Morgan wraps her arms around me from behind and lowers her cheek to mine. “You are the bomb, Quaid!”
She pecks me on the cheek, but I’m clearly not the one on her mind. She spills some wine on my boxers, and I brush it off. She’s irritating me.
“It’s my wealth, not Quaid’s,” I remind her. That wipes the grin off Quaid’s handsome face. “Please, give me a moment.”
She gasps and slithers back to the bed to pout. “Get over your scruples, dear, and let’s buy us a country.”
Quaid, who apparently can’t comprehend her mumbling, widens his eyes. “Excuse me?”
“It was nothing. Morgan’s just, just trying to figure out what to buy next.”
“Vlad told me that he expanded your corporation so you can put virtually any purchase on your business credit card, and not pay taxes on anything.”
“All the more to spend.” Morgan reclines on the bed, twisting and raising her legs playfully into the air. Why does it appear to me she is even more infatuated with her body than all the men she constantly flashes?
I state the obvious. “He can’t see you.”
She flinches, and studies me for a moment.
“What’s that?” Quaid leans into the camera. “Morgan, will you get in view of the monitor and speak clearly?”
Morgan comes back behind me and bends low. Quaid’s lustful grin spreads over his face. I stiff-arm Morgan away. “Please, dear, stop hovering over me like a cloud!”
“This is unlike you, Raymond. Why so short with a woman so irresistible?” Quaid’s tone is surprisingly critical. “Do you need some”—he clears his throat—“marriage counseling?”
Morgan giggles at his underhanded flirtation. I scowl at my arrogant financial adviser. “Quaid Sandman, do I sense a hint of romantic affection for my wife?”
Quaid’s face reddens.
“Can you blame him?” Morgan quips, as if she doesn’t want to give Quaid a chance to answer me. Her smile has faded to a deep frown. I’m going to pay for disrespecting her in front of Quaid, but right now, I just don’t care.
“All business, Mr. Verity.” Quaid always calls me by my last name whenever I question a financial decision he makes. It’s a defense mechanism. “She makes you look good, sir. Very good. Count your blessings she wants to be with you, because there’s a long line of men and women who’d jump at the chance to take your place.”
Morgan beams at his praise and tries to come back in view of the camera. I wave her back to the bed.
When we disconnect, I turn to Morgan, who is refilling her glass. “Did you and Quaid develop a relationship when I was on ice?”
“I developed a relationship with him before you were on ice, if you remember. You and I have always had an open marriage. No faking fidelity, remember? Pleasure with honesty. Love, not greed. You know, what we always said.”
I shudder, but am not overly disgusted with the thought that I may have approved of her extra-marital affairs. I reveled in my own with her permission as well. I roll my eyes to the ceiling, trying to recollect who did what to who, and who did it more, as if it were some sort of contest.
“It works both ways, Raymond. Yet all parties stayed happily married, so what’s the fuss?” She lies on her stomach on the bed and rests her chin on her hands. “I’m an adult. You’re an adult. Remember?”
Adult.
The very word brings a rush of licentious memories. Indulging in such careless fantasies with perfect strangers never provoked the shame in me I seem to feel right now. I have developed a deep dislike for the reckless, intoxicated, swinger parties that used to speckle our busy calendar.
“Have you been reading the Bible or listening to an imam, or something?” Her sarcastic tone of voice frames the words perfectly, unveiling her revulsion at the thought of any external or internal suppression of the mindless pursuit of pleasure.
I feel a nauseating stab at the thought of an angry Judge awaiting me, remembering every single one of those acts for which I now feel guilty, in addition to all the sins I’ve forgotten, preparing His case, anticipating my prosecution, rejoicing in my future incarceration.
“No, I’ve not been reading the Bible.” Would those antiquated words of Scripture hold some secret to my sense of well-being? Don’t think so. “I’m sorry I was unkind, Morgan. I just don’t feel, um, I don’t feel like myself. I don’t know what it is.”
