“Who you really were? From an old passport left in an inside pocket of a briefcase. As a matter of fact, I was just looking for a briefcase when . . .”
“You did a search on the internet. You compared names and you found a Cédric Allyn-Weberson on a class photo . . .”
“Yes; well, not exactly. Some anonymous web surfer took care of doing that; I don’t know why. But it doesn’t matter. I was devastated when I learned that our life together was rigged. Such disloyalty! As if I’d been the cover or alibi for a spy.”
Cédric looked at her somewhat perplexedly. In the state he was in, no identity could have prevailed, given what he was feeling. Creatures were born nameless, then died in silence. There was no one, with the exception of a few chance encounters and sometimes some embraces. Did birds or rats worry about their social identity? Still, he refrained from commenting.
“Is my father paying these people?” he asked with a sigh, distressed by the twisted insinuations that were firing up his brain.
“Yes! A fortune! And his associates are controlling just about everything. You’ve really nothing to fear . . .”
Lorna looked at her watch as she grew restless a few moments before her departure, which she had not yet dared to announce; she uncrossed her legs and her fingers lightly clutched her handbag.
“I love you,” she said by way of farewell, without the slightest hesitation in her voice.
He watched her disappear and sensed deep within his shell of a body just how little the physiological manifestations of emotion disturb the rational mind. He recalled that Darwin had not attributed any more use to them than to the appendix and other vestigial organs. A superfluous inheritance from our ancestors. But through what magic did his brain, cut off from the rest of his vital energy, manage to register all the symptoms of love? He thought it would be better to have a lobotomy, so that all of love’s suffering would be obliterated. His emotions were floating so miserably on his gray matter, like will-o’-the-wisps of memory. The day after tomorrow, he was certain, it would all be over for him; Lorna would vanish with the rest of the universe in one final spasm of adieus, thanks as much to the cursèd fortune of the Allyn-Webersons as to the dire irony of fate.
12.
The operation had been prepared with all the rigor of sending a sounding rocket into space. San Severo Hospital, which had just been renovated, was chosen both for its accommodations and for the perfection of its technique. Even though he was well aware of his reservations, Georgio Cadavero had accepted the proposal of Aimé Ritz, his old friend and distinguished colleague from the Medical University of Palermo. San Severo Hospital would reopen its doors to the public in a few weeks. On one hand, the clause regarding the location stipulated total discretion in the event of failure so as not to ruin the establishment’s reputation. On the other, the hospital would benefit from the media splash that pulling off such a feat would undoubtedly create. Ritz had nothing to lose: ten teams of surgeons would secretly put his new equipment to the test in a kind of dress rehearsal. He had gone over with his lawyers all the legal implications that concerned him. Everything was in place; a helicopter had just transferred the donor body on its life-support machine. The owner of the property, a neurosurgeon in semi-retirement, had obtained the right—the least of favors—to be present at the crucial moments of the transplant. He was aware of his former student’s ambition; Cadavero was, moreover, a peerless medical practitioner who had to his credit major advances in neuropathic sedation techniques. His notoriety until now had been based on his science or art of resurrection more than on organ transplants, a practice that certainly required highly skilled doctors but had become rather common. For example, Cadavero had managed to bring patients out of the “hopeless” diagnosis of a stage 3 coma on the Glasgow Coma Scale. Hungry for fame, he and his direct collaborators were engaged in the most spectacular endeavors. Ritz thought it possible that they’d rushed the schedule because of a variety of deadlines having to do with publicity, competitiveness, or simple exclusivity. The hysterical pressure of the silent partner, the enormous costs of leasing the premises, and the continuous mobilization of interdisciplinary teams all contributed to this commotion.
