“But have I come back to that?” I asked.
Poor dears, all puzzled again. I should not have been so smug, I suppose; it would haunt me later.
“Back to what?” Dr. Lucas asked.
“To life. I only mean to ask if you're sure that's what this is."
* * * *
My question hardly ruffled them, I think, though it would echo for a while. The philosophical underpinnings of our situation never interested them, that I could detect, then or later. We were finished with the briefing, I could go. One of the doctors conducted me to my rooms, which were actually rather pleasant, if nondescript. A small bedroom adjoined a small sitting room, with a bathroom tucked between. Windows with old fashioned, and rather yellowed, venetian blinds. Clean down to the last corner, a state so conspicuous I wondered if they were worried I might be susceptible to bacteria or contagion, me in my freshly dead state. Or post-dead, rather.
Dr. Potter stopped by to suggest that I rest, as in the morning I would be having several imaging studies, under the supervision of Dr. Lucas herself. He asked me some questions, took my vital signs, noted the strength of my reflexes, all the while making neat notations into his computer. Dr. Potter expressed his hope that I understood the importance of the work in which he and his colleagues were engaged.
“I believe I am engaged in it, too,” I said.
“What? You are, of course, you are. And you play the most vital role of all. One might say that, even."
“I believe you could say that."
He lingered another moment and finally came to the point. “Do you remember your past life? Do you know who you were?"
“I was—I suppose I am—Roger Dennis, a systems analyst for a small software company in Montreal. Is that right? I could tell you some of my memories but I doubt you would know whether they're correct or not."
“No, I suppose I wouldn't."
“Then I don't understand your question."
“I was simply curious because you've expressed no interest in any of that. Your life. Your family."
“But I'm dead, as far as they're concerned."
“Yes."
I turned away from him, lay on the bed. “Then I really don't see the point.” And I didn't. I felt nothing. Not for my mother, my sisters, the woman I had been dating. It was as if the memories had grayed.
Dr. Potter retired soon after, when the old man Farley came with my dinner. Setting the tray on a table in the living room, nodding to the security guard posted at my door, Farley showed his name badge (for what, I don't know) but refused to look me in the eye. I suppose he knew I had been dead and was uncomfortable about it. Not a scientist, I guessed, but someone rather ordinary, though he had remarkable blue eyes and shaggy, heavy brows hanging over them.
The meal appeared to have been prepared carefully, but I found I had no taste for it at all until the hot foods cooled. Even then I could not stomach the small beef steak. I ate the leafy salad and the over-boiled broccoli. Presently the old man came to take the plate away, still refusing to look at me, snatching the tray and scurrying away, and I wished, vaguely, for a pair of fangs to wear the next time he came in.
Needing no rest, I went for a walk. I wondered if the security person would try to hinder me but she simply fell in beside me. Her presence proved no bother at all, since she said not one word. I was delighted that we might thus avoid all personal tedium and we explored this post of scientific progress as thoroughly as I was allowed, even leaving the building, at one point, to stroll in a courtyard, the moon over the wall, razor wire thrown into silhouette.
The fresh air smelled wonderful and I remarked on it. The security woman said she liked to get out, and I smiled. The stars were fierce. One would have thought that, once outside, my curiosity would have led me to examine the exterior of what had evidently become my prison; but it was only the stars that I cared to watch. Fascinating, thousand upon thousand, teeming, dense, white-hot light drifting from such incomprehensible distances, a particle of light bound all the way from a star into my eye. Pouring untroubled through all that emptiness. I felt something familiar, standing there, gazing upward. Some shiver of feeling passed through me, an echoing loneliness.
I asked the security woman to lead me back to the rooms then, and she did, and I lay in bed all night, staring upward in the dark.
* * * *
As it happened, those first examinations stretched into some months. I doubt any human body has ever been better mapped, unless it be one of the virgins of the 120 Days of Sodom. The staff of the installation was not large but there must have been forty or fifty people on site. They were all bright, earnest people who dressed very badly, and after a time I came to the conclusion that they were engaged in the search for something almost out of habit, as if this project had been funded once, a long time ago, and continued because nobody had asked about it since. Most of the people here were doctors but I was never sure which of them were medical doctors, though I did soon enough recognize Dr. Stewart as a neurosurgeon by his arrogance and haughty treatment of his peers.
There were certainly enough of them that their complete attention on my limited number of molecules soon proved irksome. I was scanned in a magnet and under radiation, by positron emission, by sound wave; I swallowed radioactive dyes and endured other kinds of contrast imaging studies, the whole panoply available right there in the complex. My image was reconstructed in three dimensions in the various computers in the various rooms and I would lie there, watching the iodine-stained image of my heart beating, the slight ischemic defect in one of the walls, present since I was a child, from a time when I nearly drowned and had to be revived by cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Even granted that some of the equipment appeared outdated, the array of toys these fellows had was impressive. The imaging studies proved only that my body had apparently taken on its normal human functioning once again, in spite of the fact that I had suffered a brain concussion and death and had been preserved by means of something called gamma serum, followed by refrigeration for nearly two years.
