The Motions: An Echelon of Beauty Part 3
*This is that story from college that is beyond repair but really I’m trying cause fuck it I was proud of it at the time… this section, believe it or not, is based, in part, on a true story. I forget the guy’s name but I think I saw it on the History Channel some years ago. Blew me away.
In a morning no different from any other, might as well have been January because the calendars page hadn’t moved in three years, a dark-haired woman coughed and Khrise’s tears ceased and their absent was so stark that he never looked like the same man again. And as her throat resounded, further in the tent, a little boy screamed, drowning in his vomit, and a legless man beside him lost hold of the edge of his cot, trying to get up to maybe run from death but forgetting that death had already fixed the race by removing his legs, falling onto a wooden tray of scalpels, knocking the cot into another man’s shoulder whose weakened flesh cracked and began spilling blood that was neither red nor blue but rather a purplish bronze.
But Von Khrise’s attention was only at the source of that cough. I turned to him, and seeing only a wax mannequin, I knew that I had become the head doctor. Without a word, I ran to the boy in an attempt to turn him on his side, watching out of the corner of my eye my old friend stumble cautiously to the love of his life.
Shortly after that day, our staff increased, and the deaths became less rapid, though their inevitability never dwindled. During this time, the doctor knelt by the side of his final patient’s bed more as a loved visitor than as the woman’s doctor. She was a native, unlike any of the staff, and didn’t speak any English, though the doctor’s eyes reflected some sense of understanding and empathy. I noticed nothing unique about her curly dark brown hair, or the pale skin that covered her face and the fair clothing covering the rest of her. But, I imagine that Von Khrise had been around the dying long enough to know what a soul looked like, and there was something infinitely unique about hers.
Every morning thereafter, I stumbled into the tent, walking by the same men dressed in black carrying bodies wrapped in sheets and black faces. On entering the tent, I always found the doctor tending to his patient. And at the end of every day, when I drank to forget about all the hopeless facial expressions of the dying that were burning in my mind’s eye, he remained in the tent, forever at the same spot by her bed. I began to wonder if he ever slept, but when my attempt at interaction with Von Khrise went ignored. Coming close to what had become their corner of the giant hospital tent for the first time, I just then noticed dozens of open medical journals and books piled on the floor along with bunches of expended instruments that had obviously been used to attempt countless fantastic ideas and measures of the desperate surgeon.
Unable to get a response out of him, I remained behind Von Khrise as he brushed her thinning hair with a damp sponge, speaking something softly in a language neither she nor I could recognize but clearly understood. I heard the protests of his love, that he was eternally hers, and no black death could interrupt love. She nodded and cried and I could see an emptiness encompassing most of her exposed flesh as though there the only flicker of life remaining in this corpse was directed to her eyes and her lips. One eye dully stared at the tent’s ceiling, while the other followed her doctor’s wrinkled lips. Days ago, I noted that she no longer spoke, and her breathing had become practically nonexistent. It was apparent that she no longer held the physical strength to even turn her head. I wondered whether she had lost all use of her limbs, but noticed that she was managing to stroke the hand clutching her own, or perhaps it was Von Khrise, moving that hand. I could never quite tell.
In the end, the most evolved human lover I had ever known was entirely unable to keep his love on this Earth, though he attempted every scientific means known to man, even some of the lesser known occult and forgotten practices of medicine.
Her diseased body was placed in an expensive vault, and Von Khrise left the hospital the same day her body did. I heard about him often, from other doctors, how he had isolated himself to her burial site and spoke to no one. It became a mystery as to where he ever ate or slept, as he was never seen except by those passing through the graveyard. For days, however, he would disappear, and then someone would catch him emerging from the vault in the middle of the night. His sanity was time and time again brought into question.
Not many were surprised when the body disappeared from the vault, and Von Khrise along with it. Even less were surprised when it turned up months later inside his bedroom. At one point, a plaster mask had been constructed and was attached to the front of her decaying head, dressed up to resemble the beauty that once existed when the warmth of life illuminated her face. The rest of her body was somewhat of a medical marvel, as it showed few signs of decay. It turned out that Khrise had invented a new system of mummification in which much of the outer skin could be protected from decay through various oils and soaking methods.
The local authorities were called, and on entering the bedroom, found Von Khrise asleep with his lover’s corpse wrapped tightly in his arms. He had the light of true happiness on his unconscious face and for some reason the investigators decided to silently remove the woman’s body without disturbing Khrise’s unique dream-state in which, as it turned out, he had been using to restore some sort of a soul into the empty casing of a body in his arms.
There were never any legal proceedings for Von Khrise. It seemed as though no one had any desire to punish the man as no real fault could be found with what he had done to save the one he loved.
After the woman’s body was removed, I went to the doctor’s house, thinking that he might be more willing to speak about this chapter in his life now that it was over. But, I found him lying in the same position as he had been when the body was removed. The sheets hadn’t been disturbed, and the room was set exactly as it had been in the photograph that was published in the community newspaper. The doctor was gone; his cold body remained, and there were no plans for restoration.
