Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Lou Aronica et. el.

  “But… not unforgettable, you know. Dr. Stone asked his questions, and the lights inside Rose flickered on, the beautiful strings of lights. The computer zeroed in on each light individually. And the HDI machine made thousands of intense, local disruptions in the magnetic field of Rose’s brain. All along the K-lines, electrons ripped out of their orbits, atoms ionized, cells and cell clusters died. And all the time she was paralyzed, perfectly conscious, perfectly aware that something was happening to her, something she couldn’t quite grasp, because after it was gone, how would she ever know? Once—she told him this the evening before the deconstruction—once, on a hot summer night just after her family had died, she woke up and found herself alone, flat on her back, with her head at the foot of the bed. Her feet were almost touching the headboard. She’d had no sense of sweating through the night or rotating in half a circle across the soaking sheets; there was only darkness and disorientation and a sick feeling of lost time. Each moment of her deconstruction must have been like that night, an endless awakening into neverness, as if she’d never existed and never would. And Rose, of course, tried to fight it, but what could she do? Dr. Stone thought he could see the patterns of her stubbornness, the way the silver lights twinkled and rippled like waves of shooting stars. Nothing is lost—that was always Rose’s faith, but what could be left after the HDI machine annihilated half her brain? Was she praying, trying to hold on to a little certitude and meaning while the other things slipped away? On and on the deconstruction went, all morning and far into the afternoon, almost forever. But, you know, in the hospital, with the overhead lamps burning so hot they’re hyperreal, time is nothing.

  “Isn’t it time you read her the poem?” The Director asked Dr. Stone this in a voice that seemed to come out of nowhere. The grim little man was sitting at the table in the viewing room, waiting with the others. In front of him, he had a list of the questions Rose was supposed to be asked. And Dr. Stone licked the coffee and blood gumming his teeth and said, “The poem. Yes, the poem.” He was sweating, and he had his fist clenched so hard the tendons were popping out in his wrist. He looked at her, lost in the pit of the machine, and asked, “Rose, do you remember this poem: “Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory?” ‘ And sure she remembered, how she remembered!—how could she forget? And when he got to the line, Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, the secret light inside her was alive and burning with a color as pure as any rose. “Rose, do you remember, do you remember… ?” But she didn’t remember, and that was the hell of it, didn’t remember anything about roses, because he and the HDI machine had done their work, and inside Rose’s mind the lights went out like a Christmas tree suddenly unplugged. And Dr. Stone couldn’t finish his poem; he had no voice left, you know, he couldn’t utter another word, because it, too, had finally gone out, the secret light.”

  One-Eyed Nick finished speaking, and he heaped more trash on the fire. Flame shadows writhed across the dirty nylon of his parka. The old woman seemed to be staring through the fire at him. Her dark eyes were lucid with reflected light. He wondered if he’d been wrong about her right from the start; maybe she could understand what he was saying.

  The Napalm Man drained his bottle of whiskey and rubbed his temples. “That’s a sad story, Nick. Why is it impossible just to find a little happiness?”

  And Sarge put in, “I’d be happy if I could just get simplicity, ya mean?” He licked his lips, spat and then asked, “That’s not the end of the story, is it? You haven’t told us what happened to Dr. Stone and Rose.”

  One-Eyed Nick blinked slowly, thinking that if he and the old woman, all of them, had to exist and be a part of the City’s endless life, wouldn’t it be great if they were as rigid and unmoving as brick, as hard as stone? He sighed and said, “The end of the story—do you mean before or after the Reds bombed the hospital?”

  “Before,” Sarge said. “We know about the escape after the goddamn bombing. Tell us what happened to Rose and Dr. Stone.”

  There was a pressure beneath One-Eyed Nick’s forehead, and his arm hurt. He said, “Dr. Stone talked to Rose alone in her room after the deconstruction, and he felt like crying. The thing is, she didn’t want to be reconstructed. “Oh, no, please, I’m scared!”—that was all she could say. And who could blame her? Doctor Stone knew that the Director had plans to make her into a simple schoolmistress, you know, one of those nice ladies in a white shirt and tie, teaching propaganda to aid the war effort. “It’s okay, Rose,” he said, “I’ll help you remember—I have a plan.” And she went over to him and pressed her head down on his shoulder, and she sobbed. And he stroked her hair; he bit his lip so hard it bled. He’d risked everything to save her memories, to be able to make up a biochip, a bit of synthetic brain that would be as much her as what he’d taken out in the HDI room—and all for nothing. But, no, not for nothing, you know. Right then and there he made up his mind that he’d do the reconstruction himself. No matter what this Rose wanted now, he’d remake the Rose he knew and loved.

  “But things never work out like you want. He had to wait at least a month for her to heal before he could do her implant, or else she would really wind up nuts. And that was too damn long, because he found out that the hospital was going to be closed down immediately. Moved, you know, because the Red artillery was getting too close. And worse, he was going to be transferred to a mental hospital in First Sector. As a reward. A goddamn promotion!—the Director had been so impressed with Rose’s deconstruction that he’d promoted Dr. Stone to be Chief of Psychiatry at St. Mark’s Hospital. Or maybe he was just jealous of Dr. Stone and didn’t want him around; but what did it matter why Dr. Stone was being promoted, the thing is, in the Black Zone, you couldn’t refuse promotions. He would never even talk to Rose afterwards, let alone get the time and an operating room to make her whole again.