The procedure was in place just before dawn on April 1. All the operating rooms were ready. After everything had been meticulously prepared, the medical staff, consisting of three anesthesiologists, a few nurses, and an entire battalion of surgeons, moved about as if they were walking on train tracks with complex switching points. In Cédric’s case, the general anesthesia would obviously not require assisted ventilation, at least not in the first phase of the operation, but rather a precisely calculated therapeutic hypothermia. In front of their control instruments, the medical team’s attention was entirely concentrated on the proper irrigation of the patient’s cervical area. Two operating tables were positioned parallel to one another under steady surgical lamps in the largest of the operating rooms, whose asepsis had been verified several times. The surgical machines, the anesthesia machine, the medical equipment trolleys where exceptionally precise electrosurgical knives were aligned next to other tools specially conceived for the procedure were soon in the hands of a throng of gloved men and women in sterile suits and masks. A fleeting wave of silence passed when the two bodies were set less than three feet apart. Then the most impressive ballet ever performed in an operating theater took place. Dr. Emilia Baldini, from the teaching hospital in Milan and one of the innovators of the use of polyethylene glycol and chitosan in the restoration of damaged nerve cells in the spinal cord; Dr. Mirami, whose claim to fame lay in his role in the neurosurgical division of Spalline Hospital; and even Aimé Ritz, the director of San Severo Hospital, had all insisted on participating in vivo in the experience, even if they would have to slink quietly away in the event of a setback. Around Georgio Cadavero, in the first circle of the mechanical surgery team that would hurriedly have to cede its place to teams of neurosurgeons, the tension went up another notch when the two bodies, one of a man in a state of brain death and the other of a man in a medically induced coma, were stripped bare to make the transfer easier. While those two bodies were of approximately the same corpulence, Cédric Allyn-Weberson’s, atrophied by months of immobility, seemed very feeble next to the donor’s body, which had darker skin and well-proportioned musculature. Beneath the donor’s taped skull, the draw sheet that partially masked his face nevertheless revealed a well-defined lower jaw studded with the black hair of a nascent beard. The man’s throat bore a dotted line marked in red ink. The flesh was cut to the bone. The first team diligently prepared all the muscle tissues, the blood vessels, the trachea, and the esophagus, while two other teams were positioned to sever the two spines at exactly the same time before the bodies were switched. While the donor was being detruncated with an electrosurgical knife, Dr. Cadavero and his team were identically operating on Cédric’s body. In perfect synchrony, the stage of the double decapitation was timed to the second. A nurse removed the head of the anonymous donor as soon as it was detached. The blood and bodily fluids of his decapitated body were sponged away, and it was immediately taken over by the life-sustaining team and plugged into the life-support machines. When the severed head of the recipient, decked out with all kinds of sensors, clamps, and electrodes, was placed with comical speed onto the table of the unknown man, a new wave of terror went through the assembly. No doubt because of a suddenly very obvious logical quandary: this head by itself, which was being transferred under a plastic bubble, seemed more like the object or organ to be transplanted than that enormous body that had remained on the table in the sorrowful majesty of a torture victim. The head was what was to be transplanted! But a life depended on every second—the life of the recipient, everyone thought, as they cast doubtful glances at the inert body. After having placed the donor’s slit throat below the recipient’s sixth cervical vertebra and throat, which was cut below the thyroid and the larynx, it was now a matter of reconnecting the spinal cords of the saved head and the sound body a
ccording to the most daring procedure ever devised, while in an acrobatic shuttling back and forth other surgeons were trying to save the circulatory system, nerves, and ligaments before the essentially prosaic remainder of the repair work could take place.
Dr. Cadavero had told the journalists a number of times that the trickiest thing was reestablishing the continuity of the spinal cord. To the great displeasure of the ASPCA, the neurosurgeon Robert J. White had grafted the heads of primates onto other bodies of the same species a good half-century ago, but without being able to reactivate the neural pathways. Now, however, we had the chemical means to reestablish those infinitely complex links. With a wave of his hand, Cadavero indicated to the nurses that they should sponge the perspiration-covered foreheads of his collaborators. He scolded the person inserting the oxygenation cannula. For a moment, his mind became clouded and he imagined himself an orchestra conductor surrounded by cacophony, or a ship’s captain facing the sinking of his vessel. Hours were spent around that operating table. Several minutes had been lost at crucial moments during shift changes; hands hesitated, some teams seemed at the end of their rope. Although the operation had been painstakingly prepared, it was still a question of double or nothing. The stakes were such that, for Cadavero, failure would be worse than execution by the Sicilian mafia. The sweat of panic was stinging his neck and eyelids. Too many investments of all kinds were putting his career, his reputation, his very future at risk!
