Occasionally late at night, this one burns in my brain and I cannot get to sleep for thinking about it. This is a lil ramble about Imago by Tristan Alice Nieto, a short story from Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which was Topside Press’s final publication and is in print from LittlePuss nowadays. I’ll put a CW for discussions of death, murder and bodily decay (and also chronic pain) but I promise it’s not that bad. (though it is somewhat morbid obviously)

||Imago is easily the best short story to come out of either Topside anthology collection, which is saying something given that Meanwhile, Elsewhere is actually pretty good across the board. No other short story tugs at my stupid brain the way Imago does several years after I last read it though, so I’m having to write this. I guess I’m feeling a bit corpselike lately.

The thrust of Imago is that it’s a soft-scifi future where people can get their eyes swapped for stereoscopic camera sensors, and other biotech-y things. There’s been a huge plague on the planet at some point, dubbed the “white plague”. (lol, lmao) Since people have been dying all over the place as the world goes to shit, the development of Revivarol seems like a great idea: a shot of oxygen directly to the brain, essentially kick-starting a recently deceased person and putting the body’s repair mechanisms into overdrive. The final frontier! Death defeated! Except that the kind of oxygen deprivation among other things that happen when the body dies tends to mean that Revivarol patients are cold, distant and often irritated, with badly fragmented minds not even resembling the person they were in life.

This is where we find Tabitha;

“It’s phrased as a question, but I don’t know the answer. Am I Tabitha? I think that was my name, but I don’t know if I’m still her.”

She’s been murdered, her eyes are missing, and a few days later the cops have shot her with Revivarol in a morgue, hoping to get answers on her murder. Brain death being what it is though, the worst parts of a Revivarol resuscitation have long since set in.

So immediately this is like, Oh, Yeah. It’s hitting the general fear of death in a very specific and unique, physical way, by making decomposition a livable experience, and also it’s bringing a loss of self and identity into the picture. A ragged grinding corpse, days out from death and with degrading grey matter: find out who killed you. Couldn’t really tell you why this hits, but personally I guess I feel instant and all-encompassing sympathy for Tabitha, in life a sad transbian who was murdered and in death an agonised thing living within a broken body. I love how harrowing Imago is, I can never sleep after I read it. Bonus points because her family can’t bear to deal with her in her revived cadaver walking around, double bonus points for when she talks about rising agony held off by diamorphine, her drugged body crumbling inside, or her wrists grinding angrily around, or the pain that shoots through her head when she turns it. Being dead leaves you stiff since decomposition has already begun, but also hey, that’s just chronic pain right? I’m a decaying corpse animated by too many painkillers. Joints coming apart and body failing! I know how that one is. This shit fucking sucks.

The murder aspect makes it worse, because at least if you get Revivarol’d like 18 hours after a peaceful death, you’d come back to a pretty intact body. Being stuffed into a suitcase for three days after being killed means Tabitha is covered in slash marks, tire tracks, rope burn, bruises, her elbow is hyperextended, shit like that. Plus, there are postmortem wounds, which never clot (dead) and don’t stop bleeding. Gotta drink hot tea with sugar to keep your muscles from going into rigor mortis, (again) your saliva flowing while it lasts. Total failure of the flesh automaton, neurotransmitters animating dead flesh.

Getting to watch this at a remove through the camera-eye the morgue gave her, as she examines her body at a distance in first person, adds a cool level of queasy dissociation, looking at her own corpse. It’s kind of a horror story I guess, which I hadn’t considered before, but it gets at the ugliest and most tangible fears about death imo. That’s kind of what the whole thing is about, I guess, as much as death: the abandon of a failing body. Sure, humans shouldn’t link their visual implants up to ultraviolet cameras to see, because their brains will essentially melt from getting that much visual info for more than a week, but who cares? Tabitha is already dead. Fuck it, just another bit of failing flesh. She doesn’t have more than a few days anyway.

“I feel like someone pulled a bag of greasy chicken bones out of the rubbish and called it a person. Have I been in formaldehyde all this time? Was I pushed off the shelf?”

Among all this, Tabitha ends up rifling through her ruined grey matter for more on the remaining memories that stand out the strongest: her girlfriend, long deceased, who she can remember adoring but not the name attached. In with the rot and death, the thread of trying to recall her lover (clashed violently against the memory of being murdered, of her corpse failing) is what grounds the story and keeps it from being completely unrelentingly grim:

“My mind naturally floats back to the one source of emotion I have left – my nameless lover. I stare at her image, her abyssal eyes and bold, crooked smile. It has the quality of the last surviving work of some lost, forgotten master. The one thing I managed to save from my gallery of memories as it went up in flames.”

I have a habit with Imago, wherein it enters my brain late at night (like 3am, 5am) and refuses to get out, so I sort of traumatise myself with it, for catharsis. I think it’s good if you’ve been feeling low or flat, 'cause if you have any sort of opinion about being a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters, little sparks of electricity moving your flesh, it’s probably hard not to feel things about it.

It feels weirdly healthy, I guess, the way Imago tangles so directly with the concept of death, with understanding in full the gravity of your own. It’s an experience, getting to see Tabitha told by a cop that they’ve got her murderer once she points him out. She gets to remember a lot of what he did, she gets to know his name and face, his record. She doesn’t feel much about the stabbing or the man who stabbed her, but it could be either emotional reactions dulled by Revivarol or the human brain being incapable of having an opinion on one’s own murder.

“The truth is I don’t really feel anything for this man. The vague sense of pity I feel seems to stem from a deeper kernel of anger, of disappointment and betrayal. I can’t really tell what I’m angry at. Maybe it’s society, or the system that failed him, failed both of us. Or maybe I’m just disillusioned at the notion of justice – the idea that there’s anything he or Danielle or the entire police force could ever do to make this even remotely fair, let alone right. As if finding him would bring me any kind of satisfaction.”

That can’t be all for her, though, so after talking to her murderer a bit she sets out knowing that her eyes were stolen deliberately, to get them back. They have wireless connections and an AR uplink, so. The scene where the Revivarol is wearing off is both disgusting and fascinating, though: muscles like steel pistons, joints fully broken down. Knowing that you were killed just for your eyes must be kind of galling;

“This will be my last action on this earth, even if it ends up meaning nothing.”

It’s a weird, gross and honestly sad story, my kinda thing, but it ends very well which is why I like it. It’s bittersweet and wonderful after all the gristle and blood and dying. When I get to feeling morbid and shitty about a body that’s failing, about flesh that can’t do what I need it to, Tabitha’s shambling-corpse journey and subsequent final memories of her girlfriend always leave me feeling wistful but satisfied (and pretty gay) after everything. It’s a good dose of death, sadness, lost love and a lil bit of trans positivity. I’m still not bored of rereading it even though it’s short, and I doubt I ever will be.