Body Destiny
Douglas C. Smyth
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©2002
Prologue
Masked face stares into mine. Surgical mask. A blue-white light shines through my eyelids. The sun, shining, warms my upturned face. Marilyn’s wheeled me…to the pond? It’s been a hard week. Jenner acting the fool once again. Euros, Yen, Bolivars, Pesos, numbers, numbers bleeding down the screen—David saying, “you did it again, Werner!” His face is a younger copy of mine, alight with triumph, the blur of the long window behind him.
Surgical mask, blue-white light, operating room blues, I hate those… “Keep all life supports going on both of them, even when I do the transfer to her…plasma bath…” his voice is familiar. “…scalpel.. He’s all clamped down? No, no, no need for scalp sutures, not on him…yes, yes, for her, of course…”
Operating room?
“Kidneys, liver, heart, they all just give up, finally, Mr. Akstrom, after a certain age.”
That same voice.
Certain age, certain age. “…Don’t look your age…” “…amazingly youthful for your age, Mr. Akstrom…” Different voices.
“Too old, Mr. Akstrom, for an ordinary operation…” the doctor’s voice. Then, more insinuating, “but…one chance in a million….”
I like high odds.
The blue-white light. Awful light to die under…
The top of my head? Are they lifting it off?
Lights in darkness like swirling curtains fly past me, folds enveloping me, enfolding me, weighing me down, down, never been so deep, scrabble for footholds, handholds, only smooth walls, rushing air, I’m falling, flailing, the stain of my consciousness smearing on blank glass walls, down, down…did somebody scream? Echoes rise from a dark place. Then all is quiet.
Chapter One
How long have I been lying here with my eyes open, looking out of this sunny window? Days? Weeks? I am Werner Akstrom, and someone should attend me! Why is no one looking after me?
Something tore at the corner of my vision, a robin, hopping from branch to branch near the top of a large maple. The tree stood across the broad lawn, down by the water sparkling in the sun. I could make out the brown in the water and the buildings on the other side. The East River?
Wait a minute. Something was wrong. I could see the robin’s red breast, I could distinguish the individual leaves, the bricks of the buildings on Welfare Island weren’t even blurry—did they call it Welfare Island anymore? Was I wearing glasses?
I reached for my nose, but nothing happened. I had arms, I could feel them, but something was holding them down. I didn’t have glasses on, I was sure, because I felt no weight on the bridge of my nose. They had been so thick, so heavy. Had someone operated on my eyes?
“Hey!”
That was my mouth opening, and I could feel my voice in my chest and throat, but it certainly didn’t sound like me. It sounded like a…a…a young woman!
“Anybody here?”
Again the strange sounding voice, but issuing from my mouth. High and young. Female.
I tried to lift my head, but it wouldn’t move. Tried my arms again. Was I clamped down? Why would they clamp down my arms for an eye operation?
I could hear footsteps, and now I could see, sweeping my eyes from side to side: the room had old-fashioned wallpaper, with geese figures flying up towards the ceiling; the same wallpaper is in my bedroom at the farm. But this wasn’t the farm. My bedroom at the farm looked out on woods, not the East River. Thoughtful of them, though.
A nurse in white uniform hove into view, almost the way sailing ships used to appear over the horizon, white sail first. Pretty. I remembered her, could almost remember her name. She was young, not much over forty.
She peered down at me. “I heard you calling, but I just couldn’t believe it at first!” She was breathless. “You’ve looked awake for weeks now, and never a peep. All the stats looked fine, but…” she paused and scrutinized me. “It was you, wasn’t it? You called out?”
“Y-y-yes.” I was reluctant to speak again, tried to pitch the strange voice lower, but still it came out sounding high and young. “Can you undo my arms? I’m clamped down, right?” Every word coming out of my mouth was a word I meant to say, but it wasn’t my voice. I sounded like a young girl speaking! Was I going crazy?
“This’s wonderful! I, I’ll have to tell the doctor,” was all she said, as she bent to touch something by the side of the bed. I could feel the clamps release. “Go ahead. Move a little. But be careful. We’ll get the physical therapist in here, but it may take an hour to get a hold of her, okay?” She straightened up. “Only thing you can’t move now is your head and neck. Gotta keep those immobile until the doc says. Post-op checked all your limb movements, but we had no way of seeing if you could control them yourself—you didn’t seem to be here, if you know what I mean.” She looked up at me, and then beyond my left shoulder. She was reading instruments.
“How am I? What’s happening?” I couldn’t believe my voice. Maybe they’d pumped helium into the room. Helium made your voice sound high, but I would have been squeaking like the cartoon mouse, not chirping like a young girl. Something else was strange. I could hear every movement, the plastic cloth of her short skirt rubbing against the plastic knit of her stockings. I remembered, as if this were ancient history, that I liked nurses dressed like this. I’d always demanded that nurses around me be dressed in short skirts. I’d given the hospital enough money, hadn’t I? But how could I hear her moving, hear the fabric rubbing? Even with two hearing aids, I hadn’t heard this well in thirty or forty years.
She looked at me strangely, and then smiled. “As I said before, your numbers were fine before, and they’re fine now.” Her voice sounded normal for a woman, so they couldn’t have pumped the room full of helium, and I didn’t have a gas mask.
I moved my arm, glanced at it, then stared. A young girl’s arm. I moved my arm; it moved. This was my arm? It did not hang slack and stringy, it was not sprinkled with coarse white hair.
I held up my hand. It wasn’t my hand, either. After a hundred years of living with it, I should have known what my hand looked like. Were they playing some trick on me? My hand should have been liver spotted, with fingers growing crooked, misshapen with age, and the back of my hand should have been lined with hair down to the first knuckles. This hand was small, with fine long fingers, a beautiful hand, and sheathed in smooth light brown skin. I could discern just the lightest of fuzz. There weren’t even any wrinkles, and the nails were well cared for. It reminded me of Clara’s hands when I first wooed her. That must have been almost eighty years ago. Clara’s hands were white and pink. This hand I was looking at was a young woman’s hand. How could it be mine?
