Truth Front

The city burned below him in the twilight and his mother wheeled him from the window. She whispered softly to him and they moved through the fluorescent corridors of the giant building like lighted veins of some immense creature with her pushing the wheelchair behind him. He was calm and didn’t speak.

There were people waiting in the room when they got there. Sisters, brothers, old friends, strangers. They smiled and stared at him and all of them reached out to touch him, to feel the last jarring verification of his life soft on their skin.

They set the wheelchair against the far wall and locked the wheels. They strapped his forearms down to the armrests and then they strapped his feet to the legs of the chair and connected the serpentine hoses to the veins in his arms and hands and chest. They did this in silence and there were no windows in that room save for the windows of their eyes upon him, stares of pity and remorse and guilt and something like tenderness.

His brother came slowly forward with the needle. It was fitted on the barrel end of a medical gun and his brother looked at him and then his brother looked at the crowd of people in the room and waited for the signal which came from everyone and no one at the same time. The needle clicked into his neck with a thump as his brother pulled the trigger and the world melted away from him immediately into a thickening semblance of the former world.

His brother stood back and watched and waited like all the others in the room. They stood staring at him and the drugs danced through his blood of misunderstanding and the blinding white lights of the room bore all the imperfections of his young face as the muscles began relaxing to rubber beneath the skin. He could feel the weight of his eyelids like the gravity of his life story snapping shut to memory and he could feel the tears welling in his eyes despite his mother’s assurance that there would be no tears cried today.

When the people in the room realized he had not died they told his brother to increase the dosage and his brother turned the dial on the needlegun and stepped toward him and put the gun to the other side of his neck and pulled the trigger. He felt his bones slacken with the poison and the room grew rigid and taut around him and his mind still held that electric clarity unique to him. From some cavern of wounded awareness he remembered how his little sister used to come back from the dentist crying because she had five cavities and how every time she came back from the dentist she had cavities and he remembered how he used to laugh at her because he was older and he’d never had a cavity and then he looked up at her face in that bright white room fashioned from some wicked reverie and she smiled down at him with those teeth gleaming and her eyes shining and communicating something like placation but also disdain because he was not dead yet.

There was a small gathering on the other side of the room, a hushed discussion regarding how to proceed. He heard his mother ask him if he was feeling pain and he wanted to tell her that he was feeling pain but he couldn’t speak. His brother walked up to him again and turned the dial twice more on the needlegun and put the gun to his temple and squeezed the trigger and the pain he felt at that moment was lasting and deeper than the malleable heat of the earth and he thought his heart might explode from the loneliness.

His mother asked the brother to increase the dosage and hit him with the needle one more time and the brother said the gun was already set at its maximum dosage. His brother said he didn’t understand why it wasn’t working, he said that there was enough toxin in the gun to kill a giant. To kill God, he said.

He sat in the wheelchair and looked up at all the people with their round faces bunched into pangs of confusion. It was dark outside and the people in the room were murmuring and sharing muffled questions about the mystery of why the young man wouldn’t die. He knew that death for some special souls couldn’t be forced but he could exonerate the people in the room because they knew nothing of the nature of special souls nor how to identify them. He couldn’t move any part of his body save for those dark eyes that scanned the room and the people he loved inquorate about him and he knew that he would be better off dead and yet he was powerless to his own divine privilege.

They decided to move him to a different room and apply another toxin and he knew they would be unsatisfied until his heart stopped beating and his eyes closed for good. They unhooked the hoses from his veins and wheeled him to the door but no one reached out to him this time, as if the death they sought for him was infectious in his pores. They all stood staring and censuring silently in that violent light and watched his mother push him back through the corridors empty and replete with the echoes of shadow.

And he felt that his name had not changed but only his appearance as reflected from the dark hall windows though he couldn’t turn his head to see.

(Originally published 6.28.8)