We Are Both Mammals (6 page)

He had done this for a stranger. For someone
who was not his friend, not his relative, not a neighbour nor even
an acquaintance; not of his own culture nor even his own species;
someone about whom he knew next to nothing, someone with whom he
might be utterly incompatible, someone who would slow him down and
make him ill – at least in the beginning of the recovery. And
what if I hated him? What if I resented being used as an experiment
– an unvolunteering prototype for this new surgery – and
vented my anger on him? What if I murdered him, committing suicide
in the process?

The thurga had placed his life in my hands
even as he had saved mine.

Was I supposed to be grateful?

Or was I allowed to feel angry that someone
had sewn me into another creature, giving me a conjoined twin,
saddling me with the burden of another’s life, without my
consent?

Sleep, when it came, was a relief; not just
from physical pain and discomfort, but from my own thoughts.

It often came in broken phases, however;
often at night I would find myself lying awake, just as I often
drifted off to sleep during daylight.

Some of those nights were so long. My body,
confused by the drugs and by the shock of the whole ordeal, seemed
to be unsure of itself and what was expected of it.

On one such night, I lay thinking, trying to
ignore the vague nausea and various aches and twinges that plagued
my every waking moment now that I was not heavily sedated.

It had occurred to me that if I desired it,
I could strangle or suffocate the thurga beside me with relative
ease: by the time the nurses arrived, he could be dead. Of course,
I too would die shortly thereafter: a murder-suicide.

I would die a murderer, having killed the
one who had devoted his life to saving mine.

Had Toro-a-Ba known that such a thing might
occur, when he volunteered to save my life?

I began to think about what thoughts may
have passed through Toro-a-Ba’s head when he made that decision.
Had he fully understood what it would be like?

Had he honestly been content to spend his
life in the service of one who was a stranger to him?

Who would volunteer for that? Who would
devote every moment for the rest of his life to supporting someone
else about whom he knew virtually nothing? Why on earth had this
thurga thought that such a thing was a good idea? If he wanted to
help people, surely there were ways he could have helped more
people than just one. He might not even have survived the surgery:
both of us could have died, and then Toro-a-Ba’s plans to do good
would come to nothing.

Even now, as he lay asleep in the bed beside
mine, his life was at risk. I was hardly psychologically stable;
that must be obvious to him.

I watched him, more than arm’s reach away
from me in the gloom, watched his tiny ribs moving with his deep
little sleeping breaths. The fuzz that had been growing on the big
shaven patch on his side had now lengthened to almost half of its
natural length, so the nurses had shaved part of it again, creating
a smaller patch of pink skin around the place where the hose
entered his side, so that the regrowing hairs could not interfere
with the still-healing skin around the hose, and so that it was
easier for the surgeons to inspect the hose where it entered him.
The effect was bizarre; but it was merely one bizarre detail in a
tapestry of bizarre disaster.

He was so small.

He had known that I was human,
when he volunteered for the surgery. But had he realised that he
would be placing himself, forever after, at the mercy of one who
was probably a dozen times his size and weight? Had he realised
how
vulnerable
he would be? Not just vulnerable in that he might not
recover well, might be sickly for the rest of his days, might not
even survive the procedure to begin with, and in that whatever
happened to me forever after would directly affect him also; but in
the fact that if I so chose, I could kill us both with
ease.

Had he not understood that?

I gulped, watching him.

What was
wrong
with this creature? Why would he
shackle himself to me?

What madness possessed this little furry
body to think that the best possible use of his life would be to
physically join himself to an alien for the rest of his days?

We were both monsters, now.

–––––––

At last I was able to drink and retain not just water
but fruit and vegetable juices. Tasting fruit juice again after two
weeks unconscious followed by a further two weeks of tasting only
water or vomit was both shocking and delightful to my mouth. Before
long I was able to digest yoghurt. The surgeons and other
specialists were elated: clearly, their work was a success. They
had done something that had never been done in the whole of medical
history. The techniques they had pioneered, and their successful
execution of something many had considered impossible, would see
their names etched into medical history, both human and thurga.

Not once had any of them asked,
retroactively, for my permission; nor for my forgiveness. My body
was their success, bearing the marks of their genius; my personhood
was, apparently, not of concern.

I almost wondered that I did not hate them
more.

Perhaps, I grudgingly thought to myself,
despite all my anguish, part of me was actually thankful to be
alive.

Now free of the heaviest drugs, my mind was
recovering more quickly than my body. I was offered books and
magazines, and I accepted. I could even ask for specific ones, and
they would be found for me and brought to me. I was supplied with a
reading stand like the thurga’s. Due to the fact that the surgery
was still being kept secret from the outside world, I could not be
given any electronic device that could access the Internet; so my
reading material was all hard-copy. I did not mind; whom would I
contact anyway?

Upon request, the surgeons
allowed me to have a small music player with headphones. Hearing
music again after five weeks was unexpectedly blissful. My brain
seemed to give a jolt at the shock of hearing music
– 
music
, not just sounds! – again; and then I felt my whole body
relax. Hitherto I had never realised how much music means to
me.

As with the reading material, I could
request whatever music I wanted, and it would be procured for me
and loaded into the player. Sleeping was easier when I could be
lulled into it by music. With books, music, a clearer head, a
gradually healing body, and some food passing over my tongue
once more, I began to feel a little bit alive again.

It seemed like so long since I had felt
alive. Five weeks can feel like half a lifetime.

Perhaps it was a lifetime. Perhaps I had
died; the single human, the autonomous Daniel Avari had died, and
now there was a different creature in his place – a two-headed,
conjoined freak of a creature. From now on, my life would not be
anything like what it had been before. For all practical purposes,
I had died. The life I was living now was not mine.

