Anaphylaxis
Dar'st thou die?
The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
William Shakespeare, Measure For Measure, Act III, scene i
The death of Dr. Martin Perry, Ph.D., was remarked upon, and mourned, in many quarters: in the press, the university he worked for - Florida, in Gainesville - his community, and in a limited capacity whatever family he still had. He was a botanist by trade, profession, and passion, but he had worked for NASA as well as teaching at UF. Wherever he had been he was remembered as a kind and forthright man who made valuable contributions to his field - carnivorous plants, a bit of theorizing about xenobotany for NASA - who had clashed with his colleague Dr. Drake Le Carde and his controversial attempts to revive prehistoric insects, and saved the career of Dr. Irving Collins, the former Chief of Flight Control who had taken so much public blame for the death of Tom Ryan, the beloved astronaut...poor man, his hands always shook, never recovering from what he consider his life's greatest failure.
Dr. Perry was, in other words, a highly memorable, highly visible member of the University of Florida family. Which, of course, makes the particulars of his death so strange.
Martin Perry died in the early morning hours of 28 th, February, 2010. For some time he had been working on a new project which he disclosed very minimal details about - a new plant with fascinating qualities that grew in treacherous reaches of Baltistan, a very isolated part of Pakistan, which he had apparently read about in some esoteric material that had been deposited near to a hundred years earlier at the UF library. He took some administrative leave and spent two weeks travelling, and staying, in the Pakistani city of Gilgit, at the beginning of 2010.
What the plant was has yet to be determined or investigated seriously - perhaps what later happened to Dr. Perry, the symptoms he clearly experienced, has scared off anyone who wanted to follow him back to the Indian folklore that brought him so much bad luck.
Certainly there are references to a terrible nectar that would "grant strange and marvelous new life" in the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, which make reference to "une herbe aux le Plateau de Leng," where Leng has problematically been understood to mean a vast area encompassing Tibet, far western China, and the Kashmir.
Being the materialist that he was, Perry may have sought to debunk any mystical properties of the plant and explain whatever was "strange and marvelous" in purely naturalistic terms...but how he triangulated where to go, where and how to look for it, instructions on growing it - all are awash in mystery.
Every witness agrees that the plant was a kind of grass that he grew on a plot in his backyard outside of his greenhouse, which contained an overabundance of unusual carotenoids which gave the individual blades a striking, bright scarlet color - very much like blood. How he got it through customs is not known: one theory by law enforcement - what little information they are willing to give - was that he bribed the relevant officials, while others presuppose the grass looked totally harmless until he planted it, where it acquired its morbid and unwholesome color.
When he came back stateside with the plant that he had acquired, the last week of January, Dr. Perry informed nobody of where he had been or what he had been doing. Where he was in Gilgit are not well-remembered by locals there, and his passport stamps show nothing unusual - Orlando, Dubai, Karachi, and returning the same way. But immediately his inner circle knew something was wrong: many remarked that he was not even the same man - he seemed furtive, curt, short-tempered.
His neighbors - whose eyewitness accounts are at this point invaluable for a narrative of what happened - soon noticed that Dr. Perry had seemed to have picked up some nameless ailment while travelling. He looked and acted very unhealthy: he looked really sick some mornings, like he'd been throwing up a lot, pale, listless, and withdrawn. But as the days went by he looked, and acted, sicker and sicker: he cancelled a spate of classes, citing - appropriately - illness.
Thereafter he was very rarely seen, mostly staying indoors, except for in the morning when he would come out and look over that red grass, like a farmer looking over his prize crop. He'd step in it, one more than one eyewitness said, as though to test it, and when he did, the grass would spurt red sap that looked just like blood.
The whole time, he would walk with kind of shaky gait that got more and more unsteady every day, so that near to the time he died he looked from a distance like a lame old man. He had developed a cough that sounded dry and asthmatic, in between muttering to himself, and wheezing like he was always out of breath - those that could hear it were sure whatever language he was speaking wasn't English.
The way he dressed now was even more off-putting: he had taken to wearing a large, black overcoat, and only this particular overcoat - no shoes, only a black overcoat to cover his entire body. His skin got paler and sicklier as time went on. In the last few days, he looked prematurely aged, fully thirty years older.
But by far the worst part - for his neighbors, anyhow - was how violently ill and sickly Perry seemed in his final days...the veins on his face stood out, bulging, pale blue and red.
At this point he was noted as never having gone to his greenhouse anymore, which he used to do at least once a day either before or after he went to work at the University. In fact, the door to his greenhouse - the place where he kept all his rare plants and so on - was never seen to have been opened once. Things only got stranger from there: for the duration of this disturbing, enigmatic period, there was a faint odor always coming faintly from his house, which would become strong to the point of being unbearable when Dr. Perry would come outside.
