Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Lou Aronica et. el.

  He finished his story with a thoughtful pull of whiskey and nodded at One-Eyed Nick, who said, “The thing is, Dr. Stone was a proud man. He reached too far, I think. Because of stupid pride, you know. There was no way out for him, for Rose.”

  Sarge put his forefinger up to his temple and cocked his thumb. He said, “When there’s no way out and a soldier’s about to be captured, he’s supposed to blow his own brains out, ya mean?”

  One-Eyed Nick rubbed his sore arm and said, “You know, Dr. Stone considered suicide. Even though he was puffed up with pride, he was miserable because Rose had to go through with the deconstruction. Bad things were scheduled to happen to her. Could he really save her and put her together afterwards? Sometimes he thought he could, and then he was wild with anticipation and a sense of immortality. Just as often, though, he had doubts. He had a bad case of the jitters from drinking too much coffee. He’d spent too much time analyzing and touching the pieces of Rose’s soul. He was sick of all the sleepless nights on call, wandering the ward’s bright corridors. In any hospital, you know, there’s always an air of unreality, an underlying layer of false hopes and fears. The orderlies rushing by with their blood samples and specimens, the nurses and their needles, the surgeons’ tight, grim smiles—who really wants to believe the things they do to mind and flesh? And, you know, the chemical smells and the noises. There’s nothing that’s natural or normal. In the hours before dawn, when time drags on forever, you can hear each and every little sound. And everywhere, of course, the TV cameras mounted high in the corners of rooms, watching. Lots of times, Dr. Stone felt oppressed and doomed, like everything he’d ever done wrong in his life was about to catch up with him. I think he’d have loved to have shot up a lethal dose of ALH-25 and watched the atom bombs go off inside his head. But what would have happened to Rose then? Should he let another doctor do the deconstruction, let him touch her mind? No, he decided he had to treat her. He’d take her into the HDI room, and he’d do it as carefully as it could be done, he’d do it right. He had a plan to save the best part of her, the secret light, you know, her very soul.

  “When it came time for her deconstruction, he went to see her. There were no croissants or doughnuts that morning; no warm aroma of coffee overlaying the smells of lysol and fear. Somehow, Rose had fastened the velcro and nylon restraints around her ankles and wrists. She lay spread-eagled on her broad hospital bed—the thing is, she always had a sense for the melodramatic. “I’ve saved the orderlies the trouble,” she said. “Isn’t it true that the patients must be restrained before they’re taken in for deconstruction?” The truth is, though, she really didn’t know all that much about it because Dr. Stone had never explained the details of the procedure. And she had never wanted to know. Gently, he could be gentle, you know, he gently ripped open the velcro snaps and began rubbing the dents from her wrists. “After we go into the HDI room, the nurse will give you something—we can’t use mechanical restraints during deconstruction.”

  “He tried to explain that during the deconstruction, certain of her memories would be activated. Then the nerve signals to her muscles would have to be cut off, like when you dream, or else her body would try to reenact the remembered motions; her arms would flail and her legs kick out as she tried to run away. “I’ll be paralyzed, won’t I?” she asked. “Listen, Rose, don’t be afraid, I’ll help you.” But she was afraid; she was so afraid she was dripping sweat. And she was very angry because the hospital mattresses were covered with plastic and held her nervous sweat close against her skin. She asked for a clean gown, and after she’d changed and come back from the bathroom, she said, “You’ve tried to be so kind to me, but what can you do? Oh, I knew this day would come, knew it but didn’t care. And now that it’s come, it’s strange, I find I do care, very much.” As he stroked her hands, trying to calm her, she said, “The first time we met, I asked you if you believed in God, do you remember? Oh, God, what a thing to throw at someone, but I think I wanted to make you a little nervous because I was very nervous, having to tell you things about myself, the private things I didn’t think anyone would understand, especially a doctor; doctors always made me nervous, but you understand me, a little at least, the important things—don’t you?”

