The Deaths of Dr. Zhen

by Brian Osburn

haggard when he limped inside the late-night coffee shop in downtown Baltimore. A strong Nor'easter had swept in earlier that evening. Accompanying the strong rain was copious lightning and thunder. As Zhen shook out his over-coat and hat at the establishment's threshold, a large bolt of lightning hit somewhere close by. It was quickly followed by the crack of powerful thunder.

  Not one to be frightened by a simple thunderstorm, Zhen had a moment of whimsy. Another bolt of lightning lit up his countenance, revealing a barely detectable smile as small rivers of rain water ran down his wrinkled face. Zhen mused that this would be a perfect night to have a macabre conversation, for Baltimore was the hometown of Edgar Allen Poe, nineteenth-century America's most renowned poet of darkness.

  Downtown Baltimore had been Poe's haunt. Zhen wondered if perhaps Poe had ever visited this particular building back in the early 1800s when it housed some other business. Zhen mused that Poe would have enjoyed eavesdropping on the conversation to come.

  Dr. Friedberg was already seated and enjoying a latte. As Zhen took his seat opposite him, Friedberg made a hand gesture to the bored counter-help to set both men up with a round. The server nodded and went to work frothing foam. Friedberg offered his hand then to his former professor. Zhen accepted Friedberg's open hand and gave it a strong, brief shake. “You're never late, are you professor?”

  “Never,” replied Zhen, “You know how I feel about such things.” Friedberg smiled. Indeed, Zhen was adamant about punctuality. He was once known to frequently lock the doors of his class to keep out late-coming students. “I believe I was once a victim of your locked door policy.”

  “And you never were late again, were you Dr. Friedberg?”

  “Never,” he replied as two hot lattes arrived at the table. Friedberg took a spoon to his and stirred it as he tried to formulate a way to start a dialog with his strange mentor. Another bolt of lightning struck outside, more distant this time. A second or two passed before its thunder rattled the plate glass window they were seated against. “Professor,” Friedberg began hesitantly, “what you propose is quite, uh, very...”

  “Unique?”

  “Yes,” he replied, but that wasn't the word he had in mind.

  “Disturbing?”

  “Yes.” That word was more like it, he thought.

  “Macabre?”

  Friedberg shifted uncomfortably in his seat, raised an eyebrow and nodded his head. “I'd like to try and understand your motivation for attempting a stunt like this,” he said with a tone that bordered on chastisement.

  “And that is why we're here tonight, Doctor Friedberg, although I can assure you, this is to be no stunt.” Zhen put his cup down and continued. “Let's begin with a question to you,” he suggested. Friedberg agreed with a nod and returned the steely gaze of his mentor head-on. “Tell me of your experiences during the Great Depression.”

  Friedberg smiled, let loose a chirp of a laugh and put down his cup. “Tell me of your own, Professor,” he replied. The year was two-thousand eight and Friedberg was barely forty years old.

  Zhen himself was barely in his sixties. “I cannot,” Zhen replied in earnest. “I wasn't born yet.”

  “Nor I,” stated Friedberg.

  “Tell me of your adventures during the French revolution, then.”

  “Professor! What?”

  “The Middle Ages, perhaps? What about the time of Christ? Tell me what it was like to walk amongst the dinosaurs, Ben.”

  Friedberg didn't say a word. He put his elbow on the table and used his hand to hold his head in a thoughtful pose.

  “You find my questions senseless, don't you?” Zhen coyly said.

  “Professor, they're ridiculous.”

  “Before you lose interest, let me further explain.” Zhen paused and bent over the table. His pause was long enough for the sound of the rain hitting the plate glass window to briefly take over the conversation. “You can't tell me about these things because you were not conscious during them.”

  “Professor, you're testing my patience now. We've covered that.”

  “Wait let me finish my thoughts and you'll understand.” Zhen leaned back and took a quick drink of his latte and then continued. “Each person who has ever lived never had any memorable experiences before being born. It's quite impossible to describe, the nothingness before memory. That is why my questions do not make any sense. Until a person's memory kicks in, there is no sense of time, no sense of anything at all.”

