Wake Up Barton Fitch

1

Wake Up Barton Fitch

Beautiful people can get away with murder. Anything they do is appealing and sexy, even eating spaghetti like a starving street person with sauce on their chins is somehow attractive.
"We the jury find her guilty of killing her husband but must acquit her because she is just too beautiful to spend her life in prison. We must have missed something, no one this hot could be guilty of this heinous crime. Case dismissed."
That's how it goes.
Barton Fitch hadn't tasted spaghetti in one hundred and seventy-five years. The actual tasting of anything had left him decades ago, the prison food paste too quickly consumed had no taste, just the rancid molecules it absorbed from the stagnate air of his prison cell.
He heard them coming; ages had passed since the last time they had come for him.
He knew the sound, heavy footsteps, dragging of metal and in case he might have mistook the visit for an assisted walk in the guarded courtyard, there was that damned beeping sound, the electronic pulse of the prisoner transport machine. His dim, cataract eyes, watched the cell door open, gloved hands grabbed him under his frail arms and tossed his like a sack of dirt into the transport, his head the only part of his old body showing above the device. It spun him around and out into the blazing hallways lights. The beep droned on incessantly as the guards followed the machine carrying prisoner #4709.
America had long ago decided that genetically stable humans were, for a better word, desirable. While disease prone and inferior gene mapped subjects would be allowed to die a natural death, unhindered by the miracles of modern day gene therapy. There was one group of humans who, no matter what their gene map showed, would receive gene therapy to extend their cursed lives indefinitely.
Convicted criminals.
A triple life sentence could actually be fully carried out, the subject losing all attachment to reality, kept in cells, nothing more than a beating heart and mush for brains. The families of the victims could sleep well knowing that somewhere, their convict was getting their just reward, and they would live to see the convicted live out their punishment, even if it took three hundred years.
Barton Fitch, prisoner #4709 was one of the first condemned to this justice, and he certainly was not attractive. He sat staring out at a blank white hospital wall, his eyes slowly glanced to the left, a dusty dog-eared poster hung on the wall. A picture of a small puppy's head peering back over the shoulder of a tall young girl with perfect teeth smiling as she ran down the sidewalk in small town America, "Keep America Strong, Get Your Gene's Mapped Today!"
He couldn't remember ever being this afraid. What year was it? His thin wobbly knees twittered, his hands thrust between his bony thighs to keep them still. It didn't work. He looked up slowly, intelligent grey-green eyes flanked by deep set wrinkles and a bald halo of silver hair creeping over his long ears. His bottom lip quivered as a puddle of spittle gathered strength behind it, and deep inside, raiment's of teeth appeared dark and lonely.
The doctor slid a surprisingly warm gloved hand into his white hospital gown, pulled back the cloth and aimed a long hypodermic needle.
"Won't hunt much, at least that's what people tell me," the doctor said smiling forcefully.
Barton winched and gasp in the cold sterile hospital air into his aged lungs as the needle plunged into his body.
"There's a bit of go juice for ya!", the doctor said smiling.
Barton felt the injection immediately. This hands turned to sweat and his heart raced, followed by an instant fever causing his eyes to almost close as a colossal headache pressed him down to hell. He was too old to cry. The normal human response to every cell in his body receiving new instructions was beyond anything he had ever experienced at this level.
What new hell have they invented now?
His dirty fingernails gripped tightly into the cheap plastic he sat on and through the sun-blast coursing through his bloodstream he heard a deep metal groan in the room. Behind him the wall was moving.
"He's ready," the doctor said loudly.
As the wall separated, Barton Fitch dragged his trembling body around to face the now open wall, a large viewing window behind the wall caught the cold lights of the room. He wiped his feverish brow and shielded his eyes from the light. Through the glass he could see a very tall form standing in dim light.
"Bring him closer," a deep woman's voice echoed from beyond the glass.
A guard entered and grabbed the subject under his arm and dragged him to the viewing window. Barton raised his eyes from the floor and confronted his past. It was her.
A long arm draped in rich fabric and gold jewelry extended towards him, long fingers pressed a thin faded picture against the glass.
"Do you remember her, Barton?", the angelic woman asked coldly, slowing twisting the picture against the glass, dragging it down to his eye level. He closed his eyes. Inside his head lights were going off like fireworks. Each time he opened his eyes the room grew brighter, and everything appeared sharper, puncturing his dead mind. He was waking up.
"Yes," He stammered.
"Do you remember what you did to her?", her voice sliced into his head through eardrums freshly alive for the first time in decades. Her voice boomed, too loud to close off inside his head.
Barton Fitch fell to one knee, his right side crooked in the air by the guard attempting to hold him standing. His left arm dangling down, he swung at the glass, trying to push himself away from the encounter.
"Please, leave me be. Let me die."
"Oh, I don't think so Barton, in fact your starting to look your old self again. You fucking monster."
The guard pulled him up and jammed something hard against the small of his back. A jolt of electricity seized through his fail frame.
"You know I didn't kill her," Barton exhaled the tortuous words, tears falling on cold tile. He had nothing left for her to redeem.
The woman behind the glass dropped the picture.
In its place he saw a reflection of himself for the first time in fifty years, drawn and wrinkled grey skin cocooning an old man he did not know. In the moment he had to watch his reflection, he saw the miracle happen, the skin turning pinker, warmer, this eyes looking less hollow, he could now feel strength returning to useless muscles and his legs felt stronger. Indeed, he was changing and by the time he walked out the exam room, he had no need for the prisoner transport, his gate returning quickly and the physical mind of a younger man quickening. As his body raced backwards in time, the new feelings came, the wonder and joy that should be present, completely absent inside Barton Fitch, because as he was becoming whole again, returning to the age he had been when he came here, this horrible reality stole the promise new life from him.
         As he sat in is old cell, the stale air sang its familiar
song of death not far off, but it flowed gently into renewed
nostrils of a man barely twenty-five in appearance. Fresh tears
flowed down unwrinkled cheeks, and dark hair and whiskers began
growing slowly back where they used to be so many decades ago.