I murmured, ‘You look well.’
‘Thanks. So do you.’
He said, ‘Senex bis puer.’
‘An old man is twice a boy?’
‘That’s the one. I’ve just taken up wrestling, along with the kick boxing.’ He put up his hands. ‘Wonderful sport. I’ll show you a few moves later.’
I wiped my face. ‘I think I’ve got the idea.’
But I pushed him then, a couple of times, quickly, and he fell back. He was flushed with fury. For a moment, I thought we’d be wrestling. We’d have enjoyed that. But before he could react, I’d dropped my hands and was laughing, so the argument was whether he’d lose his temper or not.
He managed not to, distracting himself by opening a cabinet within which there was a monitor. He switched it on and flicked to a channel showing the orgy room. I spotted Alicia dancing alone, naked. She looked freer than I had seen her before.
‘Want this on? Or would you prefer to slip into someone comfortable – when I’ve finished with you?’
‘Neither.’
‘Nor me,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s ever new for people like us. It takes a lot to turn us on – if anything does at all.’
‘What else is there? Why have we done this?’
‘But there is something left. You don’t know?’
‘Not unless you go to the trouble of telling me,’ I said.
‘Murder. It is the deepest, loveliest thing. You haven’t tried it yet?’ I shook my head. ‘One must experience everything once, don’t you think?’
I said, ‘No one’s ever hit me like that.’
‘Shame.’
‘Why did you do it?’
He touched my neck, chest and stomach. ‘I considered that body for myself, but wanted something a bit wider and more chunky. I’m surprised it hung around there for so long. Still, they did have an excellent choice of new facilities. It would have looked good on me. It doesn’t look bad on you. How does it feel?’
I moved my limbs a bit. ‘Fine – until you attacked me.’
‘How long have you had it?’
‘Not even three months.’
‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’
‘I’ll survive,’ I said. ‘I’m just a little annoyed. Thanks for the concern.’
‘It was your body I was thinking of, rather than you. Hey, what d’you think of my body?’ Without waiting for a reply, he removed his shirt. ‘Sometimes, all you want is to be able to look in the mirror without disgust.’ I nodded approvingly, but, obviously, not approvingly enough. ‘What about this?’ he said. He was showing me his penis, even slapping it against his leg with obscene pride. ‘It just goes on and on.’
‘Incomparable.’
‘That’s what they all say. How are my buns?’
‘Jesus. With those you could be your own hotdog.’
‘I’ve been in this body for three years. You get used to bodies, and the person you become in them. As with jeans, Newbodies are better the more they’re worn in. You forget you’re in them.’ He pulled at his stomach. ‘Look at that: I’m increasing here, but I don’t want to be perfect. I figured out that perfection makes people crazy, or feel inferior.’
‘Whereas’, I said, ‘it’s one’s weaknesses that people want to know?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘No one ever gets rid of those. I think I’ll do another ten years – or even longer, if things go well – in this facility before moving on to something fitter.’ He filled his glass once more and held it out. ‘To us – pioneers of the new frontier!’
‘We have a secret in common,’ I said, ‘you and me. Do you get to discuss it much with others?’
‘They do talk about it, “the newies”. But I want to live, not chatter. I love being a funky dirty young man. I love pouting my sexy lips and being outstanding at tennis. My serve could knock your face off! You should have seen me before. I’ve got the photographs somewhere. What’s the point of being rich if you’re lopsided and have a harelip? It was a joke, a mistake that I came out alive like that! This is the real me!’
‘What I miss,’ I said, ‘is giving people the pleasure of knowing about me.’
He was unstoppable. ‘Soon everyone’ll be talking ’bout this. There’ll be a new class, an elite, a superclass of superbodies. Then there’ll be shops where you go to buy the body you want. I’ll open one myself with real bodies rather than mannequins in the window. Bingo! Who d’you want to be today!’
I said, ‘If the idea of death itself is dying, all the meanings, the values of Western civilisation since the Greeks, have changed. We seem to have replaced ethics with aesthetics.’
‘Bring on the new meanings! You’re a conservative, then.’
‘I didn’t think so. I guess I don’t know what or who I am. It’s always uplifting, though, to meet a hedonist – someone relieved of the tiring standards which hold the rest of us back from the eternal party.’
