‘By the way,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’ll need a new name. You could keep your old name, of course, or a derivative. But it might cause confusion. You’re not really Adam any more. What do you think?’
My instinct was to change my name. It would help me remember that I was a new combination. Anyway, hybrids were hip.
‘What will it be?’ he asked.
‘I’ll be called Leo Raphael Adams,’ I said at last. ‘Does that sound grand enough?’
‘Up to you,’ he said. ‘Good. I’ll tell them. You have money, don’t you?’
‘As you insisted, enough for six months.’
‘I’ll make sure you receive a passport and driving licence in your new name.’
‘That must be illegal,’ I said.
‘Does that worry you?’
‘I’m afraid so. I’m not a good man by any means, but I do tend towards honesty in trivial matters.’
‘That’s the least of it, man. You’re in a place that few other humans have ever been before. You’re a walking laboratory, an experiment. You’re beyond good and evil now.’
‘Right, I see,’ I said. ‘The identity theorists are going to be busy worrying about this one.’
He touched my shoulder. ‘You need to get laid. It works, doesn’t it – your thing?’
‘I can’t tell you how good it feels not to piss in all directions at once or over your own new shoes. As soon as I get an erection, I’ll call.’
‘The first time I had sex in my new body, it all came back. I was with a Russian girl. She was screaming like a pig.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I knew, that night, it had been worth it. That all those years, day after day, watching my wife die, were over. This was moving on in glory.’
‘My wife isn’t dead. I hope she doesn’t die while I’m “away”.’
‘It’s okay to be unfaithful,’ he said. ‘It isn’t you doing it.’
We talked for a bit, but I felt restless and kept bouncing on my toes. I said I wanted to get out and walk, shake my new arse, and show off. Ralph said he had done the same. He would let me go my own way as soon as he could. First, we had to do some shopping. Ralph had brought a suit, shirt, underwear and shoes to the hospital, but I would need more.
‘My son only seems to possess jeans, T-shirts and sunglasses,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I have no idea what twenty-five-year-olds wear.’
‘I will help you,’ he said. ‘I only know twenty-five-year-olds.’
I was photographed for my new passport, and then Ralph took me to a chain-store. Each time I saw myself in the changing-room mirror I thought a stranger was standing in front of me. My feet were an unnecessary distance from my waist. Recently, I’d found it difficult to get my socks on, but I’d never been unfamiliar with the dimensions of my own body before. I’d always known where to find my own balls.
I dressed in black trousers, white shirt and raincoat, nothing fashionable or ostentatious. I had no desire to express myself. Which self would I be expressing? The only thing I did buy, which I’d always wanted but never owned before, was a pair of tight leather trousers. My wife and children would have had hysterics.
Ralph left to go to a rehearsal. He was busy. He was pleased with me and with himself, but his job was done. He wanted to get on with his own new life.
Staring at myself in the mirror again, attempting to get used to my new body, I realised my hair was a little long. Whichever ‘me’ I was, it didn’t suit me. I would customise myself.
There was a hairdresser’s near my house, which I had walked past most days for years, lacking the courage to go in. The people were young, the women with bare pierced bellies, and the noise horrendous. Now, as the girl chopped at my thick hair and chattered, my mind teemed with numerous excitements, wonderments and questions. I had quickly agreed to become a Newbody in order not to vacillate. Since the operation, I had felt euphoric; this second chance, this reprieve, had made me feel well and glad to be alive. Age and illness drain you, but you’re never aware of how much energy you’ve lost, how much mental preparation goes into death.
What I didn’t know, and would soon find out, was what it was like to be young again in a new body. I enjoyed trying out my new persona on the hairdresser, making myself up. I told her I was single, had been brought up in west London and had been a philosophy and psychology student; I had worked in restaurants and bars, and now I was deciding what to do.
‘What do you have in mind?’ she asked.
I told her I was intending to go away; I’d had enough of London and wanted to travel. I would be in the city for only a few more days, before setting off. As I spoke, I felt a surge or great push within, but towards what I had no idea, except that I knew they were pleasures.
