Zendegi (39 page)
Authors: Greg Egan
But the war she’d actually found herself in was nothing like her father’s struggle. Perhaps not many people would subscribe to Shahidi’s mediaeval view of side-loading, but there were other reasons to feel disquiet about the process - some of them indisputably solid and real. The killjoy cleric who didn’t want the workers playing football with their hero’s Proxy was enough of a political animal to put that point of contention aside and find common cause with everyone whose job was at risk. This was not going to be a simple matter of watching one more crazy mullah brought down by people with saner priorities.
Nasim switched off her notepad. It was after two, and she knew that if she didn’t get four hours’ sleep she’d be useless in the morning. She had an appointment with the security consultants, and she needed to be sharp or they’d have her signing off on all kinds of expensive placebos.
21
‘Congratulations, Mr Seymour. Your new liver is ready.’
Dr Jobrani turned his computer screen so Martin could see the photo that had been emailed from the organ bank. Even obscured by a maze of translucent scaffolding and immersed in a yellow-tinged nutrient bath, it looked encouragingly healthy and whole. It was miraculous enough that a slab of meat this large could have been grown from a few dozen cells extracted from his own skin; that the result was also an intricate maze of chemical factories and energy stores was positively surreal. And even if the whole liver-in-a-bottle process wasn’t quite as flawless as advertised, Martin had seen enough scans of what remained of the organ he’d been born with to be pretty sure that this hydroponic version would be a trade-up.
‘Now it’s just a matter of scheduling the surgery,’ Jobrani explained. ‘I managed to get them to pencil you in for a slot early next month. Once you’ve signed the paperwork I can send you to the surgeon for the final checks, and we can make it official.’ He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically, then started pecking his way through his computer’s menus, hunting for the right form to print out.
Martin hadn’t seen his oncologist in such an ebullient mood before, perhaps because this was the first time he’d had anything like good news to offer him. Two weeks earlier, he’d had to tell Martin that the tumour-specific markers in his blood were showing an increase. The cancer was developing resistance to the antibody treatment; that had not been unexpected, but it was happening earlier than they’d hoped. The new liver could certainly prolong his life, but the resurgent cancer would probably still take him within a year.
Martin said, ‘What are the risks? Of the surgery?’
Jobrani stayed focused on his menus. ‘It’s best if you discuss that with the surgeon. Just let me find this form.’
‘I’m not sure about the date,’ Martin said. ‘Can’t we make it a few months later?’
‘Later?’ Jobrani stopped typing and looked at Martin. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
Martin had been preparing himself for this conversation for some time. In his imaginary rehearsals, his white lies had always emerged smoothly and persuasively, and he’d won the day without too much fuss.
He said, ‘I want to spend more time with my son before I risk the transplant. If I die on the operating table—’
Jobrani scowled. ‘That’s nonsense! You know that the state of your liver is the only reason you have no quality of life now. It’s true that you could die in surgery - but if you survive you’ll have ten times as much energy, for at least another six or eight months. Every week after the transplant will be worth ten weeks of the kind of life you have right now - and twenty of what you’ll be like if you push back the date much further.’
Martin looked him in the eye. ‘Forget about quality of life. Can you swear to me that my chances of surviving six more months from today are greater if I have the transplant? That the odds of dying during the operation are less than the odds of dying from the lack of it?’
‘If you postponed the surgery for six months,’ Jobrani replied, ‘your chances of dying in the theatre would triple. At least triple.’
‘Okay. But that’s not what I asked.’
Jobrani had no interest in sanctifying Martin’s bizarre request with actual probabilities. ‘You’re not being reasonable, Mr Seymour. Do you really think your son benefits from seeing you this way?’
Martin said, ‘There are things that I need to resolve. Things that are important to me. I can’t take the chance of leaving them unfinished.’
Martin was on the verge of pulling something out of the freezer to microwave for dinner when Rana turned up on the doorstep with an enormous bowl of hot stew.
