Adrift in the Noösphere (10 page)

“Fucking ay! Now, get back to work. And get fifty percent more nip slip and camel toe in there!”

Back in his upholstered veal-fattening pen, Jay Cornelius laid his head upon his desk and silently wept for precisely thirty indulgent seconds. Luckily, his back was to the shared aisle and any passersby. When he raised his reddened eyes, the first thing he saw was a picture of Jessie. So he returned to work, ordering a re-shoot of the simulated celebrity catfight with fifty percent more of the mandated lascivious ingredients.

His spirits revived, briefly and somewhat guiltily, on the Metra train home that evening. Usually Jay drowsed, stunned into stupidity and resentment by the day's grotesque demands. Now he opened his weary eyes as a strange rustle went through the car, murmurs and one squeal. A gust of perfume galvanized his allergy-stricken nostrils, and someone dropped into the seat beside him. Jay glanced sidelong, blinked, felt his jaw loosen, looked away, looked back. The young woman ignored his glance. She was fantastically gorgeous. Jay felt his reason totter. Impossible! On an evening Metra route? Wait a minute. It had to be a photo shoot. Vox pop video, something viral for YouTube. He didn't want to be filmed as the sort of idiot who stands behind a celebrity holding up rabbit ear fingers behind her head, so instead he let his eyes shuttle back and forth in search of the AV devices. Doing that he probably looked just as dorkish, he thought in self-reproof. But he couldn't hold his incredulous curiosity back a moment longer. He was a journalist, after all. Sort of. He turned, feeling a fatuous grin on his face, unable to block it, and said, “Excuse me, aren't you—”

“Girly D'joan,” the pop diva said wearily. Her voice was electrifying. “Don't tell me your name, bozo, I'm not interested. Frankly, I'm bushed. You want to know why I'm on the Metra instead of coddled with a limousine, but this badge I'm wearing on my left breast which you are far too bourgeois and inhibited to look at declares my allegiance to the principle of Carbon Frugality, which I trust answers your question. Also that guy on the other side of the aisle who looks like a gorilla on steroids? My bodyguard, Slim Harry, and he's packing a taser. Just saying. Have a nice rest of the day.” All this canned diatribe, which was surely rehearsed, came at him without a single glance from her famously dazzling icicle eyes. Something slammed into the window. Jay jumped.

“Jesus!”

A smear of dark blood. More thuds. Birds were tumbling from the sky, dozens of them, plummeting in the faded light, hundreds, maybe thousands.

Ms. D'joan gazed impassively past him. “Another avian toxic death event,” she murmured to Slim Harry, who'd instantly loomed at her side, protective and immense. “Good thing we took the Metra instead of driving.” Multitudes of birds were still flinging themselves at the ground, clanging against steel roof and sides, splattering blood. A window cracked but failed to shatter.

Ahead of the train, rattled by the same suicidal flock, one Sal Travett, behind the wheel of a ten-year-old Kia, tried to slip under the closed gates at a grade crossing and got stuck in the path of Jay's train. The Metra locomotive made short work of Sal and his Kia, but an undetected weak spot in one of the buckling rails caused the car containing Jay, Girly, Slim Harry and a score of other riders to jackknife, punching a metal-edged folding tray completely through Jay's midriff, nearly severing him in two.

§

The Beadle Monger cradled Jay Cornelius's head in its infinitely large, infinitely soft lap, while Jimmy Brunner caressed Jay's fevered brow. “There, there,” whispered Jimmy, “it's not as bad as all that. Just take it easy, and you'll soon be whole again.”

Jay raised his head up tentatively and looked down upon himself. He was saddened but not surprised to find that he had no body below the neatly truncated waist. He tried to express his feelings about this, but could not speak.

Brunner began softly to sing. “Oh, it's no feat to beat the heat. All reet! All reet! So jeet your seet, be fleet, be fleet—cool and discreet, Honey....”

The warbled lyrics soothed Jay, and he began to relax—until Jimmy saw fit to administer a cure. The male nurse clutched what appeared to be a grinning moray eel, large around as Jay's forearm. Now he tried to feed it head first down Jay's throat.

Gagging as the eel's snout passed his lips, struggling for breath, Jay rebelled, thrashing futilely without legs, like a character out of a Tod Browning film.

