We Are Both Mammals

by G. Wulfing

  –––––––

  Shortly after I received my music player, Surgeon Sarah Fong announced with some pleasure that, now that it was apparent that both Toro-a-Ba and I would survive and our recovery was progressing satisfactorily, she had arranged for a psychologist to speak with us, to assess the psychological aspects of the surgery. She mentioned that the psychologist was human, and inquired of Toro-a-Ba whether he would like to see a thurga psychologist in addition. He declined, saying that such an arrangement was not necessary.

  The thought made me feel nervous, ill – many things still made me feel ill – and confused. How was I supposed to talk to a psychologist? What on earth was I supposed to say? I was scarcely sure even in my own mind what I felt about what had been done to me; how could I explain anything to a psychologist? And how was I supposed to speak freely about how I felt about being conjoined to another without my consent when that other was present, in the room, in the same bed?

  I was an experiment, a test case; perhaps I was not supposed to feel anything. Perhaps my right to an independent opinion had disappeared with my ability to function independently; killed in the accident that had left my body unable to support itself.

  The psychologist, when she arrived a couple of days later, seemed nice enough. She was frank, but not insensitive. I felt a grudging appreciation for this: finally, someone on the medical staff seemed to be genuinely aware that I had feelings aside from my physical ones.

  She spoke with us privately, with only the three of us in the room, and invited us to call her by her first name, Tara. Most of the questions she asked were simple, ‘getting to know you’ sorts of questions, like how old I and Toro-a-Ba were, where and how we had grown up, et cetera. I am sure that she knew most of this stuff from the information she must have been given about us when Fong and Suva-a hired her to counsel such an unusual case; and I suspect, therefore, that she asked those questions to put us at ease and to get a sense of our mental states. She explained that this was a preliminary session, only half an hour long so that neither of us would get exhausted: she would be back a few days later to talk with us further.

  She also asked more pertinent questions, of course. She asked us how we felt about what had happened, and related questions; all of which I struggled to answer. I am sure she noticed this, but I saw no point in trying to pretend that all was well with me; particularly to someone who was highly trained in observing people’s emotions. Besides, I had not the energy to care. Let them think me mentally unsound if they would: I probably was, and if I was not allowed to be mentally unstable after such an accident and such a surgery as mine, when is a person allowed to be mentally unstable?

  I wondered if she noticed that the thurga and I did not speak to each other once during the whole half-hour session.

  Toward the end of the session she remarked to me that it seemed to her that I was still trying to come to terms with what had happened to me; and that that was perfectly normal and natural and I should take as much time as I needed to do so. It felt like being given permission to be mentally unstable and emotionally unsure, and somehow that felt nice; probably because it was a verbal acknowledgement of what I had suffered.

  The psychologist was there to counsel both of us, of course. After the first session, as I was processing the haze of emotions that filled me, I realised vaguely what these sessions reminded me of: couples counselling. The counselling of two people whose lives are bonded together … though no married couple was ever so literally bonded as I and the thurga were.

  In my clouded, unhappy state, the sickening thought occurred to me that the thurga was my wife. I was married to a furry, quadrupedal creature with a face like a possum’s …

  I vomited, and kept doing so until there was nothing left in my stomach to evict.

  –––––––

  The following afternoon, I lay dozing, thinking of nothing in particular. The room was empty but for me and the thurga.

  “Daniel.”

  The thurga’s soft voice broke into my thoughts.

  “Hhmh?” I mumbled, drowsy and distant.

  “May I speak with you?”

  “Mm-hm,” I consented, gathering my mind somewhat and turning my head halfway toward him, not actually looking at him.

  “I should like to apologise.”

  I blinked, sleepily surprised, and my head turned slowly to look at him.

  “I am aware that you are not pleased with what was done to you. I am sorry. I think you would rather have died, and if I had known that when the surgery was proposed, I would not have volunteered. I am truly, truly sorry to have done this to you. I regret with all my heart that I have caused you grief.”

  I stared at him.

  I had always struggled to read the facial expressions of thurga-a, and in truth I had not spent much time with them. Toro-a-Ba held my gaze with those big dark eyes of his, and they seemed wetter, more liquid, than usual; then I realised that they were watering at the edges. The watering welled up as I looked, and I realised that Toro-a-Ba was crying.

  I had known that the thurga-a can weep, but I had never seen it before, as they seem to be a rather serene race. Tears began to trace a darker path through the thurga’s dark brown fur, on either side of his pointed, possum-like nose. I held his gaze in wonder.

  For a long moment, all we did was stare at each other.

  “I am so sorry, Avari-Ba,” Toro-a-Ba said, in what was almost a whisper, still in his clear, deliberate way. “Please forgive my ignorance. My misguidedness. I thought that I was doing a good thing, but I have only brought you pain. I should have let you die in peace. What I have done is unforgivable, but I beg you to understand that my intentions were only to help you.”

  I was speechless.

  Another long moment passed, and Toro-a-Ba continued to weep. He did not sob, but the tears continued to soak their trails into his fur, and the pillow underneath his head grew damp patches. The big dark eyes blinked occasionally, but still they regarded me.

