When I came to, it was as if I was under
water. There were muffled, indistinct sounds around me, and a diffuse
greyish-pink light in my eyes. It took me a moment to realise that my eyes were
closed, and the colour of the light was because it was coming through my
eyelids. And then I realised that I couldn’t open my eyes.
I have never woken up with my eyes
closed: never, ever before.
I knew something was wrong right then,
when I knew I was awake, but couldn’t open my eyes. I tried to reach up to rub
my eyes – and found I couldn’t move my hands. For a fleeting moment I wondered
if my hands had fallen asleep, turned numb. But no, that wasn’t the case: I
could feel the weight of my hands on my chest, and my chest itself through my
hands. But there was something amiss in that feeling, something besides the
inability to move.
A couple of seconds later it hit me: I
could feel no heartbeat in my chest.
And I wasn’t breathing. My chest lay
still and unmoving under my hands. I willed myself to breathe, focusing intently
– with a growing fear intensifying my will – on drawing breath through my
nostrils – only to find that my nose seemed blocked, stuffed with something.
That’s when I realised that my hands were
bound together over my chest, at the wrists. So were my legs, from the knees
down, and the binding was so tight it was cutting into my ankles.
I tried to move my arms and legs, willed
them to move with intense concentration, to shake them free of whatever was
binding them. Nothing.
Instant, overwhelming panic.
I tried to call out, to scream. Not a
moan escaped my lifeless throat, not a whisper from my closed, dead mouth.
Dead.
I was dead. And my dead body was lying,
bound hand and foot, somewhere. And there was nothing I could do about it.
I surrendered to pure, mind-melting,
terror.
I don’t know for how long I was in that
state – may have been seconds, may have been hours – but at some point it struck
me that I was awake, clearly aware and thinking, and feeling, and hearing, and
seeing.
If my senses were alive, how could I be
dead then?
My still, dead body mocked my question
silently.
It gradually became clear to me that I
was apparently physically dead, but somehow still alive. At least, some part of
me, that could think, and feel, and hear, and see, was still alive. I couldn’t
move any part of my body, but the fact that I was aware of that was itself
something I could work with.
Cogito, ergo sum, of course!
Perhaps all was not lost then? Maybe I
could figure out what to do, if I could process the information coming through
my still-alive senses?
I forced my panic and terror down,
focusing on my senses intently.
I couldn’t see anything through my closed
eyelids, of course, but I began to make out moving patches of darkness in the
grey-pink light filtering through them. The muffled sounds I had noted
corresponded vaguely with these moving patches, and it didn’t take me long to
realise that these were people around me, conversing in low tones as they moved
around. But why were these voices so muffled, why couldn’t I hear them clearly?
As I focused intently on the sounds
around me, I realised that something was pressed up against my ears. And inside
my nose too – I didn’t need to try and pull air through them, and fail, to note
that my nostrils felt distended and stuffed. Visions of corpses in coffins and
on pyres came to mind immediately, bodies with their ears and nostrils stuffed
with cotton. Was that how I was, were these sounds indistinct because my ears
were stopped up? If I was physically dead, then that would make sense: my body
would be treated like any other corpse, my ears and nostrils would be stuffed
with cotton, a cloth or bandage would be tied around my head to prevent my mouth
from falling open – and even as I thought this I felt the cloth on my cheeks,
and realised my jaw had been bound too.
Something like a memory stirred in me
about why this was done – apparently for a whole variety of reasons (which
usually means that nobody really knows the real reason – but anyway….): it was
apparently done to prevent insects from invading the body, to prevent unseemly
bodily fluids from running out of the orifices, to slow down the process of
decomposition – and apparently also to prevent the soul from re-entering the
body that it had left.
But what if my soul – I, me – had never
left my body after I died?
What if I was trapped inside my own dead
body?
Another wave of terror struck me, even
more intense than the previous one, shattering all thought, all desperate
attempts at sanity. Except for that one insane thought that resonated like a
demonic, never-ending bell, echoing in the thick dark well of terror that I had
fallen into: I was dead, and I was trapped inside my own dead body.
At some point – again, I don’t know after
how long – the spell of terror receded suddenly, as I became aware of hands on
me, caressing my cheeks. I heard the muffled sounds of sobs, indistinct cries of
anguish. Was someone mourning me? Suddenly the mourner’s head was pressed
against my hands, into my chest, sending tremors through my body with the
desperate shudders of sorrow and grief that he or she was experiencing. Who was
this? I could not tell anything beyond the fact that someone was grieving me.
Me.
I.
Who was I?
A vast blank silence was all I had in
answer.
Strangely – or perhaps not so strangely –
there was no wave of terror, no fresh attack of panic at this realisation. Maybe
I was getting inured to these waves of fear, or maybe I had given up feeling
fear anymore, I can’t say which it was for sure. Either way, I was grateful that
I was not hit by fear again. That I could still think clearly was a relief, even
if I wasn’t entirely sure to what extent there was clarity of any kind, or even
to what extent I could think at all.
With this realisation, a swirl of
thoughts came to me: for one, none of this made any sense. How could I feel,
think, be, if I was dead? That meant either that I was not dead, or –
what? That death was not the end? That I, a ‘soul’ (for want of a better word)
of some kind, continued to ‘live on’ (again for want of a better word) in some
way? And that it was this soul – my soul – that was experiencing what I
was experiencing? And who was I anyway?
