Another Deadhouse Report

Corwyn Green

(1997) (dedicated to Kilgore Trout, the character in Kurt Vonnegut’s books)

{*{ As usual, we found it when the neighbors noticed the smell. As usual, by the time the smell got out of the house, across the street, and into the neighbor's air conditioners, the house itself was so messed up it could only be torn down and rebuilt. There has to be a better way.

There was one difference this time: the neighbors knew they were talking about a deadhouse. I don’t know how they found out.

It used to be that people would call us saying some animal died outside. They’d complain that workmen weren’t doing their jobs, weren’t keeping the outside’s beasts from prowling around and leaving their carcasses right in the street, and all the dumb things those people say. Those rich people think they deserve absolute comfort because they’re human beings, and, personally, I don’t see the connection. They've never been outside, they’ve never seen the sun--much less an animal--and they think they could tell us how to do our jobs.

Their taxes. Bull. Shit. They don’t have a choice about taxes, and the government doesn’t have a choice about hiring us. Who else are they going to hire? The rich people?

Besides, we don’t need to keep animals away anymore, there don’t seem to be any. }*}

{*{ My partner’s telling me to go on with the report. He’s right, I shouldn’t be complaining about the government into this thing. The government just might choose to read this.

Mr./Mrs. Government, may it be stated for the record that I do...fine... that we do our job. See, I tried to keep the civilians from panicking, I said that it was just a dead dog. No one seemed to believe me, but they didn’t seem to care what it was. Except for one young kid who told me “I know you’re hiding the icky stuff. It’s a house full of dead people, isn’t it?” I said it wasn’t, and the kid said “if this time it ‘wasn’t’ a house full of dead people, then sometimes it is.” and hung the phone up on me.

They know.

But it’s not the crisis we thought it would be. Maybe they’re so stupid, they think everyone in a whole house can die a natural death at the same time. Maybe they don’t realize it could happen to them. Maybe they know it can, but just don’t care. Anyway, no one’s panicking.

I know that if I lived like they do, I wouldn’t care either. Which is why I live like I do, working... }*}

{*{ My partner’s bothering me again.

We put on freshair masks and waited for the sensor to tell us which house it was.

I thought their foodsystem malfunctioned and poisoned them all. See, I know that neighborhood: it was the target of Boatswain Gourmet’s advertising campaign. That machine was just too messed up to fix, so they recalled all the units, but only a fraction of the ones bought were found. I guess the other people just didn’t care enough to call up and have their foodsystems replaced. I figured that most people must still be using Boatswain, so I was expecting one to break any time now.

My partner insisted that the food-poisoning problem was beaten, that not even Boatswain could poison a family. But he thought it was the Alaskan-Martian virugerm. He always thinks it’s the Alaskan-Martian virugerm.

He says he has a cousin in the government who says that the virugerm is spreading. He says they’re hiding it for the same reason we hide deadhouses. But, if the virugerm was here, it would be killing off houses, and we’d be finding them. We’d find houses full of moving corpses with skin that looks like a bunch of tiny snakes were growing up under it. The skin-snakes would be closely packed and they’d be waving almost all together, like grass in the wind.

We never saw anything like that. All we ever find are corpses lying peacefully in bed.

My partner must know that too, because when I tried to get him to bet a hundred on his germ, he said no, he said he only took foolish risks when he’s doing his job. }*}

{*{ O.K. he never said “foolish” but that’s what they are. }*}

{*{ O.K., O.K., I’m getting back to the report.

The sensor located the house-- city CM, group 121, 156th Avenue, House 2099 at the corner of Sunny Street. Those rich people have whole houses to themselves, but they just lie on their beds in the living room, giving the rest of the house to the robots. They could do that in a two-room apartment, but no, they need a whole house so they could impress their neighbors. And what do we, working people, get? A two-room apartment. They know we’ll work no matter what they give us, their psyco-computers told them that, so they give us their worst.

If I had a whole house, I wouldn’t give it to robots. Hell, I won’t even let robots in the house. I’d cook my own food in my own microwave, and recycle my own junk, and

Let go of the microphone! I’m doing the report }*}

{ No, you’re not doing the report, you’re talking about your dream house. Again.

And what the hell do you think your...junk has to do with our deadhouse? }

{ Exactly. Then “nothing” is what you should say about it.

Just as the deadhouse family couldn’t live without it’s machinery, we were unable to enter their sun-less tomb without our own machinery, as if the need for machinery was contagious. Yet, I was grateful that the gas masks isolated us from the smell as successfully as the deadhouse families isolate themselves form the world and, finally, life itself.

We expecte an ordinary deadhouse examination and cleanup. But there was nothing ordinary about this deadhouse family. These people didn’t die some painless, accidental death. One of the corpses had decayed until it could hardly be recognized as human, some of the others looked recently dead. One child didn’t die at all.

