Who Cares for the Dead

## II Data (Callum)

That the means by which he eventually found equilibrium in his life was in helping the dead, surprised no one more than Callum himself. it had been a slow, meandering journey from humanist to misanthrope, each step as significant as any other, though he had been unable to recognise their importance at the time. As a child he had been fascinated by people, and he observed them whenever he was able, speculating on what drove them to behave as they did.

He recognised patterns in behaviour and attitude that allowed him to categorise them into groups, for easy reference, but it could never be an exact science, he soon realised. Though he could sort flowers by colour, which allowed for some understanding of their patterns, he would end up with identically coloured roses, tulips and lilies in the same group, which led to confusion when he then tried to categorise them by genus and species. And so it was with people too.

As a young man, he was chronically excited about the possibilities that lay ahead of him, the new people his adulthood would allow him to encounter. He was weary of the repetitive restriction of seeing the same faces every day in school - all long since categorised and assessed, then re-assessed as raging hormones turned them into impulsive, irrational things barely distinguishable from beasts in the fields. Callum yearned for greater exposure to new and intriguing people, and peoples, and so it was with some satisfaction that he accepted an offer of a university place, to read anthropology.

At first, it felt like a revelation, discovering he was not alone in his search to understand people. Here were others who not only shared his fascination but, having come from places Callum was barely even aware of, all were bursting with new data - new attitudes to categorise and new social stigmas to take into account when ascertaining what the triggers were that led a person to behave a certain way in a given scenario. Here were new ideas and tools and theories to help him refine his own system of categorisation, now much more complex and intricate than his original flower model. He had learned that rather than trying to put people in categories and groups, it was actually less effort to accept that people are simply too unique and discrete for generalisations to ever be a useful tool in isolation, and instead to view each as its own entity, with a set of traits that could be assigned to each, not dissimilar to the badges he had earned as a cub scout to acknowledge different skills learned.

His system had developed over years of observation and conclusions, which would be scrapped and re-concluded time and again - graphs to plot shortness of temper against tendency towards aggression, graded and colour-coded mood groups, with different shades to indicate the level of an individual's propensity towards a certain behaviour. When he looked at people, he imagined them each having a series of embroidered, triangular badges stitched to their sleeves, each with the symbols Callum had assigned to character traits and moral values, and each a carefully calculated shade of an even more precisely calculated colour, to represent where on the graph fell the intensity of that trait in that particular individual.

So focused was he on understanding people that it was some years before Callum realised he knew little about himself. He had categorised himself in a hundred different ways and even fantasised about making his own badges to wear, to make himself easily readable to other people, if only they would adopt his system. He did not recognise that, though the precision would allow the circumnavigation of most of the waltz of awkwardness that was constantly being danced by people who did not use his system, the end result would be to circumnavigate so much of what makes us human as to render the system void. He had devoted so much time to understanding people, he had forgotten the importance of engaging with them. He did, of course, interact with them, but it had reached a point where the emphasis was far more on the "act" than the "inter". He played a role - a flawless performance every time, but it was just a means to an end, a method of obtaining the information he needed, and all consisting of behaviour observed in others and then mimicked.

Callum realised that, though he had all the data, ultimately he had no idea what its purpose was. He could read people well enough to be able to respond in a way that was pleasing to them, or at least inoffensive - his every action towards another human being carefully calculated to keep them interested and engaged, but with the sole purpose of collecting data so that he could improve the system. It occurred to him that the system was the means, but also the end - it was self-perpetuating. Essentially, he was collecting data to improve a system, which he then used to gather more data more accurately in order to refine and improve the system so that he could obtain more data, and so on.

This realisation insinuated its way into his psyche over several months, the change too small to perceive, so that gradually each interaction started to feel more and more frustrating, without him ever being able to pinpoint why. He became angry, but couldn't understand what was triggering the anger. His only real fulfilment had always been the data, and now that fulfilment was ebbing, and having never aspired or desired, beyond the data, Callum was at a loss to replace it. One morning he awoke before his alarm, and for the first time in years, he wept.

