Death’s Secrets

by Simon Owens

It has come to the point in my life to where I no longer know when I’m dreaming of dying or when it’s actually happening; the two coincide so perfectly that I can’t tell the difference. I come out from an origin I know nothing of and penetrate through the haze to my conscious plane. Eyes closed, I could be dead, my body in a state prepared for decaying, or I could be alive, with my mind cranking away and just imagining the memories of me killing myself, knowing that my efforts are futile. You see, my friend, my life cannot cease, my breathing can only decline for a short while, and my heart’s struggle is endless. Unbelievable but true. I’ve tried many forms of suicide to cut off my link to this world. I’ll spare you the ugly details, but I assure you that my creativity has reached a peak of brilliance when it comes to death.

Time will tell for sure, no doubt, but I am tired of waiting. I’m tired of falling in love; I’m tired of watching them retreat into death, knowing that I cannot follow. Mainly I’m just tired. The reason? It’s because I’m afraid of what sleep brings--an escape from reality. As my life draws on, I feel myself being torn from the real world, and everything that embraces me is a mirage it seems.

Somebody once told me that inspiration is the key to happiness. Inspiration by definition is a form of motivation or stimulation. Sometimes I could just be standing in the shower, letting the water course down my body, watching the pearls of liquid bounce off my biceps, and I can’t help feeling like a human god. Anything is within my grasp; my life can be an escape from physical boundaries if I want it to. But I’m what you might call a higher level thinker but a lower lever doer. My goals sit on the lonely horizon, close enough for me to see but too far away to take hold of. My shrink tells me that I’m “stuck.” He speaks to me as if every word that comes out of my mouth is a key into my mind, one only he can use. He tells me my mind has to “process” the events in my life, as if my brain is a computer that has to contemplate and place data in order to function. My body is a machine. My mind, however, has the freedom that no man-made object will ever possess.

But my jolts of inspiration in the shower are mere pinpricks to the power that flows through me at other times. There have been instances when I’ve been sitting in a Roman Catholic church, listening to the chanting and praying of my neighbors when I can almost seize the secret to my essence. I stare upward, my eyes roaming over the lonely crucifix isolated on the wall. I ponder over the horror-stricken eyes of Christ. The answers to everything lay just beyond his dilated pupils. He sees through these plastered walls into a time that existed before even I was born. The thorns surrounding his head dig and probe at the knowledge that lays under his skull, the blood which fuels his body but not his soul drips down his tortured face. The posture and stance of his beaten body forms a symbol that even now brings awe to its worshipers. His hands and feet--an unknown agony that must be ripping through his entire body. There they are, the crowd, feeding upon his misery, his torture giving them ecstasy. They stand in his shadow, yelling up to the Heavens and beyond: “ Crucify him!” The weather responds to their unending fury, strengthening their will: “ CRUCIFY HIM!” And in absolute terror I see myself in that crowd, murder carved into my eyes, evil inscribed upon my tensed muscles, power coursing through my upraised fist. “ Crucify Him!” I yell in a hoarse voice, the veins throbbing in my head, and I notice that I can hear my heartbeat even over all this noise, my stubborn, undying heart, and then everything goes dark.

My eyes open and my nose detects the odor of incense mingled with the smell of sweat. The sound of the church choir can not even begin to compare to the cacophony which is pulsating through my head. I watch as the priest walks up the aisle, and I know now that the celebration of mass has reached its end. I look at the crucifix again, and it’s obvious that it is nothing but an icon of the power which has me in its fist. In an ungraceful lurch I run from the church burning off the currents of fire searing through my blood, wasting all this power which has been given to me. It is time for me to die again even though I know that death is only a temporary relief for me. I will always be there to meet the sunrise.

In my long, sorry life, I have come to the realization that in order to completely understand the idea of death, you must first consider its opposite circumstance: birth. Somebody once said that once you’re born you start to die. This is such a pessimistic way to look at life, but I’ve learned that it’s true. As soon as the matter that will soon congeal into your body starts to form in your mother’s uterus an imaginary clock starts counting down the seconds towards your death. Some people have better made clocks than others, but more often than not you’ll find a spring or two loose in a man or woman’s clock, one that is sure to call forth death and misery. My clock, however, defies the imagination and tests the limits of the unbelievable. Not only does it never stop ticking, but my aging process ceased to continue at the age of twenty.

My own birth was unique because it was a foreshadowing of things to come even if nobody had realized it then. I died for the first time in my life before my head ever broke the surface into the light of day. My family would tell the story for years and years after it happened, all the way up to their deathbeds. I, of course, remember none of it, but the descriptions that my family members gave to me were horribly true.

