Voices

1

Where am I? The words were clear but they had no sound, no voice to communicate timbre or gender. Where are my hands? What is that light? What’s that? Why can’t I look away? Where am I?

The voice had questions mainly. Sometimes, though, memories of strange feelings or half-formed images occurred in his mind. Foods that he never liked suddenly held the most wonderful flavor. He bought a bunch of carrots at a vegetable stand and ate them all in one sitting in the park.

The voice wasn’t always there. There were days at a time when he heard nothing at all. Days where he was almost the man he had been before the Pulse addiction.

Pulse. Wonder drug and death sentence all in one. On the first night he used the drug Leon had lived a whole life span riding at the side of the conqueror Hannibal. He’d ridden fantastic blue elephants across the Alps. After a few years the hyper-real fantasies degraded to washed-out memories with little direction or content. But the addiction was still strong because Pulse was the only thing that kept his brain from collapsing.

“Are you using again?” Dr. Bel-Nan asked at the Neurological Institute of Staten Island.

“No,” said Professor Leon Jones, father of the congresswoman from the Bronx, the onetime UBA heavyweight champion of the world, Fera Jones. “I don’t even want to hear that one voice. You think I want a crowd?”

Bel-Nan, a tall white man in his fifties, smiled. He was missing a lower front tooth. This one detail always disturbed Professor Jones, though there was much that could have disturbed him. Bel-Nan was one of the foremost brain specialists in the world. He was one of the founders of the mysterious Church of Life Everlasting. He had been sentenced to the MacroCode polar prison system for performing illegal brain transplantation operations. He had further developed his techniques in prison.

The operation that Bel-Nan had performed on Leon was a more sophisticated version of the experiments that had put him in prison. Taking living brain tissue from an anonymous donor, the surgeon replaced certain regenerative tissue in Jones’s cortex and frontal lobe. These cells stimulated the atrophied portion of his brain, allowing the onetime history professor to survive without taking Pulse.

“Sometimes there are vestigial memories, pieces of thoughts that the donor once might have had,” Bel-Nan explained as he pushed the long and greasy blond hair away from his eyes.

“But, Doctor,” Jones complained. “It’s not just a word or a patch of color, something like that. There’s questions and sometimes I have yens, desires for things I never wanted before.”

Bel-Nan smiled. His face was long and somehow crooked, as if maybe the man who knocked his tooth out had also broken his jaw. Jones had seen quite a few misshapen faces like that during the years he managed his daughter’s boxing career.

“The brain is a mysterious thing, Professor Jones,” Bel-Nan said. “It is the most volatile and creative material in the world, maybe even the universe. It can evolve without dying. It can conceive of itself. Its concepts are beyond the living cells that comprise it, so that life for us is defined by the faculty of thought rather than the ability to breathe. Breath, as magical as it is, is nothing compared to the reality of personality.”

The ugly scientist smiled, unashamed of the crooked grin and missing tooth.

“What does that have to do with this voice in my head?” Jones asked.

“Your brain has discovered new material,” Bel-Nan explained patiently. “It’s making up this voice to explain it. The shock of the new cells becomes a question in your conscious mind. Where am I? That’s the feeling of the new cells. They are displaced and that feeling of displacement becomes a question. This strangeness of the new cells seeks out a new answer, therefore you try new things. A different taste. A walk in the park. Tell me, do you have headaches before you hear this voice?”

“Yes, I do. I get a headache that lasts for hours, and then, when it subsides, the voice comes out. Not a voice, really, but ideas. Some come across as words, and others, others are images. Why? What does a headache mean?”

“The cells are integrating. As they come together there’s friction and maybe a little heat. That particular phase of the integration is successful, the pain subsides, and a new member is added to the collective of brain cells. There must be something old in those cells and a confusion arises. But all of that will pass. Maybe if you take vitamin E_3 or, even better, hedroprofin, the swelling will be contained. But I wouldn’t if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“This is a moment of discovery that very few humans have ever undergone. You are experiencing the reintegration of your mind. You are absorbing the life and the soul of another. Feel it, Professor Jones. Record it. It could be one of the most valuable self-examinations since Freud.”

“You think somebody’d pay for it?”

“I’d read it, Professor. I’ve done a dozen of these operations since they were legalized. But this was the deepest and most extensive transplant of living tissue. I replaced a rather large portion of the cortical stem and interior with various materials from a single donor. We were relying on the similarity of the neuronal material, hoping that the new elements would adapt to the function required of them.”

Leon had been on life support, he was told, for eighteen months after the operation. Machines the size of a brownstone maintaining basic functions that his brain had to relearn.

“You are the first to survive this long,” Bel-Nan said.

“Well,” Leon said. “I guess a few echoes aren’t so bad compared to death.”

“Not so bad at all, Professor.”

__________

Professor Jones had spent all of the money he made in boxing on the operation. His daughter had helped only insofar as she used her influence to get him well placed on the waiting list for the highly experimental procedure. But even with her help he was lucky to have been chosen.

It had been three months since his release from the hospital, and so far Leon’s health was fair. He still felt weak after very little exertion, and sometimes when he woke up in the morning he was a little disoriented. He’d look around the room searching for something familiar. Once he thought he saw a small dog sitting patiently in the corner. But one blink and the dog was gone.

2

When Leon took the hedroprofin the voice disappeared. He was happy not to feel that he was going crazy, but he discovered that he missed the voice. It had been an anchor after years of Pulse addiction. With no obsession left he found himself drifting.

His daughter was in D.C. testing the waters for a greater political career. As a onetime drug addict, he was an embarrassment to her. The newspapers that backed Fera Jones’s political ambitions blamed the elder Jones for forcing his daughter into the ring to pay for his drugs. It wasn’t true. As a child Fera had begged to fight. She was overactive, and boxing was the one thing that calmed her down.

They talked every day for a few minutes. But she was busy and he had nothing but time.

