Franklin paused at the interruption, cleared his throat, and continued.
“But now, humanity may be closer to an answer than ever before. Before very recent events, my guest’s most prominent public appearance was still to come: a lead role in the upcoming horror movie Basement, under the acting alias of Gary Jackson. Since then, astonishing evidence has arisen that Mr. Jackson is, in fact, Sheldon Funk, a Canadian actor who disappeared from public view late last year. But the real story, far more fantastical than anything Hollywood could ever devise, was yet to come. Mr. Funk was actually discovered dead on a bus en route from New York to Toronto, and was admitted to the morgue as a John Doe. There, video evidence verifies that during his autopsy, during which his chest was opened and his heart physically removed, Mr. Funk rose from his examination table, attacked an attendant and then fled the hospital, disappearing for months until finally contacting medical authorities and revealing his condition to the public. Mr. Funk has been exhaustively examined by medical experts, including an independent panel of doctors hired by this network, and all have verified that he is, by all standard presumptions of the word, dead. And yet, he sits with us here tonight. The workings of the world as we understand them have been twisted out of shape since Mr. Funk’s first appearance on newsstands a month ago. Many are calling this an elaborate hoax. Some have labeled Mr. Funk a medical marvel, or the next pure step in human evolution. Some call him a religious miracle, a claim he himself strenuously denies. One thing is certain; he has captured the attention of the world. Is he a man? Does he still retain the rights and freedoms we in our innocence often take for granted? Or is he, as one of our guests contends, a fraud, or worse, a blasphemy? Our Speaking Frankly religion correspondent Julianne Staenky has prepared this report.
“Death,” a female voice intoned in my earpiece as the live feed switched to tape. “It comes in many disguises, but until now, the end result was always the same . . .”
“And we’re clear,” the director announced. “Four minutes until live.” Franklin stood up and hurriedly walked off-stage, an assistant following him with a pack of cigarettes. The woman began texting something on her phone.
“Those sons of bitches,” Rowan cursed in a whisper, covering her mic with her hand. “We’ve been played, Shel.” She shook her head; there was a healthy undercurrent of admiration in her tone.
“What the fuck. Is this all about?” I asked her, not bothering to cover my own microphone. “I wanted to protect myself, not. Have a debate on the moral issues. Of my existence. And who is that woman?”
“This is how you play the game, love,” Rowan said, placing a warm hand over mine on the desktop. “You have to trust me. This was inevitably going to happen, so better now than later, when people have had a chance to form their own opinions. We can’t have that. This is a setback, but if we keep our heads about us, we will prevail. They have rattled our cage to see if we’d bite, but that’s it.” She motioned at the woman. “That bitch over there” Rowan uncovered her microphone for the phrase, then covered it back up; the woman looked up, face puckered in a grimace, clearly catching the insult “is Pauline Kud. Senator Kud from Montana. She’s a tight-assed republican mouthpiece who has had you in her sights for weeks.”
“Why is this. The first I’ve heard?”
“I’ve tried to keep it from you. Her people have been calling our offices ever since your death mitzvah.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Senator Kud represents a sizable contingent of people who object, on religious grounds, to your presence. This whole show is no longer a coming-out, it is going to be a test of your moral right to exist. Fuck. Oh, and Igör?” She leaned past me to Rhodes, who had been patiently listening to our chatter. “You don’t breathe a word until spoken to, all right? No off-the-cuff remarks, no humor. Keep to the point or you’ll be lucky to get a job bleaching anuses.” Rhodes nodded understanding.
