“I’m sorry,” Clark said. “I guess sometimes we just find ourselves in a rut.”
And as if the word had poetic power, they began rutting all over again.
I was hoping that Mira had seduced Clark so that he would publish my work. But the following morning I was stirred back to reality by a phone call.
“Hello?” Mira said.
“Hi, Mira, it’s Clark . . . Heinemann.”
“Hi,” she said, with an élan I’d never heard in her voice before.
“I’ve decided to go ahead with our plan and publish an original Paul Henry story.”
“Oh my God, that’s so wonderful. It’s perfect.”
They discussed the details for a while, and then he said, “I had a great time last night.”
“We should get together again soon,” she agreed.
“How about tonight?” he asked.
“I’m supposed to see my mother,” Mira said.
Yes! I thought. Lead him on until I’m published and then tell him you did it all for me.
“OK,” Clark said rather sadly. I could feel his disappointment through our connection.
“But I could call her,” Mira offered. “I could change it to sometime next week.”
“I’ll get the wine, and we can eat in my apartment.”
“We don’t even have to eat,” Mira promised, and I cried out.
“Is there some interference on the line?” Clark asked.
“Not on my end.”
Every night for the next three months Mira was at Paul’s apartment doing things we had never done.
When she told him that she was pregnant, I hoped that the smug editor would see his error and kick her out. But instead he kissed her and asked her to marry him. He didn’t think about it for one moment. What kind of fool does something like that?
But I was relieved anyway. They would have a life where my name would never be mentioned. I would slowly fade from consciousness and then finally follow my body into death.
I hadn’t considered what would happen with the publication of my story “Shootout on the Wild Westside” in the fall edition of Black Rook Review. Clark wrote a moving testimonial to me, “ . . . a writer who never gave up; who died working on his next story.”
I was dragged through a series of interviews, to a dozen public readings, and finally to a publishing house that wanted to put out a collection of my multi-genre tales.
Clark and Mira didn’t stop having sex until the seventh month of her pregnancy, and then, and then . . . they decided to name their son Paul Henry Heinemann.
Clark became an expert on my work and often gave talks about me.
. . . Paul Henry was a complex man who was ahead of his time. He wrote fiction that was destined to outlive him. He selfishly used his time for the one thousand stories he crafted over thirty years.
He wasn’t a happy man. He wasn’t nice or good or caring or even very friendly. He hated editors like me because we couldn’t see his value . . .
And after talks in Cincinnati, Seattle, Boston, LA, and twenty other towns and cities, he’d meet some young woman writer and make love to her the way he would to Mira when he got home.
I hated him then, because I had never cheated on her. Maybe I didn’t treat her as well as she deserved, but at least I was faithful in my mediocrity.
When Clark came home I never rested, because he’d made a career out of me and so talked about me and my work almost every day.
And when he wasn’t dealing with me directly he was calling out to his son, “Paul Henry,” and I was forced into the life I never had, paying for my small-minded, selfish ways.
And then one day Mira found a letter in a pocket of the brown corduroy jacket that Clark wore when on the road. It was some love letter that a young woman secreted for him to find, so he would think of her when he was far away.
The fight went on for hours. Mira cried, and Clark tried to explain, then to apologize, and then to say he had no excuse. She told him to get out, and instead of being happy about his misery, I felt, for the first time since the heart attack, real pain. Their pain was mine. I couldn’t escape it. My consciousness was melding with their emotions.
At one point Clark and I saw Paul Henry standing in a doorway that led down a hall to the boy’s bedroom.
Clark told his son to go to bed.
“What’s that man doing on your head, Daddy?” the four-year-old asked.
After putting his son to bed, Clark returned to the living room, and Mira kissed him.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“Seeing you with our son,” she said. “I’m still mad but I forgive you.”
Later that night, Mira and Clark came in to say good night to my namesake, kissing him and promising strawberry pancakes in the morning to make up for all that yelling.
I wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen next. When they had even the tiniest spat they made up for it with marathon sex sessions. I was going to experience Clark’s rolling doughy body making Mira cry out for him as she’d never done for me.
But that didn’t happen. Clark and Mira turned on Paul Henry’s night-light and departed, somehow leaving me in the room with their son.
Alone, the boy dutifully picked his teddy bear off the short chest of drawers next to his bed and squeezed it tightly.
He had golden skin and similarly colored curly hair.
He seemed to be thinking about something when he said, “You look so sad.”
He seemed to be talking to me.
This was a surprise. Even those people who rarely saw me, usually senile and near death themselves, never addressed me directly. They would ask Clark who I was and why I was there.
“You,” Paul Henry said.
“Me?”
He nodded. “Why you look so sad?”
“I do?”
“Uh-huh. Why?”