Those few seconds of wavering provoked a massive adrenaline rush in him. With an irritable order shouted with icy humor, he regained control of the situation. The dozens of doctors at work immediately rallied like so many music boxes rewound by the same hand. The nerve tissues of the head and body were wedged together in proper physiological position and were now connected in every single fibril; the circulatory system had been reestablished after the connection of the arteries and all the jugular veins. The bone stock was repaired once the myocytes had been sutured. The hypothermia that had maintained the upper part in an almost lethal state was progressively reversed through the joint effort of the IVs and an oxygen intake. But all that was now merely a matter for the resuscitation mechanics! After so many experiments with beheaded animals and humans, the transplant of a living body on a consenting head had just been accomplished: a world premiere in this private hospital in Turin. Georgio Cadavero had a burst of exaltation, a flash of delirium almost, but his mood darkened rapidly as he imagined that the outcome could lead either to great fame or great disapprobation. He admitted to himself, when he left the operating room, that the short- and medium-term risks of rejection, despite all the innovative treatments, were greater than anything in the entire history of transplants. Not only could the body refuse the chemically unfamiliar head despite all the immunosuppressant medications, but the nervous and lymphatic systems located in the skull could also reject all the information coming from a network of unregistered connections. Without even taking into account all the other homeostatic parameters. But enough! Basta! Day was breaking, and the patient had just been moved to a highly equipped Intensive Care recovery room.
The neurosurgeons, their colleagues in vascular and plastic surgery, and all the additional personnel assembled leisurely in the conference room for a debriefing. Exhausted from this medical marathon, the ones who were most involved in it complimented each other with some restraint: the battle was not yet won even if the procedure had been carried out without a glitch, although the mastermind had been understandably tense. Cadavero went up to the podium, freshly shaved and wearing a suit and tie. His expansive forehead shone beneath the lamps; he was smiling ostentatiously and stooping slightly.
“Thank you, one and all. You were truly marvelous!”
Applause broke out, which he calmed with a broad, pope-like wave of his hand.
“It’s not yet time for congratulations. The patient is alive; we’ll bring him out of his induced coma in a few days if all goes well. But we’re walking on an unknown planet; each moment brings a new danger. In the short term, a severe rejection of the transplant is to be feared. Nothing can be excluded: the collapse of immune defenses, the absence of reflexes in the brainstem, irreparable brain damage due to poor irrigation during the operation itself, all sorts of viral infections . . .”
Dr. Mirami brought up the possibility of a malfunction of the somatic and autonomic nervous systems, which would risk compromising the patient’s rehabilitation.
“The human brain is like modeling clay! You’ve heard of neural prostheses; if necessary, they will allow us to solve any problem of nerve impulses and discordant faculties.”
Aimé Ritz, rather optimistically, wondered how the so-called second brain would react; this was the name customarily used to describe the enteric nervous system.
“Let’s wait until our patient’s mind wakes up before we start worrying about what his intestines think!” Cadavero said, amid laughter.
Annoyed by the flippant comment, a young Neapolitan doctor renowned for his research on neural implant systems abandoned his usual reserve: “An eminent French specialist of facial transplants says that we are undermining the ethical pact in the absence of any previous experiments, because it isn’t monkeys or corpses that . . .”
“Will ever make the progress of surgical science possible,” declared Cadavero, emphatically. “Compared to what we have accomplished here, a face transplant is mere cosmetics! And let’s leave the ethical matters to the thinkers and poets. Our role consists of saving lives in every imaginable way. We are modern Prometheuses!”
“But we must talk about ethics,” the Neapolitan said, this time with less assurance. “Listen. I read somewhere: ‘A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.’”
“What are you driving at with your little quotation?” Cadavero asked, as he poured himself a glass of wine.
“We know nothing at all about the identity of the donor or the reasons for his brain death. Did he have a family, children, a wife? Will the recipient himself be told these things? From a genetic point of view, if he survives, Mr. Allyn-Weberson will have radically changed his identity; he will be carrying the genes of a stranger . . .”