I leaned back in my chair while Rowan checked her cell for messages and Rhodes looked over his personal notes of the procedures he had practiced on me. Compared to this, the weeks of prodding I had recently completed had been a breeze. After Rowan had finessed me out of the remaining shoot for Basement — amazing how the word “cancer” can get you out of almost everything — she had called on the talents of Dr. Igör Rhodes, cosmetic quack to celebrities and dictators. Rhodes, after the customary bout of disbelief/vomiting, took to my case with the unforced glee of a child discovering his first dead animal. His first steps were mostly cosmetic — trowel and concrete jobs to support a sagging infrastructure — but then he began to undertake a serious examination of my new makeup. It was thanks to Rhodes that I had a slightly decreased appetite, far more manageable. In a frenzy of let’s try this, he drilled a small hole through my skull and poked around my hypothalamus area with sparking electrodes until my appetite began to wane. I preferred to not think about how damaged my poor brain now was, but given that it should have rotted into jelly months ago, there was no point in worrying. The hunger was still there, but muted, more of a mild craving for a tender forearm than a raging appetite for human brains. He also came up with a substitute foodstuff, experimental human muscle grown in petri dishes and incubators. It was like getting ice milk instead of cream, but it fooled my new self into accepting it as fresh kill, at least for a while. Why I could live only on fresh flesh, we still had not a clue.
Once the preliminaries with Rhodes had been completed, a murder of lawyers at Masters Talent’s beck and call had crafted a personal letter to several leading minds in the scientific community, asking them to a special meeting of utmost importance to their understanding of the universe. I had then become the personal plaything of every yahoo with the letters P, h, and D behind his name. I was offered up to the highest-profile medical journals in the world, and allowed everyone who asked to poke, jab, swab, spray, probe, swathe, inject, fondle, and season me unmercifully, all in the name of knowledge. Only the lawyers and a niggling sense of morality kept them from dismembering the cognizant corpse altogether. After they had had their fun, findings were rushed together, papers prepared, and articles released to the general public.
The furor was immediate. I was a fraud. I was the liberal media’s middle finger to an increasingly gullible middle-America audience craving the next fleeting distraction from a withering recession. Where was the proof? Where was the death certificate? In a world dependent upon sound bites and ambush journalism to make any sort of impact on citizenry, a series of papers and photographs would no longer cut it, not for something of this magnitude. Not nearly sexy enough. Pundits claimed the whole thing reeked of alien autopsy specials, seizing upon every aspect of the event and gleefully covering it with ridicule.
Conversely, there was the already-sizable contingent of theological devotees convinced that I was God’s emissary, or God himself, or some type of deity. Religious shut-ins clamored for articles of my clothing. Goths claimed I was evidence that Hell was closed for business and its patrons primed to dig their way back up. I was hope for salvation and/or the beginning of the end.
Both sides were rabid, coating the other with frothy hatred.
Through it all, Rowan and Masters Talent kept me hidden from public view, moving from place to place, lawyers primed and ready to deny any and all demands for access to the freak through a stockade of bewildering legalese. It must have been costing them a fortune, but I was an investment they believed would pay off dividends. My future earning potential was enormous; I could feed a small nation on my speaking fees alone. I was the cornerstone of a burgeoning empire, employing people in different facets of the entertainment, scientific, and telecommunications industries. People now depended on me for their livelihoods, Rowan carped, so I had better not take the coward’s way out and off myself in a crematorium or something.
Police interest in my case had not been difficult for the cadre of lawyers to dissolve. They had finally figured out my
identity; the thoughtless teen who had taken up two seats to himself on the bus that long-ago night had ended up absconding with my identification and carry-on. He had tried to use the restroom after I had passed on and, after forcing the door open and discovering my body, searched my pockets for my wallet and then removed all my belongings from my seat. He had been smart enough to keep everything hidden for a time, throwing away most of the papers and resumes, but the boy had finally succumbed to temptation and used my driver’s license as a fake ID to gain access to a Yonge Street titty bar. One phone call later from a fearsome bouncer to the lad’s parents had been enough to unstopper the boy’s tongue and bring the whole story pouring forth. Police had been contacted, two and two were finally added together, and they sped to my house to try to divine what had happened to that pesky walking stiff they had misplaced so many weeks previous.
