Caesura

In this world, death is a caesura. It arrests life rather than ends it. How could it be otherwise? The smallest schoolboy knows that the vital force is imperishable, that it hovers and hibernates when the body loses the vigor to support it, that it returns when the body is repaired. Old citizens never die of heart troubles, though their eyes grow rheumy and joints knobby with arthritis. The dead are collected after battles and ransomed back to the enemy’s surgeons. Victims of falls from horseback, rampant machinery, a thousand mishaps, suffer no greater misfortune than bills and stitch marks.

In such a world death is cheap. Cities fall and rise and fall again in endless campaigns of conquest, the soldiers needing only bandages and splints to rise again, the ranks of armies clashing in futile skirmishes that trample the works of better men. Violent criminals cut purses and throats in broad daylight, knowing the victims will be revived in the morning. Their own sentences on the noose are mere inconveniences, eased by a few hours and menthol lozenges.

Death is so frequently associated with violence that no other outcome to violence is acceptable. Suicide is inconceivable. Surgeons are as common and respected as longshoremen, tending to the endless queues of slashed-up bodies at the morgue- for there are no actual hospitals.

Society has stumbled to its current sophistication but slowly. Public utilities are smashed nearly as fast as they are constructed. Midnight arrests are common in even the most democratic cities. Scarcely a day goes by without riots on every avenue, arcades caught in firebombing, liquor drunk in the pews of the cathedrals. Dead bodies can lie for weeks before the surgeons recover them. Rifles shoot across public thoroughfares and barricades sprout on the steps of houses of government. Civilization totters.

It is the inventiveness and audacity of one man that shocks the world onto the tracks. He invents dynamite to serve as a final, ultimate weapon, to sell and make himself rich, but the first batch is stolen from his home and detonates around the body of the thief. For the first time in history there is nothing left of the mortal shell. Learned men debate the fate of his questionably immortal soul, but regardless of the final answer, the first true death in history has occurred.

The first man to create explosive weaponry will command final authority over existence. He will have the power to end an infinite life on earth, albeit one spent growing forever older and bonier. He will be unstoppable, for who would risk a life that is otherwise infinite? This much, every nation of the world recognizes.

The inventor is detonated along with every remaining scrap of dynamite and every note of its construction. The second death in history occurs. Peace reigns worldwide as eternal warfare shrieks to a halt, bands of criminals drop their weapons, stunned at the sudden import of their rough and painful play. They are like children who have broken family crystal, or accidentally led pets into crowded traffic.

Now the world is sedate and unarmed, a comfortable stasis. Milkmen lay bottles out in predawn dimness, pharmacists study in back rooms, trolleys roll over the cobbles. Men and women murmur gentle conversations, loving and without passion, in ice-cream parlors. Fat barristers and chiefs of commerce talk through the night in handsome offices. Anything suggesting progress, a change to this hard-won moment of sanity, is swept aside with polite laughter. How could they change? Why would they change? They have lives both eternal and comfortable.

There is no longer violence, save of the most formal kind. Crimes of passion are extinct. Instead, death is used to minimize various alleged sufferings. Naughty children are injected with sodium pentobarbital after dinner and revived for bedtime as punishments. Unwanted old relatives, and prisoners of the more authoritarian nations, are kept dead for every moment save interrogations, family visits, or church.

Other children, parentally smothered and too shy to resist, are snuffed and kept dead as quiet and timeless monuments to their own sterling qualities. Some wait decades to awake. For it is better to keep a child at home, as peers age and go to school, as suitors wait and slowly despair, as careers and marriages end, than to risk losing that precious child. For their today, they have given all possible tomorrows.