To begin with, it was a barely perceptible sob, and the feelings that went with it were so alien to him that at first he thought it must be a hiccup, or a twitch. Then it came again, and the feelings inside him intensified. Feelings he had observed in others for years, and analysed and catalogued and graphed and plotted, but never felt. He had no context, or frame of reference, for what he was feeling, only that it did not feel pleasant at all. The sob became a whimper, which in turn became a cry. Before more than a minute had passed from the initial feeling, Callum was foetal, on the floor, wailing and beating his chest as year upon year of repressed emotions and sadness all clamoured to be released. The desperation and despair was worse than anything he had ever felt - no physical pain could ever come close.

\* \* \*

Whether hours passed or days, Callum was uncertain. The realisation so overwhelmed his fastidiously organised brain, that sensory information reaching it was more or less ignored, as he struggled in vain to understand the magnitude of his error. Had he wasted everything in his search to understand? Could anything be salvaged from the car crash that his life so suddenly had become? Would he be able to learn, so late in life, to interact with people so effortlessly, as other humans seemed to? So accustomed was he to conversation being a tool for extracting information that he never dwelled on the possibility of there being any other motivation - at least for him. He understood that conversation was important for forming bonds, but he had only ever really considered the means, not the end; The only bond he had forged was with his data.

By the time Callum was able once again to stand up, to observe his environment, he felt sure that so much time had passed there would be no one left who remembered him anyway, so he was surprised upon switching on the TV to find that it had been only a few hours since the revelation. The TV was a long-standing source of confusion for Callum - he had bought it some years ago when he realised that much of peoples' conversations revolved around things that were either specifically made for TV, or reported on by one of the many news programmes. He had felt he was missing out on vital information by having no frame of reference when people inevitably turned their attention to the ersatz-firegazing they would indulge for hours at a time.

It was confusing to him for a number of reasons - having only ever been interested in the way people express certain things, and what that in turn means about that individual - he had failed to notice the importance of simply being entertained. Oftentimes he would overhear snippets of conversation which he took to be gossip, but would realise after a few exchanges that rather than sharing information about a mutual acquaintance, the participants were in fact discussing something they had both independently learned from watching TV. Partly to allow him to understand the references and relevance to an individual, and partly to enable him to contribute to such conversations, Callum bought himself a TV. It was an old cathode-ray behemoth from the 80s, now long since shunned by society in favour of flat screen plasma, but as Callum was interested in the content, rather than the quality of the picture, he was oblivious to benefits of a clear screen and high definition, so it was no hardship for him to tolerate its gargantuan bulk in the corner of his modest living room, so long as it was a useful tool in his quest to understand people.

Having always spent his leisure time either talking with people, or writing up salient bits of information gleaned from them, Callum had never really, even as a child, paid much attention to television, and so at first he found it very disorientating. He was regularly and consistently confused by the distinction between drama and reality shows: because he had always sought out people to converse with, to study, he had never bothered with media as a distraction, and so assumed that everything on TV was intended to be factual. Though he would never have recognised it to be the case, Callum could spot a bad actor within seconds of their first words. so used was he to observing body language and its use in reference to speech, that the incongruity of the words being said, and the body language which accompanied them, confused him immensely. Where others would simply identify it as bad acting, Callum would struggle to reconcile why the body language and spoken word were so at odds - it was a good few months after starting his exploration of television that he finally grasped the notion that much of the content was intended solely as entertainment, though this itself was to be the cause of further consternation as there seemed to be little distinction between reality and fiction, and the purposes of each.

Seeing the TV now, was as though seeing in colour for the first time. Suddenly the people he saw weren't just dumb animals, driven by instinctive impulses to do one thing or another - they were self-aware and contemplative, and rational: each doing what they did for their own, carefully considered reasons. He could categorise them all in an instant - all their behaviours recognisable as things he had analysed and studied and pondered - but the realisation was dawning for Callum that simply understanding the concept that how a person acts, or reacts, is based on a number of stimuli, does not give any real insight into their motivation. He knew the how, but not the why. And now, for the first time - realising he needed purpose - the why had become all that mattered. There may be a way to use the data he had collected, looked at in the context of this new epiphany, but it would mean going through vast swathes of information and re-analysing and re-concluding. It would be like looking for a needle in haystack, but without actually knowing what a needle looks like. Just the thought of going over the data again made Callum feel physically sick, as he realised that every morsel of information would serve as a reminder that he had wasted so much time, and life, on an ultimately pointless search. He eventually had to acknowledge that catalogues of information were all but rendered moot by their lack of any kind of conclusion of motivation. Having always been most content in his own company, safely analysing the traits and peccadilloes of his subjects, Callum suddenly felt very alone, and foolish. He felt his eyes once again fill with tears, and as though knocked by a great weight, he once again fell to the floor and sobbed.