  Minutes dragged on, and still I had nothing to say. At last Toro-a-Ba turned his head from me and inched himself as far as he could onto his far side, facing away from me as much as his bandages and the still-tender hose would allow. I think he continued to weep, but facing away from me: alone, as much as our circumstances would allow. We would never be able to cry alone again.

  And I, after watching him for a moment, returned my gaze to the wall in front of me. He was right: he had done this. If no volunteer had been found, the procedure would never have taken place, and I would have been allowed to die quietly, unconsciously, from my wounds. This was his fault. All of it.

  He should have let me die.

  –––––––

  That night, I awoke in the darkness. There was silence aside from my own breathing: all the machines had been turned off, as they were no longer needed: Toro-a-Ba’s and my bodies were managing to function without external assistance – that is, his was. My body would never function independently again.

  I lay in the deep gloom for a while, gazing at the pale light that came through the curtains of the window, and the more yellow light that dimly came from the doorways. The night nurses would be on duty as always, somewhere in the building, but this room was empty and I could hear no voices.

  At length, I heard a clear murmur. “Daniel.”

  It was Toro-a-Ba, of course.

  I looked across at him, hearing the pillow make a slight scrunching sound under the back of my head as my head turned, which seemed loud in the quiet room. The thurga and I had not spoken since our conversation that afternoon.

  There was a pause, and then Toro-a-Ba said:

  “I do not wish you to be trapped in a future that you have not chosen. If you wish to be free of me, free of your life, all you need to do is talk to Surgeon Suva-a and Surgeon Fong. They should be able to separate you from me, and it is probable that I will live and you will die. If this is what you wish, I beg you to do it.”

  I s
wallowed. That very thought had occurred to me, weeks ago, amidst the clamouring haze of other thoughts and emotions, shortly after Surgeon Fong had informed me that it would in theory be possible to save Toro-a-Ba if I were dying; and now I wondered why I had not pursued it. Surely Surgeons Fong and Suva-a could reverse the surgery, and if they were successful then I would die while Toro-a-Ba would live.

  Why was this thought not attractive? Why was I not eager for this to happen?

  If I wished to believe that my current self had any altruism in it, then I could argue that Toro-a-Ba had already consented to possible death for my sake and had sacrificed much that I might live, and that therefore I did not want to put his life at risk yet again, nor make his sacrifice pointless; however, I could not deceive myself that such was the case.

  Far more likely was that I was a coward. Having cheated death once, the thought of surrendering to it willingly ran counter to my instincts; even though my current life was scarcely worth living, even though my future life had been ruined, and even though my escape from death had been none of my doing but indeed entirely without my sanction.

  Was I so much a coward? So much that I would live in misery, bemoaning my fate and hating the ones who had bestowed it upon me, rather than end it as it could have – would have – ended had they not intervened?

  It would be a painless death; a knowing death, a willing death; I would have time to make any and all arrangements that I pleased; and if it could be confirmed that Toro-a-Ba would survive the surgery, I would not be condemning him to lose his life with me; – condemning him to die because I refused his gift of life. I could die peacefully under anaesthesia on the surgical bed, and Toro-a-Ba could live on, knowing that all the suffering he had endured had been no one’s doing but his own. And if he did not survive, that too was his own fault: he had risked his life for a stranger, and though the first risk of surgery had been survived, fettering himself to another was a continual risk, and he had known that from the start. Either way, Toro-a-Ba would have no one to blame but himself.

  Was this not what I wanted?

  Then why did I baulk at it?

  Was life really so precious to me? Even a life perpetually joined to an unchosen other’s?

  “I know,” I croaked flatly to Toro-a-Ba.

  There was a long pause.

  Then Toro-a-Ba inquired softly, “Then what, if I may ask, do you choose, Avari-Ba?”

  ‘Mr Avari’. Hitherto he had always addressed me, when we were alone, as just ‘Daniel’.

  Except, I then realised, for this afternoon.

  I flexed the toes of one foot under the bedclothes; one of the few movements I could make that brought no pain.

  “I don’t know,” I replied at last.

  There was another long pause. The room was so quiet. Not even the analogue clock on the wall ticked: its mechanism was silent.

  Then Toro-a-Ba gave a soft sigh.

  “Avari-Ba, if we may leave aside, for a moment, your choice in this matter, I should like to converse with you, if your state will allow it. I have lain beside you for six weeks now, and still I feel that I do not know you at all. Whether I live or die, or whether you live or die, I should like to know the person to whom I joined myself. The person for whom … I did this.”

  I sighed, as deeply as I could without incurring too much pain, and the sigh came from the deepest part of me.

  There seemed so little point in talking. So little point in anything. If I was going to die, then nothing I said mattered. If I was going to live, there would be plenty of time for us to get to know each other; and what did our pasts matter, anyway? If my future tied to this creature would be different from anything in my life hitherto, then what did my life prior to this point matter? What did it matter who I had been, or what I had done, before?

