This is the rough draft of the second part of my short story. The first part is also posted to our "myspace" page.
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An anechoic chamber is a psychoacoustic research devise. It is used to test sound sensitive technologies as well as the acoustical properties of the natural world. The projections of sound waves from a very high-end loudspeaker as well as the scattering of sound fields for the human head have, for instance, been accurately measured in one of these chambers.
As the name suggests an anechoic chamber is a room. This room is usually large enough to accommodate a few full grown adults. Four-foot long wedged fiberglass absorbers specially shaped to reflect sound waves toward the exterior of the room, and keep incidental acoustic energy trapped beneath their looming forms, prickle out from walls and ceilings facing all angels. These chambers have the futurist appearance of a Marvin the Martin cartoon or an early cubist painting. The name ‘anechoic’ literally means ‘without echo’; it is the most silent environment on the planet.
It was inside the anechoic chamber at Stanford University that the contemporary American composer John Cage heard the almost mechanical ambient whine of a distinctly high-pitched tone and a distinctly low-pitched tone. Neither of these tones oscillated and each where present during his entire stay in the chamber. Cage was later told that the high-pitched tone was the bleating of electrical activity of his nervous system; and the low tone, the moan of his blood debouching from capillaries to veins, and from veins to heart: In the most silent room in the world he had heard the evidence of his own life.
John Cage was moved by this experience to write his magnum opus—4’33”— in which a pianist with a stopwatch sits motionless at a grand piano for four minutes and thirty three seconds. For four minutes and thirty three second an audience member is forced to confront the absence of music, and in doing so inevitably notices the sounds of the room. Rain rapping skylights and windows; coats, like leaves and branches, rustling against arms and legs; a ringing of the ear; the respiratory ambience of the air ducts far above the heads of the listeners; coughing; muttering; all the living improvisation that usually goes unnoticed writhing between the notes. Cage persuades us that to be alive is to fill silence.
One is tempted to imagine Abraham Failer transported in the moments succeeding his death to a performance of 4’33”. Abraham sits, gaunt, sallow, his skin clinging to the latticework of his bones and muscles like a thin wet cloth, the outline of his skull visible beneath the feathers of his white hair, the crux of his throat exaggerated by the thinness of his neck, the bulging of his hooded eyes embellished by the deep moat of their orbits. The dead man perches like a vulture in the midst of a well dressed crowd of seensters, hipsters and the avant-elite unable to hear the pulse of his blood or the din of his nervous system. Abraham would hear silence. Real dead silence. The silence of his own static internal organs; the cold of the tiled floor; the yawning of the shape of the room; the empty spaces outside the window; the crushing hush of the universe: Silence.
Shortly after he died Abraham did not hear the approach of the physician. Abraham did not hear the physician’s questions. He heard the nearly empty room in a new way. He heard the absence of his own heartbeat; a sound that he had never attended to but which, in its stay, had left a disturbing stillness. Abraham did not notice the physician until the physician’s stethoscope was hovering above his chest. At which point Abraham turned his head to face the physician who, divested of any notion that he was face to face with a living man, fled the lonely hallway.
The physician placed an alarmed call to his superior—the head physician of Mt. Zion—who personally verified her colleague’s conclusions about Abraham’s state: He was dead. The head physician’s findings worked their way up an abstract hierarchy of command through a chain reaction of increasingly frantic phone calls which eventually resulted in the complete quarantine of Mt. Zion.
A full physical, blood screen, and relocation of all patients became the responsibility of a government medical team which swiftly took control of the facilities. The medical, scientific, and philosophical import of such an anomaly seemed clear. A research grant was drafted and eventually a special team of researchers headed by a neurologist, a cognitive psychologist, a linguist, and a professor of anatomy was assembled to study the great aberration of the man who survived death.
An article of the teams entail findings was published in the journal Nature: Abraham was not the victim of disease. There was no detectable contagion keeping him in an animate state. C.A.T scans revealed no brain activity whatsoever though he could walk, dress himself, and even seemed to mournfully affirm his own sunken face in a mirror. Many of the researchers metaphysical question—did he think? did he have the mind of a child or a man? did he have memories? could he be taught?— where resolved by Abraham himself when he surprisingly rested the power of speech from his own dead lungs.
He did not breathe. He had to affect speech by swallowing air and forcing it out of his mouth with quick spasmodic contractions of the stomach—like a kind of solo Heimlich maneuver. The air escaping from his throat would vibrate his vocal cords resulting in a series of guttural croaks that sounded something like the highbred of a broken outboard motor and a belch.
It was not a pleasant experience to be present when Abraham “spoke”. His utterances where viscose pathological moans that where torn from his liver and delivered to his mouth by an act of great will power. He gagged, spit, and trembled. One half expected the words to flop from his mouth and flounder dying on the cold floor. Because of the effort, and the spectacle, Abraham spoke only on such occasion as to express a desire.
He did just that one night in response to a curious tremor of his left ring finger. Some time during his dreamless twilight the dead man became aware of the conative circular motion of his digit. His finger was making tipsy loops like it was carelessly twining an invisible lock of hair.
“Nuuuuuurrrsss!” croaked Abraham.
The professor of anatomy presently appeared in the doorway. He did not ask for the details of his subject’s distress. In fact he never asked Abraham anything. He never addressed Abraham. He had learned in his first year of medical school to detach himself from the dead. Mentally excoriating the viscid traces of laughter, crying, thoughtfulness or any other expressions from the faces of the deceased was a task that he now preformed on an unconscious level; this was simply a corps of an unusual kind. He saw no shade of a mien in Abraham.
“My” Abraham sighed in an unintended imitation of Frankenstein’s monster “fingeeeeer”.
Abraham raised his hand to meet the dispassionate gaze of the professor. The professor seized the hand, turned it palm up, and raised it to his bespectacled eyes, with one swift motion; as though Abraham had stolen the hand from him and he was appraising it for damage. The professor inspected the finger and found several small holes directly beneath it at the pad of Abraham’s palm. It was not the unconscious impulse of muscles from some animal part of the dead man’s brain circumnavigating the socket of the finger: Abraham was being eaten by worms. The motion—perhaps the chewing or maybe churning—of the worms was somehow driving the finger to trace an orbit.
The dead man’s body was decaying. His skin was mutating into carrion and attracting coffin flies and blue beetles. The insect’s larva where entering, microscopic, into the pours of his skin and masticating their way back to the surface. Soon the heat generated by the chewing of millions of tiny boneless jaws, and the unconscious circular wriggling of the larva, would catalyze the growth of the microbes and bacteria already present in Abraham’s gut. Something had to be done. Loosing the only man to survive death to the pressures of decomposition was out of the question. Abraham was too valuable to humanity.
Another grant was written and a wing of a nearby public aquarium was vacated. The dolphin tank was emptied; the animals where set free and the tank filled with formaldehyde. Abraham was to make his quarters here: Safely insolated from natural forces behind a urine colored veneer in the most lifeless environment on the planet.
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Again, feel free to criticize especialy the last few paragraphs. There is a third and final part to come: It will be posted soonish.