They pulled me out of my mother more than three months before they were expecting me. She suffered through six hours of intense labor, sweat trailing down her cheeks like rivers, eyes bulging and staring to the sky for some prayer of help. She later told me it was the most excruciating pain she had ever been afflicted with, more so than all my other brothers and sisters combined. I could imagine my father and the other people in the room, only able to sit back and watch as my mother was put through the most unbearable agony of her life, helpless to relieve her. After many hours of crude, atrocious screaming their curiosity was sated as my head reached the surface. I met the world in silence, my face a dark, bloodless blue, my lifeless hands hanging limp at my side. The umbilical cord was wrapped three times around my neck. I was dead, my life taken away by asphyxiation. The verdict was simple: my mother’s pain could be blamed on the fact that I was not alive to help her, I was nothing but a sack of grain being forced through her body’s tensed, high strung muscles. I was a breathless bag of meat, but the emotional pain that my parents went through after the discovery of my death must have been insufferable. A cousin of ours was finally able to pry my dead body from their arms and brought me into a back room and laid me down in a cradle where I was to wait until proper funeral arrangements were made. That was the last they saw of me until they were awoken by my screaming the very next morning. Back then they called it a miracle. Now I just call it a curse. Perhaps the curse is nothing but a genetic disorder which exists in my blood, but somehow I don’t think so.

The blood which flows through my veins fuels a compassion which dwells within me. This obdurate body of mine stands still in time, watching the objects around it corrode but it is unable to join in on the fun, but my mind has cultivated in its wisdom over the decades, providing me with an uncanny sense of intelligence and astuteness. Yet still I yearn for the love and affection which any male desires in his normal life time. My eyes feast on the presence of any beauty, whether it be nature or women. I covet the ardor of a female; it seems to be the only weakness I was born with.

I fell in love for the first time when I was only fifteen years of age, scarcely old enough to shave. Her name was Bethany, and her exquisiteness was strong enough to shame the most beautiful aspects of nature into hibernation. Call to mind the most picturesque facet of the deepest rain forest, think of the cold morning rain dripping through the green leaves of heaven, and then you will understand what it was like to gaze into her eyes, those deep sapphires of jade. She owned the bodice of an angel, and her soul seemed to glide through the deepest sunset. Her skin had the rich texture of silk, but had the warmth and love which no fabric will ever encompass. Her words contained the music and poetry of a Shakespeare play rising up into a fervent climax. We kissed for the first time under a three hundred year old bridge in Europe, and that memory stands as the only crutch which keeps me sane today.

I’ve found that younger people have the most tender and easily broken hearts. They think that love is some secret which they were lucky enough to stumble upon, so they choose to cherish it, to embrace it. Most times they try to grab hold of it too quickly and it crumbles away in their hands. I married Bethany when I was only 17 years old, making the mistake of handing out my heart when it was the most vulnerable. She took it with the best intentions, but in this case that wasn’t good enough.

I can still remember, after all these years, how we used to lay in the shade of the cemetery statues, contemplating mortality, death, sin. Little did I know then that death would only remain a word for me, since I would never get to experience it first hand. We sat in silence, waiting for long dead spirits to burden us with their wisdom, their tales of agony, their instances of joy. I miss those imaginative ghosts. These days, when I sleep, they haunt me, mocking me because I can’t cross the line to their world. One soul, with a burned and disfigured face, laughs at me , knowing that his painful death is more desirable than my painless life. I act like I don’t care, but I do, and I always will.

The thought that leaves me content is the fact that in the beginning, everything was all right. In the beginning we were both innocent and ignorant, and the two worked together well enough to keep us happy. The kisses were long and soft, and they weren’t ended with regret. We were both in love at first, and that, at least, should count for something. It wasn’t until we reached the age of forty when things began to run sour. By now, we had four kids, and Bethany was already beginning to possess the signs of a woman who has passed her prime. Wrinkles were starting to form at her eyes and mouth. Gray hairs were starting to peek out of formerly dark hair. Even her body was taking on the toll of age. And here I was, forty years old, and I was still as strong and athletic as I was when I was twenty. It was at this point that I started to figure out that something was very wrong with me, but back then I didn’t have a clue to what it was. I didn’t take it too seriously though, and neither did Bethany. After all, forty wasn’t that old of an age. Sure, looking that young at forty wasn’t normal, but it wasn’t exactly a miracle of science either. But once we reached the age of fifty it was a different story. By now Bethany’s hair had turned almost completely gray, and her body had lost its feminine shape. I, myself, was still a young man, energetic and full of strength, and there was no use trying to deny that things were progressing into the extreme abnormal. I would wake up to see her staring at me with unmasked confusion. I would walk into a room and find her silently crying, and when she’d see me she would try to dry up and act like nothing was wrong. I remember making several attempts to bring up the subjects which must have been tearing her mind apart, but she always refused to speak of it, as if she could pretend that the issue wasn’t there and maybe it would go away.

Finally, the uncertainty and confusion must have brought her to the brink of insanity. The love had slowly slipped out of her eyes, taking all the beauty with it. She now viewed me as a freak of nature rather than her husband, and this inevitably drove her away. I came home late from the fields one day to find her gone. She had taken up our kids and left, traveling on to some unknown place. She couldn’t even leave me a note of explanation, because back then neither of us knew how to read or write. Depression overcame me, as what had been the most important thing in my life, my family, clawed my heart out and dragged it away.