And I continued to wonder what Toro-a-Ba had
been thinking when he volunteered for the surgery.

Did he not understand?

No matter what they said, the surgeons had
not operated on me to save my life. They had experimented on me. If
their experiment was successful, I might live. But my living was a
side-effect: they had been operating on a dead man. When Surgeon
Fong had seen me lying injured in that hospital, her thought had
not been that she might be able to save me: she had seen only a
perfect chance to experiment with her and Suva-a’s theories. Since
I was already as good as dead, I was the perfect specimen on which
to test surgery with a high risk of fatality.

Toro-a-Ba was merely part of that
experiment. He had volunteered to be their test subject. He was not
my saviour; he was an accomplice to the experimentation they had
done on me.

How naïve was this thurga? Did he actually
think that he had done some good?

Idiot.

Unfortunately for me, the surgery had
succeeded.

Why? Why, when there were so very many
things that could have gone wrong, had the surgery succeeded?

I should have been dead. The odds were that
I should have been dead. But I wasn’t. A die with a hundred black
faces and one white had, inexplicably, landed with the white face
up.

–––––––

Shortly after I received my music player, Surgeon
Sarah Fong announced with some pleasure that, now that it was
apparent that both Toro-a-Ba and I would survive and our recovery
was progressing satisfactorily, she had arranged for a psychologist
to speak with us, to assess the psychological aspects of the
surgery. She mentioned that the psychologist was human, and
inquired of Toro-a-Ba whether he would like to see a thurga
psychologist in addition. He declined, saying that such an
arrangement was not necessary.

The thought made me feel
nervous, ill – many things still made me feel ill – and
confused. How was I supposed to talk to a psychologist? What on
earth was I supposed to say? I was scarcely sure even in my own
mind what I felt about what had been done to me; how could I
explain anything to a psychologist? And how was I supposed to speak
freely about how I felt about being conjoined to another without my
consent when that other was present, in the room, in the
same
bed
?

I was an experiment, a test case; perhaps I
was not supposed to feel anything. Perhaps my right to an
independent opinion had disappeared with my ability to function
independently; killed in the accident that had left my body unable
to support itself.

The psychologist, when she arrived a couple
of days later, seemed nice enough. She was frank, but not
insensitive. I felt a grudging appreciation for this: finally,
someone on the medical staff seemed to be genuinely aware that I
had feelings aside from my physical ones.

She spoke with us privately, with only the
three of us in the room, and invited us to call her by her first
name, Tara. Most of the questions she asked were simple, ‘getting
to know you’ sorts of questions, like how old I and Toro-a-Ba were,
where and how we had grown up, et cetera. I am sure that she knew
most of this stuff from the information she must have been given
about us when Fong and Suva-a hired her to counsel such an unusual
case; and I suspect, therefore, that she asked those questions to
put us at ease and to get a sense of our mental states. She
explained that this was a preliminary session, only half an hour
long so that neither of us would get exhausted: she would be back a
few days later to talk with us further.

She also asked more pertinent questions, of
course. She asked us how we felt about what had happened, and
related questions; all of which I struggled to answer. I am sure
she noticed this, but I saw no point in trying to pretend that all
was well with me; particularly to someone who was highly trained in
observing people’s emotions. Besides, I had not the energy to care.
Let them think me mentally unsound if they would: I probably was,
and if I was not allowed to be mentally unstable after such an
accident and such a surgery as mine, when is a person allowed to be
mentally unstable?

I wondered if she noticed that the thurga
and I did not speak to each other once during the whole half-hour
session.

Toward the end of the session she remarked
to me that it seemed to her that I was still trying to come to
terms with what had happened to me; and that that was perfectly
normal and natural and I should take as much time as I needed to do
so. It felt like being given permission to be mentally unstable and
emotionally unsure, and somehow that felt nice; probably because it
was a verbal acknowledgement of what I had suffered.

The psychologist was there to counsel both
of us, of course. After the first session, as I was processing the
haze of emotions that filled me, I realised vaguely what these
sessions reminded me of: couples counselling. The counselling of
two people whose lives are bonded together … though no married
couple was ever so literally bonded as I and the thurga were.

In my clouded, unhappy state, the sickening
thought occurred to me that the thurga was my wife. I was married
to a furry, quadrupedal creature with a face like a possum’s …

I vomited, and kept doing so until there was
nothing left in my stomach to evict.

–––––––

The following afternoon, I lay dozing, thinking of
nothing in particular. The room was empty but for me and the
thurga.

“
Daniel.”

The thurga’s soft voice broke into my
thoughts.

“
Hhmh?” I mumbled, drowsy
and distant.

“
May I speak with
you?”

“
Mm-hm,” I consented,
gathering my mind somewhat and turning my head halfway toward him,
not actually looking at him.

“
I should like to
apologise.”

I blinked, sleepily surprised, and my head
turned slowly to look at him.

“
I am aware that you are
not pleased with what was done to you. I am sorry. I think you
would rather have died, and if I had known that when the surgery
was proposed, I would not have volunteered. I am truly, truly sorry
to have done this to you. I regret with all my heart that I have
caused you grief.”

I stared at him.

I had always struggled to read the facial
expressions of thurga-a, and in truth I had not spent much time
with them. Toro-a-Ba held my gaze with those big dark eyes of his,
and they seemed wetter, more liquid, than usual; then I realised
that they were watering at the edges. The watering welled up as I
looked, and I realised that Toro-a-Ba was crying.