“Excuse me, Miss…”
The nurse turned around. “I was just going to get my Skinscan to double-check some things. Be right back.” She nodded at me, her mouth in a faint smile, and it gave me a funny feeling, as if it weren’t me she was smiling at, and it wasn’t me, Werner Akstrom, who was looking at her.
What was it that didn’t feel right? It wasn’t just that I could see every wrinkle around her eyes and mouth, hear every movement she made, and smell her scent as if she were lying next to me. None of my senses had been this acute for years. It made me remember clear cool mornings when I’d go down to Wall and Broad before anyone else arrived, have the whole street to myself. That was when I was building up Xanadu into what it is today.
But that wasn’t the point, now, was it. My eyes grazed her receding behind, but there was something missing, as if I had to remind myself: I’m looking at a woman’s ass; I like looking at women. It felt a little like one of those times when you’ve forgotten how to spell a word that’s staring right at you on the page, and you stare back at it so long that it loses its meaning, and looks all wrong, even when it’s right.
I would have shaken my head if I could, but it was clamped tight.
The nurse returned with her Skin-scan, held it up to my face, saying, “this even runs a brain scan, but the results are a little uncertain when it has to go through a Scalprite bandage like yours.”
Bandage? I reached up to my head. My fingers slid over metal straps—the clamps—and then touched the head. I could feel myself touching myself, so it must have been my head, but it was too small, and the wrong shape. The bristles of close-cropped hair arrested my fingers, and then I touched the helmet-like bandage. It felt like some space-age material, light and strong.
“Now, Ms. Akstrom, this is going to prick—“
“Ms?” I glared at her. She was holding up a needlegun.
She shrugged. “I know, I know.” Her eyes were tired. “I’m supposed to say Miss or Missus. House rules, but…” she shrugged again and put the needlegun to my arm.
“Mister Werner Akstrom to you, Miss! I’ll, I’ll have your name!” This sounded extremely strange, echoing round the room in the girl’s voice. In my mind, I had thundered them out in the famous Werner rumble.
“Oh, brother!” she mumbled. “I’ll be right back.” She strode out of the room, slipping the needlegun onto a nearby biohazard tray.
I made myself watch her hips undulate out the door. It felt like an exercise that someone had assigned me, someone far removed from me. Was I finally too old to look at a woman?
I eyed her again when she returned. This was terrible! What would the famous Werner Akstrom be if he didn’t letch after women even in extreme old age? She had a generous bust, and I tried to imagine fondling one of her breasts. Freed from its constricting harness it would be soft and plump, a warm weight in my hand. Again, there was some strange disjunction, as if I were looking at someone without any sex. But I remembered her, remembered thinking she was sexy!
She was carrying a mirror, and I wondered what it was for.
She smiled at me, put the mirror down on the table over my bed saying, “After all the time you’ve been unconscious, it’s certainly understandable that you’re a bit confused. I’m going to have to get your doctor right away, now that I’ve confirmed that your numbers are stable. As for the name on your chart…” she smiled a superior smile, the kind I always hated in a woman. She leaned over, did something to the mirror, smiled at me again and turned to leave the room. “I’m going to get Doctor Cortez. He’s the one on duty right now—most of the time, actually. Doctor Champagne usually doesn’t make it until late at night.”
Doctor Champagne was my doctor, my surgeon, although I’d met Cortez, his assistant, before. What had she been smirking about?
My eye raked across the mirror, now angled towards me and my scan stopped with a jerk. I couldn’t help seeing the face that was looking at me from the glass. It was a young woman’s face. I had never seen her before.
I frowned at it, and the face frowned back. Dark eyes with long dark lashes, finely articulated black eyebrows, high forehead, and a delicate nose. Not just pretty. If I had seen this face glancing up at me in a restaurant or an office cubicle, I would have said, “Wow, a stunner, a real looker!” Even with her hair shaved off. Her skin was dark, and she looked southern European, young, 80 years shy of my age, certainly, not Nordic at all—all of us Akstroms looked as if we’d just come off the boat from Norway—and certainly not male. The thick fringe of short hair outside the bandage looked black, although it was almost too short to tell for sure. My hair, what little there was of it, had been lank and white.
“How could this be me?” I asked the face in the mirror. The lips in the mirror face asked simultaneously. I stared. She stared back.
“Nurse! Stop it! This is some elaborate joke, and I’ll not put up with it any longer!” Amazing what you could do with a computer—a simulation, I assumed.
Of course, there was no one there, although I could hear people down the hallway. I grimaced and the face in the mirror did also, but it looked as if it was unused to anything that indelicate.
I touched one of the cheeks I saw in the mirror, felt my fingers touch me, saw them touch the face in the mirror. The cheek was extraordinarily smooth, as if it had never been shaved in its life. Still watching myself in the mirror, I touched the little nose, the full lips. Yes, I could feel the fingers touching me as the fingers in the mirror touched the mirror image.
But how? I, Werner Akstrom, a young woman? I buried my wife, Clara, twenty years ago after sixty years of marriage. Then I had mistresses galore, although none as young as this face looked. I fathered two children—at least two—and they were old now themselves. I could see them when I thought of them, Belinda and Charles sitting, staring at me—was it when I first went into the hospital?
Not this hospital. From the feel of it, this place was a doctor’s private clinic. Going into the hospital felt like yesterday, but maybe it was weeks, or even months ago.
