corpsified 5 : the point from beyond the grave

"I could have done a lot of things differently with my life," I said.

"What are you, dying?" said Victor. "Your life's not over."

"In a lot of ways, it is, yeah," I said. "That's what I've been trying to say."

I turned my gaze to the heavens and closed my eyes. Through the skin of my closed eyelids I felt the flash and tremble of the fireworks as they blossomed against the ashen backdrop of a cloudy night sky. I inhaled the heavy air of celebration and held it in my lungs as I considered my words.

When I opened my eyes, Victor was gone. Or, he wasn't. The actual, physical Victor, was gone, and in his place was a stack of grinning corpses. They stared at me with the lifeless eyes that I had tried, moments ago, to imitate. The Victorcorpses managed a much better job of it than I had been able to muster. As they stared at me with a silence more solemn than any silence the real Victor could affect, they multiplied. Dozens and dozens of new Victorcorpses appeared and crammed themselves into a finite space, as they multiplied into infinity, all within the span of a few breaths.

They stared at me, each one of them, and as I watched them, they opened their mouths to speak.

"We might have been," they said in mournful unison.

"You might have been," I said, "but you are."

The corpses had nothing further to say. I did.

"You might have been," I repeated, "but you are. I know Victor can see you just as plainly as I can see my own dragging corpses. I'm stuck with a room full of corpses wherever I go -- the rotting reminders of my lives that might have been."

Still, the corpses stared at me, multiplying again and again without comment.

"I used to feel like I was 'faking it', pretending to be, for instance, a software engineer," I said. "I felt like I was just aping what I figured a software engineer ought to do. I was pretending to fill a role."

"We are roles," said the corpses. Simultaneously, the all of them looked down at the green grass, shuffled their feet a little, and seated themselves. I think they figured I'd be a while.

"Yep," I said. "You are roles that Victor never got to play at. You are the roles that Victor never even realized he could play at. It took me a long time but I eventually figured something out: if you play a role long enough, a number of interesting things can happen. You can become that role, or you can realize that it's just a role -- as easy to shrug off and replace as a dusty jacket."

"We are dusty," said the corpses, "but we are not jackets."

"Oh, but you are," I said. "You are the jackets that Victor chose never to wear, every time he opened his mouth to speak a thought, every time he chose to drive left instead of right, every time he made a commitment of any sort. You are the remains of a mass-murder of Victor's future."

"We like murder," the corpses said. "It keeps us from being lonely."

"How can you be lonely," I asked, "when you outnumber us infinitely?"

"We miss him," said the corpses, "the one who got away."

"Ah," I said. "The real Victor. The one that keeps on going while all the others get sloughed off, eh?"

"Yes, that one."

"That's how it goes," I said, and then I thought about what I'd said. That's how it goes is really all that can ever be said, about anything at all. That's how it goes, or as the blessed Mister Vonnegut said more succinctly, so it goes.

"We are the tragedy of the living," said the corpses. "Our laughter is the birthplace of gods."

"And your visage is maddening sorrow," I said, "and with all Man's power, nothing can ever be done to be rid of you."

"We persist," said the corpses. In unison, the infinite span of corpses, sitting hipbone to hipbone, an infinity ranks deep, snapped their heads back and "ooohed" as a fantastic explosion of pyrotechnics illuminated the crowd on the grass.

"You've just got to stop worrying," said Victor, "and get on with things. You only get one chance to live life."

"No," I said, "sometimes you get a second chance."