Do Not Resuscitate

by Nicholas Ponticello

  DO NOT RESUSCITATE

  DO NOT

  RESUSCITATE

  or

  The Monkey Parade

  by

  Nicholas Ponticello

  Copyright © 2015 Nicholas Ponticello

  E-Book Edition

  ISBN-10: 0990824705

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9908247-0-1

  All rights reserved.

  For permission to use, copy, or reproduce the contents of this book, please send requests to info@booleanop.com.

  www.booleanop.com

  Cover Illustration by Nicholas Ponticello

  To Nico—for bringing me to life

  FOREWORD

  ANCIENT ALCHEMISTS, despite having accomplished nothing for which history has any reason to remember them, became legendary for their tireless quest to conceive a magic formula that would take an ordinary substance, like iron or lead, and transmogrify it into yet another ordinary substance, gold, which humans have, incidentally, singled out to be of more value than all the other ordinary substances in the universe.

  It was a futile endeavor, however, for it turns out ordinary substances such as lead and iron are composed of tiny little particles—namely protons, electrons, bosons, and so on—invisible to the naked eye, but which are so tightly linked arm in arm that the process of taking them apart and putting them back together again in any coherent manner takes a great deal of energy, which, as it turns out, takes a great deal of gold. A conundrum.

  Incidentally, scientists today are trying to do the same thing as these ancient wizards, but instead of making gold out of lead, they are trying to make something potable, like freshwater, out of something toxic, like the ocean.

  Here, again, a lot of energy and gold must be applied with great persistence for anything to get done.

  The lesson: some things, once altered, are not easily undone.

  Ancient alchemists, moreover, concerned themselves with an even higher aim. They sought to develop an elixir capable of granting the drinker the gift of immortal life. One might argue pharmaceutical companies are the distant cousins of these prehistoric potion masters.

  They called the alchemists’ quest for immortality the Magnum Opus, the Great Work.

  In the following true account, the author refers with regular occasion to the Magnum Opus. While the staging of these references is sometimes confounding and tends to interrupt the flow of the narrative, it was in the better judgment of this editor to let the text alone, for who can say what profound implications may be lurking in the flotsam and jetsam of a dying man’s last words? —NP

  CHAPTER 1

  MY NAME IS JIM LORENZO FROST, and at the end of April, I will download my brain to a microchip no bigger than a thumbnail. The microchip will be stored in a titanium canister in a warehouse at Humanity Co. until the specialists there figure out a tidy way to get my brain off the microchip and back into a human body, preferably my own, or at least a copy of my own.

  It isn’t my idea of a good time. My daughter Eliza talked me into it. She says it is common practice now to back up your brain. She has hers done every year or so, like a teeth cleaning or a routine trip to the doctor. She says almost everybody does it nowadays. I don’t know what everybody thinks they’ve got up there that’s so important.

  Nevertheless, I agreed to it. Not because it makes any sense to me. I still remember the phone number of my best friend in elementary school, little Frankie Mahoney: 310-746-2275. Undoubtedly the number has changed, or Frankie is dead. So who needs a microchip for that kind of thing? Useless information.

  Nevertheless, if downloading my brain onto a microchip will help Eliza sleep at night, well then that’s that. My dear Eliza needs all the sleep she can get. She has what they used to call a nervous condition. Today they call it generalized anxiety disorder. I think that’s the same thing my mother had. She just called it the jitters.

  The motive for backing up your brain is simple: to live forever. At the present moment, the said objective is impossible. They can get everything out of your head, or so they say, and package it nicely in a shiny titanium canister that you can put on your mantel, or in a trophy case, or bury in your attic. But they don’t have the foggiest idea how to get all that hogwash back into your head if, say, you suffer from memory loss or Alzheimer’s disease, or you die and you want to upload your memories to a clone. For now everybody’s memories just sit in a warehouse somewhere gathering dust. And that’s what Eliza would like for me, too: my very own dust-gathering microchip. As if the graves of the dead don’t gather enough dust already.

  Eliza has three girls of her own. The eldest has just graduated college: Stanford. I was a Berkeley man myself, but I managed to get through my granddaughter’s commencement without hissing. That’s what we Berkeley Bears do when we come across a Stanford Cardinal: We hiss. And sometimes we make a chopping motion at our necks. But I try to keep such impulses to myself.

  Eliza’s eldest girl is named Marilee after my deceased sister, may she rest in peace. And goodness knows my sister Marilee is resting in peace somewhere, or resting nowhere at all if that’s how it goes after you die. But at least she’s not buzzing around on a microchip waiting to be brought back from the dead. The technology for that kind of thing wasn’t around when she died. So I think it is safe to say my sister Marilee is gone for good. Done. Finished. Kaput.

  Which brings me to my point. I cannot say I want to be gone for good. And although I am not wild about putting all my memories onto a microchip, I can’t say I’m opposed to putting a few of my memories onto paper so that little Marilee Junior or whoever else happens along might hear from me from time to time and know that I was once futzing around on this planet.

