by Greg Egan
He said, ‘I want to spend more time with my son before I risk the transplant. If I die on the operating table—’
Jobrani scowled. ‘That’s nonsense! You know that the state of your liver is the only reason you have no quality of life now. It’s true that you could die in surgery - but if you survive you’ll have ten times as much energy, for at least another six or eight months. Every week after the transplant will be worth ten weeks of the kind of life you have right now - and twenty of what you’ll be like if you push back the date much further.’
Martin looked him in the eye. ‘Forget about quality of life. Can you swear to me that my chances of surviving six more months from today are greater if I have the transplant? That the odds of dying during the operation are less than the odds of dying from the lack of it?’
‘If you postponed the surgery for six months,’ Jobrani replied, ‘your chances of dying in the theatre would triple. At least triple.’
‘Okay. But that’s not what I asked.’
Jobrani had no interest in sanctifying Martin’s bizarre request with actual probabilities. ‘You’re not being reasonable, Mr Seymour. Do you really think your son benefits from seeing you this way?’
Martin said, ‘There are things that I need to resolve. Things that are important to me. I can’t take the chance of leaving them unfinished.’
Martin was on the verge of pulling something out of the freezer to microwave for dinner when Rana turned up on the doorstep with an enormous bowl of hot stew.
He invited her in, then went through the ritual of ta’arof, refusing the gift three times before finally accepting it. Rana insisted that she couldn’t possibly join them - she would be eating with Omar and Farshid when they got home - and though she also insisted that Martin and Javeed should feel free to start immediately, it would have been unbelievably rude either to hurry her out of the door, or to begin the meal in her presence.
So Martin put the fragrant dish in the kitchen and the three of them sat nibbling on pistachios.
‘You should come and stay with us, Martin jan.’ Rana looked around the living room appraisingly; she almost seemed disappointed that there were no clumps of dust or obvious traces of vermin in sight. Martin was still perfectly capable of keeping the house clean.
‘You’re very kind,’ he replied, ‘but honestly, we’re doing fine here.’ Javeed, whose idea of heaven would’ve been having Farshid on call to entertain him twenty-four hours a day, glanced at Martin, but managed to keep his mouth shut.
Rana smiled regretfully. ‘Well, the offer’s always open. You and Javeed would be welcome as our guests, any time.’
‘Thank you.’ Martin didn’t doubt her sincerity - and he could forgive her for scanning his house for signs of incipient Widower’s Squalor - but he wasn’t ready to let the last traces of structure in his life start melting away. He’d finally given up on the shop and put the business on the market; if he lost control over his own domestic routines he’d have nothing.
‘So how is everyone?’ he asked. He hadn’t visited Omar’s home for a while, nor discussed his family, and it turned out that after six years on a waiting list, Rana’s father-in-law, Mohsen, was about to have new prostheses fitted: fully-functioning mechanical legs that he’d be able to control by thought alone. Javeed listened in amazement to Rana’s sketch of the process: they’d already implanted electrodes in Mohsen’s spinal cord and he’d spent two months practising with virtual copies of the limbs, fine-tuning the interface in preparation for the real thing. Martin was surprised that Omar hadn’t mentioned any of this.
Rana left, and they wolfed down the stew. Though Martin did not forget to take the medication that helped with his impaired digestion, he ate so rapidly that he got stomach cramps anyway, and Javeed spent the rest of the evening teasing him about his greediness and bad manners. Laughing made the cramps worse, which only egged Javeed on. When Javeed finally climbed into bed, Martin sat smiling in the darkness, clutching his side.
Just after midnight Javeed woke, crying for his mother. Nothing Martin did comforted him. Finally, at his wits’ end, he brought an electronic photo frame loaded with pictures from the Australian trip he’d taken with Mahnoosh the year they’d married. Martin had never got around to showing them to Javeed before, and something about the unfamiliar images fascinated and calmed him. It was as if this evidence that his mother’s life extended far beyond his current knowledge of her gave him back a small part of what he’d lost: a sense of her continuing, a sense of a well that would never run dry.
When Javeed fell asleep, Martin went back to his own bed and tried to conjure up Mahnoosh beside him. All the hours he’d spent in the scanner reliving his memories of her had robbed him of any hope that he could be surprised by some long-forgotten incident, but that wasn’t important now. All he wanted was her presence, even if it was utterly familiar; even if it offered nothing new.
But the darkness remained blank, the pillow uninhabited. He’d wanted her to haunt the Proxy’s thoughts the way she’d haunted his own - so was that the trade-off? Was that how it worked? At his behest, had she already acknowledged the succession?
Martin paid the taxi driver and walked slowly past the protesters, who seemed to regard him more with curiosity than malice. Who was this sick old man visiting Zendegi day after day? He was surprised that they didn’t know yet; that they hadn’t guessed, or got the news from an informer on the inside. After all, he was here to commit a sin that made Azimi’s whoring of his God-given talent about as serious in its blasphemy as a love potion or a lucky charm.
