The Singer
Page 14
could think of with vitamins in that might hold back the blackness closing in at the edges of his vision. I didn’t know much about this, of course, and now wished I did—why did I leave school so early? Well, I knew why, obviously, but I never thought I’d need to know how too revive a dying male strumpet to a fit enough condition to be operated on.
It didn’t seem to be working. By the tie we reached John Doe’s cave, he had completely lost consciousness and I had to carry him down the deserted corridor over my shoulder. Doctor John Doe wasn’t at his desk when we burst in. I could hear a noise behind the door of his surgery—a strange, crackling noise I’d never heard before, like the fabric of the air itself was being torn apart.
There wasn’t really anything I could do to alert him to my presence so I just sort of hung around awkwardly, waiting for him to return. In the meantime I tried to compose what I was going to say—well, write—to explain why I was there. But I was too nervous to think of anything at all. It was completely ridiculous. After a while I kind of got a bit tired just standing about. It was quite exhausting having to carry Reese around all the time. There wasn’t a chair in front of John Doe’s desk and it would have been out of the question to sit in his throne-like seat behind it. So in the end I just sat on the floor. But it was a bit cold there, and I’d lost my vile parka somewhere along the way. I almost missed it now.
I glanced at Reese’s prone form, splayed out across the cold stone slabs and breathing weakly. It looked so… comfortable. If I could just drag him against the wall and lean on him…
No. I was not going to sit on Reese. I was not going to use the unconscious and possibly moribund form of my keyboard player as a handy cushion. It was completely unquestionable. I needed to retain every scrap of dignity I had left.
On the other hand, I had done him the favour of carrying him around everywhere. And being as he was now in no fit state to do the talking for me, he might as well be made useful…
I was saved from this exacting dilemma by Dr. John Doe himself, who chose that moment to saunter absent-mindedly through the door. I stood up instantly.
He started when he saw me, but didn’t seem too dismayed.
“Alex Young… how on earth did you get in here? Who told you where I was?”
I started scribbling down the persuasive and emotive speech I’d thought up, but Dr John Doe seemed to be too preoccupied with Reese, who he’s just noticed sprawled across the floor.
“Dash it! What’s happened to him?”
I rolled my eyes. How could I explain?
He won’t eat. He’s lost the will to live. But the real reason we’re here is-
“He’s lost the will to live?” He tossed my notebook back to me. “Damn. I should have foreseen this eventuality. It’s a very risky business, removing someone’s capacity for true love. It’s no surprise that this has happened. But they always insist so urgently, and who am I to refuse them? It’s my job. I’d be living in poverty otherwise…”
I started writing again in my notebook. Maybe if we could get Reese’s case out of the way I could move on to more urgent maters.
Is there anything we can do to restore him?
John Doe sighed regretfully and shook his head.
“I could have done, a few months ago. It would have been free, too. Reese was an experiment, the first to have surgery of this nature done. When I did it he was very young, and it was a delicate operation. I didn’t have a full idea what the consequences of this would be, so I gave him the chance to be restored, if it didn’t work out, at no cost whatsoever. But he seemed to be doing so well, and he never asked for anything at all…”
So why can’t you restore him?
“I sold it. That piece of his heart. I implanted it into an investment banker who’d been born lacking one. He’s become a conceptual artist now—left his wife and run away to Bodmin Moor to live in a commune and make ceramics. But even if I’d known Reese would need it, I don’t know what I’d have done. You can’t turn down a profit like that, especially when I need all the funding I can get for my new research. Do you realise, I’ve found that the life force which innervates our muscles can be made artificially, and run through a metal wire. Soon aspiring Singers might not even need surgery. Not if we…”
I didn’t have time for this.
So there’s nothing you can do?
Doe looked genuinely remorseful. I’d never have thought someone so wildly rich and successful, responsible for so many binding and life changing contracts, could still be so human. But why shouldn’t he have a heart? He was just a scientist: the one who did the transformations. It was the rest of society that exploited the magic he could work.
“I’ll put him on my respirator for now. Who knows? We may be able to revive him anyway. But if not, well… Oh dear, if any of this gets out…”
He lifted Reese’s body easily with his pincer and forcep arms and deposited him in the surgery. When he returned and sank into the chair behind his desk, I made sure I had prepared what I was going to write.