothing was there. I’m wondering if maybe you’d say differently.”

“Dead body?”

“Dead body. A hand, I saw. It was burning in the bottom of the pile. And then this morning it was gone.”

He met her level gaze. Her bright blues eyes seemed to wait for him to reveal more. He held out the silence.

“That sounds extreme. Maybe it was a mannequin hand.”

“The inside was flesh.”

“You said it was gone this morning. Maybe you just didn’t really see it yesterday.”

“I could report it to the police. We could see if there are surveillance tapes around—“

“Don’t—“

Matt lapsed into silence. Bella’s voice lashed and then died instantly. A momentary look of panic flashed and vanished from her eyes, and she pulled back into her seat.

“Don’t…?”

“Don’t stress Lena out anymore, okay?” Bella answered. “Don’t get her roped into some kind of crazy witch hunt with you. Lena has real things to do. Not all that should revolve around you, all the time, like it does.”

“It doesn’t,” Matt answered. Bella acted as though she hadn’t heard. She was staring forward. Too late, Matt realized Lena’s presentation had started.

He scanned the current presentation slide, mentally scrambling in an effort to catch up. Eight time-lapse photographs were lined up, four on top, four beneath, showing what seemed to be the thin, sturdy, almost plastic membrane in the shape of a heart progress into something fleshed and filled-out. The first image was a plastic shell suspended in some kind of saline solution. The next seemed to have developed a thin, slime coating. The next had been moved into a mold whose translucent outline bore the unmistakable negative space for a human heart. The next had two dozen hooks and needles piercing the flesh, seeming to weave and coax the direction of artery growth.

“Professor Fahrid’s design above… Disfigurement by stage seven… Beats under electric pulse… Constitution too weak to support normal blood flow…”

Matt caught only fragments of Lena’s voice. She flipped slides, and on it was the wireframe model she had shown Matt yesterday. Its left ventricle was constructed this time.

“Hope to implement… Full 3-D design… Stem cell cultures in hopes of…”

She flipped the slide again. This one contained two images, left and right. The left was a computer model, a lifeless polygonal human with its chest slit a few inches by the sternum and cracked ribs hinged back, the wire-frame heart, now fleshed in, secured in the chest cavity. The image was captured “Future implementation”

The left picture, with “Current implementation” captioned on top, was not a computer image. It appeared to be a simple cellphone photo, of a widely torn-back chest flushed white beneath the surgical lighting. The heart model Matt recognized as Fahrid’s from a few slides back was situated between the two lungs, both ghastly white and near indistinguishable from the bed of ribs that had been cracked back around it.

Neither the chest nor the heart caught Matt’s attention. Instead his eyes trailed to the bent arm, elbow just out of frame, and the fingers curled down near the hipbone where the image stopped. He stared at the cadaver’s fingers, all curled and white and bloodless, its nails like the nails in the fire but uncracked now, flesh still secured to the bone, except for near the wrist where a flap of skin had been cut away to reveal bone.

Without a word, Matt reached to the backpack Lena had left at the foot of her seat. He unzipped the front pocket and grabbed her wallet, flipping it open to see that her ID was tucked inside. He slid it into his pocket, and he stood, and he looked to the rear exit.

Maybe all dead hands looked identical. But he felt he was looking at the hand he’d seen in the pyre. The cut at the wrist, the flap of skin peeled away to reveal the protrusion of bone. He’d seen that. It was etched into his memory. He’d seen that exact cut in the pyre.

“Hey, where are you going?” Bella whispered.

He left the row. He quietly set a hand to the rear door and eased it open without a sound.

“Where are you going?” Bella hissed.

The door shut behind Matt. He clung to the image of the dead body on screen, its chest flayed and open, its curled hand filling just the edge of the frame. It reminded him all too much of… No, it was more than the hand in the pyre. Somehow, it reminded him of something worse, something more sinister. It filled him with some kind of aching familiarity.

(Lena did not want him focusing on the body.)

Matt knew the path to Lena’s lab, because he’d surprised Lena before in her PI’s office complex with flowers for her birthday. The secretary had found him endearing ever since, and she wouldn’t bat an eye if he entered.

(Bella did not want him pestering Lena about it anymore.)

