Seize the Night

smell. A dead man was sprawled on the floor in front of the sink.
    At first I thought he must have been killed by whatever made the cocoons. I expected to see a wad of spun silk in his open mouth, yellowish-white sacs bulging from his ears, wispy filaments trailing from his nose.
    The cocoons, however, had nothing to do with it. This was a suicide.
    The revolver lay on his abdomen, where recoil and death spasm had tossed it, and the swollen index finger of his right hand was still hooked through the trigger guard. Judging by the wound in his throat, he'd put the muzzle under his chin and fired one round straight up into his brain.
    Entering the lightless kitchen earlier in the night, I had gone directly to the back door, where I'd halted with my hand on the knob when a monkey shadow leaped up the glass. Approaching the door and backing away from it, I must have come within inches of stepping on this corpse.
    “This what you expected?” Bobby asked, voice muffled by the hand with which he was trying to filter the sickening odor.
    “No.”
    I didn't know what I'd expected, but I was sure this wasn't the worst thing that had been lurking in the deepest cellars of my imagination. When I'd first seen the cadaver, I'd been relieved as though subconsciously I had envisioned a specific and far worse discovery than this, an ultimate horror that now I would not have to confront.
    Dressed in generic white athletic shoes, chinos, and a red-and-green plaid shirt, the dead man was flat on his back, his left arm at his side, the palm turned up as though seeking alms. He appeared to have been fat, because his clothes were stretched taut over parts of his body, but this was the result of swelling from bacterial-gas formation.
    His face was bloated, opaque eyes bulging from the sockets, swollen tongue protruding between grimacing lips and bared teeth. Purge fluid—produced by decomposition and often mistaken for blood by the inexperienced—was draining from the mouth and nostrils. Pale green with areas of greenish black, the flesh was also marbleized by hemolysis of veins and arteries.
    Bobby said, “Must've been here—what?—a week, two weeks?”
    “Not that long. Maybe three or four days.”
    The weather had been mild for the past week, neither warm nor chilly, which would have allowed decomposition to proceed at a predictable pace. If the man had been dead much longer than four days, the flesh would have been not pale green but green-black, with patches that were entirely black. Vesicle formation, skin slippage, and hair slippage had occurred but were not yet extreme, enabling me to make an educated guess as to the date of the suicide.
    “Still walking around with Forensic Pathology in your head,” Bobby said.
    “Still.”
    My education in death dated to the year I was fourteen. By the time they enter their teens, most boys have a morbid fascination with gruesome comic books, horror novels, and monster movies. Adolescent males measure progress toward manhood by their ability to tolerate the worst gross-outs, those sights and ideas that test courage, the balance of the mind, and the gag reflex. In those days, Bobby and I were fans of H. P. Lovecraft, of the biologically moist art of H. R. Giger, and of low-budget Mexican horror movies full of gore.
    We outgrew this fascination to an extent that we didn't outgrow other aspects of our adolescence, but in those days I explored death further than did Bobby, progressing from bad movies to the study of increasingly clinical texts. I learned the history and techniques of mummification and embalming, the lurid details of epidemics like the Black Death that killed half of Europe between 1348 and 1350.
    I realize now that by immersing myself in the study of death, I had hoped to accept my mortality. Long before adolescence, I knew that each of us is sand in an hourglass, steadily running out of the upper globe into the stillness of the globe below, and that in my particular hourglass, the neck between these spheres is wider than in most, the fall of sand faster. This was a heavy truth to have been carried by one so young, but by becoming a graveyard scholar, I meant to rob death of its terror.
    In recognition of the steep mortality rate of people with XP, my special parents had raised me to play rather than work, to have fun, to regard the future not with anxiety but with a sense of mystery.
    From them, I learned to trust God, to believe I was born for a purpose, to be joyful.