I could remember nothing at all.
Whatever it was, one thing I was sure
about (with an increasing sense of urgency that was nevertheless somehow unclear
– I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was causing the urgency): but I knew I
had to try and reach out to my mourners, to tell them that I was still here,
alive in this body. That there was maybe some mistake, some wrong diagnosis of
death, and that they needed to revive me – or rather, my body, and make it
habitable for me again. And perhaps they could tell me who I was….
But how was I going to tell them
anything? I couldn’t move any part of my body, not even my little finger, let
alone my lips and tongue and vocal chords.
An idea, vague, snatched out of
memory-like thoughts – something about willing one’s thoughts, telepathically,
into another’s mind – came to me. A moment’s derision at my own fancies was
followed by the hard realisation that I had nothing else: there was literally
nothing I could do besides thinking. I literally had to think my way out of this
situation.
So, what did I have to do now? Project my
thoughts to my mourners in some way, yes – but how? And to whom?
I realised then that I didn’t know who my
mourners were, either. How could I project my thoughts into the heads of people
whom I didn’t even know, whom I wouldn’t even be able to recognise, even if I
could see them?
It was increasingly clear now that there
was very little I knew of anything – not my name, my age, my occupation, family,
friends, where I was, when this was happening – nothing was coming to mind. But
I think I was getting used to this now, this complete absence of anything to
work with in my thoughts, beyond the fact that I was thinking. Perhaps this is
what happens with death – everything gets wiped out, except the fact of thought.
In any event, I did not want to waste
time on this. That sense of urgency, barely simmering all this time in the
substratum of my thoughts, was pushing hard now. I needed to let people know
soon that I was still here, before….
I suddenly felt hands pushing roughly
under me, lifting my body briefly from wherever I had been lying, and carrying
me a short distance, before lying me down again. It was a hard, somewhat uneven
surface, with little knobs and ridges pushing sharply into my back. I realised
for the first time that, although it felt vaguely uncomfortable, nothing that
was happening to my body was actually painful – which it should have been. Maybe
my pain sensors had died with my body, maybe all my sensory perceptions had got
dialled down, so to speak. In any event, I was more interested in urgently
understanding what was happening to me, because the simmering sense of urgency
was now flowering again into full-fledged panic. Something felt deeply wrong,
deeply dangerous, a feeling that intensified when the muffled wailing around me
intensified.
Then I sensed something being placed over
me, and everything went dark and ominously silent. I felt a rumbling beneath me,
as if whatever it was that I was placed on was being moved, rolled along
somewhere. A few moments later, this too stopped, and it was followed by a
fairly loud clang, but without echoes or reverberations that I could sense –
like something heavy falling into place, finally and perfectly….
I understood now where I was. In a
coffin. Which had just been wheeled into the giant oven of a crematorium. And
the heavy sound I had heard had been that of the furnace door falling into
place.
This was what I had been dreading, what
had been driving my sense of urgency. I was being cremated. I was going to be
burnt to ashes – or rather, my body was. What would happen to me? I had no idea.
But I did have an overpowering, vivid vision of sheets of flames exploding into
life around me, licking and eating into my body, bursting open my bones and
skull while I screamed in inconceivable agony – and what if I would not die,
even with all that?
Then it all came back, in a massive,
overwhelming flood of images and sensations, emotions and feelings, memories and
hopes – who I was, the people who mourned me, the life I had lived…. It was as
if they had been released by the surfacing of this final realisation of where I
was.
I screamed – or tried to. And at the very
moment, a thousand flames screamed into life around me, destroying the coffin in
seconds, washing over me – another massive, overwhelming flood, but this time of
pure, inexorably insatiable, intense heat. The pure agony of fire eating me was
instantaneous and instantaeously finished too. I felt my skin evaporate in
seconds, and with that went whatever sensations I had had, as well as all
memories of who I was. I felt my muscles boil and fall away from me, and with
them went all the feelings and emotions that had just surfaced. Then I felt my
bones burst open, and my brains turn to mush and then to cinder before my skull
exploded, and with that the memories and hopes that had defined my life melted
into the flames that had released them.
Actually, I cannot say how long all this
took, even though I speak of moments and seconds. Time loses all meaning inside
that box, especially once one’s organs and cells and molecules begin their dance
with the flames. It may have taken hours, days even – I don’t know – for my body
to be fully consumed by the furnace.
But what of me, this I that speaks these
words?
I don’t know. Perhaps I am no more than
vestiges of thought trapped inside the molecules of gas inside my body that were
released by the flames – after all, they say all dead bodies get bloated as they
ferment inside. Perhaps those thoughts bear the vestiges of me, perhaps the
flames sear them into my effervescing molecules as they eat up my body. Perhaps
those molecules have circulated and found their way into you, dear reader, and
have implanted these vestiges of my story in your own body – in your eyes and
nerves and brain-tissue – and become your thoughts. I have become a part of you,
become you even, in my death – just as you too, will become a part of someone
else when you die.
Or perhaps I am just a story, just
another story, a bunch of words cobbled together to describe a death – a story
that I had made up in my time, about the end of time. About the end of I. About
the ends of all Is…. And about the ends of words.