So I dwelled in that house for years, too attached to it to sell it and move on. During all that time I would fall asleep while holding her things close to me, smelling her lovely scent, and I could almost believe she was sleeping right beside me, as young and as beautiful as ever, but every time I opened my eyes I faced the cold, empty side of the bed. The house eventually began to wither and rot, as I no longer took the time to maintain it. In short, I submersed myself into my own self-created Hell, hating it and loving it both at the same time. It wasn’t until I witnessed Bethany’s death when my Hell no longer satisfied me.

The end of her life called me subconsciously, her mind must have projected out wanting and need and I reacted to the calling as if years hadn’t separated her departure from now. I woke up one morning from my smelly and disgusting sheets and I knew that she was dying, and I also knew that she was clinging onto life only so she could see me. I left the house to find her, and it was to be the last time I passed through its doorway.

I found her in less than two days, in a nearby town less than five miles from the house I grew up in. Instinct pulled me towards her, and it was because of this unnatural calling that I stumbled into the building where she would spend her last few minutes of life.

I ran into the room where she was laying, and at first I didn’t recognize her. She was now a withered old woman. There was not an inch of her skin which wasn’t wrinkled, what little hair she had left was snow white, and when she opened her mouth to say my name I could see that she didn’t have a single tooth to call her own. She had reached the end of her life, and it seemed at first that she had changed too much for me to identify her. But as I got closer, I peered into her eyes, and they held the same heavenly beauty as they did when I first met her.

“ Bethany,” I said softly, my throat congested with tears.

“ You heard me calling you,” her ancient mouth replied. “ Last night I dreamed of you. You were an old man, and we sat in the cemetery just like old times and talked to the ghosts, knowing that we would soon be joining them. I guess I know now that this is only a half truth. You won’t by seeing them any time soon.” She was trying to cry now, but her tear ducts were just as dried up as the rest of her.

“ Why did you call for me Bethany?” I asked, trying to hide the emotions which were ripping me apart.

“ To ask for your forgiveness,” she replied. “ I wanted you to understand why I did the thing that I did.”

“ I never blamed you for leaving me, Bethany. How could I? I mean, look at me.” I pointed at my chest, as if to emphasize the fact that I was impossible to live with due to the sheer sight of me.

“ I know that you never blamed me for leaving you,” she said. “ I wanted you to forgive me for not trying to cope with what you were.” She left off there, her beautiful eyes studying me for a physical reaction.

I wanted nothing more than to just say: ‘ of course I forgive you’, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t help myself from remembering how she hadn’t even tried to make an attempt to understand me or my condition, especially when I had tried to speak of it to her. She had given me the final verdict without even consulting me first.

She seemed to interpret what I was thinking even though I hadn’t yet voiced it out loud, because her face sagged lower than it already was.

“ I don’t blame you,” she said softly, before closing her eyes. “ Goodbye lover, I go now to join the ghosts, I leave to haunt my own ignorance and self pity.” And just like that she died, taking in one last breath before her lungs ceased to continue forever. Her eyes managed to produce a single tear, and it traveled through her wrinkles like a mountain stream.

I just stood there in shock, not even bothering to walk over to her and check to see if she was truly dead. My heart beat quickened and I closed my eyes to keep my world from going dizzy, but it was useless. I could feel a sickness rising from my stomach and I sprinted out of the room in an attempt to push it back down. I ran for almost an entire hour before I felt it was safe to stop. I fell to the ground, gasping for breath, squinting at the bright sun which was beating down on me. After a few minutes I was finally able to prop myself up onto my elbows and see where I was. I was surprised to see that I had led myself back to the bridge which Bethany and I had first kissed under. I ran my eyes up its ancient pillars all the way up to its massive height. I looked back down to the waters which flowed beneath its center and came to a decision on what I must do. I hauled my aching and tired body to a standing position and limped my way over to the beginning of the bridge.

I climbed up its stony structure, the incline trying to pull me down, my tired legs barely able to support me, but I pushed on, my determination acting as a source of energy. I used its rocky ledge to balance me, and in ten minutes I finally reached its top. Once there, I climbed onto the side and peered down to the dark water below me. The current called to me, just as Bethany called to me in her last days of life. I stood up straight and closed my eyes, and the beauty of her face hid in the darkness behind my closed eye-lids. I watched as she opened her mouth and I listened as she said one word: “ Jump.”

I opened my eyes and leapt, my arms outsplayed like wings. It was almost like taking flight. Instead of being frightened I enjoyed the feel of the wind as it gradually sped up and pushed against my face. I watched as the darkness climbed up to me at a quickening speed, until it filled up my entire line of sight, and finally I hit the water.

For a few blissful minutes I was dead, but for me its sweetness was only temporary. The pain from a jagged rock woke me and I coughed out the water which had been floating in my lungs. My worst fears were finally confirmed. Not only was I immune to old age, but I was immune to death as well. I pulled my half-submersed body out of the water and walked away, embarking on a new life.

Since then I’ve tried many forms of suicide, experimenting with my creativity to see if I was really immortal. I was surprised how easy it came to me. Most people who do kill themselves usually have to build themselves up mentally to do it. They’re frightened and nervous, and for good reason. No one knows what to expect once they leave this world. What exists beyond it? Resolve? Damnation? I however, have always looked forward to it with anticipation. Every time I would come up with a new idea for ending my life I would rush back and forth, gathering the things I needed to fulfill my task.

