Building 11 “The Eyes Are Moving”

I was visiting a friend recently, at their home while their parents were away.

Their parents have been away for a long time, and if it wasn't for her brother I doubt I would have been made to know that she had been released from the hospital.

Or at least, what is left of her.

What is left of Tracy.

I never saw one as advanced as this. I have interviewed others, people who's bodies mysteriously keep going despite having essential systems stop working, like the heart or the lungs. I've interviewed them.

It has been a strange occurrence that has been sitting in the back of my mind for weeks now, somewhere behind the disappearance of Max and the revelations about my mom's missing corpse.

I had considered asking my dad if he had known anything about the incident at the morgue, but I know I couldn't be happy with the answer, whatever it may have been.

She doesn't seem to remember me, and she doesn't seem to really have any real functionality to her. She just lays in the basement where they had left her.

Her brother had said that he had tried to bring her upstairs, but that all the effort he could muster wouldn't make it happen. Her form lacks a rigidity, and he worries that now that she really doesn't really have any real sense of self preservation that he could accidentally drop her down the stairs, and she wouldn't do anything to stop it.

I checked her over. She didn't have a heartbeat, and she didn't take a breath the entire time I was there. As far as I can tell at least. When I looked at her, I felt such separation from it all. After all the grief I have had over her in the past, you wouldn't think that I could feel so little when looking upon the still form of my friend.

The only things that gave any indication of life were her eyes. She followed my movements around the room, blinking every minute or so in a slow, empty sort of way, like she was committing to a reflex that was built into her, a habit of blinking after keeping her eyes open for long periods of time.

She doesn't need to blink anymore I think.

Her eyes don't really dry out, and her body seems to be, if anything, fully removed from virtually all signs of degradation or the passage of time. One would find it easy to look upon her and assume she was comatose, but her eyes have just the slightest semblance of knowing, the slightest sense of identifying that there is someone in the room around her.

I tried reading to her, one of the books we had read on the playground on a hot summer day.

Back then we had sat there all alone, the other kids relatively preoccupied with something else. We had read the book together, our shoulders touching, the sun on our backs as we sat against the fence around the school. The ground underneath us was hard, blacktop in name but not color.

It was a memory that I had thought of a lot over the last few years, but one that I had never worked up the nerve to have mentioned to her when she was alive.

And though I see her eyes moving, I know that she isn't alive.

And when I read the book to her there was no sign of change in her features at all, save perhaps a grimace when it seemed to have had its fill.

I asked her brother what his plan was with her, and he said he didn't really know. The family didn't really want to think about it, and their parents had more or less moved out, though they still insisted that it was a vacation.

I try to see her as a living person. I really do. But I know that none of this is how it is supposed to be.

I have looked at my old notes, and I know that she died.

She died on Jun 26th of last year.

I was devastated by it.

You helped me get through it, and I ended up alright on the other side.

And yet here she is.

Here is her body.

I've noted this before. I know I have, but there is something about it that is sitting around in my head.

What is it? What the hell is it?!

Her parents considered the possibility of burying her as she is. She is by any legal definition dead. She has no brain activity, and no heartbeat. There is no respiration, and they stopped feeding her after it became clear it was simply sitting in her stomach.

Her brother was horrified by the idea, and honestly so am I. I know she didn't want to linger in a state like this, but there is dead and then there is this, and she was dead dammit! She was already dead, and now here she is, lingering in a state that barely counts as existence, but I see her eyes moving. I see them moving, and so long as they are moving, she cannot really be dead, no matter what they say.

She was dead...she was dead and I cried for her. I cried until my head was throbbing and my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest.

Her existence doesn't feel cruel. It feels wrong, because in July of last year I buried her. I went to her funeral, and I was a mess for days after. And so much has changed since then, and to have her here now, it isn't some cruel twist of fate. The universe was one way.

And now it is another.

It is another in ways that suggest something to me, but I don't know what.

And all I can do is scream when I take my walks at night.

Because all of this feels so unfair and unreal.

And Max's body still is missing...

though everyone knows...

they know she is dead.

She is dead.

But no...

She isn't here anymore.

And neither is Tracy.