Infinite Dreams (10 page)

A harried-looking doctor came through, stopped at my bed, and warned me that I might lose the leg, and then left (I’ve always wondered why he felt he had to tell me). At least I got an orderly to put a bandage on the foot, to keep the flies off it. He didn’t put any antiseptic on it, though, and the next day it looked terrible and smelled bad, and I could just imagine what my leg looked like under all that cloth. Even the fact that losing my leg would surely get me out of the war couldn’t cheer me up very much.

All’s well that ends, though, and some brilliant anonymous surgeon-perhaps the one who had scared me so—did fix up the leg and foot, and miscellaneous other parts, and after a mere four months of painful physical therapy I was able to be a soldier again, and then a civilian.

Another damned war story, you say, but no, that’s not the particular demon I was trying to put to rest here, even though war did provide a certain amount of the detail. The real experience to be exorcized is the more subtle one of reaching up one day and finding that your halo’s gone. I had a friend who was suddenly and severely disabled, and he reacted in a human way, sliding into bitterness, lashing out at the people around him, driving away his family, then his friends, and then one day I left him too, in spite of knowing how he felt. Exit plaster saint.

Leonard Shays came back home to Tampa from the Lebanese conflict with a chestful of medals—which was no distinction—a slightly fractured mind, a medical discharge and two fairly efficient prosthetics, replacing his left foot and the right leg from the knee down.

The singleshot laser boobytrap he had triggered on patrol in the slums of Beirut had been set to scan at chest level, to kill. But Leonard, canny with experience, had tossed in a microton grenade before entering the hovel, and the explosion jarred the mounting of the boobytrap so that it scanned in a downward slant across the doorway. It was practically no pain at first, much pain later, and now just a feeling that his nonexistent toes were curled down in spastic paralysis. It made it hard to walk but the VA was giving him therapy. And he couldn’t get a job, not even with his Ph.D. in mathematics, but the VA was also giving him a
small check on the first of every month.

“Morning, Dr. Shays.” His favorite therapist, Bennet, closed the bathroom door quietly. “Ready for the workout?”

“Am I ever? Ready to get out of this damn thing, though.” Bennet picked up Leonard gracelessly and pulled him out of the whirlpool bath. He set him on the Formica edge of a table and gave him a starchy towel.

He studied the stumps professionally. “How’s the wife?”

“Don’t ask,” he said, scrubbing sweat from his hair. “We had a long talk Friday. Our contract comes up for renewal in ’98. She decided not to renew.”

Bennet turned off the motor and pulled the plug on the bath. “It’s her right,” he said. “Bitch.”

“It’s not the legs. Absence thereof. She explained that carefully, at some length. It’s not the legs at all.”

“Look, if you don’t wanna …”

“It’s not that I can’t get a job and we had to move to Ybor City and she has to carry a gun to go shopping.”

Bennet grunted and straightened a stack of towels.

Leonard fumbled through his clothes and got a cigarette, lit it.

“Shouldn’t smoke those things in here.”

“Just leaving.” He draped a gray robe around his shoulders. “Help me with this thing, OK?”

Bennet helped him put on the robe and set him in a wheelchair. “Can’t smoke in Therapy, either.”

Leonard put the clothes on his lap and turned the chair 180° on one wheel, hypertrophied biceps bulging. “So let’s not go straight to Therapy. I need some fresh air.”

“You’ll stiffen up.”

He rolled to the door and opened it. “No, it’s warm. Plenty warm.”

They were the only people on the porch. Bennet took a cigarette and pointed it at one of the palm trees.

“You know how old that one is?”

“She said it was because of the
piano.”

“Yeah, you shouldn’t of sold the piano.”

“Couldn’t work the pedals right.”

“Someday you—”

“I wasn’t going to sell it anyhow; I was going to trade even for classical guitar or lute if I could find somebody.”

“Yeah?”

“I went to all the skills transfer agencies. Every one, here and St. Pete. Even one in Sarasota, specializes in music. Couldn’t find a guitar player who was any good. Not in Bach. If I can’t play Bach I’d rather just listen.”

