Authors: Jennifer Pelland
“From what little I’ve seen of it, it doesn’t seem to have been particularly accurate. It didn’t even get my name right.” Joseph walked to the nearest wall and said, “Computer, please put me through to Giancarla Baratella’s office.”
A moment later, Giancarla’s face filled the wall. “Joseph, what… Oh, you have company. What happened to him?”
“I, um…”
She held three of her hands up. “Say no more. So, I take it Jean-Pierre needs my help.”
“Yes.”
“Are we talking about setting his broken nose, or—”
“He needs to be able to support himself.” Joseph knew far too well how impossible it was to make a living in that body. His only options had been exhibition and charity. Jean-Pierre had already used up his exhibition time, so all he had left was this act of charity.
Besides, if modern medicine could give people extra arms, surely it could give his old body some relief.
“Ah. Yes. Hmm.” Giancarla turned away and said, “Computer, give me complete information on the body of Joseph Merrick.”
It flashed an image of a tall, slender, brown man.
“No, the body he was born in.”
The image was replaced with the one that Joseph knew all too well.
“Neurofibromatosis
and
Proteus Syndrome. Well, your body certainly was a deformity overachiever. Jean-Pierre, why on earth didn’t you have these switched off?”
“I didn’t want a static body. That would have been boring.”
Giancarla sighed. “Jean-Pierre, if there’s ever a prize for stupidity, I’m nominating you for it. Deformity is not something to be left unsupervised.” She turned back to the image. “Well, the neurofibromatosis should be fairly easy to switch off, but the Proteus will be a tricky one. The only cure on record is not letting a fetus with its gene markers be born.” She studied the image further, having the computer rotate it so she could view it from all angles. “The skin growths will be easy to take care of. Computer, show skeleton.”
Joseph staggered back. The skull that stared back at him looked like the face of a demon. That’s what had been lurking just under his skin? Good God.
“Now this is the challenge,” Giancarla said. She zoomed in on his skull, and Joseph looked away. “I’ve never seen natural bone growth like this. It’s…well, frankly, it’s horrifying.”
He peeked back, shielding the view with his hand, carefully looking only at her, at the concern marring her bizarre features.
Well, at least she finally recognized his former body for what it was.
She shook her head. “Jean-Pierre, you had no idea what you were getting yourself into, did you?”
“Obviously not,” he slurred.
“This is barbarous. This is precisely why we’ve been so careful to maintain the integrity of the dome. Just knowing that the human body can do this to itself…” She switched off the image, and Joseph let out a pent-up breath and dropped his hand. “I can make the body livable. It’ll take some work, but I can do it.”
“Can you make it look as it would have looked had I been born healthy?” Joseph asked.
“Absolutely. Computer, simulate this body’s appearance without either Proteus or neurofibromatosis.”
The face staring back at him looked exactly like the face from his New York fantasy world.
“Will you look at that,” Giancarla said. “Jean-Pierre actually got something right. Now mind you, unless I can engineer a cure for Proteus, there’ll be more corrective surgeries in that body’s future. They’ll be minor—a tweak here, a tweak there. He’ll probably be in surgery less than most of my clients are. But I assume you’ll want him to pay for his own upkeep, yes?”
Joseph looked down at Jean-Pierre, at the man wearing the body that God had seen fit to give Joseph. It could be fixed. It could be made human.
God had never seen fit to fix him.
Or maybe God was the one who had arranged for him to be brought to this future for the cure.
That body was a horrible, hateful thing. It had given him nothing but anguish all his life.
Could he bear to have someone else live in it once it was made whole?
With his back to Giancarla’s image, he asked, “How long will it take to do the procedure?”
“This is going to take a lot of careful sculpting. I’m used to working with planned deformations—no one’s worked with chaotic, natural deformity in decades. Still, if I get the bots in on it and call in some assistance, I can probably complete the job in one marathon session.”
“Do it,” he said. “All at once. Whatever it costs.”
“Thank you,” Jean-Pierre sighed.
“And give him this body back.”
