Desirable Body

by Hubert Haddad

  “Your most recent exams don’t show any nerve damage. Rest assured, you will wind up adapting to feeling on intimate terms with your new body, and by fully adopting its center of gravity.”

  As he uttered these words, Dr. Morcelet felt his throat contract slightly. The freak-show phenomenon before him did not correspond to any model that neuroscience had conceived. The dissociative problems from which this sad hybrid was suffering were to be expected under the circumstances: depersonalization, selective amnesia, and other symptoms to which bizarre interferences were added. The functional rehabilitation program had in fact foreseen that Cédric would have difficulty accepting his new unity: how could a human head weighing a few pounds—supposing that it had retained all its cognitive functions—adapt smoothly to the intrusion of this enormous graft, a beheaded stranger? Morcelet deemed that the notorious multiple personality disorder so dear to Americans, but absent from the statistical books of mental health problems, would be apt in the case of this new clinical example. He coughed, one hand in front of his mouth.

  “But do the pains in your body lessen after the electric stimulation sessions?”

  Cédric shrugged without moving at all above the axis vertebra. The core of pain that estranged him from all known sensations, whether on standby or in sleep mode, sometimes at the slightest touch, had nothing in common with some vague “psycho-physiological” manifestations. It wasn’t a question of hallucinosis, or else the “phantom” in him inhabited him completely.

  “It’s as if I were being asked to report . . .”

  “What do you mean exactly?”

  “It’s as if I were a dead man occupying the place of a living man.”

  With pins and needles in his legs, the psychiatrist hesitated for a few seconds, searching for the right words. The sensation of a limb or a phantom organ spread over the whole body could not be so terrible because there were no damaged nerve endings like those in a residual limb; unless the transplanted body had taken over, and the trauma had been transmitted through the donor’s spinal cord?

  “What do you feel in your cervical spine?”

  “Do you mean my scar? At times, it feels like a boa is swallowing a rhinoceros.”

  On the way back to his room, with a nurse at his elbow as he leaned on a walker, Cédric perplexedly repeated the therapist’s last words: “If you can use metaphors for your pain, it’s a sign that it already hurts less!”

  17.

  Aglacial cold had transformed the thick snow into ice. Everywhere statues of stalactites appeared and spectral figures could be glimpsed through the trees, the highway equipment, or the masts of the many sailboats in the harbor between the municipalities of Coppet and Versoix, where a liter- ary grande dame had once lived. Partially frozen near the shore, Lake Geneva sparkled like a steel blade beneath the blue sky. From the windows of the manor, you could make out the western part of Geneva on the other side of the bridge, and the foothills of the Jura glimmered with starlight in the dawn.

  Lorna stared at these austere sights from the dreamy distance that insomnia leaves in its wake. The previous night, she’d become more convinced of her need to get away, at least for a time. After the months she had taken off from work, her news agency was now offering her a trip to Arabia Felix. Tribal insurrections had spread to the entire region, reigniting the most muddled of civil wars among the Arab Spring demonstrators in Sana‘a: Islamist rebels, Shiite minority fighters, and government troops supported by Saudi Arabia. The infamous risks of the job had surprisingly curative powers against depression. She recalled having met Cédric at a cocktail party at his magazine’s headquarters five years earlier, when she’d returned from Baghdad. When he learned of the massacre in the Syrian Catholic church in Baghdad from which she’d just escaped, Cédric practically apologized for being an armchair journalist. Still, by attacking major corporations, he was in fact perhaps more vulnerable than she was. Lawsuits, intimidations, blackmail, and physical assaults were part and parcel of his professional life.

  The previous day, alone with Cédric’s father in an enormous living room the size of a reception hall in a Swiss bank, Lorna couldn’t help inquiring somewhat obliquely about the irreparable disagreement between the businessman and his son, and the probably not inconsistent motives for Morice’s so distant yet so substantial aid. An old man with gray eyes and a transparent smile on his thin face, Morice Allyn-Weberson had asked her to stay for dinner after their early afternoon interview as the snow fell in large, foamy waves on Lake Geneva.

  “Why did Cédric break all ties with his family? Is it because of your business activities?”