  Seventy-three years I have been futzing around on this planet. And that’s how I suppose most people begin their biographies: I was born seventy-three years ago, on February 26, 1983, to Jonas Frost, the owner of an antique shop, and Anita Lorenzo, his pretty Italian wife.

  CHAPTER 2

  “IS IT GOING TO KILL ME?” I asked when Eliza told me I was going to have my brain downloaded to a microchip.

  It’s a question I ask a lot these days. “Is it going to kill me?” When I climb a long flight of stairs or get behind the wheel of a car or choke on a half-chewed bit of steak. Is having my brain downloaded onto a microchip going to kill me?

  Eliza assures me it will not. But I can’t help wondering. If my thoughts, my memories, my preferences, my impulses—all the things that make me me—are going to be transferred onto a single, tiny microchip, then where does that leave me, the original me?

  “It’s just a copy,” Eliza says.

  But if I can manage to be in two places at once—well I don’t know what that means for the existence of a soul.

  My dear Eliza has had her brain downloaded sixteen times, and she certainly doesn’t seem any less herself than before. Far from it. Today she called me on the phone to fuss over my hair. It’s always too long or too short or too gray. Eliza fusses over a lot of things. When she was in preschool, Eliza couldn’t put her socks on without making sure the seam lined up perfectly with her toes. And try to get her to drink a glass of milk a day past the expiration date—forget about it! You might as well ask a chimpanzee to recite the Gettysburg Address. That’s Eliza.

  My other daughter, Eliza’s sister, however, turned out to be quite the opposite. Kendra Ann. A lovely sensible girl. She is married to a British Indian who works as a venture capitalist in London. They have two boys, an oddity in a family prone to spawning girls.

  Their mother, my wife, is now dead. Cancer. She is also gone for good. I think that is why Eliza is so keen on getting my brain downloaded. Eliza lost her mother when she was ten, and she has been worried every d
ay since that I’m just as likely to blink out of existence. Maybe I am. We all are, I guess. But Eliza assures me this microchip will soon solve that problem.

  CHAPTER 3

  I HAVE MY ORDERS FROM ELIZA: haircut, Fort Mason Center, two o’clock. After all, tonight is the banquet for the retired men and women of the SHEM Project, and I am the guest of honor.

  The organizers have asked me to give a speech. I haven’t prepared anything yet. I was thinking of winging it. Eliza won’t hear of it, though. She said, “Dad, you can’t wing it! That’s how people end up on YouTube!”

  “Don’t tell me how people end up on YouTube,” I barked at Eliza. “When I was little Marilee’s age, I was a YouTube sensation!”

  It’s true. I was.

  But Eliza will never know if I decide to wing it or not because she isn’t going to the banquet tonight. It is a well-known fact in the Frost family that Eliza is afraid of crowds. She is sending her three girls in her stead: Marilee Junior, Luanne, and Joyce.

  Eliza’s husband is not going to be there either. He is overseas negotiating a water trade in Sudan.

  Good luck!

  I started working for the SHEM Project when I was twenty-three. I was just out of college and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life when I saw an advertisement on Craigslist for a courier service in the East Bay. I sent an application to the contact listed and received an e-mail from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. The e-mail was only three sentences:

  Thank you for applying to Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. Payments will be made upon receipt of goods. Within the next few weeks, you will receive an e-mail containing the details of your first assignment.

  I thought it was a joke. And I didn’t hear another word from them for nearly two weeks, so I got a job at the Berkeley Art Museum standing around the gallery, telling guests to shut up and to keep their hands to themselves. I had been at it only a few days, and I had become quite the expert at giving fussy, screaming kids the evil eye, when I received my next e-mail from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. It read:

  Dear Mr. Frost,

  Please retrieve luggage for passenger “Adrian Jacobs” from United flight 467, arriving at the Oakland International Airport on June 13 at 4:37 p.m. Deliver directly to Genova Delicatessen on Fifty-First and Telegraph. Look for the man in the yellow jacket.

  Thank you for your service.

  Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc.

  I was scheduled to work at the museum on June 13, the day of the delivery. So I called a friend of mine, Charlie McAllister, who had gotten me the job at the Berkeley Art Museum, and I asked him if he could cover for me. Since Charlie had a habit of blowing his paycheck on pot, he took the shift no questions asked.

  I had to look up the metro lines that would get me to the airport and then to Fifty-First and Telegraph since I didn’t have a car at the time, and my sole mode of transportation around the Bay in those days was the neon-green eighteen-speed road bike I had inherited from a crazy roommate that moved to Hawaii one summer and never came back for his stuff. Last I heard he had joined the Navy SEALs.

  The museum paid about eleven dollars an hour. And after taxes I usually walked away with something like $300 a week, which was good money for a broke graduate in a garbage economy. Although they were calling it a recession, it wasn’t quite so bad then as it is now. With the price of everything today what it is, $300 a week might pay the water bill for a month. But back then it was decent money.