Apparently, the decayed corpse belonged to the person who died first. It lay in the house, rotting, emitting it’s foul stench, while the living family members were made helpless, unable to call anyone, not even a workman.

A few people were diagnosed by our medical facilities to have died of heart attacks, which is only to be expected. They lived a life where their biggest challenge lay in commanding their machines to cater to their every whim. Apparently, the shock of the first death was too much for their feeble bodies, and they died in the very same beds in which they had been born, grown, and lived.

Two died of starvation, which is also understandable, considering the air they breathed. When we used to deal with dead animals, I didn’t even wear a freshair mask, disdaining unnecessary machinery. The smell of death in nature is merely unpleasant, just a warning for the living to stay away from the body whose soul has left it so recently. Death only becomes unbearable when confined and concentrated, trapped within insulated walls by the relentless air conditioner’s molecular grids. Then it becomes something monstrous, something with a presence all it’s own. It displaces good air like Loch Ness must, by his sheer bulk, displace the water in his lake. Although the smell of death could not affect me, I could asses it’s strength by the thinness of the good air that came through my mask.

The freshair mask protected me, but there was nothing to protect the family. Although some died from the shock, two were too strong. Their bodies, too weak to move them out of bed, were strong enough to keep breathing, strong enough to seek life in an atmosphere of death. But such is our lot that if we’re able to go on, we must. And we will, even if

Let go of the microphone. }

{ NO! Get }

{*{ That is why I never let my partner do these reports.

That’s his way of dealing with all the shit we see every day: he thinks it’s one of those, what’s he call ’em, “nineteenth century stories of the macabre”.

That’s what he does about the macabre stuff we see in life: he turns it into long boring wordy descriptions that never get to the point.

His point is that the smell made them loose their appetites and so they starved to death. Or, at least I think that’s his point... }*}

{*{ Yes, he says that was his point.

Alright, we find the house, go in...

We assume that the most decayed corpse was the first to die. He was a Appetiter addict.

These people take pills for everything. They need sleeping pills to fall asleep, coffee to wake up, Appetiter pills to get hungry, drinks to stop being hungry, they even got pills that make them feel not tired when they really are, so they could finish watching those day-long T.V. shows that are so popular these days. I never take pills for anything. I figure my body knows when it needs food or sleep better than I do. My partner only drinks coffee, but man, he really drinks coffee, gallons and gallons

Stop throwing your paperclips at me! Geez!

I haven’t seen an Appetiter addict yet, this was my first. He took Appetiter until the medical computers forced him to stop eating, then he’d take more as soon as he was permitted to. Appetiter suppresses the gaging reflex, so everything he forced down, stayed down. He was so fat, they had braced his stomach with metal things so it wouldn’t flow off the bed and pull him down onto the floor.

I noticed that only one person in this household ever took Appetiter. This tells me all I need to know about what the rest of the house thought about him. I’m glad he’s dead, I know I shouldn’t say that, but, well, he shouldn’t really... }*}

{*{ Thank you! My partner says “but people like that are as much of an insult to nature as the AM virugerm”. I guess “the insult to nature” got tired of being bossed around by a computer, so he told his son, the computer genius in the bed right above him, to shut the medical safe-guards off. Although only doctors and workmen are supposed to be able to do that, his son figured out how.

These people got nothing do but watch their ceiling T.V.’s or think, and I guess some of them think. Some thinker probably figured out about deadhouses and told everyone else. Maybe it was even the Appetiter addict’s son, he was pretty smart to override the computer safeties. If he really did know about deadhouses, it could have been enough to keep him holding on, knowing that we were coming sometime...

Well, he was smart, but he wasn’t smart enough to realize his father would die without the computer safeties. Predictably, the Appetiter addict kept taking pills until he ate too much and, in non-medical terms, his guts burst within him. Unfortunately, the kid wasn’t as good at computer stuff as he thought he was. He accidentally wrecked the whole house system, and everyone’s medical systems were shut off, including the part of the system that’s supposed to call for outside help.

And... here’s my partner, who’ll tell you about his conspiracy theories, using the strangest words he could pull out of that twisted brain of his. }*}

{ It was not an accident! I bet anything that child was plotting murder from the very start! }

{ No, I don’t want to bet actual money. I told you... }

{ No, listen, you only think it was an accident because that’s what the child told you. His dead father certainly couldn’t speak, couldn’t tell us any other story. But have you wondered why the child was the only survivor? }

{ I thought not.

You know what they say about lines between genius and insanity. That child was definitely a genius, and he wouldn’t have been human if he had retained his sanity.