  The head of the M.A.W. laboratories nodded distraughtly.

  “Most probably. You’ve read his work; he accuses us of the worst evils . . .”

  “Is he wrong?” Lorna asked candidly, keeping one eye on the strange butler who served and then cleared up with mechanical slowness.

  “For Cédric, the entire pharmaceutical industry is an international criminal organization responsible for the pathological alienation of just about all the world’s peoples with the heinous complicity of governments and public health services! According to this line of thought, I, who take a good dozen medications every day, must logically be a victim of my own laboratories . . .”

  Lorna smiled at this rather forced riposte. Cédric had not worn kid gloves to denounce the falsified favorable studies, the bribing of politicians and scientific experts, the pharmacists’ seminars in the Maldives or the Seychelles, the artificial creation of morbid symptoms or side effects that then required new drug dependencies, the testing of previously untested and often toxic molecules on impoverished people in Africa and Latin America.

  “I see you’re smiling,” the billionaire said. “Yet I am merely a cog in the machine; my company depends on, but does not control, an industrial holding company whose sole aim is to expand its interests. It is a brain without a soul, I grant you. But you cannot fight an economic machine, you know, whether you’re an economist, a rabble-rouser, or a financier. Unlike Voltaire’s famous watch, this huge crazy clock with its millions of watch hands does not really have a watchmaker . . .”

  From the bay windows overlooking the lake, Lorna, slightly dazzled, was scrutinizing the ice figures on the shore and deep within the property grounds. One of those figures, near a fountain that had become a mirror, must have been an actual statue beneath the stalactites. With such a sea of ice, her departure for Rome later that morning seemed unlikely, to say the least. Did she really have such a great desire to see Emilio again? She would change her ticket and take a nonstop flight to Yemen from the Geneva airport after spending a comatose night at the hotel.

  The previous day Morice Allyn-Weberson had been eager to offer her a photograph of Cédric at twenty. In a bathing suit on the beach, he was glowing with youth and the fragile harmony between a body and soul faced with life’s mysteries. Lorna had sensed that this curious gift would be followed by some revelation. The businessman had practically blessed her for having contacted him the day after the accident and come to visit him in Geneva three months later despite her misgivings.

  “Cédric is my only child,” he confided. “He hates me but he is my son. I’ve continued to love him from afar ever since he broke off all contact with me after his mother’s tragic death. Perhaps he didn’t tell you that she threw herself out a window in front of me? Cédric didn’t believe it was a suicide. When you’re twelve years old, how can you believe your mother would kill herself? Because she’d attempted to hang herself a few days earlier, I wasn’t really a suspect. But Cédric turned against me, and since then we’ve hardly exchanged a single word! After he finished his studies at an elite boarding school, he ran away several times before disappearing completely. It didn’t take me long to track him down. Do you think I didn’t know his alias? In a way, I’ve never left him. I’ve followed his escapades without his knowledge. All his movements were communicated to me, with the exception of the last one, on th
e sailboat. I’m angry with you, Lorna. Because of your whim, I was unable to save him.”

  Lorna interrupted him forcefully: how could he have prevented a winch from falling accidentally? The old man preserved his somewhat haughty, if not contemptuous, affability.

  “You must know that money is power and provides a number of opportunities. But what happened is an insurmountable tragedy: my son no longer has his original body; he is no longer genetically my son. Do you understand? If he has children with you, they’ll have the other man’s genes!”

  Lorna’s eyes widened with fear at the monstrousness of such reasoning. Clearly the bourgeoisie placed heredity among its vital interests, on a par with its need for control. At that moment, overcome with nausea, she excused herself and went back to her room to vomit up her entire meal. As soon as she lay down in the half-light of the ice and the full moon, she made every effort to forget. But Cédric’s naked body slid beneath her sheets and she thought she’d moaned for a long time either from fright or from pleasure without betraying for a moment the silence of her dream.