  “He was worried at the shrillness of her voice, the barely controlled panic. He would have ordered a sedative but that would have interfered, with her deconstruction in unpredictable ways. So he poured her a glass of water and said, “I understand, Rose; it will be okay.” But the thing is, he wasn’t too sure it would be okay, and as for understanding, he didn’t even understand himself, so how he could he hope to understand her?

  “Then she sat on the edge of the bed and began kicking her feet in her nervous way, and all the while she stared at him with a look that gradually changed from fear to a sort of ironic contempt, and then to pity. Pity for him! That was the way she was; it was her finest quality. She had this ability to see her own sufferings reflected and magnified in others. With pity came that unreal calmness of hers, and then a look that Dr. Stone would never forget. She was staring at the gray, empty TV screen on the wall, or maybe she was staring at the wall itself—he couldn’t tell which. Her eyes—she had dark, intelligent eyes, you know—her whole face was full of light, full of rapture. It lasted only a moment, this look, and then it was replaced by her familiar mask of sadness and irony. “This must be so hard for you,” she said. And Dr. Stone put on his best bedside voice, you know, trying to reassure her. But he was really trying to make everything okay in his own mind, and he said, “Don’t worry, I can save you.”

  “For a long time, she just sat there kicking her legs, she didn’t say a word. The only sounds in the room were the rising and falling of their breaths and the jerky squeaking of the bed’s steel frame as she kicked and kicked. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she smiled and quoted a favorite line from one of Shelley’s poems: ‘ “I am the eye with which the universe beholds itself and knows itself divine.’ “ And then, she told him, “Oh, I don’t think you can.”

  “He thought she must be a little crazy, after that. If you can look at everyday things, at a turned-off TV set, or the paint on a blank wall, or even in a dead flower, if you can see evidence of purpose or divinity— that’s a little crazy, isn’t it? Crazy, sure, but the thing is, he loved her for being crazy. He was shaking from the coffee he’d been drinking all night, and he fumbled for words. He said, “During the deconstruction, your memories can be saved on the computer. And then, during the reconstruction, it’s illegal as hell and they can get me for malpractice, maybe even send me to the incinerators, but when we make up the biochip, everything can preserved. Almost everything; sometimes there are memories that don’t associate well, and we can’t get the mapping right. If there’s a choice, Rose, your life has been so hard—aren’t there some gainful memories you’d rather not have?”

  “Rose’s face flushed with anger when he said that; she grabbed the sleeve of his jacket, and her fingers dug in like claws. “How could I have expected you to understand?” she asked him. Then her face went calm and soft, and she sighed. “All my life I’ve been searching for the words to the one true, unutterable thing words can’t express. Or maybe it’s just that I will never find the words. But I have to, before I die, say it; it’s something like… like a woman giving birth, out of the pain, something wonderful, life, it doesn’t stop. Sometimes I think God is terrible beauty, relentless love. Intellectually, and intuitively, I have to believe it’s sufficient to have lived even for a minute. When Johnny died… it will never stop hurting, but I’ll never lose him, he’s not lost. Don’t take away the painful memories, Doctor, they’re all I have.”

  “Soon after that, the orderly came for her. He helped her into an ugly wheelchair, you know, one of those monstrosities of dingy, brown vinyl and chrome. He rolled her down the corridors to the HDI room. There she was given an injection. One of the nurses had brutal little fingers, all hard and yellow from the cigarettes she chain-smoked between de
constructions; Dr. Stone could hardly stand to watch Rose gasping as the needle went into her arm. The truth is, he hated the HDI room, everything about it, even though he’d done fifty deconstructions there. The shiny floors smelled of soap and polish, and it was too clean. And the stainless-steel cabinets and tables, the electronic machinery with its black plastic switches, all spotlessly clean. At the end of the room was the imaging device, you know, the computer. It was a huge, metal and glass doughnut with a dark hole at its center big enough so that a child could have sat in it. “Oh, God!”—that’s what Rose said when she first saw it, “Oh, God!”

