Desirable Body
Page 11
An Austrian team has perfected a bionic hand controlled by the brain that provides advantages similar to those of a transplant and is able to do a variety of everyday tasks. According to Dr. Aszmann, bionic reconstruction is less risky than the hand transplant that has been performed since 1997, which requires taking very strong immunosuppressant medication and often resulted in the need to re-amputate the patient.
A new leak of radioactive water, with radiation levels of up to one hundred times greater than those that have been recorded since the catastrophe, was detected this morning on the site of the Japanese nuclear reactor in Fukushima, according to TEPCO.
An international team, including scientists from the Astrophysics Department-AIM and the Particle Physics Department of CEA-Irfu, has just used the Mega-Planck satellite to discover galaxy clusters upon clusters upon clusters with characteristics that were previously unknown. Located extremely far away from us, the clusters of clusters of clusters that group up to a thousand galaxy clusters of clusters are the largest structures in the universe. Astrophysicists were able to detect the new clusters thanks to the imprint left in the background radiation of the universe by the hot gas from the clusters. Of the 389 clusters detected by Mega-Planck at distances from 5 to 10 billion light-years, most were previously unknown.
Swen sighed in dismay at the exhausting diversity of the information he received—countless articles in that vast encyclopedia of current affairs that the media machinery churned out night and day. What was the role of the intermediary drudge in all this? By changing a word from time to time, there was of course the possibility of keeping oneself amused.
The discovery of human meat in the Pindu brand of lasagna, which was supposed to contain beef, caused a scandal in the UK—where man is revered and eating him is taboo—and led to the withdrawal Friday in France and Belgium of the suspected products. Human meat was found in large quantities in the UK (up to 100%) in the Pindu lasagna of a Romanian producer, the president of the Cadigel company—which owns the Pindu brand—explained to investigators. It was determined that it came from slaughterhouses in the Timisoara region, which slaughtered and cut up both beef and humans, he added.
But for David Cameron, this story is “shocking and entirely unacceptable.” It creates a problem of “confidence,” he said from Brussels. In the UK, the affair also takes on a cultural dimension: human meat is normally unavailable in stores, unlike in France and Switzerland, where it is esteemed for its tenderness. In the UK, the country par excellence for the sport of foot racing, man is one of the main recipients of the animals’ Victoria Cross, the highest award of the United Kingdom honors system.
Just for a laugh, Swen was about to send the reworked dispatch to his meteorologist colleague Michelet, when news retransmitted from Palermo popped up on his screen and went straight to his heart. He didn’t give a damn about the “tragic end of the first man to receive a total body transplant,” but Lorna, Lorna! How could he survive a single day without the only woman he’d ever even dreamed of loving? Nonetheless, he pulled himself together, his eyes already dry. The great reporter from the news agency who had been parachuted into every corner of this apocalyptic world was not a woman to let herself get caught, not even by the Cosa Nostra! A slim hope caused him to scroll through the news with a trembling finger.
The murder of the man who received the first full body transplant and his companion has caused considerable consternation in the medical research and financial worlds. Cédric Allyn-Weberson was found atrociously mutilated inside a rented Alfa Romeo on a Sicilian coastal road. The sole heir of a recently deceased wealthy Swiss businessman, he disappeared from his Paris home on June 30. While there is no question that La Stidda was involved, the motives for this double homicide remain unclear. Was Cédric Allyn-Weberson a hostage of the local mafia? Could he have survived without his specialized medication? Did his jailors assassinate him, as often happens when a ransom is not paid? Another trail concerns Lorna Leer, the man’s companion. It will be recalled that Leer, an investigative journalist, had openly implicated a consortium of pharmaceutical laboratories regarding an attempted homicide of Cédric Allyn-Weberson. Having landed the day before the tragedy at the international airport in Catania, she had just recorded and broadcast on a news site the testimony of an anesthesiologist nurse from Principessa Jolanda Hospital whose name we will not reveal. This nurse stated that a victim of a motorcycle accident transported to the Emergency Room two days before the fabled transplant in Turin showed no visible lesions on arrival, but seemed rather to be under the influence of a hypnotic sedative such as propofol or etomidate before he was declared to be brain dead following a disastrous surgical procedure. The possible relationship between these comments and the execution by beheading of the well-known transplant recipient is still unknown. Only his head was found at the feet of Lorna Leer, who had been killed by a bullet to the head at the wheel of the Alfa Romeo. The steep ransom that most likely was impossible to pay under the circumstances leads one to suspect collusion between the hostage takers and the assassins, with their highly placed backers in the business world. Europol and the Italian criminal police are investigating, together with the Carabinieri, in order to get to the bottom of a mystery that grows deeper by the hour.
“Unbelievable!” cried Swen. That blabber-mouthed nurse, that whole story about the mafia and the manhunt, and the kidnappers who were paid more to murder their hostage than to free him! Wasn’t one of his small roles at the news agency in fact to establish the pertinence and authenticity of each and every dispatch before writing it up? And this one, he believed, was sorely lacking the slightest credibility.
HUBERT HADDAD is a Franco-Tunisian novelist, poet, playwright, short story writer, and essayist. He has received literary prizes for a number of his publications, including the 2008 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the 2009 Prix Renaudot Poche for Palestine, a compelling political novel. Published in seven languages, Palestine is currently being adapted into a motion picture. His latest novel to be translated into English, Rochester Knockings, was published in 2015.
ALYSON WATERS is a translator of modern and contemporary French and Francophone literary fiction. She has translated works by Vassilis Alexakis, Louis Aragon, Emmanuel Bove, Albert Cossery, Jean Giono, Daniel Pennac, and Tzvetan Todorov, among others. Waters has received several grants and prizes for her translations, including, in 2012, the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize for Eric Chevillard’s Prehistoric Times.