Professor Jones lived in two small rooms on Middle One twenty-fifth Street near Adam Clayton Powell. When he was a child Harlem was an entirely black neighborhood, one of the centers of African-American culture. But now it was as faceless and multicultured as any other neighborhood in Manhattan. The Schomburg Residence Hotel was happy to take a congresswoman’s father for a tenant. The rent was $2,000 a week, 60 percent of his disability insurance.

He read and reread books about history. Not histories, but books that spoke of the art of recording the past. Collingwood and Hegel and Ahn Min. That’s what intrigued Jones: the intangibility of what was. The passage of time and the forgetfulness of humanity. Even his talk with the unsightly Dr. Bel-Nan. Did he say that the cells of the donor remembered details from the previous life? No, not exactly. He hadn’t exactly said anything.

“The best history is a shopping list,” one of his professors at Howard had said. “Three bananas, two lengths of copper wire, and a broad-brimmed hat. Now that’s something to sink your teeth into.”

Bel-Nan wasn’t even his real name. He’d changed it hoping, like the rulers of a new dynasty in China who rewrote history, to be seen in a new light. From many years of study Jones had decided that nothing anyone ever said was true; at best it was what they believed.

__________

On a temperate December morning Professor Jones decided to go down to Morningside Park, a green valley between towering buildings. In his childhood his Aunt Bing would tell him that the park was a dangerous place where drug dealers and gang members met. And so when his Uncle Bly took the short cut through the park little Leon would turn his head every which way to see where the killers were hiding.

“It’s okay in the daytime,” Bly would assure him.

But Leon never stopped his vigil until they were back on the regular streets, safe from harm.

“Mister?” a child’s voice asked.

At first he thought it was the voice in his head. The question was not a lament, however. Professor Jones looked down and saw a blond-haired child, no more than five, standing at the far end of the park bench.

He blinked once, expecting the child to disappear.

“Are you cold, mister?” the girl asked instead of dissipating.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I’m cold,” she said.

Leon had worn a corduroy jacket over a plaid woolen shirt. He also had a cashmere scarf that Fera had given him wrapped around his neck. The scarf was making him too warm but he hadn’t thought to take it off yet.

“Here,” he said. “Try this.”

The little girl threw the wrap around her shoulders with the grace of a somewhat older child. She shivered and then smiled.

“Thanks,” she said.

“All warm now?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “Can I sit here until my mommy comes back?”

“Where is your mother?” Leon asked as he lifted the child to sit there next to him.

“She’s up over there talking to Bill,” the girl said, pointing down a path that turned away and disappeared into the trees.

“What are they talking about?”

“How come you looked scared when you saw me?” the girl asked.

“Did I?”

“It’s not polite to answer with a question,” the girl said primly, gesturing her hands like a traffic cop or maybe a music conductor.

“I asked the first question,” Leon said, also gesturing. “And then you asked about why was I scared.”

“But I wasn’t answering your question,” the girl giggled. “I was changing the subject.”

“Oh you were, were you?” Leon had the urge to reach out and tickle the child, but he didn’t. He didn’t know her. He could go to jail for twenty years for child molesting. But she was so darling, like Fera had been. She didn’t look anything like Fera, but she had the same silly spunk.

“I was surprised,” he said, “because when I was a boy and lived here there were no little white girls in Harlem.”

“Am I a white girl?”

The question stunned Leon. He didn’t know what to answer.

“Your hair is almost white,” he said lamely.

“But you didn’t mean my hair, huh?” the girl said. “You meant my skin.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“And if I’m white then what are you?”

“Black,” Leon said instantly.

“But your skin is just brown,” the girl said. “And my skin has some brown and some pink and some yellow, too.” She rubbed her arm and peered at the skin as she did so.

“I think we’re all the same color, just more of some colors and not so many of others.” She held out her arm and looked at Leon as if to get his opinion on her theory.

Leon suppressed the urge to hug the child. He clasped his hands and pressed them against his lips.

There came a gurgling cry. Leon jerked his head around to look up the path where the child’s mother was talking to someone named Bill.

“Coming, Mom!” the child yelled. She was running up the path, toward the cry.

Leon was exhausted by the long walk from his apartment to the park. He struggled to his feet and went up the pathway, but the girl had already disappeared.

When he got to the playground on the other side of the park the girl was gone. Children capered while their mothers or nannies watched, but there was no one who looked like the child’s mother talking to anyone who looked like a Bill.

No one seemed worried about a gurgling cry.

__________

“I met this little girl in the park today, Fifi,” Leon was saying to his daughter on the vid that evening. She was at her office, poring over a blue and red pie chart on a wall-mounted computer screen.

“A child?” she asked, turning momentarily from the graph.

“Just a little girl. Her mother left her alone and she wasn’t dressed warmly enough. I let her have that scarf you gave me last Easter.”

“You gave a strange child in the park your scarf?” Fera gave the vid screen her full attention now.

Cosmetic surgery had completely fixed her broken nose and the permanent swell that had developed over her right eye. Her golden skin nearly shone in the fluorescent lighting. At twenty-five she was ravishing if a bit imposing at six-nine and two hundred plus pounds.

“She was cold,” Leon said in a glad tone. “Smart little kid, too. Reminded me of you.”

“What’s the child’s name, Daddy?”

He could hear the concern in her voice.

“I didn’t get it. Her mother called and she ran away. I went after to make sure she was all right, but you know I’m so tired after the operations.”

“Why did you need to see if she was all right?” Fera asked.

“Oh, it was nothing. Just the tone in her mother’s voice.”

“What tone?”

“It sounded more like she was screaming than calling, that’s what I thought, but when I got to the playground they were gone.” When Leon Jones grinned and nodded his head, he realized, for the first time, that he’d become an old man.

“Daddy. Daddy, are you listening to me?”

“Sure I am, Fifi.”

“You drifted off there a minute.”

“I did?” the professor said. “Oh.”

