And Again Page 15

  “Absolutely not,” he says. “Do I really have to give you, of all people, an antismoking lecture?”

  “I can’t paint,” I say. “Reckless things, remember?”

  “Since the transfer?” he asks, and I nod.

  “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not my hands, I can hold a paintbrush. It’s something else. Something didn’t transfer over.”

  “Fuck,” he says, handing over the cigarette. I take it and inhale, and the sizzling heat of it floats into my limbs. I feel a little dizzy, though I’m not sure if it’s the sudden onslaught of nicotine, or if it’s the fact that I haven’t slept since I visited my studio, or if it’s David. I hand it back to him.

  “Good as you remember?” he asks.

  “Nothing is as good as I remember,” I reply. He nods, but he looks away. I wonder if I’ve admitted something I shouldn’t have, a truth that all of us have been trying to avoid.

  “You know, my handwriting is different since I had to relearn it,” David says, finally. “Maybe it’s like that with your painting, maybe it was some mixture of muscle memory and years of practice that made you paint the way you used to.”

  I hold out both of my hands, palms up, considering the lines on them. The cut from the broken plate is a thin pink seam along my pale skin. I wonder if it will leave a scar. My first scar.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about those articles you read where people get lung or heart transplants and take on personality traits of their donors. You know, how they might crave a food they never liked before, or suddenly get the urge to listen to a specific type of music? It makes me wonder if it isn’t just about the parts of our brain that store memory. I wonder how much of what made me a painter lived in that body, and not just in my head.”

  “Like maybe if someone got your heart, they would be able to paint the way you used to?” he asks. He reaches forward, brushing a curl of hair off my face. It feels like crossing a line, when he touches me. He’s still holding the cigarette between his fingers. Flecks of white ash fall into my hair. I think of Sam, then, how difficult it is for us to look at each other now.

  “I think maybe they would be able to do a lot of things that I can’t anymore.”

  His apartment is dark when we arrive, even though it’s not quite evening. All of the shades are drawn. It’s like we’re underground, and the sun is somewhere far away. It only adds to my feeling of disorientation, this inability to judge time or direction. Even in the dimness I can see the money in this place, the same way you can spot an expensive suit. My eyes are drawn to the walls, where huge black and white photos hang in heavy frames.

  “Who’s your decorator?” I ask. I recognize a photo, one of a series by Carla Abramson that came through the Museum of Contemporary Photography a few months back. It was a study of decay, the corners of the city where the relics of the Industrial Age have been allowed to deteriorate. This particular photo shows the peeling metal of rusted L tracks.

  “My wife,” he replies, remaining in the entryway as I cross to the frame. “You like it?”

  I shrug. “I know the photographer a little. I was never really impressed with her work, but these aren’t bad, for what they are.” I glance around. “Your wife isn’t a fan of paintings?”

  “That’s my preference, actually,” he says. “I’m a fan of the real world. I never had much patience for someone else’s interpretation of it.” The reflection of movement in the glass catches my eye, and I realize he’s crossed the room to stand behind me. “This is normally the point where I would offer you a drink, but . . .” he trails off.

  “Right,” I say. I don’t turn to him. I watch him, the dark silhouette in the glass, as he steps toward me, closing the gap between us until we are one muddled shape against the dim half-light of the window. I shut my eyes before he reaches me. I shut my eyes, and wish they had picked someone else to be saved. Someone good, someone like Sam. Not me, not David. It is a terrible mistake, to play god and save the wrong people.

  It has been so long since I’ve been touched that my body is already alight with energy, every hair standing on end, in the moment before his chest presses into my back, in the moment before his hands slip under the hem of my shirt. It has been so long that it feels like I’ve never been touched at all. And then the realization comes in that fleeting moment: I have never been touched. Not this version of me.

