Marie is still pretty, even with her regulation grey outfit. Dishevelled hair, always full of straw or something or other. A disarming smile. Her lips a bit chapped from the fresh air and the cold. I wanted to take care of her. She didn’t want me to. She thrashed around in my arms, like a flighty filly.
I gave up. And anyway, my clicker was jealous. We shared the same teepee (while we were living in teepees). He was a sane man, my clicker. An honest man, loyal and loving. A true resistance fighter. He told me that I aroused him, with my newly released half in the same bed.
I think it’s hard to love someone who has a half. Who the hell knows what he’s done with his half? And the ones who’ve got jars don’t have the same deal as us at all. They don’t turn into fugitives. They’re happy to admit that they have replacement hearts and lungs, available in a goddam storage jar, and there you go. It must even be quite a reassuring thought. Statistically, it prolongs life by a dozen or so years, which is nothing to sneeze at. In any case, loving someone who is a half (that’s what we should say, but I can’t get used to it)—well, it’s not that straightforward. I’ll leave it up to you—to your common sense, to your imagination—to envisage the consequences of a situation like this. You’re perfectly capable of it. With a bit of empathy. A bit of sympathy. I can’t do everything, in this notebook. I’m running out of steam. I’ve already written one hundred and thirty-three pages. And then, well, if you’re still up for it, you’ll draw your own conclusions. I can’t do more than that.
I’m cold.
I have to hurry.
I’m lying down at the end of a tunnel. They’ve wrapped me in woollen material and moss. Halves are bringing me down hot herbal tea. We’ve run out of wine. I’m coughing. I can’t get enough air. But we’re being hunted down. I’d like to go outside and breathe. I’d like to breathe like a normal mammal endowed with two lungs. A kind half found me an old pot of honey. I don’t see Marie anymore. I don’t know what’s happening to her. Sissy never visits me. The bitch.
I’d like to write ‘we wrapped me in woollen material’, because it’s our group, us who are looking after me. But, oddly enough, you can’t write that. Not in any language, as far as I know. I have no choice but to write ‘they…me’, not ‘we…me’. I’m learning. I’ve been writing for a fair while now, but I’m still discovering things. If I wasn’t writing, I’d be wondering what I’m doing here, in this hole, with this group. Sometimes, I’m completely surprised. In the old days, babies born by caesarean section were called ‘surprised babies’. Because they hadn’t battled to get out of their mothers’ bodies. Because they hadn’t endured the contractions. They were born without transitioning.
Where was I? I stopped writing for a bit because Moses flipped out. We had to deal with him. Moses had huge expectations for our big expedition and he hasn’t got over his disappointment. They didn’t manage to bring him back his half, Momo. At first I thought Moses was attached to Momo like I was to Marie, and I was upset for him, for his suffering. Moses would talk to himself under the trees. He raised his head to the sky and stood holding his chest. The clicker told me that, at the very instant our team was about to grab Momo, a group of nurses behaved in an unusually heroic way. They began to defend the dormitory as if their lives depended on it. As if they really and truly believed in the whole thing. As if together they had decided to counterattack. It was terrifying. They lined up and used their bodies like battering rams, charging at our team. A hellbent robot is like a speeding truck that nothing can stop. Our team took flight. And they left Momo back there. Unplugged. All alone. No one knows what happened to him.
I felt sorry for Moses, but as it turns out he is part of a small group of people I’m wary of. I haven’t worked out exactly what’s going on, but it’s a group that works at some distance from our tunnels. They’ve organised a field hospital operating theatre. Moses is at the end of his life, like me. He has a heart condition on top of everything else. And I think he had designs on Momo’s heart.
We can’t let things like that happen. Can we? In my mind, we were reuniting—I mean, we were rescuing our halves simply to be with them. To protect them. So that they wouldn’t suffer what was happening to us. If we too start chopping them up—that’s not good.