He invited her in, then went through the ritual of ta’arof, refusing the gift three times before finally accepting it. Rana insisted that she couldn’t possibly join them - she would be eating with Omar and Farshid when they got home - and though she also insisted that Martin and Javeed should feel free to start immediately, it would have been unbelievably rude either to hurry her out of the door, or to begin the meal in her presence.
So Martin put the fragrant dish in the kitchen and the three of them sat nibbling on pistachios.
‘You should come and stay with us, Martin jan.’ Rana looked around the living room appraisingly; she almost seemed disappointed that there were no clumps of dust or obvious traces of vermin in sight. Martin was still perfectly capable of keeping the house clean.
‘You’re very kind,’ he replied, ‘but honestly, we’re doing fine here.’ Javeed, whose idea of heaven would’ve been having Farshid on call to entertain him twenty-four hours a day, glanced at Martin, but managed to keep his mouth shut.
Rana smiled regretfully. ‘Well, the offer’s always open. You and Javeed would be welcome as our guests, any time.’
‘Thank you.’ Martin didn’t doubt her sincerity - and he could forgive her for scanning his house for signs of incipient Widower’s Squalor - but he wasn’t ready to let the last traces of structure in his life start melting away. He’d finally given up on the shop and put the business on the market; if he lost control over his own domestic routines he’d have nothing.
‘So how is everyone?’ he asked. He hadn’t visited Omar’s home for a while, nor discussed his family, and it turned out that after six years on a waiting list, Rana’s father-in-law, Mohsen, was about to have new prostheses fitted: fully-functioning mechanical legs that he’d be able to control by thought alone. Javeed listened in amazement to Rana’s sketch of the process: they’d already implanted electrodes in Mohsen’s spinal cord and he’d spent two months practising with virtual copies of the limbs, fine-tuning the interface in preparation for the real thing. Martin was surprised that Omar hadn’t mentioned any of this.
Rana left, and they wolfed down the stew. Though Martin did not forget to take the medication that helped with his impaired digestion, he ate so rapidly that he got stomach cramps anyway, and Javeed spent the rest of the evening teasing him about his greediness and bad manners. Laughing made the cramps worse, which only egged Javeed on. When Javeed finally climbed into bed, Martin sat smiling in the darkness, clutching his side.
Just after midnight Javeed woke, crying for his mother. Nothing Martin did comforted him. Finally, at his wits’ end, he brought an electronic photo frame loaded with pictures from the Australian trip he’d taken with Mahnoosh the year they’d married. Martin had never got around to showing them to Javeed before, and something about the unfamiliar images fascinated and calmed him. It was as if this evidence that his mother’s life extended far beyond his current knowledge of her gave him back a small part of what he’d lost: a sense of her continuing, a sense of a well that would never run dry.
When Javeed fell asleep, Martin went back to his own bed and tried to conjure up Mahnoosh beside him. All the hours he’d spent in the scanner reliving his memories of her had robbed him of any hope that he could be surprised by some long-forgotten incident, but that wasn’t important now. All he wanted was her presence, even if it was utterly familiar; even if it offered nothing new.
But the darkness remained blank, the pillow uninhabited. He’d wanted her to haunt the Proxy’s thoughts the way she’d haunted his own - so was that the trade-off? Was that how it worked? At his behest, had she already acknowledged the succession?
Martin paid the taxi driver and walked slowly past the protesters, who seemed to regard him more with curiosity than malice. Who was this sick old man visiting Zendegi day after day? He was surprised that they didn’t know yet; that they hadn’t guessed, or got the news from an informer on the inside. After all, he was here to commit a sin that made Azimi’s whoring of his God-given talent about as serious in its blasphemy as a love potion or a lucky charm.
