Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (19 page)

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 or, even better, hedroprofin, the swelling will be contained. But I wouldn't if 3

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?"