‘Where do you get them?’ I asked. ‘The bodies.’
‘They’re young people who have, unfortunately, passed away,’ said the doctor.
Stupidly, I said, as though I were looking at the result of a massacre, ‘All at once?’
‘At different times, naturally. And in different parts of the world. They’re transported in the same way as organs are now. That’s not difficult to do.’
‘What is difficult about this process now?’
‘It takes time and great expertise. But so does cleaning a great painting. The right person has to do it. There are not many of those people yet. But it can be done. It is, of course, something that was always going to happen.’
Suspended in harnesses, there were rows and rows of bodies: the pale, the dark and the in-between; the mottled, the clear-skinned, the hairy and the hairless, the bearded and the large-breasted; the tall, the broad and the squat. Each had a number in a plastic wallet above the head. Some looked awkward, as though they were asleep, with their heads lolling slightly to one side, their legs at different angles. Others looked as though they were about to go for a run. All the bodies, as far as I could see, were relatively young; some of them looked less like young adults than older children. The oldest were in their early forties. I was reminded of the rows of suits in the tailors I’d visit as a boy with my father. Except these were not cloth coverings but human bodies, born alive from between a woman’s legs.
‘Why don’t you browse?’ said the surgeon, leaving me with the nurse. ‘Choose a short list, perhaps. Write down the numbers you fancy. We can discuss your choices. This is the part I enjoy. You know what I like to do? Guess in advance who I think the person will choose, and wait to see whether I am right. Often I am.’
Shopping for bodies: it was true that I had some idea what I was looking for. I knew, for instance, that I didn’t want to be a fair, blue-eyed blond. People might consider me a beautiful fool.
‘Can I suggest something?’ said Ralph. ‘You might, for a change, want to come back as a young woman.’
I said, ‘A change is as good as a rest, as my mother used to say.’
‘Some men want to give birth. Or they want to have sex as a woman. You do have one of your male characters say that in his sexual fantasies he’s always a woman.’
‘Yes … I see what you mean …’
‘Or you could choose a black body. There’s a few of those,’ he said with an ironic sniff. ‘Think how much you’d learn about society and… all that.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But couldn’t I just read a novel about it?’
‘Whatever. All I want is for you to know that there are options. Take your time. The race, gender, size and age you prefer can only be your choice. I would say that in my view people aren’t able to give these things enough thought. They take it for granted that tough guys have all the fun. Still, you could give another body a run-out in six months. Or are you particularly attached to your identity?’
‘It never occurred to me not to be.’
He said, ‘One learns that identities are good for some things but not for others. Here.’
‘Jesus. Thanks.’
I took the bag but wasn’t sick. I did want to get out of that room. It was worse than a mortuary. These bodies would be reanimated. The consequences were unimaginable. Every type of human being, apart from the old, seemed available. The young must have been dying in droves; maybe they were being killed. I would make a good but expeditious choice and leave.
When the others fell back discreetly I walked beside this stationary army of the dead, this warehouse of the lost, examining their faces and naked bodies. I looked, as one might look too long at a painting, until its value – the value of life – seemed to evaporate, existing only as a moment of embodied frustration between two eternities. Then I began to think of poetry and children and the early morning, until it came back to me, why I wanted to go on living and why it might, at times, seem worth it.
I considered several bodies but kept moving, hoping for something better. At last, I stopped. I had seen ‘my guy’. Or rather, he had seemed to choose me. Stocky and as classically handsome as any sculpture in the British Museum, he was neither white nor dark but lightly toasted, with a fine, thick penis and heavy balls. I would, at last, have the body of an Italian footballer: an aggressive, attacking midfielder, say. My face resembled that of the young Alain Delon with, naturally, my own brain leading this combination out to play for six months.
‘That’s him,’ I said, across the lines of bodies. ‘My man. He looks fine. We like each other.’
‘Do you want to see his eyes?’ said the nurse, who’d been waiting by the door. ‘You’d better.’
‘Why not?’
‘Look, then,’ she said.
She prised open my man’s eyelids. The room was scrupulously odourless, but as I moved closer to him I detected an antiseptic whiff. However, I liked him already. For the first time, I would have dark brown eyes.