Inside, he willed the elevator to fail; if he had to take the stairs he could spin that out for at least fifteen minutes. But the door sprung open and the usual insufferably cheery woman’s voice asked him in Farsi to state his destination. Martin let her cycle through English, French, Arabic and back to Farsi before responding.
Nasim was caught up in a meeting that had run into overtime; Bernard helped Martin prepare for the scanner. ‘How long are you planning to stay in Tehran?’ Martin asked him.
‘It was going to be six months,’ Bernard replied. ‘I’ve been training some local staff to use this machine. But I might be staying on; I’ve met someone I like.’
‘Congratulations. But you should take him back to Europe, to be safe.’
Bernard was surprised. ‘You’re kidding, right? I thought no one had been prosecuted for years.’
Martin said, ‘If it’s still considered political suicide to take the laws off the books, I wouldn’t treat them as defunct.’
Bernard adjusted Martin’s goggles and gestured for him to approach the MRI. ‘I think I’ll take my chances,’ he said. ‘If we go back to Europe, in three months I’ll be wearing a wedding ring.’
Martin lay down in the machine. His body was rigid; he took a few deep, slow breaths. He closed his eyes before Bernard flipped down the goggles. His fists clenched; no gloves today. The motor whirred.
Bernard said, ‘Martin? Can you open your eyes please?’
Reluctantly, Martin complied. The goggles were feeding him street scenes of Sydney in the eighties, accompanied by snatches of music and news. Hunters and Collectors sang ‘Carry Me’, the vocals as raw as an open wound. Tim Ritchie on 2JJJ introduced The Residents’ eerie, pulsing electronic version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Whatever its faults, the machine had certainly learnt how to take him back.
Martin tried to relax and follow the cues as the state premier, Neville Wran, floated in front of him, waffling gruffly about nothing comprehensible. Martin couldn’t recall having any particular opinion of the man. State politicians just made him think about trains - train drivers’ strikes, trains coming to a halt in the middle of the night. Once he’d been travelling home from the city, close to midnight, and the train had stopped on the bridge over the Parramatta River for forty minutes, for no apparent reason, with no explanation. He’d looked out over the dark water and thought about diving in and swimming to the shore, just to put an
end to the waiting. The memory was vivid; he could see red paint flaking off the carriage’s old-style, manually operated doors. He could have jumped out; there’d been nothing to stop him. But he hadn’t been quite foolish enough. In fact, he hadn’t really been tempted at all.
And he’d been back to that carriage a dozen times already under the scanner’s gaze. Was it something he desperately needed the Proxy to remember? Had it been a great defining moment for his world view, his moral framework? No. So why was he wasting time thinking about it when every second he had left was precious - and every second in this machine doubly so?
Now the goggles showed Midnight Oil on stage at Selina’s nightclub. Martin could almost smell the spilt beer and acrid sweat . . . but so fucking what? No doubt something in his head lit up at the sight of this performance; he’d been there on the night, or one very like it. But he was just spinning his wheels, deepening the ruts memory had carved out by pure chance. The machine didn’t know how to take him anywhere new from here. It knew it needed more from him, but it didn’t know how to find it.
The machine seemed to reach the same conclusion; it gave up on the nostalgia trip and started showing him photographs of strangers. An old man stood in the ruins of a house; the style of his clothing and what remained of the building made Martin think of the earthquake in Kashmir. A woman with a dark blue, lace-trimmed headscarf held the hand of a young girl in a pink floral dress, on a crowded street somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia. Individuals, couples, families; each image persisted for just a second or two. Though Martin couldn’t help noticing clues as to where and when the pictures had been taken, Nasim had reminded him many times that this wasn’t meant as a trivia quiz, a tool to boost the Proxy’s general knowledge. The aim was far more abstract: the images were like flashes of light, positioned at random in a vast space of possibilities, and the record of his brain’s responses was like a collection of shadows of a single complex object, cast from many directions. If the Proxy could be sculpted so it cast the same shadows, that would help strengthen its resemblance to him.
The metaphor was imperfect; the real process was neither as simple nor as passive as that. But it did include a hint of one potential pitfall: a thousand acts of illumination from the same direction would reveal no more detail than a single flash. Nasim and her colleagues did not understand the process well enough to know in advance which images would be freshly revelatory and which would tell them nothing new. The only solution was to throw so many different scenes at him that the unavoidable dilution of their effectiveness would be overcome by sheer force of numbers.
Martin caught himself being distracted by these meta-thoughts and forced himself to attend more closely to the images themselves. Two boys in a parched rural landscape prodded an ants’ nest with a stick as their dog looked on dubiously. Two tearful women embraced on the steps of a courthouse. A drunken youth swung a punch at another man outside a nightclub while a woman sitting awkwardly on the pavement looked up at them, scowling. Martin struggled to keep his eyes open; he succeeded, but it felt like a superhuman task. A frail-looking child rode alone on a merry-go-round, seated on the back of a red horse with a garish green saddle. An elderly woman gazed sadly at a framed black-and-white portrait of a uniformed man. It was like being trapped in a never-ending Benetton advertisement. Martin thought about the contents of his freezer; Rana had brought them a meal the night before, and if he bought two more frozen meals on his way home he’d be fine until the weekend. Then he and Javeed could go to the bazaar together, and cook something in the afternoon. He loved chopping fresh dill; the scent was exhilarating.
