Lullaby (15 page)

‘I don't know.'

‘I think you need to know. Before you decide what to do, you have to be comfortable
with your answer to that question.' She stared at me, as if expecting, there and
then, I might reach some understanding. ‘He holds your memories. The doctors lie
to him, say the operation was a failure
and Theo is dead. He wakes, and believes
he is you. So does everybody else. If you knew that was going to be the outcome,
would that be like dying, or like falling asleep?'

I said ‘dying' but the word didn't fit. I tried ‘sleep'. Same problem.

Maggie pressed even closer. My certainty shrank before her.

‘I wouldn't be afraid,' I said. The words came first, then the shadow of belief.
‘If my memories survive, so do I.'

‘What if there are errors in the memories? If the replication is only approximate?'

‘All memory contains errors.' My raised voice bounced back at me, as sharp and unwelcome
as her questions.

She pressed again.

‘So what if the transfer is unsuccessful, and you both die, but a madman wakes, having
read your story, and believes he is you? He thinks the government has erased his
memories, and left him to walk the streets. Now are you dead?'

‘Of course I am.'

‘Because?'

‘My memories are gone.'

‘He knows a little bit about you. He has some of your memories, just with a lot of
errors.'

‘That's ridiculous,' I said.

‘Yes it is. Somewhere, a line is drawn, between us and the world. And this operation
challenges that boundary. What about an amnesiac, who awakes having lost his memories
and must learn of his past from scratch? Has he died? How can we be just memories?
How does that leave us with enough?'

‘What else could we be?' I asked her.

‘I don't know, but surely something. Hope demands it.'

I wanted her to hold me. I wanted her words to stop, and my tears.

‘I think that's what you'll lose first. That hope,' she said.

I felt a first hint of what it might mean to come apart completely.

‘What if the glue that holds us together is a story?' Maggie whispered. ‘Two people
wake. The same, yet separate. A contradiction.'

I couldn't look at her.

‘You asked me if I thought he knew,' she said.

‘Who?'

‘Theo. You asked me if I thought there was a moment when he knew he was dying. It
upsets you, doesn't it, the thought of that.'

‘Of course it upsets me.'

‘Why?'

Two hours before, I would have refused to answer. ‘I should have been there.'

‘You couldn't have saved him.'

‘But he shouldn't have been alone. Not then.'

‘We die alone,' Maggie said. ‘That's how it is.'

‘It would make a difference to me, to have him there, holding me. Give me something
to focus on.'

‘Something other than what?' She was relentless. But she had to ask.

‘The fear.'

‘And what is it we are afraid of? Why does death terrify us?'

‘Because, it's…' I looked for the right words, and discarded every option.

I will miss it. In that instant of leaving, I will miss the life that I am to be
deprived of, but that will quickly pass. I will be desperately sorry, that I cannot
stay, that my love has reduced to its last measly portions, too meagre to go around.
Knowing that they will cry, when I am gone, and
I will not be able to reach out and
hold them, that makes me desperately sad. I will regret all that I have not done,
all that can not be done, all that can not be undone. All of that is awful, unbearably
awful, but none of it is frightening.

So what is there to fear? I could think of nothing but the nothingness. The inconceivability
of a world in which I did not exist. The inevitable impossibility of no longer being.

‘My fear got worse and worse, until eventually I was staying awake most of the night,'
Maggie said. ‘My mother took me to see her brother, who was a deeply religious man.
My mother didn't believe in God, but she thought her brother might be able to help
me. Perhaps she thought that he would convert me, and it would last just long enough
to get me past my problem. A temporary inoculation.

‘My uncle listened to my story, and then he said: I can't help you with your fear,
Margaret. I can only tell you why I don't share it. You see, I believe I have a soul,
and that soul is part of what helps me see and feel and know the world. I am not
frightened of dying, because I believe the soul will outlast the body, and I am not
frightened of
sleeping, because when I sleep, my soul sleeps beside me.

‘I thought about it for a moment, and then I said to him, my mother doesn't believe
in the soul, but when she goes to bed, she isn't frightened. Why is that, do you
think?

‘I remember he reached out to me. He was a big man, and his hand covered my head
like a helmet. A smile spread beneath his thick beard.

Maybe your mother just uses a different word, he said.

What word?

She doesn't believe in her soul, but she believes in her self. You believe in your
self, don't you Maggie? You believe you exist?

I nodded.

Then sleeping isn't dying, my uncle said. It can't be.'

Maggie stopped, as if there was nothing left to say.

‘Think about that,' she said.

‘Think about what?' I whispered. I didn't want her to leave.

‘The stories we use to talk ourselves into existence.'

Questions queued, jostled, foundered. Fragments of understanding jigsawed together,
then dissolved. My mouth hung open. I could hear my own breathing: heavy, laborious.

‘I don't even know what—'

There was a knock at the door. I jumped backwards and the tap handle bruised my spine.

16

‘Are you all right in there, Rene?' Doctor Huxley's voice.

‘Yeah, just finished, thanks.'

I stared at Maggie. We both listened for his footsteps, but he didn't move away.
Maggie eased back, and quietly pulled the shower curtain across. I unlocked the door
and slid it open, just enough to pass through. If Doctor Huxley had looked past me,
there was no hiding the shape behind the curtain.

‘Have you decided?' he asked.

‘I need more time.' It was the truth.

‘There's not much.'

‘I know.'

‘I'll take you back to Maggie's office. I'll call again in thirty minutes, that's
the most
I can give you.'

