REAL DEATH by Terry Hayman
Terry Hayman’s “Real Death” is a story of an unwanted legacy that poses questions about the value of immortality and the cost of affluence.
Real Death
by Terry Hayman
My mother’s funeral and her bequest to me were as embarrassing as the woman herself. A kind of final test.
The funeral…
The fact there was a funeral at all says it, doesn’t it? A major stakeholder in Genrev dying from old age? I’m sure the Genrev board would have simply “disappeared” my mother were it not for her uncontestable, world-posted will. It turned her fifty-one percent share over to an unsympathetic charity if her burial wishes weren’t carried out exactly.
So there we all were in her chosen barrio cemetery, eyes shifting about anxiously as the priest finished up, expecting some kind of swarming from the onlookers pressing their noses to the high black bars twenty meters to our left. Not that they’d try anything. Uncle Castor had hired a small army to keep us safe.
Now I and Mother’s four brothers — George, Bradley, William, and Castor — stepped forward, untied the ropes suspending my mother’s casket in a double trapeze, and lowered the casket into the dank earth. The ropes slipped roughly through our gloved fingers. The bugler played “Taps.”
When the coffin hit and settled, we threw our rope ends in and grabbed the shovels without looking at one another. It was almost atavistic, this death ritual. Perhaps that was why, as I drove my shovel into the dirt pile, a thrill of grief clawed up my throat and made my hands shake. All I had left of Mother were her shares, her house, and her hundreds of paintings. And I was to use or dispose of them all “properly.” Which meant what exactly?
“Luther? Finish up, old man.”
I jerked up my chin to see my uncles had already cast down their shovels. Their piles of dirt were done, their overcoats rebuttoned, their faces not even perspiring. And for just a second I knew they looked… wrong. George, still the stopped-22 he’d been at my birth, stood long-limbed and golden-haired, an Olympic diver. Bradley, s19, constantly aroused, a sexual predator. William, s15, plagued by recurring acne despite the medications I’d prescribed. And finally Castor, the eldest uncle. He glowered down at me with all the weight of his s28 years and position as CEO of the family business.
Freaks.
I swallowed dryly. My mother talking. She’d hated the drug that had made her so very rich after my father died. MSODI. Em-Soddy. She’d made me put off my own injections so long that now I was stuck in my sixties forever.
The surety of death gives life definition, was her favorite saying. But her death hadn’t. The yearning look in her eyes when she’d died, the obscurity of her directions to me in her will…
What do you want me to do now, Mother?
I creaked up my body, clanked down my shovel, and wiped my brow. “I’m finished.”
Castor, the uncle who’d just called me “old man”, shook his head at my weakness and turned to the assemblage. We — the bugler, the non-injected barrio priest, our mayor, a collection of art critics, me, and my mother’s brothers and younger sister, Rohe — held our breath.
“Marla’s last will and testament demanded all this.” Castor sniffed. “And she asked me to say a few words. Therefore, I say that Marla Milbrand was a fine painter and it’s a damn shame she let herself die without ever selling her work.”
He looked at me then glowered at the rest to silence the titters. “Go home. We’re done here.”
The company cattle, for that’s what the whole assemblage was, dependent on Genrev’s drugs and Castor’s skill in keeping up their production, turned and shuffled for the cemetery’s back gate in a scared little procession.
Except me. I was sure, somehow, that Mother had intended me to stay by her grave. So I did, even though Castor shot me a disapproving glance. I was thankful, though, when he motioned five heavily-armed security guards to stay with me. Then I swallowed and shut my eyes, tried to find some answers in the blowing leaves and rotting earth.
“Mother?” I whispered. Sentimentalism — was that what she needed? “I’m sorry I couldn’t follow you. And I don’t know… What do you want me to do with your stuff? The paintings. Do I sell them? Give them to people? I’ve… never understood what you… Any of…”
Then, damn me, I felt a surge in my lower chest and realized I was about to sob. I hunched and raised my overcoat collar to hide my face. The sob shook me like a convulsive fit. My cheeks grew wet.
I wiped them quickly with my sleeve. This was what came of leaving out the mood elevators from my MSODI mix this week as a final tribute to my mother. I’d been confident my more mature body gave me increased ability to control my negative emotions. I’d been wrong.