This child was a prisoner of his comforts. He was held immobile by a softness stronger than the most unbreakable spacewarped substances. And although we could send the spacewarped objects back into the primal chaos (if this was my typewriter and not a microphone, I’d capitalize the “c” in “chaos”) that they came from, the child could do nothing about the society that kept him prisoner. He was trapped in a bed directly above the man with the monstrous addiction, the man whom they boy was forced to acknowledge as his father. Although the boy had never seen his father, he could definitely hear him chewing, belching, moaning in agony but still eating more. It seems that pills could do everything else, but they can’t completely eradicate pain, and all addicts must eventually face the consequences of their actions. The only way today’s science could take away pain completely is by taking away a person’s consciousness. Perhaps, consciousness and pain are so inextricably interwoven, so inseparable one from the other, so

Thanks, I was deliberately trying to provoke you into throwing that paperclip back to me. I’m glad it worked.

This child either hated his father, for his father’s moans must have disturbed the child’s T.V. watching, or the child took pity, but either way that genius knew what he was doing when he turned the medical safeguards off. My partner is right, it’s hard to believe a child smart enough, logical enough to out-reason a computer, could lack the logic to realize that the well-being of the medical safeguards was the well-being of his father.

The child knew he was killing his father. But he could not see beyond his father’s death, could not anticipate the decaying corpse his father left behind: there had been nothing in the child’s life to teach him that corrupt deeds encourage further corruption. He probably though his father would lie there, silent and still. He probably thought he was bringing peace to the rest of his family.

The house computers are good, they must be, and it must have taken the child tremendous amounts of time and energy to bend the machines to his will. I can’t believe that a comfort-loving housedweller, even this extraordinary genius child, would do something that difficult just to accommodate a parent’s request. He must have done it for other, more urgent, and all-around darker, reasons.

Only the extraordinary hate that twisted this child’s mind could have given him the incentive, the patience and energy, to do what he did.

He said that his father asked him to shut the safeguards off, but could we really know that? The dead can’t speak, we can’t ask his father if he had indeed asked his son to shut the computer off. But if they dead could speak, would they support this child’s story? Or would they have a story of their own, a story much more sinister }

{*{ If the dead could speak they’d tell my partner to stop putting words in their mouths. They’d tell him that making talking dead people tell the reader what the author supposed happened is a dumb writer trick.

Hell, I give him too much credit by saying it’s a dumb writer trick because he’s not a writer, he only thinks he is. Although, if I let him do the reports, he’d certainly write a novel for each one.

No one wants to listen to his wild plots and gloomy settings, so he uses this recorder as a captive audience. He thinks that no one’s ever going to listen to this thing, basically because no one’s ever going to listen to him. I tell him that if no one listened to it, they wouldn’t have us recording it.

So I’d like to apologize to our captive audience before this gets any worse. I’m not exactly the get-to-the-point scientist type either: all of them got rich enough to buy robots that took care of all their life functions for them.

Only us people, who want to do things, are here doing things. We knew we couldn’t get rich being workmen, which is why we became workmen.

But I won’t pretend that either of us is truly competent. I’ve seen some of those T.V. shows where workmen put out fires and stop burglars and such. I really wish we could do that, but we can’t, even if the opportunity did come along.

Ha! My partner has been bombarding me with paper clips, and I do believe I have them all! He’s never getting them back! Never, I say!

Well, the kid didn’t die. We come in the house, there’s that decaying mound of fat. Their ceiling T.V.’s were still going.

No you can’t have it! }*}

{ }

{*{ }*}

{ }

{*{ Alright, just no wild speculations. You could do the report in your wordy writer-speak, but just spare me the speculation! }*}

{ I won’s speculate. Although, if they simply wanted a clean-up, they’d have robots to do it. Humans are different from robots only in their capacity for speculation. How would a robot react to a situation it hasn’t been programed for? If a robot, for example, found a house full of walking corpses who’s skin looked like waving grass, would a robot suspect that it was the Alaskan-Martian virugerm, or would the robot think that the corpses were living people?}

{My partner says the robot would react in the right way because it’s been programmed to. But what if it hasn’t? How would a robot react to an unfamiliar situation? }

{*{ It would react a lot better than you would: it certainly wouldn’t cut and run.

Well, once was enough. You did, you’ll do it again. }*}

{*{ Hey, if you hadn’t started speculating, I wouldn’t have taken it away from you. }*}

{*{ O.K., my partner’s promising to be good--again--so I think I’ll give him one more chance. }*}

{ My speculation is better than his social commentary, and definitely better than every one of those irrelevant sentences he just finished recording.

Their skins were green, and I don’t mean “about to throw up” green, I mean green like piss or some new kind of mold. I thought, for sure, this was the first stage of the AM virugerm }

{*{ }*}

( Alright! Guilty as charged.