In the beginning, I started with the normal methods of suicide. I cut arteries, only to wake up later covered in dried blood. I would impale myself and open my eyes to the sight of the blade laying on the floor in front of me. I would drink poison and I would black out, but I always came back with vomit on my lap. I was bewildered as to how it worked, at first I didn’t understand how I could stay alive, because during the time between when I kill myself and when I actually wake is a blank for me. I’m not conscious, so I can’t observe how my body heals.

I set out to find an answer to this problem on my own, and it didn’t take long to solve the dilemma. But at first my efforts didn’t work, because I made the mistake of relying on others. I started by seeking out people in need of money and luring them back to my house by waving coins under their noses. They followed me there and I sat them down and they watched as I locked the money in a safe. I explained to them that they would get the money once they did what needed to be done. I wanted them to stay there once I died and then tell me what would happen as I healed. But every time I woke up I would face an empty room, they were never there. I wondered how horrifying it must have been when I healed, for not even the bravest man would stay there until the end.

The years passed on and I puzzled over how I could get past the use of human help. If only I could find some way to mechanically observe my passing and my rebirth, but at first the primitive times which I lived in kept me from doing so. Thankfully, technology solved my problem for me. As I made my way through the 20th century, I was more than delighted when the first video-camera was invented, and I was among the first to buy one of course. I set up my own private studio and began killing myself continuously, trying past techniques so I could gain a better understanding. The first time I did it I used the most vile and potent poison imaginable, injecting it into my veins. Later, I watched on the television screen as I first passed out, and then as my skin turned a dark, deathly green. Blood and vomit started to leak out of my mouth and finally my chest stopped moving, signifying my death. To my unending amazement, in less than an hour I could see as at first the greenish color of my skin slowly began to diminish, as the blood began leaking out of my mouth once again, and finally as my chest once more began to move up and down. It was a miracle and no less. It was something out of a fantasy or horror story, seemingly too surreal to be true. But I had the proof right there in front of me and there was no way to contradict it. The next thing I did was impale myself in several places with the sharpest blade I could find. I cut into both of my legs and stabbed both of my arms, and finally ended by plunging it deep into my chest, then sat back and let the camera do its work. An hour later I watched as the wounds first stopped bleeding, and then actually reversed themselves, drawing the blood back into them and then sealing themselves together, leaving unblemished skin. I even went as far as cutting off entire body parts, but they only grew back, like the limbs of certain animals. It was like watching a science fiction movie where I was playing the leading role. It was beyond description.

All this happened over a very large span of years, more than 200 I think. Knowing this, one would realize that I had a lot of time to kill. I couldn’t spend all of my time committing suicide, so I had to resort to other measures of filling up my days. My love for Bethany had never faltered, even after her death, and I still wished to have a link to my family, even if it was a distant one. After she died, I set out to find my sons and daughters, who by now had grown up and moved away to live independent, separate lives. When I found them though, I forced myself not to come in contact with them, because I didn’t want to put them through the same pain and torture as I had with Bethany. So I watched, content that I could be proud of their achievements even if I didn’t get to congratulate them for it. Eventually they grew old and died, but my family genes lived on and grew strong, as my relatives multiplied considerably.

I always couldn’t help from being surprised when new-born babies, even generations after my sons and daughters, would still come into this world carrying our family resemblance. You would think that my blood line would quickly thin out of the family as it branched off into different marriages, but I constantly found myself startled when I would look into a baby’s eyes and see Bethany’s green brilliance swimming in them, or my dark and rugged features. Fifty years after my oldest son died, a boy named Seth was born, and once he reached his manhood I was amazed to see that the only--only-- difference between him and me was the fact that he was an inch or two taller than me. He didn’t have my curse of immortality though, and I couldn’t help myself from hating him a little for it. Maybe these children had their own way of haunting me, just like the ghosts which dwelled in that long-ago cemetery. Their physical characteristics were a symbolic representation of me, and their retreat from life was a harsh realization which never failed to take me off-guard.

At first, I kept to my self-promise that I would always view them from a distance, never straying close enough to come into contact with them. After the introduction of the 20th century though, I wasn’t able to help myself. My need and desire to be with them had grown so much that it was now an unbearable agony ripping me apart internally. Tentatively, I introduced myself into their world. I started out with minor interaction, things like standing next to them while waiting for a train and striking up a small conversation with them, or showing up at their work places with well-rehearsed questions and comments which had to do with their profession. One time, I even pretended to be a news-journalist and convinced one of them to let me conduct a personal interview. Every time I would meet one of them my heartbeat would quicken in anticipation and my senses would make the world somehow more distinct. The colors were brighter, scents were sweeter, sounds would reverberate through my ears longer than they should have. It got to the point when these trifle occurrences of meeting no longer satisfied me, and I wanted to try a closer relationship with one of them.