The expedition also got hold of some old jars stockpiled at the Centre, and still full. One solution that came up was to collect a reasonably fresh heart from one of the jars and attempt a transplant on Moses, to console him, in a way. Personally, I wouldn’t go near a heart whose provenance or removal date was unknown. Anyway, the whole group is arguing and arguing about it; before it goes to a vote, Moses will have had time to drop dead ten times over. I can understand why he’s lost it.
When I arrived at the forest, my clicker showed me some videos. At first I thought they were advertisements, ads for a better world, for holidays or something like that. Old people at the beach. A sea unlike any I’d set eyes on. I’ve only ever seen the sea once, on a school excursion. It was overcast and raining, but that wasn’t what annoyed me; it was that I couldn’t actually see the sea. I would have liked to get a bit more perspective. We were level with the water, flat water on a flat beach, and I would have had to climb up to a high spot, but there we were, shuffling around on that narrow beach. All I could see was a band of grey water with some sky above. I thought the sea was much bigger. What do you see when you see the sea? Only a fragment. I wanted to see the whole sea. Anyway. On the video you can see old people on a white beach with overhanging trees that provide what seems like the most lovely shade, and a turquoise sea, utterly turquoise, neither blue nor green but that colour you see on pigeons’ throats…sometimes, on some pigeons…well, anyway, I’m making a comparison with whatever I can. With the colour of my eyes. On the video the old people are laughing and cuddling each other and passing suncream around and drinking from tall coloured glasses and sleeping and listening to music and doing the kinds of things you’d imagine doing in a world where you didn’t have to work all the time or look for work that didn’t exist and worry about how you were going to pay for everything that had to be paid for and fight off all the illnesses and all the pain and when you got home deal with a dog that wasn’t even a dog. I began to understand that it wasn’t an ad because not a single product was being pitched—apart from the old people themselves, in a way, the lifestyle of old people. I began to feel angry. It wasn’t a holiday resort, or a luxury retirement home, not exactly. It was their life. The clicker zoomed in on one woman in particular. The hologram image magnified, and magnified, and I hiccupped. I couldn’t breathe properly anymore. I tried to breathe, to breathe, catch my breath, but it didn’t come, I couldn’t inhale, on the contrary every-thing inside me wanted to disgorge itself, the hiccup turned into nausea. It was a stolen video—the clicker had obtained it through our undercover network—but the hologram was high-definition and the woman looked at me with eyes that I recognised. I recognised her. She was old, but they were my eyes. It was me.
It was me as a very old woman. That seemed strange for a start. The image had been doctored, altered, enlarged, the wrinkles photoshopped out, but it was an old woman who was identical to me. Me when I would never reach that age. Because I’m going to die soon, with what’s left of my body. That’s why I’m in a hurry to write.
Have to hurry.
Her face…The worst was looking at her eyes. That quite unusual green verging on turquoise, with a golden halo around the pupil. A narrow scar circled her left eye. It was attractive, like a smile line, but I’m sure that scar annoyed her—when we zoomed in you could see she tried to hide it with concealer. It was an attractive scar. It had turned out well. She had not only taken my eye but also my eyelids, my attractive eyelids, still smooth, transplanted onto that face stranded somewhere beyond time. With my rows of eyelashes, with my tear duct. An eye like the sea, the sea where she cavorted like a happy-go-lucky sea lion. What did she see? I saw the sea she saw. It was my eye, my missing eye. I had a feeling in my b
elly, something black like bile, icy-cold. I’m frightened, I thought. That’s it. She frightens me. She is terrifying, horrendously so. Pure horror. So I thought: Get a grip. The feeling rose from my belly towards my throat. I felt hot in the head, in my cheeks, even my brain felt hot. Have you ever felt like killing someone? I mean for real, not metaphorically? When you work out in practical terms how you’re going to go about it, which flight you’ll need to catch, the location, the hideout, the weapon, your ways and means, accomplices, the level of suffering you want to inflict before death?