“I’m s-sorry.”
The confession brought on more sobs.
Then I jerked up straight. I was not alone with my security guards. There, sidling up around my right side, was my Aunt Rohe. When she knew I’d seen her, she switched to a provocative sashay, her taut s18 hips twitching, elasten-breasts bouncing. She rubbed herself up along my arm. “Why, Luther Milbrand,” she purred. “You’re a momma’s boy, after all.”
“Don’t, Rohe,” I said, pushing her back from me. As a boy, Rohe had been my fantasy. For a short time in my thirties we’d even played house together, until my mother found out. She’d called Rohe shallow and dim. Not my answer then or now.
Rohe kicked a clod of dirt from the pile I hadn’t quite finished. “Luther, Luther. Always the coward. You know what you need? A trip to a barrio club. Pick up a hot young shag ripping through her youth, thinks she’s going to live forever, hasn’t realized that you have to have lots of money to do that.”
“Already dying,” I murmured.
“What?”
“She doesn’t realize she’s already dying.”
Rohe smiled cruelly. “From the time she’s born.”
“I’ll come.”
Rohe stared at me blank-face then understood and smiled wickedly again. “Get you at nine o’clock. Time of your life, old man.”
#
Rohe didn’t show until nine-forty, roaring up to my hacienda on a hydrogen-converted old Harley with high handlebars and sunk-back seat, making enough noise to wake the entire Hills neighborhood. “Get on!” she said, tossing me a black helmet that was barely a skull cap.
“Does this make me your bitch?” I slid on behind her, pulling my concealed fanny pack nervously around to my front.
She laughed. “Fuck you!”
We surged into the night.
Barreling down to the rutted highway few of the Hills class used any more, Rohe drove the bike like a demon, weaving at over a hundred kph around potholes and travelers bumping along in their vans. The smells got noticeably thicker when we finally cut off the highway and sputtered our way slowly down into the barrio. North of where the cemetery had been. No security detail this time, either. Street vendors sold red-streaked, sizzling foodstuffs I was sure had been outlawed by the FDA. Nightclubs puffed pheromone-based scent clouds around their entrances. A palpable grit hung in the air, settling onto my tongue as we chugged along.
Under a purple neon sign that said zap!, Rohe parked the bike, disabled the engine, and turned her face half to me. “Get off.”
“Oh!” I said and scrambled awkwardly off backwards, burning my calf on the rear converter cowl.
Rohe didn’t let me reach down to rub it. She grabbed my elbow and dragged me through the pheromone puff-cloud into the club. Kept dragging me inside as my feet slowed to non-responsive in the crash of sound and lights and smell. Much like the hallucinations induced by Entropal and such, but real here. Dangerous side-effects threatened, like optical burn-out, hearing loss, physical trespass by the shuffling, jerking bodies everywhere. It was vaguely centered on a sunken central floor area, ringed by a railing like a coliseum, but the jerking seemed to be going on everywhere, up through the seats, seated or standing.
“Who are they?” I called ahead to Rohe.
She turned her head back towards me and pointed to her ear like she hadn’t heard clearly over the slamming noise, but I caught from her gestures she was going to introduce me to a group up in a ridge of tables overlooking the main dance area. I made out three boys and a girl. They stood out from the others because they were jabbering at each other and seemed to actually hear what was said. It didn’t understand until we struggled to within a few feet of them and entered a noise-break zone. All of a sudden the background racket cut out and even I could hear the teens. “… babba babba, man. Right down the fuckin man’s pipes!” “You mean?” “Rickeny.”
Of course. A canceler. The blue box on the table probably. Which meant a portable device. Expensive, tricky to set up. What were barrio kids doing with—
“Luther!” said Rohe, making the kids all start and turn towards us. “Meet Biloize, Sharken, Goat, and Marquise.”
They all grinned insanely with glassy eyes. Two had filed teeth. All were tattooed, body scarred, and smelled like garbage burn.
“Are you all… from around here?” I said.
They all burst like one into a howls and snorts, made eerie by the canceler kicking in to cut out the highs like a music-hater’s peak control.
