Brainless

Brainless's Confession #2

I bet that you're wondering how I died. You’re going to have a good laugh.

There are so many ways to die, every instant of one’s life, so many possibilities. Some are more likely than others. Heart disease, infectious disease, cancer, car crash, domestic or professional accident, suicide; you have every opportunity to pass away from one of these. If you’re looking for a bit more originality, pass away from an overdose, get killed while accomplishing your patriotic duty or, if you don’t have the taste for traveling, just in front of your house by your neighbor who mistook you for a burglar.

Sub-categories exist. In the domestic accidents category, for example, you have about the same chances to break your skull by falling down the stairs, to burn in a fire, to confuse the juice bottle with the one for house-cleaning products, to drown in your pool, your bathtub, or your toilets if you like stunts. In the infectious disease category, you have however infinitely more chances to die because of tuberculosis or HIV than the consequences of a rare and deathly form of African trypanosomiasis.

Then, all is a matter of style. You can know a statistically original death, but in common circumstances. You’re coming out of the supermarket with your grocery bags. Two gangs are sniping each other out in the parking lot. Paf! you take a lost bullet in the chest. You see that on TV everyday. Or, on the contrary, choose the most classical of deaths, but in extravagant circumstances. Like this guy whose car exploded as he was coming home from work, explosion caused by his keychain, an authentic grenade, because the pin broke when he drove over a speed bump without slowing down.

Yes, morons often die in funnier ways than others.

Let’s talk about my own case.

Each year, at the beginning of July, people celebrate at Meckling, a small village a half dozen miles away from Vermillion, the corn festival. Kids, accompanied by the municipal band, parade in the streets, costumed as maize ears. Housewives have stands where they sell diverse culinary specialties: pop-corn, corn pies, corn waffles, corn soup... while men, wallowed on benches, get drunk with contraband alcohol. It is a well appreciated festival. Since I was a kid, I never missed an edition. Even after my father left, I continued to nag my mother so she would bring me there.

The highlight of the party takes places in front of Meckling’s town hall: the competition of the biggest corn eater of Clay county. A show that has always excited me. A long table is set on a podium. Pyramids of boiled corn on the cob, still fuming, are brought in by girls in miniskirts, blouse tied above the belly button and cowboy hats. The contestants then come to sit. They check if they all have a bottle of water and a softened pat of butter. The mayor makes a brief speech, wishes them good luck and gives the head start by shooting a gun to the sky. Each contestants grabs a cob, grossly butters it with their fingers and gnaws on it like a hysteric hamster. As soon as a contestant finishes their cob, they drop it in a bucket and tackle the next one. Three judges are here to count the consumed cobs - they have to be eaten up to minimum 80% to be valid. A fourth judge monitors the timer, because the time is limited.  After about fifteen minutes, one of the girls in a miniskirt comes back onstage armed with a hammer and, at the judge’s signal, bangs on a big bell hung to some type of gallows. The contestants put their hands on the table while the judges proceed to a final count before announcing the results under the exclamations of the crowd. The winner gets a trophy, a five hundred dollars check and a bag of a hundred pounds of corn.

When I was a child, the same guy won the competition five years in a row. He was a lean man, looking like a scarecrow, but he mastered the hamster technique perfectly. A true machine. His record: eighty-three cobs cleaned until the last grain in fifteen minutes. Be less than eleven seconds per piece. I had nicknamed him Cornman and made him my hero. In my eyes, Superman, Batman and the others just couldn’t compare.

Once, I mustered the courage to ask him for an autograph. He still had bits of corn on the chin and around the mouth. I preciously conserved his autograph that he scribbled on a piece of paper tablecloth. I can still see the trace of his buttered fingers.

His name was Curtis Cameron. He lived in a van, near Sioux Falls. The winter that followed his feat, he died of cardiac arrest, in front of the TV, beer in hand. So I’ve heard. I was eleven and I don’t know what shook me most; that Cornman died, or that he died so commonly. I wasn’t asking for the moon. I would have been contented with a fire or an asphyxiation caused by a defective stove. But a heart attack... Statistically, the least interesting death possible.

I continued to attend the competition with an almost intact enthusiasm, but I missed Cornman. I didn’t want to be a simple onlooker anymore. I wanted to take part. I had to wait until my sixteenth birthday, the minimum age according to the rules. Ryan Campbell, who had just celebrated his, also signed up for the competition, and we went with his mother; mine was working that day. During the ride, Ryan didn’t stop bragging, saying that I stood no chance, he trained, and had enough room in his stomach to beat Cornman’s record. It’s true that I didn’t really train and that my gut didn’t look like a tanker, but I had observed a lot. From the bottom of my heart, I was certain to win. From the losers’ paradise, Curtis Cameron was watching over me.

In fact, he mostly wanted me to join him there.

We were ten contestants, all very focused, as if it was the most important day of our lives. I went to my seat, unscrewed the cap of my water bottle, checked that the butter was soft enough to be easily spread. An adorable and sexy girl came to place in front of me a mound of cobs. The grains were a bright yellow, I imagined them juicy and crunchy.

The mayor made his little speech, then he drew his gun and shot it to the sky.

I remember that when I seized my first cob, I wondered what altitude a bullet shot upwards could go up to; and when it falls back down, can it kill someone?

The first rule to be a good corn eater is to be generous with the butter, because it helps the bite slide down the throat and into the stomach. Then, one has to move their head as little as possible. The hands turn the cob and the forearms move it; somehow like a cylinder on a typewriter. The upper incisors are at work. Mines are rather large, which was an advantage.

I was off to a flying start. After five minutes, I was two cobs ahead of the other contestants, including Ryan. I felt that my stomach was already full, that it couldn’t dilate anymore. I should have taken a break to drink a bit of water. But Cornman’s ghost was whispering in my ear: “Don’t lose pace, kid!” Half chewed corn was escaping from my mouth, butter was running down my fingers. I took on the next cob, and that’s when I started to suffocate. I could try to inhale as much as I wanted, air wasn’t going in anymore, neither through my mouth nor through my nose. I was in apnea, I was drowning in corn slurry. I tried to grab the bottle at my feet and I slid out of my chair. I ended up slumped on my back, looking at the sky. Spasms were shaking my body, people started to scream, and I was looking at the sky thinking that the bullet shot by the mayor was going to land, right on my forehead.

An object that falls into the atmosphere doesn’t accelerate forever, it reaches at some point its maximal velocity where the effects of gravity are balanced with air resistance. But what is the maximal velocity of a 9mm. gun bullet? It must still hurt when it lands on one’s head.

This is what I was thinking about while suffocating like bait in a fisherman’s net.

I could have survived if... all resides in the “if”, in this spectrum of events which, one added to another, quietly lead me to my death.

I could have survived if the only doctor of Meckling hadn’t been dead drunk.

I could have survived if the mayor, some Madsen guy, wanting to rescue me, had operated the Heimlich method rather than a mouth-to-mouth, which only worsened everything.

I could have survived if the firefighters hurried from Vermillion hadn’t gotten stuck in traffic and arrived five minutes too late.

What does it feel like to die? Do you seen an angel coming down from the sky to take you away? Do you see a tunnel of light open? Do you hear voices or music?

Sorry, I have no idea. I forgot. At one point, I was alive, at the next, I wasn’t anymore, that’s all.

However, another time, I could tell you what it’s like to come back.