Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  She nodded yes meekly, and I felt the perverse thrill of having another human entirely obedient to my will. I tried to suppress it, but couldn’t completely succeed.

  Disgusted with myself, I placed my hands on her soon-to-be- lost face.

  Then I dove beneath her flesh.

  How do you convey extrasensory modes of being in terms of the five senses? I haven’t found a way after all these years. It may be impossible. Better minds than mine have tried. Synesthesia comes close, offering the feeling of skewed perspectives, of the mundane transformed, but in the end, it, too, fails to capture the reality.

  Still, how else can I tell it?

  My surroundings vanished. The first thing I tasted was Hana’s health and youth, refreshing as the heat of the sun. I could have reveled in it for hours, and had to pull myself away. Her vitality was so different from what the hurt and sick people, the broken ones, had given me in school. That was a taste I couldn’t stomach, the reason why I used my talents as I did. Next I went beyond surfaces, to bathe in the noisy cellular automatons I proposed to change. They hummed a blue light like ginger, happy and content in their stubborn ways. I felt the configurations of muscles and bones, swam along the maxillae and up the zygomatic arch to the temporal bone and down to the nasal bone, even unto the cartilage at the tip. When I was certain I knew her face in its entirety, I began to initiate the changes.

  A writer I like once proclaimed, “There is no art without resistance of the medium.” I was an artist by any standards, and my medium was one of the most recalcitrant. The plastic stuff I worked with had its instructions on how to behave, and resented my intrusions. Membranes squeezed out lugubrious sparks against my mental tweaking. Pseudopods of angry noise attempted to push me back. Still, I persisted, knowing the battle would be mine. I ordered growth here, diminishment there. Melanin, marshal your forces and march! Lymph system, retreat! Sebaceous glands, surrender!

  At last I was satisfied. I swam out of her skin, back to the external world.

  The return of sunlight caused me to blink painfully. I stepped back awkwardly, fatigue heavy in my limbs. Maggie steadied me, anticipating my confusion.

  “Wow,” Hana said. “What did you do? I feel like ants were crawling under my face.”

  “Get used to it,” I said. “It only becomes more intense.”

  I turned to go. At the door, I stopped, guilty, and said, “Ms. Morrell— I’m sorry if I was rather brusque.”

  But she didn’t even hear me, both hands on her alien face, as she felt the changes massing beneath her forsaken flesh.

  Scarves of smoke ghosted the trapped air in the club. Twisting ceilingward, they encountered shafts of colored light that tinged them gaudily, lending them a brief vitality much like life.

  Almost everyone in the noisy, crowded room was smoking—both tobacco and California sinsemilla. When a Banneker graduate could peek away your lung cancer for more money than a prole made in a year, then smoking—once almost extinct—became yet another exclusive status symbol of the rich.

  And we—Jeanine and I—were indeed among the rich tonight.

  After a tiring day at the clinic, I had felt I deserved the best night out I could manage. That meant one place: Radix Malorum, atop the Harlem Pylon. Just the view south from its sweeping windows was worth the inflated prices. Manhattan looked as if some angry god had ripped down the night sky, shaken the stars into geometric patterns, and laid the priceless carpet at our feet.

  Jeanine was telling me about her day. I half-listened, sipping my overpriced drink at intervals, letting the alcohol have its way inside me without interference.

  “I swear,” she said, “These kids I teach are getting smarter every day. Pretty soon they’re going to have to lower the franchise again. Can you imagine it at twelve? When we were growing up, I remember everyone said fifteen was too low. What’s in that latest release of mnemotropins anyway? Sometimes I can barely keep ahead of my students.”

  I muttered something about reversing evolution, reverting to the self-sufficiency of most other mammals soon after birth. Truth to tell, I was busy wondering if tonight was going to be the night I dared satisfy my curiosity about Jeanine.

