Nostalgia (7 page)

—
DR SINA
,
HAVE YOU HEARD
again from Presley Smith?

The molten-voiced Dauda from DIS, sounding only half a tone lower than before.

—No, I haven't. I've not heard from Presley…Why do you ask?

—Have you tried to get in touch with him, Doctor?

She was offensive, and persistent, like a bad smell. But she was on the right track, of course. I paused only a moment before unravelling my lie.

—No. He's your baby, you said. I have other patients to take care of. Besides, he told me his problem was under control.

—That's interesting. But do you know where he is, Dr Sina?

—Why? Is he missing?

That met with a blunt silence, and so after another pause I reiterated my denial, offering what was only a half-truth.

—No, I don't know where he is—if he's not at home or work.

—He's not at work or at his residence, Doctor. His condition could have worsened, that's why we are concerned. If he tries to get in touch, please call me. We want to cure his problem. It will not resolve by itself, as he apparently believes. I'm sure you know that. If you could kindly explain that to him. You have referred him to us.

You mean lie to him. And you assume I will speak with him before you do. You've lost him, and you know he doesn't trust you.

The pattern on the screen went blank and Dauda was gone.

I had only one patient that day, but the work was long and arduous, involving our different specialties at the centre. We'd encountered memory rejection—the patient's fiction, the implanted autobiography, was rejected by her brain, and that was not only embarrassing but possibly dangerous. The task at hand was to debug the fiction, find the contradictions in it, one or more. Sometimes they can be trivial, a chronological or factual error, for instance. Others take all one's ingenuity to uncover, the information stored deep inside the mind, often in pieces across the brain. This case was one of the latter and the bugs were finally eliminated electromagnetically.

As I came out of the Sunflower and was walking home by the river, somewhat preoccupied by the case, Presley
Smith pushed forward into my mind again. I asked myself, why not simply drop him: he was a DIS concern, they should deal with him. They wanted him. The risk of offending the Department is never worth the trouble. It always knows better, in the end inevitably it comes out ahead. The spit falls back on you, as the saying goes.

But I knew I could not drop Presley. There was a bond between us. More and more I had come to realize that our lives were intertwined, and possibly in ways I dared not even contemplate.

Could we be mistaken, could Presley keep those rogue thoughts under control, as he said? On the surface of it, why not. We all get nagged by random thoughts occasionally, which we live with until they disappear—that is, we've forgotten them. But who was I kidding? Presley's outlying thoughts were genuine leaks, memories from another life—I knew that, DIS knew that, and he knew that. He had not denied his symptoms, simply refused treatment.

No probes.
Was that sufficient reason?

He could have been a dangerous criminal in a previous life. A serial killer or a child-torturer or a terrorist who now posed the risk of waking up and therefore had to be…neutralized? He was
their
man, as Dauda said; they knew him. Why not trust them, the guardians of our safety? In keeping my interest in him, against their demand, I could well be abetting a potential criminal. I could be setting him loose on the public when he truly belonged in the prison of his altered mind.

If he were made to stay there, would I then be free of him?

Think pleasant thoughts, I counselled myself. Recall last evening, how Joanie and you spent it together, and you didn't have to stoop to sniffing out telltale smells on her. She was all yours. All yours.

After a dinner of coconut fish (my concoction), as we sat in the living room over a crisp Shiraz, she said to me,

—Why are you so preoccupied of late?

Genuine concern. She came to stand next to me where I sat, fingers caressing my hair as I pressed my head against her warm belly. Tears came, I'm ashamed to say, I had become so incontinent lately and the wine didn't help. I feigned surprise.

—Am I? It's just a patient of mine I'm worried about. A tough case.

—I think you keep things from me.

A fine one to j'accuse. As I've said, it is the insouciance of this generation—or is it the utter innocence?—that takes you by surprise. No wonder we call them Babies. Surely she knew that her own cheating hurt me? But then how could she, when I was always ready with a fawning smile when she returned from a tryst, forgiving her spontaneously instead of confronting her?

—There's the professional code of confidentiality, I told her.—I can't discuss patients.

—I don't mean that! Do you keep a diary?

—Not a diary diary…just notes…

—The problem with you oldies is that you have secrets from your long lives. I get lonely sometimes, you know.

She had sat down now and spoke with a sadness that seemed genuine, and I felt needed. Maybe, I thought. Maybe…there's hope, that the generations will come closer. Age need not be a handicap, as sexual orientation or race or physical challenge once were. We don't have lepers or wogs anymore. We live in more tolerant times with richer lives, and fulfillment comes in all shapes—

—Ouch!

