The Happyning

I never considered myself an unhappy guy. Sure, I had my pains, my anxieties, even moments of despair when I learned that I was soon going to die—but I also knew comfort, love, beauty. I fancied I knew what happiness was, in the down-to-earth manner of the everyman who every so often finds themselves at the top of a crest on the rollercoaster of life. It existed as a contrast to the sadness we found in the dips and the ordinary life in between. Indeed, how could true happiness be known, if it was not for its moments of absence?

It was only when I injected the symbiote that I realized my mistake.

In my line of work, I overhear a lot of things, I just need to be good at pretending I don't. The hushed, excited chatter of scientists is music to my ears, a sneak peek into possible futures. Lately, they were talking about a new form of life that could play the role of every cell at once. It could draw energy from air and light, replace tissue, muscle, bone… even blood. They whispered that if it could be tamed, it could even cure mortality. Usually, I would have contented myself to dream about it, but I had only just learned that a cancer was devouring me from within and that I only had two months left to live. So I, the venerable chief of security at HazardCorp, who had thirty years of service behind his belt, thirty years of irreproachable ethics and severe adherence to protocol, did the unthinkable: I stole it.

As soon as I was back home, I mainlined it. Straight into the vein, the dark sludge went. What did I have to lose? My career? Pointless, once you're dead. My life? Also pointless, once you're dead.

I was well aware that bleeding edge technology or medication almost never worked as intended. My best hope was to survive a bit longer, and if it killed me, well, it would all be over at least. What I did not expect was for the veil to be lifted from my eyes. I saw everything. I understood everything. Nothing was sad. Nothing was ordinary. All of my worries faded away. Why worry, when you cannot die? I rose up and looked around. I was taken aback. Everything was so… beautiful. The sink was beautiful. The bathtub was beautiful. The discolored spots around the toilet bowl came together in a pointillist masterpiece. Even my mirror image was a work of art—I had always thought I was ugly, but if Picasso was art, what were the bold living lines of my face if not a masterpiece?

I ambled into the kitchen, mirthful. There I found a maelstrom of colors and smells. I examined the intriguing shape of a half-eaten carrot on the counter, the intricate patterns of growth of the trees the floor was made of, the fascinating crawl of a maggot in the flowerpot's soil. I looked at every object from every angle and everything was so delightful, so laden with meaning that I started crying. Afterwards, struggling to think of new things to marvel at, I had an inspiration: I grabbed a kitchen knife and sliced my arm open. A red river poured out, breathtaking in more ways than one, following the outline of my arm, catching against every little bump, and then taking a subtle off hue on the edges. It did not hurt. Nothing hurt.

My reverie was interrupted by a scream. My wife had just come back from work and nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the crimson ocean in which I sat, a big fat smile adorning my big fat masterpiece of a face. She ran to me, retching. “Oh my God. Oh my God,” she repeated in an endless litany. Her pathos was exquisite. There was more beauty in her crouched, hyperventilating figure than I thought there had been in the entire universe before I saw the light. I grabbed her wrist.

“It's OK,” I said. “I'm OK. Everything, it's so… so…”

I trailed off into a series of elated sobs. Rose unsuccessfully tried to wrest her hand away from my grasp and I could read panic rising in her face. It suddenly occurred to me that she could not see what I saw. But I wanted her to see. No! I needed her to see. She deserved—far more than I did—to know true happiness, true bliss, true freedom.

So I bit her.

#

My memory is a little fuzzy about what happened afterwards. I needed to get out of the house and look at the rest of the world with my new eyes. I ran down the street… oh, to see the sun, the birds, the asphalt, the cigarette butts on the ground! These wonders overwhelmed me so utterly that I bit my tongue off. I must have flaunted my bloody arms and face in front of too many of Maple street's posh cafes, though, because next thing I knew I was surrounded by police. I gleefully realized I knew one of them—good old Madeline from our years at Oakville High, that little tornado of angst, paranoia and malice, no wonder she'd joined the forces. She was fabulous. Fierce. How could I ever have hated her?

“Ma'line!” I said, sputtering blood.

I opened my arms wide. She raised her gun in response, fear and disgust roiling brightly in her eyes like fireflies. She did not appear to recognize me. The two other policemen tackled me down. I bit both of them back, out of love—and in return they gave me a delightful buzz in the form of a taser in my ribs. I smiled beatifically, so they gave me another. Bless the police, oh, bless them!