The scene came back to me as if it were happening at that moment: Belinda looked down at me on the hospital bed, her claw-like fingers extending like a cat’s claws, ready to rake and sink into its prey. Her eyes were hungry, and her teeth glinted. Charles was squinting at me speculatively. I had known what they were thinking, could see it in their hopeful, greedy faces. It wasn’t what they said, of course, but I knew: they thought I was too old, that I was going soon, checking out, and then, finally, they’d get their grubby little fingers on Xanadu.
Had I tricked them again? I wasn’t dying now. I felt better than I had in years, but, well, not exactly like myself, either. I looked at the mirror again. How would anyone know I was Werner? If they got control…Belinda’s husband, Jenner, made a mess of everything he touched. Belinda and Charles had never even bothered to come into the office. I had never trusted any of them with my method, my formula. Well, not even Jenner would have understood it. None of them, not one of them seemed capable of understanding why currencies fluctuated against each other, or how Xanadu made millions from my predictions.
Had I turned the firm over to David? My favorite grandson. He at least had a flair for currency trading, but the last I remember Jenner was being stupid, buying short against a falling Euro. I’d railed at him, of course. We had been on the way to losing millions.
But if I had this face…I reached under the covers, explored the throat, the smooth, taut skin, where it had been all loose and wrinkled. My hand slid lower. A breast! By forcing my eyes as low as they would go, I had just a glimpse of the rest of me beneath the covers. Twin peaks rising. I couldn’t believe this! I could feel my hand touching the breast, and could feel the fingers touching me where the breast would be.
This was a strange dream. The way out of a dream would be to pinch…I pinched the nipple.
“Ow!”
This was me. My fingers felt further, but it wasn’t at all like feeling up one of my women, feeling up Marilyn. I could feel myself touching myself, breasts, my breasts, being probed by my own fingers. They felt smooth and firm and had pointed nipples. One nipple was sore, but it stood up bravely, even so.
I was a young woman? Did I reincarnate into the body of a young woman? Not that I believed the stuff about reincarnation. I had often wondered what it would be like to be a woman. I had never dressed up as one. I’d known several Wall Street types who had. But I’d thought about that a lot when I was a young man about town with a succession of girls hanging on my arm—what would it be like? When I was older I wondered what made women tick. What did they want? What was it in women that brought them in droves to a man like Frank Delahanty with his jovial red face and big belly? I’d wondered over and over why so many succumbed to me. When I had looked in the mirror, a long gray face with drooping eyelids and steel-colored eyes had glanced back at me. I’d overheard people say that my heart was like steel, “just like his eyes.”
The nurse—now I remembered her name. That was extraordinary in itself. Her name was Mary Fisher. She was bringing someone with her. I could hear them. They were framed in the doorway, Mary Fisher, broad-hipped, her eyes coquettish as she glanced up at the young doctor. He stood for a moment, looking at me, and our eyes met. His skin was pale and fine, and his black hair was a curly mass all over his head.
He came forward smiling, and I had a curious sensation that he wasn’t smiling at me, and yet it was me lying there. His eyes were bright and alive. Why did I feel like this, warmed, almost the way a cat must feel when she purrs?
“Uh, glad you’re back with us. It’s been a long time.”
“How long, Doctor. How long has it been?” I couldn’t help smiling at him. I felt warmth in my face and chest when I heard his voice. I was acutely aware of his long-lashed eyes, of how they focused on me.
“About three weeks. Twenty days, according to the chart. Oh, and Nurse Fisher, here, noticed discrepancies in your data, and she called me in to correct them. This is the first time you can remember, uh, being in your present, uh, words are sort of inadequate…” he turned to the nurse. “Excuse me, Fisher, but I need to talk to the patient confidentially for a few minutes.”
The nurse mumbled something and ambled out of the room, saying she had other patients to attend to anyway.
He watched her go, then turned to me and smiled. “Do you remember at all what happened?”
I tried to shake my head, then remembered I couldn’t. “No. All I know is that I’m Werner Akstrom, but I don’t seem to look like, sound like, or feel like Werner anymore. I appear to be a young woman. And I just realized that all the aches and pains I had, the continual soreness in my liver and kidneys, the shortness of breath, the tiredness, all that is gone. And I can see and hear better than I did when I was forty-five. Nothing short of a miracle. Can you tell me what kind of operation this was?”
“Well, first of all, you’re not Werner Akstrom any longer. Even if you once were. According to your lawyer, Vince Fancher…?”
“Yes. Fancher.”
“You can’t be Werner, even though you may have his consciousness and memories. You see, you may not remember, but—“
“Now wait just a minute, young man!” I sounded all wrong! It was disconcerting when the young man just grinned at me.
“Anyone looking at you is going to see a young woman—and hear one, too, no matter what you say, or how you say it.”
“You better explain.”
He looked patient. “I’m better at medicine than at explaining it to laymen, or especially to an attractive laywoman like you.” His grin was self-deprecating, but also conspiratorial, and I could feel something curious and warm inside me as I looked up at him.
“Do you remember talking with Doctor Champagne about how no routine operation would forestall what was happening to you?”
“Everything failing? Heart, lungs, liver, right? And that I was too old—”
“Everything but your brain. You were still as sharp as a whip, as the old phrase has it. Or, in medical terms, extraordinarily little atrophy, despite your advanced age. But do you remember him holding out a chance for something…different?”
I squinted up at him, trying to catch on to something in that deep well of memory. Champagne’s jolly-seeming voice welled up from the depths and I heard a phrase. “Once in a million? Did he say something like that? I can’t remember what it was about.” I saw myself, or rather the mirror image, the girl’s face. She looked coy as I added, “it sounded like some kind of high stakes wager, but I don’t really remember.”