“You coulda gotten one that was otherwise good. Learn Bach on your own.”

“Bennet, hell, that’d be years. I never learned that much new on the piano, either. Don’t have the facility.”

“You bought the piano in the first place?”

He nodded. “One of the first skill transfers in Florida. Old Gainsville conservatory man. He thought he was going to die and wanted one last fling. Paid him fifty grand, that was real money back in ’90.”

“Still is.”

“They cured his cancer and a year later he commmitted suicide.” He threw his cigarette over the edge and watched it fall three stories.

“It’s exactly as old as I am. Fifty-one years, the gardener told me,” Bennet said. “I guess that’s pretty old for a tree.”

“Palm tree, anyhow.” Leonard lit another and they smoked in silence.

“I wouldn’t have sold it except my car went bad. Turbine blades crystallized while I was stuck in traffic. Had to
get a new engine, new drive train. Try to get around this town without a car.”

“It’s worth your life,” Bennet agreed.

Leonard snapped the new cigarette away. “Might as well get going.”

He was always tired after therapy but he always hobbled down to the gate and across to the little tavern, drank a beer standing up and walked back to the parking lot. He’d found out that if he didn’t walk about a mile after therapy he would hardly be able to get out of bed the next morning, for the stiffness.

He went home and was surprised to find his wife there.

“Good afternoon, Scottie.” He walked in unsteadily, carrying two bags of groceries.

“Let me help.”

“No.” He set the groceries down on the dinette table and began to take out things to go into the refrigerator.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what the hell I’m doing here?”

He didn’t look at her. “No. I’m very calm today.” He took the frozen foods over first, elbowed the door open. “Therapy today.”

“Did it go well?”

“Besides, it’s as much your house as mine.”

“Until January. But I don’t feel that way.”

“It went pretty well.” He shuffled things around in the refrigerator to make room for a scrawny chicken, the only luxury he had purchased.

“You got the car fixed.”

“All it took was money.”

“Have you tried to sell the baby grand?”

“No.”

Carefully: “Does that mean you might buy back the talent some day?”

“With what?”

“Well, you—”

“I need the money to live on and the piano’s yours to sell or keep or bronze or whatever the hell you want to do with it.”

“You don’t like to have it around because—”

“I don’t give a flying
… I don’t care whether it stays or goes. I kind of like it. It’s a fun thing to dust. It keeps the place from blowing away in a high wind. It has a certain—”

“Leonard!”

“Don’t shout.”

“It’s not mine; I bought it for you.”

“That’s right.”

“I did.”

“You did lots of things for me. I’m grateful. Now.” He shut the refrigerator door and leaned on it, drumming fingers, looking at the wall. “I’ll ask. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came back,” she said evenly, “to try to talk some sense into you.”

“Wonderful.”

“Henry Beaumont said you told him you were thinking of selling your mathematics, too.”

“That’s right. After the money goes. It’s not doing me any good.”

“You worked nine years for that degree. Long years, remember? I was with you most of them.”

“Five, to be accurate. Five years for the Ph.D. First the Bachelors and—”

“If you sell your mathematics you lose it all the way back to grade school.”

“That’s true. Tell me something else old.”

“Don’t be difficult. Look at me.” He didn’t. “Daddy will—”

“That’s really old. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Still trying to be a hero. Your courage is an inspiration to us all.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He sat down at the kitchen table with his back to her. “You were the one who wanted out. Not me.”

“Len, if you could see yourself, what you’ve turned into …”

Any time somebody starts out a sentence with your name, Leonard thought, they’re trying to sell you something.

“Daddy said this morning that if you’d go to see Dr. Verden—”

“The imprint man he goes to.”

“The best overlay therapist in the state, Len.”

Early attempts at overlay therapy were called “personality imprinting.” The name had a bad connotation.

“The principle’s the same no matter how good he is.” He looked straight at her for the first time. “I may be a worthless self-pitying bastard, but I am me. I stay me.”

“That sounds pretty—”

“Pretty stupid from a man who’s just sold one slice of his brain and talks about selling another. Right?”

