We Are Both Mammals (5 page)

In a kind of sick, dreamlike way, I pondered
the ramifications of this surgery. I felt crazed and ill as these
thoughts drifted through my head, but considering them from a
distance, acknowledging them but pretending that they were not
really mine, not really real, enabled me to refrain from bursting
into maddened tears or screaming in hysteria.

My every bodily function would be noticed by
someone else. Every cough, every sneeze, every hiccup and bowel
movement and moment of indiscretion – all would be known.

If the thurga became ill, I would probably
become ill too.

I imagined returning to work with a thurga
walking alongside me, hooked up to me by a hose. How would my
colleagues react? Had they been told of what had happened to
me?

How could I ensure that the hose joining us
would not snag on the various machines in the laboratories …?

Would my employer want me back if I had
another – an unpaid, unneeded hanger-on – beside me at all
times?

My heart sank, if it were possible, even
further. No. I would not be able to return to work.

I would probably become unemployable.

This thurga and I – who would want us
now?

I could never marry. That was not such a
hardship, I supposed; in all honesty, I have never considered
myself the marrying type; but the fact that the option had been
taken from me forcibly without so much as consulting me
rankled.

I could never flirt again.

I could never
meet
anyone ever again
without them seeing my – my deformity. My dependence on
another living creature for survival. My
disability
. I was disabled now. Just as a
person’s crutches or wheelchair is noticed before any other feature
– just as a person with a disability is marked and recognised
by that feature before all others – so would I be.

And the staring. I would be
stared at. Like a deformity or a prominent facial birthmark,
my
attachment
would be stared at more than I was. In fact, I the person
would disappear. Daniel Avari would disappear: I would be known as
‘that guy with the thurga attached to him by a gruesome sort of
tube with bodily fluids in it’.

Daniel Avari no longer existed. In the eyes
of others, I would become an un-person: just a man with a very
strange disability. People would cease to know me as Daniel. They
would cease to know me as a person.

I was no one.

In keeping my life, I had lost my
identity.

I would never be alone again … yet I might
well become the loneliest person in the world.

I am an orphan. I have never had any family.
As a child, this saddened me. Yet I discovered, as a young adult,
once I had left the orphanage, that having no family can be an
advantage: total freedom was mine. Total independence. I could go
where I wanted, do as I pleased, and no one, ever, could tell me
not to. I had a job; but if I chose to leave it, the only person
who would starve was me. If I chose to relocate to another city,
another continent, another planet, there was no one but myself to
consider. There was no one to come home to; but there was no one to
tell me not to leave. I was a free agent. My life was all my own;
my days were mine to spend as I would.

Not anymore.

Never again.

I closed my eyes and tried to rest in the
dark … but even in the dark there was no relief. I could feel the
bandages on my ribs and abdomen, and though I could not feel in my
side the hose where it entered me, I was painfully aware that part
of me stretched out of my body and away to my right and led to
– fed into – another creature. An alien. A thing that
looked like a possum.

I had an alien attached to me.

Like a conjoined twin, but worse: my twin
was not even my own species.

I was like a sideshow freak from the
long-gone centuries when such things had existed.

I was like a monster. A two-headed
monster.

I started to weep.

I wept uncontrollably, like a child.

I do not know if I sobbed aloud or if I wept
in silence; I do not remember if the night nurses came to me or
not; they may even have sedated me: I do not remember. I was lost
in darkness and grief. The pain was overwhelming, and the
difference between the physical pain of my sobbing and the pain of
my emotions themselves had blurred: both seemed the same.

A long time later, Toro-a-Ba confessed to me
that he had sensed me weeping on that night. For a moment, he said,
he had wondered if I needed help or was trying to vomit, but then
he had understood. Somehow, he said, he had understood what I was
feeling and why I was weeping; and he had known that if he moved or
spoke or gave any sign of his presence, he would only have pushed
my crazed, grieving mind further into hysteria or anguish. So he
had said nothing, remaining in utter silence and stillness as
though he were in deep sleep, and had listened, with his eyes
closed, to my grief and pain.

Toro-a-Ba does not remember if the nurses
sedated me or not. All he remembers is that his heart ached for me,
and that it was all he could do to feign obliviousness and refrain
from trying to offer me comfort, knowing that to do so would be the
worst action he could take.

On that night I was crying alone in the
dark, like a child who fears monsters under the bed; but the
monster in my room was not under my bed, but in it. The monster in
my bedroom … was me.

–––––––

Surgeons Fong and Suva-a informed me and Toro-a-Ba
that, upon their and others’ recommendations, the government had
granted us a special subsidy: we would not have to work for the
rest of our lives.

It took me a while to process this, and as I
contemplated it in the following hours the thought occurred to me
that it was as though the thurga and I were being paid for
existing, or for being the surgeons’ test subjects – or perhaps I
was being repaid for what had been done to me.

The subsidy took care of the question of how
I was supposed to work with a thurga attached to me; but while the
thought of never working again may appeal to some, it did not to
me. What was I supposed to do with my life if I had lost both my
independence and my ability to work?

Because this procedure was new and
experimental, it was being kept secret from everyone outside the
clinic, with the exception of Toro-a-Ba’s immediate family, so that
the human media could not discover the story and make it public
before it was certain that the surgery had been a success. Thurga-a
generally do not pay great attention to the news unless it is
relevant to them, but for the sake of the human population the
surgeons wanted to handle the matter delicately, and not reveal it
until the time was ripe. The laboratories where I worked had been
told only that I was recovering but would never be able to return
to work; and, of course, Toro-a-Ba had worked here at the
clinic.