He pulled Lena’s ID from his pocket and scanned it. The door unlatched. The receptionist, Margot if he remembered, saw him and smiled. Matt tried for a smile and a nod too.

(So he would just check it out alone. The itch became like a rash, if he could just understand what the cut had been. Just convince himself that the two bodies were separate…)

“Hey Margot, Lena needs me to grab something from her lab bench before her presentation, sorry.”

“Oh… I can’t let you down there,” Margot answered, blinking in surprise. She chewed her lip, chalky and cherry red.

“It’s very important for her presentation.”

“Still… You haven’t done any of the biohazard training, have you? It’s policy.”

“Is it…” Matt dropped his voice. “Is it because of the cadavers down there?”

“Cadavers?” Margot’s voice startled Matt. He jumped back a bit as Margot clutched the edge of her desk for effect. “Goodness no. Goodness no you cannot bring cadavers into this building! Are you crazy? No! Dead bodies in this building? You think I’m happily working here while there are dead bodies beneath my feet? Goodness gracious no. They’d arrest us for five different felonies I image. No… no all the cadaver work happens at Holyoke General Hospital. Only at Holyoke General Hospital.”

“Oh…” Matt answered, a bit taken aback, and a bit ashamed for having thought differently in the first place. “Okay then. Thank you.”

He turned on his heels, swallowing his disappointment. It was for the best, probably. There was no real logic in needing to see the cadaver body. He could ask Lena point-blank about the wrist. Maybe she would know, better yet, maybe she would finally believe him about the burning body. He had no real reason to trust Bella’s advice out of anyone’s.

“Well…” Margot spoke up, her voice lilting. “if she really needs it, and you can be fast…”

Matt paused. Margot’s words hung in the air. When he turned, her eyes were sly.

“Oh, um, it’s okay, Margot, she’s just—“

“Just don’t tell Fahrid I let you down there, okay? Can’t have poor Lena messing up her presentation, especially when you were sweet enough to come all the way down here.” Margot answered, and she motioned to the elevator just a bit down the hall.

“Oh…thank you,” Matt answered, his voice wavering uncertain. He had no good way to talk his way out of his lie, so he stepped into the hall, and he hit the down button. The elevator door pinged open for him. Matt coughed, and he vanished inside it.

He need only poke around the lab, and grab the first important-seeming notebook he could find, and resurface with it pretending it was what Lena had sent him to retrieve.

The temperature dropped with the decent and the door opened somewhere colder, dryer. Matt stepped out into a concrete hall. Matt coughed, and it echoed now in the hallway leading to Lena’s lab. The fit continued, until his heart stuttered sluggishly and tears beaded in the corner of his eyes. His footsteps echoed along with the coughs as he rounded the end of the hall to Lena’s lab.

He stepped up beside it and set his pocket to the scanner. It blipped. Lena’s card got him in, and Matt entered.

The lab was something he’d only ever seen once: a modest set up, white tiling and white walls and a white ceiling. Blue-topped counters lined each of the walls, and a single island in the middle bore shelves that stacked to the ceiling. Beakers, boxes of pipet tips, bottles of ethanol and dilutions lined the shelves, pipet racks sat on the counter—spotlessly clean—where the sink carved out a section in the corner. A water bath sat, set to 37 degrees Celcius, heating a bottle of red cell medium. An incubator sat opposite. Its shelves were like the shelves of a fridge lined with flasks of cell culture. On the opposite counter were several petri dishes, none with tops, all sporting different swaths of translucent flesh. A large heat lamp burned above them. There was a stop watch beside the set-up, ticking down.

Matt stepped forward. His shoes were still wet from the storm, he realized, and they squished leaving sponge marks with each step. He gave the lab another once-over, and a thin gray notebook propped on the middle shelf caught his attention. That would work. He grabbed it, flipped through it. It was filled with the documentation of experiments over the last couple weeks.

Matt…

His name flickered past at the head of one of the pages. Matt paused his flipping, and he sifted backwards until he happened upon the same page. It filled him with a strange twisting dread as he locked onto it, and read.

Height…

Weight…

Waist circumference…

Wrist circumference…

Hair length…

Shin measurements…

Thigh measurements…

Forearm measurements…

Matt skimmed the list. His name sat in solitude at the top, and down the entire page stretched a hundred or so different measurements, each penciled in with recordings to hundredths in their precision. His insides squirmed as he read the list again, his mind empty for any reason for having such detailed notes of him.