After the agency’s lawyers ascertained that the police sought my body in relation to the ongoing investigation and not in relation to any other disappearances in the city — Rowan kept her instructions to the lawyers vague on this point, and they were just professional enough not to press the issue — they had taken a mighty legal jackhammer to the whole construction. Starting with the police chief and working both up and down the hierarchy, the case of the missing mummy was summarily pushed to the back of the cold case file for lack of evidence, as well as being a drain on taxpayer resources. All involved agreed it was best left forgotten, one of those strange cases cops talked about in the wee hours of the drunken morn. Cops were paid, non-disclosure contracts were signed, and the incident was forgotten until I appeared on the front page of the New York Times, when it was too late to do anything about it.
Mom had been gathered up and moved to a remote facility for aged and infirm relatives of the rich and powerful in southern Florida, under the direct supervision and care of Rhodes himself. He and he alone could explain to the workers why she was a special case, why she had to be kept separate from other residents in a special wing, why her room was to be kept locked at all times, why her dentures had to be removed, why she had so subtle a heartbeat as to be all but undetectable.
Mom was indeed dead, with delusions of animation; it was not a miracle that she had not bitten anyone, for she had, several times. However, lacking dentures, her constant soft gumming of her attendants’ limbs was a cause for irritation, not worry. Rhodes walked me through what he believed to be the chain of events. The virus, if that’s indeed what it is, had entered her bloodstream through the tiny nick my teeth made in her hand when she had grabbed at me. It took its sweet time having any impact; maybe it was her age, or perhaps the myriad medications she was on acted as a firewall. The eventual substitution from infirm, incoherent, doddering woman to shuffling death instrument was so gradual that no one had noticed, and her lapse into biting at everything that moved was written down on her chart as yet another step down the dementia ladder. She was kept in restraints, pinned down with leather straps, pointless nutrients forced intravenously through a needle in her arm. Rhodes told me he had gotten to her just in time; her arm was swollen to burst from all the liquid they had thoughtlessly pushed into her. Rhodes made a quick incision in the forearm and squeezed the liquid out into a nearby slop bucket while his assistant held Mom down. She was so weak from hunger at that point, it was all she could do to silently gnaw at the air in Rhodes’ general direction. It was testament to how poor a nursing home I had put my mother up in that, while the attendants and nurses had indeed noted the mysterious absence of N. Nowlan one winter’s eve, they did absolutely nothing about it. Dead, for them, was dead, gone was gone, and mysteries were for the “living”; presumably, the “living” kept in better care facilities than Mom’s.
Should we kill her? Many times I had wished I had the strength of will to euthanize her, rationalizing it as performing an act of mercy, plunging an air bubble into her bloodstream and ending her/my torment. These were idle thoughts, envisioned over interminable evenings as Mom warbled her merry way through her personal haze of theocratic conspiracies and prevailing discombobulation. She had no quality of life, I told myself. Better a painless slip through the veil of the sheltering sky than this unending descent into incoherence.
Even as I thought this, I knew I could never follow through. Fear stopped me. Fear of being caught. Fear of being wrong. Fear of destroying a perfectly rational being hiding behind the eyes of a madwoman. How could I ever be sure?
But that’s what I ended up doing. Wasn’t it the same now? By Rhodes’ account, Mom was now a growling, feral beast. She paced back and forth in the corners, silent, her eyes roaming the room as she traveled the same path again and again, a tiger gone heat-stupid in captivity. Was there anything human in there? Why was I rational yet my mother/progeny a slavering chowderhead? In the images Rhodes played for me I saw nothing in the husk that haunted that room, nothing human, nothing sane, nothing beyond an animal instinct for raw flesh that we could not explain.
“Mr. Funk,” Franklin said, his voice greased over with faux politeness. “Good evening to you, sir.”
I jerked involuntarily, startled out of my thoughts. The report had ended and Franklin was live on-air, waiting patiently for a response. I took in a breath to speak, too loud, suddenly nervous. The breath was uneven, the dry processed ether of the air conditioning scraping against the ragged lining of my throat as it made its way down into my lungs, the process obscenely amplified by my microphone.
“Thank you, Franklin. A pleasure to be here.”
“Next to Sheldon, we have Ms. Rowan O’Shea, personal representative for Mr. Funk.”
“Good evening,” Rowan replied with a gracious, natural smile. She could have been an actress herself.