  We had met over a year ago, at a party given by one of my clients. From across the room, her radical beauty had overwhelmed me. Her thick black hair fell in waves to her shoulders. Her long face, with its high cheeks and prominent nose, achieved a composite beauty greater than the sum of its parts. Deep luminous eyes were fringed with the thickest lashes I had ever seen.

  My first thought had been: What genius built that face? I don’t recognize the style at all. Then I muttered aloud, “You cynical bastard. Why can’t she be real?”

  I had come on to her shamelessly, with all the intensity I could muster. Despite my gaucheries, she had seen something attractive in me. That night, upstairs in our host’s bedroom, atop a bed piled with coats, we became lovers. She excited me so much that I forgot to dive beneath her skin and search for traces of alterations.

  Since then, I had deliberately forborne. She meant too much to me now for me to know another sculptor had swarmed beneath her flesh. But not to know was killing me, too.

  I shook my head. Jeanine asked, “’s matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking about this crazy world we live in. Why can’t things be simpler, like, say, about fifty years ago, when those loopy Kirlian auras and biofeedback were as close as anyone got to the notion of reading and altering bodies like books?”

  She took my hand across the real linen cloth. “I’ve never heard you talk this way before, Jack. You must have had an awful day. Why don’t we just head home now?”

  That sounded good to me, so we summoned the waiter—a human, of course, not a mek, at these prices—and he arranged the crediting of the restaurant’s account, not neglecting his gratuity.

  Shuffling between packed tables, we made for the door.

  Halfway there, a tug on the hem of my quilted dinner jacket stopped me.

  I looked down. A man’s choleric, beefy face stared aggressively up at me. He was obviously drunk and belligerent. I thought I knew him, but couldn’t remember where from.

  He slurred his speech. “If it’s not the illushtrious Dr. Strode, demigod and paragon. Sit down with us and have a drink, Doc. Just to show there’s no hard feelings about throwing us out of your stinking clinic.”

  I regarded his companions, one of whom was a thin, dandified man, and it all came back to me.

  “Listen,” I said, “my policy is not to handle illnesses, especially something as critical as failure of the immune system. I couldn’t do anything for your friend.”

  “Tell the truth, you high and mighty bastard. You could, but you wouldn’t! And every other honest peeker has more cases than they can handle. So now Mitch is on monoclonal antibodies, which are only, like, eighty percent guaranteed. While you waste your talents skintwisting.”

  “I am a biosculptor, not a ‘skintwister,’” I said. Jeanine was pulling at my arm. The restaurant had grown quiet as all heads swiveled.

  “I say you’re a lousy skintwister,” the man said, and started to rise.

  I grabbed his shoulder while he was still coming up. His life aura stunk of fear and bad living. It took me less than a second to give him a shot of angina that folded him up in a gasping heap. Let him try to prove I had anything to do with it. He had the physique where such an attack could be purely natural.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Jeanine.

  She stared at me as if I were Satan himself—or at least Faust.

  And she wouldn’t let me touch her at all that night.

  I studied my hands with unnatural calmness. I knew something bad was about to happen.

  I felt weird inner tremblings and quiverings. Something prevented me from diving into my own flesh and finding out what was wrong. Instead, like anyone else, I was forced to watch it all from the outside, my own body a mystery.

  Immense pain shot up each f
inger from my wrists. The dorsal surfaces of my hands suddenly blackened, puffed, and split, like pork in an oven, revealing bloody red meat and white phalanges beneath the blistering epidermis. The ruined skin began to fall away in rotten strips, until it hung like a diseased orchid from my carpal bones.

  I shot up in bed, my pulse pounding, sweat drenching the sheets. Jeanine wasn’t beside me, having left me soon after the scene in the club.

  It took me longer than it should to restore my bodily equilibrium, but at last I got my blood pressure down to 110 over 80. I turned on the light then, lit a cigarette, and thought about what had just happened.

