Part 3
An excruciating sense of heaviness
met Mortimer when he felt his thick blood begin to work its way back through
his veins. His eyelids weighted down on his face, too weary to lift themselves.
Hadn’t he just been sprinting?
He lie still for several minutes, gathering
up his strength ounce by ounce to open his eyes. Once he had summoned the pure
force of will, he shot his eyes open. The blinding brightness from an overhead
surgical lamp burned his retinas and caused his recently underused pupils to
dilate at an unhealthy speed, forcing his eyes closed and causing a fair amount
of ironic humor. Behind the ambient sounds of heart monitors and life support
systems beeping he thought he heard his wife.
He chanced opening an eye again,
this time cautiously. A thousand dangling tube fibers hung from the ceiling,
each one embedded in his skin. Doctors swarmed above him, gently removing the needles.
His body had been unable to process the anesthetic while he had been dead, so
his limbs still bore a lingering numbness.
“Welcome back to the realm of the
living, Mortimer,” said an intern in an unnecessarily dramatic tone. “You’ll be
happy to know that you are now one hundred percent cancer free! We’ll get you a
copy of your death certificate as a memento and get you into physical therapy
as soon as you rest up, alright?
“Muuhhh” replied Mortimer as
eloquently as he could. A supervising doctor took note of this response on a
notepad she had been scribbling on, documenting the procedure so that the
results could be sent back to the University
of Central Michigan
“How are you feeling, Mortimer?”
asked the chronicler after she finished her memo. Mortimer turned his head to
face her. “Nnnn… Not all that bad, I guess… Am I still dead? Initial difficulty communicating orally. Potentially
permanent side-effect of deadness. Effects subside rapidly, scribbled
the chronicler without responding.
“There is one thing you should
know, sir,” said a different doctor. Mortimer was finding it difficult to keep
track of who was talking. He turned his sore neck towards the new voice. “Sometime
before you were killed, a tube fiber was misplaced on your left arm. It was a
minor artery, but the dead tissue spread too far before we were able to detect
it twelve days later. It was necessary to amputate your arm. I’m sorry, sir,
but there was nothing we could do.”
The doctor was perplexed at
Mortimer’s calm as he thanked the doctor for the news and asked to see his
wife. Once he was sure that a reasonable number of the tube fibers had been
removed and properly set up for cleaning, he went out into the hall and
informed Mortimer’s wife that she was allowed to see her husband. He stood
outside the operating room window and watched as Mortimer and his wife were
reunited.
Another doctor came up beside him
and watched the emotional scene within. “Amazing technology, isn’t it? We just
gave that guy his life back.” The calm the doctor had witnessed didn’t bother
him so much anymore, as the pure happiness of the situation washed over him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I guess we did.”
In a vast and empty plain, a robed
skeletal figure relinquished his search for Mortimer. He had initially found it
odd that he had arrived early to that realm, but now found sense in it.
“Sixty three more days, then.”
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