Dating : Beneath

A son of mine had died unexpectedly and with a normalcy that surprised me, I preserved its delicate corpse and slowly, but surely, managed to give enough proteins, electric shocks, minerals, artificial palpitations, and stretching exercises so that it could reach, in due time, the height of a normal adult. It hung from fifteen different ropes and cables in the same room where its crib used to be, and its eyes, mouth, nose, anus, ears, and throats were penetrated in a constant motion to maintain the clear perspiration of being alive and in movement.

When he came of age, after much feeding and injections, after much trimming and regurgitation, I finally decided to wake him up. There was, however, no way to reanimate his brain in any capacity, so it was squashed and drained through his trachea, and replaced with a metal balloon which, with my programming and engineering skills, slowly dissipated through his entire skeleton, slowly, enveloping him in the sweet metallic embrace of life.

I deliberated when and how to turn him on, and finally decided on a fine, summer morning with all the windows open so he could experience the warmth of the sun and of his own mother in the same timeframe.

I let him drop, kissed his beautiful bald head and then bonked it. His eyes fluttered, his mouth twitched, his arms flailed, and through his nose I could feel it: the fake breathing of life. He was alive, after all, I had preserved him, and he was as alive as a dead person could be.

“You’re back, you’re back at last!” I cried and hugged him and kissed him all over.

But he said nothing. He simply stared into the nothingness and then from corner to corner trying to make sense of it all.

“I’m alive?” he said which really surprised me, since he had just barely learned to talk when he drowned and those were surely not his final words. I nodded.

“Yes, I kept your body as pristine as you would have yourself, and even added some additions,” I tried to explain, even though I was shaking and shaking. I couldn’t believe that my dream had come true. “Your bones are unbreakable and your soul can’t never leave your body. You don’t need to eat, drink, and sleep. And you are loved. You have been loved for all the years I neglected you.”

“In this body? You could have given me a better body,” he said and then tried to move his mouth, up and down, and up and down again. I understood he was trying to breathe, or laugh, or scream, but he did not know how.

“It was this or nothing!”

“Nothing,” he said and stood up and I hugged him again and cried. “You are going to love me like this, with what you have created?”

“Of course, of course,” I said but he shook his head. “I created you once and now… and now… what… do you mean…”

“You will not love me but I have to pretend that you will,” he said and patted my head. His strangely elongated face and his wrinkless, eyeylidless eyes looked at me. All the orifices of his body opened and closed in quick succession, as if being pumped by a machine, and his fingers touched mine, and I felt it, for the first time, the coldness of his skin. “I remember your eyes, before…”