During my interview, my heart did get ahead of me. I asked Dr. Conner if she’d have dinner with me at Faire Gallery Café on Capitol Hill, despite the differences in our ages, bank accounts, and academic rank. The blistering stare she gave me, peering over the rim of her spectacles, was paralyzing, like maybe I was something toxic she was looking at in a petri dish—English and philosophy majors get this kind of Godzilla-eyeball all the time.
I told her, “I’m a lot smarter than you think.”
“You’d have to be,” she said, spanking me for taking such liberties above my station.
Cold and efficient, she avoided my romantic overture. But I could sense how important this new study would be for her career. She said it was based on work conducted in 2008 at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm by Valeria Petkova and her colleague Henrik Ehrsson. These two called it the “body-swap illusion.” Their test subjects wore a shiny black helmet that favored ones used in football minus the face guard, and sat across from other people or mannequins like the crash dummies used to test air bags in cars, and after just a few moments of being rigged up like that, they shook hands and experienced the mind-warping sensation that they had suddenly switched bodies with those others. In a word, the illusion was that they were lifted out of themselves, however briefly, freed from the tight Cartesian cage that always held the self cloistered, locked in solitary confinement as a lonely monad forever separate from other unreachable monads—as I was from Samantha Conner—ontologically isolated, solipsistic, drifting through life with the rest of the world, its objects and others, always “over there.” Their work promised to be a new tool for exploring that greatest of all mysteries, self-identity; for breaking down the epistemological apartheid of mind-body dualism; and for enhancing virtual reality experiences.
But here’s the trick:
Dr. Conner and her technicians won’t use a lifeless mannequin. Or even another person. No, she dismissed that as being too easy. Too tame. She told me she had always been a nonconformist, an explorer in pursuit of the extraordinary, a person who questioned authority, and rejected any rules that held women back in a patriarchal society. Since childhood, Samantha had always looked at familiar things as if they were strange, and strange things as if they were familiar. She was congenitally disposed to always challenge conventions, the pedestrian, the predictable, the mundane, and go where others feared to go. I swear, her spirit of adventure and imagination stirred me up like music. Because she tilted toward innovation and breaking taboos (and also because, to my knowledge, she hadn’t published a scientific paper in five years), she said my companion in her raising the stakes on Petkova’s study would not even be human.
He’s sitting right in front of me now, a 130-pound Rottweiler named Casey, her dog: lazily licking his paws, and wearing a black helmet just like the one I’m holding in my hands. It covers his eyes and pointed ears, and displays a 3-D version of what the other participant sees. In other words, what I see. I wasn’t surprised that she was uncommonly fond of her dog, and selected him to be my partner. People in Seattle are so in love with this species they probably spell its name, dog, backwards, and why not? Canines and humans have a 75 percent overlap between their genetic codes. From one of my seminars on Plato’s Republic, I remembered that in Book Two, Socrates praised dogs for being high-spirited lovers of wisdom. So, yeah, I was okay with dogs, those symbols of fidelity. But I’m wondering, you know, how all this is going to turn out, if maybe I should have told her about some of the other, bizarre experiments for which I’d been a human guinea pig, if maybe all that might somehow prove to be an X factor neither she nor I had figured on. Maybe when I signed the consent form, which elaborated on the possible side effects of this experiment, but also pointed out that some consequences were unpredictable and might cause death, maybe I should have told her then in that tiny office of hers, with a wall of awards, the sawdust smell of new books, and a view of Lake Washington, that some of those government-funded studies I survived won or were finalists for the Ig Nobel Prizes, handed out for the most ridiculous scientific research conducted every year.I
Over a period of two years, I participated in experiments that measured people’s brainwave patterns while they chewed different colored M&M’s. In another experiment I was tested to determine if University of Washington males were more sexually attracted to UW females than to tennis balls—we were, according to the findings, but only marginally. I was the test subject for a musical condom that contained a microchip like the ones in musical greeting cards—when used, it played the 1812 Overture and Handel’s Messiah. And I will never forget the bumps I got on my head from a study called “Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts”; or the survey I was in about human belly button lint—who gets it, when, what color, and how much.
“Jeremy,” said Dr. Conner, tapping the end of her nose with a pencil. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I sat up straight in my chair. “I think so.”
The shiny plastic helmet was as light as Styrofoam in my hands. It would cover everything except my mouth. Slowly, I slid it over my head, plunging the room into darkness as black as onyx. I could faintly hear voices around me, Dr. Conner and her two technicians, but the world was void, without form or light for the longest time, as it must have been in the nanoseconds before the Big Bang. So far all right. I felt Alphonse throw a switch on the side of my helmet. It began to hum. But then, unbeknownst to the others, some kind of circuit went haywire. Inside the helmet my nostrils caught a whiff of smoke, then pain like a burning wire stabbed through my temples. I winced, and held my breath, but I didn’t let on that anything might be wrong because I wanted full payment for my participation in this so I didn’t want them to terminate it prematurely.