When I chafed at all this attention, however, I did note that my fate was superior to that of the nineteen corpses who had failed to resurrect, all of whom were undergoing the most extensive autopsies imaginable, under supervision of a team of pathologists led by Dr. Shiraz.
They were looking in the wrong place, and I already suspected the truth, but I had no reason to say so. I no longer felt present in a living world, I felt I had settled into something else. This proved more than an illusion. Nothing they did hurt me in the least, or caused me the slightest discomfort, not when they sampled liver or lung tissue, not when they cored my bone for marrow. I said nothing. If offered a painkiller I took it, but I felt nothing from it, except a temporary sense of concealment.
At night, in my small suite, I lay on the bed watching the shadowed ceiling. No longer sleeping, though I only revealed this to the doctors when they were performing their sleep studies. Had I always been an insomniac? No, I had never had any trouble of that kind. But my medical records, which they had apparently obtained, indicated that I had asked for sleeping pills on several occasions from my primary care doctor. Because I liked to take sleeping pills, I said. Very pleasant.
They gave me more sleeping pills. They gave me injections. They could knock me unconscious, they learned. But they could not put me to sleep.
This caused some consternation, particularly for the neurologist Dr. Shabahrahmi, who performed various scans of my brain, some lasting for hours, to determine exactly what type of brain-wave activity I had when unconscious. He found nothing determinate, except that I never slept.
I often rested, however, lying in the bed dressed as if I were sleeping, staring up at the darkness, at the ceiling, at whatever was there.
At the end of these first examinations, nothing had been determined that could differentiate me from my dissected fellow specimens, except that I had, for some reason, gotten up from bed when I was supposed to, and the others ha
d not. The mystery had, in fact, deepened, since it was clear that, along with rising from the dead, I had undergone some kind of change. I had lost the need for sleep. But these learned people could not determine why.
I had lost other appetites, and these were duly noted and, in the secondary phase of their study of me, tests were performed on these missing appetites as well. I had asked that the dietitian no longer allow the old man to serve me any meat, and, after a while, I lost all appetite for cooked food. I ate fresh fruits and vegetables. The doctors tested me by feeding me meat, which I would promptly vomit up, and they would scurry to do tests on the vomit, to determine what type of stomach acid was present in it, and to look at my stomach, to see if they could learn why my stomach was suddenly rejecting this food. But again, the tests showed no conclusive results, vomit that was like anybody's vomit, feces that was like anybody's feces, nothing to lead them anywhere, only the fact that I had changed in some way, for some reason that eluded them.
It was suggested that my change in eating habits might be the result of some psychological changes, and that these might require study, but there were no psychiatrists or psychologists on the staff of the project, and these branches of science were not held in high regard. Those ideas were never pursued.
* * * *
A week or so passed during which no tests were conducted and nearly all my time was my own. I remember speculating that perhaps they were abandoning this line of research and would set me free. Looking back on that now, it seems such an innocent thought, particularly for a man who had already died once and ought to know better. But a certain innocence still remained to me. I was aware that many discussions were going on around me during this quiet interlude, but I ignored them. With hours to myself, I sat for long intervals in the courtyard at night, staring up at the stars, watching them wheel slowly overhead. Gazing upward into the face of something cold and unknowable.
Dr. Lucas called me to her office at the end of the week, and the security guard, Taquanda, the same woman as on my first day, escorted me to her. They had kept up the practice of the continuous security escort and guard for my quarters though I had never shown the least inclination to escape, so I had gotten to know some of my guardians by name. Dr, Lucas beckoned me inside and closed the door. She always did her makeup very badly, sloppy lipstick and crooked mascara, and today was wearing something awful, a knit dress that clung to her lumpish body in all the wrong places; she seemed even more hideous than if she had been naked, so that the interview was conducted, on my part, in a state of horror, as though I were conversing with Grendel's mother. “Can you guess why I've called you here tonight?"
“I suppose I could try. You've been reassessing your results this past week and there's been a lot of disagreement as to what you ought to do next. But now you've come to some decision."
“Yes, we have.” She patted her hair, drab, thin stuff, no shape. At that moment, I understood I would never be going home. Something about the indifference of her ugliness, none of the gentle peace of homeliness. “We'll be taking another line of research starting tomorrow."
I accepted the information without any show of interest, and she waited, and finally said, “You really aren't at all curious about what we're going to do, are you?"
“You're not going to let me go?"
“No, of course not."
I shrugged. “Then the answer is, no, I'm not curious as to what you're going to do."
She appeared startled by my statements and leaned back in her chair, tapping that crooked nose with a sharp fingertip. “We can't let you go, unfortunately, you're our only hope."
“To bring back more people like me. From the dead."
“Surely you understand the value of what we're doing."
I gave no sign that I understood anything at all, and finally, exasperated, she began to clean her eyeglasses with fierce little motions of her hands. “Well, I don't have anything more to say than that. We'll be trying another line of research starting tomorrow. I wish you the best of luck."