“That’s the KREM. I’m still not convinced Champagne had to use it. It’s a short-term memory blocker. He insisted, said it was necessary given the ‘special circumstances,’ whatever that meant. Maybe it had something to do with keeping the operation secret. I don’t see the need for that, either, but he’s the one in charge. Anyway, despite the short-term memory loss, we’ve got at least four expert witnesses who’ll say, if asked, that Werner Akstrom was mentally competent when he agreed to the operation, and signed the will—“
“You speak as if Werner,” I paused. Everything felt so strange. “As if Werner were dead.”
“Well, legally, according to Fancher, he is. But that’s one thing Werner was determined to take care of. One of the reasons for the witnesses, too. He had Fancher do a lot of legal work—birth certificate, will…” he laughed. “First time I’ve ever seen a will signed in the operating room. Had to have the papers and pens go through the autoclave, but Werner insisted.”
“Then who am I, if I’m not Werner?
“Oh, I’m not explaining this very well!” He shook his head and looked flustered. “Look, on the chart, I’ve just corrected it to read Wanda. That’s what the official papers say. Wanda Akstrom. Would Werner be your father, do you think?”
“My children are in their seventies, so it seems unlikely.”
The young doctor grinned. “Guess the story could be that you’re a granddaughter, or even a great-granddaughter. You see, what actually happened, what the operation did—“
“Yes. What did the operation do?” An image ran through my head. Blue-cold light of the Operating Room, someone on an operating table laid out beside me. The doctor was working on two of us simultaneously? “Did he switch something by mistake?”
Doctor Cortez’s mouth stretched into a wide Latin grin. “Oh, there’s only one thing that was switched—given, actually. Werner is listed as the donor. It wasn’t a mistake. Champagne’s specialty is brain surgery, after all. Werner knew that. It’s just never been done before. No one had the opportunity.”
“Wait a minute. Are you telling me that my, uhm, Werner’s brain was given to this Wanda person? That my brain was put into her body?”
“That’s it. Exactly… I don’t think the girl’s name was Wanda, certainly not Akstrom.”
“What was her name, then?”
The Doctor held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We were never able to find that out. I guess the operation was not entirely legal for that reason. No consent on her part was possible, and she had no relatives. You see, she was brain dead within minutes of arrival at ER. Not quite DOA, but nearly. Shot in the head. There were no ID’s. We did a broadcast appeal on local TV and radio, but there was no response. Even before that, Champagne insisted that this was a golden opportunity for Werner, that we had to test her for tissue and blood compatibility on the off chance—I mean she had damage only to the brain, the one thing Werner had that functioned well. Anyway, when the tests came back, they were about as perfect a match as you could ask for. And there were no other signs of violence to this girl, uh, woman.
“So the operation went ahead. That was even more miraculous. But I’ve still wondered…where she came from, what had happened to her. Looked a little like the women I’ve treated in the refugee clinics, although I would have recognized her if I’d seen her before. You don’t forget a face like yours.” He was looking right at me. “Now there’s no way of knowing where she came from. The police investigated. Guess they called it an unsolved murder slash suicide. You know, no signs of violence—except for the bullet to the head. No clues. Lucky for you, though.”
I did believe in luck. To be lucky you took advantage of whatever chances came your way. Sometimes you even had to steer those chances, make sure of those chances. Had Werner? I couldn’t imagine myself arranging to have someone killed simply so that I could live. No. Especially not a woman as pretty as she must have been. I had done things I was still ashamed of, like ruining the Sterns back in the sixties when I was in the loan business. Ralph’s widow hadn’t known the first thing about the business, and I had wanted their territory. But I knew nothing about tissue and blood types. The last thing I remembered as Werner was just after the scene with Belinda and Charles.
I was lying in the hospital bed, hearing the calls for doctors over the PA system, and I felt terribly tired and depressed. I could remember turning off both hearing aids and lying in the quiet. Seeing my awful children had left me exhausted, and then after that it felt as if my mind took off, gliding like liquid light. I left behind my fears for Xanadu, my real child. It was more than I could bear to think about legal details to haggle over with Fancher. I just wanted to rest. Feeling the peace of that deaf-induced quiet, feeling pain-reliever no pain—had they given me one of those “super analgesics”—that was when a peaceful cloud settled over me. I just wanted to die. My mind had drifted, thinking my life’s been long enough. A hundred years. Death is like this: peaceful, painless, restful, quiet, and no more consciousness. What good was consciousness, anyway? Just something to bedevil you about what you’ve done wrong, or could have done better, or didn’t do. Or about the terrible things other people do, and the ills of this world, and how maybe, after all, you’ve made them worse, not better. I remember thinking, what a relief it would be to lose consciousness and never get it back. Forever.
I must have been ready to die. I wondered what had happened to change my mind—had someone persuaded me? The doctor with his one in a million chance? The will and birth certificate and witnesses bespoke of weeks of preparation. For an off chance? Did the doctor tell Werner that head accidents happened often enough that it might be worthwhile to wait?
And then this girl got herself killed? ‘Luck’ just seemed too pat. I guess things did happen that way sometimes, but it was hard to believe. This was luck that depended on someone else’s misfortune. Here I had been ready to die and now I lived against all odds, too old to expect to keep on living, and she had died, although she was too young to die—or maybe we both lived, or…this was confusing. All I knew was that I was in her body and she was not. My fingers and my spine curled with a pain that wasn’t pain. It was guilt, guilt for this young woman who had been killed—even if I had nothing to do with it. I had benefited, after all.
Chapter Two
Greg watched as the mechanical arm trailed great spider’s legs of broken wires while rolling across the rubble-strewn ground. It nimbly stepped over chunks of cement wall, putting down its wheeled feet only millimeters beyond them. It reared, its maw opened, and it disgorged several tons of building scrap into the waiting compactor.
