Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (26 page)

I
lay there through the night. Though not badly hurt, I likely would have died; even if I'd found the motivation to rise and move on, I could not have navigated back to Habiba Village. But the next morning a half-dozen Bedouin men arrived astride camels, the wind flattening their white robes in folds against their bodies, curved knives at their waists and bandoliers slung across their shoulders. They'd heard the blast from miles away and come to investigate. Without a word they took in the scene and collected what remained of Suleiman, loaded us on the animals and headed south. They asked questions I didn't understand, and in response I told them, over and over, where we had come from. Which was where, after four days of steady, direct riding in fair weather, they deposited me and Suleiman and his remaining camel.

A
t Suleiman's home I stayed outside for three days while his wife wailed, first in grief, then in labor. I was in the midst of digging a grave when her cries ceased, and that peculiar desert silence marked the birth of Suleiman's son.

The pickaxe recoiled from stony soil, throwing sparks with each swing. The spade handle cracked, then snapped in half. A full day and night passed before I had a hole deep and broad enough to bury what was left of my friend.

I did not dare go inside the house. Noora took mercy in the searing daylight hours, bringing water and strong, aromatic sherbet to revive me. She did not speak. Her eyes had lost their twinkle, and she kept them trained on the dirt. I imagined she felt responsible for her father's death, and I wanted to tell her that God had not taken Suleiman as punishment for her flirtations. But then, what did I know, really? Maybe He had.

With Suleiman interred there was nothing left to do, so I sat down on the ground and waited. I didn't know what I was waiting for, until the governorate police showed up in their Jeeps.

T
hey brought me to the precinct, a concrete block of a building just outside Tarabeen. Their manner was courteous, even friendly; I was allowed to sit uncuffed in the front of one of the Jeeps, and at the precinct they offered bottled water, tea, and cola, insisting with the good humor of proper hosts that I accept one of the three. I opted, in the heat, for water. I sat in the chief's office, a windowless room with only a small oscillating desk fan to move the air. The chief himself, a thin, ashen man whose face remained coated with a sheen of sweat no matter how often he mopped at it with his handkerchief, asked the questions. They did not believe I'd done anything wrong, he told me, and they certainly had no intention of charging me with a crime. The Bedouin who'd rescued me had gone to him after, explained the scene they'd happened upon, and he was satisfied that Suleiman's death had been an accident. But it was incumbent upon him to confirm details with the only witness—me—or else he could be accused of shirking his duties.

I sipped water and told the chief that whatever questions he wanted to ask, I was happy to answer.

Things went well for an hour or so. When he'd exhausted his queries the chief smiled and stood up and offered his hand, saying, Thank you for being so cooperative, and I met his hand with my own and said I only wished that there'd been no reason for us to talk in the first place. I was about to leave when he said, Oh, I'm sorry to keep you any longer, but there is one more thing.

I turned to face him again.

A formality, he said, smiling, his head bowed a bit in apology. For our paperwork, we must confirm your passport information.

It was the first time I'd had to use the fake passport from Roberto's fixer since coming to Egypt, but I assumed if I'd managed to get past immigration officers in three countries on my way here, there was little chance a provincial police chief in the Sinai, especially one so eager to perceive and treat me as a friend, would smell a rat.

Naturally, I was completely wrong in this assumption.

I
should preface this next by saying that I understand how strange and perhaps even creepy it will sound. It's not lost on me. I contend, though, that what we now define as ‘strange' and ‘creepy' will, like everything else, undergo such a transformation at the moment of the Singularity that the words themselves, suddenly signifying nothing, may well fall out of use.

So here it is: when the time comes, I will occupy Peter Cash's experience.

There's little point in speculating about the details—it could be a virtual reality created by nanobots in my brain, hatched whole cloth but no less real for that, or it could be a direct feed from Peter Cash's mind, assuming he chooses, as many will, to stream his sensory and emotional experiences onto the Internet, in the same way that people stream video of their bedrooms and work spaces today.