So that is why I finally befriended a little boy named Cory, a kid whose eyes were perhaps an even more complex green than Bethany’s. I chose him because he was an orphan, both of his parents dead from an unfortunate car accident, and he was the easiest to gain access to. He was an eight-year-old who spent his days in an orphanage, and I first met him through a program called “ The Big Brother Project”, a creative way to introduce family lifestyle to a kid by dumping him on a volunteer willing to give up his or her time. I, of course, was the perfect candidate, and over the following weeks I slowly began to form a bond with him which I hadn’t thought possible. Up until that point I had almost forgotten what it was like to be carrying a little one under my wing, and it didn’t take me long to get back into the habit and ease of caring for a child. He was a bright kid, both smart and cunning, and easy to talk to. His true intelligence didn’t dawn on me though until he pointed out that my outward appearance didn’t reflect my true age.

We had been at a local park playground, him swinging on the monkey bars and me reading to myself, when he asked a question I didn’t hear.

“ What?” I asked, a little annoyed that I had been torn from my reading.

“ How old are you?” Cory asked again, looking at me with uncanny intelligence, or more accurately, he was looking at my eyes, as if trying to test what I was about to say for its truthfulness.

Even though I had no intention of actually telling him the truth, the question made me think. How old was I? I didn’t know, but more importantly, I realized it didn’t matter. What did age mean to somebody who lived forever? Nothing. But instead of giving him a rough estimate of my age I gave him the most believable answer:

“ Twenty.”

“ Twenty?” he asked, for some reason looking shocked.

“ Yes, twenty,” I replied, feeling like a broken record, repeating that same number as if I could believe it.

“ Then how come your eyes are so old?” he said, and now it was my turn to look shocked. Had I really thought I could fool him just because he was a little kid? Memories started to pull themselves to the surface, and I tried to keep them down but it was useless. I remembered how Bethany had gone insane when she realized what this little boy was already beginning to suspect. Suddenly, I felt like crying, and not because of the memories which had drudged their way up. I knew now that Cory was in danger of sharing the same fate as Bethany, and I loved him too much to take that risk.

“ C’mon Cory, it’s time to go home,” I said, trying to hold back the tears attempting to burst out of my eyes.

“ But we just got here,” his whiny, eight-year-old voice replied.

“ I know that Cory, but it’s time to go.” I turned my head away from him, so he couldn’t see the look of depression on my face.

“ What did I do wrong?” he asked guiltily, tears starting to well up inside him also.

You broke my heart, you tore it out just as Bethany did, I wanted to say but didn’t.

“ Nothing, you didn’t do anything.” I said, and when I said goodbye to him fifteen minutes later it was the last time I saw him, a little defenseless boy who realized somehow that his anciently old brother was going to leave him to fend for himself.

Needless to say, that night I felt like dying. Needless to say I did just that.

Cory stayed in my dreams for a long time after that. Always he would stop and look back at me, taking a mental photograph of my face as I took one of his. So now I found myself wanting to die for different reasons. Before, it had been so that I could escape life, this time I wanted to escape guilt. I had lit a fire within Cory and had fueled it into a searing flame, and then on my own accord I had extinguished that fire. Soon I was opening my mind to different possibilities of death. Perhaps I had been wrong in searching myself for an answer for my self-destruction. Maybe I should have been looking in a different direction…

It was this line of thinking which caused me to make the biggest mistake of my long, long life. I still look back at that time and wonder what had possessed me to do the things that I did. I committed what is possibly the most unforgivable sin: murder.

This was my line of reasoning: To me, the art of Death is a secret. For most people, it is just a phase of life, but I wasn’t lucky enough to be born with an internal clock like everyone else. I thought that by trying to study myself to learn Death’s secrets had been an act of ignorance on my part, since my body wasn’t formed with the common knowledge which most bodies have. My sanity must have left me for a short while because I concluded that I would have to observe the death of a normal Human being to find the key to ending my existence.

So thinking, I set out to find a victim, my mind canceling out the morality of what I was doing by focusing on the slight chance that the idea might work. But to be truthful, it seemed to me to be a lot more than a slight chance that it would work. I was crazy enough to believe that it would almost positively work out.

One week after I made the decision I was walking along a sidewalk and an alcoholic was thrown into my arms, as if God was saying: “ Here, take this one.” My first instinct wasn’t to look at the man I was holding, but to the holy presence which had given him to me. I looked up to see a muscular man who looked like he had been crudely carved out of rock. He was almost seven feet tall and he looked down at the man in my arms with unhidden contempt. Almost as an afterthought he glanced up at me and voiced a rough apology before turning and shutting the door behind him. My eyes wandered up above the door and I read “ PHILMAN’S BAR” written in large, flaking letters. I had just begun to wonder why this man was thrown out when he vomited all over the front of my shirt. The stuff was putrid and disgusting, but the most significant thing I noticed about it was that there was a fair amount of blood floating in the green mess. I tilted his chin up with my finger and he looked at me with bloodshot, murky eyes. His hair was a mess, probably ridden with lice and other parasites. His face hadn’t seen a blade in days, and stubble sprouted out of his face in patches. Worst of all though was the yellow, sickening color of his skin. I could have been wrong, but I automatically assumed that his liver had seen better days.

“ Whiskey,” he whispered softly, his breath making me want to hold my own.

“ You want whiskey?” I asked, still convinced that it wasn’t a coincidence that this man was in my arms.