Greg amused himself by thinking of the huge wrecker machines as different kinds of insects. The arm was a praying mantis, and the compactor was a beetle, crouching on the ground, opening its wings as if to fly when the mantis came with another load of scrap. The huge beetle even defecated, a pellet the size of a car engine, and almost as heavy.
Now the great wings closed slowly. Wood cracked, and popped, plaster pulverized, sending up a cloud of powder into the blue sky. The whole site was cloudy with dust, and everything was coated with it, including Greg’s new car, a little red Saab that looked like a lozenge.
He’d been skeptical about the job to begin with. A lot different than programming for a bank in midtown Manhattan.
He’d ached to get out of the city, to see blue sky with more than a few degrees of horizon—until the night before he left. He still didn’t know what had gotten into him, sort of aimlessly wandering into that cat house—he’d never seen the inside of one before—and that one must have been one of the skuzziest there was, although maybe they were all that way. And then—he shook his head to wipe it clean of that beautiful sad face. He forced himself to look at the mantis as it devoured another chunk of old building, tried to get back into the pleasure of watching it as he had the moment before. He tried to remind himself of an idea he’d had, that he was opening up a piece of the prairie that had been shut away from the incredible reach of sky for almost a hundred years. Now the sun was shining on it.
Greg grinned at the Quaker phrase that bobbed up to consciousness from his dim past. He was bringing the prairie “into the light.” If only a new shopping plaza or office complex or whatever it was, wasn’t going to be built here in its place. Well, he’d be long gone by then. Greg gazed out at the expanse of rubble and wondered what it had been like when the Plains Indians had ridden through here. Or the cowboys, afterwards.
He had run away west like so many before him. He had left her behind. That pleading face, though, he kept on seeing it, as if it were burned into the backs of his eyes.
Could he go back and find her? Not until he paid off his cards, anyway. MasterCard, Visa, Carcard, Discover…He worked hard every day, even spending extra hours in the office with Wilbur Williamson IV, trying to untangle the screwiest office programs he’d ever seen, and yet his debt just seemed to grow and grow.
The mantis was working on the last wall of a five-story building, and Greg checked the control monitor. All still go, and the solar panels were soaking up more than enough power for the work tomorrow, despite the dust.
The dust was the one real downside of this job. It was better than working in the gene-splicing lab, though. He’d done that last year, before the bank, but the hermetically sealed windowless rooms had made him stir crazy. He’d go in when the sun was just above the horizon in the East, and come out, in winter, as the afterglow was going down in the west. He’d hungered for the out of doors, for natural light, for the sounds of water and wind.
Well, the bank job had been even worse in some ways—seeing the out of doors when he passed a window—but his own cubicle was still windowless, and the out of doors was the city. Midtown high-rises, tiny slices of sun and sky when he went out for lunch. At least he was outside here, and the sky was vast.
Every time he told himself that, her face would come back to haunt him. It had been over two months!
He thought of finding her, tracking her down. He hoped she’d left that place by now. Where could they go together? He was a gypsy, but not like the real ones. They traveled as a tribe, but he just drifted from place to place on his own. Wherever he was, he wanted to be someplace else.
The mantis was biting off the last bit of wall. It turned around and waited. Greg scanned the control panel. He’d programmed what was supposed to happen next. He punched A3 and watched as the mantis lumbered towards the open jaws of the beetle. Meanwhile, he punched B3 and a third machine, it looked like a giant anteater, began to vacuum up the remaining debris, the small stuff, bricks, broken pieces of lathe, and the dust. It would deposit its load into the beetle as well, in a final, dusty disgorging that looked like an anteater vomiting into a beetle’s wide-open maw.
Greg turned back to watch the mantis. His program was supposed to do away with a couple of steps at the end of the day. He’d just linked a whole chain of behaviors. The mantis stopped within inches of the beetle. That was good. It reared up, again. Good. It’s jaws opened above the opened wings, and half-digested wall fell with a crash into the waiting belly of the beetle beast. So far so good. Now it was supposed to retract its jaws…
The great jaws opened, leaned forward towards the beetle wings, and took a large bite.
“Oh, shit!”
Greg almost broke the remote panel over his knee, but he stopped. If he broke it, he couldn’t fix it.. He punched the off buttons instead. Then he looked up at the offending beast, frozen in mid-air, at the damaged compactor, at the anteater frozen in the middle of the cleared site.
Wilbur Williamson IV had warned them all, “any damage to this machinery, and whoever’s on shift is gonna pay for it, unnerstand?”
Greg’s fingers played with the log off button, but then he thought better of it. He’d never pay off his cards if he left everything like this. Repairs could run to twenty grand. It didn’t seem fair, since WW, as many called him, had encouraged him to reprogram all the machines, and he had untangled most of the guy’s office programs, and practically for free. He should have charged overtime.
Well, he knew something about the remote that WW didn’t. It had wireless connection to the firm’s main account. Greg dialed into it and called up his name. There it was on the little screen: Greg Sommers with his temporary address, his bank account number, his credit card numbers, his social security number…at least he didn’t have a permanent address.
Greg pointed at the control point he’d established at the top of every account and hit delete. His name and all the numbers vanished. He saved the empty file. Next, he went back to the machine log. He pressed delete again. It disappeared. Then he set the remote to wipe the hard disk of all files with his name on them, and activated a double delete (his own invention). That made it impossible to recover the lost files.
Magic, he thought. Greg Sommers was never here. There was no record of him to be found. Even the credit card companies would get notices saying his accounts had been canceled, although they could access his bank account for whatever balance they found there. Now all he had to do was to get out, get rid of the car, his cards—he’d just been dreaming of hitting the road again, hadn’t he? Did he have enough cash? He’d stop at the ATM before he deleted his bank account.
