The Body, Electric

My body is a body in which I mean it eats, sleeps, pisses, and shits, all thanks to the 200 jolt-a-roos the ruffian at the corner gives me once per week. I am ageless, I am boundless, but I can no longer stand outside to watch our frequent thunderstorms. This galvanized heart of mine requires a fine balance. Too large a zap, and I’d be toast.

Your body is no longer a body, but a little speck of dust hovering above the city of Pittsburgh or a gulp of riverbed silt during a Polar Plunge. You could double as dry shampoo or popcorn seasoning or diatomaceous earth, zap zap zap killing bugs, blandness, and oily scalps all before I tip out of bed and guzzle down my first fuel of the day.

Our bodies, we promised to one another. You said yes, I said yes, and we kissed under a sun-dappled pergola with honeysuckle tickling our noses, sneezing away from the officiant’s face because our bodies once reacted to now long-dead things like pollen and mildew.

Our bodies hiked the mountains around Calgary before the wildfires ate them up. Sampled street food snails in Saigon’s alleyways lucking into one of the last trans-Pacific flights. Waved back at saintly reliquaries in the Florentine museums soon to be flood-lost. Our bodies coupled though failed in reproduction, but we hosted office holiday parties, and volunteered for the library and animal shelter, and held fundraising barbecues in the backyard. Pretended at normalcy as the world worsened as it spun. Our bodies loved, held one another and most others, and we pined for a love without end.

Our bodies might live forever, the scientists began saying, and the pharmaceutical companies threw onto billboards, and our doctors went along with because they were tired, harried. Insurance companies chomped at the chance to build the never-ending patient, a body doling out money, everlasting.

Your procedure was scheduled the same day, right after mine, but when my anesthesia wore off, you already sat at my bedside, reading. In your sad Didion phase, you loved saying, and I felt too groggy to ask why you’d been discharged ahead of me, why you wore no gown. The tears streaming down your chin, I assumed, were nothing more than relief for surgeries complete and a heartrending book, tented over your jittering knee.

After the hospital, my body healed.  Your body slowed with each passing year, your heartbeat turning elephantine, trudging through quicksand. You made a choice opposite my choice, as twilight sleep rendered me agreeable. You chose mortality.

Why? My body raged. Your body stood tall, firm in your decision.

My body pled, crawled, begged, and craved understanding. Your body offered only kind smiles and soft words against the inevitable. Why should we live forever when we’ve killed the bees and the trees and the fish and the fungi? Years, decades, eons would pass, and what beauty would remain? I loved blaming those damn books, your shelves of grief-filled memoirs and morbid microhistories. You’d always quote from your favorite one: death is a gift for a life well-lived.

Time trotted on, and I couldn’t stay mad, not when your organs stuttered and failed, all the ones they could no longer replace, while my ticker only needed the occasional winding. I haunted your bedside until the back alley jump cables couldn’t wait, when insurance stopped covering “maintenance visits” for me and bodies like mine. You haunted our household until you couldn’t, when the spark you were born with grounded back to the earth.

My body is a body I wear about our ghost-gray house, cobwebs adorning the corners in the decades since you dusted. This rechargeable corpse I drag through the bare-aisle supermarket, the running path down by the dried-up canal. Here my body is, as long as the corner ruffians stay in business. Here your body isn’t. My body, electric, persists without your pulse, throbbing, bleeding, next to mine. I once laughed at your prayers before mealtime, your commitment to confession every Sunday. And here I am, praying into the gusts that carried your body’s ash away. These days I find my hands clasping, willing the jump cables to deliver a final shock, the lightning to catch me unaware.

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Ⓒ Lauren Kardos