The clicker told me she was probably about a hundred and sixty years old. On the video, when you see them up close, the old people are more or less old. In spite of the plastic surgery, you can see from the wrinkled bodies that some of the old people are about eighty, while others must be heading for two hundred. All of them are white—I mean, tanned from the sun, but white. Judging from the average age of those old, rich creatures, whom we call (so the clicker told me) the pureblood stock, there isn’t just one but several Generations, so instead of referring to halves, we have to say thirds or quarters, probably even tenths. They use one clone, then two, then three, then four, et cetera. They dissect them one after the other. What’s more, a lot of those pure-bloods have had biological children, who themselves were entitled to their doubles or to their triples, not just to the jars of organs given to those who are, let’s say, simply well off. Only the planet’s super-rich can afford clones.
The clicker zoomed in on the very old and very well-preserved body of my pureblood. I could just make out another narrow scar below her right breast, below the bikini top, right where my lung was breathing, right where my heart would be beating if they captured me, where Marie’s heart was beating or that of other thirds and quarters I didn’t even know, younger ones, stored away or hidden somewhere. Purebloods can have their heart replaced—or any organ they want—several times in their lives. Almost indefinitely. Kidneys, liver, stomach, veins, arteries, eyes, genitals…Entire sections of skin can also be transplanted, it works well, like clothing made of skin, smooth bellies, thighs, faces, arms… But it’s expensive to have a clone, even for the one per cent of super-rich who own ninety-nine per cent of the world’s wealth. Breeding a clone costs them about one per cent of their ninety-nine per cent—I’ll let you be the judge. So, when the egg is good, it’s more economical to do it in pairs. When the egg is good, as in the case of almost all my Generation, they harvest it straightaway, divide it and implant it in two or more uteruses. My mother was never more than my incubator. That woman huddled inside her raincoat, hunched over her knitting or craning towards her virtual images, crouching against the gate to the Centre. Sometimes such a rebel. My mother.
That’s how they came up with Marie and me, and all the others, Momo and Moses, and José and my patient’s husband, and Pépette and Juliette, et cetera. And they had a shot at that experiment of keeping one asleep, who didn’t wear out, and to let the other one loose in the jungle of the world. The pairs of twins drove the scientists crazy. One’s looking for work and accommodation, while the other one lies snoring in a space blanket. I swear you’d think it was a reality TV show. Social peace, they call it. They tried heaps of things. Personally, I think it’s the demon of comparison at work. I’d rather not know. Honestly.
My clicker sensed that I was weakening. He held me tight. He tried to make me laugh. And he succeeded, the idiot. The trauma is in the past, he said. The baby you once were no longer exists, even its cells no longer exist. The past is past. You must live completely in the present. Know who you are! Focus on your timeline! Treat your old wounds like contaminating agents to be cleansed from your system! Where’s the baby?
They were the same words I used to chant to my patients. That I used to chant to him. And now he was playing peekaboo with me. Where’s the baby? We got the giggles.
I don’t even know if it’s the multimillionaire old biddy who is directly responsible for my fate. For my birth—let’s say it like it is. Especially since it’s via a legal deed, signed by her parents at the moment of her birth, stipulating that clones will be harvested for her and that, automatically, as soon as one of her organs breaks down, they will remove it from me, as they must have removed organs from my predecessors, and as they would from the fresh young Marie if I hadn’t taken action.
Apparently the clone stock becomes weaker over time. So there’s a sort of expiry date. A bit like yoghurt. You can make yoghurt with yoghurt for a fair while, and then, from time to time, all the same, you have to get hold of new yoghurt. If you see what I mean. If you’ve ever transferred yoghurt culture into a yoghurt-maker. They even came up with the idea of deep-freezing, but that was the end of us offshoots. Which is why there’s now a limited lifespan for any of Frankenstein’s monsters. (That’s what some of us call the offshoots. Frankenstein’s monster was a fictional creature. A creature made out of various body parts.)
A brain transplant is their cut-off point. They tried a thousand times with monkeys: it works, but it only extends the life of the brain, not the body. It’s the brain’s ego that survives, but the container, the face and all the rest of the body, is nothing more than a walking corpse. And even then, it seems the ego doesn’t cope well with the brain transplant. It seems there are worse things than death.
Where was I?
I’m cold.
