ESSENCES
I’ll tellya,” said Dr. Montrose as solemnly dictatorial as Tupin talking about the ex-/future Russian empire, “We can take your brain, enclose it in a life-support system, no eyes, tongue, taste, ears....just the brain itself, no present or future, just memory/dreams...”
Albrecht suddenly getting all teary-eyed sentimental, “Fall along the Seine,boating up the Thames,visiting Glenna in Carpinteria....”
“Carpinter-what? What are you talking about?”
“Carpinteria, she and her husband have this place on the California coast. In love for fifty years but we never touched each other, a portrait of her over the fireplace when she was fifteen, like a blonde water lily in a blue dress...”
Dr. Montrose smiles.
“I like that. That was at seventeen.Now what’s she like fifty years later?”
“Not fifty years later, sixty seven years later. She’s seventy-two...”
2.
“Maybe we could put her brain next to yours. If there were some way to connect them...”
“How long will it last? I mean the brain, our brains?”
“It’s hard to say , out of the body and all, all kinds of revivifying agents. I spent twenty years in Santiago de Chile in Ecuador in the mountains where living to a hundred and twenty was very common.You know, the Apples of Immortality, Wagner’s Freya...”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I just hope I do. Our swine have done beautifully, our pheasants and dogs...”
“You mean I can be immortal? Immortal in a hospital.”
“2010, 2050, 2100...will there be any hospitals left? What I’m thinking about first is hospitalization-stabilization, then, what’s her name, Amy, your M.D. wife’s daughter in Kansas City, your wife’s not going to be around very long I guess, she oughta be here today, but your daughter....you can be a living heirloom in her home in Kansas City..and then her daughter or son....nothing wrong with being a living heirloom...”
“And power outages?”
3.
“We can build in a self-generator, just small technical details.”
“Generation after generation after generation?”
“As long as you last...although maybe you’re rather have your wife’s brain next to you instead of Glenna’s. Or maybe both of them. A menage a trois....I’ve been so boringly one wife, one life....”
“But how will you know when I’m gone?”
“All kinds of built-in alarm systems.”
“But, really, what if my cancers got into my brain?”
“I doubt they will...without the rest of your body, no cancinogenic stimuli. Of course there’s bound to be some degeneration, but I’m not promising immortality, just extended mortality.”
“I keep thinking of Glenna out in Santa Barbara. Couldn’t you attach our brains to computerized bodies, or even bodyless just attach us so we can dream together?”
“Not ready for that yet. We’re not ready for other solar systems yet, some day, perhaps but....you can dream about her all you want for as long as you’ve got....”
“You should have seen that portrait of her as a young sylph!And the years of daily e-mails, soul-mates, that’s what she
4.
always called us, what she always wrote about. I’d fly out to see her every once in a while, was good pals with her husband too, and when he died I wanted to just go out there and be with her full-time...”
“And what happened?”
“I don’t know. She’s like all my old -- and I mean OLD -- friends. All she thinks about is death. Like she’s already dead.
“So you don’t want a menage a troi brain-triangle, three brains next to each other, maybe, just maybe even connected.”
Albrecht gets up, leaning on his cane. It’s a real struggle; he’s almost tottering over to his doom, one big bang on his drum-hed and that’s the end of Symphony Number End.
“So what’s going on?”
“Going out. Ça sufit. I’d rather just die. The idea of an eternity, even an extra ten or twenty years thinking about, dreaming about the Ile San Luis, Gretta, when I was twenty, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence at twenty-one, Dolores Volini at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, box seats, Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme by Paganinni, my grandmother’s potato pancakes around Christmas/Chanaka, my Brazilian wife’s ankles the first night I saw her, Glenna and her
5.
patté and whole wheat crackers, deers in the driveway, the first snow, Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, Dietrich in Kismet, those golden legs...”
“I think you might need some counselling...maybe I should call...”
“Call this!”
Threatening to hit in on his conker with his cane, “Wiedersehen, Adios, Adieu...why didn’t my grandmother teach me more Czech...”
The doctor turns, let’s him go, turns himself and goes back into his office and turns on his eMac. Internet Search...then turns it off, puts on his coat, there’s this great German bar down the street. No Chinese additives, just genius killer Deutschland stuff. Hesitates. Waits until Mr. Battercane gets in the elevator and goes down, down, hopefully forever, down.....
HUGH FOX
Most of Fox's 110 published books are poetry, although he is also a novelist, critic and quite by accident (having married a Peruvian back in 1955 and starting to visit all the pre-Columbian ruins in the Americas and beginning to see things that no one had ever seen before, like Phoenician writing on Peruvian Indian pots) an archaeologist. His latest book is THE COLLECTED POETRY OF HUGH FOX (540 pages) from WorldAudience in NYC. Still 34 unpublished novels on his shelves.
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