Alexander Is Awake

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a room of people, heard from underwater — too far away)
Babylon. Three twenty-three BCE. He is thirty-two. He is dying for twelve days.

[Verse 1]
The accounts agree on the strange part, which is why it survived:
that the body did not decay. Six days, they say, after death,
in Babylon, in June, and there was no corruption in it,
which the ancient world read as proof of the divine —
he is not rotting because he was never merely a man —
and which some modern physicians read very differently indeed.

[Chorus]
Guillain-Barré. Ascending paralysis. It starts in the feet.
It climbs. It takes the legs, the trunk, the arms, the breath —
and it does not take the MIND. That's the whole horror of it.
You are inside, awake, hearing everything, unable to signal.
Alexander is awake. They are deciding what to do with him.
He is in the room while they discuss the body.

[Verse 2]
His generals filed past the bed to see if he still lived.
The soldiers were let in, one at a time, to say goodbye,
and the sources say his eyes moved, and that he could not speak,
and the physicians pronounced him dead when the breathing went shallow
enough to be missed, which with this illness it would be,
and the not-decaying was not a miracle. He wasn't dead yet.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
It is a hypothesis. I want to be careful and say that plainly.
It was published in a medical journal in nineteen ninety-eight
and it is contested and it cannot ever now be proven,
and it may simply be that the ancient sources exaggerated.
But if it's right, then the most documented death in antiquity
happened to somebody who was listening to it being reported.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the voices, receding)
Six days.
Six days of hearing them get it wrong.