It felt violating, almost, to see himself deconstructed into hundreds of numbers. Like he was a specimen. Like he was something to experiment on.

The discomfort that filled his lungs was something difficult to breathe through. He flipped the page, and found the measurements continued.

Carotenoid artery diameter: …

Left/Right ventricle volume:…

Left/Right atrium volume:…

Depth of carotenoid vein permeation: …

The measurements became something Matt could not understand. The discomfort was violating. He felt suddenly in the lab of a stranger. He closed the notebook, and he looked around again, as if hoping something tacked to the wall might explain it.

He saw nothing tacked to the wall; Matt spotted only another door in back, leading to a supply closet of sorts, or something larger than that. There was a gauge beside the door that read -4C on it.

He stepped forward, and he jostled the door until it budged. Inside was dark. Inside was colder, chilled numbingly cold. Matt shuddered. He flipped the light on.

He froze.

A gurney stretched across the opposite wall. A body sat atop it.

The skin was sickly white, a pure milky unblemished hue robbed of all blood and life in the artificial casting of light. A simple tarp was draped across it for modesty sake, but limbs extruded from the edges. Toes curled up, their tendons taut and stiff beneath the skin. Light hair dusted across the skullcap, soft like snow, unbludgeoned, not knotted with blood, but so deathly still, so deathly stiff. A medical mask of sorts covered the nose and mouth, connected elsewhere. The right arm protruded from the tarp covered, slung out, fingers curled up and in, begging to mirror what had been burned.

Matt hadn’t noticed the tremble working through his system. The cadaver wasn’t the same as the one pictured in the slides. Matt knew that immediately from the intact right wrist hanging off the edge of the gurney.

The cadaver was, he realized, likely not even a cadaver.

Cadavers would never enter this building, Margot had said. This body, whoever and whatever it was, did not belong in the lab. This body was something Lena had brought here on her own terms, which she’d stashed away in the freezer room of the lab she shared with no one else.

Something cold, something dead, that existed in a place outside the realm of medical license. Lena’s discomfort with the dead body in the pyre resonated in him with new meaning. Bella’s fear of police involvement twisted in his gut. He knew he was staring at something heinous. He knew he was tightly wrapped, down to his every last measurement, in something that would terrify him to understand.

Silently, Matt dropped to his knees. He stared at the gurneyed body a little longer, and wondered what lifeless thing it was, and if his own fingerprints were now in the room, and if the body up there knew anything about the body in the pyre.

“Matt!”

His head shot up. Lena’s voice sent ripples of fear through him.

He did not turn though. He could only stiffen as the pounding of her feet approached, as she dropped down and grabbed him and held him, rocked him, muttering something through tears—

“No!” Matt yelled. He swung his hand out, throwing her off as he scrambled away. His back collided with the nearby wall. He swore he heard the gurney rattle. “Why is there a cadaver in the lab? He’s not one, is he? You brought it here.“

“Listen to me, Matt.”

Matt looked up. Lena inched closer, careful steps along with that same worried face. She looked as though he might fracture any second. She shouldn’t look like she pitied him. She shouldn’t look concerned.

“He’s dead,” Matt repeated.

“That’s not right.”

“The body! In the pyre! He was dead too.”

“Yes, he was,” Lena answered. Her words were sharp now, cutting in between Matt’s hysterics.

“Dead!”

“Yes! Yes Matt, the body in the pyre was dead, okay!? Dead! Stop saying it! I know. I know…”

Matt watched her approach with wide, hunted eyes. His hand shot behind him, to the drawer handle digging into his back. He opened it and plunged his hand in. It wrapped around the only thing he could grab, just a scoopula, which he brandished like a weapon for his own sake. Lena stopped, looking more hurt than threatened.

“You put it in the fire?” Matt whispered.

“Yes, I did,” Lena admitted through gritted teeth. “Now let me explain.”

“The whole body!? Was it there—just the arm—did you cut it up!?”

“Let me explain—“

“Was it a cadaver? In the fire?”

“Not—don’t call it—no, no it wasn’t.”

“Did you kill him?”

“I didn’t!”

