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Writer
Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 45
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The Man Who Had Nothing
This is a weird little experimental thing I did. I was just practicing description, but I like the way it turned out, and I've been thinking of putting it into more context and expanding it. Any comments whatsoever will be much appreciated.
Once upon a time, there was a man who had nothing. He lived in a vat of filthy green liquid and the various tubes going into his various orifices had become tangled with his greasy black hair and beard, the matted ends of which rose to the top of his vat, providing a surface for disgusting layers of generic and unidentifiable filth to settle into a homogenous brown paste. Such repulsive and sickening sediment, though, at least seemed an honest mess, something that could simply be disposed of, and it’s residue wiped away and obliterated with chemicals. The man who lived under this, however, transcended this earthly and reparable simplicity of repugnance. The cloudy liquid allowed me to see, at first, only his head, most of which was mercifully covered in dark, thick hair. Only a rotted nose and the pits of swollen sunken eyes could be made out behind his beard, and as I turned my light to his face, I caught a gleam of milky white before his eyeballs withdrew deeper into his skull, rolling back into the safe darkness as his bloated lids closed on them. His head fell back onto his shoulder, pulling down with it the matted flotsam, which the fluid eagerly oozed through to wet the dusty surface. A gnarled claw of a hand with long curved fingernails pawed weakly at the largest of the tubes protruding from the mouth, then fell back into cloudy obscurity.
I withdrew my gloved hand from the mess and tried to shake the muck from it. “I’m not touching this one. Get the hazmats in here and we’ll check out the rest of the building.”
“Yessir.”
I wiped my hand on the edge of the vat and carefully pulled off the soiled gloves, dropping them onto the floor. I turned my head up to examine the rest of the room. It had been meant to be a living room, but it was devoid of furniture and the quaint fireplace on one wall had been blocked by a grey filing cabinet. The tubes coming from the room’s occupant were separated into two bundles, one of which disappeared into a hole in the floor. The other was suspended from the ceiling by wires, and lead through a doorway into the kitchen, where it was separated again and fed into various rusted pumps, tanks and pieces of ancient electronic equipment. The pumps were silent and the black monitors dully reflected the glare of my light through thick dust.
“See if you can get them to turn the power back on in here. I want to see if this stuff works.”
“Yessir.”
I heard some disgusting gurgle of bubbling muck from the tank behind me as the room become illuminated with blinking lights and the glow old CRT monitors. The ping-pinging of the man’s heart rate began, and was accompanied by the whirring of fans and a rhythm of numerous pumps.
“He’s… alive, sir?”
“Yeah… he moved when I shined the light in his eyes. This old stuff had all been running until we cut the power.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know, but I’m damn glad he’s not me.”
“Yeah….”
“Ok, let’s get the rest off this place before our pals in show up.”
The rest of the place consisted of a bathroom that looked, much to my relief, as if it had been used for its intended purpose, though not for a long time, and two bedrooms. One was a storage room, filled with tanks and barrels of what was presumably flowing through some of those tubes, and cans of more appealing foodstuffs sitting next to a microwave and tiny cot in the corner. The other bedroom had been converted into some sort of office. There was a dusty desk with a computer, and cabinets filled with both paper files in manila folders and detached computer drives. The dusty paper files were covered with lists of inscrutable numbers and four letter acronyms, and were all dated from over four years ago. They were undoubtedly records of the history of the unfortunate man soaking in the living room.
“Ok, I think we’re all clear. The clown suits going to show up any time soon?”
“Yeah, they’re here now. Getting their stuff out of the truck.”
“Good. You can go see if there’s anything interesting in the basement, and I’ll give the grand tour”
“Right”
I gave the hazmat crew a few cursory directions before heading outside into the relatively fresh air, where I could take off my mask and fill my lungs with more pungent and pleasurable toxins. I sat down on the porch and looked around the neighborhood. It was largely abandoned, and the once idyllic lawns and hedges were overrun with weeds. The only inhabitants of this area were either too old to move out, or enjoyed the privacy of the place for whatever generally lawless reasons. It was all rather brown, dirty and depressing, and the paint was wearing off the houses, leaving them as uniform rows of rot and disrepair. I put out my cigarette in the pot of some dead flower, replaced my mask, got up and turned back inside to watch the progress inside the house. The four men in white plastic suits and hoods had set up two blinding lights focused on the vat, and had begun to cut away the matted hair of the soaking man so that they could suck out the filth he had become entangled with. They had already put my contaminated gloves into a large white plastic barrel and were covering them with what they could skim off the top of the vat.
As the surface of the liquid was cleared, I could get a better view of the center of this ridiculous tangle, the pale, twisted and bloated creature who cringed away from the bright lights shining on him. His skin was pale, translucent, where it wasn’t interrupted with sores, and his network of weak blue veins showed through. He was terribly skinny, and his empty flesh hung off his bones like some ill-fitting costume. There was such filth gathered in the folds of skin that as the suited arms of the white suited men disturbed the fluid, and at the poor man twitched and shuddered, clouds of foul yellow sediment dirtied water and obscured my view.
When the crew had finally managed to cut the man loose from his own matted hair, they sucked the green fluid away, leaving the man twitching at the bottom of his vat. One of the crew then climbed in and crouched over him, carefully pulling the bundle of tubes out of his throat. The man vomited up some white fluid, screamed quietly, and convulsed violently. The faint beeping from the other room turned into a steady whine, and the creature passed away.
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