Walking out of the hairdresser’s, I saw my wife across the road pulling her shopping trolley on wheels. She looked more tired and frailer than my mental picture of her. Or perhaps I was reverting to the view of the young, that the old are like a race all of whom look the same. Possibly I needed to be reminded that age in itself was not an illness.
I recalled talking in bed with her last week, semi-asleep, with one eye open. I could see only part of her throat and neck and shoulder, and I had stared at her flesh thinking I had never seen anything more beautiful or important.
She glanced across the street. I froze. Of course her eyes moved over me without recognition. She walked on.
Being, in a sense, invisible, and therefore omniscient, I could spy on those I loved, or even use and mock them. It was an unpleasant loneliness I had condemned myself to. Still, six months was a small proportion of a life. What would be the purpose of my new youth? I had led a perplexed and unnecessarily pained inner life, but unlike Ralph, I had not felt unfulfilled, or wished to be a violinist, pioneering explorer or to learn the tango. I’d had projects galore.
My bewilderment was, I guessed, the experience of young people who’d recently left home and school. When I taught young people ‘creative’ writing, their excessive concern about ‘structure’ puzzled me. It was only when I saw that they were referring to their lives as well as to their work that I began to understand them. Looking for ‘structure’ was like asking the question: what do you want to do? Who would you like to be? They could only take the time to find out. Such an experiment wasn’t something I’d allowed myself to experience at twenty-five. At that age I moved between hyperactivity and enervating depression – one the remedy, I hoped, for the other.
If my desire pointed in a particular direction this time around, I would have to discover what it was – if there was, in fact, something to find. Perhaps in my last life I’d been overconstrained by ambition. Hadn’t my needs been too narrow, too concentrated? Maybe it was not, this time, a question of finding one big thing, but of liking lots of little ones. I would do it differently, but why believe I’d do it better?
That evening I changed hotels, wanting somewhere smaller and less busy. I ate three times and went to bed early, still a little groggy from the operation.
The next day was a fine one, and I awoke in an excellent mood. If I lacked Ralph’s sense of purpose, I didn’t lack enthusiasm. Whatever I was going to do, I was up for it.
There I was, walking in the street, shopping for the trip I had finally decided to take, when two gay men in their thirties started waving and shouting from across the road.
‘Mark, Mark!’ they called, straight at me. ‘It’s you! How are you! We’ve missed you!’
I was looking about. There was no one else they could have been motioning to. Perhaps my leather trousers were already having an effect on the general public. But it was more than that: the couple were moving through the traffic, their arms extended. I considered running away – I thought I might pretend to be jogging – but they were almost on me. I could only face them as they greeted me warmly. In fact, they both embraced me.
Luckily, their talk was relentless and almost entirely about themselves. When I managed to inform them that I was about to go on holiday, they told me they were going away, too, with friends, an artist and a couple of dancers.
‘Your accent’s changed, too,’ they said. ‘Very British.’
‘It’s London, dear. I’m a new man now,’ I explained. ‘A reinvention.’
‘We’re so pleased.’
I understood that the last time we met, in New York, my mental state hadn’t been good, which was why they were pleased to see me out shopping in London. They and their circle of friends had been worried about me.
I survived this, and soon we were saying our farewells. The two men kissed and hugged me.
‘And you’re looking good,’ they added. ‘You’re not modelling any more, are you?’
‘Not at the moment,’ I said.
One of them said, ‘But you’re not doing the other thing, are you, for money?’
‘Oh, not right now.’
‘It was driving you crazy.’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I believe it was.’
‘Shame the boy band idea didn’t work out. Particularly after you got through the audition with that weird song.’
‘Too unstable, I guess.’
‘Would you like to join us for a drink – of orange juice, of course? Why not?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the other. ‘Let’s go and talk somewhere.’
‘I’m sorry, but I must go,’ I said, moving away. ‘I’m already late for my psychiatrist! He tells me there’s much to be done!’
‘Enjoy!’
I rang Ralph straight away.
‘You got your erection, eh?’ he said.
I insisted on seeing him. He was rehearsing. He made me go to the college canteen during his tea break and wait. When he did turn up, he seemed preoccupied, having had an argument with Ophelia. I didn’t care. I told him what had happened to me on the street.