“You did! Why would you burn it otherwise? You did.”

“I didn’t!”

“Who then!? Who did!? Who killed him!?”

“Bella did,” Lena snapped. Then she pulled back, and breathed once before whispering, “Bella killed him, three years ago.” Lena moved, and she was a smaller thing now. She stepped over Matt’s feet without his brandished scoopula reaching her, and she stopped by the gurney. She set a hand around the mask and lifted it. The body on the gurney had just a bit of color to his lips—sandy hair, bony frame. Matt stared at in in a momentary transfix of horror, then he touched a hand to his own burning face. “I’ve been trying to save him ever since.”

Matt didn’t hear. He stared at the body, his attention transfixed.

He stared at his own face, silently white on the gurney.

“It’s me…” Matt muttered.

“It’s you,” and it was an admittance of defeat. “It’s the next you I’m making.”

Matt shook his head. And he shook it some more, because it was all he could do. “Who was the body…? In the pyre? Who was it?”

“It was you, Matt.” She swallowed once. “The you who died last time. He’s been on ice, a few months now, because I needed to find a time when the trash heap was high and no one would notice but…you did. You weren’t supposed to notice.”

Matt shook his head again. “I’m me.”

“You’re one of you… So was he, in the pyre.” Lena looked to the gurney, and she nodded her head to it. “So is he, eventually.”

She placed the mask back over the body’s mouth lovingly, then she stepped away from it. She stopped in front of Matt and crouched, easing the scoopula away from him until it just dangled in his fingers, then she stowed it in her pocket. Her hand rose, the back of it skimming his hot cheek. “I keep trying, but I can’t get you right. It’s…they’re cadavers, at some point, the number of strings I pull with Fahrid to get them and not ask me why.” She looked around, agitated, then her manic eyes were back on him. “They’re only the framework though. I can’t make everything. I try to make everything I can—your organs, your mind, your face—I can make all the pieces of you now, and put you back together inside a cadaver’s body. But you just don’t last. Over and over—I’m doing something wrong. Your heart doesn’t keep beating in rhythm. The smog fills up with lungs with tar and it never filters out. Then something hits…a fever…pneumonia or…and you just don’t bounce back. I’m making you in a way that keeps on breaking, and it kills you again every time. It’s my fault, somehow, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

Horror blossomed hot and violent under Matt’s skin. Lena’s touch was like ice.

“That’s wrong. I’m me. Who did you burn?”

“So far, five of you… Five of you I’ve burned.” She looked away. “Including the real you… I’m sorry—I had to burn your real body and replace it. If I hadn’t then the hospital, the doctors, your family, they’d think you died.”

“…In the garbage pyre…?” Matt whispered.

“You were brain-dead,” Lena answered. She stood now, moving back to the gurney where her hands lingered above it, careful, loving. “The car smashed through you—not me and not Bella—it should have been me for dragging you out. …Should have been Bella for driving,” Lena said, a hint of malice in her voice. She reached beneath the gurney and grabbed a monitor and a pair of diodes. Then she moved back to Matt’s side and pressed them to the sides of his head. “But it was you. The doctors said you’d last only another two weeks after the accident. No part of you could recover from being so…so mangled up. It was just the machines keeping you alive, and only until the swelling in your skull finally killed you… They said to take you off lifesupport, Matt. I almost lost you. I almost lost you… ”

Lena tapped a button on the machine, cranked a dial up, and electricity seemed to burst behind Matt’s eyes. He blinked through it, confused.

“Everything I know is about modeling, scanning, printing organs. And I know you better than anyone. I just needed to model you perfectly, and build you up from scratch.” Lena tapped off the dial, and removed the diodes, and stood. She leaned over the body on the gurney and attached them to the sides of its temple. “Right down to your brain waves. Your memories.”

“…My memories?”

“Yeah,” Lena answered. The body’s eyes twitched, still shut, but suddenly alive with movement. “And you won’t remember this.”

Matt swallowed. His heart beat shallowly in his throat, fluttering and erratic. It sent stars through his vision. “Are you erasing my memory?”