Greg looked around him. It was funny how computer reality and real life didn’t intersect. The machines were frozen in their dance, his bright red car was still there, covered with dust, and the sun was practically sitting on the flat western horizon. As Greg strode towards the car, it whirred and the door opened. He stepped in, the door closed, the electric engine came to life. Silently they pulled away from the curb.
Back at the apartment building, Greg paused before the row of mailboxes, unlocked his with the touch of his right fingertip, scooped out his mail, pressed the cancel button, and left the slot door open.
Still wondering if he had enough cash, Greg was buoyed to discover a new card in among his bills. A Uni-card. He had applied for it for the lower interest rate, only twenty five percent. Now, since he’d canceled the other cards, he could use this one—as long as he filled a new, convenience address where they couldn’t find him, until he felt like being found. Maybe someday he’d file for bankruptcy and clear up all his old debts, or maybe someday he’d be rich enough to pay them all off—as long as they stopped ripping him off with all that interest.
He filled out the change of address form, putting down his grandparents’ Poughkeepsie address, a P.O. Box number he remembered for no good reason. Might as well use it for this. His grandparents were long dead. He dropped the postpaid envelope in the mail chute.
Carefully, he ran his papers and other cards through his little shredder, and then dumped the shreds in the incinerator chute in the apartment building hall.
After loading his Kombi-Kase with the few essentials he wanted to take with him, he left a voice mail at the dealer’s to pick up his car at the bus station for lease surrender. He walked down the hallway one last time, Kombi-Kase rolling behind him. It was late at night. He stopped to tape a notice on the super’s door, with his key card attached. He got a whiff of the awful smell of Iowa corned beef and California cabbage and was glad he was leaving.
A nomad again, but he knew where he was going. In his mind, a red light flashed on the outside of a dreary window down in Alphabet City, way down on the Lower East Side.
Chapter Three
My fingers curled with the need to itch my scalp. The helmet bandage protected me from the urge, but for a few moments, it was almost overwhelming.
After those first few moments of waking, I was too busy to notice. The doctor and the nurses for the day and night shifts converged on my bed. “We’re going to unclamp you,” Doctor Cortez announced. He sounded tense. The nurses hovered above my head. I felt the clamps release, but he was holding my head. That was reassuring, and something more. I stole a glance at him.
I could feel myself smiling. He grinned back, but tightly. Then he and nurse Fisher gently helped me to sit upright. They let go and bent solicitously over me to make sure I could hold my head up by myself. No problem. Then Miss Iron Buns, the physical therapist (I think her real name was Irene Burns) came in to make sure I had no difficulties when I got up to walk. She had me do a whole routine—slip out of bed, walk across the room, turn from right to left, and then left to right, sit down in the armchair, get up again. It was strange, moving in this new body. I was aware continually of its youth, flexibility and its femaleness. They agreed that I didn’t seem to have any problem moving, and the young doctor kept on shaking his head in amazement. “All those connections, millions of them, and we haven’t found an error yet. You should’ve seen the operation! It took a supercomputer and an autolaser, and even then it was hours.” He stopped abruptly and looked at my hands. “Berger,” he called out, “get her that palm-top I saw in the closet. See if she can manipulate the cursor with her hands. Hand-eye coordination, you’d be surprised, but that’s probably about the biggest test.”
It was Werner’s palm-top. I ran my new fingers over the familiar-looking machine, then pressed the start up, keyed in my password, and was on my way into Xanadu—I wanted to see what had happened in my absence—when the doctor said, “Can you type an email?”
I nodded, pointed at Communicator and started typing a letter to David, my, well, Werner’s grandson. Even though my fingers no longer had their familiar rheumatic twinges, I was typing more slowly than Werner. I could feel that the fingers were supple and strong, but they were unsure where they were supposed to go. “I can do it, but it’s as if these fingers haven’t learned to touch-type yet.”
“Probably haven’t.” Doctor Cortez dazzled me with a smile. “But your hands work the way they’re supposed to? I’ve got to say this for Champagne: he’s a genius. He worked out the program and guided everything. Only problem working with him is he hates to make patient rounds. Gets me to do them whenever he can.”
So, that explained his absence.
The doctor, after conferring with Iron Buns, urged me to take a walk later in the day. But the morning’s activities had tired me out, so after they all left, I lay flat on the bed and passed out for what seemed like hours.
I came to for lunch, an exquisite mushroom soufflé, fresh salad, some mineral water and pills.
“What’re the pills?” I was still groggy from the nap. I tucked into the soufflé, glad I wasn’t subjected to regular hospital fare.
“You told the Doctor it itched under your bandage. Those are anti-itch meds.”
I shrugged. “It’s not itching that much now. I’m groggy enough as it is. I’ll take them if it gets worse, but not now.”
“Doctor said—”
“Look, if it’s so important to you, I’ll take them when I get back from my walk, okay?” Hearing myself, not in Werner’s bass, weighted with authority, but in this young woman’s voice was still hard to get used to. The tone reminded me of the teenage Belinda defying her mother and me. That was over fifty years ago.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when the nurse shot back, “For a pretty little thing you are one big, uh—” she stopped, classic hand over mouth.
I nodded at her. “Just remember who pays the bills.”
She turned away, probably to make faces at me out of my sight, but I didn’t care.
After lunch I got out of bed, marveling at how my limbs worked, especially gratifying after five years in a wheelchair, and when I stretched out my legs and looked at them, I was even more impressed. Great legs, long and brown.
I went to the closet and took down Werner’s gray bathrobe. That’s when I got a shock. The arms were way too long, and the bottom pooled in folds on to the floor. Werner had been tall, but until that moment, I hadn’t realized how small I was in comparison. It made me feel vulnerable, especially when I glimpsed Nurse Berger down the hall. She towered over me.