I came to my senses alone in an alcove of peace and serenity. Exquisitely textured cement, fragrant urine, intricately rusted bars were my new kingdom. I extended my arm through a gap and fancied I could extend my whole body through it, if only I could shed some layers. I recalled my anatomy classes and found that they were not nearly as boring as I thought, especially when put in practice: epidermis, dermis, hypodermis, muscle… I scratched my skin with my nails, then scraped it off with my teeth, intending to reveal my inner beauty, but… what was this ruckus? This melodious song?

“The fuck are you idiots doing?” said Madeline's shrill soprano—Amazing Grace sung by an angel wouldn't have been sweeter to my ears.

Her two colleagues barged into the room. They pointed straight at me, blood dripping from their bitten hands.

“You did this?”

I nodded enthusiastically.

“He did this!” said number one.

“He did this! Ha! Ha! Ha!” said number two.

Number one punched number two in the face. A tooth lobbed gracefully to the ground. They both started laughing hysterically, and so did I—their mirth was contagious.

“Awesome, dude! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“What the fuck?” said Madeline, drawing her gun.

Number one took keys from his belt and unlocked the jail cell.

“No!” Madeline yelled, and she emptied her whole clip into number one's back. It didn't seem to affect him.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! It tickles!” number one said. How burlesque!

“Oh fuck. Oh shit. Oh fuck. It's started. The zombie apocalypse. Fuck,” Madeline said.

That was a crude way to describe something so beautiful, but the rawness of her emotion touched me deeply. Oh, if only she could see! Alas, she was already gone and my new friends gave me a ride back home. As soon as I opened the door I was greeted by a mouth-watering scent. Rose was baking brownies. I opened the oven door and fished one out straight from the tray, but she batted it right out of my smoldering hand.

“They're not for you, silly!”

#

“Has the world always been like this?” our neighbour Anthony said.

“I suppose so,” Rose answered.

His delight was delightful: in our brave new world, delight nested upon itself like Matryoshka dolls. Rose had converted him and his boyfriend with blood brownies. “This is extraordinary! How come it all looked so bland before?”

We discussed for a while and came up with a theory: before this, our entire being had been geared towards survival. We needed food, shelter, safety, we needed to have sex to reproduce and propagate the species. This inflicted madness upon us: in dealing with all of that worry, that stress, that anxiety, all of the world's beauty was suppressed except for these few transcendent moments where the wonder was so strong it poked through. Now, all of these worries were behind us. We had no needs anymore, because we would never die.

All that remained was bliss.

“We need to enlighten the rest of humanity, for their sake.” Anthony said. “And for that, we need a plan. The blood brownies were a brilliant idea,” he told my wife.

“As for you,” Anthony added, now looking at me, “the fact that you have managed to enlist the police so early in this revolution is a testament to the grandeur of dumb luck. However… you should refrain from going out for a while. You look dreadful.”

“I fink I am beauhiful, fank you very mu'h.”

“Naturally, but the unenlightened tend to react irrationally to the sight of shambling corpses, which… well. Look at you. You lost almost all of your blood.”

“Di'n't nee' it.”

“All the same. People will resist being enlightened if they think it will turn them into monsters. Trust me.”

I nodded sagely and slipped my tongue in my pocket. Anthony was smart. That's why Rose had enlightened him. I was perfectly content to go along with his plan. I would have been content with anything.

#

Over the next months, still quarantined in my lair, I witnessed the city bloom like a crocus after the snowmelt. Through the curtains, I instantly recognized those who had been touched by the divine, from the sparks of delight in their eyes and the careless way they walked, unaware of their own bodies. They had been turned inside out: their souls faced outwards, to fully take in the splendor of the universe.

The media was not quite in agreement. Things were happening that no one understood. People quit their jobs in droves. Some stopped eating or drinking, others started eating sand, excrement and other things they were not “supposed” to eat. There was violence, self-harm, murder, cannibalism. Spontaneous orgies in tea rooms. Other occurrences shocked by their sheer strangeness, such as a man painting himself purple at a reception desk or a woman juggling spoons in the middle of the street. Every strangeness was different. Each of the Enlightened had their own experiments to carry out, perfectly tailored to who they were. And it was all magnificent, the destruction as well as the creation. The world's potential had been unshackled.

No one minded anybody else. It was all love, love, love.

As for me, I was rotting. I did not need flesh to survive—not any more—so it did not bother me. In fact, it was a wonderful experience. I made countless new buzzing friends. I named them all as they circled my head: there's Barbara, there's Jason, there's Samuel. Each contributed to a lively dance that had been playing beside us all this time, unappreciated. There were new smells coming from my body, pungent yet subtle, many different kinds that paired with blood like cheese paired with fine wine. My body flaked off in a way that reminded me of autumn leaves. These were only the small wonders of rot. There were many others that I was dying to share with my brethren while I still could: soon I would only be bone and symbiote.