He looked down at Jean-Pierre’s startled eyes,
his
eyes, and saw twenty-eight years of unfulfilled dreams reflected back at him.
He couldn’t let someone else wear that body once they were fulfilled. He couldn’t let someone else become the man he should have been.
From the wall, Giancarla said, “I thought you said that was out of the question.”
Joseph turned, advanced on her image, and said, “You have to guarantee that I won’t wake up until the body’s been made completely normal.”
“After all this, you still think of it as yours.”
“Of course.”
“I will never understand you bring-forwards, but that’s what makes you so much fun.” Giancarla’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, you have my promise that you won’t wake up until it’s cured. Well, I have a very complicated sculpt to plan, so if you’ll excuse me—” The wall went blank.
Joseph took in a deep breath, then let it slowly pour out of him. Soon, the worst would be over. There was just one last thing to do to set everything right. He turned to Jean-Pierre and said, “We need to make a public statement.”
Jean-Pierre cocked his massive head to the side. “And pray tell, why?”
“You and I are going to make sure that every bored, wealthy person in this dome knows that you had to come begging to me to be let out of my body. This must never, ever happen again.”
He shrugged. “Fine, if that’s your price.”
“It is,” Joseph said. “Once that’s taken care of, we’ll be even. What do you think about doing it at the Alamo? The historical significance—”
“Of a doomed last stand?” Jean-Pierre chuckled. “Brilliant.”
“Perhaps it was doomed,” Joseph said, “but it was never forgotten.”
Jean-Pierre fell silent for a moment, then said, “Can I eat something first? I’m starving.”
Joseph dug through the kitchen cabinets until he found something soft, and when Jean-Pierre was done, Joseph held out his hand, helped that body to its feet, and gave it his arm.
Time to make that last stand, doomed or no.
It would be difficult, but then again, he’d been through so much harder.
Notes on “The Last Stand of the Elephant Man”
I remember reading about Joseph Merrick as a child, and seeing the movie (the one that got his name wrong) when I was in my teens, but I didn’t see a close-up of his face until quite recently. In that close-up, the space around his left eye was almost completely untouched by his deformity, and I saw his humanity shining through that prison of protruding flesh and twisted bone. I had to save him. Only he’d been dead for nearly one hundred years. So all I could do was save him in prose.
This story was helped immensely by an email conversation I had with my friend Morgan MacLeod on the realities of living with physical disabilities, especially physical disabilities that worsen with age.
STEVE, THE MOST INCREDIBLE THING just happened.
A thud jarred Stephen back to the present, and he looked up to see one of the protesters pressed against the windshield, pounding her “Give Back the Oceans” sign against the glass. “Have her tell them to give us more time!” she cried. “Make sure they know what’s at stake!”
An MP pried the woman off of the hood while others struggled to hold back the protesting crowd.
Three years ago, Suze would have been out there with them, her “Save the Whales” sign hoisted high. And he would have been right next to her. She’d had such passion for the cause. He’d so loved seeing the whales through her eyes.
The funding—it’s come through. We’re going to do this. I’m going to do this.
So much had changed since then.
The MPs managed to get the crowd back under control long enough for Stephen’s escort to drive him through the gates of the military hospital.
As usual, Lieutenant Guerrero was waiting for him at the door. “There was another series of attacks overnight, and a massive beaching just an hour ago. She’s not doing well.”
Of course I know what I’m getting myself into. There’s no way I’m sitting back and letting someone else have all the fun. Besides, the worst case scenario is that the procedure doesn’t work.
“The vote should be in soon,” Guerrero continued. “General Krueger will stop by your wife’s room to deliver the outcome personally. And no matter how the vote goes, the U.S. government will continue to protect and care for Ms. Murphy. You have our word on that.”
“All this fuss for one cetacean biologist,” Stephen murmured.
“Your wife is a patriot. If it weren’t for her, we never would have known why they were attacking.”
With brains that big, the songs have to mean something.
If it weren’t for her, they wouldn’t have attacked in the first place.