“Daddy, I don’t want you going up to that park anymore.”

“I must have been thinking about Maitland,” Leon mused.

“Who’s Maitland, Daddy?”

“Frederic William Maitland. He wrote a history, the history of English law. Ideas can have a history, you see. People are too complex, their motivations too capricious to be documented accurately.” It was a fragment of a lecture he’d given thirty years earlier, but he experienced it as a new idea.

“So, Daddy, you’ll stay away from the park?”

“Whatever you say, honey.” Leon was reconsidering the notion of ideas having history separate from the people who had those ideas. Language can have a documentable history where the orator may not, he was thinking as he broke off the vid connection to Congresswoman Jones.

__________

“Hi, mister,” the little girl said in the park three days later.

It had rained on Tuesday. Wednesday he started reading Marc Bloch’s book on feudal society. He had long admired the Frenchman’s patriotism but never read deeply of the man’s work. That afternoon he considered writing a history of his block of One twenty-fifth Street. He thought that maybe if he could keep it down to that, or maybe just a history of the businesses there … Maybe, he thought, the nature of the businesses would express the changing nature of the population, its makeup and income. Finally he fell asleep.

But on Thursday he made a pilgrimage to Morningside Park. He had forgotten the rain, his urban narrative, and any promises made to his daughter.

“What’s your name?” he asked the child.

“Tracie.”

“Do you come to the park every day, Tracie?”

“Not every day.”

“But many days?”

The child nodded vigorously and climbed up on the bench to sit next to her friend.

She told him all about a test she’d taken in which she misspelled the word merry-go-round.

“I thought it was marry go round,” she said and giggled.

The love Leon felt for that child frightened him. He noticed that she had on the same cranberry-colored dress that she’d worn on Monday and supposed that it was either her favorite or that her parents were poor.

“Would you like some ice cream?” he asked Tracie.

“No thanks. But I would like to go swimming.”

“You would?”

“Yes please,” she said.

“But there’s no place to swim around here. And even if there was, it’s December.”

“Uh-huh. Yes there is. There’s a big lake, and it’s warm there.”

“You must mean the pond down in Central Park.”

“Nuh-uh. It’s a pond right here. Come on, I’ll show you.”

She pointed up the path where her mother had been talking to the man named Bill.

“You go on,” he said, thinking that her mother would be angry at him for walking with her.

“But I can’t go swimming by myself. I’ll get in trouble.”

“Isn’t your mother up there?”

A frown knitted itself in the young face. Tracie concentrated on the words Leon spoke. He imagined them running through her mind again and again: Isn’t your mother up there? Isn’t your mother up there? Isn’tyourmotherupthere. Isntyourmotherupthere, until it was just a fast jumble of meaningless sounds.

“Talking to Bill,” Leon added.

“Yeah.” Tracie grinned widely and jumped off the bench. “You wanna go swimmin’, mister?”

“No,” he said. “You go on.”

The gurgling cry of her mother’s call came just after Tracie rounded the bend.

3

Pell Lightner was waiting on the marble bench that sat out in front of the Schomburg Residence Hotel. Professor Jones felt as if he had been caught committing some crime. Indeed, he had been wondering on his walk home if Tracie’s mother would allow her to come visit, that if he screwed up the courage to go up that path he could introduce himself and maybe become a friend of the family. He loved the child.

“Good afternoon, Leon,” the short chocolate brown young man said.

“Pell.” Leon walked past the bench and up the granite stairway. Maybe he hoped that Pell was just stopping to rest, that he was up from D.C. on business and had stopped to sit after visiting some of his White Noise friends at the Common Ground below One thirty-fifth Street. But Pell jumped up and accompanied the professor as if he had been invited.

And how could Jones turn him away? He was Fera’s full-time live-in boyfriend, had been her boxing manager—after Leon had succumbed to the symptoms of Pulse use—and was now her valued congressional aide. Pell was a savvy kid born of Backgrounder parents. He had no education except what he had gleaned from public computer links and by overhearing others talk about the news. He couldn’t read, but the advancement in reading computers meant that he had heard many of the classic novels, and he preferred listening to the East Coast Times to getting news from the vid. When Fera picked him up he latched onto her like a barnacle, Professor Jones said for the first few months. But the young man showed his worth when he steered Fera through the Konkon fight, a fight she would have surely lost if not for Pell’s psychological motivation.

“How have you been, Leon?” Pell asked in the small two-man elevator.

“Slow.”

“Fera said that you’ve been taking long walks.”

The elevator doors slid open on eight.

Mrs. McAndrews was sitting on her rocker in the hallway, munching her gums. The elderly Korean woman had married Sergeant Steven McAndrews in 1955 at the age of sixteen. Now, at one hundred nineteen, she’d been alone in Harlem since the nineteen eighties. Her husband and son both dead, her family back home forgotten, or forsaken—Leon was never sure which.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. McAndrews.”

“Mr. Jones,” she replied, surprisingly lucid considering her obsessive munching. “This your son?”

“No. My daughter’s boyfriend.”

“You a boxer too, boy?” She spoke with a slight Korean accent.

“No, ma’am. I’m a congressional aide.”

Inside the rooms Jones offered Pell tea or gin.

“It’s all I got. The gin is good. The tea’s good for you.”

“No thanks. You been drinkin’ a lotta gin?” Pell asked, almost nonchalant.

“Fera’s worried, huh?” Leon said. He sat down in the reclining bamboo chair that his first wife had bought when they were just married.

Pell lit on an emerald hassock that came from Amherst with Leon and his second wife, Fera’s mother, Nosa.

“Yes she is, sir,” Pell admitted. He wore a soft gray andro-suit that was open at the collar, revealing a pendant of twigs bound together in the form of a falling man. “She said that your mind was wandering, that you were talking to children you didn’t know in the park. She called Dr. Bel-Nan. He assured her that it’s all a part of the healing process. Me coming up here is just to keep Fera from worrying. You know she’s drafted her first bill: the Chromosome Pattern Security Act. If it’s passed it will be the first law enacted that will encompass the planetary colonies.”