Nasim said, ‘Martin, we’re taking you out.’
The goggles went blank; Martin waited for the servo to withdraw him from the scanner.
When his face was uncovered he sat up and turned to Nasim. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I know I lost focus. I didn’t get much sleep last night; maybe I just need some more coffee.’
‘I don’t think coffee will do it,’ Nasim replied. ‘Even when you’re attentive we’re getting nothing useful now. The rate’s been trailing off for days.’
Martin felt a chill of fear. ‘You’re not giving up?’
‘No, of course not!’ Nasim sighed. ‘This is my fault; I should have been on top of this sooner, but I’ve been a bit distracted by the inquisition.’
Apparently the investigation into Zendegi’s breach had been generating resentment and discontent among the staff; Bahador had made some acerbic comments about a return to Khomeini-era paranoia the last time he’d bumped into Martin.
‘We’ve pushed the current methods about as far as we can,’ Nasim continued, ‘but that’s not the end of it; it just means we have to change tack.’
Martin said, ‘Okay - but how close is the Proxy to completion right now?’
‘It’s improved a lot over the last few weeks,’ Nasim assured him. ‘Quantitatively, statistically, we can show that. But at this point it’s not . . .’
‘Foster parent material?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘What about mind-the-kid-while-I-duck-into-the-shops material?’
Nasim smiled uneasily. ‘We’ve got some way to go, but I’m not discouraged. We always knew this wasn’t going to be easy.’ Martin appreciated the way she declined to point out that she’d originally told him it would be impossible.
‘Is there still a chance we could complete this in six months?’ he asked. ‘If you find a new approach, that might even be faster than the old one, mightn’t it?’
Nasim didn’t answer him directly. ‘Give me a few days,’ she said. ‘Take a break from the scanner. I’ll talk to the people at Eikonometrics who’ve been working on some other side-loading projects. Between us, I’m sure we can come up with a better way to pick your brains.’
‘We won’t want the books!’ The man, Reza, laughed as incredulously as if Martin had offered him a good deal on a blacksmith’s forge. ‘We’ll take over the lease, but forget about the stock and the business. We want to use this space for a gym.’
Martin resisted the urge to throw Reza’s derisive laughter back at him. ‘A gym? Here?’ He gestured at the shop’s display windows stretching from floor to ceiling, just centimetres back from the pavement packed with pedestrians and motorbikes.
‘Exactly!’ Reza replied enthusiastically, as if Martin had been congratulating him on his visionary plans. ‘We’re taking more space upstairs and next door, but we need this place for the windows. We put the hot women just behind the glass. Free advertising.’
Women exercising, on display on Enqelab Avenue. Reza must have caught the hint of scepticism on Martin’s face, if not the undertone of dismay, because he declared with cheerful optimism, ‘This is a new country. Anything is possible.’
They used the real estate agent’s website to organise the transfer of the lease. Martin had three weeks to vacate the premises.
When Reza left, Martin put an advertisement online for his print-on-demand machine, then emailed the three students who’d worked for him in the past, to see if any of them could come in and do shifts for the closing down sale. He composed some posters on the office computer, then printed out versions proclaiming fifty, seventy-five, and ninety per cent off. He taped the first set to the windows.
Then he found an empty packing box and took it to the English language section. Javeed would have ten million electronic books to choose from, but Martin still wanted to pass on something from his own century. From the novels he picked out The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five; from non-fiction, The Diary of Anne Frank, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Gulag Archipelago. He was tempted to go on and fill the box to its rim, but once he started fretting over omissions he knew there’d be no end to it. Javeed wasn’t going to a desert island, and the weightier Martin made this package, the greater the risk that actually reading the books would seem like a daunting or oppressive prospect.
Would the Proxy have anything wort
hwhile to say about these works? Martin wasn’t sure that he remembered enough himself to discuss them in any detail. But anyone risked seeming like a lightweight to a teenager who’d just read Solzhenitsyn; it would be absurd to set the bar too high. Martin would be satisfied if the Proxy could share a laugh with Javeed at the mention of Major Major or Milo Minderbinder and bluff his way convincingly through the rest.
He stood by the sales counter and looked around the shop; in a strange symmetry, it had begun to smell of wood and glue, the way it had smelled when the carpenters had first been putting in the shelves.
Was there anything else he should set aside? He already had Mahnoosh’s bookshelf at home, stacked with her favourite works in Farsi; he wouldn’t know what to add to that. He taped up the box and wrote Javeed’s name on it in big letters, to be sure it wouldn’t get thrown out by mistake if something happened to him suddenly.
As he was putting the packing tape back in the storeroom, his notepad chimed.