‘That shouldn’t have occurred,’ he said, with some concern. ‘It’s never happened to me, though I guess I’ll start to get recognised when I’ve played Hamlet.’
‘What is going on? Don’t they do any checks first?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But the world’s a small place now. Your guy’s from LA.’
‘Mark. That’s his name. That’s what they called me.’
‘So? How can anyone be expected to know he’s got friends in Kensington?’
‘Suppose he’s wanted by the police somewhere?’
He shook his head. ‘It won’t happen again,’ he said confidently. ‘The chances of such a repeat are low, statistically.’
‘There have been other weird occurrences.’
‘For example?’ He didn’t want to hear, but he had to.
‘Tell me, first, how did he die, my body, my man?’
Ralph hesitated. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Why, are you not allowed to tell me?’
‘This is a new area.’
I went on, ‘In bed, I was aware of these twinges, or sensations. There were times in my Oldbody life, particularly as I got older, or when I was meditating, when I felt that the limits of my mind and body had been extended. I felt, almost mystically, part of others, an “outgrowth of the One”.’
‘Really?’
‘This is different. It’s as if I have a ghost or shadow-soul inside me. I can feel things, perhaps memories, of the man who was here first. Perhaps the physical body has a soul. There’s a phrase of Freud’s that might apply here: the bodily ego, he calls it, I think.’
‘Isn’t it a little late for this? I’m an actor, not a mystic.’
I noticed a lack of respect in Ralph. I was a puling twenty-five-year-old rather than a distinguished author. It hadn’t taken long before I was confronted with the losses involved in gaining prolonged youth.
I said, ‘I need to know more about my body. It was Mark’s face they were seeing when they looked at me. It was his childhood experience they were partly taking in, not yours or mine.’
‘You want to know why he snuffed himself out? I’m telling you, Leo, face it, this is the truth and you know it already. Your guy’s going to have died in some grisly fashion.’
‘What sort of thing are we talking about?’
‘If he’s young, it’s not going to be pleasant. No young death is a relief. The whole world works by exploitation. We all know the clothes we wear, the food, it’s packed by Third World peasants.’
‘Ralph, I am not just wearing this guy’s shoes.’
‘He was definitely “obscure”, your man. There’s no way I’m going to let them give you shoddy goods. Anyway, it’s impossible, at the moment, to just go and kill someone for their body. Their family, the police, the press, everyone’s going to be looking for them. The body has to be “cleared”, and then it has to be prepared for new use by a doctor who knows what he is doing. It’s a long and complicated process. You can’t just plug your brain into any skull, thank Christ. Imagine what a freak show we’d have then.’
‘If he’s been “cleared”, I think that at least you should tell me what you know,’ I said. ‘I presume he was homosexual.’
‘Why else would he be in such good shape? Most hets, apart from actors, have the bodies of corpses. You object to homosexuality?’
‘Not in principle, and not yet. I haven’t had time to take it in. I’m at the beginning here. I need to know what all this might mean.’
Ralph said, ‘As far as I know, he was nutty but not druggy. A suicide, I think, by carbon monoxide poisoning. They had to fix up his lungs. I looked into it, for you. Adam – Leo, I mean. I asked them to give you the best. Some of those women were in great shape.’
‘I told you, I’m not ready to be a woman. I’m not even used to being a man.’
‘That was your choice, then. Your man had something like clinical depression. Obviously a lot of young people suffer from it. They can’t get the help they need. Even in the long run they don’t come round. Antidepressants, therapy, all that, it never works. They’re never going to be doers and getters like us, man. Better to be rid of them altogether and let the healthy ones live.’
‘Live in the bodies of the discarded, you mean? The neglected, the failures?’
‘Right.’
‘I see what you’re getting at. “Mark” might have suffered in his mind. He might not have lived a “successful” life, but his friends seemed to like him. His mother would like to see him.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘What if I –’
‘Don’t think about pulling that kind of stunt in front of his mother,’ he said. ‘She’d go mad if you walked in there with that face on. His whole family! They’d think they’d seen a fucking ghost!’