“ Whiskey,” he repeated in his slurry, liquid voice.

“ All right, fellow,” I replied. “ Where I’ll bring you there will be plenty of whiskey.”

At the sound of this some amount of his wits crept back into his eyes. He opened his mouth to grin and I saw that what teeth he had left were blackened and at different variations of decay. I pulled off my winter jacket and wrapped it around his bony shoulders. “ C’mon, I have a warm fire waiting for us at home.”

“ And whiskey?” he asked, he carried the look of a person who thought it was too good to be true. He was probably wondering how he had become so lucky, just like I was doing right then.

“ And whiskey,” I answered, flashing him a grin of my own. “ What is your name, by the way?” I asked casually.

“ Fisha’” he replied, and I assumed he meant Fisher. Fisher…perhaps that should have been my name instead, for I was the one who was luring him, using alcohol as my bait. Even through my excitement I was able to make this connection.

We walked all the way back to my house with him gibbering off in idiotic conversation while I listened. He talked about his hatred with the owner of Philman’s Bar, who had no trust in poor Fisher, and who wouldn’t believe that he would eventually pay him back. I, of course, agreed with everything he said, all too aware that each step brought me closer to enlightenment. As time went on his words started to become a little less slurred as the alcohol slowly began to wash out of his system. His words and thoughts started to become more intelligent, and I feared that he would start to question why I would take a perfect stranger into my house to drink with me, but I guess he wanted the booze so badly that he didn’t dare question were it came from.

At long last we reached my house, and I opened the door to usher him inside. He just stood there on the doorstep for a moment, perhaps somehow sensing deep down inside of him that something was very wrong about this whole situation. But the alcoholic need must have been too great, because he once again gave me a toothless grin and stepped inside. I closed the door behind us.

I led him down the long expanse of my hallway, switching on lights as I went. He was still talking his mindless blabber, but I was no longer listening. I had a hunger growing inside of me not all that different from his.

We reached the kitchen and he abruptly shut up, sensing that his hunger was about to be sated. I moved over near the sink and opened up my liquor cabinet, which had a fine collection of different name brand bottles. I also had a good taste for liquor, although it couldn’t begin to compare to that of Fisher’s. I picked out the first bottle of whiskey I saw and displayed it for him to ogle over, and ogle he did. His eyes became locked on the cap, and I humorously moved it back and forth and watched as his eyes followed.

“ How’s this look?” I asked teasingly, flashing the label for him to see it.

“ It looks swell,” he replied without hesitation. “ But…” His eyes lowered down to the ground.

“ But what?” I asked, scared that he might back out of this after all.

“ Well…I don’t exactly have any money on me right now.” His head snapped up suddenly as he said the words which he had no doubt said a thousand times before: “ I can pay you back.”

This for some reason struck me as hideously funny and I started laughing hysterically. This man was talking about paying me, not knowing that he would be paying me soon, although not with money. He gave me a confused look for a second before letting out a donkey laugh of his own. Don’t get the punch line of a joke? Well just laugh along anyway and maybe this odd man will give you a drink. Well, who was I to defy this man from his pleasure? I unscrewed the cap and filled up a glass I got from the sink. He took it from my hands before I even got a chance to offer it to him. Drink up you greedy pig, you’ll be able to compensate for it soon.

The first glass he drank he gulped it down in less than a few seconds, but the second one I poured he sipped patiently, as if he was at a formal party and I was the butler who gave him his mixed drink.

Soon, he began to get bored with the plain manner of the kitchen and, without warning or asking, started walking off to snoop around my house. I followed him into the place which I called the “family room,” because of the hundreds of pictures on the wall. Generations upon generations were piled into this room, everybody who had the slightest link to my family heritage. It was eerie sometimes, being somewhere where most of the people looked like either Bethany or me. It was sometimes extraordinary how closely some of the people had come to looking like us.

Fisher walked over and picked up a picture of a girl named Becky, who was almost the exact replica of Bethany. The bone structure, skin color, hair color, and eye color were exactly the same. He pointed to her, his dirt encrusted fingernail touching the glass.

“ This your wife?” he asked, showing me his ugly grin.

Since the resemblance was so similar, I lied: “ Yes it is.”

“ She’s pretty.”

“ Thank-you.”

“ I wouldn’t mind getting down those pants, you know what I mean? Eh?” He laughed to show he thought he was funny.

“ Is that so?” I said this in a normal enough tone, but my eyes were on fire with anger. The fact that this low-life was picturing my wife naked was almost unthinkable. He, though, was oblivious to my fury and continued to walk around the room. He continually raised his glass to his lips to drink greedily, wiping at his mouth afterwards with my coat sleeve. The first glass he had drunk in my kitchen had already begun to take affect, and now he was starting to stumble and stagger just as he had when I first met him. This was one cause for his sudden death; the other was because he neglected to tie his shoe-lace. He brought one foot up and put it in front of the other, but this time the lace had flipped forward and it was caught under his heel. The next foot came up, and as the lace tightened he tripped, increasing momentum as he fell. His first instinct had been to reach out his hand to catch himself, but the alcohol had made him too slow for that. All he succeeded in doing was hitting one of the pictures off the table on his way down. The frame flew across the room and the glass shattered into a thousand pieces on the ground. My eyes widened as it dawned on me that the picture he had broken was none other than Cory; his eight-year-old face grinned up at me below the jagged pieces of glass.