“Close.”

“Wrong. There’s a basic difference between skill transfer and overlay ther—”

“No, there isn’t, they’re exactly the—”

“
Because
,” almost shouting, “I can shed skills when and as I feel I no longer have use for them, where your
im
print witch doctor just looks up in some god-damn book and finds a pers—”

“You’re wrong and you know it. Otherwise—”

“No, Scottie. You’ve let your father sell you Tranquility Base. These—” “Daddy’s been seeing Dr. Verden for fifteen years!”

“And see what it’s gotten him?”

He wasn’t looking at her any longer but he could see the old familiar counting gesture. “Money. Prestige. Self-fulfillment—”

“And whose self is he fulfilling? Every time I see the old guy I expect him to be Sinbad the Sailor or Jack Kennedy or some goddamn thing. Fifty years ago they would have locked him up and thrown away the combination.”

“You act as if he’s—”

“He is! Certifiably.”

He heard the door open—“We’ll see about that!”—and slide shut and he reflected that that was one improvement over their house in Bel Aire. You can’t slam an electric door.

Leonard woke up stiff the next day in spite of his having exercised. He would have allowed himself an extra hour in bed but today he despised the pathetic image of a naked legless cripple lying there helplessly. He decided against the struggle of showering, taped the pads to his stumps, strapped on the prosthetics and pulled on a pair of baggy trousers.

It was intolerably muggy, so he threw economy aside and switched on the airco. While his coffee was heating, he unwrapped the latest
ASM Journal
and set it with a thick pad of paper and a pencil next to the chair that sat under the air-conditioning duct. The microwave cooker buzzed; he got his coffee and sat down with the first article.

The doorbell rang when he was on the second article and second cup of coffee. He almost didn’t answer it. It was
never good news. It rang again, insistently, so he got up and opened the door.

It was a small, bland-looking black man with a leather portfolio under his arm. Salesman, Leonard thought tiredly.

“Leonard Shays?” Leonard just looked at him.

“How do you do. I’m Dr. Felix Verden, you may—”

He pushed the button but Verden had a foot against the door jamb. The door slid halfway closed, then opened again.

“Mrs. Dorothy Scott Shays is your next of kin.”

“Not any more, she isn’t.”

“I sympathize with your feelings, Dr. Shays, but legally she
is
still your closest relative. May I come in?”

“We have nothing to talk about.”

He opened the portfolio. “I have a court order here authorizing me—”

Leonard teetered forward and grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirt. A man in uniform stepped from where he’d been hidden, next to the wall beside the door, and showed Leonard his stunner wand.

“All right. Let me get my book.”

Dr. Verden’s office was comfortable and a few decades out of date. Pale oak panelling and furniture crafted of a similar wood, combined with blued steel and fake black leather. A slight hospital odor seeped in.

“You know the therapy will be much more effective if you cooperate.”

“I don’t want it to be effective. I’ll go along with the court and surrender my body to you for treatment. Just my body. The rest is going to fight you all the way.”

“You may wind up even worse than before.”

“By your lights. Maybe better, by mine.”

He ignored that by rustling papers loudly. “You’re familiar with the process.”

“More familiar than I want to be. It’s like a skill transfer, but instead of subtracting or adding a certain ability, you work on a more basic level. Personality.”

“That’s correct. We excise or graft certain basic behavioral traits, give the patient a better set of responses to life problems.”

“A
different
set of responses.”

“All right.”

“It’s ghoulish.”

“No it isn’t. It’s just an accelerated growing-up process.”

“It’s playing God, making a man over in your own image. Or whatever image is stylish or rec—”

“You think I haven’t heard all this before, Leonard?”

“I’m sure you have. I’m sure you ignore it. You must be able to see that it’s different, being on the receiving end, rather than—”

“I’ve been on the receiving end, Leonard, you should know that. I had to go through a complete overlay before I could get licensed. I’m glad I did.”

“You’re a better person for it.”

“Of course.”

“That could be just part of the overlay, you know. They could have turned you into a slavering idiot and at the same time convinced you that it was an improvement.”