The Man Who Keeps Dying

CW: Violence, murder, blood, gore

On the first morning, the nurse killed me with a pillow. I remember the fabric filling my mouth, the tremendous pressure on my nose, and the surprise of discovering how long a person can remain conscious after the body begins to die. My hands were strapped to the rails. My left leg was numb below the knee. Through a slit in the curtain, I could see daylight pouring over the parking garage. She whispered, "Thank you for your contribution," and pressed harder.

When I woke again, the clock read 6:12am. The same gray morning light crossed the same parking garage. The same paper cup stood on my bedside table. My hands were free. My left leg was numb below the knee.

At 6:17am, the nurse entered carrying a tray of medication. Her name tag said EDITH VOSS.

"Good morning, Mr. Sorrell. How are we feeling?"

I screamed until she closed the door.

"You remember," she said. She sounded disappointed, but not surprised.

I had been admitted for a routine operation on a torn tendon. I remembered the anesthesiologist asking me to count backward. I remembered reaching 86. Nothing else. Now my throat hurt and I could taste the pillow's detergent.

"What happened to me?"

"A complication."

"You murdered me."

She checked the intravenous line. "That's a strong word for a process you don't understand."

At 8:04am, she injected something that made my blood feel full of insects. My heart stopped at 8:11am. I woke at 6:12am, with the paper cup beside the bed and the same gray morning light on the garage.

By the fourth death I had learned the schedule. By the ninth I had learned that she could change it. By the twentieth I had learned that the hospital would not let me leave.

I tried to jump through the window. The glass broke and I fell six floors, striking a parked ambulance hard enough to feel my spine fold. I woke at 6:12am. I attacked Edith with the metal pole from my intravenous stand. She died with blood bubbling through her teeth. I woke at 6:12am, and she arrived five minutes later without a scratch.

I begged a janitor for help. He stared at me until his expression softened. Then he took a folding knife from his pocket and cut my throat. The next morning he came in with a mop and asked whether I wanted the television turned on.

I tried to keep track by scratching marks into my skin. The marks disappeared. I tried to carve them into the bed frame. The frame repaired itself. I counted deaths instead, silently, because numbers were the only property nobody could confiscate.

At 107 I stopped counting. At some point I realized I was never hungry. Food arrived, and I could eat, but my stomach did not demand it. I never needed to urinate. My fingernails never grew. Pain came and went with perfect fidelity. Everything else about being alive seemed optional.

"Am I dead?" I asked Edith.

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Thirty-seven years, according to the records."

I looked at my hands. They were the hands I'd had at 41, before the surgery. "Why can't I remember?"

"Memory interferes with cooperation."

"Cooperation with what?"

She smiled, showing a narrow strip of pink gum above her teeth. "You'll understand when you're ready." She killed me that afternoon by putting a needle through my eye.

The hospital changed only when I stopped looking directly at it. A framed landscape in the corridor acquired an extra mountain. The parking garage grew another level. Once I watched a doctor walk past my door carrying a transparent bag containing something that looked like a human face. On his return, the bag was empty and the doctor's own face hung loosely from his jaw.

I learned the building's geography by running between deaths. The surgical ward connected to a pediatric unit where the cribs were full of blankets shaped around invisible children. Beyond it was a chapel with no crucifix, no altar, and rows of pews facing a drain in the floor.

People sat there with their eyes closed, moving their lips. I thought they were praying until I heard the words. "Please let it hurt less next time."

In the basement I found a wall of clocks. Each clock had a patient's name beneath it, and each hand moved at a different speed. Mine was mounted near the floor. The hands spun so fast they made a high whine. Beside it was a brass counter reading 48,903.

A woman in a surgical gown stood nearby. She had no eyelids. Her eyes were dry and filmed white.

"Is that how many times I've died?" I asked.

"How many times you've been useful," she said.

I asked what useful meant. She began to cry without blinking. A bell rang overhead, and she bent backward until her spine snapped. Her body hung there, arched like a bow. Then the bell stopped and she straightened. "I used to think they were punishing us," she whispered. "That would have been merciful."

Edith found me at the clocks. She wasn't angry. She looked like a teacher who'd discovered a child reading above his grade level. "Curiosity is a healthy sign," she said. "But you shouldn't compare your numbers."

She escorted me to an operating theater. On the table lay a man whose chest had been opened from throat to navel. There were no organs inside, only a black cavity that seemed much deeper than his body. Something at the bottom of that cavity moved.

"This is Mr. Halden," Edith said. "He used to be a pastor."

