Distillation

SHORT STORIES

From Plaintiffs and Pontiffs

DISTILLATION

The subject's spirit is distilled into a fine aether—a heat is applied to his core, his spirit is brought to a boil, and all of his more volatile elements are turned into vapors. His anger overcomes its vapor pressure first, then his love, then his eccentricity, and so on—more elements than can be enumerated here. These elements travel through glass tubes, miles and miles of glass tubes, tubes held together by intricate metal stands and sheer human ingenuity, infinitely complex but still small enough to fit on a counter. The various elements are condensed along the way, boiled again, condensed again, filtered, centrifuged, drained—and finally the resulting, separated liquids are collected at the counter's far end, in several beakers. The chemistry works without the subject's consent, the process goes on without his comprehension.
    “Will they be returned to me at any point?” he asks the technician, a mumbling man that refuses to make eye contact with him at any point. The technician is wearing a white lab coat, connoting a scientific authority, but he seems unfamiliar with all the dials that he adjusts at spontaneous intervals. Like clockwork, every adjustment sends him back to an equipment manual, absurdly thick, as if he's just another part of the machine—maybe he's just another part of the machine. If he is, he isn't nearly as well made—he has an unnatural bend in his upper torso, presumably from long hours pouring over this manual and others. His thick glasses attest to the assumption—he'll be the part that needs replaced first, the subject thinks to himself. But the subject doesn’t really know that, because he has no idea what's going on.
    “Returned?” the technician finally replies, between adjustments.
    “Yes, will I be able to keep it?”
    “I'm afraid, sir, I'm afraid it will all go right in the trash. These types of things, impurities, they go right in the trash. Of course we'll analyze them all first, to make sure they don't have anything important in them, but then they'll clearly all go in the trash.”
    They're talking about pieces of the subjects soul—if he had any anger left, he would have displayed it. Instead he just asks another question. “Well, what do you consider important? Some of these other things, I might have called them important.”
    He is looking specifically at a beaker labeled 'Sentimentality et al'. There's a hazy liquid floating along the top, probably that very same sentimentality, clearly immiscible with the emotions it shares the beaker with—and the 'et al' emotions settle to the bottom with a more specific gravity. He wants to tell the man that surely he'll miss his sentimentality, but he's finding himself unable. So instead he just points, and waits for a response.
    “What do I consider important? What's important is objective, and furthermore it's common knowledge. I shouldn't have to explain.” He explains anyway. “Rationality, rationality is important. Magnanimity. Temperance. All the heavier elements. Just think of the science, really, the periodic table. Clarity. You've been told all your life to strive for Clarity. You've probably even said it to yourself, you've probably even convinced yourself—I see some Prudence emerging from the filth inside of you, and that's something that Prudence would say. You should have listened to your Prudence, you wouldn't have ended up here. But it was buried too deep. Look at this, look how colorful this stuff I'm removing from you is, how cloudy it is, how opaque it is. Nothing important is opaque. Or insoluble.”
    He turns rapidly to a page near the end of his manual, with pictures—pictures of colorful and cloudy liquids, probably for use as a reference. For a moment the technician seems like he might show the pictures to the subject, but then thinks better of it—proprietary information, no doubt. The subject sees them anyway.
    “These are chemicals that you never should have put in your body, and now they must be removed,” the technician adds, with a tone of finality. “It'll be over in just another two minutes. The doctors will be in to retrieve you shortly.”
    The subject's time is running out. He's starting to feel like someone else entirely, and the feeling is unsettling him. Until this moment, he hadn't considered his identity to be important to him. The people that sentenced him to this process, they told him he would change, but the threat never caused him fear. He changes his mind—he is afraid. And so, while the technician is turned away, writing something on a notepad, the subject attacks him.