What exactly the smell was like is a matter of some dispute - all agreed it would hang in the air and be dispersed with the breeze, and all agreed it was highly disagreeable. One neighbor described it as: "What you would expect a bouquet of dead flowers to smell like. After only a few minutes I would start to feel nauseous after smelling it for too long."
So this went on for some weeks - the neighbors watching Dr. Perry, mute, wearing that black overcoat that eventually looked disgusting from never getting cleaned, shambling around, coughing softly and mumbling to himself with the veins bulging, pulsing, in his head. It didn't take long for some talk in the neighborhood to coalesce about calling the authorities, and a community action group was formed, because tenured professor or not, Dr. Perry's behavior, sickness, and smelly house were all clear and dangerous nuisances.
But that very week came the climax to the horror - and the end of Dr. Perry.
Every night, without fail, the most terrible noises came from Dr. Perry's house, always well after midnight: moaning and groaning and, sometimes, the sound of someone throwing up. Some nights there was a pounding noise, like he was hitting the wall with his fist. Neighbors looking out the window swore that the patch of red grass seemed to glisten eerily in the moonlight, as though reflecting it back up to the sky.
Finally the neighborhood had enough - the police were called at last.
It was fortuitous that they were. For when the policemen arrived and entered the house, the entire cul-de-sac and many from the down the street gathered to see what had happened, they found it full of broken mirrors - not one mirror had been left unshattered - and dead man in an advanced and nauseating state of putrefaction and decay. They carried the body out with the help of a called hazmat team...where it was never seen again.
This may or may not be connected with calls of alarm that the house had been contaminated with something - what the something was, never discussed publicly, but inferred to be one of Perry's experiments gone horribly wrong - certainly there were a swarm of agents from the EPA and, not a few hours later, the FBI. Whatever they found has not - nor, probably ever will be - made public.
There was no body at the funeral, it was discovered a week after his death, for Martin Perry had been cremated. This was full in the face of his own, stated desire to be buried with an orange tree sapling so that his body could nourish something beautiful and bountiful - very poetic, very rather like him in life - so to cremate him instead was a gauche slap to the man's reputation. Why was it done?
Even if whatever had killed him badly disfigured his body, they could have still had a closed-coffin funeral...yet they did not. They cremated whatever it was they found in his house, promptly, and though the ashes were supposed to be scattered somewhere special to him, nobody remembers it happening - because it probably never did.
It was somewhat ironic that they cremated his body: not twenty-four hours after Dr. Perry was found dead, his house caught fire, burning the whole thing right to the ground, literally nothing left, not even the yard or the greenhouse - the whole property, not only the backyard but the front as well. It left behind a true eyesore: a charred crater, even a month after.
There were repeated and harassing interviews from law enforcement - federal agencies - of Dr. Perry's neighbors, colleagues, and family, trying to determine who, if anyone, would a vested self-interest in the deliberate arson and destruction of his house and his work. The fire marshal was, in the meantime, never able to determine a cause for the fire - eventually the property was paved over and turned into a small, but convenient, access road for golf carts getting to the fairway on which the house sat. A row of palmettos was planted on either side. It was as though the house never existed - and perhaps, after all, it need not to have.
The memory of what went on that strange late winter in 2010 is still fresh - the neighborhood, a gated community in suburban Gainesville, saw its property values plummet, and many who were present for the decline and death of Dr. Perry moved away, leaving houses vacant in a down market for almost two years. For months afterward neighborhood children frightened each other with tales of a boogeyman that shambled about the bushes, a plant-monster that used to be a man - they were hushed up quickly by their parents, who exchanged nervous, knowing glances.
The official report said that death came from exposure to a particularly poisonous plant, species uncertain - but whatever killed Martin Perry cannot and, probably, should not be known with certainty. His research, whatever it was, was clearly misunderstood, and his appearance was clearly from an allergic reaction that he was fighting in his effort and commitment to the scientific community. The man's final days - the strange illness and off-putting behavior, the red grass that looked like it was spurting blood - are taken from several eyewitness accounts, all of which, to a one, are forcibly ignored and refuted by the University of Florida. Police records are sealed and are unlikely to ever be unsealed, hospital files are very hard to request and be seen by the average person. It is the word of powerful organizations against a handful of rattled rich people who would just as soon the entire thing never be spoken of again.
And so, maybe, it never will be.
It is easy enough to portray someone as a harmless botanist and devoted scientist, far easier than it is to tell the truth, that he lived his final days - and, maybe, lives still yet - as a deformed, hideous, sickly monster wishing for a death that will never come.