But I know exactly what it is. The fear of death has me once again in its icy grip, intermittently quickening my heart rate and breaking me out in a sweat, but I fear that putting the truth into words would deepen the dread.
“Have you been talking to your jailbird sister?”
I don’t answer this right away, even though I have not. Morgan’s question, however, rekindles a desire to speak with Tamara. I shake my head. “No. Now I have a question for you. Please answer honestly.” I pause. She raises her eyebrows in anticipation. “Have you been with anybody besides me since I was resurrected?”
“No. But so what if I have?” She sits up on the side of the bed, and tries to cover her legs with her nightgown—an atypical gesture for her. “I thought you abhorred the prudish ways of antique do-gooders.”
My brother’s hypocrisy comes to mind. I don’t want to be like him. “I do, Morgan, I hate hypocrisy above all.”
“There’s no right and wrong, especially when it comes to enjoying our own . . . ”
“I know what I said,” I interrupt, sitting down beside her to face the large mirror on the wall. I stare at us for a moment, teased toward complacency in view of the incredible benefits of the technology I have pioneered.
“Marriage, like food, gets boring if you don’t embrace some diversity.” She gazes into the mirror with me. “You said that, too. Come on, hon. You wrote the bible on this stuff. If that was true with our old broken-down bodies, how much more true is it in these bodies?” She sheds her nightgown to remind me of the upside, but my thoughts are too dark to be pleasantly distracted. “What good is being a god if you can’t do what you want?” She slides behind me and begins to massage my shoulders. “Why lock up nature’s best art in a closet, or limit it only to one set of eyes? Makes no sense.”
Her words sound so right, but they do not comfort me. There is no comparison between the physical shape I’m in now and where I was on my deathbed 27 years ago. “Does it ever bother you that this is not your body? That someone was, was killed so we could live?”
“Someone? What? I can’t believe you just said that. What has happened to you?”
I sigh deeply. What has changed in me? “I don’t know, Morgan. I just feel, you know, different about things.”
“Maybe it’s the stroke. Maybe it messed you up more than you realize.”
“Twice now I have looked death square in the eyeballs, and do you know what I felt?” She doesn’t venture to answer. “Horror.”
“Well, you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
“Accidents still happen, as my occasional stuttering and relative weakness on my left side daily reminds me. Our transplanted human brains are genetically defective. We will not live forever. Decay’s inevitable. We’re all still going to die. You, you, you just don’t know what it’s like, Morgan, to face death and not, not feel ready.”
She sighs and reclines in the bed, careful to keep her legs angled away from my eyes—an involuntary, yet informative gesture that she may still have some capacity for shame over our careless excesses and our voluptuous gluttony. Staring at the mirror affixed to the ceiling above our bed, she sympathizes with me for a moment. “I know what you went through was difficult, and I’m sorry.”
I lie on the bed next to her, and gaze into her eyes in the reflection. “Do you promise to be only with me? At least for now?”
She shrugs, and then rolls to look me directly in the eye. “Of course. The idea of an open marriage is being open with each other. I’ll clear things with you first, if you insist.”
That doesn’t quite answer my
question, but I rest content with it. If she’s unfaithful, at least she’ll notify me.
She grabs her pocketbook and heads into the bathroom. As the silhouette of her flawless body swaggers away from me, I realize why she has consented so readily to my irregular request. My wife is practically a paid prostitute. I have always accepted and funded all of her flirtations and flauntings, even sadistically reveling in the thought of our mutual adultery. She has always prostituted her body to whichever eyes or body suits her fancy. The lustful glances of naïve young men or rich old men are the currency that keeps her self-esteem at a perpetual peak. In giving her a flawless new body, I have handed a drug addict a stadium full of mind-numbing rocks and illusory powder. How can I protest my wife’s licentiousness when I have rolled out the red carpet for her? And it’s not even her body she’s prostituting, but a perfected twin. She is literally not the woman I married.