  As I hopped on BART toward the Coliseum, where I would catch a shuttle to the airport, I considered whether delivering one stinking package could possibly make up for the lousy sixty bucks I was supposed to make that day at the museum. I was real hard up for cash in those days, and I didn’t want to take out another loan from my parents, who were always so uptight about money and seemed to resent their children for never returning big on their “investment,” which is what they had called us as far back as I can remember.

  I had to ask myself if this little excursion was worth it. The fare for the BART ride alone would cost me my dinner. But the e-mail from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. had been so deliberately surreptitious that I figured, what the hell?

  When I arrived at the Coliseum stop, I got turned around at the station and ended up missing my shuttle, which put me about ten minutes behind schedule. I started to get nervous that I’d be late and that some bum would snatch up the luggage before I arrived.

  I didn’t even know what the luggage was supposed to look like. All I had was a flight number and a passenger name: Adrian Jacobs.

  The airport was a mess. Back then you could book a flight from Oakland to Los Angeles for forty-nine bucks. So people were flying in and out of the Bay Area all of the time. When gas prices skyrocketed in the twenties, the era of affordable air travel came to an end.

  I checked the arrivals kiosk for flight 467. The plane had arrived on time from Chicago, and passengers were directed to baggage carousel A2. When I got there, the carousel had already been picked clean, and all that was left on the conveyor belt were three large suitcases, what looked like a laptop bag, and a small red ice cooler, the kind paramedics use to convey donor organs.

  I felt a little shifty approaching the carousel. The TSA officers didn’t take much notice of me, not until I started thumbing the ID tags on all the bags. The last tag I checked belonged to the red cooler, and lo and behold, it read, “Adrian Jacobs.”

  A TSA officer who had been watching me paw through the bags started toward me to offer assistance or to whisk me off to airport jail—I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I swept up the red cooler in a hurry and made a beeline for the door.

  The cooler was light, no more than a few pounds. And I tried to imagine what it could contain that required hand delivery in lieu of UPS or FedEx shipping. Clearly something with an expiration date, I thought, seeing the beads of condensation form on the cooler’s white lid.

  This is the point in the story where people usually ask me if I looked inside the cooler. And I say that I battled the urge all the way to Genova Delicatessen. I like to say, “It was a question of ethics,” or some other such thing, “and in the end, I had the willpower not to look.”

  Which isn’t exactly true. Granted, I never looked inside the cooler, but the reason I never looked doesn’t have anything to do with ethics, per se. I just didn’t want to know what it contained, not really.

  It could have been a bomb or crack cocaine or a kidney, and I didn’t dare mix myself up in a mess like that. As far as I was concerned, so long as I didn’t know what I was carrying, I was an innocent man.

  How’s that for ethics?

  I was young, and it’s hard to imagine getting caught up in anything really serious when you are only twenty-three. Life just isn’t serious when you’re twenty-three. At least it wasn’t for me back in the year 2006. I suppose it’s a bit more serious for twenty-three-year-olds now, what with the water shortages and the collapse of the economy and everything.

  But back then I had the philosophy that ignorance equated to innocence, or some other such nonsense. And, therefore, it didn’t matter if it was twenty kilos of crack cocaine in the red cooler, or a bull elephant’s tusks, so long as I never found out about it.

  I took BART and then a bus to Fifty-First and Telegraph. When I walked into Genova Delicatessen, I had the feeling that everybody was staring at me, staring at the red cooler.

  It’s more likely that nobody was staring at me because nobody in the whole place could have known what the hell was going on. I certainly didn’t. But I felt like the red ice cooler stood out like a sore thumb, and I couldn’t wait to ditch the thing. I looked around for a man in a yellow jacket, and not finding any trace of him, I started to get nervous. I decided to order a sandwich so as not to look too conspicuous. Meanwhile the red cooler sat across from me at the little table, wanting to explode its mysterious contents all over the room.

  After about half
an hour, a police officer came into the deli, and I just about pissed myself. In the time it took me to finish my sandwich, I became convinced that I had gotten mixed up in an international organ-trafficking scheme and that the red cooler contained the liver of a kidnapped child from Guatemala, or some other such horror.

  My palms were sweating and my pulse was racing as the cop put in an order for a sandwich and then paced about the room waiting for his number to be called.

  I was trying my best not to call attention to myself, and I was kicking myself for finishing my sandwich in such a hurry because now I had nothing left to do except sit there and pretend to be caught up in a text conversation on my phone.

  And just when I thought my nerves couldn’t handle the suspense, a man stepped into the delicatessen wearing blue jeans and a bright-yellow jacket. He looked around the shop, his eyes lingered momentarily on the red cooler, and then he stepped up to the counter and ordered two sandwiches.

  I watched his movements intently, wondering how I should make myself known without alerting the suspicion of the cop.

  But then the cop’s number was called, and he picked up his sandwich and left, at which point the man in the yellow jacket walked straight over to me and sat down.

  “I ordered you a sandwich. But it looks like you already ate,” he said, indicating the residual crumbs and wax paper on the table.

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “No worries. Is that it?” he asked, pointing to the cooler.