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nothingofvaluewaslost · 1 year

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STORY: Slabbed Maris

Low-key science fiction/horror? Maris is a young distance runner. Out celebrating her first big win, she is approached by a man who has a rather unsettling business offer.

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Slabbed Maris, by Christina Nordlander

Maris stepped outside in the stadium and felt the world narrow. The detox, hours of looking down into the toilet bowl, dad’s still upturned face in the hospital ward, all sunk to some lower streak of her mind where she didn’t have to focus on it. The process was slow enough that she could feel it happen.

During her last balancing steps to the track, she diagnosed herself, let her sensations flicker up and down the steel web of nerves. She wasn’t twenty any more – heavier, more swollen with muscle – but her lungs were as deep, the tendons in her calves and knees as hard.

The world moved in blinding jolts. Now she was on one knee, her sole against the textured pedal. The Bosnian was at the block in front, to the right. She was just a pale-skinned back and a lowered head, but she was close enough that Maris could smell her skin, almost close enough that she could feel her pulse beat in her own flesh. The rubber surface under her palms must have been rolled out in sections. If she’d had time, she could have studied it to find the point where the pattern started repeating. Tree canopies rocked above the bleachers, heavy and dark with leafage.

She never looked up at the crowd when she was in the stadium, and she wouldn’t do it today. There was no reason for them to send the one she’d recognise. Even if they weren’t present, it made no difference.

Time was extenuated. The moment that had been right before her when she knelt in the starting-block felt more distant with every breath, until some part of her started to believe that it wouldn’t come.

Now.

The moment she heard the shot she exploded from the block, knees pistoning, the burning air shooting in and out of her lungs. The Kenyan was in the lead to the left, but the space between them didn’t seem to be increasing. Yes, Maris was gaining on her.

It had been after her first big win: the European Championship, eight hundred metres, when she’d been barely more than a girl. Victoria had thought it was a good idea to celebrate with a club night: heavy food, air spiked with alcohol, a venue of glass and neon, music that pulsed on her eardrums. She could hardly say no when she was the woman of the hour. Everything except the volume was bearable.

She kept close to the wall, a single sheet of glass. They were eight floors up, the street was a ravine where blurry darkness had started to rise. Here it was possible to imagine that you were in a faerie forest of crystal spires, and had perhaps started to detach from the Earth.

Mum’s and dad’s warm arms hugged her. Dad’s tan suit had already got wrinkled, he’d found the drinks and probably new friends already. Mum had straightened hair and a cucumber sandwich in her hand. Maris smelled the cucumber. She didn’t even look thirty.

They congratulated her, and the intoxication got nourishment for a little while longer. It felt like she’d already started to distance herself from the Maris who’d knelt on the red pitch beneath the golden sky.

“We are friends, right?” mum said when she came back with a glass of water for her.

“Uh?”

It felt like it took a long time for the memory to return. It had been the last time she’d left their house in Peetri.

“Oh, you mean that...”

Mum raised her hand to her smooth cheek. After the operation, she’d shown them photos from the clinic, where her face had been covered with something that looked like creased cling film.

There was nothing there to see, all scars had floated beneath the surface.

“Mum, I was never angry, was I?” Maris said. “I just didn’t think you need to make yourself younger.”

Mum squeezed her in a hug. When they let go, she said:

“I know you just want what’s best for me, honey. But if there were an operation that made people faster, you’d be singing a different tune.”

After a moment, Maris said:

“I guess you’re right. I give.”

Mum laughed, slapping her back.

“Someone has to beat you today!”

A while later she went to take a seat with dad, and Victoria came back, a slim drink in her hand.

“Not to worry you,” she said, her voice low, “but there’s a guy creeping on you.”

She gestured towards the darkness of bodies in the club’s interior. Points of light sparkled on her rough nail polish.

“Sure it’s on me?” Maris said. “My mother was here a while back.”

Victoria sniffed. “Seriously, Maris. You want me to have a talk with him?”

“Depends. Is he good-looking?”

It wasn’t all a joke. All her instincts were running on all cylinders after the race, including those. It was many months since she’d seen Kris go out to his car in their drive. She wasn’t getting him back.

Victoria clicked her tongue. Maris followed her gesture. She got a couple of steps closer to be able to see. The low light had made her eyes water.

The guy was sitting on a neon green couch without a backrest. If he had a drink she couldn’t see it. He didn’t look many years older than she, indifferent looks. Victoria was right, he was creeping. “Undressing me with his eyes,” a forgotten classmate had said, and Maris had had a hard time picturing it, how to tell one kind of look from another. This guy was studying her as if he were rotating her body parts before his eyes, one at a time, and knew exactly what to use them for.

She raised her hand in Victoria’s direction, an averting motion, and took a couple of steps across the floor. The ones sitting with him might have been his group or strangers, she didn’t have time to care.

“Do you want anything from me?” she said in English. “You’ve been staring at me for a while.”

Maybe her voice sounded harsher to him. Her movements were as forceful as in the stadium, but she had no experience of this type of situation.