‘You still think I’m just a playboy, do you? Look at those books!’ He pointed at a shelf. ‘I’m taking those in! Euripides, Goethe, Nietzsche. I’m dealing with the deepest imponderables. You know what happened to me? I was seventy-five years old. My wife leaves me – not for some virile fucker, but to become a Buddhist. She prefers old fat stomach to me! Some other cultures go for different body shapes, you know.’ He went on, ‘Mostly, my children don’t bother with me. They’re too busy with drugs! My friends are dead. I can buy women, but they don’t desire me. I didn’t just work all my life, I fought and scrambled and dug into the rock surface of the world with my fuckin’ fingernails! I lost it all and I was dying and I was depressed. You think I wanted to check out in that state?’
‘It sounds hard to say it, but that’s a life, I guess. It’s the failures, the hopeless digressions, the mistakes, the waste, which add up to a lived life.’
If he’d been in a pub, he’d have spat on the floor. ‘You’re only an intellectual,’ he said. ‘I deserved a better final curtain. I bought one! I can tell you, I’m doing some other pretty worthwhile things. Let’s hear from you now. What are you doing with your new time?’
‘Me? I’m only a menial at the Centre.’
He made a face. ‘You’re going to keep doing that?’
‘I’m definitely not doing anything worthwhile. In fact, I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have had a career rather than having to make one. Now, I’m going to enjoy my six months.’
‘You’re really going back into your slack old body suit?’
‘This is an experiment. I wanted to find out what this would be like. But I’m still afraid of anything too … unnatural.’
He had been pacing about. Now he sat down opposite me. His tone was more than businesslike; he was firm, but not quite threatening, though it seemed he could become so.
He said, ‘You can sell that one, then.’
‘Sell what?’
‘That body.’
‘Sell it?’
‘Yeah, to me. I’ll pay you well. You will make a substantial profit which you and your family can live on for the rest of your God-given life.’
‘What about my old body?’
‘I’ll get that back for you. No problem. An old body sack is about as valuable as a used condom.’ He was looking at me passionately. ‘It’s a good deal. What do you say?’
‘I’m puzzled. You’ve got the money. Go and buy one. I went to a place, a kind of small hospital. I’m sure you did the same.’
‘I did. You think those places are easy to find? It’s not that simple any more.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You were either well connected or lucky,’ he said. He was drumming his fingers. ‘Things have changed already.’
‘In what way?’ He didn’t want to say. ‘To put it objectively,’ I went on, ‘if people want bodies so badly, they could eliminate someone. Unlike you, I’m not recommending it, only suggesting what seems obvious. This isn’t the only desirable body around.’
‘Bodies have to be adapted. The “mark” on the head tells you that’s been achieved. The body you are in now isn’t valuable in itself, but the work that’s been done on it is. The people who do it are like gods, extending life. There are only three or four doctors in the world today who can do this operation, and they’re like the men who made the atomic bomb – hated, admired and feared, having changed the nature of human life.’
‘Do you know these body artists?’
‘I can get to at least one of them,’ he said. ‘And I have ill acquaint ances who will pay a great deal to be moved into another body facility.’
‘People who will give everything rather than die. I can understand that. Wow, I’m in big demand,’ I said. ‘But I’ll wait for my six months to be up. What’s the rush?’
‘Someone might be dying in awful pain with only weeks to live. They might not be able to wait for your little “try-out” to come to an end.’
‘That, as they say, is life.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
I said, ‘Is it someone you know? A friend or a lover?’
‘Shut up!’
I said, ‘Fine. But that’s what I’ve decided to do. I’m not handing my body over to anyone. I’m just settling in. We’re getting attached.’
‘But you don’t even want it! How can a few months matter when you’re going back? I would advise you most strongly to sell it now.’
‘Strongly, eh?’
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t want to put myself in unnecessary danger. You’re not the sort to be able to look after yourself.’
‘Matte, it’s my decision. I don’t want your money, and I don’t want my “body holiday” interrupted.’
He was having difficulty controlling himself. Some anxiety or fury was flooding him. He walked about the cabin, with his face turned away from me.
