by Brian Osburn
The Deaths of Dr. Zhen
by
Brian Osburn
Copyright 2012 Brian Osburn / Landfall Media Group, LLC
The Deaths of Dr. Zhen
a short story by Brian Osburn (2012)
Blink on. Blink off.
Takes no faith at all
for the lost soul on a journey
Up the ivy-covered wall.
It would be hard to find anyone as smart as Dr. Gilbert Zhen. While a young man, Zhen had steadily climbed to the top ranks in his graduating class at Princeton. During those days, he dated a beautiful girl from nearby Smith College. Her name was Elizabeth Morgan, but he called her Betty. They fell deeply in love, and married each other as a graduation present.
Gilbert took a teaching position at the University of Maryland and not long into his tenure, they had their first child; a boy they named William. A year later, they got their baby girl and named her Antoinette.
Zhen worked tirelessly; continuing to teach while pursuing his doctorate. In no time, Zhen received a PhD in biology and considered entering medical school.
His young family was poor, but they were wealthy with love for each other. Betty encouraged Gil to follow his goal and attend medical school. Gil carefully considered all his options and agreed that it was the right path for him and their family. He had always been interested in research, so perhaps he could get a job with a drug company after medical school and earn a nice living for his family.
His choice was set and he began medical school that August. Once again, he worked as hard as any man could. It would have been easy for him to put all of his efforts into his work and his studies, but Gil was an amazing man. Incredibly, he still found the energy to enjoy his growing family and share precious time with them. The Zhen's were on target to fully experience the American dream.
Gil was able to take off from his studies for only one full day during that semester. That day happened to be Christmas Eve. He and Betty decided that a perfect way to spend the day was to visit the grandparents who only lived a hundred miles away. So off they went as a family.
Towards the end of their journey, the Zhen's were on a charming two-lane New England back road. The kids were singing Christmas carols. Betty sang with them. Gil smiled with a deep contentment. He was about to finish his first semester of medical school with top-of-the-class marks. It was Christmas and all was right with the world.
Just minutes later, as their minivan crested a steep rise in the road, Gil's heart stopped. A large pickup truck traveling at a very high rate of speed was also at the top of the hill with Gil, but the truck was in Gil's lane and driving in the opposite direction. Zhen could do nothing. The two cars hit head-on at a speed that sent the minivan's hot engine into the passenger compartment.
Betty, Will and little Toni were killed instantly. Zhen was brutally injured, but lived. The driver of the truck, a drunken city-councilman who was headed for another bar down the street, was not hurt except for a scratch to his forehead. It had taken Zhen five years of tireless effort to create a perfect life for his family; one horrific moment to lay it all in ruin.
The next two years of Zhen's life were spent in living nightmares.
The first of these terrible times was the funerals for his family. Zhen could not walk on his broken legs. He had to be wheeled into the funeral home and to the grave site.
Zhen's parents, Betty's parents, and everyone in attendance wept uncontrollably. It was weeks before either he or anyone on either side of the family could feel anything other than overwhelming grief. Gil wept openly for a month. As time passed, his broken body began to heal.
He was learning how to walk again when the trial of the city-councilman finally began. The proceedings were not conducted before a jury. The judge alone would determine the outcome. The trial was over in a single day. The councilman was found guilty of vehicular manslaughter, yet received only three years in prison.
Not long after that, Zhen learned that the defendant only carried the state minimum on his car insurance, so Zhen received only twenty-five thousand dollars for the death of his entire family. He sued the councilman, and was awarded a three million dollar judgment. Predictably, the councilman promptly filed for bankruptcy.
In the span of two years, Zhen's life had been laid waste. In that second year, the city councilman was given probation and released from prison, the civil trial ended, and the final payment to the cemetery and funeral home was made. Zhen was a broken and hollow man. He took what was left of the twenty-five thousand dollar insurance payment and put it into some stocks and forgot about it.
After a total of three years had passed, Zhen went back to teaching at the University of Maryland, but never returned to medical school.
And for years after that, his life consisted of going to work and then going back home to an empty and sad house.
In his twentieth year at Maryland, Zhen was well known as a hard, cold teacher of biology. Those students who worked hard, he fairly rewarded. Those who shrugged off his class, he burned.
For a man who knew practically everything on the subject of being biologically human, Zhen was becoming less humane with each passing day. He was an expert in anatomy and could recite for hours, if encouraged, the litany of body parts to be found in a man, and the function and possible malfunctions of each of said parts.
However, Zhen's soul had become comatose long ago. He denied that he even had a soul as a human soul was nowhere to be found on the finite list of human body parts.
Slowly and steadily, Zhen had traveled to a dark destination.
He was unforgiving of everyone who had offended him. The drunken city-councilman, the lenient judge, the students that mocked him in class; Zhen held them all in utter disdain.
The students who did not know of Zhen's tragic past wrote off his behavior as the mannerisms of a bitter, old man. In reality, Zhen was the epitome of hatred itself, though he hid his feelings as best he could from those around him.
Still, he remained a complex and thoughtful individual, and it was during this, his twentieth year at the University of Maryland, that Dr. Zhen began to seriously consider the final fate of his long dead family.
His strong, natural curiosity began to focus on human consciousness and death. He read hundreds of books on any subject dealing with the afterlife and even took a lengthy sabbatical to travel the world in search of the answers to the questions that had formed in his mind. He spoke with holy men from all the world's faiths and searched among their ancient texts. He even became a student again and took graduate-level theology classes. Of course, he attended these classes at another college some distance from his own so as not be discovered on his admittedly personal quest.
His zeal (if he had ever had any since the accident) for teaching students had waned. He was no longer confrontational in the class, and his students suffered from his lack of interest. Whereas before he had produced hundreds of some of the most respected physicians in the country, he would be lucky if now only a handful in any semester would rise up to achieve “top” status. His attention was still on his quest for answers to questions that had no answers to be found except, possibly, through direct personal experience.
It was based on this revelation, that some things could only be “known” experimentally through an experience of human consciousness, that Dr. Zhen hatched a desperate plan. If his questions about death needed experience to provide answers, then experience is what he would seek. And after all these years and all this pain, why not!
Dr. Zhen was fortunate in the timing to seek an experience with death. Advances in medical knowledge might well enable him to have that death experience and still live to tell the tale.
His journey to the other side of life
would be lengthy and fraught with danger. The plan for such an endeavor was simple enough; die, stay dead, and then return to life with the answers to his questions. The devil was going to be in the details because what Dr. Zhen was attempting had never been done before without the person permanently becoming a fixture in the afterlife, if it existed, which he highly doubted.
Dr. Zhen did not intend to merely poke his head in death's door. He wanted to stick around for awhile.
An acquaintance who was an expert in the care of trauma patients; the exact type of specialist that Dr. Zhen needed to successfully conduct such a bizarre experiment was Dr. Ben Friedberg. Friedberg worked in the emergency room of a prestigious Baltimore-area teaching hospital and had once been a student of Dr. Zhen. In time, Zhen contacted Friedberg, briefly laid out his idea, and proposed a meeting to discuss “certain details.”
Friedberg accepted to meet on short notice with his old college professor, yet there was an uneasiness in his acquiescence to discuss “something that was both intriguing and important to mankind.” Those were Zhen's words.
He remembered Dr. Zhen to be, in a word, eccentric. And that was being kind. It would never have been his first choice in how to spend an evening, but he would have to speak face-to-face with Dr. Zhen about this plan of cheating death.
Dr. Zhen was wet and
