“Then we go ahead,” said Haisal irritably. “Quiet down, everybody. Sam, you ready to take all this down? Doctor, can you wake her up?”
The room became still as the notary public turned on his monitor and the doctor and nurse gave Jocelyn Feigerman the gentle electric nudge that would rouse her. Then the borough president spoke:
“Mrs. Feigerman, this is Agbal Haisal. Do you hear me?”
On the CRT over her bed there was a quick pulsing of alpha waves, and a tinny voice said, “Yes.” It wasn’t Jocelyn’s voice, of course, since she had none. It was synthesized speech, generated electronically, controlled not by the nerves that led to the paralyzed vocal cords but by practiced manipulation of the brain’s alpha rhythms, and its vocabulary was very small.
“I will ask the doctor to explain your medical situation to you, as we discussed,” said Haisal formally, “and if you have any question simply say ‘No.’ Go ahead, doctor.”
The young resident cleared his throat, frowning over his notes. He wanted to get this exactly right; it was his first case of this kind. “Mrs. Feigerman,” he began, “in addition to the gross physical problems you are aware of, you have been diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzheimer’s syndrome, sometimes called senile dementia. The laboratory has demonstrated fibrous protein deposits in your brain, which are increasing in size and number. This condition is progressive and at present irreversible, and the prognosis is loss of memory, loss of control of behavior, psychotic episodes and death. I have discussed this with you earlier, and repeat it now so that you may answer this question. Do you understand your condition?”
Pause. Flicker of lines in the CRT. “Yes.”
“Thank you, doctor,” rumbled the borough president. “In that case, Mrs. Feigerman—Joss—I have a series of questions to ask you, and they may sound repetitive but they’re what the law says a magistrate has to ask. First, do you know why we are here?”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that you are suffering from physical conditions which will bring about irreversible brain damage and death within an estimated time of less than thirty days?”
“Yes.”
“Then, Mrs. Feigerman,” he said solemnly, “your options are as follows. One. You
may continue as you are, in which case you will continue on the life-support systems until brainscan and induction tests indicate you are brain-dead, with no further medical procedures available. Two. You may elect to terminate life-support systems at this time, or at any later time you choose, as a voluntary matter, without further medical procedures. Three. You may elect to terminate life support and enter voluntary cryonic suspension. In this case you should be informed that the prognosis is uncertain but that the necessary financial and physical arrangements have been made for your storage and to attempt to cure and revive you when and if such procedures become available.
“I will now ask you if you accept one of these alternatives.”
The pause was quite long this time, and Feigerman was suddenly aware that he was very tired. Perhaps it was more than fatigue; it might have been even bereavement, for although he had no desire to shriek or rend his clothes he felt the dismal certainty that a part of his life was being taken away from him. It had not always been a happy part. It was many years since it had been a sensually obsessive part … but it had been his. He tried to make out the vague images before him to see if his wife’s eyes were open, at least, but the detail was very inadequate … . “Yes,” said the tinny voice at last, without emotion, or emphasis. Or life. It was, almost literally, a voice from the grave; and it was hard to remember how very alive that wasted body had once been.
“In that case, Mrs. Feigerman, is it Alternative Number One, continuing as you are?”
“No.”
“Is it Alternative Number Two, terminating life-support without further procedures?”
“No.”
“Is it Alternative Number Three, terminating life-support and entering cryonic suspension?”
“Yes.” A long sigh from everyone in the room; none of them could help himself.
The borough president went on: “Thank you, Mrs. Feigerman. I must now ask you to make a choice. You may elect to enter neurocryonic suspension, which is to say the freezing of your head and brain only. Or you may elect whole-body suspension. Your doctor has explained to you that the damage suffered by your body has been so extensive that any revival and repair is quite unlikely in the next years or even decades. On the other hand, suspension of the head and brain only entails the necessity for providing an entire body for you at some future day, through cloning, through grafting of a whole new donor body to your head and brain or through some other procedure at present unknown. No such procedures exist at present. This decision is entirely yours to make, Mrs. Feigerman; your next of kin have been consulted and agree to implement whatever choice you make. Have you understood all this, Mrs. Feigerman?”
“Yes.”
Haisal sighed heavily. “Very well, Joss, I will now ask you which alternative you prefer. Do you accept Alternative Number one, the cryonic suspension of head and brain only?”
