In the Capitol basement, morticians attempted to correct him.  They patched the skin that had molded and applied a preservative lacquer over the skin that had not.  They extracted his blood and replaced it with formaldehyde.  As they worked, angry crowds gathered outside.  They brandished torches and incense.  They thudded furiously against the bolts, screaming, "Let us in!"  Eventually, they applied fire to the entrance, creating ragged gaps in the wood.  "We've come to rescue him!" they screamed.

Inside, they ran wildly, fervidly.  In the basement, they scuffled briefly with the morticians, stabbing one, and forcing the rest to give way.  With snarls of triumph, they descended upon the corpse.  "We adore you!" they sang.  They kissed and stroked him.  

Sirens sounded, signaling the approach of additional authorities.  Some, panicked, attempted to take the man with them.  Queerly, however, he had become unyieldingly heavy.  Together, they pushed and pulled, but they could not budge the whole of him.

Hearing police in the hallway, some panicked further.  With pocket knives, they hacked off manageable relics.  They took hair and skin shavings.  They took fingers and toes.  Others raided the vials containing his extracted blood, which they stashed in pockets or purses or simply quaffed on the spot.  Other groups, via a mad effort, were able to saw off partial limbs.  They took one leg, just below the knee, and one arm, just above the elbow.  They staggered out by means of back exits.  Their own limbs strained and buckled.

Several, however, made no attempt to escape.  They kneeled quietly before the body, murmuring homages.  They gazed with joy into the rotting face.  "He lives!  He lives!" they whispered.  They remained thus, enrapturedly limp, even as the authorities handcuffed and detained them.

After the violence, the morticians took extra care.  They repaired the body in an underground bunker, militarily protected.  They replaced the missing parts with silicon and clay.  They commissioned a new sarcophagus, not of glass but of an impenetrable plastic.

In the following weeks, there were millions of mourners.  Most were well behaved.  They respected the rules forbidding fire.  They bore unlit candles, edged with construction paper flames: red, yellow, orange.  They carried hymnals with gilt edges.  They brought devotion cards depicting ghosts and winged men.  They carried heavier books, with sacred titles, which they tossed gently against the sarcophagus' reinforced plastic.  "Goodbye," they said.

Extremist mourners congregated in alternative venues, dark and secret.  They centered their worship on the pieces that had been illegally hacked from the corpse.  On their altars, they viewed the shriveled flesh, broken in places, and stained with a sickly purple.  "How vibrant!" they cried together.  "How intensely alive!"  They kissed the rotted toe nubs.  They gnawed at the limbs, assimilating shreds of hard meat.  At the same time, they swallowed drafts of mortuarial formaldehyde, which rigidified their eyeballs into blind stares.  Through this darkness, their focus tightened, and they perceived him only the more intensely.  "He lives..." they sang.


Other groups confronted the tragedies in other ways.  For them, life did persist in those inert forms, though not quite as the extremists had asserted it.  The brains, in particular, where the personal identity rested, seemed too decayed to reanimate.  In the bodies, however, tiny portions remained: cells - or less than this - which bore the imprint of additional characters.  They were starting points, potentially vital.

In monoculture, the groups achieved little.   They obtained flat dishes of tissue, fragile and ill, which proliferated briefly before dying.  At times they could derive embryos with ill-shaped organs and lumps instead of limbs.  These, however, also died at early stages, when the brains were still small.

After a few years, they devised an unexpected solution.  In culture dishes, they combined tissues from all four sources.  These formed a complex ecology.  Each supplied the others' needs, compensating for individual deficiencies.  They created a strange patchwork, intricately interwoven, with four discernible colors.

In a similar way, the groups constructed chimeric embryos, also composed of four parts.  At first, they used mice as surrogate mothers, but later they used rabbits.  The animals' insides were warm and nourishing and familiarly mammalian.    

Most, of course, aborted spontaneously and many others were stillborn.  Of the remainder, only one survived the first year. 


The creature was presented on a Wednesday morning, nearly a decade after the first tragedy.  It had one wing, on the left side, which was small and translucent.  It had one long rabbit ear, with pink fur, which was also slightly deformed.  On its chin were distinct patches.  Some were bald.  Others were one of three types of whiskers: pink, white, or grey.  Its torso was similarly mottled, though the whole of it was exceptionally broad.  The limbs, also, were blotchy and banded, though all were rather long.

Its locomotion was strange and senseless.  By turns, it flew, jumped, ambled, and levitated.  It was enclosed in a simple habitat: half garden and half play area, upholstered with plush toys.  A viewing pane fronted it, composed of inviolable plastic.

At first, the crowds were shy with it.  They watched it tentatively, cautious about committing themselves.  "It's not real," whispered some, while secretly hoping that it was.  "It is real," countered the others, while secretly hoping that it wasn't.

No one was sure quite what to offer it.  Some just brought unmodified artifacts: bunnies and wreaths.  Others embraced the true spirit of the project.  They brought eggs painted with holly and teeth and halos.  They brought incense scented with chocolate and gingerbread and saliva.  Others simply brought what they themselves liked best: games with coins or marbles, or crockery basins with spiced polenta.

The creature was pleasant, though in a dull and non-insistent way.  It nodded and smiled.  It issued general proclamations, such as "Nice day!" and "Best wishes!"  Occasionally, it cried "Good tidings!" without specifying anything in particular.  It seemed in addition determined to give people things.  By turns, it pushed each of its plush toys in front of the viewing wall, yelling "Yours! That's yours!"

In time, it was moved to less public apartments, though still under heavy guard.  Gradually, people began to refer to it as him, or even Him, because that seemed comfortable and rather easier.  With this new pronoun, he gave frequent speeches, often for the benefit of children's charities.  These speeches were written by other hands, and were phonetically simple.  He smiled broadly for the photographs, endearingly hideous.

At his new window, devotees hurled a torrent of new objects.  There were cookies and candles and decorative plants.  Most frequent were the teeth: adult teeth, knocked out intentionally, leaving jagged parts in the gums.  They were most often the front teeth, whose removal was maximally conspicuous, so that it meant more.

Most of his admirers, however, were sensible and non-confrontational.  They restricted themselves to family celebrations, conducted in private.  In their living rooms, they mounted his picture, affixing it to the apex of evergreen trees.  They painted the trees' branches carefully, with an artificial lacquer, creating pastel needles: pink, blue, and yellow.  When the boughs were dry, they hung strings of heirloom teeth, accumulated over generations.  Each length represented an entire mouth's production of a single child: those of great-grandparents, grandparents and parents.  Each season, the teeth were re-dusted and remounted, in the expectation that he would one day arrive and desire to take them.  In a flourish he would harvest them, then divide into two parts: molars at his right hand, incisors at his left.  In their place he would leave money, minted from his own treasury: egg-shaped coins, embossed with an antlered head.

In the evenings, the families knelt reverently in front of his picture, mounted on its elaborate altar.  "I adore you," they whispered.