This last week I have been a stranger in a strange land and the territory has been my own flesh... Funny how not being well makes you feel like a passenger in a meat vehicle. You know how to drive the damn thing, but have no idea of how it really works and how to fix it beyond basic maintenance.
Talking of the freakiness of flesh - here's a short story I finished this time last year. I don't tend to use first person very much, I prefer the part of omnipotent God-like third person, but first person felt right for this piece. Brought you closer to the experience, to that dark, dusty room, the slice of light cutting through the air like a sliver of another reality...
The Unlit Lung
Death didn’t exist before the summer I turned fourteen. That long parched drag of a season my dog, Murdock, would lay panting in the shade of our crabapple tree, his pink tongue dripping until he lay in a puddle. That summer was so hot the blackberries cooked on the bushes and everywhere smelt of preserve.
That was the summer I met death. I learned that sometimes, even if you were nothing alike, you could share your father’s fears, the same genetic fate. That beneath the organic wonder of life there were things beyond the blood, shadows waiting for the light of day to reveal them.
The summer passed. Each sun-burnt, wild day blurring into the next until my birthday came and went. I felt no different, as immortal as ever, but deceived myself with thoughts of being more grown-up. In the last year I’d cut class a few times, smoked my first cigarette and pretended to like it, and almost kissed a girl.
When the phone rang late one evening, not long after my birthday, I ignored it and lay on the floor of the curtained living room watching TV and picking at the scab that covered my left knee. I heard my mother’s flip-flops slapping the floorboards the length of the corridor and when she answered the phone her muffled voice echoed, making the hall sound like a cave. The phone trilled as she hung up and she headed back to the kitchen, her tread slower.
We found out what was going on at dinner, after she’d snapped at my father for reading the paper at the table and moaned when I secretly fed Murdock my greens. She sighed deeply, letting the phone call and stress dissipate across the table in a cloud of stale breath. She looked wearily at my father.
“Your grandfather got his help to call earlier.”
He dropped his knife. It bounced on the floor before he bent to retrieve it and my mother rolled her eyes as he wiped it clean on his trousers.
“What did he want?”
She turned to look at me.
“He wants to meet Paul. Tomorrow.”
I had never met my great-grandfather and my parents rarely spoke of him. When they did, as they did that night, it was in hushed tones behind closed doors, usually when they thought I was asleep. From the few words I’d heard through the walls or filtered through keyless locks, I could guess he was unusual. He rarely left the house, was sick in some way and there may have been an operation. What I knew for certain, I could tell from my father’s voice; my great-grandfather was terrifying.
The two hour drive from our house to great-grandfather’s was like sitting in an oven as it was pushed towards the edge of a volcano. My curiosity fast turned into nerves and by the time we pulled up outside the detached house, I had been infected with the fear that filled the car.
My father turned off the engine and we sat in silence, listening to the metal ticking as it cooled. The decaying house was large, the paint peeling and the windows yellow. It was set back from the street in a garden of weeds and the houses on either side seemed to be leaning away from it. I looked away in time to catch my parents staring at each other, they may have been silently mouthing things. They turned towards me and my mother cleared her throat.
“Paul. Your great-grandfather is a strange man, a strange sick man. But he’s still your great-grandfather. Be polite, call him ‘Sir’ and what-ever you do, don’t stare at the lung on the mantelpiece.”
I don’t remember much about getting from the car to the door of my great-grandfather’s study, but I think my mouth hung open, forgotten as I tried to decipher her words. Was it a riddle, a joke? I kept thinking of the bag of pink and grey butcher scraps the neighbor sometimes gave us for Murdock. She called them lights and my mother said that it meant lungs. My father always went pale as they slopped into the dog’s bowl. All I could think of was a table lamp shaped like a lung, glowing pink and illuminating the wall with the shadows of veins.
The door seemed big. It was dark wood, made darker still by the blue shadows that filled the house. I remember staring at the door handle, thinking that it looked like brass plated finger bones. It suddenly felt like winter and a chill crawled across my skin as I raised my hand to knock.
“Come in.”
His voice hissed and crackled like a broken radio, rumbling like the end of an earthquake. How he knew I stood there I didn’t know. In retrospect, he had summoned me and had ears that could hear as well as any other man. But I was infected with my father’s tension and the idea of organ lamps. Old men who could see through doors didn’t seem impossible.
