The Book of Tar by Brandon Case
The hospital bed cradles my body like some pharaoh on display at The Honolulu Academy of Arts. My fingers tremble as I adjust midnight-blue candles. On an aluminum tray that’s bent where Cousin Kevin leaned on it, The Book of Tar lays above my heart, oozing black tendrils.
Am I ready?Fuck, is anyone ever “ready” at twenty years old?
I lie still, yearning to shift my aching back but too weak to move and unwilling to burden another; no position would be comfortable anyway.
Having already said goodbye, my family exits the room in clumps, jamming the single door of this green-walled room at Queen’s Cancer Center like wayward blood cells in a tumor-engorged heart. Everyone wears black robes over their street clothes. Everyone except Cousin Kevin in his vibrant Hawaiian shirt and tan cargo shorts. He winks at me on his way out.
Goddamn Cousin Kevin, wearing his brightest clothes and a grin like he’s flown to Honolulu for a beach vacation instead of my living funeral.
Dad leans over the bed and rests his forehead against mine. “Son, we support your decision… whatever happens.” Suddenly he half-collapses, his head is as heavy as a bowling ball, pinching my swollen lymph nodes like an unexpected biopsy needle.
I yelp, and he leaps away, backing toward the door. Shame drips off him like ooze from The Book of Tar as he says, “Love you, kid.”
Kid… funny how a diagnosis freezes you in time. Chronologically, I’ve been an adult for years, although I haven’t experienced much of what personhood offers. That’s about to change; if this ritual goes to plan; if I’ve absorbed enough study despite my chemo brain; if I can keep my trembling fingers steady.
I say, “See you on the other side.”
Alone as must be, I open The Book of Tar, releasing scents of freshly dug earth, wet wool, and funeral rain. I brush away strings of tar that wriggle like earthworms. Inside, the manufactured-smooth pages are common 8 by 10 printer paper, filled with Times New Roman font and bound inexpertly by hospital staff. Modern materials, gone being the kitsch-creep of dry skin covers, vellum, and scratchy ink. Ancient aesthetics of the Necronomicon. Its words and symbols are what matter, what draws dark power and transmutes life—what offers an end to suffering, a half-life to those who’d otherwise have none.
Chanting voices slip into the quiet. Not from my family or The Book of Tar. Outside the hospital, where a crowd protests, knowing I’m about to perform the ritual. Errant words are distinguishable: necromancy, God, suicide, sin. The normal crowd that despises autonomy in anyone besides themselves.
With a red skin marker, I draw circle-bound stars and interlocking runes, swirling up my arms and down my chest. My shaking fingers smudge a symbol. I try to scrub it away, leaving a pink smear. Technically, I should abandon the ritual and plead for a nurse to wash me. Try again another day. Another day weaker. Another day of pain, fading toward final death, beyond option. Fuck that. Hopefully, the inscription’s intent is what counts.
Last is ceding life. Gone again are the ritual knives, alters, blood-letting. This modern rite strips everything to singular choice. Commitment to undeath, accomplished by a button on my IV.
I unleash its poison.
Soporific dark pulls me. Not gentle like natural sleep—insistent as Ambien. Irrevocable, the horror of arms closing too tight, holding too final.
Wrongly being. Thoughts round, gray river rocks sliding, clacking meaningless, subsidence to roaring rapid. Vacant. Sky dripping black honey, shifting coils of winding and unwound. Me, broken shell in an abandoned bird nest, lost amid endless unmoored.
“…smeared.”
“Should’ve waited…”
Voices unknown, detached of meaning. Terrifying. Alone. Trapped. What’s happening? What have I done?
“Bro, quit pretending you’re a limp eggplant.”
Cousin Kevin, unmistakable. Coaxing an aggrieved sigh from whatever substance I yet possess, like a breeze stirring curtains in the closed room.
“Did you hear that?”
“Help him remember!”
Warm, wet, glutenous. Gold, dripping into the vacancy of me, a tiny yolk in my desiccated eggshell.
Shimmering memory. A laughing boy of four with black hair, rolling on fresh-cut crabgrass, watching his tortoise stride in stately fashion. Nearby, a middle-aged man, beaming fatherly pride, strong as suns.
My eyelids crack open. Hospital room, Dad stands in a crowd of blurred faces. The stout woman beside him plucks a string of black goo from The Book of Tar. She puts it in her mouth, chews, spits the strand into her palm. Golden now, she presses it between my lips, honey-sweet and flower-fragrant, feeding me like a baby bird.
Shimmering memory. A crying boy of nine with black hair, holding out a broken robot—not his toy, pleading for it to be fixed on his cousin’s behalf. Nearby, a sturdy woman, overflowing with motherly love, deep as oceans.
In the present, Mom, silent tears as I focus on her. My surroundings make more sense. Chanting outside: necromancy, God, suicide, sin. My family, implanting memories of us in my undead body. Sacrificing bright moments from their lives to renew me.
Obnoxiously loud, colorful clothes push forward. Cousin Kevin, obviously, even with his face blurred. He grabs a fistful of wriggling tar—reckless, too much—and shoves it in his mouth, chewing till golden, face going slack. Cupped in his hands, a pool of condensed light, he pours into me.
Shimmering memory. A brooding adolescent of twelve with black hair, watching adult surfers in fascination and melancholy. The year of diagnosis and dying future. Nearby, a lanky teen, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and tan shorts, masking sorrow with cheer, bright as aloha.
I jerk upright in bed and stare at Cousin Kevin, who wears the same outfit as that day. He grins at me and says, “Wanna go to the beach?”