  “You owe me nothing, Avari-Ba,” Toro-a-Ba said quietly, after a long moment. “It was I who did this to you. If you are already dead inside, then words are meaningless anyway. I shall let you sleep.”

  There was silence – a different silence, now; a silence of expectations no longer expecting.

  –––––––

  Days passed, and I could not decide whether to live or die.

  For all the effort that living things put into living, the question seemed like it should have been an easy one to answer. Life is desirable, isn’t it?

  Or if, for me, it wasn’t, then the answer seemed obvious.

  But I dithered.

  I had woken from my coma feeling closer to death than to life. Perhaps, when one has come so near to death that it seems still within reach, just on the other side of the veil of sleep, one is reminded of how unwelcome it is; how counter it runs to the instinct, the desire, of living things to live and thrive.

  My brain had known how close I was to death. My brain still knew that my life was borrowed, not my own. And perhaps it was my brain that craved life, and feared returning to the darkness that it had seen so imminent.

  My body was healing; my brain desired life; it seemed that my heart was the only part of me that was reluctant. But a life with a heart that longs for death is no life at all.

  I knew that my indecision was cruel to the thurga beside me, who had placed his fate in my hands even while I was still unconscious; but I could not make myself care. He had done this, all of this, to me; since he had put me in this position, he could now await my decision.

  I did not speak to him, and he did not attempt to speak to me.

  The psychologist, Tara O’Callahan, came to meet with us again. This time she remarked on the fact that she had not seen me so much as glance at Toro-a-Ba, ever.

  I shrugged, regarding the blankets.

  “This surgery was performed without your consent,” the psychologist began. “I have never experienced anything similar, but of course I can imagine that it’s shocking and it’s traumatic to wake up to find that you are permanently attached to someone else, and that you’re going to have to live the rest of your life that way.” She paused briefly. “You’ve effectively gained a conjoined twin, Daniel, and that’s shocking. It is only natural that you should struggle to accept it; anyone would. No one would go through this surgery happily and without any issues.

  “But I get the feeling that you are really unhappy about this. I’m starting to wonder if you wish the surgery had not been performed.”

  I was silent, regarding the blankets again, but without really seeing them. I suspect that my face told everything.

  There was a long pause.

  “If you don’t want to live, Daniel, that is understandable,” Tara said calmly. “But when a person goes through something like this – any great trauma – there is a lot of grief and processing that has to happen. Even if you feel like dying now, it doesn’t follow that you’ll always feel that way.”

  “May I speak?” Toro-a-Ba asked quietly, after a brief pause had elapsed.

  “Go ahead,” the psychologist invited him.

  “The surgeons have told us that, if Avari-Ba were to die, then it is possible that the surgeons could separate me from him, providing I could get to a hospital in time. That being the case, I have discussed with Avari-Ba the possibility that he could ask Surgeon Suva-a and Surgeon Fong to separate us. If the surgeons can do so successfully, then there is a good chance that I will survive, as my organs are healthy. Avari-Ba would die … but he may consider that preferable to living with me.”

  Toro-a-Ba paused. No one spoke.

  “The thought that Avari-Ba might not accept me occurred to me when I was volunteering to undergo this surgery,” the thurga explained, in his calm, soft-spoken manner. “I thought to myself about how I might feel in Avari-Ba’s place, and I thought that I might feel angry and upset that such a thing had been done without my consent.

  “But I had no way of knowing what Avari-Ba would want. So I decided that if Avari-Ba was angry with me, and wanted to die, I would accept that. I would rather offer my life to a person who did not want it than h
old onto my life and send to death someone who, if they had been given the choice, would have chosen to live, albeit with me.”

  He paused again. The psychologist and I were silent. Even I could not help but gaze at the thurga beside me.

  “And so, if Avari-Ba wishes to die now, I will accept that. I do not want him to think that he must live because of me. I have already risked death in partaking in this surgery; I hold my life lightly and am ready to let it go. I have given my life to Avari-Ba; if he wants it not, he is free to reject it. My life is worth nothing if it causes more grief than it alleviates; if it causes someone to wish for death rather than for life. If Avari-Ba would rather die than live, I will not demand that he live for my sake. My life for his was supposed to be a gift from me, not a curse.”

  There was a long moment of silence. I returned my gaze to the blankets and sheets that covered my lap, but I saw nothing. I did not know what to feel; part of me definitely wanted to weep, but not in front of others.

  ‘Not in front of others.’ If I did not die, my whole life would be lived in front of others, now; at least one other.

  “I feel sorry for Avari-Ba,” Toro-a-Ba murmured, since no one had spoken; he was making the longest speech I had ever heard from him. “I did not know that my actions would cause him such grief. I wish that I had known then what I know now about Avari-Ba’s desires; but I wished that then also, and that wishing did not help me to know. In that lack of knowledge, whatever I did would be taking a risk, and I knew that the outcome might be sorrow. “It is not Avari-Ba’s fault; and it is not mine. Things are as they are. I made my choice; now it is Avari-Ba’s turn to make a choice.”

  –––––––