The man lit up, as if his gaze had been just a way to attract her attention.

“I have an offer that I think may be of interest to you, Ms. Burale,” he said, putting one hand in the upholstery. “It is something we’ll have to discuss in private.”

“You realise why I’m not able to do that.”

The guy grinned, as if to show that he wasn’t a threat.

“You can bring a chaperone,” he said. “Or, it’s steroids you’re worried about, isn’t it? Ask your promoter.”

Maris went back to Victoria. She’d expected her to say no – “chaperone” was an old-fashioned concept, out of place here in the aquarium-lit club – but Victoria inclined her blond head.

“If you want to speak to him,” was all she said.

A black-clad staff member went with them to unlock a conference room. Maris followed behind the guy. Behind her, she heard Victoria’s heels, bright on the wood tiles, how they sank to muted thuds on the carpet.

The staffer let them in and left them. White walls, a shiny table and chairs that enclosed you. In her memory, it felt like the circuit of light hadn’t reached all the way to the walls. She had to stop herself from gripping the chair arms and pushing up a couple of times. “You just won the Championship,” Victoria had said when she’d complained about missing training. “Tonight you can take it easy, surely?”

They sat with their backs to the door and the guy facing them. With his smooth black hair and the skin colour that might have been called “olive,” he looked like he might have been from many places on the globe. He wore a dull dark blazer with the mint-green logo of a company, and he’d put a cardboard folder on the table, without looking at it.

Maris waited, but Victoria was silent. She was the one who had to start:

“So what did you want?”

“Ms. Burale,” the guy said, “I want to buy your body.”

Victoria gave a hiss and Maris put her fists on the table.

“That was a joke,” she said. “Not a particularly funny one, either. How about you get to the point, why we’re here?”

The guy leaned closer.

“Have you heard of slabbing?” he said.

The only thing she could imagine in this context was a slang term for some sex act. That wasn’t it. She shook her head, her flat-top swaying a little beneath the draught.

“Not surprising, it’s still a new process,” the guy said. “There is no reason for you to have heard of it, unless you were interested. My group purchases bodies. We contact individuals who interest our line of customers, aesthetically, and pay them what they want, in return for them bequeathing their physical remains to us.”

He smiled, making a little gesture towards his folder as if to open it.

“The bodies are washed, internally and externally. Any cavities are filled... like in embalming. Then, each body is placed in a tank that is filled with liquid polyethylene. Clear polyethylene. As soon as the plastic has cured, it is preserved. The block is placed in a casing of a more durable polymer, for protection. I can describe the process in more detail, if you wish. If you’re interested, certainly.”

Then it was just paperweights with a 3D engraving inside the block. Or amber lumps with insects, sleeping in slow light.

“And then, do you sell them?” she said.

He nodded.

“To whom? Rich giants who need a paperweight?”

He laughed, maybe mostly to acknowledge that it was a joke.

“Private buyers make up the greatest part of our turnover. But we also have a fair number of buyers from exhibitions, non-profits... you do realise, we don’t buy your old granddad with bingo-wings and an enlarged prostate. Of course he’s no worse as a human being, but... millions live happily, with bodies that do everything that’s required of them, without being of interest to us. Whereas your body... after all, we saw today what it can do.”

He leant forward again. His eyes were on her with their moist shine.

“1:57:01. Women’s European champion at... twenty? And it’s not just about your physical capacity, even if that’s why we’re here. You’re straight, long-limbed, hard-bodied. Firm caramel skin, impressive hair. You turn running into an art.”

Maris looked ahead, waiting for him to finish. Normal compliments she could have handled, maybe. Victoria rocked her chair with a little creak, as if to remind her that she was there.

“I’ve got photos,” he said, “if you want to see the result.”

Maris put out her hand and pulled it back before he had time to give her the folder. A moment later she’d changed her mind, but it was too late to say anything. She glanced at Victoria, in case she might ask for it, but instead she said:

“Are you all right, Maris? We’ll leave whenever you want.”

“I’m all right.”

She turned her gaze towards him again:

“They’re dead. I’ve never seen a corpse.”

She’d intended it to sound self-ironic, but maybe he just heard how pathetic she was. (She must have seen corpses in the news or in photographs, city squares after bombings. How could this feel different?)

He sat quiet.

“Do you pay people up front, or their next of kin?”

It sounded rational.

“Everyone chooses whether to take the payment or give it to their family,” he replied. “Or a part of each.”

“What kind of price are we talking about?”

“The price is negotiable,” the guy said. “We can start with... twenty billion euros. Do you want to go higher?”

For a moment she sat almost impassive. It was as if her brain could grasp “twenty” and “billion,” but not both at the same time.

The guy focused on her.

“Are you interested?” he said.

“Yes, I am interested.” Her voice grew stronger. “I need to speak to my family... if my parents don’t like it, I might change my mind. But so much money for what you do with my corpse after I’m dead? I won’t be using it then!”

She was still a little removed from reality. She didn’t need billions, not now that running was her day job.

“There’s one more thing,” the guy said.

