Subj: Lucky You
Date: 99-02-28
From: IslandMan@AOL. corn
To: SwissMs@Int lAccessCornpuServe. corn
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE JUST WON A COMPLIMENTARY
STAY AT THE INN ON THE AZURE HORIZON, VIEQUES ISLAND, PUERTO RICO, IN CELEBRATION OF OUR 20TH ANNIVERSARY. CONFIRMATION TO FOLLOW BY FAX. IN OTHER
WORDS, ELIZABETH, WISH YOU WERE HERE!!
ROOSEVELT ROADS NAVAL STATION, VIEGUES ISLAND
The effects of Peter’s stroke-though no one was prepared to say, unequivocally, that it had been a stroke-proved transient. By the end of the week he had made what appeared to be a complete recovery. His work on the weapon was going well, his team was back in the loop, his outlook appeared to have brightened. Though he sometimes stopped in mid-sentence to stare into the middle distance, on the whole he was less removed from others and from himself. To Beatrice he confided that his brain still felt as though it were hovering outside his body, unworthy to take possession of its new home or, worse. searching for the phantom body from which it had been amputated. When these spells came upon him, a spark of terror would light in his eyes. Beatrice was learning how to spot the signs and was able to get him through the difficult times. “You’re a pioneer,” she reminded him, hoping to flatter him past his fears. “No one’s ever been through this before.” “No research to consult.”
“Exactly. But do you know what it reminds me of?” she asked. “The car. He laughed out loud.
In 1961, when Peter had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the properties of plasma in vacuums, he had used some of the prize money to buy a BMW. He’d taken a lot of ribbing for shoving up with it at the lab, but owning that car had taught him something about himself. As first he’d been overwhelmed with buyer’s remorse, feeling embarrassed by the BMW’s enormous cost. Next he felt undeserving of its luxurious appointments and, oddly, incompetent to drive something so damn fast. Beatrice had talked him down from his guilt-after all, he was hardly the first Nobelist to treat himself to an expensive car. As for being intimidated by its speed and size, within a week he found he could put the pedal to the floor on the highway, and park it just as easily as he could his old Volvo. Its power and agility began to awe him-as Peter phrased it, to represent him. He loved the way he could zoom away from everyone else at stoplights, accelerate to one hundred miles an hour within seconds, or tear around a curve without any sway. One day on one of those arrow-straight, two-lane blacktops cut to Los Alamos, when he could see ten miles of empty road stretched out before him, he had opened it up full throttle and watched in fascination as the speedometer passed 100, then 120, then 140, until sage and scrub and yucca became a blur. There was only road and distant mountains, suspended in time and velocity. He was thinking hack to his boyhood and the day he had first grasped Einstein’s relativity equations, when the car lifted off an invisible rise in the road and landed not on macadam but on hard sand. The rest was a funnel of dust and spidering windshield, bits of broken cacti, wheels of blue sky arid a screech of barbed wire twanging like a gigantic guitar string as he ripped out two hundred feet of turf and flew on. When the car finally succumbed to friction and the resistance of many otherwise immovable objects, he sat silent and elated behind the wheel. A huge dust cloud surrounded the car. From inside, there was only a faint brown light, well suited to the contemplation of his mortality. “And how did you feel?” Beatrice said. “Do you remember?” “I felt happy.”
The car, amazingly, had landed upright. He was alive, unhurt. He had gone faster than he had ever imagined he could. He would never have to own a car like this again because in that moment he had experienced it more intensely than most people would during a lifetime of careful ownership. Best of all, he no longer felt old.
“You remember when you came home that night?” asked Beatrice. “You were ready to kill me.”
“I thought you had lost your mind.”
“Those wrecked by success.’ You showed me the passage from Freud.” “And the next day we bought a VW bug with the insurance money. “But I did feel reborn. At age forty.”
“Maybe,” said Beatrice, “you can have that feeling again. Once you get past this buyer’s remorse. In the weeks following the incident with the BMW in the desert, Peter began some of his most audacious work. One breakthrough followed after another. And the feeling had lasted for years. But nothing lasts forever.
