Death Departed

Prologue

Electric pulses. Warm sentiments. Soft whispers that linger slowly on half-hushed lips. That’s what awaits you on your deathbed: that, and the much spoken of promise of rising again. You expect that if they did see you raise your arms and legs, swimmingly wriggling and reviving, you would be greeted with jubilance, ecstasy, and a little surprise. You would want those same malleable arms to fold around you, hot skin on cold, a kiss on the cheek, a younger brother crying on your pillow of a leg. But what if you could wake? What if you did? What if there was nothing to greet you but the hard, metal clutch of a surgeon’s table, a machine clenching you with an iron fist. That scene of jubilance and ecstasy is hit out of you like a forceful punch to the stomach. That light and sunny room clustered with family and friends – a laboratory. They say it started with stem cell research, that concept that man governed life and death, that not only could he play God but become God. What if that sentiment grew? What if man realised that not only could he decide who should be born but also who should die? There is a hiss, a slap of oxygen attacking your nostrils. There is a time of withering where skin turns from purple, to blue, to red, to a mellow hue. The artist spins a disk of colours attached to a glass tube, attached to your skin. Then the table dips, you find yourself in a vast expanse of water looking up to the skies, to the heavens you should have been in. You have been chosen. You are ordained.

You turn, breathing deeply, and your body now obeys your command more fluidly than it had done before – in the past life. You stand, unaware of or abashed by your nakedness. The clutter of surgeons bow deeply to you, as if you are somehow more real, more worthy than their flesh and blood selves. You feel afraid. You want to go home, you want the memories of your childhood and you see them clearly before you, but the names, the places they are gone. You are a lone wanderer. They say you have a purpose but can’t tell you what it is. They say you have been brought back for a reason, that God brought you back, but you know they are lying: it was their machines. Suddenly it hits you, that indefinable truth that’s been nagging in your mind, always that feeling that something was following behind you. You were right. They’ve been watching you your whole life – waiting for you to die.