The red Merlot on the table beside the bed invites me to get off this island of guilt onto the sea of intoxication, and I accept. I pour two glasses for quick drinking. I shouldn’t judge her. I’m no better. If I can’t climb out of the mud, might as well warm it up and roll in it.
The tall mirror reflects my tanned, muscular frame, my bulging biceps and smooth skin, my perfectly toned legs, only minimally softened by my recent hospitalization. A memory from my past rushes to the forefront of my mind: I am taken back to that room where I did chest compressions on a flat-lining 18-year-old high school quarterback who accidentally overdosed on his prom night. I was a brand new med student—this was my first attempt at performing CPR without direct physician oversight, and my first face-to-face stare down with death. The young man’s body was similarly firm and tanned. A lovely girl in a strapless gown wept in the waiting room, her inebriation apparently not sufficient to stifle her mournful cries. The young man’s parents arrived as a resident took over chest compressions and I attempted my first intubation. They screamed their grief to heaven, praying for him to live. It would be a prayer that would not be answered in the affirmative. What hopes were dashed without warning! For him, there was no going back to right wrongs or make amends. There was no second chance.
Death—the great thief, the pleasure snatcher, the crippler of power and fame, the final nightmare. When will I lie once again on my cold bed of death, my life irretrievable by the best physicians and the most advanced technology, uncomforted by loved ones, and feeling pitifully unwelcomed at the edge of whatever future awaits me? Or, perhaps, my life will get snatched out of me without so much as a moment’s notice. Most never see a deathbed. Life departs quickly, like the explosion that took my consciousness and threatened to maim my mind. I could have died right then. Where would I be if I had?
Any enjoyment I might feel at the sight of my new body in the mirror, and my appetite for alcohol and intimacy, diminishes. I take the glass of wine and throw it against the mirror, breaking it and splattering the red wine all over my silvery reflection.
13
I PICK UP THE PHONE to speak with her behind the bullet-proof glass.
“It’s good to see you, Tamara.” It actually isn’t good to see her, but I want to be nice. She looks as old as dust in Pharaoh’s tomb, and about as attractive. Eschewing make-up and other forms of vanity that have consumed most in our society, the deleterious effects of her long years are undisguised. Her hair is thin and mostly gray, stubbornly holding onto the last bit of its matte black. There are bags of fluid under her eyes, and her knuckles are gnarled and stiff. With her thin arms and shoulders, it seems like half of her 150 pounds have settled in her hips. Certainly not the kind of person you’d expect to see in a jail cell.
She studies me for a moment, leaning forward with her elbows on the counter. “Hello, Ray. I have missed you.”
With her kind smile, my abhorrence of a hundred of her reproofs is overshadowed briefly by the sentiment of ten thousand fond childhood memories.
“You look great,” I lie again.
“I have prayed for you so much. How are you doing?”
I don’t know why I expected to hear a “You look great, too” or “So glad to have you back” or “Congratulations on your new lot in life.” Tamara, however, was never one to be generous with compliments.
“I’m well, Tamara. Thank you. Morgan and I have been celebrating my resurrection non-stop.” I stretch out my arms and then press my hands against my tight cotton button-up shirt, so she can see just how thin and firm I am. She doesn’t look impressed with my renovation. “Savannah and Mary Nell send their love.”
Her smile widens, thinning her pale lips and revealing a missing incisor tooth. My eyes keep drifting to a dark spot on her right cheek. This is the first imperfect elderly person I have even seen in months. I am surrounded by people who can afford new bodies or people wealthy enough to afford plastic surgery, gastric bands, and personal trainers.
“How’s that beautiful little girl?” Tamara scratches her nose.
“Mary Nell? Oh, I love her.”
“Does Morgan love her?”
I nod cautiously, not wanting to lie a third time.
“Uh oh.” Tamara must read the doubt in my body language. “Savannah is keeping her, right?”
I wince. “Keeping Mary Nell?”