I put the bathrobe away. It was warm enough for me to go out in my hospital gown, and if people didn’t like it, to hell with them. I glanced at myself in the mirror. I looked pretty good. If there were men around, they’d probably like seeing me in this: it was short, and my legs showed off to good advantage.
As I ventured out into the hall, I had an unnerving thought. I might be cute to look at, but as far as anyone could see, I was the girl someone had tried to kill only weeks before. I hunched my shoulders and looked anxiously around me. There was only the short-carpeted hallway, the four rooms, each “customized” for the patient, and the nurse’s station in the middle.
I could hear a woman’s voice, not the nurse’s, in the room across from me. It sounded New York, maybe with more than a trace of Jewish, and with a cultivated whine. It hit me again that I had no idea who the girl had been, that is, who I was—a good part of me anyway—or why someone would kill her. Was it jealousy, or one of those love killings you hear about? No sign of violence, the doctor said. Not raped.
Even bitches with pretty faces didn’t usually end up with bullet holes behind their left ear. Cortez had shown me where the hole had been. “ I put in the fiber plate,” he told me.
I stopped and looked at myself in a full-length mirror at the beginning of the ward. Beneath it was a caption: “Do you look your best today?” It was probably directed at the nurses. I posed before it. I had to admit that if I were still Werner I’d like to look at this girl. I’d scrutinized my face in the mirror the nurse had left in the room. Afterwards I’d pressed Cortez on whether I looked Hispanic like him. I certainly didn’t look Nordic.
He’d shaken his head. “Maybe gypsy, or one of those others from the southern parts of Eastern Europe, that’s my guess. In the clinic—I do the work pro bono once a week—I get a lot of refugees from there: Rumania, Georgia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Armenia, Moldova, Turkey, Syria…that whole area’s been a mess for years. You do look like you come from one of those places.” He had scrutinized my face. “A lot of women are in sweatshops, but the pretty ones, like you? Did anyone tell you about your hair when you came in? Beautiful long black hair. And we had to shave your head—for the operation.” His eyes went round. “I’ve heard stories! The pretty girls—there are houses full of sex-slaves. Brothels run by the mob. You know, girls lured over here, or kidnapped. They can’t get away. No papers, men threatening them—that’s what seems most likely to me. She was one of those girls, and she tried to escape.”
Cortez saw the shock in my eyes, and misinterpreted it. “Not to worry. We checked for AIDS and STD’s. That’s routine. You’re clean.”
It wasn’t the medical risks. What had my body gone through, what had they forced on her? Creepy to think how she could have been abused, must have been in terror for her life--and then her worst fears were realized. The fear, the pain she had suffered. And here I was living and breathing in her body. And feeling none of it.
Now, looking at myself in the nurse’s mirror, seeing this girl’s shape, I found myself speaking to her. It felt as if I shared her body with her. “I don’t know who you were,” I thought to her, “but I owe you more than I can ever give. At least I can give to what’s left of you the best that money can buy.”
The pretty face stared back at me. She looked sad, maybe sad for the life she’d lived, as well as for the one she’d lost. But then I told her, trying to smile, encouraging the face to smile back, “you’re incredibly lucky, too. Now, you and I can be the woman you always wanted to be.”
Looking at this new me, I realized I was going to have to make some adjustments. Major adjustments. As Werner, I had been a skirt chaser. Now I would wear them. Did women chase zippers instead?
Women don’t chase. Someone had said that. I knew that wasn’t always literally true, but more so than not. What did women do? They were expected to allure, seduce, pose, wait. Could I do that? I looked at myself in the mirror and struck a pose. There was power there—
I smiled into the mirror, thinking, well it’d be a challenge—that’s when I sensed someone. He was watching me. I caught a glimpse of him and shuddered. He was guiding the soundless cleaner/waste compactor in front of him. He had a lantern jaw, slack eyelids and ferret-like eyes. The custodian.
This guy would have tipped his hat to Werner, and sirred his way around the room, but his mouth was set in a lascivious rictus, and his eyes swiveled after me, reminding me of a lizard waiting for a fly. Instinctively, my arms went in front of me, sheltering my vulnerable breasts. It was a gesture I recognized, but it wasn’t one I had learned. Not as Werner. I suddenly realized how small I was.
To make a point of ignoring him I went to the door of the room nearest me and looked in. An old man lay in the bed, his eyes closed. Colored tubes from metal supporting arms flowed like a cataract of plastic into him. I didn’t recognize him, but he could have been almost in my generation—I mean Werner’s. Was he waiting for some kind of operation, or was he just waiting to die?. From the wall pictures, I guessed that he was an architect or a builder, a big one. Several of the skyscrapers on the wall looked familiar, but maybe because they looked like a lot of other steel and glass buildings in downtown Manhattan.
Waiting. How long had Werner waited? It must have been several months. My last coherent memory, when Belinda and Charles visited me in the hospital, must have been in the middle of winter. It was late spring or early summer now, wasn’t it? I glanced out the window to be sure and saw another robin; it was pulling a long worm out of the ground. The lawn was bright green, not brown the way it would have been by mid-summer. The tree outside my window had leaves on it.
I turned back to the man on the bed. Looked like he was lingering just this side of life with that gray skin and the deep shadows beneath his eyelids.
He opened his eyes and grinned up at me. His teeth were yellow and long. I leaned closer, I’m not sure why. The next thing I knew, his hand seized my wrist, exploding from the bedclothes. He was holding me so tight I gasped.
“Well, pretty one! Didn’t expect to see a patient like you around here.” His voice was a deep wheeze. “Not that I’m complaining.” He gave a low cackle that turned into a hacking cough, and then it looked like he was going to choke. I tried to pull my arm away, pushed at his fingers, but he held on like a death grip. I was about to scream, to shout for help, when he let go to fumble upward, probably for my breast. I sprang away, then stood there staring at him and panting.