These are only two of innumerable possibilities, and again, the details don't matter. What matters is that, one way or another, I will be able to see, feel, smell, and taste the things that Peter Cash sees, feels, smells, and tastes. Whenever I choose to I will enjoy, as though I were there myself, the sight of Emma walking about her bedroom in the morning before work, viewed from the perspective of someone lying in bed with his head propped on a couple of pillows. Emma dressed, for example, in nothing but a snip of black panties, standing at the door of the closet with her hands on her hips, considering what to wear to the office that day, her breasts pert and pale, the nipples stiff against the chill of an early spring morning. Or else talking to Emma over a Sunday morning beer on the deck at the Port Hole, seagulls wheeling about in the sky above her, fishing vessels smeared with diesel soot bobbing against the docks below.

Or, yes, okay, sex with Emma.

I mean, imagine it.

But experiencing Peter Cash's life in real time is just the beginning. I'll also be able to cast back in his mind and draw on, for example, memories of the pleasant rush of his courtship with Emma, the effortless way in which they fell into one another, as if every prior moment in their lives had occurred solely for the purpose of bringing them together that day in the Hilton ballroom, and I will be able to experience these memories as seamlessly as if they actually belonged to me. And not only will this give me the ability to enjoy life with Emma whenever I care to, but—and here's a critical detail—I will experience it as if I
were
Peter Cash, rather than just my own consciousness occupying his body and circumstances. I will become him. I will lose myself and know, finally, what it's like to be perfect for her.

I hope I live long enough to see it.

T
he last time that I saw Emma, as I waited in the coffee shop for her arrival, nervous as I'd ever been in my life, and through the window I caught a glimpse of her sauntering up the sidewalk in a scoop-neck blouse and denim skirt, the sun behind her highlighting little wisps of hair that had escaped from her ponytail, I was reminded of the time I first laid eyes on her, when I'd been in eighth grade, and she in seventh.

I had known even then. At first sight, as they say. Trying out for the junior high cross-country team in a frigid autumn rain, shivering in tank tops and flimsy running shorts. All of us thin-limbed, gawky with pubescence. Clutching ourselves against the cold while we waited for the coaches to indicate it was time to move. The more serious runners, those with real ambition who trained on our own over the summer, engaged in self-conscious demonstrations of that seriousness, kicking our legs out to loosen the thighs, squatting to double-knot laces on expensive, cleated shoes. Emma stood out from both the serious runners and the tourists. She was not self-conscious in any way. She hugged herself like the tourists, sure, but while they stared apprehensively at the coaches, squeegeeing rainwater from their foreheads with shaky hands, trapped each in private misgivings about their legs, their lungs, their decision to come here in the first place, she gazed placidly out below us, to where our little town unfurled in the valley beneath the cross-country course. She was attentive—when the word came from the coaches, she would fall in with the rest of us—but not on tenterhooks. A vault of self, even at age eleven. I glanced at her, then stared, then gaped, and I forgot about the cold and the rain, forgot about the twelve minutes flat I'd hoped to run on the 3K course, a time I'd been chasing all summer with the goal of being the best runner on the team. Forgot myself, never to recover. We were young, but it didn't matter. The common notion that romantic love among children is fleeting, insubstantial—not true, at least in this case.

Here we were now, approaching forty, and as Emma opened the door to the coffee shop and stood in the entryway searching the room, her face broadcasting ambivalence, this was the memory that sprang to mind: the two of us half-formed, trembling in the rain, our ambitions no greater than to be the best among a group of thirty or so.

Who can make sense of it?

S
peaking of running, and getting back, for a moment, to the creation of superhumans via nonorganic enhancement—imagine a time when an athlete whose lower legs were amputated when he was one could be banned from international competition because he had an
advantage
over whole-bodied competitors.

And then imagine no longer, because this very thing happened, way back in 2008.

His name is Oscar Pistorius. He was born without bones in his lower legs. Now he runs on prosthetics called ‘Cheetah Flex-Feet.' In terms of mechanics, these are simple devices, J-shaped blades of taut carbon fiber that act as springs. We're not talking bionics, here, or even robotics. There are no moving parts. There aren't even joints. But the Cheetah Flex-Feet are, nonetheless, a triumph of engineering. So much so that they earned Oscar Pistorius a ban from the IAAF, who cited their belief that because of his prosthetics, Pistorius uses less oxygen and fewer calories than whole-bodied athletes traveling the same speed. The Flex-Feet also earned him, tellingly I think, the label of ‘pioneer on the posthuman frontier' from a bioethics think tank at Johns Hopkins. For the purpose of running 200 meters as fast as possible, the Cheetah Flex-Feet are superior to the lower legs you and I were born with.