Oh yes. My clicker and I were watching that video. I asked him again if he could replay the sea. That supernatural, turquoise sea. I used to think the sea was always murky, black, terrifying. We have a book by Victor Hugo in the encampment (Victor Hugo was a nineteenth-century writer), in which I found this sentence: ‘A strange sense of sombre expectation hung over the sea.’ I say it over and over to myself. I don’t know why, but this sentence makes me feel better. We can never listen to music here: the little battery power we have is reserved for more necessary functions. ‘A strange sense of sombre expectation hung over the sea.’ This sentence made it seem as if the sea was an immense reservoir of possibilities. Anyway. That was not at all the sea on the video. I couldn’t stop asking the clicker to replay the images, again and again. A bit more and we could have been at the cinema. At the drive-in in the forest! (Drive-ins were open-air cinemas; our ancestors used to drive there and watch films from their cars.) I wanted to keep looking at the old woman. The pureblood. The woman for whom I was born. The one for whom Marie and I, and perhaps others exactly like us, were born. I found the whole thing difficult to take on board. For weeks, I found it difficult. It seemed so hard to believe. It requires a radical change of thinking, really, to no longer see yourself at the centre of things—at the centre of your own vision of the world. To understand that you are nothing more than a peripheral offshoot. Required by people very far away, light years away from you. Who have decided, bingo, that you would be born, that you would be harvested, then taken to pieces. I felt like Copernicus (Copernicus was a scholar from I-can’t-remember-which century), who worked out that the Sun doesn’t orbit the Earth, but that the Earth orbits the Sun.
The Earth isn’t at the centre. It’s true. It’s not at the centre of anything, as my clicker explained to me. We see the Milky Way as if it were a ribbon. We believe we’re in the middle of the ribbon, at the crossroads of different pathways, if you like. Not at all. The ribbon is an optical illusion. The Milky Way is a large spiral, a disc, as are most galaxies. And we see the disc side-on. We’re right on the edge, on the edge of the disc, not at all in the centre, but rather so lost out on the periphery that we see the spiral in cross-section.
We are small and spinning in the cosmos, and the life forms we’ve discovered elsewhere, people who probably look like us (well, anyway, we don’t have a clue), are too far away for us ever to be able to talk to them.
So, there you go.
My clicker holds me tight. I’m out of breath. He’s almost hurting me.
Apparently at my age, not that old, we don’t have a single original cell. All our cells have automat
ically replaced themselves. All our body tissues renew themselves several times in the course of our lives. Our heart and our brain take longer, I think, but most of the organs in our bodies are routinely less than ten years old and are continuously regenerating. A red blood cell, for example, lives for only a very short time. Likewise for the cells in our eyes.
I’m cold.
I’m frightened that I’ll get an infection in my one and only kidney. It’s wearing out. Admittedly, they could always transplant one of Marie’s kidneys; it wouldn’t kill her to have only one kidney. But (if you’ve been following me) I have become completely opposed to this use of the halves. To this use of us.
I’m afraid the only truly durable bit of my body is the electrical box. The unit implanted in my grey matter. Fortunately, thanks to my skull, to my sturdy, hermetically sealed cranium, I can’t feel it. I think I’d go crazy if I could feel it beneath my skin. Fortunately, I’ve got a Tupperware head, ha! Otherwise I couldn’t help operating on myself, like I did with my dog, Wolf, and when I removed my implants, with one small, clean incision. The main thing is to perform it with conviction. No hesitation. You cut, and that’s it. No soul-searching. Get a grip. I’d be up for it, if I could feel that thing moving under my fingers. If I could feel how hard it was, its corners. In the mush of my grey matter. It gives me electric shocks. Perhaps it’s malfunctioning. It’s emitting things I can’t control anymore. It’s not good. I no longer have any resistance. In the past, I felt as if I knew how to erect my own immune defence system against the things inside me. As if I knew how to detect them and stop them. But perhaps the problem is in my own brain—tissues becoming necrotic from contact with the unit—and not at all the unit itself that is corroding, as I’d hoped was the case. Or perhaps the corrosion is attacking my brain.
Our Life in the Forest Page 9