She nods. “All over the country right now, parents are trading in their handicapped children for perfected clones of their children, basically donating their babies to science labs for experimentation. I worry that Morgan, especially, would try to influence Savannah.”
“Morgan wouldn’t, she, well.” I stop. There’s no use lying to Tamara. She could always see through me anyway. Tamara has a remarkable gift of discerning motives, deception, and half-truths. Nothing would transform this into a bitterly contentious conversation faster than my dishonesty.
“It’s honorable that you would want to protect your wife’s reputation, Ray, but I came to know Morgan quite well when you were in cryo. She’s not one to be inconvenienced with the nuances of humanity’s defects and blemishes, and she can be quite persuasive. Without the boundaries of God’s law, there’s no end to the cruelty of human lust.”
“I didn’t come to argue. I came to enjoy my sister for a few moments.”
“Is Savannah keeping Mary Nell?”
My heart begins to throb under the adrenaline rush that escalates as I leave the question unanswered. I look down at my hands for a moment until Tamara begins to sob.
“Oh, God!” Without shame, not caring who’s listening or what they think, Tamara begins to cry out tearful prayers. “Oh, dear God! Please help this poor little girl. Help Mary Nell, Jesus . . . ”
Her mournful petition brings out the worst of my guilt. Her eyes are squinted shut and her gnarled hands are clasped in fervent prayer, oblivious to the fact that I am still before her. I let her continue for a moment, as the tears stream down her eyes. Finally, I interrupt by clearing my throat. “How are they treating you, Tamara? Have you made any friends? I’ll bet you’re popular ‘round here, huh?”
Her tone becomes harsh. “When a dying child needs CPR, you don’t waste time with petty compliments and small talk.”
I am taken back to that emergency room where I did chest compressions on that 18-year-old star football player. My speeding heart seems to stand still for a few seconds, and I gasp for air.
“Does Mary Nell deserve to live, Ray?”
“Of course! I tried to change Savannah’s mind, Tamara. I love Mary Nell deeply. She’s my only grandchild, and there will probably not be another. Why are you doing this to me?”
“Did Mary Nell’s parents give her that right to live, Ray? Hmm? Our”—she licks her lips—“democratic vote?”
I snap, “Why does it matter?”
“If the government gives it or our consensus gives it, then the government and the people can take it away! Then she doesn’t have the right to live, does she? No one does. How would you like if it someone treated you that way, discarded you because of their subjective opinion
of your worth?”
“I suppose we have to resort to invisible tyrannical genies on golden roads to explain how we have the right to life? Is that it?”
Surprisingly, she appears pleased with my insulting comment, as if I’ve followed her crumbs to her desired conclusion. My mockery hasn’t provoked her ire as it suspected I would.
“When the facades come down, Ray, look what blasphemies are on the inside.” Her tone is gentler than her choice of words. “Beneath all that stolen meat, can’t you see how wicked and hopeless you are without Jesus?”
“Oh, please!” I leap to my feet, prepared to leave.
“Sit back down,” she insists calmly, pointing at my chair. “Please, sit down. With Mary Nell’s life in the balance, I’m not letting you run away. You’re gonna face the truth.”
“You are so, so predictable. Ever heard of the separation of church and state?”
She shakes her head side to side. “What you think the First Amendment means is not reality, and it’s not biblical. ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.’ Jesus is King of kings, Ray. There’s no blessing for our nation, nor for you, outside of God.”
“We live in a democracy, not a theocracy, Sis.”
“Tell me again, Ray, why what we do is a good argument for what we should do?”
“The government lets the people do what the people want. If someone wants to live by a holy book, fine. But if they want to live according to their own personal moral standard, we shouldn’t judge.”
“So if the people want to kill gays, enslave blacks, or erect a theocracy, would you still agree that we should do what the people want and not judge?”
I tap my index finger against the glass mockingly. “Ever heard of the United States Constitution?”
Body by Blood Page 8