What's more, they point the way to the future. Listen to Hugh Herr, a scientist at MIT and friend of Oscar Pistorius: ‘We're going to see a point in this century when the running times, the jumping heights, in the Paralympics, are all superior to the Olympics. The Paralympics won't constrain technological development. So what's going to happen is the Paralympics will be this exciting human-machine sport like race-car driving. It will make normal human bodies seem very boring.'

I
hadn't anticipated how angry everyone would be.

In retrospect it's more than a little ridiculous, that I thought I could fake my death without anybody getting pissed off when the ruse was up.

First there was Dwayne, punching me in the mouth at Logan.

My mother was furious as well, angry to a degree I didn't know she was capable of. I would have expected her to come to the airport on my arrival from Egypt, to insist on it even though Dwayne would be there to drive me back home, but no. She did not come, and for more than a week after I returned she let my calls go to voicemail, and did not answer her door when I knocked on it.

Eventually she relented, of course, and when she did her tears were copious, her embrace fierce as ever.

Still, if my mother were that angry with me, what could I expect from the rest of the world?

Many of the hundreds of thousands who'd bought Emma's book, upon learning that I was actually alive and well and returned now to the United States, felt as though they had been misled. No, not misled: lied to. In a world that had taken God from them and replaced Him with talk of nucleic acids, pilfered from them the rush and hum of love and replaced it with explanations of brain chemistry, they felt robbed of the one thing that they'd ever been able to bring themselves to believe in with their guts and hearts as well as their brains. And as a consequence, they became angry as hell.

Maybe rightly so. Maybe it wasn't at all unreasonable for them to wish I'd stayed dead. Maybe it was even okay for the angriest among them to threaten to make me dead again, this time for good.

Because really, what have I done for anyone other than myself? I wrote down some words. That was it. Look at my apolitics. Look at how I squander my wealth. Witness the uselessness of my profession, the inward focus of my one talent, and look how devoted to it I was, to the exclusion of all else. If no man is an island, I am at least an isthmus. Being dead is clearly the best thing I've ever done for the world. Maybe I should have stayed that way.

W
hich highlights another unfortunate aspect of Hankie being gone: he, among all the people I knew, would have been the only one to find me faking my death funny. He would have thought it hilarious, in fact. Had he still been alive, he would have bought me a beer by way of thanks and congratulations. He would have thumbed his nose at the people who didn't get it, the thousands demanding (and receiving) refunds from my publisher when they learned I was alive. He would have strode unrepentant beside me, his shitkickers clopping the sidewalk, and when the haters got in my face he would have shoved them aside, told them to fuck themselves with their mothers' dicks, would have done for me what I could not, in his absence, do for myself.

A
s it stood, though, with Hankie buried for real and no one else willing to defend me, I played the penitent and came by it honestly, hung my head, received spit on one cheek and turned the other for the slap, sought out and read every word of vitriol, accepted every media request and sat patiently through eviscerations in newsprint, on television, in podcast, on glossy page.

More than one interviewer, hot with the righteous anger of multitudes, shoved photos of suicides inspired by the book in my face and asked me what these people had died for, now that the world knew the example they'd followed had been a sham.

This was one of several questions, repeated over and over, for which I had no answer. And when I had no answer I simply looked at my feet and waited. There was nothing to say that would be equal to the loss, and thus there was no point in offering regret, or pleading that there was no way for me to know the book would be published in the first place, let alone have the sort of hypnotizing and tragic effect that it had.

So instead of talking I stared at the floor, and hoped people did not mistake my silence for indifference. And though I agonized, I did not ever wish for it to be done, which was fortunate, because it seemed America's appetite for celebrity was matched only by its appetite for punishment, and the hits, as the deejay said, just kept on coming.