“You speak so well, Pell.” Leon said. “I remember when ‘nig’ and ‘motherfuckin’ chuckhead’ were in almost every sentence you spoke.”

Pell had a wide face and an equally broad grin. His eyes lit up and the corners of his mouth raised to form the shallow bowl of his delight.

“It’s only senators that can talk like that in Washington, sir.”

“But do you understand what you’re saying?” Leon asked. “What?” Pell’s confusion showed.

“I mean, you can’t read, can you?”

The wary look of Common Ground came suddenly into the well-spoken young man’s eyes.

“I read. I’ve read the Declaration of Independence, Moby Dick—”

“Without your phono implant?”

Pell tensed for a moment and then let go. He smiled and asked, “What’s the problem, Professor? Why rag on me?”

“Did you know that Homer was an illiterate?”

The question got Pell’s attention.

“Yeah,” Leon continued. “In his time there was no written language, at least not for everyday people like Greek storytellers. A good one like Homer could remember, word for word, a dozen or more epic poems. Poems much longer than most novels you hear today. And he would really act out each part. Deep voice for Zeus and twittery little words for children and animals.

“In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury has his ideal community double as a library. Each member commits an important text to memory. It’s called the oral tradition, Pell. Your generation is returning to that. Just like Bradbury’s fireman. Only he still wanted to read.”

“That’s very interesting, Leon—” Pell began. He was going to continue but the professor cut him off.

“So you can see what’s in the cards. The word hear will gain a new significance, while write will fall into disuse. And really, what will writing become when no one can read? And what will the future generations think of writing? Like we think of hieroglyphics, no doubt. And this transition will not take thousands of years, merely decades. Five years without electricity and all of civilization could fall back into barbarism.”

Leon laughed and sat back. It had been years since he befuddled students with his intellectual constructions. Pell was a bright kid, but, the professor thought, he knew nothing and had no idea of the depth of his ignorance.

“So,” Pell paused, making much of his deliberation. “What you’re saying is that you aren’t going senile and Fera can stop worrying about you.”

“That’s one thing,” Leon said, nodding sagely. “Another is that we teeter precariously upon the edge of the precipice.”

It was Pell’s turn to laugh.

“You laugh?”

“I been teeterin’ ever since the first time I was gang raped on the IRT at three in the mornin’.” Pell tapped the branch talisman. “Barbarism done been here, Professor. You could put the rent on that.”

__________

As was often the case, Pell had the last word. That night Leon Jones mulled over and over the crimes committed upon the young man. He’d never heard of the rape. He doubted if Fera knew.

That he survived, Leon wrote in his journal, is a feat greater than all my years of education and Fera’s heavyweight belts rolled up into one.

__________

“Hi, Lenny,” Tracie said in the dream.

Leon was a child too. They were sitting on the ground near a Morningside Park bench. Chamomile was flowering up through the cracks in the asphalt, stingless bees gathered their pollen.

“Do you wanna come on down t’ my house?” Leon wasn’t surprised to hear himself speak in the deep southern accent of his childhood. He was a child after all, playing with his best friend Tracie in the park.

Tracie shook her head vigorously. “I can’t. Not till you go swimming with me.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know,” the blond child said. “But it’s about the park.”

Leon noticed that it was fall. The leaves were turning. They must be maples, he thought, because their leaves are so red. Just then he saw a gang member run from behind one tree, cross the road, and then hide behind another trunk. Another man with a gun followed.

“It’s our park,” Tracie’s voice said.

There came that gurgling scream.

“What’s that?” Leon asked fearfully, but he wasn’t sure if he meant the gang member and robber or the scream.

“That’s just my mom,” Tracie replied. “She’s always screaming like that.”

The dream replayed itself again and again until Leon came to anticipate every event. Sometimes the gang member chased the robber. Sometimes he could make out Tracie’s name in the scream.

4

“Your daughter called,” Dr. Bel-Nan said the next day at their regular appointment.

“Yeah,” Leon said. “She a good girl.”

He was sitting on a medical table, on waxy paper, in his underwear.

“She’s worried about you.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know why she’s so worried?” Bel-Nan asked. He was studying an X ray of Leon’s brain on a wall-size passive computer image that appeared as a complex acrylic painting. No light shone from behind the screen, but if Bel-Nan touched any specific point that area was enlarged by ten and overlaid on the broader image.

“No, sir. I don’t.”

Bel-Nan checked image after image, sometimes increasing the subject of his study a thousandfold.

Meanwhile Leon sang, “What you gonna do when the pond goes dry, honey … ?”

After fifteen minutes of study and song Bel-Nan turned and asked, “Have you been to the park lately, Professor?”

“I was up there yesterday. Kickin’ back, takin’ it slow.”

“You seem to be speaking in a … a … I don’t know how to say it,” Bel-Nan said.

“Dreamt I was a boy last night,” Leon said with glee. “When I woke up I remembered how I talked back then. They called it ignorant where I went to school so I weaned myself off of it. But you know it kinda tickles me to go back to it a li’l bit. Yeah, just a li’l bit.”

“Is that how you spoke to the little girl, the one you met in the park?”

“Not in the park, no.”

“You saw her somewhere else?”

“In a dream I did. In a dream about the park.”

“What was she wearing?” the doctor asked, seemingly distracted by something he’d seen in the X ray.

But Leon wasn’t fooled. The question was wrong even for a psychiatrist to ask.

“What you lookin’ at, Doc?”

“What? Oh, uh, nothing, really. I mean, I’m looking to see if the microcircuitry has begun to dissolve. You see,” he said, building confidence as he spoke, “the time it takes for the sheath around the circuit to melt away should be enough for the brain to have generated its own neural links.”