“Cool and discreet, Honey,” sang Brunner, as he impossibly threaded the eel down Jay's throat—

§

“Please sit down, Mrs. Cornelius,” said the doctor, grave face sunlamp-tanned. “This gentleman is Dr. Hare, our Ethics Officer. Let me offer you—” He pressed an open box of Kleenex toward her side of the desk. Jessie took one, swallowed, blew her nose.

“Ms. Kanavan,” she said. “Call me Jessie, Dr. Wu. I want to see Jay. Why won't the bastards let me?”

“Jessie, you do understand that your husband was in the very gravest condition when we began the surgery three days ago. Please let me be blunt. We were obliged to perform what is called a craniectomy—” He broke off, coughed. “Your husband's lower torso was severed almost entirely just below the ribs. Very fortunately, we had a compatible donor, who suffered a massive internal brain injury in the same train accident and whose—”

“God damn it, why didn't you let him just die?” She was weeping again. Bent over, clutching her own belly. It felt torn open.

“Well, you must understand, Ms. Kana—Jessie,” the Ethics Officer told her, offended. “The Hippocratic oath. This facility's top surgical team has been preparing for another incident of this kind for five months. Your husband will receive the best—”

“My husband the guinea pig! You're telling me you stitched him onto some dead woman's lower body.”

Wu regarded her. “This was a far more serious and complex procedure, Mrs.... Jessie. Fortunately, recent outstanding work with stem cells allows us to anticipate fully functional regrowth of anastomozed neurological structures subserving the—”

“What? What are you babbling about?”

“We originally planned to graft his head to the neck of the donor. That proved infeasible for a number of— In lay persons' terms, Jessie, we transplanted his brain.”

She sank back in her chair, faint, ill with horror.

“You fucking shits,” she shouted at him. “You've given him a woman's body? What makes you think he'll want to live like this?”

“A rather sexist objection, don't you think, Ms. Kanavan?” said the Ethics advisor.

Jessie was on her feet, enraged, hands extended and clawed, making sounds even she did not recognize as words. Dr. Wu rose, too, made shushing motions with his expert surgical hands. “We have many months of recuperation ahead of us,” he said. “You will both adjust. It is a sort of miracle, you know. If this terrible accident had happened anywhere else, your husband would indeed have died within minutes, hours at best. We brought him back from the brink. And that poor woman's death—

“Such a generous donor family!” said Dr. Hare.

“—is not entirely in vain, not now.”

§

REPORTER: So what's that shiny thing sticking out of the top of Girly's head? Looks like someone left half a hatchet stuck there.

DR. WU: His head. The patient is Mr. Jay Cornelius. His identity is unchanged. Ms. D'joan is deceased. Let me remind you that the donor's identity is strictly embargoed. It will not be published, and there will be no photographs! You have all signed—

REPORTER: Hey, come on, he's got tits. Great tits.

REPORTER: So've you, Billy. Time to cut back on the Quarterpounders.

(Laughter)

REPORTER: Yeah, but Girly's are better. What a waste.

DR. WU: Gentlemen! And ladies! Please, some decorum. This is a patient who has recently undergone an immensely stressful operation, as the videos you've just viewed demonstrated. Now the fellow from the Post asked about the microwave reflector inserted into the cranium between the two halves of Mr. Cornelius's brain.

REPORTER: It's a Space Age Mohawk!

(Laughter)

DR. WU: What you see is the outer portion of a steel microwave reflector that has been positioned with exacting care to avoid damaging the corpus callosum, which joins the twin hemi—

REPORTER: Keep it simple, doc. We're not all from The New York Times.

(Laughter)

DR. WU: Very well. Let me explain. In simple terms, we had to open the top of the skull to allow the traumatized brain to expand, as it does after injury. In order to effect the transfer without further deterioration, the patient's brain had to be cooled to nearly freezing point, as was explained in the video for those of you who kept up. Now, the stainless steel plate acts as a heat sink and a reflector for the 4GHz microwave—that's 7.5 cm—as well as a temperature control device. Following the Gregory Jones cranial protocol, the microwave beam is collimated with a simple catadioptric collimator, and we use the reflected pi-phase-synchronized microwaves from the central plate to interfere destructively at the center of the brain with the incoming non-reflected beam—

(Noisy hubbub)

§

Medical Diary of Patient 005: Entry #17

Magritte is the prophet of my life. The shards of his broken window, each shattered portion of burst pane thick with the paint strokes of sky, trees, grass, the world; everything ordinary broken yet nothing lost, everything refracted and held, ruined, beneath the raped window. Holograms of indecipherable meaning.