“No.”
“Do you accept whole-body suspension, then?”
“Yes.”
“So be it,” rumbled the borough president heavily, and signed to the notary public. The man slipped the hard-copy transparency out of his monitor, pressed his thumb in one corner and passed it around to the witnesses to do the same. “Now,” said the borough president, “I think we’ll leave the family to say their good-byes.” He gathered up
the notary, the nurse and Marcus’s mother with his eyes; and to the doctor he signaled, his lips forming the words:
“Then pull the plug.
”
On the first morning of de Rintelen Feigerman’s new life as a widower, he awoke with a shock, and then a terrible sense of loss. The loss was not the loss of his wife; even in his dreams he had accepted that Jocelyn was dead, or if not exactly dead certainly both legally and practically no longer alive in the sense that he was. The shock was that he had not dreamed that he was blind. In Rinty’s dreams he could always see. That was a given: everyone could see. Human beings saw, just as they breathed and ate and shit. So in his dreams he experienced, without particularly remarking on it, the glowing red and green headlamps of an IRT subway train coming into the Clark Street station, and the silent fall of great white snowflakes over the East River, and the yellow heat of summer sun on a beach, and women’s blue eyes, and stars, and clouds. It was only when he woke up that it was always darkness.
Rosalyn, his big old weimarian, growled softly from beside the bed as Feigerman sat up. There was no significance to the growl, except that it was her way of letting Feigerman know where she was. He reached down and touched her shaggy head, finding it just where it ought to be, right under his descending hand. He didn’t really need the morning growl anymore. He could pretty nearly locate her by the smell, because Rosalyn was becoming quite an old dog. “Lie,” he said, and heard her whuffle obediently as she lay down again beside his bed. He was aware of a need to go to the bathroom, but there was a need before that. He picked up the handset from the bedside table, listened to the beeps that told him the time, pressed the code that connected him to his office. “Rinty here,” he said. “Situation report, please.”
“Good morning, Mr. Feigerman,” said the night duty officer. He knew her voice, a pretty young woman, or one whose face felt smooth and regular under his fingers and whose hair was short and soft. Janice something. “Today’s weather, no problems. Overnight maintenance on schedule; no major outages. Shift supervisors are reporting in now, and we anticipate full crews. We’ve been getting, though,” she added, a note of concern creeping into her voice, “a lot of queries from the furloughed crews. They want to know when they’re going to go back to work.”
“I wish I could tell them, Janice. Talk to you later.” He hung up, sighed and got ready for the memorized trip to the toilet, the shower, the coffee pot—he could already feel the heat from it as it automatically began to brew his first morning cup—and all the other blind man’s chores. He had to face them every morning, and the most difficult was summoning up the resolution to get through one more day.
Rinty Feigerman had lived in this apartment for more than thirty years. As soon as Jocelyn’s son, David, was out of the house they had bought this condo in Brooklyn Heights. It was big and luxurious, high up in what had once been a fashionable Brooklyn hotel, when Brooklyn had still considered itself remote enough from The City to want its own hotels. Fashionable people stopped staying there in the thirties and forties. In the fifties and sixties it had become a welfare hotel, where the city’s poor huddled up in rooms that, every year, grew shabbier and smelled worse, as the big dining restaurant, the swimming pool, the health club, the saunas, the meeting rooms, the rooftop night
club withered and died. Then a developer turned it into apartments. It was Rinty Feigerman who picked the place, studying the view and the builders’ plans while he still had eyes that worked. But Jocelyn had furnished it. She had put in end tables and planters, thick rugs on slippery floors, a kitchen like a machine shop, with blenders and food processors and every automatic machine in the catalog. When Feigerman lost his eyes, every one of those things became a booby trap.
For the first couple of years Jocelyn grimly replaced candy dishes and lamps as they crashed. She had not quite accepted the fact that the problem was not going to get better. After the damage toll began to be substantial, the week a whole tray of porcelain figures smashed to the floor and a coffeemaker burned itself out until the electrical reek woke her up, Jocelyn, sullen but thorough, attacked the job of blindproofing their home. The living spaces she kept ornate. Rinty stayed out of them, except on the well established routes from door to door. They wound up with three separate establishments. One was for company. One was Jocelyn’s own space, formerly dainty but in the last two years more like a hospital suite. And the rest was Feigerman’s own: a bedroom, a bath, a guest room converted into a study, a guest bath rebuilt into a barebones kitchen, all crafted for someone who preferred using only his sense of touch. And the terrace.