  Friedberg slowly nodded. “That is understandable. You really cannot describe anything before your own personal memory engages. Even the first two or three years after birth are a blank to most people because their means of storing data at that time is incompatible with, shall we say, subsequent iterations of operating system software.”

  “You were always quick, Ben,” Zhen said with a wry smile. “In a nutshell, humans blink on.”

  “Okay, I agree. What we mean by the human experience, it blinks on.”

  “There's more! Humans blink off, too! And you'll know this to be true when I explain. Human consciousness and the unconscious are closely tied to memory. They're all intertwined like ivy.” Zhen interlocked his fingers to illustrate the point. “Now, imagine this human ivy on the side of a wall, which represents time in human terms. The ivy crawls up the wall, which supports it. As long as there is wall to climb, the ivy attaches itself to it and continues. However, and this is the key, the ivy cannot go through the wall to the other side. The wall itself which supports it acts as a barrier to prevent it from crossing over.”

  Friedberg continued to listen intently.

  “What I'm trying to say is this. Human consciousness is a function of time. When time is up, so is human consciousness. There's nowhere else consciousness can go. It was supported by time and when the wall ends, the ivy necessarily ends. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, and professor, I must tell you that what you're suggesting here flies in the face of what every major religious faith on earth teaches. What you're telling me is that just as human blink on, when they die, they also blink off.”

  “Exactly!”

  “I don't subscribe to that professor. I always believed that human consciousness extends beyond this plane of existence.”

  “And what proof do you have that a heaven or hell exists? None. And what proof do you have that human existence extends beyond our own time and space? None.”

  “Thus, you have the mystery of faith, Professor.”

  “I know damn well what it's called, and I have none, you hear!” Zhen barked.

  He had become visibly agitated. A long silence ensued as Zhen realized he had crossed a line that could endanger his relationship with his former student. Things needed to calm down, but as if to put the exclamation point on his rant, another bolt of lightning with powerful thunder struck nearby.

  Friedberg felt that he had heard enough and rose from his seat. “Perhaps it is best if I...”

  “Wait, please Ben.” Zhen had reached out to Friedberg's hand and was holding onto it.

  A pained expression crossed Dr. Friedberg's countenance. He sighed and slowly sat back down.

  Zhen let go of him to search for a handkerchief to wipe his head, but settled for a napkin that had accompanied his coffee. He regained his composure and then continued. “I want to find out if what you believe is the truth, Ben. I have to know. Because I fear that our conscious, subconscious and memories are all as mortal as the human body itself.”

  “Professor, you know I respect you to the utmost degree, but I'm about to end this discussion.”

  “Don't pull the plug on the discussion, Ben. Pull the plug on me, instead.”

  Friedberg was not amused by Zhen's last comment. “People have died before and been brought back, professor. You'll discover nothing by doing it yourself.”

  The professor sat back and left his hands on the table. 'I want to be dead longer than any of those people. I want to be dead for at least an hour.”

  The trauma d
octor sat back in his seat and left his hands on the table. He let out a long breath. This last statement of Zhen's was beyond the pale of reason.

  Friedberg was well aware of the new medical breakthroughs that showed human heart muscles and brain cells were non-necrotic even after an hour of clinical death and that it was actually the re-infusion of oxygen that caused sudden, massive cell death. The answer to bringing someone back from the dead after an hour had passed would be to reintroduce oxygen to the body in diluted amounts and slowly raise its concentration over time. Of course, some chemical or drug regimen and a lowered body temperature would be factors to consider in developing the overall processes for bringing someone back who had been dead for so long. All this flashed through the trauma doctor's mind in an instant. “What you propose, Professor, has never even been attempted before. You don't just expect me to lay you down on a gurney, kill you off, and then try to bring you back to life an hour later, do you?”

  “No Ben, certainly not. This project will require intense and dedicated research.”

  Friedberg continued his misgivings. “Even if I could figure out a way to revive you, after an hour or more, you might have severe brain damage, and if not, then severe heart damage.” Friedberg's expression softened. He looked thoughtfully at his old college professor. “Why do you need to seek this particular information that you will naturally find out in the course of time?”

  Zhen thought back to that terrible day when the lives of three people