Tony Fisher

Tony Fisher opened the letter and stared blankly at his medical diagnosis. He had drawn the short straw. He was the 1% that made the other 99% rejoice. He was going to die, whilst they would recover and live.

His condition was new to medical science. No one ever suffered from it in the ‘old days’. No one knew where it came from or how to cure it, it had just popped up. It was out there all on it’s own, and had taken Tony with it. Put bluntly, he was fading away. His cellular structure was, for some reason, being slowly leached of matter. The press had called his illness the ‘invisible illness’. It was a pun, the cause of the illness was invisible, and the illness made you invisible before it killed you. You literally wasted away to nothing.

The medical establishment were very excited about it. He would be paid vast amounts if he allowed himself to be experimented on. The best minds and the most expensive procedures would be arrayed against science’s lack of understanding of this strange disease, they all wanted to know what it would do to him before he died. Medical science was thrusting itself through the unknown, reaching into the darkness, rising on a tide of enquiry, only to lap at his feet. Is it any wonder then, that Tony Fisher was feeling a little under the weather?

He took their money and didn’t turn up for the tests. Instead he took himself off on a journey of discovery. He stood in the airport looking at the departures board as it scrolled down through the flights. Where do you go to find the meaning of life he thought? He had already consoled himself with the idea that life wasn’t just about growing old. In the greater scheme of things there was no difference between dying at 70 and dying at 30, neither did there seem to be any sense in dying when you were loved or dying alone, true, he would rather be loved but it didn’t make dying better, if anything it made it worse.

He went to the Philippines and went on a bender. He got stoned, shagged and hopelessly drunk. But it wasn’t long before the effects of the disease started to kick in. The sex was feeling less and less real, he ceased to be able to reach the sense of fulfilment he was hoping for. The drink stopped making him merry and the drugs didn’t work. This was what the doctors had predicted. Slowly it would get worse, soon the food he put in his mouth would no longer fill him; his friendships wouldn’t sustain him; nothing he looked at would strike him as beautiful; soon nothing that he could do, think or have done to him would be able to reach him. He would slowly become less and less real until he drifted off into nothingness.

So he found himself in the early hours watching the tide coming in. He ran the sand through his fingers, watched it fall and mound on his palms before sliding away between the cells, but he couldn’t feel it, they might as well have been someone else’s hands. Strange, he could still feel pain, but everything else was gone. He decided to go home.
He rang the bell and waited as he heard his mothers footsteps padding down the stairs. She flustered as she opened the door but at the sight of Tony a startling smile lifted her face. “Tony” she cried and went to embrace him but there was nothing to hold. Her arms slowly slipped through him and wrapped themselves round each other. She invited him in but it was the same when they talked, their words never quite met. He said he loved her but she didn’t seem to hear. She said she loved him but he knew that she didn’t. In they end they talked about the price of petrol whilst both knowing he was dying.

After that he decided to go back to the doctors, of course there was nothing they could do, they ran multiple tests but the truth was he no longer existed, it seemed that the only part of him left was his own belief in his own existence. Technically his heart had stopped beating and his brain no longer functioned, he was declared dead, but without a body it was difficult for anyone to mourn.

His parents decided to have a funeral anyway. They chose a coffin, placed flowers on it, and invited all those he had known. Tony stood around and listened. People who had passed through his life told each other things that they had never told him. They remembered stories about him and laughed. His father wept, for his “beautiful son” before inconsolable, he had to sit down. Old friends retraced his life through their experiences of him and for the first time it seemed to Tony as if they really must have loved him. People he had hurt still remembered him fondly, and Tony, who didn’t exist, wept too, he wasn’t sure if he was crying for them or for himself or for never realising how much he was loved. Later, as they lowered the empty coffin into the ground, Tony was overcome with a strange sensation, he knew he wasn’t dead, he was at his own funeral and yet he was alive. He watched them shovelling the earth over his coffin and realised that it felt good, startled, he checked himself. He was feeling good. He hadn’t felt good for years, that was one of the things the illness took away. He ran to the graveside to help shovel the soil in, but nothing happened, so instead he danced like a mad man, jumping and singing as the soil piled higher and higher on the grave of Tony Fisher.

Tony Fisher was never the same after that. For all the changes that had happened from the outside, that was the first time that something had happened right at his core. It was, for want of a better word, a spiritual experience. Tony had seen the face of God and nothing would ever be the same again. That was the point at which Tony started to recover. It took many years and wasn’t an easy journey – it’s hard to know when you’re really real. But seven years later he became a dad, which was a pretty good sign.
His recovery did cause all sorts of legal problems. He had taken the medical establishment’s money, but now he wasn’t dead they wanted their money back. Obviously, this cast grave doubts on their competency as it was they who had said he was dead. And besides, once you were dead there were serious doubts whether you could, from a legal point of view, be alive again. Tony gave them the money; he had better things to do with his life.