  “Overlooking all this stuff was a wall of plexiglas; it was really more like a window to the room next door, the viewing room. There were tables and empty chairs in the viewing room, and Dr. Stone saw her staring at them like she couldn’t guess what they were for. “The guests of the hospital use them,” he explained. “To witness the deconstructions.”

  “The nurses put Rose on a flat, brown vinyl table. They placed her elbows down into the armrests and eased her head into a specially molded head holder. The injection was beginning to take effect, and she couldn’t move any part of her body below her neck. But, like it was a bad dream or a nightmare, she could still mumble a few words, still cry out in terror and pain. “No, no,” she said, over and over, “Oh, God, please no!”

  “She was flat on her back, and after a while she couldn’t see anything, so she couldn’t have been aware of the men filing into the viewing room. But Dr. Stone saw them through the window, you know, serious men in gray suits. They took their seats silently, without fuss or hesitation. The Director of the Electroshock Research Program, the Chief of Psychosurgery, the Zone-Therapy Chief Lobotomist, the Government Man and the General—Rose was famous, you know, and the authorities wanted to see how the deconstruction would work on someone like her. The last one to enter the viewing room was the Director of Psychiatry. He was a pompous little man with tiny blue eyes and a pink face like a baby’s. Microphones on one of the tables picked up his irritating voice as he said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  “That was a very bad moment for Dr. Stone, one of the worst moments of his life. He dropped his chin down into his chest, staring down at his reflection in the polished floor. Rage and pain, pain and rage—he suddenly knew what he was doing was wrong. His whole life, everything he’d ever thought or felt, all wrong. But he had to hide it, he couldn’t just find a scalpel in one of the cabinets and start cutting into his neck; no, he had to go through with it, so he swallowed against the hard knot in his throat, stepped over to Rose and checked the IV dripping the tracer into her vein. Into her brain. The tracer would circulate up through her brain arteries, through the capillaries into the amygdala and brain stem, through cerebellum and cortex; it would diffuse across individual neurons and synapses. Ultimately—if everything went right—it would highlight the K-lines, you know, the circuitry of chemical memory. Rose’s memories. “No, no, please!” Dr. Stone heard someone say, and it took him a while before he realized it was Rose, lost in a nightmare, and not himself who was shouting.

  “He nodded at the nurse; she flipped a switch. The machinery came alive with a hum, and Rose’s table began moving along the floor track. Straight toward the imaging device on the far wall. Her head disappeared into the center of the machine. It was surrounded by holographic scanners and computers she couldn’t see; her brain vibrated with magnetic resonances and chemicals she couldn’t feel. Dr. Stone studied his gauges, adjusted the field, and he turned to address the guests. That was what he had to do, you know, put on a kind of show, make it interesting, especially for the layman in the viewing room who’d never seen a deconstruction before. “One of the oldest philosophical and scientific debates,” he said has been the mind-body problem. For a long time, of course, it’s been accepted that the mind is just what the brain does, as in any other body function. It’s only because of the brain’s mystery and complexity that there was ever an argument about mind. After all, we never talk about a “stomach-digestion” problem, unless there’s a food shortage and we’re forced to eat rotten soup rations at one of the Zone kitchens.”

  “Dr. Stone hated himself for making jokes while Rose’s brain was about to be stripped naked, but the thing is, he couldn’t help himself because he was going out of his mind with remorse. He felt wild and fey, like he wanted to kill the men in the viewing room, or to kill himself, kill someone. He suddenly hated the idea of experimenting on human beings, on anyone, even the criminally insane or the brain-damaged soldiers down on the other wards. Originally, you know, like a lot of others, he’d argued that it was immoral to do experimental brain surgery on healthy chimpanzees or other animals. The thing is, if you’re trying to get at the material basis of mind, to really show it at the molecular level, you have to have a human being, because who can say if animals really think like we do? And that was the real reason for the deconstructions, you know. To show that we’re all robots enslaved by our brain chemistry, that there’s no such thing as soul.