  “The next day, as he told her he would have to leave her, when he saw the confused, hurt look on her face, he didn’t want to live. But he had to live, that was the hell of it, to live somehow—to help her regain her memories, do you see? That evening, he drank half a bottle of scotch, and he became very drunk, so drunk he went into the bathroom and retched into the toilet until his stomach was dry. Blind drunk—he was so drunk that when he looked into the mirror, he couldn’t see himself. So he smashed the mirror, punched it again and again until it shattered, and then he grabbed up a glass splinter in his bleeding fist and rammed it into his face. Into his eye. The glass in his eye; it ruined his eye—the surgeons had to remove it.

  One-Eyed Nick pressed his hand over his eye patch, feeling the stabs of ghost pain as he began to remember. He couldn’t help looking at the old woman. Her eyes were wet with tears, and he knew there was something important he had to remember. “As a part of an experiment that Dr. Stone suggested—you know, a couple of his colleagues owed him favors and couldn’t help feeling bad when they heard his story—the surgeons removed other things from his head. Even as the hospital was being evacuated, there were secret sessions with the HDI machine, and then, the implant surgeries. You see, Dr. Stone hoped to be classified mentally impaired so he could be moved along with Rose and all the other patients. So he’d always be with her, at least until one of them really died. And he had to remember the pieces of Rose’s life so he could put her back together, but for himself, of himself, he wanted no memory. No, he hated himself, he would not remember who he was, except at the very end, when he finished telling his and Rose’s sad story.”

  In the alley of D-Street, the rain had died. Everything was glistening wet, shiny from the streetlights, silent. Almost silent—the old woman had started crying openly. And then One-Eyed Nick suddenly remembered that she really wasn’t so old, though she very much a woman, the best woman he’d ever known. Oh, God, it was Rose! His Rose, how could he have been so blind? Rose was crying, the great, wracking sobs almost lost into her cupped hands. It tore Nick apart, the sight, and burned inside his head, where something terrible and beautiful was happening t
o him. He was beginning to remember himself, too. Somewhere in his head, the implanted biochips were firing and coming alive, whispering, filling him up with Dr. Stone’s memories. His memories. He remembered that he had been a doctor of psychiatry who knew well enough how to ruin a prisoner’s short-term memory; he remembered ruining himself. And many other things: he remembered treating Sarge as a patient in the hospital, remembered that when poor, castrated Sarge slurred out his plea for “simplicity,” he was really saying, “I just want some pussy.” Simplicity—it was really he, himself, who wanted simplicity; how simple it was to fall in love with Rose, over and over and forever. There was a pain in his chest, then. Like a shock of lightning it radiated up the angle of his jaw to his head. He shut his eye against the blinding, white pain. Light—each of us, he thought, carries inside whole universes of memory and light. He opened his eye, looking out over the endless, sleeping City, trying to apprehend the beautiful lights which went on and on, shimmering off to infinity. Rose was right after all, there was always room for more pain, more light, more memory. It would kill him, though, if he had to remember it all the time, who was he to stand that kind of pain? He was no one, and soon he would forget almost everything; very soon, when another piece of his brain fired and the false memories came, he would be One-Eyed Nick once again, a bum in an alley, trying to keep warm.

  But now there was only memory, and now Rose was crying into the night, so he went over to her and knelt down; he put his arms around her and kissed her lips. “I love you,” he said.

  She took his hands and told him, “No, Nick, please, no.”

  Somewhere behind him, water was gurgling out of a drainpipe; the rushing sound was as uneven as the beating of his heart. “Do you remember the poem?” he asked her. “Can you remember anything at all?”

  “Sure she remembers,” Sarge said. “She remembers better all the time. Whenever you tell your goddamn story, you think of something else you’ve forgotten. Why d’ya think we keep asking questions to pump your memory? Why d’ya think I’m not bored out of my fuckin’ skull by now?”

  “Besides,” the Napalm Man added, “you put us back together again. We don’t mind listening.”

  Nick laced his fingers in Rose’s hair. Did she remember? Could it be true that nothing was ever really lost? He bent his head and asked her, “There’s something I’ve never understood. Even if I could have done the implant, given you back your old memories, you didn’t want me to. Why, Rose?”

  For a long time she sat there looking at him, and gradually her shaking went away. She seemed lost in her thoughts. Then her eyes unclouded and there was pure joy in the way they lingered over him; there was a calmness and clarity, as if she were seeing something in its true light for the first time. “I like the way I am,” she said.

  He fell apart, then, he couldn’t control it any longer; his hand trembled like an old man’s as he tried to get the blinding tears out of his eye, and his whole body shivered from the cold. “Oh, God!” he whispered, “Oh, God!”

  Rose started crying again, crying for him, he thought, crying for everyone in all the alleys of the Endless City, because nothing is lost, and someday, if he were relentless in his purpose, she would again be the Rose he remembered.

  After a while the rain returned, and the lights all around him flickered and grew hazy. He couldn’t quite remember why he was holding her, unless it was just to give a little comfort to an old woman who was cold and confused. And all he could think to say was: “I just want to make you happy.”

  A blur of spinning glass flashed above him; the Napalm Man had flung his whiskey bottle out into the alley. There was a sudden crash, flowers of glass shattering against wet brick. The Napalm Man removed a fresh pint of whiskey from the pocket of his trenchcoat and dropped it down into his paper bag. “No one’s happy until he’s dead, Nick.”

  Sarge rubbed the back of his neck and said, “I’d be happy if I could just find simplicity, ya mean?”

  Because he couldn’t stop shivering, One-Eyed Nick began looking around the alley for some trash to put into the dying fire. It would be hours before morning came, and he still had a long time to tell his story. Why he had to tell his story, he couldn’t quite say.

  And so, on an endless winter night, with the drizzling rain making him hoarse and cold, he cleared his throat and asked, “Have I told you this story before? This is the saddest story I know.”

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