Not With a Bang but a Bird Song

The resurrection procedure was simple, but it had to be performed precisely and at speed. Practitioners had to be supervised for at least a year, because if the procedure didn’t work first time, the residual electric charge from a misrection would likely fry the subject’s brain on second try.

Aaron connected the nodes carefully all over Mina’s body. In total, 52 long cables snaked their way over her naked skin and into the large generator-like device in the corner of the room. He had long been performing resurrections by himself, but for this one, he had been refused solitude.

‘Hold on, man,’ his partner said from over the body, where he was looking over sensor placement one last time. ‘You haven’t disabled high emotions. I can see the light is on.’ They needed a court order to keep this blinker on. Aaron’s hand drifted towards the button to execute.

‘High emotions!’ His colleague started towards the Aaron, but it was too late. As if in a trance, almost absentmindedly, Aaron pressed the button, and jumped out from behind the console and towards the lifeless body.

They observed. Mina gasped, opened her eyes, and looked around, confused. Her eyes finally rested on Aaron, and glassed over immediately. There was nothing he could do now about the corners of her mouth turning down, and water rapidly overflowing her eyes and spilling down.

‘You’re so cooked,’ Aaron’s colleague whispered so Mina couldn’t hear, though she was sobbing so hard now she couldn’t hear outside of her shocked body.

***

Aaron’s manager was pacing up and down his office, but Aaron was distracted by a red light steadily blinking at him, mocking him, from the desk.

‘I can have your license revoked for this,’ the man said, and stopped to look out of the window. ‘Permanently.’ He turned sharply to face Aaron. ‘You understand how serious this is?’

‘Sir, I was overwhelmed by emotion. I didn’t mean to…’

‘I have asked multiple times whether you wanted to perform this particular procedure. I doubted it necessary in the first place, then I doubted you were the right person to do it. But you told me what?’

Aaron sighed, and his manager waved impatiently.

‘What did you tell me? I want this on record.’

‘That my wife would have never killed herself. And that I was best placed to work on her case, being the most experienced resurrector in this facility.’

The man walked back to his desk, and turned off the recorder. The light quit blinking. ‘You’re dismissed for now. You might as well take her home, and try to calm her down. We’ll have her in for questioning tomorrow.’

***

Mina cried all the way. When Aaron stopped the car in front of their bungalow, he could swear he felt the car rocking with the ferocity of her sobs. He reached over the gearbox and touched her skin to check the temperature. Mina flinched and Aaron headed off to the bathroom to pour her a bath; she was still icy to the touch.

Mina bawled in the bath, too, holding his hand innately. The hand was still cold, so he instructed her to plunge it in the hot water, and breathed deeply when she let go. There was nothing human about her touch, nothing he could find solace in.

‘What did you do this for?’ She managed eventually.

‘I thought… I thought it was an accident,’ he whispered.

‘What’s so difficult to understand? How did you even convince them it might be a homicide?’

‘I told them you came back funny from the club the night before. That someone must have slipped you something. And then your prescription sertraline triggered a reaction.’

‘That would have shown up my in bloodwork.’

‘It did show up in your bloodwork.’ Aaron looked away.

‘Have you any idea how I feel?’ She beat her fists against the water, splashing everywhere.

‘Have you any idea how I fucking feel? We talked about this! You want me to remind you what you said?’

Mina shook her head, but Aaron wasn’t looking.

‘You swore to me,’ he continued. ‘You swore to me in beds, in restaurants. You swore in sickness and in health.’

She stared at the ceiling now, weightless. Her body floated to the top of the deep bath, skin rising like an archipelago broken up by foamy ocean. ‘I don’t want to be alive.’

Aaron got up and left the bathroom. He’d envisaged Mina opening her eyes and winking at him like she used to in the mornings, whenever he awoke first and stared her awake. You’re creepy, she’d joke. Like this. Then she’d wink.

They would have had to act their way through her death again, but now, he had ninety-nine problems and the farce he had prepared was going to get much harder.

Mina was leaking water from her eyes again when he returned and sat on top of the closed toilet lid. ‘My fingertips are sore,’ she complained.

‘That’ll be the electricity. I’ll give you a jade to hold. Perfectly normal.’

‘Perfectly normal,’ she parroted with a nasal tinge. She knew he was self-conscious about it.

‘Come now. Get out of the bath.’

He had to lift her out, dry her, and put her in bed, still naked. He piled a couple of blankets on top of the bedspread to keep her warm. He considered lying next to her, but thought better of it, so he turned to the chair Mina always used as a secondary wardrobe. All the discarded outfit choices still lived on the chair, and he reached under and pulled them to the floor in one yank.

‘Don’t be aggressive,’ she said quietly. He drew the curtains shut, picked up the clothes, and threw them in the laundry basket.

‘You should get some rest,’ he sat down in the chair.

‘You don’t have to watch me.’

