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Article Excerpt
I WOULD LIKE TO SLEEP NOW. I would. I've told them this, they've asked, they're interested in how I'm feeling, every time they ask, I tell them, "I would like to sleep now." I find myself emphasizing different words whenever I say it. I would like to sleep now. I would like to sleep now. They hang on everything I say. I would like to sleep now. I have little else to say to them any more, so I say it often. I would like to sleep now. They seem never to tire of hearing me say it. I would like to sleep now.
They listen attentively, but, then, every sound I make fascinates them, every move I make, every gesture. Each throb of cardiac muscle, each rippling contraction of intestine, is miraculous anyway. That the reanimated meat also possesses desires and can actually express them in words is almost more than they dared expect, though certainly not more than they hoped. That, after all, was the point. They may once have had their doubts, but now they have me.
So I keep them riveted to their monitoring devices. There must be monitoring devices everywhere within the walls of my quarters. Perhaps even within my own body, too. My own body, spying on me, getting even with me for the violence I did to it. Getting back at me and getting away with it, too. "Well," it would say (ah, sweet dualism!), "you can't be trusted, you know."
But, this matter of sleep. Early on, I complained to my chief tormentor, Kawanishi. You should consider yourself lucky, Kawanishi said, the average person sleeps away a third of his life.
I have no life to sleep away, I said.
Well, in the event, you no longer require sleep.
Doctor, require has nothing to do with it. I want to sleep.
He said, The sleep center of your brain no longer functions. For all practical purposes, it was destroyed.
Much more of my brain than that was destroyed, in fact, but this man claimed to have rebuilt much with cultures. I told him, People have to dream. They go crazy if they don't.
Do you feel, he asked me, as though (and he grimaced, he hates it when I force him to use unscientific terms) you are going crazy?
Going, I said, going, I told him, gone!
But you are doing so well.
Not bad for a zombie.
He shook his head and said, firmly, Your heart rate is excellent. Your stools are firm. Some of our subjects show strong reactions to cryoprotectants, but not you.
Kawanishi is and always has been primarily, almost exclusively, interested in the mechanical end of things, and so he lets on that, as far as he's concerned, he's done his job. I like to believe, have to believe, that the fact I may indeed be insane bothers him. After all, his process is useless if it drives its subject mad.
And if he doesn't have his doubts, why would I spend so much time talking to his colleague Barnes? Barnes is the psychiatrist, and one effect of Kawanishi's handiwork particularly fascinates her.
What scientist ever bothered to explain anything to his laboratory animals? How they found me, why they chose me, what they did to capture the I of me and thrust it back into the meticulously repaired and miraculously revitalized it of me--mysteries, mysteries all. I awoke cold and in the worst pain I'd ever known. I awoke to chaos. My subconscious self had emerged from its murky sea depths and cleanly fused itself to my conscious self. I was seamless ego from forebrain to pituitary gland. Everything was there, memories, shadows, ghosts. Who would have thought that resurrecting one person could call back so many others? Who would have thought that I of all people should be so lucky as to be reunited with my lost ones in the next life?
When I could speak [many months after my awakening, and after much therapy), I said, I want it to end. I want oblivion and darkness and silence.
I'm afraid that what you want, Kawanishi replied, is of no consequence to me. There are bigger issues at stake here than what you want. Much bigger ones.
You've got no right to do this to me. I have a right to die and be left alone.
Kawanishi shrugged that off, but later the same day I received an unexpected visit from a stranger...
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