When the hooting died down, Rohe smiled and stepped forward to rub the quivering shaved heads of the two nearest boys. “They’re all Hill babies. Close to their apparent ages. Oldest is Sharken, born twenty-six years ago. Took him a little longer to clue in and get off MSODI.”
Sharken, the smallest of the three boys, shook his head with spastic little jerks, his face beet red. The other three teens punched at his bare arms and chest until his chair overbalanced and he slammed back onto the cement floor with a shouted “Fuck-i-i-in!”
“Cluin!” yelled the second boy and slammed a fist onto the table.
“Tunin!” cried the girl.
“Savage!” said the third boy.
“Life get you, fly!”
Hysterical giggles, girl jumping on Sharken, him punching her in the head, rolling off and up, more giggles.
And Rohe, giggling with the others, swung back to me and grabbed my about the hips, jerking them into her own. “Where’d you think all the Hills runaways went?” she said.
“What do you mean ‘all?’” I said.
“Two hundred a year and growing since the barrio riots. Kids, real kids, feel the unrest.”
“Ree-spond!” shouted Sharken, on his feet now, climbing a chair.
“Happening everywhere,” Rohe said. “Castor never brought you up to speed? Ask you how to maybe start mixing a rebellion suppressor happy drug into the MSODI injections?”
I reached out a hand to steady myself on the back of Marquise’s chair. “I… never really thought…”
Biloize and Goat hooted as they shoved Sharken off his perch again. Rohe swept a hand grandly around the flickering room at the tuned-out crash and jerk of flesh. “All kids think they’re immortal. But Hills kids know they are. They’re told it from the time they’re fifteen. Told they have to decide what age they want to stay at for the rest of their lives. They can’t cope with that. Makes them crazy and want to run away.”
I blinked at the implicit accusation. “The body can’t adapt to a broken administration of the MSODI enzyme. If you start, then stop, then restart, the body—”
Rohe held up her hand even though the four kids at our table were actually listening, glassy eyes shining. “You get to choose just once then you’re stuck with your choice forever, right?”
“Physically, yes.”
“So the only way you get to change is if you stop. And that’s permanent too. No going back.”
“N-n-n-never!” shouted Sharken hoarsely, climbing up in his chair like a monkey that won’t learn to stay where it’s put. “Ne-ver! Ne-ver!” He got the others banging the table in a rough rhythm the canceler kept trying to cut out.
It finally sank in and I stared. These children had done what Rohe was talking about — stopped their MSODI injections. Which meant they were all aging and dying like the other common, disadvantaged teens in here. Couldn’t go back. Stupid. Suicide.
Like my mother.
Rohe turned to them. “Of course you could do like Luther here. Put off the decision so long that when you finally choose the company line, it’s too late. You’re an old man.”
The kids’ chant changed to “Old man! Old man! Old man!” and Marquise turned in her chair to wrap her arms around my thighs, chinning my groin.
Rohe helped me peel her off and spoke to the four directly. “So why do you all come down to the barrio, children?”
“To die!” they sang back, heads bobbing.
“How?” pressed Rohe. “By just stopping your injections? Getting old?”
“By living!” shouted Biloize hoarsely.
“Fucking!” shouted Marquise.
“Fighting!” shouted Goat and ripped open his shirt to display a long knife scar and two huge lumps of scar tissue on his lower abdomen that looked like healed gunshot wounds.
“Fuck it all. Fly!” shouted Sharken, still tottering on his chair. He stepped from it onto the railing that circled over the dance floor as the others cheered him on, then crouched and flung himself out over the floor, crashing down on the jerking bodies below like a fist of God. Everyone not hit just kept on jerking about. Among the fallen, I mentally counted the probable spinal injuries in horror. Life’s definition.
“It’s insane,” I breathed.
Rohe nodded, leaning in close. “But like I said, who believes as a teenager that you can really die?”
“It’s… it’s… ” I pushed her off, stumbling backwards and was suddenly out of the canceler’s zone. As Rohe started to come after me, I stared at her wildly and stepped quickly into the mind-blowing noise and lights and bodies. Then I swam, mouth full of the sweat and heat, through the flesh towards the upper, upper level towards the back of the room. Ducking and bobbing, weaving, in and under and through, I made the stairs and climbed, hidden, to the upper heavens where the sound and lights were dimmer. There, for a few moments at least, Rohe and her friends would not be able to find me.