  One of the first things they made us read at the Banneker Institute—right along with On the Origin of Forms—was an old essay by a doctor of the past century named Lewis Thomas, called “On Warts.” It was his graceful speculations on how warts could be cured “by something that can only be called thinking.” The instructor cited this as one of the seminal pieces in our field. But he directed our attention to one of Thomas’s offhand comments that all of us had missed:

  “I was glad to think that my unconscious mind would have to take the responsibility for this, for if I had been one of the subjects I would never have been able to do it myself.”

  “Unlike Thomas,” the instructor continued, “you special people are quite capable of taking charge of what were once perceived as autonomic functions managed by the unconscious. I can tell you from my own experience that the urge to meddle constantly in your own body will prove to be an almost irresistible one. I have one word of advice for you: don’t.

  “Your unconscious, properly trained, is completely capable of monitoring and policing your body with more efficiency than your rational self. We will see to it that you receive such training. After it, you will function at the peak of health for more years than we have yet put a number to. All provided, of course, that you give up any incessant tinkering that is sure to do more harm than good. It is a prime paradox of our profession that while we exercise complete control over the bodies of others, we must practice a certain powerlessness over our own, lest we be caught up in a destructive feedback loop of incremental changes.

  “One of the little side benefits of a trained unconscious, I think you will be surprised to learn, is the suppression of nightmares…”

  I hadn’t had a nightmare in over a decade. Dreams, yes, but nothing like this bloody vision that had shattered the night for me. I couldn’t afford to. Nightmares were the mark of an unconscious at war with itself, at least in people such as myself. They were bound to result in malfunctioning of my careful homeostasis.

  Lying back, I ran through a dozen mind-cleansing techniques before falling asleep again.

  I had no more bad dreams that night.

  But in the morning my hands were sore and stiff.

  Most days I was reasonably proud of my office. The diplomas and AMA citations hanging on the real wood-paneled walls; the thick burgundy carpet; the mahogany sideboard holding antique objets d’art and a jagged crystal from the Russian settlement on Mars (I had to perform four nose jobs and two breasts lifts for that alone); the holo of the Banneker Institute, a building evoking instant recognition and respect. The whole effect was one of serenity, calmness, and prestige, intended to put prospective patients at ease.

  This morning, after the horrors of last night, it seemed a tawdry stage set. I wanted to kick the cardboard walls down and flee. But of course I couldn’t. I had my practice, my reputation, and my self-respect to consider.

  Or at least two out of those three.

  Dealing with the woman sitting on the other side of my desk was not making the day any more agreeable.

  It wasn’t arrogance or hauteur on her part that was getting under my skin; I had encountered those often enough to have quick and effective ripostes at my fingertips. Instead she exhibited a kind of scatterbrained ditziness that was giving me a headache. Every question I asked seemed to elicit a senseless torrent of references to people and events I couldn’t possibly know or care about. All I needed was a straight answer to what she wanted done with her body. Instead I got her social diary for the past six months.

  Her lack of wits appeared an even greater shame when I considered her looks.

  If the Winged Victory had survived the centuries with its face intact, I’m sure it would have looked something like this woman. A classic, aquiline profile complemented her long, slender neck. Her eyes were penetrating but essentially empty, like a cat’s. Her platinum hair was feathered close to her magnificent occipital structure. She wore fur and silk like a queen.

  I let her wind up her latest reply without really paying attention. My life seemed suddenly full of women lately. Jeanine; the girl, Hana, whom I had found myself thinking of all morning; and now this personage—Amy Sanjour, she had named herself. I supposed I had always favored the company of women over men. Was it because I found them easier to dominate? Jeanine’s frigid treatment last night and Hana’s ineluctable haunting of my thoughts seemed to portend a table-turning in the works.

  “Ms. Sanjour,” I said when she ran out of breath, “I believe your problem is a general lassitude.” I had fastened on this recurrent leitmotiv in her rambling discourse.

  “Why, yes,” she gushed. “How perceptive of you, Dr. Strode. That’s my trouble exactly. I just can’t seem to keep up with all the things that I have to do. Parties, charity affairs, travel—it’s all too wearing lately.”

