Black Balloon

Prologue

"Cogito, ergo sum". "I think, therefore I am." Our consciousness is the only thing in which any of us can be certain. It is by its nature the first and last thing we will ever experience. For us, consciousness is, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, "All that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be." Except that it won't. We will one day cease to be. But how does one begin to comprehend such a thing? The task is impossible. But in our dying moments, we are tasked with exactly this. On a rainy day in November, it is Hermann Auerbach's turn to face oblivion.

Hermann is dying...and he knows it. Today is the day, a matter of hours at most, probably much less. It isn't a surprise. He's been expecting it for months, but that doesn't make it any less difficult to comprehend, to truly know what it is to be "no more". The doctors told him it would happen, and every day his body confirms it. He's felt the life slowly drain from him as the cancer cells multiply, eating away at the healthy tissue. Now the cancerous cells outnumber the healthy ones, and soon his lungs will no longer be able to supply enough oxygen to keep his heart beating. When it's your time, you know, and Hermann knows. But before he goes he has a job to do.

He has no complaints about his fate. Hermann has lived a good life—a great life. He's grateful that his body and mind have remained intact for as long as they have, right up until his final hour. Less fortunate souls have lingered in hospital beds, sometimes for years, strapped to an iron lung or drooling in a dementia ward, until the Universe finally had the good mercy to let them go. On the contrary, he has remained relatively physically able and mentally sound until his final hour, a blessing to be sure.

It is the middle of the night—the exact time Hermann cannot say. It is profoundly dark outside. He has no clock in his bedroom and to travel to the living room would only waste precious time and energy. Time doesn't matter anymore anyway. It has no meaning for him now. Outside the window, a steady waterfall of rain runs down the glass obscuring the forest beyond. The jungle is a blurry glob of black in the murky night.

Hermann is afraid, but not of death. He long ago made peace with that. No, what Hermann fears is that it may already be too late to accomplish what he desperately needs to. He's waited too long, he thinks. His body may already be too weak, and if he can't get it done, the future of the world will be in jeopardy. If the contents of his desk drawer were to fall into the wrong hands, an unimaginable horror could be unleashed upon the Universe. And it will be entirely his fault. The possibility of this happening is slight, but given the potential consequences, even the slightest risk is too great. It must be destroyed.

Hermann rolls over in bed as a violent spasm forms in his chest. His atrophied diaphragm muscles make a feeble attempt to expel the fluid collected in his lungs. He erupts into a sickly cough, a guttural hacking that sounds like death itself. It howls and barks. It sounds empty, echoing from some hollow place inside, perhaps through the hole that the cancer has left after eating its fill. It will never 'eat its fill,' He thinks. It has an insatiable appetite. It is a parasitic creature that won't stop feasting until it's killed the host. It has nearly succeeded.

A spatter of dark blood dribbles weakly from his chin and drops onto the sheets. He manages to roll himself to the side of the bed before expelling the rest, stringy globs of crimson phlegm that land on the floorboards with a gooey splatter.

Death's cruelest injustice is to rob us of our last shred of dignity in our final moments. We leave this world at our lowest point. We shit our pants, piss ourselves, cough, puke, and bleed. Bodily fluids leak from every orifice. We are on display at our weakest, powerless to hide our shame. In other words, we are at our most human; impotent, vulnerable, exposed. In our dying hour, we are no different than any other animal made of flesh, bone, and fluid. And the indignities don't stop at death; Afterwards, our frail, desiccated bodies are stripped naked, scrubbed clean, sliced open and pumped full of chemicals, dressed up, paraded in front of our friends and family, and then finally left to rot in the ground, where for the next thirty years we'll leach formaldehyde into the soil, our flesh too toxic for even worms to eat. Hermann wants no part of this, but what is he to do? In a few short minutes his body will no longer belong to him. It will be the burden of the townspeople to dispose of how they see fit. None of it will belong to him; his home, his things, this life. The world will move on without him.