Dead and Alive

CHAPTER 21

Blue is the color of cold vision. All things are shades of blue, infinite shades of blue.

The double-wide restaurant-style freezer has a glass door. The glass is torment for Chameleon.

The shelves have been removed from the freezer. No food is ever stored here.

From a hook in the ceiling of the unit hangs a large sack. The sack is prison.

Prison is made from a unique polymeric fabric that is both as strong as bulletproof Kevlar and transparent.

This transparency is the first torment. The glass door is the second.

The sack resembles a giant teardrop, for it is filled with fourteen gallons of water and is pendulous.

Within the freezer, the temperature varies between twenty-four and twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit.

The water in the polymeric sack is a saline solution treated with chemicals in addition to the salt, to prevent congelation.

Although the temperature remains below freezing, although tiny ice particles float freely in the sack, the solution will not freeze.

Cold is the third torment for Chameleon.

Drifting in the sack, Chameleon lives now in a waking dream.

It is not able to close its eyes to its circumstances, because they have no lids.

Chameleon needs no sleep.

Perpetual awareness of its powerless condition is the fourth torment.

In its current circumstances, Chameleon cannot drown, for it has no lungs.

When not imprisoned, it breathes by virtue of a tracheal system akin to but materially different from that of insects. Spiracles on the surface admit air into tubes that pass throughout the body.

In semisuspended animation, it needs little oxygen. And the saline fluid flowing through its tracheal tubes is oxygen-enriched.

Although Chameleon looks like no insect on Earth, it resembles an insect more than it resembles anything else.

The size of a large cat, Chameleon weighs twenty-four pounds.

Although its brain weighs just 1.22 pounds, Chameleon is as intelligent as the average six-year-old child, but significantly more disciplined and cunning.

In torment, Chameleon waits.