As Stephen walked through the swinging doors to Suze’s ward, he could hear her keening, voice hoarse with exhaustion.
“She’s been like that for hours,” Guerrero said. “But they wanted to let you have some time with her before sedating her.”
If this works, the whole world is going to change overnight. Just think about what it’ll be like to live on a planet where we’re not the only species with language. I wonder what they’re saying? I can’t wait to find out.
They stopped outside the door to his wife’s room, and Stephen pressed one hand against it, feeling the metal vibrate against his skin from the sheer vocal force of Suze’s agony.
The procedure worked, Steve. They played me a tape of blue whale songs. I understood every word.
He heard Suze gasp for breath and turned the knob.
My god, it’s horrible.
“Hey, baby,” he said, putting on his biggest smile, trying to find the woman he loved in the bones and sinews and hollows strapped to the hospital bed. He leaned forward, smoothed the back of his hand over her papery cheek, and placed a gentle kiss on her forehead.
She looked up at him with eyes that focused somewhere far away and began to sob.
They were content just to swim and sing until they saw us on the water, until they saw what we could do, what we could make. Can you imagine, Steve? Can you imagine possessing an intelligence so great and old, and watching helplessly from beneath the waves as tiny, upstart apes used their thumbs and fire to take over the world?
Dr. Hanlan put down her clipboard and waved the MPs out of the room. When the door had closed behind them, she said, “More of the same, I’m afraid.”
Stephen clasped one of Suze’s shackled hands and stared down at the ruin of her face, at the scars from the gouges she’d rent in her cheeks back before the days of constant restraints, at the lower lip that she’d chewed nearly all the way off before they’d fitted her with a bit, then removed her teeth altogether.
The hunting—it didn’t bother them so much at first. They understood the need to eat. But when the slaughter started, when we started killing them by the thousands… And then we started treating their oceans as a dumping ground… And then we deafened them with our sonar… They didn’t understand how we could do that to another intelligent species.
“Do you know when the vote’s supposed to come in?”
Dr. Hanlan shook her head. “Sorry. They don’t tell me these things.”
“God, I can’t wait for this to be over.”
“You’re that sure of the outcome?”
He gave Suze’s hand a gentle squeeze, and she moaned and babbled something that he pretended was his name. “No.”
I can still hear them, Steve. Their songs travel to me through the water. They know they have someone who understands them. They know we can’t pretend they’re just animals anymore. They know we can help them. They know we can even the odds. I just…I just don’t know how.
Stephen closed his eyes and tilted his face toward the weak sunlight straining through the curtained window. This room was his wife’s sanctuary, her prison. There were no non-essential fluids present in the room. She was given dry baths, her saline drip contained only a few grams of liquid at a time, her wastes were carried away immediately. These measures helped turn down the volume a little, but that was all. Suze’s human body was primarily made up of water, and that was enough to keep the constant connection alive.
They’re so loud. I just…I need a little break. Why can’t they let me have a little break?
“Mr. Murphy, we need to discuss what to do once the vote comes in.”
He opened his eyes again and wiped the tears from Suze’s face, if only to make it harder for them to torment her. “I’m not willing to lobotomize her.”
“It’s not a suggestion I’m making lightly. But it’s something we need to keep on the table as a possible future option. It might give her some peace.”
“No. It’s out of the question.”
“All I ask is that you consider it if things don’t go your way. It would be cruel to leave her like this forever.”
Suze snuffled and tugged at her restraints. “It’s okay honey,” Stephen said, and rose from his chair just enough to kiss her on the temple. “I’m not giving up on you that easily.”
Another sob hitched in her throat, but she looked like she was too exhausted to do anything with it.
They were fine until they saw us. They were all fine—the blue whales, the belugas, the minkes, the sperm whales, the right whales… They were happy. They didn’t know. Not until we showed them the mastery and cruelty our little brains and even littler thumbs were capable of. They begged us to help, begged us to stop, but no one would listen. Centuries of begging… I’ll be their Prometheus. I’ll find a way. Then maybe they’ll let me sleep.