    Without any anger left in him, though, his attack becomes overly rational—instead of just hitting him, like a normal person would do, the subject decides to push down on the top of the technician's head. His back is already tremendously bent—just a little more pressure, and surely the man will break completely in half. The subject stands up from the wheelchair they've sat him in, and silently extends his pallid arm over the man—his arm's a completely different color now, he realizes. They just had to get rid of my color, he thinks to himself. He hopes it's still strong enough to bend the man. Before he can test the validity of his hypothesis, though, the technician turns around. Even with so much of himself boiled away, the subject towers over him. The disparity in their height, along with several other sources of fright, cause the technician to collapse in a heap like a fainting goat.
    “That works too,” he says. Without much consideration, he pulls out all the wires that are attached to his body, and he rips off the funnel that's attached to the top of his head.
    He steps over the limp body, and goes to the end of the counter. There's too many beakers to carry, and the doctors will be there any second—he has to act fast. So he pours all the beakers together, into a larger one that he finds nearby. A chemical reaction occurs, and he chokes on unexpected smoke. “Hope that's alright.”
    He looks the machinery over—there's still large quantities of himself inside of it, he can see. There's one glass bulb in particular that's quite full of him. Leaning over the counter, he tries to pry it from its housing, but it's surprisingly firm. Time is running out. His solution, for better or for worse, is to hold his beaker under it as he breaks the bulb with a wrench he found. The liquid pours in, along with shards of glass. It's the best he can do.
    Outside the room is a hallway, alive with activity. Hundreds of doctors walk in either direction, and many of them are pushing people in wheelchairs—always a shriveled human being, drooling in streams down their neck, but otherwise perfectly alive. That was supposed to be him, but the process was stopped too soon. Nobody told him he'd look like that. He's only now putting the pieces together.
    Quickly he chooses a direction, and walks with a purpose. He holds his beaker out in front of him with both hands, balancing it so that nothing is spilled. He wonders if he should just drink it, but he is scared—no one explained to him the process, much less the reverse process, if there even is one. To drink it seems to make sense to him—it came out of him, after all, and his mouth is conventionally where he puts things back in. But he could be wrong. Perhaps he needs a syringe, and to inject it intravenously. There's about a liter of the liquid, so the thought makes him nauseous.
    At random, he picks a room.
    Inside the room he finds a real researcher—not a technician, but a man of science. He knows because of the contents of an enormous chalkboard that the scientist stands in front of, contemplating. The figures and names are legible but completely unintelligible. It must be science.
    The subject hates to distract the man, but he seems like the right person to ask. “Excuse me, could you tell me how to put this back into myself?”
    The question startles the man—he thought he was alone. Once recovered, he takes a quick look at the subject and a much longer look at the subject's outstretched bottle. He smiles, and knowingly takes the glass container in his own hands.
    “Back into yourself, you say?” he asks, and laughs. “Do you even know what this is?”
    “No, I don't.”
    “You were sentenced to distillation, were you not?”
    The subject doesn't answer.
    “It's alright. I don't judge. And I've always thought it was inappropriate for them to do these kinds of procedures without explaining them first. Is that really fair to you? No matter what you've done, you deserve to know what the law intends for you. I'll explain as much as you need.”
    “All of it?”
    The scientist puts the bottle right under his nose, and takes a sophisticated whiff. He can't help but choke a little, though, on some of the harsh vapors. “That's what I thought,” he says. “There's an absurd amount of ammonia in there. I would keep this away from open flames.”
    “What's ammonia?”
    The scientist smiles again, as if pretending to enjoy a feeble joke. He doesn't answer.
    The subject repeats the question.
    “Oh, you mean it. Well that's a pretty basic science question, you should have learned that in school..”
    “Well, I don't know it.”
    “Huh.” Feeling something like pity for the subject, he leads him to the beginning of the chalkboard, where there's a periodical table drawn out. All his other work is an extrapolation from that. “I'll start from the very beginning for you. The most basic building block is the atom, and the most basic atom is Hyperbole. And if you just follow the numbers from there—Heroism, Listening, Beauty, Boredom, Clarity, Nihilism, Opinion. Humans are clarity-based organisms. We're made of Clarity, we eat Clarity. Like sugars—sugars are just long strands of Clarity, bonded with Opinion and Hyperbole. The body takes that and reduces it for energy.