Gradually and by degrees, the pain subsided. On the screen inside my helmet I began to see spicules of light, but I was color-blind. I could only see things sharply if they were about a foot away. The character of the lab had changed into a soft-focus watercolor of washed-out blues and pale yellows, as if everything was covered by a diaphanous piece of cellophane smeared with Vaseline. But what I was suddenly lacking in depth of field was more than compensated for by the tone-color of all that I could smell angling across the air—Gaston, I realized, had a few recreational drugs and a dime bag of cannabis in his lab coat (the excellent herb called Hawaii Maui Wowie), which I guess explained why he was always grinning; and Alphonse, whether he knew it or not, was carrying in his wallet fives, tens, and twenties scented with just a trace of cocaine, which can be found on nine out of ten bills in the United States. Then, as I turned my head, I saw a hazy, helmeted shape, larger than myself, hairless (which struck me as very odd), and wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan CONSCIOUSNESS: THAT ANNOYING TIME BETWEEN NAPS. It was a totally ridiculous-looking, two-legged creature without a tail, chicken-necked, with thin, unmuscled arms, not good for anything, as far as I could see, except maybe rubbing your tummy or opening doors so you could go outside. Only at that instant did I realize it was me seen from Casey’s side of the room. Not just through the camera in his helmet, but through the exotic difference of his mind as he experienced the roomscape as an explosion of odors sweet and pungent, subtle and gross, moist and dry, everything elemental, not lensed through language, not weakened by a web of words, not muddled by culture or cultivation. I heard a collage of sounds I could pinpoint the location for in one eighteen-thousandth of a second, sounds four octaves higher than humans can perceive: the world as it might be known to an extraterrestrial from the Zeta Reticuli star system. Then Dr. Conner said, Go ahead, you two, Jeremy, Casey, shake hands.
When I lifted, then planted what felt like my black-padded paw in the palm of whoever that pathetically deaf, nose-dead creature was over there, when I touched myself touching, I was completely in Casey’s body, he in mine: two entangled electrons. All at once, the world became new, a place of mystery and the uncanny, the way a two-year-old sees it, and strangest of all was my knowing there had to a
lready be a bit of the canine in me, and the Homo sapiens in Casey, for the experiment to work in the first place. The doctor was more successful than she knew. For just this moment, not only did it feel like we’d switched bodies, but our minds had commingled, too.
And then, as abruptly as it began, the experiment was over.
I felt Gaston lifting off my helmet. For an instant the light in the lab blinded me. I kept blinking and saw through fluttering eyelids Dr. Conner leaning toward me, using one finger to push her glasses higher on her nose toward her glabella.
“How do you feel?” she said. “Describe what happened.”
I wasn’t sure I could. Yes, the body-swap illusion was over. But having been freed from my skin, after stepping outside a fixed idea of myself, I couldn’t exactly find my way back in, as if inside and outside, here and there, had always been the real illusion and I just never noticed it before now. Thanks to Dr. Conner’s experiment, I could no longer tell, in terms of the big picture, where I ended and others began.
Can you?
Yet, she and the technicians still did look faintly like a different species to me, as strange as snakes or snails. Involuntarily, I started scratching myself. And for some reason I felt more cagey, manipulative, and as playful as a puppy.
“It worked just like you said it would,” I told her. “Just like it did at the Karolinska Institute. You know, I think you’re going to get a Nobel Prize.”
“Really? You do?” Her eyes crinkled at the thought, and that wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
“Well, there was some kind of short in the helmet’s circuitry, and—and even before we shook hands, the switch happened, I mean it really happened, not with our bodies, but our thoughts.”
“Thoughts? That’s not possible,” she said. “Can you prove that?”
“Okay.” I drew a deep breath. “Just before you turned things off, I got an image from Casey, evanescent but a clear picture in my mind . . .”
“Of what?”
“Does your bedroom have a print of Picasso’s Three Musicians on the wall, over the bed?”
“Yes.”
“And a blue, corduroy bedspread?”
Her eyebrows rose. “Yes, I bought that last year.”
“And you listen to George Clinton music on your iPod?”
“Yes—yes, I do.” She cut her eyes at me. “Jeremy, where is this going?”
“Well, I saw you on that bed. George Clinton’s ‘Atomic Dog’ was playing. Some nights you let Casey sleep close by in the corner. And you always sleep in the buff. You’ve got the cutest mole on your abdomen, and this really great honeypot tattoo on the upper, inner part of your left thigh . . .”
Dr. Conner cupped her right hand over my mouth. I’d never seen anyone move so quickly. Alphonse and Gaston looked round at her in wonder. The doctor’s cheeks flushed cherry pink.
“That’s just a carryover from college and too many margaritas one night.” She laughed, her voice quivering. “I think Jeremy may need to rest awhile. Why don’t you two take a coffee break.”
I pulled her hand down and said, “No, I’m fine. I like to sleep in the buff too. And then there’s that other tattoo on . . .”