He laughed without joy, and she turned away.

***

The room was very dark when he woke up. The only way he knew he was alive and not drifting through the universe, just an unnamed particle, was pain. All the way down his back, in shards. He could have been a broken mirror.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘No,’ he moaned, and straightened his legs. The shards in his back crackled.

‘Your back?’

He didn’t respond.

‘Come to bed, then.’

She embraced him, much warmer now than she was when she’d held his hand in the bath, but the touch felt equally devoid of any other kind of heat.

‘Any palpitations?’

He felt her head shake against his chest, but he was in no mood for silence.

‘I can’t see you.’

‘No palpitations,’ she responded. ‘What does it matter?’

‘Because you’re not going to die again.’

She jolted and sat up. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t have you die again.’

She was silent for a while. ‘I’ll kill you if I have to,’ she whispered, and he bolted, too, and grabbed her arm.

‘Shut the fuck up with that.’

They became a mess of muscle, skin, hair and fabric. The sheets rose around them and fell. Mina stood no real chance, but she wasn’t scratching and punching to win.

He pinned her down and she kicked the back of his thighs, his heavy body between her own legs. ‘No,’ she breathed and spat in his face. He turned and wiped the wetness on her long hair. ‘Fuck off, Aaron.’

He felt himself get excited against all probability. Here was his freshly resurrected suicidal wife, and he had spit on his face.

‘No,’ she repeated, and kicked harder.

He got off with a sigh. ‘It’s been months.’

‘Aaron,’ she started, and the bed got lighter. He heard her feet slap the floor. ‘You’re trying to have sex with a corpse. I’ve died in this bed.’

The door shut behind her, and now it was his turn to cry until the contours of the room finally faded in, shade after shade. His mind was empty, but not just empty. It felt hollow, and every thought he had reverberated and repeated on him.

***

‘Why did they let you take me home?’

Mina was sat at the kitchen table, head in hands.

‘How come they left me high emotions?’

He shrugged. ‘They didn’t. I’ll be having a disciplinary.’

‘You’re such a prick,’ her hair shook. Long, golden locks, in such disarray now, flyaways from the hot bath. Mina paid great attention to her hair when she did. And then for months at a time, it would turn wild and round like an unruly halo. Mina, patron saint of depression. ‘Such a prick. Are you a god, now?’

‘Mina…’

‘Yes, I know. I love you,’ she used that nasal voice again. ‘I just love you so very much. That what you call love?’

‘Would it be love if I let you stay dead?’

‘Love is respecting the other person’s wishes.’

‘Love is getting yourself better. Love is perseverance,’ he said, almost as if reciting something he’s learned by heart but wasn’t sure he could believe. The words bounced in his mind.

‘Love is persecution, more like.’ He sighed. ‘Yes, I know, Aaron. I love you, too. You never understood that, really. So let me tell you.’

She patted the chair next to her. The wood rang hollow, too. Aaron realised his world was rapidly losing all flesh.

‘I don’t want to go back in there,’ she said slowly. ‘To the morgue.’

‘Resurrection centre,’ Aaron corrected her, as usual. ‘You don’t have to go back. We can figure something out.’

‘I don’t want to figure anything out. I want you to get out of my way. I want to go back to bed. Forever,’ she began to chuckle. ‘How dramatic you have made me sound.’

He chuckled, too. ‘You should have seen yourself when I found you.’ He spread his arms wide, and threw his head back and to one side. ‘Like a Romantic poet.’

They laughed until their chuckles became sobs, and then they found a way to intertwine their limbs that felt like togetherness. The hollowed world had a stone in the middle, and the stone was Mina.

‘Please bring the drugs,’ she whispered.

***

‘What would you like for dinner?’ Aaron asked, and the weight of the question rang like a church bell. What would she like for her last dinner.

Mina cleared her throat. It sounded full of salivating anguish. ‘Get me Pepe’s pizza, if you could?’

‘Four seasons?’

‘Yeah, four reasons,’ it was an old joke from when she first asked Aaron for the pizza and he misunderstood.

‘I sure as shit hope you have more reasons than that.’

They ate the pizza in silence. Just as Aaron thought all tears had been cried, he saw Mina chewing through sobs, tears salting the already overseasoned plate. He never liked Pepe’s.

After dinner, he gave Mina the pill.

‘Do you want to come to bed?’

He was going to have to sleep in another room, from now on. If he was ever going to sleep again.

‘Any last words you want to hear?’ She was tucked under the duvet, and he shook his head.

‘Isn’t this why you really woke me up? To hear something I never said?’

He shook his head again. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Alrighty, then. I love you. I’m getting real tired.’

‘You should sleep,’ he stuttered. He could feel his heart skip a few beats; it always happened in a state of heightened emotion, or at least his doctor thought so. Nothing to worry about.

Mina closed her eyes. Outside, a cuckoo began intonating a hollow, wooden song.