\*    \*    \*

## III Reflections (Toby)

The reflection that looks back at Toby from the window of the parked car is unfamiliar. the stranger's hair is short, and the suit seems incongruous next to the worn and ruddy face that, though scrubbed to gleaming, still bears the telltale signs of a life spent far away from suits and cleanliness. He takes the opportunity to check that everything looks presentable, and worries for a moment at his collar. It feels restrictive and he is fighting for breath, but loosening it makes no difference - the breathlessness comes just from the panic of being in such an alien situation and has nothing to do with the clothes he is so unused to wearing, save the psychological baggage that goes with his acute awareness of how foreign they feel. Ruffling his hair, he concedes that no amount of straightening and grooming will make the frame suit the picture. Looking away from the window he feels immediately more at ease, as the image of the reflection fades and his mind  replaces it with the more comforting, bedraggled spectre that has for so long been the norm on the few occasions Toby has had reason to acknowledge his reflection at all.

The interview is a formality - the post would be suitable for no one else, yet the nagging doubts vie to negate this most fundamental of facts - doubts born of the paranoid feeling of being a fraud; of the baseless conviction that it is all an elaborate practical joke; or that the prospective employer will have reached the conclusion that the fact no one else could do the job, probably means that there is no need for the job to be done. As with any potential outcome, Toby extrapolates from each scenario, myriad possible outcomes, and the ramifications of each, so that he is soon lost in a reverie of possibilities, mapping themselves out like the branches of a tree, desperate in each scenario to reach the leaf that represents the ultimate, chaotic conclusion, and then tracing back to recognise which of the futures is most likely, which is most favourable, and ultimately concluding that even with this knowledge, Toby is no more equipped to influence the course of events than he was before. Returning to the present with this realisation makes him suddenly alert, and panicking more intensely as he struggles to comprehend whether the speculation has lasted seconds or hours.

Tiny metal fingers lay apparently motionless on a mother-of-pearl face. Purely their position, which gives the illusion of pointing to delicate, hand-carved roman numerals, releases a wave of calm over Toby, as though working some kind of inexplicable talismanic magic in which Toby has absolutely no belief. His ability to see things as they are, simultaneously blessing and curse, is the reason for his being sought out for this position.

\*   \*

## IV Callum (Present Tense)

Having got through his breakdown, Callum becomes a consultant. He determines that he will not have wasted his life, and that he will find a use for the data. We meet him some time later, when he has established himself in a unique profession. He ends up abut to interview an applicant for a new position.

## V Both (Present Tense)

"You come highly recommended".

"By whom?"

"Professor Wells".

"You know Henry?"

"Friend of a friend".

"You should maybe re-assess your friendship circle".

"Noted".

"I'd still be here though, even without the recommendation, wouldn't I?"

Callum looks at Toby, then at a picture on a wall, and then slowly lets out a breath, as he stands up. He walks to the window, and looks out at the cit, his back turned to Toby, as he composes his reply. Toby is uncertain whether this posturing is for dramatic effect, or simply to avoid eye contact.

"You would. Your experience appears to be unique. I need someone who understands the science behind the project I'm planning, but who also has, for want of a better term, street connections, and no love of the government".

"Damned ASA ruined me".

"Which also, I posit, gives you rather an excellent motivator to be involved in this project".

"So what actually is it? I got a message to dress up smart and come here for an interview, but that's all I know".

"I think it's only right, Professor Coxcomb, that you get the chance to put all your research to work. That it doesn't just go to waste. I have some experience in that field too".

"Eugenics?".

"No, my esteemed colleague, in the field of failure".