  I have only vague memories of my first time, the first time that came before this one, the feeling of lying on my back in a dorm room with a football game playing in the background, turned up loud so his roommates wouldn’t hear us. How comical it seemed even at the time, that it should be so willfully unromantic, as if engineered to be a story my friends and I would cringe at in the years to come. Everything about it, the boy, the room, even the pain, eventually blended into nothing but a vague sense of disappointment within my memory. The shocking insignificance of it proved to be the one memorable aspect of that night.

  This time, this second time, is quite different. The strangeness of it is not gone, not when this body still feels so foreign to me, so remote. At times it feels like I’m observing some kind of animal, watching its behaviors and marveling at its reactions, its twitches and whimpers and slow unfurling, as if it were a being wholly separate from me. Its desires surprise me, catch me off guard, because they are not what I remember. I react to the smallest things, his hand hooking behind my knee, or that first icy breath of air when he divests me of my underwear. His mouth between my shoulder blades is enough to make me bite into the pillow. My fingernails make crescent-moon dents in the skin of his arms, and the sight of them on his perfect skin excites me. Sensations become too much for me very quickly, and there are several times when I must reconcile the need to push him away and draw him closer simultaneously.

  And the pain, it is both sharper and more insignificant than I remember. It is familiar now, in a way it should not be. David knows to move quickly, after the slow-build of the beginning, or perhaps he simply has no choice once he’s inside me. Perhaps he is as much a slave to the whims of his new body as I am to mine. I wonder what we must look like, with our flawless skin and uncoiled muscle, like two marble statues trying to make love. It only occurs to me after he comes that neither of us has thought to use a condom. I try not to dwell on what that bit of mutual forgetting might signify, as we lie next to each other on his bed. I can feel his pillow move when he looks over at me.

  “Better than you remember?” he asks, and I can’t look at him. All I can do is go feverish with blushing and hide my face in my hands and nod.

  Connie

  “Would you get new eyes if you had the chance?” I ask Dr. Grath as we huddle at his tiny mid-century kitchen table, with its vinyl surface and dented metal legs. He’s going through his photo albums. It’s an ongoing project; I’ve been helping him scan them into his computer for posterity’s sake, even though he can’t see them anymore. He has a son, somewhere out east, a teacher at some snooty private high school who calls every couple of months to check in. Dr. Grath thinks that his son might want the photographs someday, so I describe them to him and he tells me how to label the files. It’s sort of amazing, actually, how much he remembers. The most cursory description seems to suffice, though sometimes he asks me to describe a photo in more detail so he can augment his mental picture of it. I wonder if I’d be able to remember every photo in the albums of baby pictures my mother used to keep, the ones we’d pour over on my birthday when I was a child. I wonder if those sorts of memories might have grown soft with the transfer, if everything is one degree removed from what it was, a scan of a scan.

  “What a question,” Dr. Grath replies, waving a liver-spotted hand and blinking hard with his vacant eyes. “Of course I would.”

  “Even though it would change everything about you?” I ask. “It would change the person you’ve become in these past few years. It would change who you are.”

  “Certainly,” Dr. Grath says. “But I was a seeing person
for much longer than I’ve been a blind one.”

  I consider this. Five years seems like such a long time, thinking back on it. It almost seems like I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t sick; I can’t remember how I spent my healthy days. But the time preceding my diagnosis was much longer. Maybe that woman—the beautiful one, the one who had no reason to even consider death as a concept, much less a possibility—maybe she has not been so fully blotted out by my diagnosis as I once believed. Maybe she is alive and somewhere hidden, hibernating, readying herself to spring forth in triumphant return. Maybe I am already her.

  “You know, your breathing changes when you’re thinking too hard,” Dr. Grath says, getting up and going to his side table, which acts as a makeshift bar. He pours us two tiny, crystal glasses of port without spilling a drop, even as he crosses the room and sets mine in front of me. It’s only three in the afternoon, but I figure it couldn’t hurt. In the faded light that bleeds through the thick layer of grime on his windows, the port shines ruby red in its glass. I take a sip, and it’s terrible, like swilling nail polish remover. I choke on it a bit. Dr. Grath smiles at me, amused.