He must have been tempted, in that moment, to try to sway me. To his credit, he left
me with my thoughts, and thirty dwindling minutes.

The first five I wasted, waiting for Maggie to come back and explain herself. The
next three I spent telling myself I needed to concentrate. Don't panic. Don't screw
up. Don't think of a polar bear. My father's voice reached out through the years.
If you don't understand something, write down everything you think you know about
it.
It was all I had.

I turned to Maggie's desk and selected a keyboard. Life and death, as best I understood
it, reduced to bullet points.

•
I want to save him.

•
I can't save him.

•
I might be able to save something.

•
Trying might kill me.

•
It might not.

•
Even if I do not die, I might lose my mind.

•
If the operation is successful, I will wake twice: identical but apart, separate,
both me.

•
I cannot imagine it.

The list took me fifteen minutes to write.

Seven minutes left to decide.

I was eighteen, and my brother was dying. Or dead—a cat in a box, a matter of perspective.
I looked at the screen. I read over the points, hoping to read something new there,
something important. They might as well have been written by a stranger.

I knew nothing. I felt nothing but thrumming despair. Nature abhors a vacuum. A
memory washed in, so sweet that it hurt. The hot sun burnt a hole in the sky. Seagulls
wheeled and screeched: ugly, greedy creatures, freed from thoughts and memories.
My skin was the deep brown of late summer. The salt from the sea had dried prickly
on my back. My red shorts flapped as I ran. My feet reached, arched, flexed and sprang.
My lungs burned. My body sang the song of youth, of possibility, of striving.

He ran beside me. My brother, my other. In the fast approaching distance, the log
that was our finish line. I pulled ahead, turned to him, felt invincible. He came
up again, his smile wide, his stomach ripped by exertion. He looked good, my mirror.
Fit and beautiful. It was inconceivable that we would ever grow old. Sweat stung
my eyes. My
pace slipped; I had underestimated the distance. He pumped the air. I
pushed forward, too late. He hurdled the log and his whoop swept ahead of him, up
the headlands, past the windswept kanuka, tickling the blood red bloom of the Christmas
pohutukawa. I followed him into the water. We dove together beneath the first set
of waves. My lungs were empty but I held on, determined to outlast him. We broke
the surface together. He hit me just below the chest, a shoulder charge that took
us both off our feet. We wrestled, snorted oceans. We laughed. That moment lives
inside me, still.

I watched the bullet points fade to an empty abstraction, while my brother's body
lay warm and ready. I did not feel the decision happen. One moment I did not know,
and the next I did. We would run again, along that beach. Him and me, or we or them,
it didn't matter. They told me I couldn't save him, but there was one thing I could
never make them understand. What it is to run together, in sunshine and laughter.
We would run again.

That much I would save. I loved him. I love him. It is enough.

17

There were forms to sign and then the doctors took over, swarming about with strange
instruments, talking to each other in code. I let it happen. It was a relief, to
have handed responsibility on. I was exhausted, and even before they gave me the
first shot, I could feel myself drifting away. Sleep. I just wanted to sleep.

Somewhere, in the last moments before they wheeled me away, Emily came to say goodbye.
I know now how she managed to convince them. It was either that or she would run
to the media with the hospital's identity mistake. She's little Emily, and she can
make you think she's so vulnerable, but she has the trick of turning exactly as tough
as she needs to.

Emily leaned over the bed. Around us the
medical staff continued their excited worker-bee
dances. She kissed me lightly on the forehead. It drew me out of sleep and we hovered
together at the surface.

She said, ‘You know I don't want you to do this?'

I nodded.

Her eyes burned with determination. ‘But you also know, I want you to be okay.'

My grasp of the situation was so tenuous, all I could do was nod and smile. Other
thoughts—how beautiful she was, how much I wanted this to be over so I could hold
her again—drifted as fragments.

Emily pulled herself against me. I felt her hand slip inside my hospital gown. As
if in a dream, or waking slowly together, the way it had been. And then, so strange,
between her fingers, metal, cold and sharp. A razor blade. She cut me, a single stinging
line in my armpit. The world was too busy to notice. Somehow I knew not to wince.

‘Keep your elbow in,' Emily whispered, ‘to stop the bleeding.'

I did as I was told, marvelled at her strength, her cunning. She got off the bed,
turned and blew
me a last kiss. I did the same, using the wrong hand. I felt the
first trickle of blood, and squeezed my arm against my ribs to keep the treacherous
liquid from escaping. Both bodies would remember the blade, but only one would carry
the scar.

I smiled to myself and faded into sleep. Disappeared.

I'm told there were fifteen surgeons involved in the procedure, working in shifts
of five. The head of one of the teams, a woman in her fifties with her grey hair
tied back the way my mother used to wear it, delivered the news. By then I'd been
knocking on the door of wakefulness for hours, struggling to sort the remembered
from the dreamt, the fantastic from the necessary. Not yet lucid enough to scream.

‘Hello Rene, how are you?'

‘My head hurts.'

‘There'll be more painkillers coming soon.'

‘What happened?' I asked.

‘We were able to get a good copy of your data, Rene. That part was tremendously successful.
The whole team is delighted.'

‘And Theo?'

Her eyes dipped. ‘We managed the transfer, there were strong initial signs that the
connectome embedded, but we experienced complications. There was stem damage that
hadn't been apparent in the initial scans. Related to the electrical shock. But we've
learned more than we expected. Your contribution to medical history, your brother's
contribution, it won't be forgotten.'