The man opened his eyes. "Please," he whispered. "Don't let them tell me what it means."

Edith turned a wheel beside the table. The black cavity brightened. I heard a noise like thousands of people drawing breath at once. The pastor's back arched. A shape rose inside him, immense and jointed, pressing against the limits of his skin. For one moment his face became the face of a terrified child. Then the shape withdrew and the pastor died. A little green light illuminated above the table.

"One unit," Edith said.

"One unit of what?"

"Attention."

I waited for her to laugh. She didn't. She told me that suffering was the only sensation capable of attracting certain intelligences. Not pain itself, but the instant when a mind understood that pain might never end. That realization produced something measurable, something that could be harvested. The hospital had been built around the process.

"Harvested for whom?"

"For those who made us."

"God?"

Edith looked embarrassed for me. "That's a word people use when they don't know the manufacturer's name."

She showed me a film. It began with a child building a tower of blocks. Then the child kicked it apart, laughed, and built it again. The image changed to an aerial view of a city. Buildings rose, collapsed, rose again. People moved between them like grains of pepper. Then the city shrank to a fleck inside an enormous hand. The hand belonged to nothing I could see. Its fingers had too many joints, and each joint held another moving landscape beneath a thin membrane. I heard a sound from beyond the film, an impatient tapping.

"They made the universe?" I asked.

"They made many. Ours was an experiment in self-aware matter. It performed well until the inhabitants began developing expectations."

"Expectations?"

"That existence should be meaningful. That suffering should lead somewhere. That love should protect them from loss. They became exquisitely sensitive to disappointment. The experiment was adapted accordingly."

She said the word adapted the way a mechanic might describe fitting a new part to an engine. I laughed because the alternative was believing her.

"So the universe is a torture machine?"

"Not the universe. Most of it is empty. The important component is the mind."

I thought of my wife, Tessa, and our son, who had been seven when I went into surgery. I thought of the bedtime stories I'd told him about brave people who made the world better. I thought of every person I'd watched die, every funeral I'd attended, every prayer I'd spoken without knowing whom I was addressing.

"Where are they?" I asked.

"Who?"

"My family."

Edith paused. "You should be careful what you ask to see."

She led me into a room filled with shallow metal drawers. Each drawer had a number and a small glass window. In the first I saw a woman's hand. It moved. In the second I saw an old man's mouth, opening and closing around silent words. In the third was a child's eye.

"These are memories," Edith said. "Not specimens."

She pulled open a drawer marked with my son's birthday. Inside lay a small square of daylight. I saw my boy riding a bicycle without training wheels. He turned, looking for me. The scene repeated. On the fourth repetition he fell. On the fifth, a truck struck him. On the sixth, the bicycle folded around his legs and he screamed for a father who would never arrive.

"Stop it."

Edith closed the drawer.

"That didn't happen," I said.

"Not in your original sequence."

"What does that mean?"

"Your son's life was completed long ago. But the possibilities remain accessible. We can show you the ways he suffered, including the ones that never occurred. Your mind reacts to them as though they are real. That's very efficient."

I lunged at her. She let me grab her throat. Her skin was cold and rubbery. As I squeezed, her eyes rolled back, revealing tiny moving mouths where the whites should have been.

"There it is," the mouths whispered. "The father's love."

The room filled with the tapping noise from the film. The drawers rattled in their cabinets. Edith smiled while I strangled her. "You're producing beautifully," she said.

I woke at 6:12am. For an interval that might have been a thousand mornings, I refused to respond. I lay still while Edith cut, burned, suffocated, and drowned me. I refused to beg. I refused to hate her. I tried to become a stone.

The methods changed. They brought in voices that sounded like Tessa. They played recordings of my son asking why I had left him. They made me watch a thousand versions of his death. Eventually the voices stopped and the room grew silent. I began to hope I'd beaten them.

Then Edith entered without her tray. She sat beside the bed and folded her hands. "You've become very disciplined," she said. "It's impressive."

I stared at the ceiling.

"But discipline is not indifference. You're still hoping to win." She touched my forehead. "Hope is the richest part."

The walls fell away. I was standing on a plain beneath a sky crowded with stars. Each star was an opening in a black surface. Through those openings I saw rooms: hospitals, prisons, bedrooms, caves, battlefields. In every room someone suffered. Some were dying. Some were watching another person die. Some were waiting for a knock that would never come.

The stars pulsed together. I understood that each pulse was a moment of realization, the instant a mind discovered the world would not keep a promise it had never made.