The opportunity was given to me on a rainy summer day when a bloody crowd invaded the streets, dancing and howling in joy. My people. There was no restraining our lightful bunch. I ran out to join them, hobbling on my decomposing legs and emitting odd gargles from my throatless neck, and I saw that they loved me just as I loved them, and everyone, and everything.

#

Soon there was only one person left in the city to enlighten, only one holdout. Madeline. She had always been a broken person, paranoid, chronically angry and miserable—she, of all people, had the most to gain from the symbiote. Yet, taking advantage of the heads up the sight of me had given her, she had stocked up on flamethrowers and heavy weaponry, which she put to good use destroying us “abominations,” us “affronts to God.”

We did not hate her. Hatred had no greater footing in our pure minds than sound had in outer space. To the contrary, we found her formidable, in the same way that a tsunami, a hurricane or a forest fire was. She was special and it was only out of love and empathy, rather than self-interest, that some of us nonetheless tried to help her. Force was our first instinct—sinking our teeth into the problem, so to speak—but these attempts failed, for she was intensely focused and an incredible markswoman.

This called for subtler tactics: Anthony, who had kept his own body in pristine condition, pretended to be untouched by the “plague” and tried to reason with her. He argued that rot was not an inevitability of our condition, but rather one facet of an unending kaleidoscope of possibilities. It was a choice, as valid as any other. “You see, Madeline, it is all about self-actualization,” he beamed, but his serenity and enthusiasm was rather too obvious, too suspect. She saw right through him, and so did her bullets. His brains splattered on the ground in a splendid pattern. I fancied I could read his last thoughts in this Rorschach test.

Anthony's demise was a fitting end to an extraordinary and selfless life. My fond memories of him overshadowed any sadness I could have felt. And who was to say this was the end? From his corpse, the symbiote arose as a shambling brown husk, and I felt as if fragments of him had remained stuck like breadcrumbs in an unkempt beard. As I watched that heap wander, I sometimes saw my friend in it, then I didn't, then I did again. Incredible! I loved him so much. I daresay I loved him more than ever.

After this, the community largely gave up on Madeline. We left her alone with her choices, observing her from afar with the same fondness we reserved to everything else. I alone kept thinking about her: it occurred to me that if it had been her and not I who had been the symbiote's initial vector, the city's enlightenment would have been complete. Of all of us, she had been the one who deserved it most. Perhaps it was only my fancy, but she was the key to it all, the last bite of the cake, the last tile on the roof, the last pixel of the progress bar.

I resolved to fix this injustice. She, too, would know happiness. If not by force, if not through reason… well, there were other ways. Rose and I hatched a simple plot.

It took some waiting, but one day, she broke into our home seeking food. She was the only soul in the city who needed any, so there was still a large amount free for the picking, scattered inside thousands of dwellings. Rose and I stayed in the locked bathroom, unmoving, watching in silence the sunlight shimmer on our skulls and the staccato dance of dust motes. We listened to the rhythm of the holdout's rummaging while we held hands. There was no point in coming out. She always kept her hands less than a foot away from one of her guns. And when she shot, she never missed. She left with four cans of beans in her bag.

A few days later, I saw Madeline sitting by the river bank in front of a pile of simple pebbles, looking at them one by one. Her guns were artfully scattered about her. I shuffled close enough to them to push them with my foot, and that's when I knew it was done. Madeline turned to me, radiant. My voice was long gone by then, so I simply held out a whiteboard on which I had written:

“Hello, Madeline. How are you?”

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God, is this what I was missing? They're all unique… everything is unique…”

Enlightenment always finds a way. Wrath, anguish, hatred are conceits of mortality. None can stand against beauty, awe, happiness and love. I sat next to her and we spent a silent hour going through her collection. I could see what she was about: Van Gogh had nothing on whoever had painted these rocks. They were extraordinary. In the end, she only had one question for me:

“How did you do it?”

For all of Madeline's obsessive paranoia: the compulsive caution she exercised in her every move, the meticulousness of the traps she set around her hideout, the precision of her marksmanship… she had never once considered some of us might own canners and labellers. She did not know symbiote-infested fluids had the color and texture of bean juice.

Rookie mistake.

She jumped into my arms and I embraced her in a welcoming, if a little bony embrace. “Thank you,” she cried softly, “for freeing me.”

#

There are still some holdouts in the world, scattered fortified villages filled with the madness of an old age. As we the Enlightened roam the world, invincible and free, leaving no other trace on nature than our footsteps as we gorge on its splendor, they huddle together, fighting for survival, starving wretches fighting for scraps under a table at the banquet of God.

We love them.

One day, like Madeline, they will love themselves too.