“As well, joining us for a discussion on Mr. Funk’s medical condition is his personal physician, Dr. Igör Rhodes. Good evening, sir.”
“Jah, gut to be here, zank you, jah.”
From the moment he’d walked into his examination room and I’d heard him pronounce Now, vat zort of boo-boo haff ve here, hmm? I knew his accent would haunt us all. It was difficult enough portraying me as a sympathetic monstrosity who meant you no harm, but having Dr. Strangelove as scientific backup was, in retrospect, not the best choice we could have made. It mattered not that he was, in fact, of Czechoslovakian origin, a man with an easy grin and boisterous laugh — the mangled Ws and Vs, replacing s with z, the thin black moustache; they layered our presentation with the scent of extermination camps.
“And finally, we have with us a familiar guest to the show, Senator Pauline Kud, three-term House Representative from Montana and founding member of the lobby group Priority Action Family First U.S.A.O.K.”
“A pleasure as always, Franklin.” Her eyes glistened in the glare, wide and unfocused, their color the pale blue of dementia.
“Mr. Funk, as both guest and topic, I’d like to begin with you. I am looking at you now from across this desk, and I am having, shall we say, a difficult time reconciling the reports I have read with the person who sits before me. You understand that what you claim, even with the backing of medical proof, can only be met with skepticism by any rational-thinking adult?”
“I understand completely. I don’t believe it myself. Half the time.”
I forced a winning smile to my lips to try to acknowledge the unusual humor in the situation. Franklin blanched as I bared my teeth, and I let the smile fall away. Rowan had warned me against smiling; Rhodes’ tooth bleaching efforts had only succeeded in making my grins look all the more ghastly.
“Um. We will, we will [cough] we will get into the merits of what these reports claim momentarily, but taking your condition as fact, for the moment, I’d like to begin by asking the question that I’m sure is on everyone’s mind watching tonight; what, exactly, is the process of death like?”
“Unpleasant.”
“Could you elaborate?”
“Very. Unpleasant.”
“If I may, Franklin?” Rowan interjected.
“Please.”
“Sheldon has undergone something unprecedented in the annals of history—”
The senator nearly snapped her neck bouncing forward to interrupt. “I’d like to argue that point. The Bible clearly states that, aside from Lazarus, Jes—”
“—arguably unprecedented, then, if it moves this along,” Rowan growled back. “But undeniably traumatic. What happens after death is simply outside human understanding, and Sheldon’s reaction is a natural response to an event beyond our limited comprehension. How do you describe a sunset to a blind person? How do you explain music to the deaf?”
“Sheldon,” Franklin looked at me, “would you say that is an accurate analogy?”
“Sure?”
He turned his sights on Kud, frosty demeanor noticeably softening. “Now, Senator . . .”
I had never noticed before through the television screen, but Franklin’s skin was quite thin, like tissue paper. I watched capillaries expand and contract as blood strode its way through his system. My teeth began to ache, and I furtively reached into my pocket for a nugget of Dr. Rhodes’ patent-pending shamburger and popped it into my mouth as the camera focus switched to the senator. The craving subsided as my tongue felt its way around the contours of the gobbet and, finding it satisfactory if oddly tasteless — like chewing a wad of old gum, flavor long sucked out — flung it back into the cavern of my throat and swallowed it down.
“. . . if we may take it as fact, something that you’ve gone on the record as claiming to be a fraud ‘perpetrated on the American public to achieve monetary gain,’ your words on yesterday’s 700 Club; if we can presume for the moment that Sheldon’s affliction is genuine, how do you believe this bodes for humanity’s future?”
The senator prepared to unleash her fury. “Well, we can’t believe this, it is absurd on the face of it, and I won’t dignify such a blatantly ridiculous question with a response. What these people are doing is nothing less than one of the most distasteful examples of public deception in American history. They make these harebrained assertions, backed up with highly questionable quote unquote scientific proof, and shove them through their well-worn channels in the liberal media to try to extort money from the gullible. It is a disgusting charade.”
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