‘Lovely.’ I considered patting him on the head, but realised he would be cold. I said to him. ‘See you later, pal.’
On the way out, I noticed another heavy, locked door. ‘Are there more in there? Is that where they keep the second-division players?’
‘That’s where they keep the old bodies,’ she said. ‘Your last facility will be in there.’
‘Facility?’ I asked. The necessity for euphemism always alerted me to hidden fears.
‘The body you’re wearing at the moment.’
‘Right. But only for a bit.’
‘For a bit,’ she repeated.
‘No harm will come to it in there, will it?’
‘How could it?’
‘You won’t sell it?’
‘Er … why should we?’ She added, ‘No disrespect intended. If, after six months, you change your mind, or you just don’t turn up, we will nullify the facility, of course.’
‘Right. But I would like to see where I’m going to be hanging out – or up, rather.’
I moved towards the door of this room. The porter barred my way with his strong arm.
The nurse said, ‘Confidential.’
Ralph intervened. ‘It’s unlikely, Adam, but you might know the people. Some say they’re emigrating, others “seem” to have died. Others have disappeared, but they come here and re-emerge as Newbodies.’
‘How much of this “coming and going” is there about?’ I asked.
Ralph didn’t reply. I felt myself becoming annoyed.
I said, ‘It is curious, inquisitive types like me you claimed you wanted as “initiates”. Now you won’t answer my questions.’
‘Be a patient patient. Soon you’ll have as much time on your hands as you could want. You will come to understand much more then.’ He embraced me. ‘I’ll leave you now. I will visit you when it’s done.’
‘I’ll feel like a new man.’
‘That’s right.’
I was put into bed then, in my room, and examined by the doctor and his assistant. The doctor was whistling, and I closed my eyes. My body had already become just an object to be worked on. I imagined my new body being taken from its rack and prepared in another room.
After a while, the doctor said, ‘We’re ready to go ahead now. You made a good choice. Your new facility has almost been picked out a few times now. He’s been waiting a while for his outing. I’m glad his day has finally come.’
In so far as it was possible, I had got used to the idea that I might die under the anaesthetic, that these might be my last moments on earth. The faces of my children as babies floated before me as I went under. This time, though, I was afraid in a new way: not only of death, but of what might come out of it – new life. How would I feel? Who would I be?
A theory-loving friend of mine has an idea that the notion of the self, of the separate, self-conscious individual, and of any autobiography which that self might tell or write, developed around the same time as the invention of the mirror, first made en masse in Venice in the early sixteenth century. When people could consider their own faces, expressions of emotion and bodies for a sustained period, they could wonder who they were and how they were different from and similar to others.
My children, around the age of two, became fascinated by their own images in the looking-glass. Later, I can remember my son, aged six, clambering onto a chair and then onto the dining table in order to see himself in the mirror over the fireplace, kissing his fingers and saying, as he adjusted his top hat, ‘Masterpiece! What a lucky man you are, to have such a good-looking son!’ Later, of course, they and their mirrors were inseparable. As I said to them: make the most of it, there’ll be a time when you won’t be able to look at yourself without flinching.
According to my friend, if a creature can’t see himself, he can’t mature. He can’t see where he ends and others begin. This process can be aided by hanging a mirror in an animal’s cage.
Still only semi-conscious, I began to move. I found I could stand. I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my room, looking at myself – or whoever I was now – for a long time. I noticed that other mirrors had been provided. I adjusted them until I obtained an all-round view. In these mirrors I seemed to have been cloned as well as transformed. Everywhere I turned there were more mes, many, many more new mes, until I felt dizzy. I sat, lay down, jumped up and down, touched myself, wiggled my fingers and toes, shook my arms and legs and, finally, placed my head carefully on the floor before kicking myself up and standing on it – something I hadn’t done for twenty-five years. There was a lot to take in.