“Because your mother used to be my girlfriend, but then I, I died, and now she loves your father.” I didn’t want to say all that, but somehow his questions demanded answers.
“And so you’re sad because you love my mommy?”
“No.”
“You don’t love her?”
“No, I don’t,” I said, surprised at my own answer.
“Then why are you so mad at my daddy?”
“Why do you say I’m mad?”
“Because when I see you and you say things, it makes him upset. I don’t think he can see you, but he knows you’re there. He knows it, and he gets mixed up.”
I felt something give, like a tether pulling out of the soil.
“I guess I was mad at your father because he never published my stories when I was alive.”
“Oh,” my young namesake said, and I felt another tether give. “Maybe you could forgive him if I said I was sorry he didn’t do that. I could tell my daddy that you were mad, and then he would be sorry too.”
There was a breeze suddenly blowing through the room, and another tether pulled out of the firmament of my hatred. There was a light shining somewhere, and I realized that most of my existence after death had been swathed in darkness.
Everything was becoming light.
Paul Henry was talking, and I might have responded, but I was only aware of the light shining and the darkness that was dissipating, the strong breeze, and the weightlessness I felt from the tethers loosening.
“Will you come back?” Paul Henry asked. It was part of a longer conversation that another part of my mind had been having with him.
Before I could answer, the wind picked up, drowning out all other sound, and the light became excruciatingly bright. I was still there in the room with Paul Henry, as the world turned and Mira called out Clark’s name in ecstasy.
I would, I realized, always be there, and that was a
relief so profound that time ceased and my antipathies turned into silver-scaled fish that darted away somewhere, leaving me once again breathless.
The Sin
of Dreams
July 27, 2015
“So, who’s paying for all this?” Carly Matthews asked.
“There are a few investors,” Morgan Morgan replied. “A man who owns the largest cable and satellite provider in China, a so-called sheikh, the owner of two pro teams in the US, and a certain, undefined fund that comes to us via the auspices of the White House.”
Morgan gestured broadly. Behind the milk-chocolate-brown entrepreneur, through the huge blue-tinted window, Carly could see center city LA, thirty-two stories down. The San Bernardino Mountains stood under a haze in the distance. The summer sun shone brightly but still failed to warm the air-conditioned office.
“Government money?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” the director of New Lease Enterprises replied, looking somewhere over the young scientist’s head.
“What does that mean?”
“Someone close to the president has called together a small group of billionaires and shared with them the potential of our research. He has also, unofficially, given NLE’s holding company, BioChem International, access to the Justice Department and three constitutional experts.”
“What does the Justice Department have to do with neuronal data analysis?”
Morgan Morgan, executive vice president and principal director of NLE, gazed at the twenty-three-year-old postdoctoral student. Her pleasant features and youthful expression belied the razor-sharp mind that, his advisors assured him, her published articles so clearly exhibited.
“What business does a black hip-hop promoter from the Motor City have running a subsidiary of a biological research company?” Morgan asked.
All the fair-skinned blond scientist could do was raise her eyebrows and shrug.
“The only reason I’m here,” she said, “is because my former professor Dr. Lawson asked me, as a favor to him, to meet with you. I’m in the middle of three very important experiments, and I have to be back by no later than nine o’clock tonight.”
“What reason did Rinehart give you?” Morgan asked.
“Dr. Lawson told me that I would be amazed by what you had to say. It is for that reason alone I left Stanford to come down here.”
“I paid Rinehart three hundred and seventy thousand dollars to say that to you. One hundred thousand for his second family in West Virginia, two hundred to cover gambling debts in Atlantic City, and seventy to end the annoyance of a blackmailer who has been collecting money from him for twelve years. I don’t know how he plans to spend that seventy, but I doubt he’ll use it for payment.”
Young Dr. Matthews tilted her head and peered blankly at the ex-hip-hop manager and impresario. For a full minute she couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Well?” Morgan asked, managing not to smile. “Are you amazed?”
“Yes. But I don’t see why Dr. Lawson would want me to come down here to learn about his, his indiscretions.”
“He didn’t.” Morgan allowed. “I’ve already told you that the work we’re doing has to do with the transmigration of the human soul. Our work in that field is truly astonishing.”
“What’s astonishing is so much money being spent on this rubbish,” she said.
“Two years at Oxford, right?” Morgan pointed at her and smiled, knowingly.
“Yes, but why do you ask?”
“Rubbish,” he said, with an almost boyish grin. “Americans don’t really use that word, even though it’s a very good one.”
“I didn’t come here to dig up dirt on my mentor or to listen to your opinions on the nationality of language.”
“No,” Morgan said. “You are here because I paid your mentor good money to make sure you came.”
“And the question is, why?”
“The same reason the board of directors of BioChem International opted to give me a free hand in this soul business—sales.”