  “All right?” he asks. I nod, grimacing, but he can’t see me.

  “I’m fine,” I finally manage.

  “What’s next?”

  “This one is of your wife,” I say, clearing my throat, glancing down at the photo for only a moment. It’s easy to recognize her. I feel like I know Maureen’s face better than I know my own mother’s, we’ve been doing this for so long. “She’s young; her hair is long, in sort of a shag cut. She’s wearing a rose-colored T-shirt, and the background is dark.”

  “Is she smiling?” he asks, though I’m sure he knows the answer.

  “Yes,” I reply. She always smiled for photos, Maureen did. It’s amazing the things you learn, watching people in the tiny, split-second moments captured in photographs. I know Maureen always wore sunscreen when they went to the beach, and Dr. Grath seemed ever-interested in documenting her spreading thick stripes of zinc oxide cream onto her gleaming arms and shoulders. I know her favorite earrings, little silver teardrops with turquoise in the center that she wore in almost every photograph for the first year of their marriage. A wedding present, Dr. Grath said, when I asked him about them. I know she drank imported beer and dirty martinis when they went out. I know she read to her swollen belly before her son was born. The things I know about a woman who died back before Dr. Grath went blind. Too much, it seems sometimes. It’s too much for any one person to know, any person who never met her or lived with her or loved her. Though I think maybe I love her a little now, the way people like Linda love characters on Stratford Pines. There’s something about watching someone’s life unfold that makes you feel as if you share something deep and warm, even if the affection is only one-sided.

  “What if I’m different?” I ask. Dr. Grath considers me, his gray-tipped eyebrows furrowing, as if he’s studying me with his blank eyes.

  “Different? From whom?”

  “The person I was before I went into the hospital. The person who left.”

  “New vocal chords?” he says, as if it’s our private joke. I wonder if he can tell that I don’t smile.

  “New everything.”

  He leans forward in his chair, reaching for and finding my hand where it rests on the table. His fingers brush over my knuckles, the perfect bones of my fingers, the soft, impeccable skin. I wonder what it feels like to him, like butter or fine silk or anything that is too perfect to be part of a person’s body. He shuts his eyes.

  “Is it what they were talking about on the radio?” he asks, releasing my hand and sitting back in his chair. “A few years ago all anyone could talk about was the UN passing an exception to the ban on human cloning. They were saying it was probably for medical research.”

  “It was,” I reply, though I shouldn’t be surprised that Dr. Grath would put the pieces together. “There are four of us, in Chicago at least. I’m not sure how many across the country.”

  “How does it work?” He’s very calm, for someone who’s just realized he’s sitting across the table from a clone of his best friend. It makes me want to hug him, though I don’t.

  “They cut into your brain. The process kills you, but they’re able to extract pieces of the memory center of your brain and transfer it into a new body, into a clone of yourself. It’s sort of like injecting stem cells. The brain matter takes root in the clones and grows there. You become a new person,” I say. “Well, the same person, but a new body.”

  “So, how old are you?” he asks. He looks a little pale. I wonder if it was a good idea to tell him, if he’s too old and too fragile for these sorts of revelations.

  “I guess, maybe a few months old? But they use hormones to rapidly age the clones so they match up with the age you are at the time of the transfer. I guess they figured it would be a bit unnerving for adults to wake up in the bodies of infants. They’re all about the psychological effects, let me tell you. I have to go to a support group every week for a year.”

  “Who knows about this?”

  “Not really anyone,” I say. “We had to sign all sorts of paperwork saying we’d keep it confidential. So, you know, don’t go shouting it from the rooftops.”

  “As if anyone would believe me,” he says, though it doesn’t sound like a joke. He sounds astonished. “What do you look like now?” he asks.