I noticed how emaciated some of them looked, the ones that didn’t die from a heart attack. It wasn’t the thinness normally found in people who grew up in beds, it wasn’t merely lack of muscle or a gauntness of one who’s appetite came exclusively form a bottle. This was starvation (with a capital “s”). The addict’s son, the first person to survive a deadhouse, looked worse than any of the corpses, he looked like the Grim Reaper himself, like death incarnate.

My partner’s urging me to go on since we already covered the people who starved to death.

One woman tried to crawl out of bed. I won’t speculate about where she was trying to go, or what she imagined she could do. I won’t speculate about what feelings shook her soul or what thoughts beat within her mind, what inner force motivated her to use her body for the first time in her existence. I won’t speculate on how she felt, gasping out her last breath on the floor. Did she feel, perhaps, betrayed by her technological pampering? Did she see the irony that she should die on the cold, hard, uncomfortable floor because she }

{*{ You could see why he never gets anything published, can’t you? And he refuses to write for T.V. He keeps sending his stuff to whatever literature journals are still coming out on the Internet, but not even those dinosaurs want his imitation 19th century writing. Hell, you heard him, he’s still using a typewriter!

No, you can’t have it. NO, get }*}

{ I will not let you take this thing away form me just so you could make fun of my writing. My writing is at least as good as your social commentary.

Besides, one’s a real writer when one can say, from personal experience, that editors are vile bloodsuckers who steal paper clips.

And editors are vile bloodsuckers who steal paper clips. }

{*{ May it be stated for the record that this man, in his whole life-long career as an unpublished writer, lost a total of one paperclip. I speculate that he lost it to the one editor who got past the first page of his story, the one editor who actually removed his paperclip. }*}

{*{ It is not your favorite paperclip. It became your favorite only after you lost it. }*}

{*{ It does to matter when it became your favorite!

You see what I have to put up with? Besides, he’s been throwing the damned things at me for years. I found one of his paper clips inside a computer, another inside his coffee maker,

See, he just threw another one at me. I thought I had them all, but he’s got a whole new box there. Geez!

Listen up, partner, this is how you do a report:

One woman attempted to get out of bed, but her body wasn’t adapted to physical activity so she didn’t get wherever she was trying to get. She died on the floor and was identified as the mother.

Hear that? Two sentences!

There were a few cousins in the house, who knows why they lived there, they died quiet death, deliberately overdosing on sleeping pills.

Hear that? One sentence!

At first, we thought everyone was dead, as is usually the case in a deadhouse. But my partner noticed that the addict’s son, who was looking at his T.V. when we came in, now had his eyes turned to us.

My partner noticed it because he feels that, as a writer, he has to observe every detail he could. This time his writing, instead of just being silly, saved the boy’s life.

Oh my god, look at him! I believe that this was the first time anyone’s ever said anything good about his writing. He says yes. He’s all red over there, smiling }*}

{ you ****ing ******-****er!

Wow! I made it print stars!

Anyway, as my partner was saying, I told him about the child’s eyes having turned from the false T.V. to watch the reality around him. My partner dismissed it as a post-mortem thing, but I refused to let it rest, not until I had proven that his blood no longer moved through his veins, that he no longer drew the poisoned air into his body, that }

{*{ In other words, he checked for a pulse. }*}

{ I had to overcome many levels of disgust to bring myself to touch him without a glove. He wasn’t just a corpse to me: I had grown insensitive to mere death. He symbolized everything that modern man aspires to be: coddled into insensibility, as weak as he could get without dying.

He had never felt Sol’s steady brilliance, having replaced it with the unwholesome flickering of a ceiling television. The television draws his gaze upwards, like the heavens or God used to do for ancient man. This combination of sunlight and God was once called “Ra” by a barbarian civilization. Modern man had advanced much since then: modern man calls it “t.v.” }

{*{ Wait, if the kid symbolizes everything that modern man wants to be, and then he kills his father, are you saying that modern people want to kill their parents? And remember, the kid turned his eyes away from the T.V. }*}

{ He didn’t symbolize all that stuff, Mr. literary critic, I only thought he did when I didn’t know he was alive. }

{*{ We already know he’s alive, we know you found him, so get on with the story. And don’t tell me how terrible it is that people aspire to...what you said. If they didn’t aspire to be whatever they are, they’d aspire to be workmen, and where would we be if the government could hire a genius child instead of us? }*}

{ “We” wouldn’t be anywhere. I’d a famous writer, the genius child would be one of my many faithful fans, and you’d be a hapless bum on the street.

As I was saying (I don’t stray from the subject to wonder how we got this job. Although I do wonder, quite often...) this boy symbolized }

{*{ Don’t tell our non-existent/captive reader what the boy symbolizes. Show, show! }*}

{ You grabbed the microphone just to say that. Think about it. You grabbed }

{*{ I grabbed the microphone just to say this, too! }*}

*It's not the end of the story yet. Click here to turn the page and read on...*

Last modified: December 11, 1997
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