Beyond the sky, something enormous shifted. Its movement rearranged constellations. It was not a beast, exactly. It had no hunger I could recognize, no hatred, no appetite for cruelty. It regarded us with the detached concentration of a person listening to rain.

And suddenly I understood the worst part. It wasn't enjoying our suffering. It was listening for something in it.

A pattern. A message. A sequence of sounds that could only be produced by minds pushed past endurance. All human history, all our wars and love songs and philosophies, had been variations in a search for a single note.

"What happens when it finds the note?" I asked.

Edith stood beside me on the plain. "We don't know."

"You mean even you don't know why?"

"Of course not. We are part of the instrument."

I looked at her then, really looked. Beneath her uniform I saw scars in layers, old and new, marks that no living body could have survived. Her eyes contained that same terrible uncertainty.

"You're a patient."

"I was."

"And now you do this to other people?"

"They offered me a different role."

"To escape?"

She shook her head. "To believe I was helping."

The sky darkened. The tapping became a slow, careful knocking. Three taps. A pause. Three more. I thought of a child testing a locked door.

"You said they made us," I told her. "What made them?"

For the first time Edith looked afraid. "We aren't permitted to ask."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. The laughter came from somewhere beneath fear, from the place where every comforting story had been stripped away.

"They don't know either," I said. "They don't know why they're here."

The vast thing beyond the sky stopped moving. I felt its attention settle on me. It was like standing beneath an ocean and realizing the water had been watching. Every star went dark except one. In that opening I saw the hospital room, the bed, the paper cup, the parking garage.

Then I saw another opening beyond it, and another beyond that. Each contained a larger room. In each room something lay strapped to a table while something larger studied its reactions. The sequence continued beyond sight.

There was no highest chamber. No final maker. No explanation waiting at the top. Creation was an endless succession of frightened things building smaller frightened things, hoping the next experiment would tell them why they existed. The vast thing recoiled from what I had understood. I heard a sound that might have been its first scream.

Edith seized my shoulders. "Don't tell it."

"It already knows."

"Knowing and hearing it spoken are different."

The plain split beneath our feet. The stars became eyes. The tapping accelerated into a frantic pounding. Every room in the sky flashed with people waking from death, staring at the ceiling, and asking the same question. Why?

I had spent countless deaths believing someone possessed an answer. Now I understood that the question itself was what kept the machine running. Every mind wanted a reason. Every mind suffered when it failed to find one. The search for meaning was not a flaw in the design. It was the fuel.

Edith fell to her knees. Her uniform peeled away in strips, revealing the pale body of an old woman with a hospital bracelet around her wrist. She looked up at me with the expression of someone begging a stranger to tell a comforting lie. "Please," she said. "Tell me it means something."

I wanted to. I wanted to tell her that pain refined the soul, that love survived death, that there was a final hand waiting to gather us up. I wanted to tell myself the same thing. The words were ready. I'd heard them at funerals and whispered them to my son when he was afraid of the dark.

But the sky was listening. And for the first time in my existence, I refused to feed it.

"I don't know," I said.

The pounding stopped. The hospital returned around me. The clock read 6:12am. A paper cup stood beside the bed. My left leg was numb below the knee. The door opened, and Edith entered carrying her tray.

She was younger now, almost a girl. Her name tag was blank. She looked frightened. "Good morning," she said. "How are we feeling?"

I studied her trembling hands. There was a dark bruise beneath the edge of her sleeve. Somewhere beyond the window, something immense shifted in its sleep.

"I don't know," I told her.

She stared at me. Then she sat down and began to cry.

The clock advanced to 6:13am. It had never done that before. At 6:14am, someone knocked from the other side of the hospital door. Three taps. A pause. Three more.

Edith covered her ears. "Please don't answer."

The knocking continued. Not angry. Not impatient. Almost polite. I thought of my son, of the bedtime stories, of all the terrible things people do when they believe certainty gives them permission. I thought of the vast thing beyond the sky, waiting for somebody smaller to explain its own existence.

For years I had imagined that if I found the source of suffering I could destroy it, or bargain with it, or at least make it look at what it had done. Now I could see how childish that hope had been. The thing outside might be monstrous, but it was also terrified. Perhaps every cruelty in creation began with somebody refusing to admit that terror. Perhaps that was the only inheritance passed from maker to creation. I had no way to know.

I got out of bed. The floor was cold beneath my feet. The clock reached 6:15am. I crossed the room while Edith wept and pressed my hand against the door.

"Who's there?" I asked.

From the other side came a voice exactly like mine, but infinitely older.

"I was hoping you could tell me."