Anyone who watched the Med-channel knew about the micro-nerve-bonding process. It involved computer circuitry made from a blood by-product that was compatible with biological processes while temporarily performing complex computer functions. The inventor, Carmine Giampa, was now senior vice president of MacroCode International.

“You don’t say,” Leon said, as if this were the first time he’d heard of such a miracle.

Bel-Nan picked up the sarcasm and cut short his medical lecture.

Leon dressed and went with Bel-Nan to an ultramodern office. All of the furniture was constructed of transparent plasteel accented here and there with the odd stroke of color. It was the kind of furniture that went out of style quickly.

“How long the lease on this furniture you got, Doc?” Leon asked.

“You must tell me about the girl in the park,” Bel-Nan said. His ugly smile was gone, his hair tied back.

“Why? She’s just a child.”

“Did you dream about her before you met her?”

“That would be crazy, now, wouldn’t it?”

“You haven’t answered the question.” Leon could see the doctor’s hands clenched under the transparent desk.

“No. I dreamed about her for the first time last night.”

“Did she seem like a normal child? Was she, how old was she?”

“Twelve. Yeah, just about twelve.”

“But you said that it was a little girl.”

“I’m sixty-two, Doc. I think’a my own daughter as a baby.”

Bel-Nan was rubbing the tips of his fingers together under the desk.

“Why would you think I dreamed about a girl and then I met her?” Leon asked.

The two seconds of blank expression on Bel-Nan’s repulsive face convinced Jones that he was about to hear a lie.

“The recording process in the microcircuitry,” the doctor said, “sometimes switches events. The system of recording is linear instead of the random-emphasis method of biological memory. Sometimes an event might be misrecorded when the sheath starts breaking down. You know, memories in two places.”

“I got to go, Doctor.”

“I don’t think that’s advisable,” Bel-Nan said.

“Why not?”

“I’d like to keep you under observation for a night or two.”

“I’ll be happy to, Doc,” Leon said. “But not tonight. Tonight I’m meetin’ a friend to play a game of chess.”

The ugly smile returned, tinged with bad intentions. “What’s this friend’s name?”

Leon stood up. “What’s your real name, Doctor?”

The smile vanished.

Leon turned away and walked out the door.

“Come back, Professor,” Bel-Nan called. “I’m afraid that I can’t let you leave.”

Bel-Nan’s office was on the eighteenth floor of a forty-floor building. There was an express elevator which stopped only at floors 1, 18, and 35; this to speed up traffic for those who didn’t mind walking a few floors up or down.

An elevator car was waiting.

The ground floor was a vast chamber of Synthsteel and glass. There were two hundred feet for Leon to walk to the entrance. He moved quickly through the sparsely populated room. A line of four people waited to walk through the Data Detectors—the system that checked IDs against the possession of unlicensed property, and also for weapons, warrants, and labor truantism.

Each person passed between the slender copper-studded glass poles without incident. But when Leon passed through an alarm was set off. Two large guards emerged from a kiosk in the plaza and approached him.

“Excuse me, M,” a brawny, redheaded white man said. He was followed by a lanky young man who was white-haired.

“What’s the problem, M?” Leon said without a stutter.

“Seems like somebody put a hold on your ID,” the large redhead said in a friendly manner. “Maybe you left your briefcase or something like that.”

“I didn’t have anything,” Leon said. “It must be a mistake.”

“It’ll just take two minutes,” the guard assured.

Both men wore the bright red T-shirts that meant private law enforcement. The lanky man had yellow trousers and the redhead wore black. These colors meant that the larger man was the superior officer.

“I can’t wait,” Leon said, veering around the first guard.

“Hold it right there,” the other guard said, putting up both hands.

Leon turned to the friendly guard but all he got was an I’m-so-sorry smile.

Bel-Nan appeared a few minutes later.

“Bring him back upstairs,” he said.

“Okay. Let’s go,” the lanky guard said, laying a hand on Leon’s shoulder.

“Hold up, Lin.” The larger guard held up one finger.

“What do you mean?” Bel-Nan said. “This man has to be hospitalized immediately.”

“For what?”

“Are you a doctor?” Bel-Nan sneered.

“Moses Fine,” the brawny guard said, introducing himself. He looked down at his handheld com-screen. “This request didn’t give your name.”

“Bel-Nan. Dr. Bel-Nan.” The rage in the blond-haired surgeon made the curve in his face seem even more pronounced.

Security Officer Fine tapped the screen with his finger a few times and read. Then he said, “Okay. What’s the problem?”

“You are the problem,” Bel-Nan said. “Now bring this man to the thirty-third floor.”

“That’s the security floor, Doctor.”

“Am I the idiot here or are you?”

Moses Fine smiled.

The officer named Lin removed his hand from Leon’s shoulder.

“Tell me the nature of the condition that makes it necessary to incarcerate the patient.” Fine was quoting some ordinance, Leon was sure.

“He’s psychotic,” Bel-Nan hissed.

“He seems okay to me.”

“Are you a psychiatrist?”

“I’m not an idiot or a psychiatrist, Doctor.”

“Then do as I tell you.”

“I’m not a psychiatrist. But then again, neither are you,” Moses said. “This man is not in possession of stolen property, he doesn’t work here, there are no warrants out on him or liens against his property. If he is psychotic it’s not for you or me to say.”

Bel-Nan seemed to be considering an attack on Moses Fine. But he decided against it.

“Hold him until I return with someone with the proper credentials,” the brain specialist said. He turned back toward the bank of elevators on the other side of the room.

“Wanna take him to the blue room?” Lin asked.

“You’re Leon Jones, Fera Jones’s father, aren’t you?” Moses asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“She broke my heart the night she broke Zeletski’s jaw. She’s the best that ever was.” Security Officer Fine chewed on his lip for a moment and then said, “Go on. Get outta here.”