For a blind man with a Seeing Eye dog, that was maybe the best thing of all. It had started out flagstoned, with two tiny evergreens in wooden pots. Jocelyn’s son had had a better idea, and so he filled it from wall to wall with twenty cubic yards of topsoil. It grew grass, though nothing much else, and so became a perfect dog’s toilet. No one had to walk Rosalyn in the morning. Rinty opened the thermal French windows, Rosalyn paced gravely out; when she had done what she had to do she scratched to come back in, and then lay attentively near her master until he called her to put on her harness. Feigerman always accountered Rosalyn before he did himself. He wondered if she disliked it as much as he did, but of course he had no way to know. Rosalyn never complained. Not even when he was so busy working that he forgot to feed her for hours past her time; she would take food from no one else, and he supposed that if he continued to forget she would simply starve. Not even now, when she was so slow and tired so quickly that he left her home on almost every day, except when guilt made him take her—and a human being like the boy Marcus, for insurance—for a walk in a park. He stood in the open doorway, letting the morning sun warm his face, trying to believe that he could see at least a reddening of the darkness under his eyelids, until Rosalyn came back and whined softly as she put her cold nose in his hand.
Someone was in the apartment. Feigerman hadn’t put his hearing aid on because, as he told himself, he wasn’t really
deaf,
just a little hard of hearing; but he had not heard the door. He opened the door to his own room and called, “Is that you, Gloria?”
“No, Mr. Feigerman, it’s me. Nillie. Want me to fix you a cup of coffee?”
“I’ve got some in here. Wait a minute.” He reached for the robe at the foot of his bed, slid into it, tied it over his skinny belly—how could he be so thin and yet so flabby?—and invited her in. When she had poured herself a cup out of his own supply and was sitting in the armchair by the terrace window he said, “I’ll be sorry to be losing you, Nillie. Have you got something else lined up?”
“Yes I do, Mr. Feigerman. There’s a job in the recycling plant, just the right hours, too, so don’t worry about me.”
“Of course I’d like Marcus to keep on guiding me, if that’s all right.”
“Surely, Mr. Feigerman.” Pause. “I’m really sorry about Mrs. Feigerman.”
“Yes.” He had not really figured out how to approach that particular subject. If your wife was dead, that was one thing; if she was sick, but there was some hope of recovery, that was another. A wife now resting at a temperature about a dozen degrees above absolute zero was something else. Not to mention the five or six years as her aging body began to deteriorate—or the years before that when their aging marriage was doing the same. Jocelyn’s life was political and dedicated. His was no less dedicated, but his social objectives were carried out in bricks, steel and mortar instead of laws. The two lifestyles did not match well—“I beg your pardon?”
“I said I’m going to clear my stuff out of Mrs. Feigerman’s room now, Mr. Feigerman.”
“Oh, sure. Go ahead, Nillie.” He realized he had been sitting silent, his coffee cooling, while his mind circled around the difficulties and problems in his world. And he realized, too, if a bit tardily, that Vanilla Fudge de Harcourt’s voice had sounded strained. Particularly when she mentioned her son. Small puzzle. Sighing, Feigerman fumbled his way to the sink, poured the cold coffee away and set himself to the job of dressing.
“Dressing,” for Rinty Feigerman, was not just a matter of clothes. He also had to put on the artificial vision system, which he disliked, and postponed as long as he could every day. It wasn’t any good for reading, little better for getting around his rooms. Information Feigerman took in through braille and through audiotapes, the voices of the readers electronically chopped to speed them up to triple speed, without raising the frequency to chipmunk chirps. Nearly everything he chose to do in his rooms he could do without the vision system. He could speak on the phone. He could listen to the radio. He could dictate, he could typewrite; he could even work his computer console, with its audio and tactile readouts, at least for word processing and mathematics, though the graphics functions were of no use at all to him anymore. Feigerman was never able to see the grand designs he helped to create, except in the form of models. There were plenty of those, made in the shops of the consultancy firm he owned with his stepson; but it was not the same as being able to look down on, say, the future Bed-Stuy in the God’s-eye view of every sighted person. At the computer he was quite deft, as artificial speech synthesizers read him the numbers he punched into the keyboard and the results that flashed on the CRT, now usually turned off. Of course, he did not really need to see, or even to feel a model of, Bed-Stuy. The whole plan was stored in his mind … . He was stalling again, he realized.
