Jeffery:
That sounds fair enough. Heather, would that make you feel better?
Heather:
I could do that. It wouldn’t have to be for long, would it?
Jeffery:
Raymond?
Raymond:
If everybody else is doing it, okay.
Jeffery:
Viktor?
Viktor:
I don’t know. Let me think about it. But maybe.
Jeffery:
All right. Let’s go back to our rooms and get the one thing that’s most important to us. We’ll meet at the door in fifteen minutes.
From the St. Nils Eagle
“Dead May Not Be Completely Dead, Scientists Claim”
Researchers from the University of Applied Medicine announced today that the dead might well be taking longer to die than previously thought. Even after a person is buried, university scientists report, it may take a dead person weeks, possibly years, to complete a process that in the past was believed to take only minutes.
“This is a complicated area,” stated Dr. Carlton Bates, head of the university’s Mortality Project, “and one relatively new to science. It may have to do with certain preservatives in food, or even household chemicals in current use, or the effects of modern drugs, such as multispectrum antibiotics. On the other hand, it may be as simple as the vast advances we have made in devices to measure deadness, what we like to call Mortality Meters.”
Bates explained that though a person may well appear to be dead, and for all intents and purposes is “dead,” the only way to tell for certain would be to interview that person, something that is currently not within the range of our capabilities. It could well be, he added, that for them nothing has changed in their lives in the least. He elaborated, “It may be that it’s time to use words less absolute than either ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ to describe various states of existence.” Instead, Bates proposed what he called a “Living Quotient,” which would have a built-in range, say, of 1 to 100, with 100 standing for “most alive” and 1 for “least alive.” Anything lower than that, would, of course, be dead, he concluded.
In a related development, Dr. Rajish Chandrapanir, a researcher in the field of neuromnemonics at the university’s pioneering Electromagnetic Imaging Department, was quoted as saying, “We have long known that we can stimulate memories in living brains through the application of localized electric current. There is every reason to believe the same techniques will work on the dead as well. The problem is only in determining exactly which memories, out of all those available, are to be accessed.” He explained that researchers in this field are especially interested in what he called “Separation Issues,” that is, learning how to preserve the most important memories and, at the same time, to leave behind 99.9 percent of the others, which he called “essentially worthless.” Dr. Chandrapanir concluded that this whole reevaluation of what he described as “the old life/death conundrum” could seriously challenge our current measures of longevity and, in the long run, threaten the assumptions inherent in many social programs.
“The bottom line for you television and movie buffs out there,” he said, “is that this has nothing to do with what is popularly known as a zombie. This is real.”
Tocar.
“Hello. Hello. Who’s there? Old Stag Killer — is that you?”
“. . ”
“Well, of course I’m startled. I never in a million years would have thought an inanimate object, let alone a crossbow such as yourself, would have the power of speech, but, hey, I’m open to ideas.”
“. . ”
“Okay, so what’s that you’re saying? That the taste for blood has somehow been awakened in you after all these years, and now that you are awake, that you crave more?”
“. . ”
“Kill? And if I get caught, then I’m supposed to say that my crossbow made me do it?”
“. . ”
“All right, so I don’t plan to be caught, but even if I entertained your crazy idea, who would you like me to take out?”
“. . ”
“Well, I have to admit, that does make a kind of sense.”
Dear Members of the Cast of Mellow Valley,
You don’t know me. I realize that your excellent show has been over for many years now, but still I am writing in the hopes that someone at this studio or maybe the station or the person in the mailroom will know how to find you, and pass this letter on so you can accept my sincere thanks for everything you did in putting on your show, because watching your show changed my life.
Do you remember (of course you must) the episode where Sergeant Moody finds the duck egg that has been abandoned because the coyote ate its parents so he takes it inside and keeps it warm? And then, when the egg hatches, how it thinks that Sergeant Moody is its mother, and follows him around, including trailing him into town, where bad people try to harm the baby duck and how the Sergeant uses the skills he learned in the Special Forces to save it, putting twelve of the townspeople, including a boy who was the same age as I was when I first saw this episode, which was eight, into the hospital?
So one of the reasons I am writing is to let you know I would never have tried to hurt that baby duck, either then or now. But even more than that, it was the selfless courage of Sergeant Moody that inspired me to spend my life making statues of ducks so people can take their time to admire them by keeping them in their living rooms or dens in order to truly realize how beautiful they are. Therefore, as a token of my gratitude, if you will send me your address, or PO Box, I would like to send each of you one of my duck statues, or decoys as some prefer to call them, to keep in your own homes, or maybe your star trailers. My name is Raymond, and my business is called Raymond’s Decoys, so if you get this letter and would like to have such a statue, you can contact me c/o the Burrow in St. Nils.
Very truly yours, your friend,
Raymond
P.S. Every day I pray they bring your show back in reruns.
Somewhere in a city a man in a beret slowly shuffles forward. He wears a blue cardigan sweater and brown bedroom slippers, and his name, a thought that only occurs to him those times he least expects it — as when ascending a curb or catching his reflection in the window of a pet shop or a bakery — is Louis.
Louis is neither hungry nor not hungry. If he stares at the window of a bakery it is not so much with longing for the cakes and pies behind the glass, for the plates of cookies and trays of sweet rolls on display, as with the memory, long buried, of longing. If he pauses before the window of a pet shop to smile at the winsome kittens or to admire the determined hamsters on their wheels, it is not so much out of a longing for companionship as his half-remembering some distant time he cannot define precisely, when he must have been lonely, and back then — whenever it was — wouldn’t it have been a comfort to have a hamster or some other small rodent he could carry in his pocket as a friend? Yes.
And so he trudges on. At times his eyes fill with dust and particles of abrasive grit, and without thinking, he’ll reach up and rub them until they feel better. At other times almost miraculously he is able to see objects far in the distance, to describe them as if they were only an arm’s length away. Then that passes too before he has the chance to remember if this ever happened before, or if this is the first time and it only seems as if it happened earlier.