“Yes,” said Pastor Dan, “so let’s hope you never become one.”
Lev is never going to become a big anything. The reason why he doesn’t quite look fourteen is more than just looking young for his age. In the weeks after his capture, he endured transfusion after transfusion to clean out his blood, but poisoning his body with explosive compounds had damaged him. For weeks Lev’s body was bound in puffy cotton gauze like a mummy, yet with arms stretched wide to keep him from detonating himself.
“You’ve been cruci-fluffed,” Pastor Dan told him. At the time, Lev didn’t find it very funny.
His doctor tried to mask his disdain for Lev by hiding it behind a cold, clinical demeanor.
“Even when we purge your system of the chemicals,” the doctor said, “they’ll take their toll.” Then he’d chuckled bitterly. “You’ll live, but you’ll never be unwound. You have just enough damage to your organs to make them useless to anybody but you.”
The damage also stunted his growth, as well as his physical development. Now Lev’s body is perpetually trapped at the age of thirteen. The wage of being a clapper who doesn’t clap. The only thing that will still grow is his hair—and he made a conscious decision that he would just let it grow, never again becoming the clean-cut, easily manipulated boy he had once been.
Luckily, the worst predictions didn’t come true. He was told he would have permanent tremors in his hands and a slur in his speech. Didn’t happen. He was told that his muscles would atrophy and he’d become increasingly weak. Didn’t happen. In fact, regular exercise, while it hasn’t bulked him up like some, has left him with fairly normal muscle tone. True, he’ll never be the boy he could have been—but then, he would never have been that boy anyway. He would have been unwound. All things considered, this is a better option.
And he doesn’t mind spending his Sundays talking to kids who, once upon a time, he would have been afraid of.
“Dude,” the tattooed punk whispers, leaning over the rec room table and pushing some stray puzzle pieces to the floor. “Just tell me—what was it like at harvest camp?”
Lev looks up, catching a security camera trained on the table. There’s one trained on every table, every conversation. In this way, it’s not all that different from harvest camp.
“Like I said, I can’t talk about it,” Lev tells him. “But trust me, you want to stay clean till seventeen, because you don’t want to find out.”
“I hear ya,” says the punk. “Clean till seventeen—that oughta be the motto.” And he leans back, looking at Lev with the kind of admiration Lev doesn’t feel he’s earned.
When visiting hours are over, Lev leaves with his former pastor.
2008 report, the doctors explained that three patients had been euthanased between 2005 and 2007. . . .
At the time of writing the article, the doctors were enthusiastic about the potential for organ donation in countries where euthanasia is legal. . . .
The curious thing about this is how little publicity this has received, even though the Belgian doctors published their achievement in the world’s leading journal of transplant surgery. ~ Transplantation, July 15, 2006; Transplantation, July 27, 2008.
Full article is available at:
bioedge.org
21 - Lev
It’s a very rare thing that a clapper doesn’t clap, because by the time one gets to the stage of being willing to make one’s own blood explosive enough to take out a whole building, that soul is far beyond the point of no return.
There had still been a spark of light in Levi Jedediah Calder, however. Enough to ignite a powerful change of heart.
The clapper who didn’t clap.
It made him famous. His face was known nationwide and beyond. WHY, LEV, WHY? magazine headlines read, with his life story spread out like a centerfold, ready to be ogled and gobbled by a world greedy for dirt and personal tragedy.
“He was always the perfect son,” his parents were quoted as saying more than once. “We’ll never understand it.” To see their teary interviews, you’d think Lev had actually blown himself up and truly was dead. Well, maybe in a way he was, because the Levi Calder he had been on the day he was sent to be tithed no longer existed.
Almost a year after his capture at Happy Jack Harvest Camp, Lev sits in a detention center rec room on a rainy Sunday morning. He is not a resident of the detention center; he’s a visitor on a mission of mercy.
Across from him sits a kid in an orange jumpsuit, his arms crossed. Between them are the sorry ruins of a jigsaw puzzle left from the last person to sit at the table, one of many unfinished projects that plague this place. It’s February, and the walls are halfheartedly hung with Valentine’s Day decorations that are supposed to add a sense of festivity but just seem sadistic, because in an all-boys’ detention center, only a select few are finding romance this year.
“So you’re supposed to have something useful to say to me?” the kid in the orange jumpsuit says, all attitude, tattoos, and body odor. “What are you, like, twelve?”
“Actually, I’m fourteen.”
The kid smirks. “Well, good for you. Now get out of my sight. I don’t need spiritual guidance from baby Jesus.” Then he reaches out and flicks up Lev’s hair, which, over the past year, has grown to his shoulders in a very Jesus-like way.
Lev is not bothered. He gets this all the time. “We still have half an hour. Maybe we should talk about why you’re in here.”