My happy daydream as I walked home with a wry smile on my lips was rudely shattered as a virile young man on a monobike jostled past, hitting my shoulder with force. A pain shot up the joint. The attacker swung his head to stifle my startled expression with a toothy snarl, doubtless a resentful BabyGen who would have us GN folks collectively gassed or gunned down to make room for the likes of him. Even Joanie had expressed this feeling, though hardly with any loathing:

—Growing up is not half as good as it used to be, Frank, even fifty years ago. Admit it! You had it so good, you were pampered right into middle age like big babies. Then, on top of all that security, you built up your lives and fat worths. What chance do
we
stand in this world that you've made? What do we inherit when our natural parents simply move on, taking their wealth with them?

Joanie's childhood is no fiction. That's always a startling thought. There's an actual house in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, where she can knock on the door and tell the inhabitants, This is where I grew up, this is the room in the house extension where I slept. It's a large bungalow in the circular end of a cul-de-sac, with a large front lawn, a long driveway, and a backyard where the children played on swings. There is a high-achievers' school in the district that she attended in her teens, where she shot hoops with the future basketball star Toby Carter, and there's a mall in a suburb called King of Prussia not far off where she hung out with her first boyfriend. Her father was a furniture designer and her mother sold houses, part-time. I never saw them, they had gone away when I met Joanie. Besides the sister who lives in our neighbourhood, she has a brother. After coming to Toronto and moving in with me, she returned only once to Wynnewood, to attend the funeral of her grandmother. It was then that we met her brother, Jeff, who took us for drinks to the bar he owned and managed. Our dining room table and chairs were designed by her father. She keeps an album of photos, and one day gave me an illustrated narrative of her life. This brought tears and laughter to her face—expressions of an uncommon intensity that would have been worth recording: those blinded eyes, the dimples on the cheeks, the embarrassed look, the stains on her face when she had wiped it with the back of her wrist. All that life is gone. Though she can touch it in some way, she sometimes misses it intensely.

—How could you understand? she asked once, in that expressive, pleading way she has with that voice, that long face.

—I can try, I said tenderly.—I do, I added hastily, because at that moment I was sure I did understand her sadness, and I held her close to me.

Can the soul (or the heart) be transmitted across generations? I have often asked myself this. Soul not in any religious sense, of course. And heart not the anatomical pump. The transmission of personality traits or sensibilities such as the artistic is a subject of great interest to me. It is of course of importance to our project of extending human life while keeping our minds supple, our culture continuous and exciting. Surely intellectual alertness such as mine justifies living? There are many answers to this question, not all of them affirmative.

When I released her from my embrace, she looked up and said to me,—When my turn comes, I won't choose to pass on. I'll simply die—become part of the earth and the air.

An old-fashioned idea that my mother would have approved of.

I told her just that, adding,—And when the time comes, you might think differently.

—I think not.

The certainty of the young. But what do I know about being young? Only by hearsay and through memory; but can I trust that fiction?

—I would like to have a child, she said, eyes lighting up.—Let's have a child, or two. And I won't abandon them, I'll grow old and die for them. I'll give them security and a home!

She was nodding her head and her eyes were gleaming with excitement. She grabbed my arm. Was I up to the challenge!

—Yes, let's have children, I replied, dizzy with emotion, my voice cracking. She wanted me to be the father of her child!

Of course there was no question of subjecting her body to pregnancy. We went to a birthing clinic and I was told my body was inadequate. Come back in ten, maybe seven years, by then the technology will have advanced for older (sorry) GNs. And so that hope of a deeper relationship, that continuity that children would have brought, disappeared. I would have stayed with her as long as she needed me, and been ready to call it a day for the sake of her and her children.

When I got home, she was out.
Gone to the club with my friend
, said her message.
Food in the cooler. Love.
Whenever she used that phrase,
my friend
, I knew better than to ask, or to imagine. And
Love
, yes, the painful kind. Mine, guaranteed, hers begging indulgence. But I was too tired to be bothered today. I asked Roboserve to bring me a scotch and a cheese sandwich.

There's much to be said for the solace of the study. It's where the mind comes into its own, an entity in itself, an independent creature on its own. Cogito, ergo sum, and no need to be needed.

IT WAS NOT SURPRISING
—
THOUGH OMINOUS
nevertheless—to find that Presley's Profile was frozen. No movement, no response, only a still, flat page staring back. This is what happens to their electronic existence when people die or disappear. They leave a residue for a short time before it blinks out. Had he been found? Would I see him again? What would happen to him? I stared at the photo of the man in army camouflage, taken at the combat park, where he played at hunting barbarians with fellow enthusiasts.

