Read Being Dead for Free Online Page B

legs apart, his fat and puckered testicles were on display. They’d split and tom with the impact of a heavy shoe. The swag flies browsed his chest and swarmed between his legs. They gleaned the urine and picked at the semen lacquer on his inner thigh.
    The crabs, when they arrived and climbed the gradients of flesh and cloth, did not compete with the flies for blood. They grazed for detached skin and detritus, the swarf and dross and jetsam of animals with lives cut short.
    Here in the dunes – with Celice’s spread body, her rustling hair, her husband hanging from her leg, as centrepiece – was a fine display to illustrate the annual fieldwork lecture that she gave, normally with slides of putrefying seals or tide-abandoned fish, to the faculty’s new and squeamish students: ‘Anyone who studies nature must get used to violence. You’ll have to make yourselves companionable with death if any of you want to flourish as zoologists.’ She meant that fear of death is fear of life, a cliché amongst scientists, and preachers too. Both know that life and death are inextricably entwined, the double helix of existence. Both want to give life meaning only because it clearly has none, other than to replicate and decompose. Hard truths.
    ‘You’ll need to swallow two long words,’ Celice would say, and write SENESCENCE and THANATOLOGY on the teaching screen. Natural ageing. And the study of death. ‘Senescence is the track on which most creatures run their lives. Including us. Not all creatures, of course. Amoebolites and monofiles enjoy eternity. Unless they are destroyed by accident or predators.
Enjoy
eternity? Is that the word?
Experience
eternity, perhaps?
Endure?
Even that denotes too great a consciousness.’
    Later in their study year, her students would encounter monofiles under the microscope, splitting apart like oil in water, reproducing by fission. Two of the same. Then four. Then eight. Then sixty-four. And all their DNA identical. No deaths. No corpses. Evermore.
    A more indulgent lecturer than Celice, less disciplined, more abstract, might ask the class to wonder if that single-celled eternity was paradise or hell. To break in two and not to die. To multiply and yet remain ourselves for ever, world without end. To spread and stretch and colonize and build until there’s nowhere left to stand except on someone else’s shoulders, until the world is swollen like a boil and fit to burst. ‘Death is the price we pay for being multi-celled,’ was all she’d say. ‘Our tracks run out eventually . . .’ More slides. ‘These dusk bugs die within a single day, for every bug must have its day as you well know. This land tortoise, still living in Mauritius, has a sailor’s name and date carved in its shell.
Nicholas Surcouf. 1803.
Two hundred years old at least. And these . . .’ A photographic slide from 1910 of four young women sitting on a bench with a uniformed man spread out on the grass, a cushion for their feet. ‘. . . are almost certainly dead. Life’s only, say, up to ninety years for creatures such as you and I. We’re less than turtles. We have to die before they do. We must. It’s programmed that we will. Our births are just the gateway to our deaths. That’s why a baby screams when it is born. Don’t write that in your notes. They who begin to live begin to die. It’s downhill from the womb, from when the sperm locates the egg and latches on.’
    Celice would take the last slides from the projector, let them contemplate the startling square of light, then add, ‘You’re dying now. Get used to it!’ before she hit the switch to put the room in sudden darkness.
    ‘So, then,’ she’d say to her assembled ghosts, as she went round to lift the blinds and let the daylight in, ‘we have you here for three years, and maybe five if you go on to doctorates. This is Natural Science. Prepare for death and violence. I’m not suggesting that you go to student bars and pick a fight or frequent