‘The demand is there,’ he said. ‘The bodies of young women, on which there has always been a premium, are in big demand in the United States. These women are disappearing from the streets, not to be robbed or raped but to be painlessly murdered. There are machines for doing it, which I am hoping to be involved in the manufacture of. It’s a beautiful procedure, Leo. The sacked bodies are kept in fridges, waiting for the time when the operation will have been simplified. When it’ll be like slotting an engine into a car, rather than having to redesign the car itself each time. People might even start to share bodies to go out in, the way girls share clothes now. They’ll say to one another, “Who’ll wear the body tonight?” There’s no going back. Immortality is where some of us are heading, like it or not. But there will be some people for whom it will be too late.’
I was interested to meet someone in my situation and I would have liked to have spent at least one evening with a group of Newbodies – we waxen immortals – sitting around a card table, discussing the past, of which there would have been plenty, no doubt. His tone concerned me, however. I was afraid and wanted to get out of there but he had locked the door. I didn’t want to provoke him; he seemed capable of anything. So when he said, ‘Come, look at this – it might interest you,’ I went with him.
I followed him through narrow, twisting corridors. We passed a door outside of which stood two big men in white short-sleeved shirts. Matte nodded at the men and exchanged a few words with one of them in Greek. I was going to ask Matte what they were guarding, but I had been too curious already.
We went down another corridor. At last, Matte knocked on the door of another cabin. An upper-class English voice said, ‘Come.’
The room was dark, apart from the light shed by a table-lamp. At a desk sat a woman in her thirties, writing and listening to gentle big-band music. Her clothes appeared to be from another time, my mother’s, perhaps, though I could see her hair and teeth were not. If there was something palpably strange about her, I’d have said she resembled an actress in a period film whose contemporary health and look belied the period she appeared to be representing.
Matte went to her. They spoke, and she continued her work.
He stood beside me at the door and whispered, ‘That woman is a child psychologist, a genius in her field. Years ago, as a man, she looked after one of my children who was seriously disturbed. She knows almost everything about human beings. When he was ill, not long ago, I paid for him to become a Newbody. He had arthritis and was bent double. He needed to finish his book and to continue to help others, as a woman. Don’t you think that’s a pretty charitable thing?’ He gave me a look that was supposed to shame me. ‘She’s not sweeping the floor somewhere and chasing sex.’ He shut the door. ‘What would you ask her?’
‘How to die, I guess.’
‘Death is dead.’
‘Oh, no, everyone’ll miss it so, and there would be other psych ologists’, I said, ‘to build on his or her work.’
‘She can do that herself. Life renewing itself.’
‘How’s her book?’
‘Looks like she’ll need several lifetimes. She’s … thorough.’
‘Read it?’
‘A boxful of notes? Most of the time she lies on deck, “thinking”. She has too much sex for my liking. I’ll accept one of your points: she’d go faster if she thought she was going to snuff it. Wish she’d update her taste, too. She insists on listening to that old-time music, which reminds me of days I want to forget.’
‘I guess you can’t force anyone to like speed garage,’ I said. ‘Do your kids know you now?’
‘They don’t know where I am. They’re not speaking to me. When they get older, if they behave themselves, I’ll get them new bodies as birthday presents.’
‘They’ll want that?’
‘Those crazy kids’ll totally love it. They’ve been in bands and clinics and stuff. They get exhausted – you know, the lifestyle. This way they can carry on. I’m holding off telling them because I know they’re gonna want to get off to a new start right away.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘If they haven’t suffered enough, they’re not gonna appreciate it. This isn’t for everybody.’
I didn’t want to listen to him, or argue any more. As with Ralph Hamlet, I found the encounter disturbing. Matte and I were both mutants, freaks, human unhumans – a fact I could at least forget when I was with real people, those with death in them.
I said, ‘I need to see where Patricia is.’
For a moment I thought he wouldn’t let me go. But what could he do? He was thinking hard though. Then we shook hands. ‘There’s plenty of women here who would be attracted to you,’ he said. ‘Take who you want.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You must think more seriously about the body sale.’ He gave me his card and looked me up and down once more. ‘I’m your man – first in line with a bag of cash. Look after yourself.’