“I’m just not transferring it to him,” Lena motioned to the body on the gurney. Then her eyes, wet with pity, set on him. “You’re the first clone to find out; is it okay to tell you I’m sorry? I’m sorry I let Bella drive. I’m sorry I can’t get you right. I’m sorry you have to keep dying like this every couple months. I want you to last… I’ll figure you out eventually, with no heart troubles and no breathing troubles. I hate watching you die. I love you, Matt.”

“Like this…?” Matt echoed. He tried to steady his breathing, but he couldn’t anymore. “What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?”

“You always last the same amount of time. Before the complications set it. I’m sorry Matt, you—this you—you’re winding down.”

“No… No no no no no.”

“I’ll stay with you. I always do. I won’t turn him on until you’re gone.”

“What does that mean?” Matt asked, panicked tears cutting an edge in his voice. He understood though, as his skin tingled to numbness, and Lena dropped to his side. She wrapped him in a hug, rocked with him, as the numbness spread, as it washed through his body in bursts and Matt found himself too weak to move.

It lasted hours, or minutes maybe, he couldn’t really tell. Rasping hot breath into his lungs for the body he couldn’t feel as Lena rocked with him, crying lightly. And it lasted, and it lasted until a white hot fire cut through his chest and erupted outward, and his breathing was strangled through water, and oxygen wouldn’t reach his brain fading black and stuttering damp and dark and cold, numb, off…

in…

to…

nothing…

…

Matt sat on the couch Wednesday afternoon, his laptop open to a few half-finished labs and the tv switched on to ESPN. He rested a bag of potato chips in the crook of his arm and ate them absentmindedly, watching the clock time out on the last play of the game. The clouds had cleared. The sunlight caught in beams along the smog and lit the air a fiery orange.

“Matt, I’m taking the car out for about an hour. You good here?”

Matt glanced over his shoulder. His eyes flickered back and forth between Lena and the game, making sure the clock really was on track to time out. It did, and he let out a small whoop before dedicating his whole attention to Lena.

She shot him a small smile, and grabbed the ochre bag from the trash bin, tying it tight. Matt frowned.

“I can take the trash out in a bit. Nice day, so the walk to the pyre shouldn’t be bad.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ve got some old furniture I’m getting rid of there, so I’m taking the car.”

“You’ll stink up the car.”

“It’s a short ride.” She bit her lip. “And I’ve got other errands, might take a while.”

“It’s almost your birthday,” Matt remarked, unsure why he’d said it other than having been suddenly struck by the information.

Lena paused. “It is,” and she hefted the bag over her shoulder.

“There’s a new Thai place nearby. Do you wanna go there?” Matt asked.

“Where’d you hear about the Thai place?”

Matt paused, racking his brain. He screwed his brow in concentration and found the paths fizzling out, strangely empty. His memory had been so full of holes lately. “I dunno. Someone in my class probably. It wasn’t you who told me?”

“No…” Lena said, and some part of it was clearly a lie from the tightness in her voice.

“…I think Bella told me,” Matt said cautiously.

“I don’t really like Thai food.”

“You don’t like the take-out Thai place. This place is…” Matt trailed off, unsure how he’d meant to finish the sentence. Lena didn’t like Thai food.

“I should get going,” Lena cut in. She hefted the bag again, even though it was only maybe a quarter full. “I’ll be gone a while.”

“We can order take-out when you get back.”

Matt couldn’t explain the pained expression on Lena’s face as she left. He didn’t want to think too hard about it, because he was feeling fine for the first time in weeks and didn’t care to sour his mood with worry. He grabbed another potato chip from the bag and hoisted his laptop onto his legs, lab assignment open.

He’d gotten behind on his assignments, but it wasn’t impossible to catch up, not yet. Matt indulged for a moment in the idea of buckling down and working now, and not letting up until every last one was done. He imagined getting a passing grade in the class, and he imagined a diploma in his hands at graduation. He was giddy almost at the thought of getting out. Where? He wasn’t sure, but he could move on finally, get out on his own, get away and be himself somewhere away from—

He couldn’t finish the thought but, he knew what his mind meant by it. Lena was too good for him, really.

But the actual break up—that was a dour thought. It wasn’t meant for today. So Matt pulled up his assignment, and he skimmed the directions, and he coughed once. He kept going though, even as two or three more coughs racked his chest, because the coughing wasn’t all that bad.

Not yet.

#writing #long post #body horror //#dead bodies //#gore //#: 3 c

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