“You do?"
“Yes, of course I do.” She spoke vehemently, as though I had challenged her humanity on some consequential ground.
“Well, then, I assume I'll need it,” I said, and left her office and went back to my rooms.
I ate my dinner, an apple and two bananas, some orange slices, raw carrots, even a raw potato, which was good to keep and nibble. I have no idea which of the fruits or vegetables contained the preparation called Serum Omega, the composition of which no one ever discussed with me, since they were ashamed of its existence. I understood from the strange sensation, the tingling, in all my limbs, that perhaps the doctors were beginning their work earlier than announced. I who had not needed sleep in all these months felt a slow lethargy seep through me, my limbs heavy. What kind of poison kills the body but does not damage it? They came for me before I had completely lost consciousness, lost life, but by then I was paralyzed, and simply felt them stirring around me, dragging me onto a stretcher, wheeling me down the dull tiled corridor. The last thing I remember, in a room that seemed suddenly familiar, was a tingling at the base of my skull, where the little cap had waited, all this time, in case it should be needed again.
* * * *
This time I surfaced in a glare. A light hung just above me, a fierce, round light, and I could not see so much as feel, and the light was not so much a brightness as an insistent gaze transfixing me from a distance infinitely remote from me, out where existence is the only thing there is, out there so far away....
A dream? I never woke from it, I surfaced inside it, not as if I were waking but rather descending from a height. I became aware of where my body was and then I was inside it, but the distance seemed greater than before. I was aware of the room, the same clerestory windows, the square of sunlight traveling along the sheet that covered me. Not the same sheet, this one snow white. As before, still bodies lay in the beds on either side of me and along the opposite wall. The motionless sheets shone faintly white, and the sweet smell was almost more than I could bear. I quickly checked the bodies as before, and this time I found one of them breathing, not strong enough to pull the sheet down from her face, but breathing nevertheless, so I pulled it down, and, as I bent over, she looked at me with a complete coldness, utter contempt. She closed her eyes and turned her head away.
She continued to breathe for a while, long enough for the doctors to arrive. They were excited, of course, and rushed her off to revive her further, if they could, though by the time they wrestled her onto a stretcher her breathing was already slowing. She died, or faded, a few minutes later, just down the hall.
While they were studying her they left me alone, except to draw blood and samples of other tissue; her they dissected, sampling her in every way possible, with every type of biopsy pincer and core needle, till at the end of their studies her body was completely exploded into ten thousand pieces, all preserved in formaldehyde in offices up and down the corridors. I used to wonder what pieces of tissue floating in cloudy jars were her, in the later weeks, after they could derive no more pleasure in carving her up into even smaller slices, or mounting slices of her onto slides. Within weeks they returned their attention to me.
They studied me again, all the same tests, some even more invasive and uncomfortable than the first battery. At times they looked at me as if they wanted to cut me apart too, but they were afraid to do it. The cycle of tests went on and on, till again it stopped for a few days, and I waited.
One night in my room I felt the drowsiness run through all my limbs, unnatural to me by that point, since I had not slept in many months; so I knew I was to die again.
Same as before, a burning gaze above me, all I can remember of that time, or place, or whatever it might be called, between my death and wakening again. I lay beneath a fierce eye examining me every moment, and I longed to be removed from its gaze, but I could only lie there while it watched me, ceaselessly...
I woke in the same room as
before. For the third time I examined rows of bodies. This time no one had responded to any of the serums or gases, only me. The arrival of the doctors was delayed, as it had been each time, and only now did I become in the least curious that they should leave me alone for so long with these dead ones, this sweet smell in the air. From the expressions of Dr. Lucas and Dr. Potter it was clear they understood they had failed again, and now when they looked at me I could only wonder what lay in store.
For a few days I was left in peace. Then Dr. Lucas called me to her office, and I followed with the escort she had sent, into her sitting room with the old fashioned crank windows, partly rusted near the top. Like the office of some elementary school principal, the room was decorated with darkly stained wooden furniture, slatted blinds with frayed cords, pipes running ceiling to floor, a steam convector under the window. She was sitting in this office, dressed more tastefully this time, a dark, high-waisted dress that helped mask her lack of discernible shape, even a pair of what were called ear-bobs in my mother's day, white and round and big. A touch of lipstick. Feeling quite honored by the care with which she had done her toilet, I took my seat on the long, wide sofa. Straightening a place for myself in the twists of the chenille throw, I wondered in an offhand way whether I should be prepared to die tonight, and after a moment while she finished some notation or other in some computer file or other, I stated, “So I expect you are preparing another phase of tests."
She lifted a finger to signal that I should wait, tapped the keyboard intently for another few moments, closed the lid of the notebook, the whine of the drive dying away. “Please excuse me. Yes, we have been discussing our next phases.” She sagged in the chair, clearly exhausted. “We're puzzled more and more by our repeated failures in the aftermath of our one complete success. You, I mean."
Asimov's SF, February 2006 Page 14