“ Awful sorry about that,” Fisher said as he clumsily pulled himself to his feet. “ I’ll pay for the frame of course.”

“ I know you will,” I replied as I started to move towards him. I picked up speed as I moved.

“ Of course I won’t be able to pay you right now,” he said sheepishly, not aware of the danger he was in.

“ Yes you can,” I said solemnly, and sprang forward.

The weight of my muscular body hit his bony one and brought him to the ground once more, only much harder this time. I knocked his breath out during the fall, and I planned to keep it out. Already the drunken stupor was leaving him as the shock of my attack started to sober him up.

“ I’m so sorry, sir, I’ll fix the frame, I promise.” His pleas were pathetic and worthless; all they did was make me want to kill him more.

“ Where you’re going,” I replied, “ You won’t be fixing anything.” And this is when I brought my hands to his throat. Even before I met this man I knew that I would have to kill by strangulation, because any other way would be too quick.

I bent my face near his head and kissed him gently on the forehead. “ Say goodnight, Fisher,” I said, and began to apply pressure, gently at first, but it steadily built up until it was blocking all his airways.

He began to struggle at once, his small body bucking beneath my large one. It was all in vain, because I was too strong for him. Spittle started flying out of his mouth as he once again tried to plead with me, but this time he didn’t have the air to do so. His eyes began to bulge comically out of his face, and it made me laugh. I brought my head up to face the ceiling and let forth a stream of giggles. So ticklishly funny. I brought my head back down to watch him. His nostrils were flaring back and forth, as if there really was air going through them, but my hold was too tight to allow that. In less than a minute his face began to change color. First red, then blue, and finally to a deathly dark purple. And during all of this I did nothing but watch his eyes, because I was convinced that was where the secret to his death would hide. I could see the brilliant light of life shining in his pupils, all I had to do was see where that light went.

I was so preoccupied with this that I neglected to keep firm pressure on both of his pinned arms, and his right one managed to wiggle out from under me. He did what the most logical person would do in this situation. he went for one of my eyes. His long, dirty fingernail punctured into the soft, sensitive tissue of my left eye, and blood began to flow immediately as the whole eye ceased to function. He dug it in as far as he could, the eye actually being pushed back into my head. Despite the immense pain it brought me I didn’t bother to relinquish my hold to bat his hand away. After all, I only needed one eye to get the job done, and I knew the other one would eventually grow back anyway. I knew that he wouldn’t be lasting much longer, so I moved my face in closer for the kill. By now, he was starting to lose strength, and his bloody thumb retracted from my eye as the arm was no longer able to support it.

This was it, the moment I was waiting for, the time when I would learn how to die. I watched his eyes keenly, studying the flame burning in them which signified his life. His body, by now, had completely stopped convulsing, and I could see that the light was starting to flicker inside his pupils. Here it was, my instance of enlightenment. I moved in even closer until my one good eye was only inches from his own. Flicker, flicker, flicker. Burning brightly one second and then dull the next. It ultimately gave one final burst of energy and then…

…And then it disappeared. But where did it go? Where did the light go? Where did the fucking light go? One second it was there and the next it was gone. I lifted up my head and let out an unholy scream of rage. I sprang to my feet as my whole body convulsed with fury. I let out another shriek and then used my massive strength to lift Fisher’s lifeless body up over my head. I brought my arms back and launched him across the room. He hit the wall at a bone-crunching speed and slid down the length of it, leaving an indention where he first hit.

Now my world was going dizzy as my racing lungs tried to supply my racing heart, but I knew they wouldn’t be able to keep up. I realized then that I was going to faint, and I welcomed it greedily. The last thought before my whole world went dark was: How am I going to be able to keep my sanity after I wake up? There’s no possible way, and then I hit the ground like a brick. I don’t even know if I actually died during this period of time, but I might as well have, because I didn’t wake up for another two days.

When I woke up, I was in a totally different room and the television was on. I didn’t know how I had gotten there or who turned it on, it was like waking up into a dream. My head felt like it must have weighed a hundred pounds, and my eyelids felt gummy, especially the left one. I brought my hand up to it and it came away with dried blood. It was at this point when I remembered everything that had happened. I rolled over and vomited on the red carpet.

What had I done? What could have driven me to do the things that I did? I had once considered myself a compassionate and loving person, but this caused me to doubt my existence and state of being. I had killed a man, plain and simple, and I would have to live with the knowledge for the rest of my life. Tears started to fall into my vomit as I began to sob uncontrollably. Fisher was dead, probably already starting to decay, and I hadn’t even gained any knowledge from it, meaning he had died for a lost cause. I didn’t care if I had put him out of his misery, I knew it wasn’t my job to try and play God.

