"Eulogy sans Praise" by Giovanni Dania

Eulogy sans Praise
Giovanni Dania

Most of the boy’s muscles had already locked up, refusing to obey any command his brain sent along now-useless neural pathways. Right after his spine was rendered ineffective, and he’d collapsed under the deadweight of his own upper torso, his body had settled squarely between the foyer and living room of his mother's drab, overpriced, piece-of-shit two-bedroom apartment. The Venetian blinds over the sliding door to the balcony were closed. And the phone seemed so cosmically far away.

But his sweat glands worked. In fact, they were working overtime.

His mother wouldn't be home for at least another two hours. By then, he'd be nothing more than a corpse, whisked away and disposed of quite efficiently. The Tong had made sure to explain each individual datum of what they were doing to him in clinical, excruciating, torturous detail.

Except, of course, why.

Was there one there now, a Tong associate, behind him, studying him? Waiting for the neurotoxin to take full and final effect? He could no longer tell, pain being the only sensation he could digest reliably at this stage. His mind, starved of the myriad perceptions it ordinarily took for granted, began to feed on itself, and he was in the grip of his own unfettered memories.

The boy recalled a trip to the West Coast, his only time on a beach. The O-layer had been forgiving, that day, and he was able to spend more time under the naked sun than most people would chance. And, although the zipper on his white-trash cutoffs had broken off from the accelerated corrosion brought on by ocean spray, he'd had fun. There were even some seagulls, but they'd lacked an enthusiasm he'd felt, even in his urban ignorance, that they'd forever lost decades ago.

Eight minutes had transpired. Striated muscle that had contracted now loosened, and he felt each fiber relax with a twitch, a final expenditure of stockpiled bioelectrical energy. The bolus of yesterday's supper sank against the wall of his large intestine, slowly spreading there with warm viscocity.

And, as the youth remembered a former lover, the contours of her face, her sweet honey smell, her velvet lips, awkward, nervous fumbling in a darkened theater, he felt an urge to cry. But his tear ducts had ceased to function approximately thirteen minutes after the injection.

They'd informed him that his lungs, then his eyes would be the last to go.

The phantom smells of popcorn and urine filled his mind, dopplering sounds of carousels and joyous screams. Echoes upon echoes upon echoes of laughter, of rickety wooden platforms and rubberized wheels. He recalled his body in rebel motion, gravity rearing its head. Every fair, every carnival he'd ever been to, was let loose in that vast bulk of recollection.

Half an hour had elapsed since the Chinese mafia had broken into his apartment and invaded his bloodstream with their neurotoxin. It had taken its effect, and had spread throughout his body. It no longer needed to be propelled.

Crushing guilt and shame flared within him, every embarrassing moment of his short life exploded. His heart had stopped beating thirty-eight seconds previously, however. He would not blush.

Surprisingly, he was still sweating.

His lungs expelled their last. His blood at a standstill, he felt heavier than ever. Ravenous for oxygen, he felt a burning urge to shake, felt the reflexive need, as if he were drowning. But he couldn't. He couldn't shake.

The glands emptied of their store, he'd finally stopped perspiring.

As the muscles surrounding his eyes relaxed, he tried to focus on the Venetian blinds. He cursed them for being closed, for not allowing him a final glimpse of the outside world.

And then, he no longer saw. Blood was already congealing in his dilated veins and arteries. He felt it. He felt each individual cell on the surface of his skin flake away, layer by layer, slowly like tectonics. The only activity in his body was the liquid being pushed around in his inner ear by the delicate bones in the middle ears, but there were no longer any synapses being triggered by his cilia. He was deaf as well as blind.

That was his last thought.