Samantha’s clipboard fell clattering to the floor, and she hissed at Alphonse and Gaston, “Leave. Now!”
They hurried out of the room, and when she swung her head back toward me, I was so mesmerized by the beauty of the golden highlights in her hair that, in spite of myself, a new impulse took hold of me.
I licked her face.
That sent her backpedaling about five feet, holding the wet spot as if she’d been stung. And now she had a spot of lipstick on her front tooth. After a moment, Samantha composed herself. She smoothed down her black skirt, picked up her clipboard, found her pencil, and was again the portrait of professionalism, taking notes in her obsessively neat and idiosyncratic script, her Ts like the Space Needle, her Ms like an outline of the Cascades.
“Is there anything else, Jeremy?” Her eyes were evasive. “These perceptual and behavioral transformations are, um, unprecedented. I want to know everything.”
Actually, she did not want to know everything, so I thought it best not to tell her that, like Casey, I had an overwhelming urge to sniff her butt, something with which she would not approve, of course, but in his case and mine it was just in the disinterested pursuit of gathering information, you understand.
“Oh, there’s a lot more,” I said. “You’re going to have enough new research for publications to last a lifetime. Naturally, I’m at your service for any further experiments, conferences, or lectures you’ll be called upon to do. You know, as living proof of your success with interspecies communications. I can also help you translate technical jargon into proper English, which will make your research reader-friendly for a larger, public audience, especially with dog lovers. That means more popularity for you and easier fund-raising. You might even need to start an institute. But sorting all this out will take a while. I’d say days. Even weeks or years. Maybe we can start by you letting me take you to dinner.” I was still trying to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences.
I saw her shoulders relax. She lowered her clipboard to her side, and experimented with a smile. Just as I was seeing things anew, I could tell by the tilt of her head that she was perhaps seeing Jeremy Tucker, English and philosophy major, for the first time.
“So much about you is different now,” she said. “You seem much more useful and . . . feral. Yes, I think perhaps we can do dinner. I’ll bring a tape recorder.”
I figured we had enough to discuss for a lifetime, and who knows where things might go from there? But this is where my fabliau (I believe that’s the right form, I aced a class on the genre) ends, one I hope caused no offense, but if it did, try to keep in mind that sometimes every able-bodied American male enjoys being a dog.
* * *
I. Examples of Ig Nobel Prize winners are taken from The Ig Nobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research by Marc Abrahams (Dutton, 2002). Dog facts are from Stephen Budiansky’s The Truth About Dogs (Penguin, 2000) and Stanley Coren’s How Dogs Think (Free Press, 2004).
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CHARLES JOHNSON AND STEVEN BARNES
Anticipation [of death] reveals to [the I-self] its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the “they,” and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.
—Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
We shed the bulky, vanilla-colored coveralls worn on the Möbius line. Ferris bids the kiva surround us with breathtaking Northwest forest, green petals, and needles gleaming with dew. They shiver when caressed by the wind, as Ferris does when the tip of my tongue traces circles around her pebble-like nipples. Just visible in the distance, she has called forth an abandoned wooden Soto Zen temple, the kind once seen everywhere in Japan. When there still was a Japan. Age, even decay, has made it strangely beautiful and somehow precious in its impermanence.
Ferris enjoys coupling in settings such as this, where spirit commingles with flesh, echoes of a time when life died from the day it was born.
We drop naked onto layers of leaves covering the forest floor. I open the thumb-size vial of Thanadose. A month’s salary moving between chits to barter to black market through cutouts and burned bridges. Illegal as self-murder, and worth every erg.
Ferris tilts her head back, sipping from the vial. I follow her lead. Then, as the serum takes effect, we kiss hungrily, salty-mint syrup coating our tongues. For a time the microsynthes crawling through our veins stop whispering eternity and we can glimpse an ending, as did our ancestors. Back before we knew we were male or female, knew only that sexual sweetness banished, however briefly, fear of the eternal night.
Sweetness, in the shadow of the worm.
After a year of
trysts, we know each other’s heats and tastes and textures. I can play her exactly as she wishes to be played.
She is drop-dead beautiful, as perfect as a pleasure doll. Could have an Upper if she wished. A mere fluke of genetics that she was born Lower. A fluke of luck that she wants me.
First, I push back her nut-brown, shoulder-length hair. I slowly trace my tongue along her neck, beneath her small delicate ears, where a vein dances with life. She closes her eyes and sighs, as if drifting into sleep, but it is actually shameless surrender, luxuriating in every elemental, spasm-inducing sensation I stroke up through the envelope of her skin. She trusts me completely. We keep touching until touching becomes inebriation and our eyes begin to blur. Then my left hand parts her legs. Ferris lifts her knees, and I bury my face where her vulva and labia are moist and lathered, layered like the inside of a flower. She trembles until she is carried away, far away, returning to me with her fingers tangled gratefully in my hair, her eyes bright as stars.
Night Hawks Page 9