  I glance down at the photos of Maureen. I’ve watched her age, going through these albums. Maureen was always a beautiful woman, with bright eyes and a perfect symmetry to her smile. Catalogue pretty. Girl-next-door pretty. But even she faded slowly, as their son grew. I’ve watched as lines appeared around her eyes and extra pounds collected around her midsection. Gray threaded through her hair, a lovely enough shade that she didn’t bother dyeing it, but gray just the same. And then the speed of her aging accelerated almost exponentially, in those last few years. Suddenly her skin grew puffy and sagged off her face. Her frame seemed perennially bloated, with flat, sagging breasts and pitted flesh at the backs of her arms. Lines deepened. Age spots appeared. And by the end, no amount of brightness in her eyes could have salvaged her beauty. It had been drained away from her by time, the perfect thief. I wonder what Dr. Grath thought of her then, Dr. Grath who is still a relentless student of female beauty, even without his eyes. I wonder what Maureen would think of me now, were she still alive.

  “I look like I could be on the cover of Vogue, if I play my cards right,” I reply. Frankness has always been de rigueur with us.

  “Give me a comparison. Dietrich? Harlow? Hepburn? Bergman?” he says, rapid-fire. “The other Hepburn?”

  “Blonde,” I reply.

  “Novak? Bardot?” He pauses, as if to give the next name its due deference. “Monroe?”

  “Better,” I reply, feeling myself begin to smile, as he sucks in a little breath. This is serious business, with Dr. Grath.

  “Tell me.”

  “Kelly,” I say, letting my tongue tick against my teeth as I say it. He shuts his eyes, no doubt conjuring the image of her, that slow-motion moment where she leans in and kisses Jimmy Stewart in the beginning of Rear Window. Her perfect blonde curls. Her red lips. The string of pearls around her neck. I could hear his intake of breath when I first watched it with him, even though he couldn’t see her. The memory alone was enough to make him gasp.

  “Well,” he says, with his eyes still closed. “If you’re not going to drink that glass of port, I certainly will.” I smile and slide it across the table.

  Linda

  I don’t know if it’s because everything already feels so strange in my new body, as if I’m being constantly bombarded by a deluge of vivid sensation, but I know immediately that I’m pregnant. It’s a strange feeling, to wake up one morning and know that my new body has become a fertile patch of earth in which something tiny has taken root. I imagine I can feel it already, whatever it is, a tiny goldfish swimming inside me, the flutter of a moth tra
pped under a drinking glass. I know it even before the symptoms come, days later, when the smell of Tom’s aftershave has me heaving into our toilet. When I resurface he’s grinning so wide, and I feel so heartily terrible that I want to smack him as he leans his face, with its cloying aftershave fumes, close to kiss me. I’m back at the toilet before we have the chance to celebrate.

  I was never this sick when I had Jack or Katie. Tom and I didn’t realize I was pregnant with Katie until almost the end of my first trimester. We were in college, and it wasn’t unusual for my periods to come and go when I trained too hard for the cross-country team or in the months leading up to finals. To this day I’m still dumbfounded at how healthy Katie is, considering the diet of protein bars and sports drinks and domestic beer I thrived on back then. But this time I’m nearly crippled by it, the sickness, spending hours chewing dusty saltines as I sit on the edge of our bathtub, staring at the toilet like a well-known adversary.

  I’m not sure whom to tell. Tom is fretting about telling the kids, and has been for days now. He’s probably right to worry; he can see exactly what is going on in his house, how Jack careens between elation that I’m home and naked fear that I will be taken from him. Tom sees that I have nothing to offer the little boy, that I am still unsure how to speak to him or show affection for him or do all of the things that should come naturally to mothers. And Katie is ever-wary of me, keeping her distance, talking around me as if I am not here. As if it were my choice to abandon her at the age of four, when she desperately needed a mother.

  But I fear that telling the kids will be nothing compared to what I’m facing. The doctors. The others, Hannah and David and Connie. I feel like I’m betraying them, a little. Leaving them behind, when we were supposed to be in it all together. I’ve never wanted to be the first at anything; I’ve never relished the feeling of being special the way others seem to. I would rather follow a well-trodden path, be part of a crowd. I’ve never been good at blazing trails.