5

On the subway ride back to Manhattan Leon was lost. He couldn’t go home because Bel-Nan probably could find a psychiatrist who would agree to institutionalize him. Even on the street he was in danger because his ID-chip had a tracer function in it. Any citizen could be found at any time by their ID-chip. Law enforcement argued that it was to protect the innocent. The ACLU said that it was an infringement on Americans’ constitutional rights. But after consideration by a Supreme Court that had become steadily more conservative for decades it was decided that tracking chips was not an infringement on privacy after all.

Leon got out at the Wall Street stop of the local number 12 subway and went to the Interplanetary Trade Center. There he found a post office and addressed an envelope to Pell Lightner. He included a microrecording which he made in a recording booth available to all postal customers.

“I hope I impressed you that I’m not crazy the other night, Pell,” Leon’s message went. “Because Bel-Nan thinks that I am. He wanted to hospitalize me but I demurred. Here’s my chip. I’ll be down to D.C. by the time you get the post. Try and set it up to get a second opinion before the doctor can put me in SINI.”

Leon sent the envelope next day mail and then returned on the subway to the Lower Forty-second Street main branch of the library.

__________

There was no written material on record for Axel Bel-Nan, professor of neurological sciences at the University of Staten Island. The Stylus Machine, which was used to print out voice-recorded data upon recyclable plastic paper, was out of paper, and the librarian on subfloor eight was not sure when the trays would be refilled.

“We don’t really get much call for printing nowadays,” the young Nigerian said. “The new neural phono links do everything you could ever want right in your head.”

“Except think,” Leon said. But the young woman had already moved away.

Professor Jones’s only choice was to listen to the computer’s rendition through earphones.

“Dr. Axel Bel-Nan,” proclaimed a baritone actor from the previous century. The great Shakespearian had sold the rights of his voice pattern to the NYPL. “Born Lemuel Rogers … educated at the University of Las Vegas in the neurological sciences … alleged secretary of the illegal organization the Church of Life Everlasting (CLE) … [subsearch-1: Church of Life Everlasting (CLE); seeking to clone bodies and reintegrate the cells of deceased members into brain cavity of new life … process declared illegal by congressional proclamation in 2019] … broke with the central committee of the CLE in 2031 over moral questions … convicted in 2032 of illegal acquisition of brain materials from the Ugandan Labor Corps … served a seven-year sentence in MacroCode polar prison system … rehabilitated … released … reintegrated into the scientific community … rehabilitation insured by MacroCode penitentiary division, 2039.”

It took hours for Leon to locate every relevant file, but even then he knew nothing more than he had read in the newspapers.

It was late at night when Leon descended the great marble stairs of the library. The stone facade was one of the few landmarks left of old New York. He wondered if there was some dive west of the theater district that wouldn’t demand his ID-chip. In the old days he could have shacked up with a prostitute, but since prostitution had been legalized on the island of Manhattan the first thing she or her pimp asked for was the chip.

Maybe he could go to one of the illegal boutiques. There were still things that the law said could not be sold. But he was more likely to be arrested in an Eros-Haus than if he just slept in some doorway on a lower avenue.

He was walking down Lower Forty-second Street at about midnight. There were hundreds of bicyclists on the street, which had been closed to cars, trucks, and busses for over twenty years. A woman approached him. She had dark skin and yellow eyes. Her eyebrows were striated and there was the symbol of a supernova tattooed upon her left cheek. She wore a long and close-fitting gray dress that flared out at the knee. She stopped and looked him in the eye. At the same time someone passed close behind him. A hand touched him as if someone passing closely wanted to steer them away from a collision. The prickle of electricity danced at his elbow. He felt drawn to the woman and then he felt as if he were falling toward her.

“Damn! He’s heavy,” she said as she caught him.

6

He awoke on the sandy floor of a single-story stone building. The sun blazed through a window that had no glass. The air was very hot. He had on a pair of loose cotton pants with no shirt or shoes. He felt exceptionally refreshed. Even sleeping on the hard floor had not been uncomfortable.

Leon stood up and looked out upon a long footpath constructed from buff stone. The path was lined with houses of the same material. Seeing the dark-skinned people in whites and bright colors, speaking in an Arabic dialect that he couldn’t place, told the history professor that he was somewhere in northern Africa.

But where? There were very few cities in the world still built from natural materials. Africa had taken to the inexpensive advantages of plasteel and Synthsteel like every other part of the world.

The sun was hot and Leon needed a toilet.

“So you’re up, Professor,” a woman said.

The yellow-eyed, dark-skinned woman stood in the doorway. Her beauty still charmed Leon in spite of the fact that she had obviously been party to his abduction.

“Where am I?” he demanded.

“In the north of Africa, as I am sure you have already realized, in the desert. That’s all you really need to know.”

“And why have you brought me here?”

“To complete the experiment.” Her smile was almost disarming. She wore a simple cotton dress that was nearly as yellow as her eyes.

“I do not wish to be a party to any experiments,” Leon said boldly. “And I demand that you take me home immediately.”

“I’m sorry, but we cannot stop the experiment, Professor Jones. It is much more important than any individual’s desires.”

“I have never willingly signed on to any experiment and I refuse to cooperate with anything you have in mind.”

“Would you like me to take you where you can freshen up and use the facilities?” the woman responded.

The toilet was a long barrackslike building with a bank of commodes across from a line of showers. A young boy showered at the opposite end from Leon. He was dark-skinned, Arabic, and very interested in Leon. He stole glances while he should have been washing.

“Hi,” Leon said, thinking that he needed friends and information. The boy smiled and said something that the professor did not understand.

“Where are we?” he asked the child.

He was answered by a grin and a nod.

__________

Later that morning the same boy brought food to Leon’s room. It was a grainy flat bread with a creamy paste of grains and beans. There was sweet-tasting fruit juice that was yellowish and pulpy and figs that had been stewed in their own liquor.

“Talib,” the boy said, pointing at his own chest.

“Leon,” the professor replied, making the same gesture.

There were no guards. The yellow-eyed woman was gone. And so Leon went out to reconnoiter his prison.