  “When Dr. Stone finally got a grip on himself, he finished his explanation. “This is the imaging device,” he said, tapping the metal ring over Rose’s head. “The computer sections up the brain—imagistically, that is. It makes a holographic model of the patient’s brain and brain functions. The model will be displayed for you so you can watch the deconstruction as it progresses.”

  “At the center of the room, in plain view, was a holographic display; it looked like one of the display cases you see in the jewelry stores down in the more dangerous parts of Third Ward, but it was bigger. And it wasn’t three-dimensional images of diamonds and emeralds that were on display, no, there were ten billion tiny jewels of light making a picture of Rose’s brain. You could see every glowing fold and fissure of the cortex; in the limbic brain, deep inside, that’s where the S-shaped hippocampus was, and the amygdala, which looked like a tiny almond. These parts weren’t where her actual memories were stored, but they were vital for associating one sense, like hearing or sight, with another. You know, they’d done experiments on Red prisoners. After you surgically removed the hippocampus and amygdala, it was just about impossible for the patient to make new memories or retrieve old ones properly. And there was the medulla, and other structures—the computer could highlight any section of the brain in any detail needed. Of her brain, it’s Rose I’m talking about, you see.

  “When the actual deconstruction began, Dr. Stone was nauseated and shaking; his eyes ached and he had his fist hard up against his forehead. It’s sufficient to have lived even for a moment—he remembered Rose saying that, and he despaired. He picked up the manila folder he’d brought with him, opened it, then started to read. He was very aware of the Director and others watching him through the window. ‘Rose, do you remember…’ he began, but that was as far as he got, because his throat was dry and sore, and he had to ask the nurse to get him a glass of water. He wished he could ask Rose trivial questions, you know, stupid things that didn’t have anything to do with her rebelliousness and her famed empathy for other people. But what could he do? He couldn’t have fooled the Director, no, he’d taught Dr. Stone almost everything he knew about deconstructions, there could be no faking it. So he swallowed back his heartburn and panic, and he asked her, “Rose, do you remember the time you told your father you weren’t going to eat meat anymore?”

  “And that’s how it went. His voice was almost dead, but he managed to ask her questions about certain past experiences. This keyed off her memories of those experiences; as the memories became manifest and formed up in her mind, neurons and neuron clusters fired—there are specific neurotransmitters involved in the release of chemical memory. The tracer dripping into her veins reacted with these neurotransmitters. That’s what highlighted the K-lines, you know, the memory lines. And for a given experience, let’s say the time her fifth grade teacher caught her staring out the window at the cherry trees, there might actually be thousands of simple memories involved. Rose�
�s memories, she was a poet, you know, things like the liquid air and the smell of flowers, and the bees’ buzzing, and the brilliant explosion of white blossoms through the trees. And the pain when Ms. Bledsoe smacked her ruler across Rose’s knuckles. And her shame, of course, she felt it burning out between her legs when her bladder muscles let go and everyone in her class laughed at the yellow puddle gathering beneath her desk. And each memory stored in a really complex way. Memory isn’t quite global, but still, there are associations throughout different parts of the brain. Her memory of whiteness, the red of blood, would be stored in her visual cortex; sounds and speech and her teacher yelling at her, in the temporal lobes on the side of the head; and so on, the smells, the heat and pain. And all through the hologram display of her brain, the whole experience was modeled as an array of little lights, each light representing a bit of memory, a little of herself. Thousands of lights, like strings of lights on a Christmas tree—Dr. Stone asked her if she remembered being given a puppy when she was almost five years old, on Christmas Eve. Did she remember that New Year’s Day, trying to snip off Rufo’s ears with her mother’s sewing scissors, because she’d decided they’d grown too long and floppy and needed a trim? Sure she remembered, she could hear the puppy yelping in outrage, pain and betrayal. And inside Rose, the yelp was a pinpoint of white light deep in the listening part of her brain. And the pain, her pain, the lights burning in die parietal and temporal lobes, the beautiful, empathic, unforgettable pain.