“Idiot!” I shook my head and was out the door in three of the longest strides I could manage. I was still shaking when I got back to my room, so I leaned against the doorframe. The transom felt cool against my cheek, and its solidity steadied me. Once my heart stopped pumping so fast, and I stopped shaking, I crossed the floor and collapsed into my chair.
I had never understood before how a strong, healthy woman could whine about abuse at the hands of some doddering old man, like some of Werner’s contemporaries. Werner had always enjoyed seduction, so he had never paid these complaints much credence. It had never occurred to him to assault a woman. To be grabbed like that! I looked down at the chair and noticed for the first time it was a Solyagi Ergonomic. It had leather padding along the curved armrests, and I was sure it was either my chair, brought from the apartment on Central Park West, or it was the same exact kind.
I looked down at myself. I saw a slim, small woman with long legs, a swell of hips, breasts pushing out the front of my gown. I had just begun a whole new life. In this one, I could be a victim. I had never been one as Werner, and I’d be damned if I’d ever let something like that happen again. The girl had been victimized. She had been the ultimate victim, although maybe I’d never know why.
I had money. I could have my chauffeur, James, or somebody else with me all the time if I wanted, but I didn’t especially care for the idea of always having a bodyguard. I’d have to be a lot more careful, though.
Just to think of that old man grabbing me made me angry, but there was something else about him that bothered me. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, except that he could be described much the way Werner had been: old, close to dying, and wealthy. Well, maybe that was the only kind of patient who could afford to stay here—to wait here.
Pressure down between my legs. I had to go and badly. I got up, and went into the bathroom, for an instant I stood before the toilet, was about to pull up my hospital gown, and then I remembered. I’d have to sit down. I pulled down my underpants and looked down at myself for the first time: hair and sensitive folds of skin. I was struck by the absence of the old familiar guy dangling between my legs. Maybe I’d get the mirror to examine myself afterwards. I went with a whoosh. It was like unplugging a drain between my legs and letting go. No swollen prostate to worry about. I remembered the late nights when I stood, groggy, before the toilet, waiting and waiting for the water to come.
Now, when I went back to the chair, I felt fully relaxed. I yawned. The fact of really being in a woman’s body was enough for now. I might be more vulnerable than I had been—at least before I was confined to a wheelchair—but I had the money to protect myself if need be. Unless Belinda and Charles were able to break the will Cortez had told me about. No. I’d put it in the capable hands of Vince Fancher. I could be sure it was airtight. I closed my eyes and let myself drift off.
I was walking down the roadside in the country. It was a beautiful summer’s day; the overarching maples shaded us, lining the dirt lane. Belinda skipped beside me, chattering on about something. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, or didn’t understand the language. I held Charles’s hand, even though he kept tugging to get away. I was not going to let him run out into the road. Belinda was old enough to know better, but then maybe, I thought suddenly, Charles was too. I looked down at my hand and then up at Charles. He was taller than I was, but he still looked like a young child. I was wondering what to do, whether to ask Clara, when Belinda burst into angry tears. Through the sobs, she kept on mumbling something that sounded like, “…never listen…never listen…never listen to me…” She was always having these inexplicable rages.
I pulled Charles’s hand and there was no resistance. I looked down. My hand held a boy’s hand, but the boy’s slim wrist wasn’t attached to anything!
I awoke from the shock, my eyes opening to the bright sunshine outside the window. And then I was aware of someone leaning over me, peering down at me. I caught the glint of his eye first, and it reminded me of a rooster eyeing a bug, his sharp beak poised. Then I recognized him: Doctor Champagne. He saw me looking at him and the rooster gleam vanished like a cloud shadow passing over a hill. Now he looked the way I remembered him: fat, jolly and out of breath, his face overlaid with the false cheer of a doctor visiting his patient.
“Well, Doctor Champagne,” I said, as he took my wrist between thumb and forefinger and counted my pulse, “I guess the operation was a success.”
He looked down at me, proud for an instant, and then he looked wary. “You mustn’t talk about it, even in here. It’s still a secret procedure. I’m, uh, applying for a patent…” he grinned and repeated, “yes, a patent,” as if the idea had just occurred to him.
I shrugged. “Well, I can’t talk about it anyway, and I don’t want you talking about Werner, either.” Something rang false, but I wasn’t sure what.
Champagne frowned. “I’ve had to fight off your daughter, you know. She keeps demanding to know what’s happened to Werner.”
“Belinda?”
The doctor’s eyes rolled up in his head. “Dealing with Werner was easy in comparison.” He scrutinized me. I laughed. He added. “At least you—you as Werner—were rational, more or less. Belinda’s something else. And Charles Akstrom has been calling, too. Guess you’ll have to deal with both of them soon. I don’t envy you that. But it’s still too early. There’s almost no chance of problems from the operation now, but if you pushed yourself…those two would drive a strong man out of his mind. How you’ve survived them all this time…” He shook his head. “Anyway, you need another week to regain your strength, and your resistance, before you tackle them.”
I was relieved to hear that.
“Anything else you want to know?” He paused in the doorway.
“Well,” I paused, “Cortez told me about what you did, I mean how the operation was almost miraculous, amazing to witness, incredibly complex. I don’t pretend to understand all that, but it’s too bad you can’t go public about it. You’d be famous.” That was pointed enough, I thought. “Oh…” there was something else I’d been wanting to ask him. How did you know that the girl would match Werner’s blood and tissue types?”
Doctor Champagne blinked, like a frog suddenly blinded by a flashlight. Then he shook his head and looked directly at me. “I didn’t know. I thought, since she presented such a perfect profile for my, uh, Werner’s experimental operation—you know, no damage to anything but the brain—that it would make sense to run the tests.” He looked assessingly at me, then nodded. “Wasn’t it lucky I did?”