    “Ultimate clarity—that's a diamond. But pencil graphite is made of the same thing, and you know how confused the things people write can be—almost more important than the content of the molecule is the nature of the bond, the organization.
    “The rows of the periodic table just represent an ascending number of protons. The columns all have their own names, though—to the far right, here, you have the noble elements. I already mentioned one—Heroism. If you follow that column down, there's Nerdiness, Argumentation—you've really never heard any of this before?
    “My point is, this horrible smell—” he holds the bottle under the subject's nose, to make clear what he means. “That's a lot of ammonia. Nihilism and Hyperbole. Great for plants, a waste for humans. You really don't want this back inside of you. You'd be better off drinking window cleaner.” He hands it back to the subject.
    “Which brings us to what they've done to you. They used to do mechanical lobotomies, you know? They'd take a hammer and chisel, and would get at the brain through the eye socket. Morbid stuff. It's an oversimplification of a human, though. More than mechanical beings, we are chemical ones.
    “There's nothing to prevent us from changing our chemistry—that's what we've learned, and that's what we've done. With a little bit of heat, we can get rid of a lot of the less desirable things, until the volatile things are all gone. We can make you proportionately higher in Mercy—that's this down here. That one's confusing, it says Hg but it's Mercy. Blame the Romans. Anyway, it's poisonous to take Mercy in large doses, but there's another way around—make the Mercy that's already inside you more prominent by boiling away everything else. Same thing with Grace and Solemnity—Ag, Au—that stuff stays behind. The problem with the process is these noble emotions—they're also very volatile, but we actually want to keep them. That's what I'm trying to solve. I've been researching for years, but still haven't come up with a viable option.”
    Taking a step back and viewing the whole project, as he is, fills the scientist with ennui. He sighs gently. Then he realizes that perhaps he has lost the subject—he became distracted, in the end, by his own grand purpose.
    “I can promise you that what's left inside you is better off without what's in this bottle, and better off than you were before. The only exception would be if you had any Heroism in you before, or Argumentation, but if you did it's already gone. That's the cost.
    “And they haven't finished. You're not the person that you've been consigned to be. If you knew what was best for you, you'd go back and have them finish what they've started.”
    “What if I drink it though? What would happen?”
    “We don't do those kinds of experiments here. Not allowed.”
    “But if you had to guess?”
    “It's possible that you'll just digest it—your intestines would break down your passion, for instance, into its basic components, and then feed it into your glycolytic pathway like it's just another form of sugar. Like I was saying, we don't really do human experiments, so it's all just speculation.”
    Without giving warning, the subject drinks the entire beaker.
    It goes through him like a fire, burning his organs one after the other. It starts in his heart and lungs, then through his stomach, liver, and kidneys. When it reaches his lower torso, he falls to his knees. He would have fell on his face, but the scientist keeps him upright with a helpful hand.
    All at once the subject feels depressed, like the world is ending and that he's the only one to blame. He's angry at his circumstances, at the unfeeling concatenation of events that would lead him to such a horrible place. He is lost. The burning intensifies, and comes over him again in waves. He tightly grips the scientist's arm, as he tries to reassure him. He asks, “What's going to happen to me?” (The underlying things remain the same—but now he has a superstructure of disatisfaction, spanning those great, heavy voids).
    “Two possibilities come to mind—you'll either be what you were before, the chemical equivalent of an asshole; or you'll die.” The scientist stops supporting the subject for a moment—he goes instead to a shelf, full of small vials, that is situated nearby. He grabs something and comes back. “As long as you're experimenting on yourself, why not make it worth your while? This is pure Rn—pure Reason. It's slightly radioactive, might cause lung cancer, and might cause people to hate you, but I feel like the benefits far exceed the downsides. I'm going to leave you now to get a doctor, since I can't be liable for you dying here—but you don't have to be here when I return, you understand?”
    The doctor smiles, backs away towards the door, and adds, “If you do leave, though, and if you do ingest the Reason—send a letter, won't you? Tell me how it went.” Then he exits the room.