I was torn from my pangs of grief when the television program playing right then was interrupted by a special news broadcast. It was at this point when I realized how long I had been unconscious, because that day’s date was displayed at the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

My God, was I really out that long?, I thought to myself, even though I already knew the answer to that question. Yes, I had been out that long, and it was obvious that I had gone through a period of change during this time, that I was somehow different. Before I had fainted I had been outraged that the killing hadn’t worked out the way I had planned, not even sad that I had killed someone. And now, two days later, I was full of guilt and grief.

I broke my gaze from the date and focused in on the actual news. The woman looking back at me was a pretty blond probably in her early thirties, a successful journalist in her field of expertise. She wasn’t behind a gray desk, but rather was reporting live from some unknown town. I picked up the remote and turned up the volume.

“--happened less than an hour ago, when a public bus hit a truck holding fuel and other flammable chemicals. Witnesses say it exploded into a gigantic ball of fire, engulfing the two vehicles in flame. Firefighters rushed to the scene, and as you can see…” the camera cut to the site of the vehicles, and I could see that the fire was bad enough to where there was no chance of any survivors. “…the men are still trying to extinguish it. If you were tuning in during out last program interruption, you watched as I interviewed the Juliet Fire Chief, who said that the biggest problem after putting out the fire is identifying the dead, since once this fire runs its course there’s no chance that there will be any remains. On a more optimistic note…”

She went on, but I was no longer listening. Something she had said had sparked an idea inside of me, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. It started with me thinking: If only I had been in that crash, and then a glint of an idea had peeked out and then ran from me when I tried to catch it. The biggest problem is identifying the dead, since there’s no chance for there to be remains. How was the death of these people different from the times when I had tried to kill myself? I pictured me slicing off one of my limbs only for it to grow back on my body. I’d cut open an artery only to have my body heal it. I would die by poison, but my body would always flush it out of my system. Always it came back to that one word: body. C’mon Idea, I know you’re in there somewhere, what the Hell does my fucking body have to do with anything? I looked back up to the screen, and as I was watching the flames eat away at anything it could find, it hit me. The difference between their deaths and mine was the fact that my soul always had a body to come back to, it always had a body to heal itself with.

Eureka! I had it, I finally had the answer. If I could somehow destroy my entire body, nothing would be able to grow back, nothing could heal. But how was this the first time I had ever thought of this? How could this possibly have escaped me for all those years? Decade after decade I tried to commit suicide but it never occurred to me to obliterate my entire body. Is it possible that I subconsciously blocked it from myself so I could fulfill some task? If so, then what was it? I could think of nothing.

I pulled myself up onto my rubbery legs and walked into the kitchen. The whiskey was still sitting on the counter, and I screwed off the cap and drank right from the bottle. There were many questions circling around my head right then, but the one which stood out the most was: would it work? Because that was the only question that really mattered, the others were just petty formalities. I imagined dowsing myself in lighter fluid and then setting myself ablaze, but I knew that this wouldn’t be full-proof enough. There was always the chance that it would burn out and then leave me with a charred but still intact body.

No, I would have to make sure that every single molecule of my body was disintegrated into nothing but ash. The details I could work out in the future, right now I just had to make sure it didn’t turn into another bitter disappointment.

So I’m back to the original question: will it work? Yes, to be honest with myself, I think it will. In fact, I know it will. Everything has an end, even the strongest mountains wither away in their own time. God can be cruel, and he isn’t always fair, but eventually he always grants pity to even the worst sinners. Am I a sinner? I think about Fisher. I remember how I slowly let him die, gathering strength with his passing, laughing in glee with his failure…

…No…I’m not a sinner. Things happen, and people are sometimes pushed to their limits, and as they lay there, on the edge of insanity, they welcome it, embracing its nothingness and drinking from its empty space. I’m a good man, I’m a loving person who wandered astray. Bethany would understand, and I think Fisher does too.

It is time for me to go now, I’ve spent enough time on this trip down memory lane. I look back at these filled-in pages and wonder if they mean anything. Hundreds of years I’ve lived, and I still can’t figure out who I am, or who I was meant to become. Sometimes, late at night, I used to wonder if I’m an angel sent down from God. If so, I’ve been led in the wrong direction, and I can’t keep myself from hating Him for it. Who ever said you must love your Creator? Prove your love for me first, God, then I might be able to reconsider.

I’m looking at the clock above my stove and I can see it’s getting late. If I’m going to do this, I must do it soon, because I don’t know if I can stand living on this Earth a day longer. I close my eyes and wonder what it will be like when I get to hold Bethany once more. I’ll look into her green eyes, getting lost in them to the point where I need a map to get out. But I don’t want to get out, and I never will. I have few certainties to cherish, but I know my solitude and prosperity once I leave this world will have no end. I must go now to prepare for the final ending of my life, the ending of all endings. Even in my pain I will laugh…laugh as the fire eats away at my tanned skin. Bethany once learned the bliss of death, and now I will too. I look forward to it. Farewell, World. Don’t forget me, for I know I will never forget you.

The End

© 2002 by Simon Owens. Simon Owens is a high-school senior who will be majoring in English in the fall of 2002. At college, he hopes to hone his fiction craft and become a professionally published author, striving to become the next Stephen King. “Death’s Secrets” is one of his earlier stories, and he submitted it on a whim because he was tired of it sitting on his desk collecting dust.