I slid my fingers onto the door handle and felt the cold of the metal sink into my bones. The door opened silently, but I think I heard the creak of a coffin opening all the same. The chill of the room rushed to embrace me, the shadows that seemed piled up against the door, spilling out into the corridor. I took a deep breath before stepping into the room and almost gagged on the smell.
It was like something had died or was in the slow process of dying, but to save time had already started to decay. It took an effort of will to not cover my face with my hands, I somehow managed to remember that that would seem rude. But I couldn’t stop the crinkle of my nose or the curl of my mouth. Sometimes the body just does what it must.
The room was darkness divided into two, the halves separated by a sliver of stained daylight falling through a gap in the heavy drapes. Dust spiraled in that slice of light, catching my eye as it turned and I tried to look away, to see beyond the shadows. I stood still as I watched the shape of the room emerge, becoming aware of the chaos piled around me. The walls were lined with bookcases, crammed with leather bindings and jumbled with random shapes. There were cascades of newspapers and books spilling from the shelves and onto the floor, almost as if this clutter were oozing from the shelves, literary blood from dusty wounds. There was an empty path cutting across the floor, darker in the center where feet had polished the dust away in their journey from the door to the desk.
I hadn’t noticed him before, the bundle reclining in an over stuffed chair behind the over filled desk. But my eyes found him just as I became aware of the sound of his breath. My great-grandfather’s breath sounded like salt being rubbed into a wound.
He was thin beneath the layers of clothing, the bones of his cheeks cutting their way out of his face from the inside. It was hard to tell in the light, but his skin looked yellowed and worn thin like the paper of the books surrounding him. White hair powdered his mottled scalp, pale stubble salted his chin and all I could think of at the moment before our eyes met, was that hair kept growing after death.
But the glitter of his eyes drew me. Even as the grey skin sagged around his eyes, beneath the deep skull like sockets, his eyes sparkled with life, wet in this dry tomb where everything was turning to dust. He stared at me with those black glossy eyes and I felt as though my soul were being weighed against a feather.
This was my great-grandfather. An old man who was alive against all evidence except for those eyes. A man who still breathed despite the agony that sound made me share. A man who I suddenly felt sorry for.
He must have seen it in my eyes, the pity of youth, in a body still growing towards its peak. I think if he could have spared the energy he would have smiled. Instead, he channeled his will into lifting his arm, that shaking stick of cloth-covered bone. As that arm defied gravity, his clawed hand unfolded into the pointing finger that led me to the lung.
The lung on the mantelpiece.
It stood in a specimen jar on the shelf above a fireplace full of books. It was clear of dust, like a trophy or a perfectly preserved memory. The lung floated in an cloudy liquid that failed to obscure the dark mass at its base, a growth with tendrils emerging from it, almost like limbs.
What happened next may have been a shift in the light, the reflected movement of the old man’s arm or a trick of my over stimulated mind, even now I couldn’t say.
The lung moved.
It was like a twitch of movement in that dark matter. Like something not quite dead sighing from the wait.
I ran. I bolted for the door and ran through the winter chill of the house to escape, feeling the panic overwhelm me and pour out in a high pitched scream. Below my terror, below my own noise, below the scramble of my parents to intercept me as I dashed through the front door and out into the sunlight, I could hear his laughter. Like metal grating against glass, that sound chased me from the house and a mile down the road, where I collapsed on a parched lawn in front of the most normal house I could find. My parents found me sobbing there twenty minutes later.
That day has never left me, for that was the day I met death and he tricked me. That was the day I stopped being a child and shared the fear of my father.
Which brings me here.
I’ve been sitting in my car outside the hospital for an hour, listening to the tick of metal and remembering every moment of that day. Thirty years on and I can still recall my dad’s expression as he turned off the ignition of the car. I can’t help but feel that he knew. Think that his fear was not only of a crazy old man who lived only to scare people but that he sensed the genetic destiny of that lung.
It was ten years after that July day that I learnt my grandfather had died of lung cancer.
It was this morning that I learnt of that shadow in my father.
But the worse thing of all, beyond the organic fate befalling our male line. The thing that wakes me at three in the morning screaming like a fourteen year old boy, covered in sweat.
I think the old man, my great-grandfather, is still alive.
I think the lung is still in a jar on a mantelpiece waiting for death.
I keep wondering if the death it’s waiting for is mine.