A chair! Unbelievably a chair sat open at a table near the railing. I dove for it and got my rear firmly planted there, trembling uncontrollably over what I was going to do if some young barrio hood challenged me for it.
The girl across from me sneered and spoke loudly enough for me to hear. “No one’ll kick you out, big fly. I got cholera. They’re all scared of me.”
I blinked and took her in. Maybe sixteen but it was hard to tell in the sputtering lights up here. She looked ghastly though, limp brown hair around a face that looked dehydrated and sall
almost yellow. It might have hit her kidneys already. Death in forty-eight hours. From cholera? Absurd.
“Why aren’t you on antibiotics?” I said loudly, leaning across the table.
She twisted her head sideways, picking at her lip. “What you on, big fly? You think I can pay a medic or something?”
“I’m a… a medic,” I said. “Let me help you.” I scrambled down inside my waistband and unzipped my fanny pack. I pulled out a hypo of MSODI that I’d packed tonight in a weird moment of wanting to play barrio god. The MSODI, Malleable Superoxide Dismutase, wouldn’t kill the fecal-bred bacteria the girl was carrying, but its actions fighting cell damage might stave off her kidney collapse until I could get her proper fluid replacement and find a dispensary for some antibiotics.
“What’s that?” she said as I pulled forward her arm and shoved up her short sleeve.
“MSODI,” I explained. “Not an answer, but it’s all I—”
She ripped her arm away from me. “Em-flogging-soddy? Flogging hell, big fly!” She’d jumped to her feet now and was waving her arms around wildly. “Flogging hell! FLOGGING HELL! FLOGGING HELL! FLOGGING HELLLL!” She grabbed the edge of our little table and, in a surprising show of hysterical strength, managed to hoist it over the rail so it went sliding then crashing down to the table and skulls below.
She continued to scream.
I looked around as I nervously stuffed my hypodermic sprayer back into my pack and saw two bouncer types running up the stairs to our level. I saw Rohe down at the Hills kids’ table, looking up at me and shaking her head sadly.
Then the bouncers reached me, grabbed my arms, and jerked me backwards.
#
At the barrio police station later, while Rohe waited outside at the desk for me, a stout chunk of black police detective was attempting to force a confession.
“MSODI?” he said, holding up the hypo he’d pulled out of my concealed pack. “Now what would a Genrev medic be doing carrying a filled hypo of MSODI down to a barrio club?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t smart, I grant you. I—”
“Maybe it’s not MSODI, hunh? That what you’re trying to tell me? That you’re not even a medic? What were you doing there, tonight, man? Drug dealing? Enforcing? What?”
I looked at him stunned, not understanding at all what he was trying to establish.
“Look,” he said, leaning in conspiratorially. “We both know you’re not Hills material, right? Hill bobbies never get past thirty. Most stay barely pubescent like that fox out there waiting for you. So what you trying to pull here, my brother? What’s going down?”
I blinked again and would have tried to explain except that his partner, a white man in his fifties whose heavily-lined forehead made me shudder, banged into the interrogation room and shoved a section of the day’s Times into the black man’s hands. Leaning forward, I saw a report on my mother’s death with a graveside photograph. Castor would be having conniptions.
“That you?” the black detective grunted, pointing to the part of the photo where my struggling face stood listening to Priest Allessandro’s tribute.
I nodded.
“You’re Marla Milbrand’s son? You’re a member of the fucking Genrev Board of Directors.” I nodded again. “The family physician.” Again. “Holy mother.”
I waited while the black detective went over to the corner to consult with his partner, thankful he obviously didn’t know I was now also Genrev’s majority stockholder. When he came back, his face was twisted like he’d smelled something bad. “You know Genrev got the FDA to stop production of a generic MSODI this year? No? How your uncle, Castor Milbrand, vowed to halt all Genrev psychotropic drug research if the Feds fucked with him? You know any of that?”
I stared up at him dumbly.