Slowly. so subtly that he was hardly aware of it, he had begun to slow down. He stopped taking physical risks, he gave up exercising regularly. “And you were drinking more,” Beatrice recalled. “I don’t want that to happen again.”
Unless he was just saying it to please her, it was good to hear-a sign that he was starting to regard his new body as a challenge rather than as a forbidding mystery. “Why should it happen again?” she challenged. He had the body of a thirty- five-year-old now. His muscle tone was amazing; his sense of awareness was astonishing. He had a blood supply that sent his brain into overdrive with the promise of dissolving whatever plaque had built up in his cerebral arteries. But despite not having any more relapses in the last two weeks, he couldn’t shake the thought that all this stunning progress could vanish in an instant. “That’s only the guilt talking,” said Beatrice. “You let me worry about that, all right?” Alone and usually in the bathroom (the only place he was afforded privacy), he would study this body he had been given, running the back of his fingers lightly over the taut skin of his neck, dabbing under his eyes where he had been accustomed to seeing satchels of flesh. He practiced telling himself that this was not some alien staring back at him in disbelief, but his own birthright, a fact that still seemed a dangerous lie. No matter how you rationalized it, this was still someone else’s body. He was like a father looking at his son. “What does Freud have to say about infanticide?” he asked Beatrice one morning. “Peter, you can’t keep dwelling on this.” “I’m not dwelling, I’m just asking. ”
“It’s not your son.
“Yes, I know,” he said, as though reciting his catechism: “It’s merely a part of my body arbitrarily split off and allowed to grow independently. Cell for cell, gene for gene. My own personal property. Me. Just forty years younger. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it . . .”
He was venting, she knew, demanding that she make her case over and over again, which she was willing to do. In the end, he always felt better for it, the way he had felt in that BMW Aware of its strength and perfection, he had at first been uneasy, then comfortable, and then ecstatic to be inside that shining, flawless machine. Finally, it wasn’t a matter of being in it at all but rather of simply being it. Fit. Filled with energy. Young! Then there was the question of sex, she reminded herself. Starting in his fifties, sex for Peter had become less and less a priority or pleasure. Eventually, as he moved into his sixties, after exhausting tension-filled hours in the lab and on the test range, he simply couldn’t be bothered. But even though the sight of Beatrice naked still had the ability to stir him, he couldn’t bear to look at himself unclothed. The only mercy was that his eyes were so bad by then that without glasses he could barely see his flaccidity and wrinkles. Now things were different. Sex, finally, was proving to be the most effective solvent for guilt. He was constantly aroused now, routinely rolling out of bed in the mornings tumescent and ready. One morning, he woke wet and sticky, and this time the images from his last dream were still vivid. He had been floating in a sea of stars with a woman he could only describe-and only to himself-as the Angel of Eros. She was blond, this woman, in her mid-twenties, lithe and athletic and infinitely caring about his pleasure, responsive to his every thought and movement. It was the most luxurious and satisfying sex he could recall. Before he could strip off his shorts, Beatrice saw the stain. “Qops,” he said sheepishly.
She tilted her head, trying to smile. “Congratulations. You must tell me about it.” In the past, they had made a point of sharing their dreams, unless any of them might prove hurtful, which was almost never. Now he demurred; the Angel’s face was still etched in his consciousness. “Hey, you know what I’ve noticed? I’m sleeping on my left side again. Remember when my left shoulder stiffened up, and I had to sleep on my right? And I started to have insomnia, and when I did fall asleep I had these left-brain dreams. Now suddenly it’s no problem, which is deeply strange-” “Is that what you call it, a left-brain dream?” She looked at him. only slightly amused. “Another thing. When I put my clothes on in the morning-didn’t I used to put my socks on first?” “Why? Are you putting them over your shoes now? We’d better have you tested again.” “No, I mean before I put on my undershirt. Now the socks come last. It’s a small thing, nothing to worry about, just interesting. In the shower, too, I seem to do things in a different order. Soap my chest before my arms. Didn’t you once do some work on cellular memory?” “In graduate school. It didn’t amount to anything. ” “Circulating peptides, messenger RNA-wasn’t that the theory?” “What has this got to do with your nocturnal emissions?” “Did I say that’s what it was?”