We Are Both Mammals

by G. Wulfing

  The surgeon paused again. “The extra strain on Toro-a-Ba’s systems may mean that he doesn’t live as long as he normally might have.

  “So what all this means is that Toro-a-Ba has given you some extra time. Maybe extra years.

  “And the pair of you have given us a wonderful chance to experiment; we have learnt a tremendous amount from this procedure. We will be able to apply that to other scenarios, and as we keep studying you we will learn even more.”

  I gazed at the white-coated woman blankly. When the thurga beside me died, I would die too.

  It took a long moment for my dazed brain to process this.

  My lifespan had been shortened. I would now live no longer than a thurga. A short-lived thurga. I had been given ‘maybe extra years’.

  I stared, speechless.

  Acknowledging my expression, Fong gave a slight, rueful smile, and a tiny shrug. “It’s longer than you would have had if we had not performed this surgery.

  “When you came in, Daniel, you were a dead man. We did all this so that you might have a shot at surviving, and if it worked, it would be a procedure that we could use on others in future. So any life you have now … is a bonus. It’s life you would not have had if we hadn’t hooked you up to Toro-a-Ba.”

  I sank the back of my head more deeply into the pillow. The now-familiar nausea was beginning to creep back into me. My life was borrowed. It was not my own. The thurga beside me was the only thing keeping me alive. And my life was shortened: when that furry creature died, I would die too. His life and mine were tied together.

  Just as our bodies were. Because our bodies were.

  The surgeon, Fong, was so matter-of-fact about the whole thing. It was strange, and disturbing. My life had been saved, but ruined, by her actions; I was now permanently fettered to another living creature, who was also fettered to me, and my life had been shortened and so had his; and neither of us could ever live a normal day again. This was mind-bending; sickening; unnatural; surely enough to drive someone insane. But, inexplicably, the surgeon seemed to find nothing overly unsettling in the whole affair.

  Surgeon Fong explained that if, at any point, it became apparent that I would not survive, it would in theory be possible to save Toro-a-Ba by separating him from me, providing he could be transported to a hospital quickly enough. I, however, would not live for more than a few hours without Toro-a-Ba. My organs would swiftly fail, and I would die in great pain.

  “We could have tried to hook you up to machines to keep you alive,” Fong explained matter-of-factly, “but your quality of life would have been pretty dismal. The hospital would have done that in the first place, but for the fact that you were most likely going to die anyway, so there was no point. If hooked up to machines you might have survived, but you would simply have been comatose forever.”

  She seemed to imply that I was much better off with Toro-a-Ba keeping me alive.

  It did not feel that way to me.

  I supposed that, viewed from the surgeons’ perspectives, they felt that they had done the right thing. If nothing else, even if I was not happy with their decision, they had learned much. This had been an experiment worth making; and I was simply the unvolunteer.

  “In future, you’ll have to take really good care of this guy,” one of the other human surgeons told me lightly but seriously, referring to Toro-a-Ba. “He’s your life-support system.”

  –––––––

  I had been given medication to prevent my vomiting, since such upheaval would threaten my organs’ healing. I had not eaten in weeks, being kept alive by intravenous liquids, so there was nothing in my digestive system to evict; but that would not stop my body attempting to vomit in reaction to the anaesthetic, the drugs, and the shock it was experiencing. Everything – painkillers, fluids, nutrients – was fed directly into my bloodstream through drips, or into my organs via the hoses embedded in my body. As the drugs were lessened, however, as my body began to recover, the vomiting reflex set in. One day I took a mouthful of water – the only thing I was taking orally – and threw it straight back up again. It was agony. It felt as though my stomach and intestines were being torn out of my belly. Having vomited, I screamed in pain at the convulsion of my abdomen. A human nurse hurried in and saw what had happened, and I was immediately given more painkillers and sedated so that my body could recover.

  It was explained to me, when I awoke later, that this was a necessary stage in my recovery. The quantity and intensity of the drugs I was taking must eventually be tapered off, as if my body came to rely on the drugs it would become addicted to them and would probably never fully heal itself. Stimulating my body’s own healing powers was essential, and in order to do that the drugs must gradually be eased away. Unfortunately, this included allowing my body to react naturally to what it had endured, and that meant vomiting, nausea, and pain.

  In all of this, Toro-a-Ba and I had barely spoken to one another.

  I was intensely aware of his quiet presence, more than arm’s reach to my right. I had scarcely any right to live, now; every heartbeat of mine was his. My life was a concession. It was not my own. Every minute I had now, was his.

  Occasionally he would try to speak to me, asking me how I felt this day, but I could not bring myself to reply. Eventually I was able to speak coherently with the nurses and various specialists – human and thurga – who came to examine me and the thurga, but I could scarcely bring myself to look at the thurga, let alone speak to him. When I could look at him, I would watch in macabre fascination as the specialists examined him, and as the nurses changed or inspected his dressings and hypodermic fittings, and often in these moments I would see him glance toward me, as though seeking eye contact, but I could not meet his gaze.