Dr. Cadavero sighed wearily, one hand on his ear.
“I can understand your anxiety, young man. But let me repeat that all precautions and safety measures have been taken; we did not begin such a process without a scrupulous background check, both from a legal and ethical point of view. Mr. Puith, our legal expert, can provide you with a ton of certifications. Now, we are all going to rest . . .”
Before reaching the cloakroom, wanting to prove that no allusion escaped him and that he retained his sense of humor under all circumstances, he added in a syrupy tone: “Don’t worry. No one would dare compare us to Dr. Frankenstein. Science, human rights, and jurisprudence have totally evolved since the time of dear Mary Shelley.”
13.
The first autumn snowfall stuck to the steep cliffs, casting a milky light over a river of mist beneath the infinite shrouds of the peaks. In the interior valleys, it was almost still summer; a dawn sun revealed dazzling views on the horizon, whereas at ten thousand feet above sea level, somewhere between fall and winter, the icy breath of the summits fell on the mountain pastures and forests perched at a tilt. Between the snow-covered Mount Dou and the Isangrin Pass, which opened onto the distant foothills of the Jura, in a small valley accessible by a winding road, the Rult-Milleur château raised its octagonal tower and gables above a landscape of cow hillocks and hummocks that seemed circumscribed, to a troubled gaze, by illuminated cumulonimbus clouds or an Alpine chain. Leaning her forehead against a window, Lorna stared in turn at those limitless spaces and the château grounds’ dark cedar trees growing around a fountain shaped like a crescent moon. A sudden loud noise made the windows vibrate. Behind the tall branc
hes, a helicopter rose in a slow spiral before flying off.
Startled out of her daydream, the young woman remembered that a taxi was to drive her to the nearest train station. She was expected in Geneva that afternoon. Over the past few months her life had taken on such an unreal quality that not even a novelist would have dared exploit it. These past days spent in the hotel wing of this luxury hospital that had become a hotbed of media buzz were the last straw after all the mental stress and extravaganzas she’d had to deal with since the accident on the Evasion. How many times during the weeks and months of intensive postoperative care had Aimé Ritz, director of San Severo Hospital, in ceaseless conflict with Cadavero’s staff, informed her of alarming complications, or even of Cédric’s imminent death! Just three days after the operation, believing no doubt that he’d already accomplished a memorable feat, Cadavero—that advocate of total body transplant—held a press conference at a famous national television station where he’d just recorded a speech worthy of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Afterward the carabinieri had to be called in to protect the Turin hospital from a massive onslaught of Italian journalists and other correspondents come from the world over to get whatever interviews, photographs, or testimonies they could. From one day to the next, Cédric Allyn-Weberson became a public phenomenon; photos taken on the sly by an indiscreet garçon de chambre soon revealed the patient’s double identity. The magazine where Cédric Erg worked put him on its front cover, and after that portraits of the prodigal son of the pharmaceutical magnate flooded in. Because the press and television journalists had no other information about the family, they hounded Lorna, who had been recognized as his mistress, thanks to the cutting and pasting of images posted online by some monomaniacal hacker.
For weeks, in an attempt to escape the inquisition that threatened to overwhelm her, Lorna had sought refuge in Rome, where, against all expectations, she took up again with Emilio Panzi. Panzi, obviously aware of the news of the Turin surgeons’ remarkable exploit, had spotted her, despite her shawl and dark glasses, sitting at a sidewalk café in the campo de’ Fiori at dusk on a hot September Monday. The lugubrious monument to Giordano Bruno cast its shadow all the way to the young woman’s feet. Lorna let herself be chatted up, happy deep down for the distraction. The surgeon had the spontaneity of a recent lover, and his cheerful mood was a welcome change from the climate of anxiety and antagonism she’d suffered through on a daily basis. He brought her back to his place on the via dei Coronari, and for the rest of the week she hardly went out. Inexplicably, for a time physical love pushed her nightmares into the far regions of her subconscious. It was as if confronting the sledgehammer of sex in all its most animal dimensions distanced her from the images of decapitation and wrenching apart that had been haunting her night and day.
Desirable Body Page 4