Magritte is the prophet. His bland civil servants falling in eerie quiet through the sweet, undubious sky, bowlered and umbrella'd. Filthy Magritte in his own business suit and the oiled tip of his brush.

The “corporeal face.” Do you know that terrible painting, that piercing painting? My portrait. The hair like some damned socialite's winter coat, framing and tumbling about the Face, the Face, the round blind breasts staring back at me below the brow of the shoulders, the unscented nostrils of the navel, that pubic beard with its pursed, hidden mouth, its toothless lacking mouth.... Let's see Jessie cite her fave psychiatrist Lacan when she reads this.

I broke the mirror with my small bloodied fists. They brought the mirror to my room last night and left it here. They told me the time had come to get used to reality. Enough denial. Life is better than death in a ruinous accident. How ungrateful I was to turn my face away from the world to which I had been retrieved with all the surgical skill of wonderful hands cutting open my wrecked cranium and cupping my bloody brain and slopping it into an impossibly handy histocompatible corpse. But nothing is improbable once it's happened. Break down these walls of denial! Implosion therapy, it's called. Beyond a certain point, they implied, coddling has a bad track record. One of their early triumphs, the whispering rumors tell me, found a nail file in her handbag and before they got to her almost had her penis sawed off. Oh God, shit. The fucking feckless bastards.

At least they've taken out the famous “Space Age Mohawk” and screwed my skull back together. Her skull. Nobody mentions her name but I know that face, even with the bandages. Sitting right beside me, poor bitch. Skull itches like a bastard.

Jessie leaves messages every day, comes in two or three times a week. Of course I refuse to see her. Your wife called, they tell me. Your wife. I'd like you to meet Mrs. Jessie Kanavan Cornelius and her wife, Mrs. Jay Girly Cornelius.

The mirrored glass didn't stay on the carpet long enough for me to put any of its slivers into my filthy new body. Clean orderlies. They watch everything through cameras which they make absolutely no attempt to hide. Implosion therapy. Panopticon therapy, Jessie would call it. That damned Frog Foucault. Undoubtedly they'll be pawing through these notes the moment they give me my injection. They'll love that line about filthy new bodies. Stick the injection in. Sleepytime, Jay. Shut eyes. There's a good girl.

§

From: The Beadle Monger

To: All Employees

Subject: Jay Cornelius

I am not pleased. Not pleased at all. You are not trying hard enough. Not by a long shot. I have plans for this one. Large and extensive plans. We all know the drill. A new Messiah is called for upon my favorite test planet, and I am convinced Cornelius has the makings. A certain mundane and self-centered insanity. A perverse genius for creating disturbing new parables of existential unease, longing and dread. A new hybrid physiology. (Very important! Take note!) Wide semiotic bandwidth. Look at him/her, people! What better raw material could I give you to work with!?! It took a hell of a long time for me to set up the plausible concatenation of circumstances, the cascade of bad luck, the woman on the train, the dead birds, all the shit that would make this possible. And you guys are blowing it! Cornelius is slipping away into a funk of self-pity and mordant despair. What happened to the guy who chortled at the luminous fish, and passionately embraced the Brunner eidolon? We need that fellow back in harness!

Let's get that dreamscape romance going again! Fast!

And don't tell me that Unknown Kadath wasn't built in a day!

§

The new drug the nurses gave Jay Cornelius during the second week of his/her post-op mental struggles was one of the recently developed ultrapotent anti-depressives, an acetylcholine uptake enhancer. Irrational and bitter, he/she struggled womanfully against the injection, unfamiliar and undermuscled arms flailing, breasts getting in the way, but was unable to thwart the burly orderlies. The drug was intended to induce a kind of passive state of mental beneficence, but had the unforeseen effect on Jay of rendering him/her utterly flatline, heart as pulseless as a stone, starving cells screaming shrilly.

While the hospital staff rushed about madly with defibrillators and oxygen tanks, and the clinic's spokesperson hastily prepared a worst-case speech, Jay was very busy elsewhere.