  The following day, the sight of all those convulsed statues throughout the countryside was reminiscent of moraines that had been expelled from the estuary of a glacier. The bizarre man with his robotic movements had carried down Lorna’s luggage. As she was leaving, when a car with notched wheels pulled up, Morice Allyn-Weberson wanted to say good-bye at the door to this daughter-in-law who had been sent from heaven. He knew just about everything about her; his investigators had even informed him about her sexual escapades and her absurd taste for hardship and danger. He did not dislike her, despite her misgivings about him. A woman who puts her life at risk like that could not be greedy; outside of business, he only cared for such selfless people.

  “Farewell, Lorna. Come back to see me when you get a chance. I have faith in you. I know you won’t abandon my son, so what can I say to you? Cédric despises me but that doesn’t matter. Nonetheless, I’m going to tell you a secret: his real body, his poor, broken, and amputated body is lying in the family vault, with his mother . . .”

  Horrified by the old man’s lunacy, Lorna exclaimed: “If your son were to die from immune rejection or something else, what would you do with him?”

  “I’d place his head in there too!” he answered calmly. “Yes, his real body is waiting for him in a decay-proof coffin. A man such as myself can obtain any authorization he wants. I would place his head in there and have his name engraved next to mine. Can you imagine for a second that I would be able to outlive him? In fact, I will probably die before he does. If that happens, take good care of him; you obviously love him. Cédric is my sole successor in this world, you understand? And I don’t trust anyone, especially not my associates. And I’m going to tell you one more secret, a hypothesis in fact, a plausible suspicion, but you have to swear on my son’s head that you will never, ever repeat it . . .”

  18.

  Situated on a cliff overhanging the Adriatic Sea, in the middle of a wood in the province of Trieste, Dr. Emil Schoeler’s establishment was a refuge for patients looking for peace and quiet. It was both a hospital and a convalescent center, where celebrities in need of anonymity and people under various threats were treated in a discreet and extremely secure environment. Following the televised conference at the Rult-Milleur château that had exposed Cédric to the public in order to gratify the egos of his surgeons, the only way for him to escape the permanent siege of busybodies and journalists was to get away from there as quickly as possible. As his guardian, Dr. Servil had tended to every detail. The mission of that mediator from Geneva was to never have direct contact with the patient and to oversee the quality of care at each of his visits. The facilities offered to the son of a magnate of the pharmaceutical industry should be a matter of course, without ostentation but with all the efficiency of constant and complete aid of all kinds.

  Within the best care system imaginable, Cédric very naturally became accustomed to this level of comfort. Once you lose any hope of recognizing yourself in space, the world around you resembles time wasted. With the Adriatic in front of him, in his scenic solitude surrounded by craggy forests and dark mountains, the grounds, with their huge oaks, were the ideal space for a kind of episodic, and sometimes spasmodic, resurrection that caused him as much painful fear as instinctive surprise in the midst of birdsong and branches swaying in the sea breeze. Every morning an intact sun followed without the slightest veil of mist the most resplendent night sky. Trailed from a distance by a nurse, he was allowed to wander at his own pace along the shaded alleys. Cédric had the impression he was walking on a carpet of cicadas and bees, so much did his eyes respond by flashes and flickers to the sounds all around him. He had trouble delineating the boundaries of his five senses; summer colors tasted of sap and sounds warmed his skin; scents even invaded his ears and eyes. During a recent consultation, Dr. Schoeler, a distinguished neurologist, thought he was reassuring Cédric in describing to him a probable disorder in the connections of millions of spinal cord fibers—some of which were still being reconstituted—and the delayed impulses linked to the distortions of organ memories.

  Cédric indeed was no longer sure of his memories and from time to time came up against an obtuse will that entered him from outside his consciousness. How can you believe in your own past, and even your emotions, when your body is haunted by another’s history? Ever since he had come out of the cycle of anesthesia and medically induced comas, his brain seemed detached from reality, as if he were simply experiencing unreliable representations from REM sleep: a sort of crystalline, luminous, almost abstract dream.

  Cédric had just glimpsed his guardian angel through a looped alleyway that wound between the tulip beds. Her hands in the pockets of a light smock, the nurse let him come up to her and then turned halfway to face the man she’d been following a moment ago.

  “Oh, such a lovely stroll!” she said once he was near. “Every day you move about more easily . . .”

