We Are Both Mammals (4 page)

The surgeon, Fong, was so matter-of-fact
about the whole thing. It was strange, and disturbing. My life had
been saved, but ruined, by her actions; I was now permanently
fettered to another living creature, who was also fettered to me,
and my life had been shortened and so had his; and neither of us
could ever live a normal day again. This was mind-bending;
sickening; unnatural; surely enough to drive someone insane. But,
inexplicably, the surgeon seemed to find nothing overly unsettling
in the whole affair.

Surgeon Fong explained that if, at any
point, it became apparent that I would not survive, it would in
theory be possible to save Toro-a-Ba by separating him from me,
providing he could be transported to a hospital quickly enough. I,
however, would not live for more than a few hours without
Toro-a-Ba. My organs would swiftly fail, and I would die in great
pain.

“
We could have tried to
hook you up to machines to keep you alive,” Fong explained
matter-of-factly, “but your quality of life would have been pretty
dismal. The hospital would have done that in the first place, but
for the fact that you were most likely going to die anyway, so
there was no point. If hooked up to machines you might have
survived, but you would simply have been comatose
forever.”

She seemed to imply that I was much better
off with Toro-a-Ba keeping me alive.

It did not feel that way to me.

I supposed that, viewed from the surgeons’
perspectives, they felt that they had done the right thing. If
nothing else, even if I was not happy with their decision, they had
learned much. This had been an experiment worth making; and I was
simply the unvolunteer.

“
In future, you’ll have to
take really good care of this guy,” one of the other human surgeons
told me lightly but seriously, referring to Toro-a-Ba. “He’s your
life-support system.”

–––––––

I had been given medication to prevent my vomiting,
since such upheaval would threaten my organs’ healing. I had not
eaten in weeks, being kept alive by intravenous liquids, so there
was nothing in my digestive system to evict; but that would not
stop my body attempting to vomit in reaction to the anaesthetic,
the drugs, and the shock it was experiencing. Everything
– painkillers, fluids, nutrients – was fed directly into
my bloodstream through drips, or into my organs via the hoses
embedded in my body. As the drugs were lessened, however, as my
body began to recover, the vomiting reflex set in. One day I took a
mouthful of water – the only thing I was taking orally – and
threw it straight back up again. It was agony. It felt as though my
stomach and intestines were being torn out of my belly. Having
vomited, I screamed in pain at the convulsion of my abdomen. A
human nurse hurried in and saw what had happened, and I was
immediately given more painkillers and sedated so that my body
could recover.

It was explained to me, when I awoke later,
that this was a necessary stage in my recovery. The quantity and
intensity of the drugs I was taking must eventually be tapered off,
as if my body came to rely on the drugs it would become addicted to
them and would probably never fully heal itself. Stimulating my
body’s own healing powers was essential, and in order to do that
the drugs must gradually be eased away. Unfortunately, this
included allowing my body to react naturally to what it had
endured, and that meant vomiting, nausea, and pain.

In all of this, Toro-a-Ba and I had barely
spoken to one another.

I was intensely aware of his quiet presence,
more than arm’s reach to my right. I had scarcely any right to
live, now; every heartbeat of mine was his. My life was a
concession. It was not my own. Every minute I had now, was his.

Occasionally he would try to speak to me,
asking me how I felt this day, but I could not bring myself to
reply. Eventually I was able to speak coherently with the nurses
and various specialists – human and thurga – who came to
examine me and the thurga, but I could scarcely bring myself to
look at the thurga, let alone speak to him. When I could look at
him, I would watch in macabre fascination as the specialists
examined him, and as the nurses changed or inspected his dressings
and hypodermic fittings, and often in these moments I would see him
glance toward me, as though seeking eye contact, but I could not
meet his gaze.

I would hear him speaking, in Thurga-to or
in English, to the surgeons and nurses, many of whom he knew, of
course, from working with them here at the clinic; but I never
participated in these conversations and scarcely paid any attention
to them, even when they were relevant to me. I gathered, and
occasionally saw out of the corner of my eye, that the thurga read
books: he had a stand that seemed to be specially designed for the
purpose, with legs that stood on the mattress on either side of
him, and a slanted shelf upon which a book could rest, the pages
held open by two cords that hung from the top of the stand and
draped down over the pages of the book, weighted by heavy beads at
their ends. He would arrange a pillow or two behind his back and
shoulders to prop himself in a semi-sitting position.

He was healing much faster than I, of
course, and was probably fit enough to have left the hospital a
week ago: but of course he could not. He could never, now, go
anywhere without me.

And so he read books and waited for me to
heal.

I was still spending more time unconscious
than not, sliding in and out of sleep, dopey and sedated and
exhausted. As my intake of drugs was lessened, however, and my body
began to recover, I was awake more often, and more lucid and
coherent. I was also more sensible of what was happening to me and
how my body was reacting.

I felt ill. I felt so very ill. I felt
sicker than I had ever felt in my life.

It was not only the trauma to
my system, the chemicals in my body, the blood loss, the
after-effects of the general anaesthesia, and the fact that my body
was now trying to come to terms with
sharing itself
with another body – of a different
species, no less – that were causing me to vomit or retch several
times a day, even when I refrained from sipping water.

I was joined to another creature.

Physically joined. Permanently joined.

Its body and my body were, for all intents
and purposes, one now.

I had a conjoined twin.

At thirty years old, I had gained a
conjoined twin, and would now have to spend the rest of my life
with him.

And this ‘twin’ was not even the same
species as I.

