Three Moments of an Explosion Read Online Free PDF Page A

needle on a compass, her feet always facing him.
    He remained frozen, his wife’s feet a few inches from his own shoes. He was unwilling to move and thereby provoke that smooth and perfectly silent motion. That was how the paramedics found him, by his dead wife.
    At one point in the highly confused moments that followed, a medic demanded that Mr. Morris be careful not to tread on his wife’s hair. Which was, however, from Mr. Morris’s perspective, on the other side of her body from him.
    Thus the specificity of New Death began to emerge.
    After the Morris case was that of the Bucharest aneurysm, then the Toronto crosswalk, then the Hong Kong twins. New Death spread at accelerating rates. News coverage, which had started as sporadic, amused, and skeptical, grew rapidly more serious. Two weeks after Mrs. Morris New Died, the sinking of the overloaded ferry Carnivale sailing between the Eritrean coast and the Italian port of Lampedusa gave the world its first harrowing scene of mass New Death.
    Now, with the last verified Old Death having occurred six years ago, and the upgrading of all human death seemingly complete, we are inured enough to the scenes of countless New Dead left by drone strike, terrorist attack, landslide, and pandemic that it can be hard to recall the shock occasioned by that first spectacle.
    The shots of almost a hundred drowned migrants, dead despite their life belts, their bodies oddly stiff, their legs not slanting, their feet not sinking but visible at the surface of the water, are still iconic. It might be thought that, occurring on water, the apparent rotations of the New Dead would not appear quite so unnatural (old-natural, to use the now-preferred term) as the same phenomenon on land. This, however, was not the case.
    The quickly leaked footage showed the instant and exact swivels by which every drowned migrant’s feet always precisely faced every camera. These remained in perfect synchrony. All feet always faced all cameras no matter what abrupt and contingent motions the boats or helicopters made, or where they were when they made them. These movements were obviously not the results of currents, winds, or hidden engines.
    The feeds from the headcams of rescue divers were even more shocking. In it, the drowned dead without flotation devices all sink slowly, and every one of the bodies, at every level, is stiffly oriented perfectly horizontally, with its feet pointing toward every rising, panicking diver. This of course is the case even in the footage shot simultaneously from quite different directions, in which the same corpses can be identified.
    In the weeks that followed, more and more scenes of the smooth, precisely flat and silent rotation of the dead were released, the bodies horizontal on slopes of varying inclines, in a Baghdad plaza or on a Mexican hillside or the site of a Danish school shooting. It was, however, the Carnivale disaster that inaugurated the era of New Death.
    There is variation among New cadavers. Arms and legs may be splayed to various degrees, though the range is attenuated relative to that possible in Old Death. The bodies of victims of dismemberment or explosive force do not reconstitute, though their components, even if scattered, lie according to the condition of New Death—they are, in other words, New Dead in pieces.
    Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector—no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them—and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.
    Two facts about this epochal thanatological shift were quickly established:
    i) New Death is subjective .
All observers in the presence of New Dead, in person or via imaging technology, will perceive that body or those bodies as oriented with feet toward them. This remains the case when those observers are directly opposite each other. Perception and observation is constitutive of New