“Aw, just get out.” The detective sprayed the contents of my hypo into the air and tossed it to me empty. “And don’t come slumming here again or I’ll let the barrio deal with you. Freak.”
#
We got back to my house in the early dawn light. I swung myself carefully off the back of Rohe’s bike, careful this time not to burn my leg on the converter. Then I took off my motorcycle helmet, handed it to her, and stood staring at her and the motorcycle in the greyness. Everything looked vaguely black and white. The air smelled moist. Rohe herself looked sad under her black helmet cap.
“Why’d you take me there?” I asked.
For a moment I didn’t think she was going to answer. Then she said, “I loved your mother, you know. She hated me.”
“My mother didn’t hate.”
“Yes,” Rohe nodded. “She did. She hated everything about the Hills and Genrev. She was just too gracious to show it most of the time. I think she would have been happier living down in the barrio.”
I frowned. “It’s too crazy there. She couldn’t have done her art.”
“Couldn’t have painted. That’s right. And Marla had to paint. Besides, staying up here, it let her rub our faces in it. Like her dying was atoning for our sin. And all those pictures… ” Rohe suddenly turned her face away. “Fuck, I hope you figure out what she wanted you to do with that shit and do it fast.”
I said nothing, knowing it wasn’t just the pictures Rohe wondered about. It was the voting shares. Which also answered why she’d taken me out tonight. She’d been the family’s emissary. Scoping me out. Trying to subtly affirm my allegiance. Us versus them.
Rohe finally kicked her motorcycle back in gear to roar off into the night. When she was gone, I walked into my mother’s and my house and stood in the front hall without turning on the lights. Where the house had always breathed before, this early dawn it was silent. Totally dead.
No.
I walked, feet clicking softly on the marble floor ahead and to my right, into my mother’s conservatory. It was here that her artwork was stored in an ever-present aroma of oil paints and turpentine. Her favorite pieces graced the high walls. The rest of the pieces were stacked neatly in their upright slots along two walls. One wall all windows, before which an oversized easel was set up with the work she still had in progress when she died.
I sagged against the doorframe.
She’d always been methodical, my mother. Always striving for control even when staring into the abyss, when her joints began to ache with early arthritis, like mine were doing now. She’d refused my treatments for her slips in concentration because she wanted the struggle to be hers alone.
I recalled she’d been my age then. I’d caught her shivering in this grand ballroom, staring out at the ocean beyond the window. “I will not be a freak and defy death,” she said. The next day this room became a painter’s studio where she painted furiously until the day she died.
Figure out what she wanted you to do with that shit.
I pushed myself up and walked to the painting my mother had been working on when she died. It was of herself, young, beautiful, and with the saddest smile, the darkest light, as if she knew what all her painting was about. It was a reach for immortality after all. It was her MSODI self, held back, shown to no one.
Again the embarrassing sobs welled up inside me as they had at the cemetery. I sat on her painter’s stool and bent over double, letting my tears spill freely. But this time the tears were not for myself, but for her. For her graciousness at letting me choose immortality at last at sixty-five. For her weakness in not being able to do what she’d kept insisting was right, to give up her life completely and just go. She’d left a detailed will, her paintings. Conflicted to the last.
Which is when I understood at last what my mother needed of me. What I had to do with “that shit.”
Snuffling like a baby, it took me almost three hours to cart all of her artwork down to the beach and pile it high, douse it well with the eight cans of kerosene I’d found in her studio. By that time the sun had burst clear and high over the ocean like heaven’s gates across the water. Except that my mother didn’t believe in heaven. It was, she said, just another death avoidance. Another way of fighting the importance of the here and now, and the conscious, gradual surrender of control.
I snapped a lighter from my pocket and held it to the long torch I’d fashioned from a wood plank wrapped with a kerosene-soaked cloth. It blazed up oily and hot. I walked it to the pile of wood and canvas.
But Genrev! her voice seemed to scream at me from beyond the grave. What are you going to do with it? What are you going to do with your own life? How will you remember me?
I sniffed and wiped my nose. “It’s hard to let go, isn’t it?”
With a held breath, I jammed the torch deep under the paintings and stepped back. The flames whoofed through them in an explosion of heat, then crackled and danced until there was only ash.
