I asked if reinventing myself was not what I was doing.
More like rebuilding, he said. Refurbishing.
When I was a child, living in the first of our many homes, money was aflow, families and the neighborhood on their way up. If you tore a house down entire, you had to apply for new building permits. Leave one wall standing, it could pass as a remodel. So crews arrived in trucks and on foot to swarm over the site, piles of roofing, earth, brick and siding appeared, and within days, where the Jacobs or Shah house had been, there stood, in moonlight among hills of rubble, the ruins of a single wall.
Ready to get back to work? Abraham said. Patiently they await: Leg lifts, stationary cycling, weights, countless manifestations of pulleys and resistance. Row… Pull… Hold… Hold. Stepping over minefields of what look like tiny traffic cones. Balancing atop a footboard mounted on half a steel ball. Both of those last while clinging to walk bars and waiting for the state to wither away as Abraham said the old books predicted.
But five weeks further in, buckets of sweat lost to history, I’ve still not progressed past totter, trip and hope like hell I’ll make it to the bench. A convocation gets called. The physician I’ve taken to thinking of as Doc Salvage is spokesperson. Here’s the story, he begins. He smiles, then puts away the smile so it won’t get in the way of what he has to say.
They fully appreciate the work I’ve done. My attitude. My doggedness. My determination. They know I’ve hung on like a snapping turtle and refused to let go. The consensus is that we (pronoun modulating now to first-person plural) have gone as far as might reasonably be expected. In short, I can stay as I was, with severely diminished capacities, or.
Or being that I undergo an experimental procedure.
They would reboot and reconnect synapses, restore neural pathways, rewire connections that had failed to regenerate autonomously. And while they were in there they’d go ahead and rearrange the furniture. Spruce things up here and there. New carpet, fresh paint.
You have the technology to do that? I asked.
We do.
And I’ll be myself again, physically?
A better version. Though we understand (the smile is back) that sentimentally you may be attached to the present one.
And what of risks? Complications?
Oh, nothing terribly untoward. More or less the standard OR checklist: bleeds, infection, drug reactions. A long recovery.
You’ve all this certainty, with an experimental procedure?
Life itself is an experimental procedure. As you know.
And I’ve already had a long recovery.
Ah, that. Fundamentally you will have to start over, I’m afraid. Begin again.
And so I did in subsequent months as Doc Salvage and crew watched closely to assess development and as I pushed harder at my limits than I’d ever have thought possible. We were down in the swirly deep, in the sludge, as Abraham deemed. But within weeks the leg that before could scarcely clear the floor now could kick higher than my head, I could hop across the room, steady as a fence post, on a single foot, and fingers could pick bits of straw from off the table top. I could climb, crawl, swim, run, lift.
And wonder at what I’d been told, what I’d not.
You’ve taken note, Doc Salvage said six months later, how little resistance there is for you in physical activity.
Uncharacteristically, window shades were up behind him and light streamed in, so that he appeared to have a halo about his body, or to be going subtly out of focus.
All much as we anticipated, he said. But it is far from being the story’s end.
He paused, letting the moment stretch. Something reflective passed outside, a car, a copter, a drone, tossing stabs of light against the rear wall.
Our bodies teem with censors built and inculcated into us, Doc Salvage continued, censors that create distraction, indecision, delay—drag, if you will. Morality. Cultural mores. Emotions. Most particularly the last. And we have learned how to bypass those. Eliminate the drag. We can peel away emotions, mute them, dial them down to the very threshhold.
As, he said, we’ve done with you.
Which explained a lot of what had been going on in body and mind, things I’d been unable to put into words.
I now fit, they believed, a container they’d made for me.
But already, even then, I was spilling from it.
They had given me something. They had taken something. On such barter is a society founded. How much control over our lives do we retain, how much cede to the state? What debts do we take on in exchange for the state’s benefits? How does the state balance its responsibilities to the individual and to the collective? To what degree does it exist to serve, to what degree to oversee, its citizenry?
Theories grinding against one another in the dark.
The truth is this: Our enemies at the time were messing about with neurotoxins. It was those neurotoxins, not a CVA, not seizures as I’d been told, that came upon me in the burned-out fields of the far northwest. Those upon whose reach I was borne to the government hospital to awaken empty, blank, and helpless, isolate fragments of the world cascading around me.
The truth is this as welclass="underline" I was changed. By the gas. By Doc’s procedure. By the experience of reinhabiting my own body. And later, by my actions.
Only with time did I come to understand the scope and nature of the changes within. Doc was right that emotions no longer obscured my actions; about much else he was wrong.
A single image remains from before medics scooped me up. I am dragging myself across stubble. I can hear nothing, feel nothing. My legs refuse to function. And all I can see—this fills my vision—are my arms out before me. They stretch and stretch again. Each time I pull my body forward, they stretch more. My hand, my fingers, are yards away, meters, miles. And I do not advance.
But within a year of that meeting with Doc Salvage I was on the move. There was much, in this fledgling nation, to be done.
The lamentations of old men forever fall deaf on youngster’s ears, my uncle said. He knew that early.
Sometimes I imagine myself an old man tied by sheets into my chair in the day room of a care center speaking—even though there is no one listening, no one there to listen—about the things I did, things I refused to do, things I never quite recovered from doing.
At a table nearby, two men and a woman play cards, some game in which single cards get dealt back onto the table. In at least ten minutes no one’s put down a card. It’s the woman’s turn. The men sit unmoving, hands before them, cards fanned. They could be mannikins propped there. On the screen across the day room a giant face says she loves us, in the same movie that plays at this time every Tuesday, but no one cares.
How does one assay right and wrong? With change crashing down all around us, do the words even have meaning?
Is everything finally relative?
What would you give, Sid Coleman used to sing, in exchange for your soul? An old, old song.
I know that the world of which I speak sitting here tied into my chair would be unrecognizable to the young. Unrecognizable to most anyone, really, should they chance to be around to hear. And as I speak, I watch cockroaches scuttling on the wall, lose my thoughts, begin to wonder about the cockroach’s world. They’ve been around forever, never changed.
All this, of course, knowing that I will never be an old man.
“This is your place?”
“Borrowed. Property is theft—right?”
Out on the farthest edge of the city. Forager territory. Dog-pack-and-worse territory. I looked about at the cot, racks of storage cells, plastic units stacked variously to form furniture of a sort. All of it graceless and functional, the sole concession to domestication being a plaque hung on a side wall and jiggered to look like an old-time sampler: Always Drink Upstream of the Herd.