Everyone seemed so pleased that the surgery
had been successful. Everyone seemed to be happy that they had
saved my life, and that the thurga who volunteered had not lost
his. Was I supposed to feel grateful?

The surgeons and nurses would ask me how I
felt, and I would reply in physical terms: describing what my body
was feeling. Trying to describe what was going on inside my head,
even if they had asked, would have been impossible.

Once, awake in the late
afternoon, I stared at the scotia where the wall in front of me
joined the ceiling, and all I could think was,
Why?

Why had this happened to me?

Why was I lying here in the soft daylight of
late afternoon, in a hospital bed, attached to a thurga, when I
should have been upright and doing something?

How could this have come to pass?

I still could not remember the accident that
had caused me to be here in the first place: were it not for the
photographs that the nurses had shown me – photographs of the
collapsed machinery in the laboratory, out from underneath which
they had pulled my half-crushed body – I might have wondered
whether it had actually happened. I might have been deceived; just
an unwitting victim for Surgeons Suva-a and Fong to experiment on
…

Why me?

I did not realise that I had whispered those
words until I heard a slight movement to my right and Toro-a-Ba
murmured, “Daniel?”

“
Huh?” I blurted quietly,
a little startled and confused. I started to glance to my right,
then it was as though my head checked itself. No part of me wanted
to look at the thurga beside me.

“
Are you all
right?”

“
Mm,” I confirmed
unconvincingly, with a slight nod.

There was a pause. I could feel the thurga
looking at me.

After a long moment, I cleared my throat
slightly, and croaked, “Why you? Why did they choose you?”

“
I
volunteered.”

Why …? I wondered yet again, dizzily. Why on
earth would anyone volunteer for this?

A moment passed before I could ask tersely,
“Why?”

“
I felt moved to do so,”
the creature answered mildly, after a brief moment. “I felt pity
for you.”

Toro-a-Ba paused again, for longer. Then he
ventured, “Since we are already obliged to be intimate physically,
it seems to me natural that you and I should become intimate
psychologically, or emotionally, if you will. The gut is an
emotional organ, Daniel, in thurga-a as well as in humans, so it
follows that you and I will most likely end up sharing our emotions
anyway, to some extent, on a physical level.”

I closed my eyes and set my teeth, clenching
my farther fist, while a wave of nausea passed over me.

The creature seemed to notice, and
waited.

All I could muster in response was,
“And?”

“
So I hope you will allow
me to be honest and open with you about my reasons for volunteering
for this surgery.”

Why, I wondered, curious despite myself.
Were his reasons very selfish or impure?

“
I have wanted, for as
long as I can remember, to do something good with my life.
Something … great. I have always wanted to do something that would
be worth remembering, something that would be honourable and
virtuous and worthy of blessing. I became an intern at this clinic
in the hope that I could someday become a nurse and help people;
but it always seemed to me that there might be something more; that
this was not the end of my quest to do something great. When
Surgeon Suva-a proposed the surgery that she said might save your
life, I felt a great shout go up within me. And I knew that this
was what I had been waiting for. This was my chance to do something
good and great. I could save your life, and perhaps the lives of
others in future if this surgery was successful, and spend the rest
of my days allowing someone else to live.”

Toro-a-Ba paused. “I knew very little about
you, so I called the laboratories where you worked and asked if you
were a good person. The people there were confused at first; I had
to tell them that it was because you would be receiving organ
transplants and since I was the guardian of a human ward whose
organs you would be receiving, I wanted to know if my ward’s organs
would be going to a good person.” He made a face that I interpreted
as rue; thurga expressions can be so subtle. “It was partially
true. I could think of no other way to get such information about
you without revealing the truth.

“
Your colleagues told me
that you were. Everyone agreed that you were worth
saving.”

The creature closed his eyes for a moment,
as though tired or grieved. It was not until this point that I
realised I was looking at him.

After a moment, he opened them again, looked
into my eyes and asked, “Is it good, Daniel? Is it enough?”

Puzzled, and weary from concentrating, I
asked, “Is what enough?”

“
My reasons.” Toro-a-Ba
held my gaze. “Are they … enough? Are they … to your
liking?”

“
I suppose.”

I suspected that the creature was asking for
validation, for confirmation from me that he had done the right
thing and that I was accepting or approving of it; but weariness
was clouding my brain and the best, the suitable, response eluded
me.

“
Yes,” I said, for lack of
any inspiration. “It’s good. Your reasons are … good.”

Exhaustion seemed to consume me, and I fell
asleep for hours.

When I woke, eventually, in the small hours
of the morning, I pondered what Toro-a-Ba had said.

…
I asked if you were a
good person. Your colleagues told me that you were. Everyone agreed
that you were worth saving.

I wondered exactly who had said that, and
why they had said it. Was it only my co-workers? I could think of
no one else whom he might have had the opportunity to ask, and no
one else who really knew me well enough to make a statement
regarding my character.

‘
A good person’, and
‘worth saving’.

Had they meant it, or had it been simply
that they wanted me saved, and that the surgeons wanted to perform
their work on me?

I was mildly, dismally, listlessly curious,
but I did not have the energy to care much. It didn’t matter
whether they were wrong or right: I was alive, ‘good’ or not,
‘worth saving’ or not.

–––––––

The creature beside me had, in effect, given up his
life so that I might keep mine. This creature had surrendered his
right to an independent life, to autonomy and freedom, and had
dedicated his life to my service.

The very thought made me feel ill.