No help for it. He patted Rosalyn and sat down on the foot of his bed, reaching out for the gear.
The first step was to strap the tickler to his chest. Between the nipples, in a rectangular field seven inches across and five deep, a stiff brush of electrical contacts touched his skin. Feigerman had never been a hairy man, but even so, once a week or so, he had to shave what few sparse hairs grew there to make sure the contacts worked. Then the shirt went on, and the pants, and the jacket with the heavy-duty pocket that held most of the electronics and the flat, dense battery. Then he would reach down under the bed to where he had left the battery itself recharging all night long, pull it gingerly from the charger, clip it to the gadget’s leads and slip it into the pocket. Then came the crown. Feigerman had never seen the crown, but it felt like the sort of tiara dowagers used to wear to be presented to the queen. It wasn’t heavy. The straps that held it made it possible to wear it over a wool cap in winter, or attached to a simple yarmulke in warm weather. It beeped at a frequency most people couldn’t hear, though young children’s
ears could sometimes pick it up—Marcus claimed to hear it, and there was no doubt that Rosalyn did. When he first got the improved model the dog whined all the time it was on—perhaps, Feigerman thought, because she knew it was taking her job away from her.
When he turned the unit on now, she didn’t whine, but he could feel her move restlessly against his leg as he sat and let the impressions reach his brain. It had taken a lot of practice. The returning echo of the beeps was picked up, analyzed and converted into a mosaic that the ticklers drew across his chest with a pattern of tiny electric shocks. Even now it was not easy to read, and after a long day there was more pain than information in it; but it served. For a long time the patterns had meant nothing at all to Feigerman, except as a sort of demented practical joke someone was playing on him with tiny cattle prods. But the teacher promised he would learn to read it in time. And he did. Distance and size were hard to estimate from the prickling little shocks until he came to realize that the sonar’s image of a parked car covering a certain area of his chest had to represent a real vehicle ten feet away. When he became accustomed to the sonar he didn’t really need Rosalyn very much, and she was already beginning to limp on long walks. But he kept her. He had grown to like the dog, and did not want to see her among the technologically unemployed … . Then the coat; then the shoes; then Feigerman was ready to summon his driver and be taken to the offices in the Williamsburgh Bank Building for one more day of dealing with the world.
It was ever so much better, Feigerman’s teacher had said, than the way things were for the unsighted even a few years earlier. Better than being dead, anyway, in Feigerman’s estimation. Marginally so.
By the time Feigerman was at his office in the Williamsburgh Bank Building he was almost cheerful, mostly because his driver was in a good mood. Julius was a suspended cop; he had been a moonlighting cop, working for Feigerman only in his off-duty hours, until his suspension. The suspension was because he had been caught in a surprise blood test with marginal levels of tetrahydrocannabinol breakdown products in his system. Julius claimed he was innocent. Feigerman thought it didn’t matter, since everybody was doing it, cops and all; and what made Julius’s mood high was that his rabbi had phoned to say the charges were going to be dropped. So he joked and laughed all the way to the office, and left Feigerman still smiling as he got out of the elevator and beeped his way to his desk, answering the good-mornings of the staff all the way.
The first thing to do was to get out of the heaviest part of the harness again, which he did with one hand while he was reaching for his stepson’s intercom button with the other. “David?” he called, lifting off the headpiece. “I’m in and, listen, I’m going to need another driver next week. Julius is getting reinstated.”
“That’s good,” said the voice of his stepson, although that voice hardly ever sounded as though it found anything good. “I need you for a conference in half an hour, Dad.”
Dad.
Feigerman paused in the act of rubbing the imprinted red lines on his forehead, scowling. “Dad” was something new for David. Was it because his mother’s death had reminded him that they were a family? David didn’t seem to show any other effect. If he had shed one tear it had not been in Feigerman’s presence. That wasn’t surprising, maybe, because David’s mother had devoted far more of her attention to her political causes than to her son. Or her daughter-in-law. Or, for that matter, to her husband … . “What kind of conference?” Feigerman asked.