Chapter Text
First statement of J.Amherst to the Magnus Institute.
(Date smeared, possibly late 19th to early 20th, more likely 20th due to details.)
It seems like I’ve taken ill. I can’t keep anything I eat down, whenever I fall asleep it feels like my innards want to be my, ha, outards.
My wife has tried to call on doctors to come see me, or me to see them but I think we both know that is not how this works anymore. She sits there, in her chair, worried look on her face. It’s just the flu, I tell her. A flu that has plaguing my system for two years. [wheezing laugh] I did see some doctors in the beginning, you know. Nothing but a particularly aggressive flu, they said. Drink and sleep more, they said. Can’t be having that. Don’t trust doctors anymore. With their prodding and poking and tests and false sympathy.
There’s this deep bone gnawing feeling that I have somewhere to be. My wife won’t let me go. She says I’m too ill, too ravaged by sickness to leave. That I must stay here and get well. She’s kind, my wife.
I wish I could remember how I came to fall to this sickness, this miasmatic illness, but there can’t be a time before. I remember having colleagues, acquaintances, friends even. Where are they now? Why have they not come to see their poor friend John? My wife tells me they came calling for me but I told them in no uncertain terms to leave. Why would’ve I done that?
(Here there appears to be a section lost to extensive discolouration and mold.)
It’s odd. I can not remember a time before my illness. So much of my daily life has been warped and skewed from the perspective of my bed. The flies help me tell the time, actually. I’ve begun to notice a pattern in how they act as the day creep forward. One could almost say that I have formed a closer bond to them than to my wife, as my disease continues. She is kind, but it’s out of duty. When I look in her eyes as she enters and leaves my room, I can tell she’s begun to feel disgust as she sees me. And truth be told, I feel the same. There can be no more love between us anymore. She, as do I, wish that there could be an end to this. The flies crawl along the wall, and my eyes slowly follow them round and round. Perhaps I’ve always been sick? Maybe I came into this world a grown man, filled with mundane hopes and dreams just to have them shattered like a plate against the floor by some unseeing, uncaring god. They say on the radio that the war ended, but a modern plague claimed more lives than the trenches and gas and the shells. [Wheezing laugh] No matter who you are, you can’t outpace a plague.
Have you read “The Metamorphosis” by Kafka? You seem the sort to enjoy it. A man transformed into a beetle, spurned by his family who he supported. An apple get lodged in his body and an infection spreads. He dies alone in the attic after his entire family rejects him. I am not an insect. I will not die alone in the attic.