The nausea continued for days. It was
horrible. The powerful painkillers I was being given were enough to
prevent me screaming in pain every time I vomited, but vomiting
still hurt. As one particular drug was withdrawn from my system,
for three days I spent my waking hours lying in silence, eyes
closed, trying just to breathe calmly, and I was unable to bear
sounds louder than a softly-spoken voice. When the medical staff
tried to examine me, my body rebelled at every sensation, retching
and shaking continuously so that I whimpered and gasped in pain,
until they left me alone, concluding that examinations would have
to wait until I was asleep.

And it seemed that everywhere my mind
turned, it found something that caused me to vomit.

The tube-filled, fluid-filled hose that
joined me to that other creature.

The bandages and dressings that I knew
covered massive surgical wounds and long lines of stitches. I had
been cut into and sewn back together like a cloth doll.

The tubes and hypodermic fittings that hung
out of my body – my own naked, living skin, punctured by black
thread and plastic tubing …

The weakness, the sheer feebleness that
subsumed me.

The smell of the ointments and cleaning
products when the nurses changed and inspected my – and the
creature’s – dressings and bandages.

The sight of the discolouration of my own
skin – the bruising that yet lingered, the swelling and
puffiness …

The fact that I could feel so little: so
much of my body had been numbed that it often seemed that much of
it did not belong to me. What I could feel was often painful.

And the awful, awful knowledge that I would
never be alone again.

It was as though my body knew that something
horrific was happening. This was not mere recovery from major,
risky and life-saving surgery. This was waking into a nightmare. I
was alive, but not because my body had been repaired. I was living
on borrowed life. Someone else’s life was keeping me alive. Someone
else’s body was keeping mine from the grave.

Perhaps my body knew that it should have
been dead.

–––––––

“Daniel … are you awake?”

The thurga spoke softly, but I heard him,
automatically opening my eyes from my sleep or doze – I know
not which. The room was in daylight; it seemed about
mid-morning.

I swallowed, and turned my pillowed head
halfway toward him, thankful that for the moment I felt only
slightly nauseated. I could not bring myself to vocalise even a
grunt, but I figured that Toro-a-Ba would see my movement and that
that would answer his question.

“
I know that you feel very
ill nowadays. Are you all right?”

I pondered the question. Was I all
right?

At the moment? Not really.

In general? Not at all.

After a pause, during which I said nothing
and gave no outward acknowledgement of his question, Toro-a-Ba
added, “I understand that you may not wish to converse at the
moment, nor indeed for some time to come; however, I would like you
to know that when you are ready, I should very much like to talk
with you … Daniel.”

He was using my given name to address me;
something that the thurga-a only do when they are very intimate
with a human. In Thurga-to, the word that describes what we would
call, in English, a ‘given name’ or ‘first name’ literally means
‘an intimate name’ or ‘a personal name’. They have another word
that means ‘a private name’, and that is the third name in a
thurga’s appellation; a third name which is rarely given in
introductions but is reserved for the bearer to reveal at will to
certain persons of their choosing: soulmates, children, close
friends … Distantly, I remembered being told at the Academy where I
had done my technology training that most thurga-a have only half a
dozen people in their lives with whom they would use these private
names. The outworking of this is that when thurga-a address humans,
they treat a human’s given name as that ‘private name’, and use the
surname – usually with an honorific – as the ‘personal
name’.

He always pronounced my name perfectly, too:
not shortening the name to two syllables – ‘dan-yul’ – as most
people do, but pronouncing all three mellifluously, making the
ordinary, ancient name sound positively elegant. ‘Danny-el’.

The creature’s voice was always very gentle
and soft, and he spoke mildly, clearly and thoughtfully. At first I
had wondered if this was, at least in part, deference to my weak,
shocked state, but I had learned as the weeks went on that this was
simply Toro-a-Ba’s manner.

This was my twin. This was my new constant
companion: a creature who talked like a poet or an English
professor. I could almost have laughed, with more than a little
hysteria, but any movement of my abdomen typically resulted in pain
and nausea, so I remained still.

“
I know that you are in
shock,” the thurga continued softly. “I understand how
– horrifying this must be for you.”

I said nothing.

There was a pause.

Then Toro-a-Ba murmured, “I am not sure what
humans believe in this regard, but thurga-a have always believed
that all life is interrelated. All life is special, sacred, worth
preserving and honouring. No creature should be thrown away unless
it is poisoning the web.”

He paused again. Still I had not so much as
glanced at him.

“
Daniel, I do not know how
you feel or what you are thinking,” he said slowly. “But I hope you
understand that we need not be aliens to each other. We are
different species, but I believe that we have more in common than
you may have considered.”

I swallowed, teeth and fists clenched,
fighting the nausea that seemed to seize upon me every other moment
these days. “Like what?” I asked flatly.

“
We are both mammals,” the
thurga offered.

I turned to my left and vomited again,
freely.

–––––––

As the days passed, I found myself spending more time
awake, and more clear-headed. I became more able to keep water down
instead of vomiting it up. Slowly, the nausea abated.

Wakefulness was not more pleasant than
sleep, however.

Sleep can be many things. A hindrance; a
waste of time; a delay, a necessary inconvenience … a refuge, a
relief, a respite. It can be healing or wearying, disappointing or
refreshing.

When I was awake, I began to long for it,
for when I was asleep I did not have to think.

One night, it would not seem to come to me.
I had now been lying in a hospital bed for almost five weeks. I
could scarcely remember what it felt like to be well. Pain, nausea,
anguish, had all become commonplace to me. And as I spent more time
awake and lucid, and was less able to escape my thoughts, despair
began in earnest to join them.

What was my life now?

I would never so much as have a private
conversation again.

I would never be able to use a toilet in
privacy again.

I would never be alone again. Ever.

Everywhere I went, there would
be someone else. My independence was utterly gone. My right to live
as I chose, my right to do as I pleased, my
freedom
… gone.