His voice wasn’t loud, but something in his tone grabbed her and silenced her.

“We’re interested in your body as long as it’s at its peak. We’re not interested in how it’s going to look when you’re eighty. Think for yourself, you must have read the statistics. You might still be running when you’re forty... but you’re not going to be in a state to compete any more, are you? Even a few years from now, you will have to upgrade to longer distances, if you want to stay competitive.”

“Where are you going with this?” Victoria interrupted.

But something in her voice was troubled.

“Those who accept our offer get slabbed in the prime of their life,” the guy said. “Yes, it shortens your natural lifespan by many decades. We have never lied about that.”

“So you kill people,” Maris said. “How do you get anyone to agree to it?”

He laid his hands on the table, palms upward.

“If we were immortal, I would never make this proposal. But no matter what we do, we can’t choose to live for ever, can we?”

He flashed a smile, a magician performing his pièce de résistance. The runners of Victoria’s chair scraped against the floor.

“Maris, we can leave if you want,” she said loudly.

“You can leave if you want,” Maris replied.

She’d started feeling the cold of incipient nausea in her fingertips, but you couldn’t hear it from her voice. If she’d left, he would have taken it as fear. Instead, she met his gaze, like one blade against another. It was a childish defiance.

“How do you kill them?” she asked.

It felt brutal. “Euthanise” wasn’t right, they weren’t ill.

“Morphine, several times a lethal dose,” the guy replied. “I was given morphine once, when I fell with my dirt bike as a teen. It’s the best death you could hope for.”

“I’m not gonna lie,” Victoria said into the silence, “I think you’re bluffing. When people have received your payment, what is stopping them from running away?”

“As soon as the subject has signed the contract,” he said, “if they want the payment for themselves, they get to move to one of our resorts. There they get to stay and enjoy their money... restaurants, beaches, until... well. It’s as luxurious as you could ask.”

He opened the folder, turning it towards them. He hadn’t wanted to show them the bodies, but he showed them the resort. She saw white walls of stone that looked cast in one piece, the blue infinity symbol of a pool. All photos were too distant and angled to see any humans. They might have been from a travel brochure. Perhaps that was where he’d found them.

Silence took over. The guy let the folder drop, but she didn’t hear it.

“What profit do you make from it?” she asked. “Are people prepared to pay so much for one?”

The guy nodded several times.

“Ms. Burale,” he said. “As an athlete, why do you think we non-athletes are so fixated on you? Take me: I don’t think I’ve run a mile in my adult life. Think about the billions that will be spent this year on football alone. Those are greater sums than the ones my company turn over.”

“It’s aesthetically enjoyable, isn’t it?” Maris said. “The strength and beauty of the human body... the same reasons you watch ballet.”

He hadn’t given her time to shape her thoughts. The guy swiped his hand sideways, not a yes or a no.

“You’re a sin-offering for the rest of us,” he said. “You show that strength in the exertion, you press yourselves to breaking-point while we’re sat in the couch with a bag of crisps. That’s the perfection we want to preserve, so that future generations also can strive for it.”

Silence flooded the room. It made Maris draw a breath and move her fingers to make sure that she still could.

She looked at Victoria. The promoter’s pink and glitter-blue face jolted, as if her look had been a touch. She collected herself.

“It’s your choice,” she said with a pale little smile. “You’re a grown woman.”

Maris turned her gaze forward.

“I just want your interest, or lack thereof,” the guy said. “It’s not final until we come and get you. That is also why many choose to bequeath the payment to their family, to retain the option....” His gaze slid into hers. His eyes were grey, normal. “But I can’t persuade you to choose either.”

“People agree to it,” Maris said after a moment.

He hadn’t said how long you could stay at their home before they harvested you. It couldn’t be many years; they wanted you at your peak. In the photos she’d seen pools, the chromed tubes of gyms.

She sucked in air and spoke again:

“What makes them do it?”

The guy reached out his hand. It fell slack on the table. (If mum and dad had been struggling for money, if any of them had needed some expensive treatment, wouldn’t it have been her duty to do it?)

“The same thing that you must have asked yourself a few times,” he replied. “What will they do when they see the decline up ahead?”

Maris got up. The movement made her chair clatter. He peered up at her.

“Is that a no, Ms. Burale?” he said.

“It’s a maybe. I need to consider.”

Her voice sounded distant in her ears.

They were heading back to the club. Victoria’s heels ticked in front of her. The man was just behind the edge of her vision, so that she only felt that he was there. If she didn’t say anything, he’d think it was from cowardice.

“And what do you gain from it?” she said out loud. “Do you get some kind of bonus for each new athlete?”

She knew that he smiled, a strip of smile that changed the light level a fraction.

“I like it,” he said.

1,500 metres. The world had shrunk to a layer of heat on her skin. She couldn’t remember a world without the shadowless sunlight or the thunder of feet. The sky above the stands was one field of gold. There was pain, too, during the last lap, but all the others were so far behind, she couldn’t hear them.

Maybe not today either.

THE END

#fiction #horror #sports horror #corpse artwork #sports

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