The Shutdown

The Shutdown

She felt her body growing quiet, the heartbeat—her heartbeat—growing still. Thirty-one years was enough, enough. Scarcely one shallow breath now where moments ago four had been. Her feet are cold, her hands are cold, her nose has become quite frigid, its tip a nodule of elderly ice, little different from what descends from the eaves in January. The pills, some yet in the basilica-span of her stomach, most now flowing freely through her slurry bloodstream, have done their work. A score of ivory-white tablets, none larger than a blood drop from a pricked finger, each masterful as a surgeon, all secure in their function, keenly drilled in their purpose, like little soldiers, like assassins: leaden the brain, arrest the lungs, punish the heart, slower…slower…slow the body down…They know the matter well, understand they must bring this self-inflicted Armageddon to its height and past.

In the quiet of the apartment a groan escapes her like flatulence, quite accidental; her chest is heavier than a shelf full of Bibles and she is no longer responsible for her loss of poise. Let us catalogue the humiliations she must bear: The crystalline drool as she so seamlessly slips away on the bed; her naked obese body, so recently scrubbed meticulously clean in preparation, is now disgracefully pungent with chemically-generated perspiration; the yogurty vomit that spilled up on its own is running past her polished teeth, filling her gurgling lungs and pooling beneath her fuzzy armpits onto the dirty sheets of the too-shallow bed. All this would have shamed her had she known of it. But this mess is not her fault. She creates filth not of her own volition. Pills, she thought, would be clean, a pristine slide into re-creation, away from the debris of this failed incarnation. Maybe next time she’d be a princess. Perhaps next time she’d be rich, famous, wanted. Possibly this extinguishment of the physical self was all part of a karmic script. An hour ago this notion had comforted her, for ideas of karma populated the sorts of books she read. Eastern, New Age, Occult. In her hometown she’d had to send away for the books and it made her feel special to know that no one else thereabouts read the same titles, only her.

On the oily bed her body suddenly begins moving, a rude thrashing, almost orgasmic in intensity. How it can still manage such a feat is a miracle, nothing less. So violent does this minuet become that the sheet is torn free from the mattress and wrinkles under her thighs like a crushed flower. One would have expected the time for convulsions to be past, but these animate her like a marionette with its strings gruesomely twisted, as she jerks and writhes and tries to find grace, tries to recapture balance, flailing without coordination, without destination, almost an automaton. Her darkened lips draw oval like a fish’s hunting for air, her lungs labor to supply their load but they are drowning, she is drowning, the tangy vomit, its trespass accidental, crudely lords its dominance over her. The body fights this war the brain has thrown onto it: the body does not want to die, it has a function.

Gallantly the long-abused physique contends with this circumstance, tries to achieve this victory for the consciousless connection of tissues that lies sprawled on the bed, its systems shutting off in sequence as its feet somehow find the ability to twitch: left, right, left, right, weaker than an instant before, the toes now hardly vibrating. Intelligence may have broken its lease but in this gloaming the brute reactant zone of the flesh valiantly wrestles to catch a fingerhold in the clay at the cliff’s face, to arrest the descent down into the looming emptiness that surges like a tide. If only there was a witness, a chronicler to record this bodily valor, this tenacious stance before death, how this mindless physiology, mere tool of biology, refuses to give up as the dead woman has, how the flesh and organs, skin and cells of the body twitch independently on, denying death for a moment more, holding on though all is lost, delaying the inevitable, shivering its musculature when nothing else remains to it, refusing to die.

---Circa 1998