“Sales?”
“We have, as I’ve already told you, all the theoretical and technical knowledge to read and therefore copy the contents of a human brain into electronic data storage and from storage back into that mind or another. But because of the complexity and mathematical nuances of this process, there isn’t enough memory in our facility to contain even a fraction of a normal adult’s experience and intelligence, learned and inherited instincts, and conscious and unconscious memory—at least that’s what the experts tell me. The amount of data attached even to a simple phrase in a human’s mind could take up trillions of bytes in memory. The experience of a single day would fill up every storage device the Defense Department has.”
“Oh,” Carly said, the light dawning behind her eyes.
“Yes,” Morgan agreed, nodding. “I realized your macromolecular studies trying to simulate DNA development would give us a way to store information that is only a thousand times the capacity size of the human brain and naturally compatible with human physiology. If we could harness your bio-storage methodology with our neuronal I/O systems, we could combine them with the cloning process to transfer the human soul from one body to another.”
“But Mr. Morgan, what you have to understand is that I do not believe in a soul.”
“No,” the director agreed. “You don’t. But you’re an American citizen aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You believe in the freedom of religion, do you not?”
“Certainly.”
“And all religions believe in the human soul.”
“So what?”
“So if I offer to sell a customer a new, younger version of himself, then he has to believe that it is not only his consciousness but his actual soul that will inhabit the new body.”
“But it isn’t,” Dr. Matthews argued. “Even if the new body contained his memories when the old body dies, the origin, the sense organs that recorded and experienced those memories will die with it.”
“Not the originals,” Morgan Morgan noted. “My scientists tell me that our physical body is completely replaced by new materials every seven years; our memories, if material, are therefore not original.”
“That’s just sophistry.”
“But what if we copied Mr. X’s memories into the macromolecular computer your research postulates, talk to Mr. X in that form, and then copy those memories back into his old body?”
“His brain will remember the experiences his mind had as a machine.”
“Yes,” Morgan said happily. “We copy him back and forth a few times like that and then, with no warning, move these memories into the new body. His mind, his experiences, and his thoughts will be indistinguishable from the three storage units he’s experienced. Therefore the new man and the old man will be the same—exactly.”
“It’s kind of like three-card monte,” Carly said.
“Kind of,” Morgan agreed, pursing his lips and shrugging slightly.
December 3, 2019
Dr. Carly Matthews was remembering this first meeting with Morgan Morgan as she sat in the witness box in a pine and cherrywood California state courtroom, seven blocks east of the ex-impresario’s former office.
“You believed that Mr. Morgan was a huckster,” Ralph Lacosta, the prosecuting attorney, said. He was a short man in a black suit that seemed to call attention to his small stature. He wore glasses, as Carly did. At their last meeting, in preparation for her testimony, he had asked her out for dinner.
“Objection,” Melanie Post, the defense attorney, said. “Leading the witness.”
Melanie was buxom, around forty, and Carly found her intimidating, though she didn’t know why. The defense lawyer never raised her voice or bullied a witness. It was something about the way she looked at and listened to people—with unrelent
ing intensity.
“Reword, counselor,” a seemingly bored John Cho, the presiding judge, advised.
The judge was sixty-nine, Carly knew from Wikipedia’s newly instituted public official bio-repository. He had presided over some of the most important murder cases in recent years and had survived three bouts with liver cancer.
“How did Mr. Morgan impress you when you first met?” Lacosta asked Carly.
“He told me that he planned to migrate souls. I thought he was joking.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
“He was a music producer who was all of a sudden at the head of the subsidiary of a major medical corporation. That alone was ridiculous.”
“But you went to work for him the day you met,” Lacosta claimed. “Why is that?”
“Five million dollars.”
“Say again?”
“He paid me five million dollars and promised over a hundred million in capital to design and build a macromolecular computer for New Lease Enterprises. He also offered to let me retain copyrights and patents on the theory and the physical device.”
“And you accepted?”
“I didn’t believe in the existence of a soul, but to have the funds to build a new bio-based computer system was too good to pass up.”
“And did you accomplish this goal?”
“Yes.”
“And did NLE’s other researchers manage to copy the contents of a man’s mind, completely, from a human brain into an analogous synthetic construct?”
At the defense table, over Lacosta’s left shoulder, Carly could see the codefendants, Morgan Morgan and a young man named Tyler Edgington Barnes IV. Morgan reminded her of her father. Not her biological dad, but Horace Granger, the black man that married her mother after Thomas Matthews had abandoned them.
“Miss Matthews,” Judge Cho said.
“I cannot say that the data transfer was complete,” Carly said. “But the responses from the various I/O devices on Micromime Six were exactly the same as the subjects gave with their own bodies and minds.”
The Awkward Black Man Page 25