  “You mean I’m only limping with one leg now!”

  He stared at her, surprised in the daylight by her bland, touching beauty beneath the white band of her nurse’s cap. Was that elusive emotion he felt in the presence of a female located in his brain, or lower down, deep inside the entrails that did not belong to him?

  “Do you think I’ll be able to go home one day?” he asked, without the slightest memory of a place where he’d lived.

  “Certainly,” said the nurse, who had been trained to acquiesce to the wishes of the clientele. “As soon as you’ve regained enough autonomy.”

  “Physical you mean?”

  “Of course. But also when you no longer get dizzy in front of a mirror and when you’ve agreed to eat in the hospital cafeteria.”

  “But I eat everything I’m given!”

  “And if we didn’t give you anything, you wouldn’t eat a thing. It’s as if we were throwing roses through a circus hoop!”

  The young woman was now strolling more slowly next to her protégé. As they walked, the view changed, opening now onto the island-filled sea, now onto the illuminated mountains.

  “I’d like to know . . . ,” said Cédric in a hesitant voice.

  “What is it? I’m listening.”

  “What am I related to? What do I resemble physically on this earth?”

  “A man, it would appear.”

  “You don’t understand! Let’s go back in now, this light is piercing my skull!”

  During the days that followed, Cédric, aware that he was improving, requested the authorization to go out, to visit Trieste, to go swimming. Wasn’t he in fact a free man? The director of the establishment promised to grant all his wishes, but a little later on, after a battery of additional tests. “Transthoracic sonogram, primitive reflex, oculomotor function . . . nothing but the usual,” he explained. Cédric would have to content himself with the grounds and its alleyways for another week, but he was obsessed with a recurring idea. Was he not free to make his own choices
? Changing bodies did not entail any known type of madness, provided that the brain system was intact. His brain had no lesions, he felt warmth in his limbs, and these now moved at his will—except on some nights when he was affected by the sleep paralysis associated with short periods of hallucination. True, he was still experiencing total alienation; you don’t switch bodies the way you do dance partners. He was not psychologically whole. And his relative health was due entirely to a surgical construction. Despite massive doses of medicine, his head could reject the body at any moment. He also knew that the immunosuppressant treatments increased his chances of lymphoma and other cancers. And then, he no longer had any sexual feeling, no libido; this part of him seemed to be extinguished for good. He was particularly preoccupied by the idea that he could no longer be genuinely autonomous. In his state of dependency, he felt incapable of using his reasoning or acting on his own. Freedom of thought had to be immersed in flesh and blood in order not to be an artifice of pure reasoning. Although it occupied a privileged space in the brain, free will had to be the result of a hormonal secretion, at best a localized activity of synapses. The entire body had to be involved in the slightest decision. The thought of leaving, running away as before with Lorna, took on a variety of contours. Was her name really Lorna? Tormented by a mysterious bewilderment, in the end he conceded that this confused yearning—the only thing that could reassure him that he hadn’t been amputated from his inner self—must surely involve his physical and moral independence.

  19.

  One autumn morning, Cédric awoke with a start and sat up in bed as daylight filtered through the blinds. He must have been dreaming about the woman he loved, but her name escaped him. Had they broken up? Even though he had difficulty imagining her features, he was flooded with infinite sadness at the thought of such a possibility. Anyway, what was he doing alone in this bed, battered by cramps and twinges from head to toe? He folded down the sheet, recalling that he’d gone to bed naked the previous night because he was allergic to the seams on the flannel pajamas he’d found among the various new clothes in the drawers of a dresser. He had never asked himself where they’d come from. His care, the treatments he was given, the impeccable accommodations of the various establishments where he stayed—all of that must have cost a fortune. He observed with growing unease the huge bedroom that had been conceived for optimal comfort, although it came with the discreet presence of a medical surveillance robot no doubt connected to the computers of a host of clinicians. In the left corner, near a window above his bed, between two lamps, video cameras closely monitored his most intimate moments. “Soon you’ll no longer even notice them,” Dr. Schoeler had told him. “We forget quite quickly any outside intrusion if it’s painless.”