The town was a curving street of small houses and shops, all constructed of the same light-colored stone. The women did not cover their faces. Neither were there any buildings that seemed to have a religious purpose. Leon tried to speak to a few shop owners but there was no one who spoke English. There was no communication booth or even a phone, or policemen, or a tourist service. People paid for food and other necessities with coins of various sizes. On vacation Leon would have marveled at a place that was so primitive that they didn’t use the universal credit system.

After an hour Leon was completely lost. The streets curved continually and rarely intersected. Buildings all looked the same. He had no idea if the town went on for miles or if it was just a few blocks that spiraled around. He might have walked past the building he awoke in many times because he couldn’t distinguish one doorway from another.

His head was hurting under the hot sun and he took a seat at what seemed to be an outside café. A woman wearing a lacy blue wraparound top and a deep scarlet skirt came out and put a ewer of water and a thick glass cup next to him. She smiled and disappeared back into the building.

Leon drank and then covered his eyes with his hands, hoping to block out the light that seemed to pierce his brain.

“You’re feeling poorly, Professor?” Axel Bel-Nan asked. He was sitting across the table, wearing the same white doctor’s smock.

“I was wondering if you’d be here.” Leon spoke softly to control the throbbing pain in his head.

“Have you had enough exercise?” the doctor said. “Because you know we have lots of work to do.”

“I don’t have any work with you.”

“You are mistaken, my friend. We have the soul to find. We have that river Styx to cross. We have a god to slay, a universe to conquer, and Father Time himself to visit in his highest tower.” Bel-Nan smiled his crooked smile.

“How did you find me at the library?”

“The frequency emitted by your microstitches. It’s fairly simple to monitor.”

Pain wrenched through the core of Leon’s head. He lost consciousness for a moment.

“Help him, won’t you?” Bel-Nan said.

Hands took Leon by his skinny arms and lifted him. They took him into a doorway. He could smell meat frying and was grateful for the darkness. When they stopped moving there came mechanical sounds and then the feeling of descent.

He opened his eyes just when the elevator had reached its destination. They entered a large room where many people, of all races, bustled back and forth. The center of the room was a depression at least thirty feet across. At the bottom of the depression were four operating tables. On each table lay a human cadaver. One skinless corpse had a spiderlike crown of gold and silver on its head. Whenever the woman sitting at the control panel next to the corpse moved her hand, it moved. When she brought both hands together like a conductor, the body stood up from the table and struck a rather debonair pose for a skinless cadaver.

Leon was dropped into a PAPPSI gravity chair and pushed down a long hall lit by painful fluorescence. He was taken into a room and left there. He was grateful that the light was dim and the air was cool. He didn’t get out of his floating chair or even look around. His pain and exhaustion were so deep that he was asleep almost immediately.

Sometime later he awoke to a green light emanating from somewhere that he couldn’t see. There was also a sound, almost musical, like the long and elastic notes of electronic music, but with clicks and buzzes, bass tones and something equivalent to song punctuating the drawn-out and undulating rhythm.

Leon wasn’t sure if it was the light or the music that had woken him. The room was empty except for a few long tables under cabinets that were shut and locked. Toward the back of the room there was a corner. It was from around this corner that the light and music came.

She was in a transparent coffin perfectly fit for a child her size. Tracie was definitely dead. Her cranberry dress was gone. She was totally nude; even her yellow hair had been shorn. In its place was a deep gash down the center of her skull, sewn back for a funeral that never took place. The music came from various-sized tuning sticks at the foot of the coffin. The green light came from underneath her in what seemed to be migrating waves of a multitude of microscopic life-forms.

Leon slid to the floor and wept until he passed out.

7

He awoke on the bench in Morningside Park. It was three forty-five by his watch and so he figured that it was still in December because the sun was already beginning to fade. Everything was as it had been. He was wearing his corduroy jacket and brown sneakers that looked like regular shoes. The air was a shade cooler. The cold gathered in his shoulders.

“Hi, mister,” she said.

“Hello, Tracie. How are you today?”

“You were sleepin’,” she said mischievously. “I thought you were gonna fall down, but every time you almost did you sat up just in time.”

“I did?”

“An’ you were talkin’ in your sleep, too,” Tracie said while nodding her head.

“And what did I say?”

“Harmonica’s cryin’.” Tracie labored over the correct pronunciation.

“Harmoni …” Leon said, and then he realized what the child had heard. “Harmonic cryonics?”

“That’s it,” Tracie agreed. “What does that mean?”

“It’s a way to keep living cells in their original condition by duplicating and isolating the material vibrations of their internal environments.”

“Huh?”

“To keep someone alive forever in sleep without freezing them.”

“Like Sleeping Beauty?”

“Just like her.”

“But why would somebody wanna do that?”

Leon looked closely at the girl. She wore the cranberry dress and there was a blue elastic holding her hair up on her head.

“Do you know where I was just now?”

Tracie shook her head slowly, keeping her eyes on the professor’s face.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Take me swimmin’?”

“Okay,” he said. “You lead the way.”

Up the path they went, smallish black man and smaller still girl. The world, a New Age monk once told Leon, is a pious man dreaming of God. In the dream he sees God dreaming of him and in that dream the man dreams of God.

Smallish black man and blond child hand in hand ascended the long upward path. The park’s forest deepened as they went. The sun became brighter and Leon Jones wondered if he had died recently, if his brain were going through a final Pulsedream.

Maybe it’s just a last spasm, he thought.

But the smell of pine and the glare of the sun, the feeling of wind in the cuff of his jacket—they were all too pedestrian for Pulse. And it was warm. Leon had to take off his coat. His left knee ached as it always did when he attempted a steep climb.

Everything was real. More real even than the Pulse had been. More real than life itself had been, at least more real than he had felt for a very long time.

“It’s right up there,” Tracie shouted happily. She had thrown off the dress and ran in blue underpants up to the summit.