  “I prescribe a general toning,” I said, calculating how much she was good for. “I’ll work over your muscles, maybe boost your ATP production— Can you arrange to check in tomorrow for about a week?”

  Her face was so transparent that I could almost watch her running over her appointment book in her head. When her forehead wrinkles disappeared, she said, “Absolutely, Doctor. My health comes before anything else. I simply have to get back on my feet.”

  “Fine.” I stood to escort her to the door. She rose like a flower unfolding in stop-motion photography. Her expensive scent filled my nostrils. What a sorry mismatch of beauty and brains.

  At the door, she offered her hand.

  I didn’t know any better, so I took it.

  The room seemed to invert itself and reform faster than light. I caught my breath and shook my head, plainly dazed.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” she asked, solicitous as a nurse.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess. I had a bad night. Probably not quite recovered yet. It’s nothing, really.”

  She smiled dazzlingly. “Well, don’t work too hard. I’ll be needing you tomorrow.”

  “Ill take care,” I said.

  Then she left.

  On the way to Hana Morrell’s room, I initiated a quick internal diagnostic on myself. Everything seemed fine. Yet if nothing else, the memory of my shredding hands still remained, an unexplained abnormality.

  Maggie was waiting by Hana’s bedside. As I came up, she finished explaining how to use a terminal mounted on a swivel arm that projected over Hana’s bed. IV tubes threaded the girl’s arm. Her face—

  No matter how many times I saw it, I was always taken aback by the overnight transformation. People—most of them quite good-looking but unsatisfied—came to me, I laid my hands on them, and they turned temporarily into something resembling plague victims.

  Already a scaly scurf overlaid Hana’s lumpy features. No more was she the beauty who had occupied the bed yesterday. Clumps of her hair bestrewed her pillow, the old falling out to make way for the new.

  “Hana, how are we feeling?”

  “Okay. Weird, but basically okay.”

  “In that case, I’m going to go forward with your treatment. Ms. Crownover’s explained the idiosyncrasies of our network hookup, I see. You’ll be communicating your wishes and needs through that now. I’m going to paralyze your vocal chords for the remainder of your stay here. It’s simply to remove the temptation to talk. No sense straining your facial muscles while they’re reforming. As for eating—they
’ve already got you on your gourmet menu.”

  She eyed her IV and laughed. “Right.”

  “Okay, then. I’m going in.”

  My hands cradled her abused flesh.

  The diving was rough today. I felt swept away by the turbid currents of her transitional self. I had to exert all my powers to manage a simple reading of the progress of the changes. Making the minor adjustments necessary was almost more than I could accomplish. Her larynx fought me like a malignant snake. I got out of her susurrant, scarlet-spicy interior awkwardly, in a hurry.

  I mumbled something about seeing her tomorrow, and hurried off.

  Later in the day, when Maggie asked me if anything was wrong, I told her roughly just to tend to her end of the business.

  She was too professional to cry in front of me.

  But I learned of it after.

  Naked, Amy Sanjour differed from Victory in one respect: no wings.

  This was one body I was glad I didn’t have to amend. Contemplating her elegant contours as she dressed unselfconsciously in one of the clinic’s white robes, I found familiar thoughts running through my mind.

  Why was it that every advance in man’s powers seemed to lessen his regard for the accomplishments of nature? As soon as the first cathedral was finished, the forest began to seem puny. The airplane made an eagle’s accomplishments paltry. Each city canyon decreased the grandeur of the Grand Canyon or the Valles Marineris by a perceptible amount. The ability to mold the body made what left the womb unsatisfactory. You would think just the reverse would be true. After struggling so hard to achieve his small skills, man should appreciate the effortless workings of nature even more. But such was not the case.

  And who was I to alter affairs?

  “I was going to suggest some cosmetic attention to your epidermis, in conjunction with toning,” I said as she sat down on her bed. “But I can see it won’t be necessary, Ms. Sanjour.”

  “Please, call me Amy. If I’m going to spend a week here, it would be tiresome for you to be always ‘Mizzing’ me.”