Primordial: An Abstraction

75

I strike one of my professors.

He is very old.

Elderly.

And he’s lying in bed.

A hospital bed.

I’m in the Infirmary.

It might be the Morgue.

It’s the Morgue.

And the professor is dead.

He says, “Please. Please.”

The mortician appears. He remembers me, complimenting the shadows that “sleep on my cheeks.” They remind him of the dark side of the moon.

I say something about how my professor is dead and said please twice and the mortician replies, “Yes. But the glaucoma, you see.”

I look down into my professor’s frozen-open eyes.

There are no pupils, no irises. Only milky films that seem to glow in the purple darklights of the Morgue.

Saddened, I turn to the mortician. “All this death. All these empty shells. How do you do it?”

“Everybody dies. Can you give me a hand?”

He wants me to carry the body across the room and deposit it in what looks like a fish tank or some kind of incubation chamber that will, according to the mortician, “suck the residual life out of it.”

Objecting, I try to run away.

The mortician talks me into Stasis.

Then he talks me into doing what he wants.

I only get about halfway across the room, the dead professor slung over a shoulder, before my back gives out and I collapse.

I groan.

“You are very old,” utters the mortician, trying to help me up. “Elderly, one might say.”

I shoo him away and push the cadaver off of me and get up myself, clutching my lower back.

This takes awhile.

The mortician encourages me to buy a coffin. “It’s never too early to plan for The End.”

Once I’m on my feet he pushes me into another room where there are several varieties of coffins for sale.

He drags me around by the elbow and tells me about the exteriors and the interiors and the discounts and the pros and cons of this coffin versus that coffin.

I want to resist.

I hurt too much to stop the mortician. I don’t want to make him mad either.

Nonetheless I inform the mortician that there’s no way in hell I’m buying a coffin.

The mortician is tenacious. He wants a down payment.

I tell him no.

The mortician keeps after me. He won’t let up.

Neither will I.

At some point I lie down and close my eyes.