It was a while ago, in my early fifties, that I began to lose my physical vanity, such as it was. I’ve been told that as a young man I was attractive to some people; I spent more time combing my hair than I did doing equations. Certainly I took it for granted that, at least, people wouldn’t be repelled by my appearance. As a child, I lived among open fields and streams, and ran and explored all day. For the past few years, however, I have been plump and bald; my heart condition has given me a continuously damp upper lip. By forty I was faced with the dilemma of whether my belt should go over or under my stomach. Before my children advised me against it, I became, for a while, one of those men whose trousers went up to their chest.
When I first became aware of my deterioration, having had it pointed out by a disappointed lover, I dyed my hair and even signed on at a gym. Soon I was so hungry I ate even fruit. It didn’t take me long to realise there are few things more risible than middle-aged narcissism. I knew the game was up when I had to wear my reading glasses in order to see the magazine I was masturbating over.
None of the women I knew could give up in this way. It was rare for my wife and her friends not to talk about botox and detox, about food and their body shape, size and relative fitness, and the sort of exercise they were or were not taking. I knew women, and not only actresses, who had squads of personal trainers, dieticians, nutritionists, yoga teachers, masseurs and beauticians labouring over their bodies daily, as if the mind’s longing and anxiety could be cured via the body. Who doesn’t want to be more desired and, therefore, loved?
In contrast, I tried to dissociate myself from my body, as if it were an embarrassing friend I no longer wanted to know. My pride, my sense of myself, my identity, if you will, didn’t disappear; rather, it emigrated. I noticed this with my friends. Some of them had gone to the House of Lords; they sat on committees. They were given ‘tribute’ evenings; they picked up awards, medals, prizes and doctorates. The end of the year, when these things were handed out, was an anxious time for the elderly and their doctors. Prestige was more important than beauty. I imagined us, as if in a cartoon, sinking into the sludge of old age, dragged down by medals, our only motion being a jealous turn of the head to see what rewards our contemporaries were receiving.
Some of this, you will be delighted to hear, happened to me. My early plays were occasionally revived, most often by arthritic amateurs, though my latest play hadn’t been produced: it was considered ‘old-fashioned’. Someone was working on a biography which, for a writer, is like having a stone-mason begin to chisel one’s name into a tombstone. My biographer seemed to know, better than I did, what had been important to me. He was young; I was his first job, a try-out. Despite my efforts, we both knew my life hadn’t been scandalous enough for his book to be of much interest.
However, I’d written my memoirs and made money out of two houses I’d bought, without much thought, in the early 1960s, one for my parents and one for myself, which turned out to have been situated in an area which became fashionable.
Lately, what I have wanted to be cured of, if anything, was indifference, slight depression or weariness; of the feeling that my interest in things – culture, politics, other people, myself – was running down. A quarter of me was alive; it was that part which wanted a pure, unadulterated ‘shot’ of life.
I wasn’t the only one. A successful but melancholic friend, ten years older than me, described his head as a ‘raw wound’; he was as furious, pained and mad as he had been at twenty-five. No Nirvanic serenity for him; no freedom from ambition and envy. He said, ‘I wouldn’t know whether you should go gentle into that night or rage against the dying of the light. I think, on reflection, that I’d prefer the gentle myself.’ But it is as if your mind is inhabited by a houseful of squabbling relatives, all of whom one could gladly eject, but cannot.
But where to find consolation? Who will teach us the wisdom we require? Who has it and could pass it on? Does it even exist?
There was religion, once, now replaced by ‘spirituality’, or, for a lot of us, politics – of the ‘fraternal’ kind; there was culture, now there is shopping.
When I came round after the operation these weary thoughts, which I’d carried around for months, weren’t with me. I had more important things to do, like standing on my head! Without Ralph telling me this – he had become an optimist – I had expected to feel, at least, as if I’d been beaten up. I had anticipated days of recovery time. However, even though I was only semi-conscious, I found I could move easily.
Nevertheless, as soon as I lay down on the bed, I fell asleep again. This time I dreamed I was at a railway station. When I take a train I like to get to the station early so as to watch the inhabited bodies move around one another. Yet I have become slightly phobic about others’ bodies. I don’t like them too close to me; I can’t touch strangers, friends or even myself. In the dream, when I arrived at the station, everyone wanted to meet me; they crowded around me, shaking my hand, touching, kissing and stroking me in congratulation.