  I would hear him speaking, in Thurga-to or in English, to the surgeons and nurses, many of whom he knew, of course, from working with them here at the clinic; but I never participated in these conversations and scarcely paid any attention to them, even when they were relevant to me. I gathered, and occasionally saw out of the corner of my eye, that the thurga read books: he had a stand that seemed to be specially designed for the purpose, with legs that stood on the mattress on either side of him, and a slanted shelf upon which a book could rest, the pages held open by two cords that hung from the top of the stand and draped down over the pages of the book, weighted by heavy beads at their ends. He would arrange a pillow or two behind his back and shoulders to prop himself in a semi-sitting position.

  He was healing much faster than I, of course, and was probably fit enough to have left the hospital a week ago: but of course he could not. He could never, now, go anywhere without me.

  And so he read books and waited for me to heal.

  I was still spending more time unconscious than not, sliding in and out of sleep, dopey and sedated and exhausted. As my intake of drugs was lessened, however, and my body began to recover, I was awake more often, and more lucid and coherent. I was also more sensible of what was happening to me and how my body was reacting.

  I felt ill. I felt so very ill. I felt sicker than I had ever felt in my life.

  It was not only the trauma to my system, the chemicals in my body, the blood loss, the after-effects of the general anaesthesia, and the fact that my body was now trying to come to terms with sharing itself with another body – of a different species, no less – that were causing me to vomit or retch several times a day, even when I refrained from sipping water.

  I was joined to another creature.

  Physically joined. Permanently joined.

  Its body and my body were, for all intents and purposes, one now.

  I had a conjoined twin.

  At thirty years old, I had gained a conjoined twin, and would now have to spend the rest of my life with him.

  And this ‘twin’ was not even the same species as I.

  The nausea continued for days. It was horrible. The powerful painkillers I was being given were enough to prevent me screaming in pain eve
ry time I vomited, but vomiting still hurt. As one particular drug was withdrawn from my system, for three days I spent my waking hours lying in silence, eyes closed, trying just to breathe calmly, and I was unable to bear sounds louder than a softly-spoken voice. When the medical staff tried to examine me, my body rebelled at every sensation, retching and shaking continuously so that I whimpered and gasped in pain, until they left me alone, concluding that examinations would have to wait until I was asleep.

  And it seemed that everywhere my mind turned, it found something that caused me to vomit.

  The tube-filled, fluid-filled hose that joined me to that other creature.

  The bandages and dressings that I knew covered massive surgical wounds and long lines of stitches. I had been cut into and sewn back together like a cloth doll.

  The tubes and hypodermic fittings that hung out of my body – my own naked, living skin, punctured by black thread and plastic tubing …

  The weakness, the sheer feebleness that subsumed me.

  The smell of the ointments and cleaning products when the nurses changed and inspected my – and the creature’s – dressings and bandages.

  The sight of the discolouration of my own skin – the bruising that yet lingered, the swelling and puffiness …

  The fact that I could feel so little: so much of my body had been numbed that it often seemed that much of it did not belong to me. What I could feel was often painful.

  And the awful, awful knowledge that I would never be alone again.

  It was as though my body knew that something horrific was happening. This was not mere recovery from major, risky and life-saving surgery. This was waking into a nightmare. I was alive, but not because my body had been repaired. I was living on borrowed life. Someone else’s life was keeping me alive. Someone else’s body was keeping mine from the grave.

  Perhaps my body knew that it should have been dead.

  –––––––

  “Daniel … are you awake?”

  The thurga spoke softly, but I heard him, automatically opening my eyes from my sleep or doze – I know not which. The room was in daylight; it seemed about mid-morning.

  I swallowed, and turned my pillowed head halfway toward him, thankful that for the moment I felt only slightly nauseated. I could not bring myself to vocalise even a grunt, but I figured that Toro-a-Ba would see my movement and that that would answer his question.

  “I know that you feel very ill nowadays. Are you all right?”

  I pondered the question. Was I all right?

  At the moment? Not really.

  In general? Not at all.

  After a pause, during which I said nothing and gave no outward acknowledgement of his question, Toro-a-Ba added, “I understand that you may not wish to converse at the moment, nor indeed for some time to come; however, I would like you to know that when you are ready, I should very much like to talk with you … Daniel.”

  He was using my given name to address me; something that the thurga-a only do when they are very intimate with a human. In Thurga-to, the word that describes what we would call, in English, a ‘given name’ or ‘first name’ literally means ‘an intimate name’ or ‘a personal name’. They have another word that means ‘a private name’, and that is the third name in a thurga’s appellation; a third name which is rarely given in introductions but is reserved for the bearer to reveal at will to certain persons of their choosing: soulmates, children, close friends … Distantly, I remembered being told at the Academy where I had done my technology training that most thurga-a have only half a dozen people in their lives with whom they would use these private names. The outworking of this is that when thurga-a address humans, they treat a human’s given name as that ‘private name’, and use the surname – usually with an honorific – as the ‘personal name’.