“Wait up,” Leon cried, but Tracie couldn’t hear him or couldn’t stop.

At the top of the path there was a fallen-down wooden gate that led into a broad lawn bordering upon a lake. There were dozens of picnickers playing and eating and swimming in the lake.

“Hi, Mom,” Tracie shouted.

Leon saw a woman turn and wave. It was a tall woman in a blue T-shirt and blue jeans. She was talking to a man but he was on the other side of her and obscured from Leon’s view. The woman moved as if she were going down to the lake but the man put a hand on her shoulder and they continued their talk.

Leon was terrified but he didn’t know why. He hurried toward the water. But before he got there Tracie’s mother screamed exactly as she had done at the park days before. Leon knew this was a dream but at the same time it was also life and death. He hobbled down to the shore, where Tracie’s body had just been dragged out of the water. People stood around her but no one was doing anything. Leon threw the child over his knee and pressed against her back.

Her mother was there and the man named Bill. Maybe William was Dr. Bel-Nan’s original middle name. Tracie’s mother was shouting, “She’s dead! She’s dead!” and trying to pull the child from Leon’s knee. But he resisted her and kept going through the press-and-release exercise until the mother receded and the park faded. Tracie coughed and fell to the ground.

“Thanks,” she said. “I knew you would save me.”

“But why did I have to?”

“Because you had to,” she said. “You had to come up here so you could see my world and save me. And now I can see your world and then …”

At that moment Leon felt his heart catch and he knew the patchwork memories of Tracie Rogers, daughter of Bill and Mom, from somewhere in California, at last count five years old—these memories were his own. She kept his heart beating and his lungs breathing; she watched for old dangers like a lion’s roar. Her memories laced themselves around his deeper brain functions. She had become him and he had become her.

8

He was still on the floor near the coffin but no longer crying. The woman with yellow eyes, Bill, and a few others were checking the machinery that kept the harmonics on key.

“So you’re awake, Leon,” Bel-Nan said.

“Sure am, Bill. More awake than I ever been.”

“I take it that you and my daughter have met?”

“What the fuck am I doin’ here, man?”

Bel-Nan offered his hand. Leon took it and got to his feet. Again he felt strong and vital.

“Life everlasting,” Bel-Nan answered. “From manhood to godhood.”

“You sure it isn’t just guilt that you let your daughter die?”

“She was the love of my life.”

“Then why didn’t you splice her into your head instead’a mine?”

“I’m the only one who could do the operation. And what if I died?”

“Sounds good to me,” Leon said. “So what now?”

“I would expect you to know, Professor.”

“Let’s see,” Leon mused. “You got a clone of the child somewhere. Maybe nine months or so. You take her personality from outta me and put it into the clone.”

“The clone is twelve months, has the name of Tracie, and knows me as her father. Later on we will test the process on younger subjects.”

“Man, you got a little girl. Why don’t you just love her?”

“Tracie, or any living, sentient being, is unique. Her mother broke down after the accident. The only way to rouse her, to remake our family, is this operation.”

“Why did you need me at all?” Leon asked. “Why not just go right from the original to the clone?”

“Money, Professor. The equipment I needed to follow up the examination was too great. And also I needed to replicate the cortical functions of the brain so that I wouldn’t need to have her under treatment for so long restructuring lower brain functions.”

“And what happens to me, Dr. Bel-Nan? What happens when you rip out the center of my brain?”

The yellow-eyed woman looked down when she heard this question.

“You were dead when they brought you to me,” Bel-Nan said. “Confined to a gravity chair, having to undergo shock treatments eighteen hours a day. Hardly able to speak more than a sentence before you went into spasm. There was no cure. There was no hope but me. I gave you life. And now I’m asking for repayment. Your few months of grace for the life of my daughter.”

“What if I don’t want to give up my life just yet?”

“We cannot wait. As time passes, Tracie’s personality will become a part of you. We must move her while she is still distinct. And anyway, you want her to survive. You love her as much as I do.”

Leon thought about these last words. He did love the girl. He wanted her to be alive and happy. He wondered if there was a compromise that could be reached.

But while he thought a hand grabbed his shoulder. He felt a familiar tingling at his elbow and fell again.

__________

“Wake up, Leon,” a girl’s voice said.

It was Tracie. But she had aged at least six months, taller now and wearing the same blue jeans that her mother had worn. Her face was just that much longer, and the happiness in her eyes was leavened with the awareness of Leon’s fear.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t see what you see right away.”

“Are they operating?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I heard something,” she said. “They arrested my daddy for taking you away.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. I don’t hear things right away, either. And you’ve been sleeping so it takes even longer.”

“Daddy?”

Leon opened his eyes to see Fera standing above his bed. He was in a hospital. The ocean roared outside the window.

“Honey?”

“Yes, Daddy,” the congresswoman from the Bronx replied. “How are you?”

“What happened?”

“Pell got your letter and he got the international corporate corps to free you.”

“But how did you find me?”

“We put a tracer on you, Daddy. Don’t get mad. It’s just that when you first got out of the hospital you were so foggy. I worried that you might forget to carry your chip, so Pell had your dentist do it at your last checkup. And it’s lucky he did.”

“I’m not mad. Nothing belongs to me anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not my body or my mind, not my history or even what I know. But it ain’t bad. Naw. It ain’t bad at all. ‘Cause I’m still feelin’ and thinkin’ somethin’.”

“They want you to go to a government laboratory for some tests, Daddy,” Fera said. “It’s in a nice place.”

“What happened to Bel-Nan?”

“He was sent back to the polar prison. MacroCode paid off on his policy. They took the whole installation back for study and critique.”

“Are they going to start with transplantations?”

“I don’t know, Daddy. I don’t know.”

__________

That night Leon went outside to walk on the beach. He didn’t know what ocean it was or what sky. But the air was warm and the waves crashed. He walked down the shore with a small child at his side. They talked and laughed, but only he left footprints in the sand.