TheWalkinDude

I wrote this opening late last night, and it's going to be a long story. I just want to know if people think it has any potential, if it's worth carrying on?

Anslem: a Life

Thomas Anslem died before his last words had passed his lips to form a sentence of their own. He felt the breath freeze in his lungs. Everything was in motion, then everything was still.
Later he would describe his last memory as one of his wife reading by his bedside. His last moments were indistinct, light and dark, happy and sad.
Although he could never see it clearly in his mind this was the memory to which Thomas Anslem would return the most often. He would try to read the title of his wife’s book, try to see her face. Try to recall the thing he had started to say to her when everything faded and he was suddenly aware of something slipping away…
He thought me may have been asking her the title of her book.
He would remember the window in front of which sat his wife. The bare trees peeked in at him, morbidly curious. It was the winter of his thirtieth year and he had been dying since the spring.
While the memories were always unclear the process of actually dying was easy to recall. Everything just drained away. No light, no sound, no thought.
All that was left was a pitch darkness that would go on forever, pulsing a reeling but still unmoving, unchanging. An eternity in a single moment. Nothing existed outside of it. Thomas Anslem did not exist to hear his wife’s tears or the solemn step of the orderlies as they came to carry his body away.
The darkness went on and on, though he was not consciously aware of it. It was like a state of sleep in which the body followed the mind into unconsciousness.
The darkness lasted until he could feel a pain where he knew his head to be. He could not say how long it had been since his death that he could feel it, and he couldn’t entirely feel it in the conventional sense. It was more a state of detached awareness of something dull and insistent, hidden and menacing.
Some indeterminate time afterwards there was a stinging where he knew his eyes to be.
Then it stopped and he was in darkness again.
It went on this way for a period of time that Anslem was no longer able to calculate. The darkness, lasting for mere moments and a lifetime. Then the awareness of some ache or pain in the void where he had once felt his body.
If Anslem had been able to feel surprise by then he would have surprised himself by wondering how long this had been happening. How long had he been suspended in the emptiness, feeling and aware of nothing until the pain reared its distant head?
This was the first thought that Anslem could recall having formed. It felt strange to him; an entirely new state of awareness. He wasn’t yet used to conscious thought again.
On some level at some point he became aware that he was dead. This just made the dark seem all the more close around him.
In the moments of pain and thought that punctuated the darkness he felt completely alone and terrified. That he was dead was frightening enough. That he was forced into awareness of this fact was too much for him to bear. His periods of awareness became periods of a claustrophobic, crazed fear that would have paralysed him in life. He had never felt more trapped. That it was his own ability to think that trapped him just worsened the feeling to a state of near-lunacy. Slipping back into the lifeless void became a relief, a state of unfeeling, unknowing bliss. In death he felt safe and his half-waking moments were spent longing for it, thoughts clamped from his mind but still there, dormant and certain.
Sometimes he dreamed. These moments were the best; not having to stop himself from thinking but rather letting the thoughts find their own way out, slipping through the cracks of his long sleep.
He dreamed the most about a man pallid and withered in his deathbed. Sea tide lapped at the bottom of the bed, velvet. The man lay back against his pillow and waited for the waves to take him. Everywhere was golden; the sand drifted for moments then lay still again. Then all at once the man sat up and stared straight ahead. Some intangible smile played across his lips and he looked down at the form now sleeping beside him. The smile was tender and knowing. He put his hand to her hair and sat like that, the only sound the long slow tidesong. He pulled the sheets up across her form and pulled himself away from the bed and facing the vast sad ocean strode forward into it with limbs that felt like young trees.
The dream always ended as the waves at last crashed over the distant form of the man and pooled at the bottom of the bed, never rising up high enough to cover it. The form left lying in it slept on, rolling with the motion of the sea. It was always over too quickly, too quick to really see it.
When he dreamed Thomas Anslem was able to forget the nightmare in which he found himself the rest of the time, hollow throughout what could be months or years. Time played tricks on him, taunting him with its absence.
The pain in his head and eyes got worse, he thought at first, until he realised he was simply becoming more conscious of it. He also became aware of a ringing in his ears, crashes and booms like an underwater explosion miles distant. They made his whole mind reel and ache.
His first-remembered sense of true panic set in when the pain and sounds and thoughts didn’t dissolve into the darkness. He wasn’t yet fully conscious of the passage of time but he knew he had been aware for what seemed like hours. He felt as if he were sitting on some perverted death row. He tried with all his power to shut his mind off, to squeeze out the sensory and cognitive data pooling in his head, ready to drown him. Every time he tried the pain was more severe, the ringing louder, the great muffled booms closer. His thoughts became more pronounced and immediate.
By now Anslem thought he would have accepted the despair that came with his half-wakefulness, but this time it all came back to him. Before, there had always been the inevitable escape, the fading out of everything. This was a different kind of nightmare. This was something relentlessly cruel. Forced into complete awareness of his existence, he wanted to cry out in rage. Screwing up all the fear and hopelessness of what he would later know to be a period of almost seven years, Thomas Anslem opened his mouth and screamed.
The noise was as tremendous as it was surprising, tearing shreds from a throat he had forgotten he had. Everything started to snap into clarity, sounds distinct and somehow familiar, glorious streams of sensory data flooded his brain as he felt coldness prick his body, felt his hairs standing on end, heard crashes and beeps and screaming and somewhere far away but coming closer and closer, voices.
Running. People were running towards him. A sound he recognised felt completely new. He wanted to laugh and suddenly he was laughing, tears welling up behind eyelids gummed shut.
Moving. He was moving. He could feel every inch of air shifting around him as he was pushed along on what he knew must be another hospital bed. Another hospital? Or still here?
Still sick?
The thought made his throat clench shut tightly. His memories of panic were pulled forward into immediacy. He was still sick in his bed. He had slipped into a coma that he was only now emerging from. He was aware that at some point he had stopped laughing.
He had stopped moving too, the air sat still around him. His chest was on fire. A voice somewhere came into focus, more distinct than the others. What was it saying? Breathe. He had to breathe, that was it.
More pressure on his chest, hands heavy and pushing down hard. Lips cracked painfully apart and hot sudden air was forced through his tattered throat into lungs that wanted to burst apart.
The voice and hands and air sank back into obscurity and Anslem was left choking sharp strands of air into and out of his aching chest.
Another voice now, somewhere close. Leaning over him. Warmth over his eyes, seeping down through the lids. Foam spreading out from inside, eating though whatever was holding his eyes shut.
They felt like glass and he wanted to skim his lids across their surface. He wanted the darkness to be gone.
Something terrible clawed into his head. Light brighter than he could ever have conceived of dug down through his eyes to screech and hammer around his brain.
When Anslem finally passed out, the darkness crept back in like an old friend.

To put in into context, it's about experiments to prolong life and reanimate the dead. Our hero is the as-yet-unknowing guinea pig in the experiment. I was aiming for straight, serious sci fi, so Anslem isn't going to become a zombie and go on a vengeful killing spree, as fun as that would be to write. It's going to be about how Anslem deals with having his life prolonged with more and more success to the point where he can't die. While all around him he watches the people he loved grow old and die, he keeps dying and being brought back for longer periods of time until he's as good as immortal and completely alone in a strange new world decades later.