What personality, what habits, what history of a more credible self lay obscured behind that chimera? DIS knew, it must have that buried personality on file. And it wanted him to remain there.

But whoever he was, he refused to stay buried, he was beginning to break out.

Holly's Profile was a contrast and very much alive. It had transformed. The starving, doleful mother with child, the Profile's signature image previously, had been replaced by a landscape. The caption underneath said boldly, THIS WAS MASKINIA. The scene was a countryside, green and hilly, with an unpaved straight road of red earth, on which stood a truck. The open back was heaped with bananas or plantains. Three women stood chatting beside it, wearing bright wraparounds; a shirtless man stood on the back of the truck. A cheerful, distant past, when food was plentiful and healthy. What was going on with the Profile, and who could possibly have taken it over? To what end? If anything,
it
should have been frozen or disappeared.

The banner
Donate!
had disappeared. But
OWEO, One World for Every One!
was still there.

Holly's message centre was thick with opinions and suggestions, sympathy and grief, hatred and vilification.
Holly, we miss you! Kill the savages!—only then OWEO! Turn them to ashes—remember Hiroshima? Is this the side of us we Earthlings want to expose when we make first contact?
A dissenter:
If we didn't confine them behind bars, in a manner of speaking, they would not take it out this way.
Abuse.

I searched for “Pres” among the senders and came up with his previous expression of gratitude to Holly and then my own desperate message to him. There was no reply. It took me a while longer before, hopeless and ready to switch
off, I came across this:
Come meet me at Lovelys Café Yonge and Eg. 10. Leon.

How obvious, and crafty of Presley. Surely “Pres” would ring bells, and I could have kicked myself for not having thought of a pseudonym myself.

I dared not linger on the page. Before Tom could approach me, I went away.

The Notebook

#47

The Journalist

When they'd stripped her naked she was left in a dark and dank corner of the room, shivering from the chill, crying, terrified. Utterly humiliated. Discards of all manner all around her. The floor broken. Lizards, spiders, flying cockroaches. The heat and the smell. All her confidence, her cheerful composure, her good intentions in the dust. What would happen to her? They would hand her over to the men, who would rape her and keep her as a sex slave and a breeder. They'd kill her. To end your life like that—so abruptly, so shamefully. She'd never see Toronto again, she sobbed, all that familiarity she had taken for granted, her comfortable home base to which she could always return and feel unthreatened. She knew many people there, but her intimacy was with the city itself, not anyone she knew. How safe and civilized it was. She was in hell now, and what crime had she committed? Naïveté…that was her crime, she whispered to herself, sheer naïveté…and
arrogance…Stupidity. Grinding her teeth, she reminded herself of her dentist's admonition not to, she could lose them. She must preserve herself. She dozed off, and was woken roughly with a shove and made to stand up. The two women, one of them holding an oil lamp, examined her, touched her front to back, her hair, her breasts, her backside. Everything. She was then given soap and water to wash in the backyard, and afterwards, still outside, they helped her into an oversize tan-coloured robe of a rough cotton. There was a pale blue vertical stripe running along it, and she thought to herself, what a lovely detail. It was late afternoon. As she stood there in the yard, looking at herself in the robe and feeling some relief and hope, the younger of the two women stroked her hair, pulled her closer, and kissed her on the mouth. Holly recoiled, then unconsciously yielded to the wet tenderness, the sweet taste, the thick Oriental perfume. The woman was tall and slender, with deep brown eyes in an oval face and braided hair. She also wore a loose robe. The older woman was large and big-hipped, in a long dress. The three women ate together, coarse rice, spinach, and kidney beans from a large round tray. Outside the compound, fenced in by a long thatch, came the sounds of men shouting, and an automobile grinding and groaning its angry way over the potholed road. A brief quick thumping of boots on the ground, from a few armed men marching past. An assorted gang of children shouting in a chorus, running along together and perhaps following the men. When the three women had eaten and washed their hands and mouths, they sat back and relaxed and chewed a weed.
The two local women chatted, their voices guttural and animated, and as Holly watched them, amused by their frank expressions, she did not feel threatened by them. At length the older woman said something to Holly, and the younger woman translated,—Come, the chief wants to meet you. They gave her army-style fatigues to put on but no underwear. She put on her boots, which mercifully the women had preserved. They all laughed.