  He always pronounced my name perfectly, too: not shortening the name to two syllables – ‘dan-yul’ – as most people do, but pronouncing all three mellifluously, making the ordinary, ancient name sound positively elegant. ‘Danny-el’.

  The creature’s voice was always very gentle and soft, and he spoke mildly, clearly and thoughtfully. At first I had wondered if this was, at least in part, deference to my weak, shocked state, but I had learned as the weeks went on that this was simply Toro-a-Ba’s manner.

  This was my twin. This was my new constant companion: a creature who talked like a poet or an English professor. I could almost have laughed, with more than a little hysteria, but any movement of my abdomen typically resulted in pain and nausea, so I remained still.

  “I know that you are in shock,” the thurga continued softly. “I understand how – horrifying this must be for you.”

  I said nothing.

  There was a pause.

  Then Toro-a-Ba murmured, “I am not sure what humans believe in this regard, but thurga-a have always believed that all life is interrelated. All life is special, sacred, worth preserving and honouring. No creature should be thrown away unless it is poisoning the web.”

  He paused again. Still I had not so much as glanced at him.

  “Daniel, I do not know how you feel or what you are thinking,” he said slowly. “But I hope you understand that we need not be aliens to each other. We are different species, but I believe that we have more in common than you may have considered.”

  I swallowed, teeth and fists clenched, fighting the nausea that seemed to seize upon me every other moment these days. “Like what?” I asked flatly.

  “We are both mammals,” the thurga offered.

  I turned to my left and vomited again, freely.

  –––––––

  As the days passed, I found myself spending more time awake, and more clear-headed. I became more able to keep water down instead of vomiting it up. Slowly, the nausea abated.

  Wakefulness was not more pleasant than sleep, however.

  Sleep can be many things. A hindrance; a waste of time; a delay, a necessary inconvenience … a refuge, a relief, a respite. It can be healing or wearying, disappointing or refreshing.

  When I was awake, I began to long for it, for when I was asleep I did not have to think.

  One night, it would not seem to come to me. I had now been lying in a hospital bed for almost five weeks. I could scarcely remember what it felt like to be well. Pain, nausea, anguish, had all become commonplace to me. And as I spent more time awake and lucid, and was less able to escape my thoughts, despair began in earnest to join them.

  What was my life now?

  I would never so much as have a private conversation again.

  I would never be able to use a toilet in privacy again.

  I would never be alone again. Ever.

  Everywhere I went, there would be someone else. My independence was utterly gone. My right to live as I chose, my right to do as I pleased, my freedom … gone.

  In a kind of sick, dreamlike way, I pondered the ramifications of this surgery. I felt crazed and ill as these thoughts drifted through my head, but considering them from a distance, acknowledging them but pretending that they were not really mine, not really real, enabled me to refrain from bursting into maddened tears or screaming in hysteria.

  My every bodily function would be noticed by someone else. Every cough, every sneeze, every hiccup and bowel movement and moment of indiscretion – all would be known.

  If the thurga became ill, I would probably become ill too.

  I imagined returning to work with a thurga walking alongside me, hooked up to me by a hose. How would my colleagues react? Had they been told of what had happened to me?

  How could I ensure that the hose joining us would not snag on the various machines in the laboratories …?

  Would my employer want me back if I had another – an unpaid, unneeded hanger-on – beside me at all times?

  My heart sank, if it were possible, even further. No. I would not be able to return to work.

  I would probably become unemployable.

  This thurga an
d I – who would want us now?

  I could never marry. That was not such a hardship, I supposed; in all honesty, I have never considered myself the marrying type; but the fact that the option had been taken from me forcibly without so much as consulting me rankled.

  I could never flirt again.

  I could never meet anyone ever again without them seeing my – my deformity. My dependence on another living creature for survival. My disability. I was disabled now. Just as a person’s crutches or wheelchair is noticed before any other feature – just as a person with a disability is marked and recognised by that feature before all others – so would I be.

  And the staring. I would be stared at. Like a deformity or a prominent facial birthmark, my attachment would be stared at more than I was. In fact, I the person would disappear. Daniel Avari would disappear: I would be known as ‘that guy with the thurga attached to him by a gruesome sort of tube with bodily fluids in it’.

  Daniel Avari no longer existed. In the eyes of others, I would become an un-person: just a man with a very strange disability. People would cease to know me as Daniel. They would cease to know me as a person.

  I was no one.

  In keeping my life, I had lost my identity.

  I would never be alone again … yet I might well become the loneliest person in the world.

  I am an orphan. I have never had any family. As a child, this saddened me. Yet I discovered, as a young adult, once I had left the orphanage, that having no family can be an advantage: total freedom was mine. Total independence. I could go where I wanted, do as I pleased, and no one, ever, could tell me not to. I had a job; but if I chose to leave it, the only person who would starve was me. If I chose to relocate to another city, another continent, another planet, there was no one but myself to consider. There was no one to come home to; but there was no one to tell me not to leave. I was a free agent. My life was all my own; my days were mine to spend as I would.