Inside, he willed the elevator to fail; if he had to take the stairs he could spin that out for at least fifteen minutes. But the door sprung open and the usual insufferably cheery woman’s voice asked him in Farsi to state his destination. Martin let her cycle through English, French, Arabic and back to Farsi before responding.
Nasim was caught up in a meeting that had run into overtime; Bernard helped Martin prepare for the scanner. ‘How long are you planning to stay in Tehran?’ Martin asked him.
‘It was going to be six months,’ Bernard replied. ‘I’ve been training some local staff to use this machine. But I might be staying on; I’ve met someone I like.’
‘Congratulations. But you should take him back to Europe, to be safe.’
Bernard was surprised. ‘You’re kidding, right? I thought no one had been prosecuted for years.’
Martin said, ‘If it’s still considered political suicide to take the laws off the books, I wouldn’t treat them as defunct.’
Bernard adjusted Martin’s goggles and gestured for him to approach the MRI. ‘I think I’ll take my chances,’ he said. ‘If we go back to Europe, in three months I’ll be wearing a wedding ring.’
Martin lay down in the machine. His body was rigid; he took a few deep, slow breaths. He closed his eyes before Bernard flipped down the goggles. His fists clenched; no gloves today. The motor whirred.
Bernard said, ‘Martin? Can you open your eyes please?’
Reluctantly, Martin complied. The goggles were feeding him street scenes of Sydney in the eighties, accompanied by snatches of music and news. Hunters and Collectors sang ‘Carry Me’, the vocals as raw as an open wound. Tim Ritchie on 2JJJ introduced The Residents’ eerie, pulsing electronic version of ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Whatever its faults, the machine had certainly learnt how to take him back.
Martin tried to relax and follow the cues as the state premier, Neville Wran, floated in front of him, waffling gruffly about nothing comprehensible. Martin couldn’t recall having any particular opinion of the man. State politicians just made him think about trains - train drivers’ strikes, trains coming to a halt in the middle of the night. Once he’d been travelling home from the city, close to midnight, and the train had stopped on the bridge over the Parramatta River for forty minutes, for no apparent reason, with no explanation. He’d looked out over the dark water and thought about diving in and swimming to the shore, just to put an end to the waiting. The memory was vivid; he could see red paint flaking off the carriage’s old-style, manually operated doors. He could have jumped out; there’d been nothing to stop him. But he hadn’t been quite foolish enough. In fact, he hadn’t really been tempted at all.
And he’d been back to that carriage a dozen times already under the scanner’s gaze. Was it something he desperately needed the Proxy to remember? Had it been a great defining moment for his world view, his moral framework? No. So why was he wasting time thinking about it when every second he had left was precious - and every second in this machine doubly so?
Now the goggles showed Midnight Oil on stage at Selina’s nightclub. Martin could almost smell the spilt beer and acrid sweat . . . but so fucking what? No doubt something in his head lit up at the sight of this performance; he’d been there on the night, or one very like it. But he was just spinning his wheels, deepening the ruts memory had carved out by pure chance. The machine didn’t know how to take him anywhere new from here. It knew it needed more from him, but it didn’t know how to find it.
The machine seemed to reach the same conclusion; it gave up on the nostalgia trip and started showing him photographs of strangers. An old man stood in the ruins of a house; the style of his clothing and what remained of the building made Martin think of the earthquake in Kashmir. A woman with a dark blue, lace-trimmed headscarf held the hand of a young girl in a pink floral dress, on a crowded street somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia. Individuals, couples, families; each image persisted for just a second or two. Though Martin couldn’t help noticing clues as to where and when the pictures had been taken, Nasim had reminded him many times that this wasn’t meant as a trivia quiz, a tool to boost the Proxy’s general knowledge. The aim was far more abstract: the images were like flashes of light, positioned at random in a vast space of possibilities, and the record of his brain’s responses was like a collection of shadows of a single complex object, cast from many directions. If the Proxy could be sculpted so it cast the same shadows, that would help strengthen its resemblance to him.
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