Mindscan

3

My mother was now sixty-six. In the almost three decades since Dad had been institutionalized, she had never remarried. Of course, it wasn’t as though Dad was dead.

Or maybe it was.

I saw my mother once a week, on Monday afternoons. Occasionally, I’d see her more often: Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas. But our regular get-togethers were Mondays at 2:00 p.m.

They were not joyous occasions.

My fingerprint let me into the house I’d grown up in, right on the lake. It had been worth a lot when I was a teenager; now, it was worth a fortune. Toronto was like a black hole, gobbling up everything that fell into its event horizon. It had grown hugely three years before I was born, when five surrounding municipalities had become part of it. Now it had grown even more, swallowing all the other adjoining cities and towns, becoming a behemoth of eight million people. My parents’ house wasn’t in a suburb anymore; it was in the heart of the continuous downtown that started with the CN Tower and continued along the lakeshore for fifty kilometers in either direction.

It was hard coming through the house’s entryway into the marble foyer. The door to my father’s den was on the right and my mother, even after all these years, had left it untouched. I always tried not to look through the open door; I always failed. The teak desk was still there; so was the black leather swivel chair.

It wasn’t just sadness I felt; it was guilt. I’d never told my mother that Dad and I were arguing when he collapsed. I hadn’t actually lied to her—I’m a terrible liar—but she’d assumed I must have heard him fall and come running, and, well, it was not as if he could contradict me. I could have dealt with her anger over the fake ID; I couldn’t deal with her looking at me and thinking I’d been responsible for what had happened to the man she was devoted to.

“Hello, Mr. Sullivan,” said Hannah, emerging from the kitchen. Hannah, about my own age, was my mother’s live-in housekeeper.

“Hi, Hannah,” I said. Normally, I told everyone to call me by my first name, but I’d never taken that step with Hannah—because of our similarities in age, she seemed too much like the dutiful sister doing what I should be doing, looking after my mother. “How is she?”

Hannah had soft features and small eyes; she looked like the kind of person who’d have been pleasantly plump in the days before drugs had eliminated obesity—at least there had been some real cures for things in the last twenty-seven years. “Not too bad, Mr. Sullivan. I served her lunch about an hour ago, and she ate most of it.”

I nodded and continued along the corridor. The house was elegant; I hadn’t understood that when I was a kid, but I did now: the hallway was paneled in dark wood, and little marble statues were set into recessed niches, with fancy brass lights pointing at them.

“Hey, Mom,” I called out, as I reached the bottom of the curving oak staircase.

“I’ll be down in a second,” she replied from upstairs. I nodded. I headed into the living room, which was sunken and had bay windows overlooking the lake.

A few minutes later, my mother appeared. She was dressed, as she always was for these trips, in one of the blouses she used to wear back in 2018. She knew her face had changed, and even with a nip here and a tuck mere, she still wasn’t immediately recognizable as the woman she’d been in her late thirties; I guess she felt the old clothes might help.

We got into my car, a green Toshiba Deela, and drove the twenty kilometers north to Brampton, where the Institute was located. It was, of course, the best care that money could buy: a large, treed lot, with a modern, central structure that looked more like a resort hotel than a hospital; maybe they’d used the same architect Immortex had for High Eden. It was a fine summer’s afternoon, and several—patients? residents?—were outdoors in wheelchairs, each accompanied by an attendant.

My father was not among them.

We entered the lobby. The guard—black, bald, bearded—knew us, and we exchanged pleasantries, and then my mother and I headed up to Dad’s room, on the second floor.

They moved him around, to avoid bedsores and other problems. Sometimes we found him lying down; sometimes he was gently strapped into a wheelchair; sometimes, they even had him strapped to a board that held him vertically.

Today, he was in bed. He rolled his head, looked at Mother, looked at me. He was aware of his surroundings, but that was about it. The doctors said he had the mind of an infant.

He’d changed a lot since that day. His hair was white now, and, of course, he had the wrinkled countenance of a man of sixty-six; no point in cosmetic surgery here. His long limbs were thin and untoned; despite electrical and occasional manual stimulation, there was no way to keep them muscular without real physical activity.

“Hello, Cliff,” my mother said, and she paused. She always paused, and it broke my heart each time. She was waiting for a reply that would never come.

Mom had lots of little rituals for these visits. She told my father what had happened in the last week, and how the Blue Jays were doing—I’d gotten my love of baseball from my dad. She sat in a chair next to his bed, and held his left hand in her right one. His fingers always closed reflexively around my mother’s. No one had removed the gold wedding band from his hand, and my mother still wore hers.

Me, I didn’t say much. I just stared at him—at it, really, a shell, a body without much of a mind, lying there, looking at my mother, his mouth quirking occasionally into what might have been the seed of a smile or frown, or might have just been random movements. As she spoke, he made occasional sounds—he’d have been making little gurgles if she wasn’t speaking, too.

My own personal sword of Damocles. I was now five years older than my dad had been when the blood vessels in his brain had ruptured, washing away his intelligence and personality, his joy and his anger, in a tide of red. There was a digital clock on the wall of his room, showing the time in bright numerals. Thank God clocks didn’t tick anymore.

When my mother was done talking at my father, she rose from the chair and said, “All right.”

Normally, I just dropped her off at her house on my way back into the city, but I didn’t want to do this in the car. “Sit down, Mom,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you.” She looked surprised, but did so. There was only one chair in my father’s room here at the Institute, and, as I’d asked, she took it. I propped myself against a bureau on the opposite side of the room and looked at her.

“Yes?” she said. There was a hint of defiance in her voice, and I flashed back. Once before, I’d broached the topic of how futile it was to come here each week, how my father didn’t even really know we were here. She’d been furious, and had verbally slapped me down in a way she hadn’t since I was a kid. Clearly, she was expecting a repeat of that argument.

I took in air, let it out slowly, and spoke. “I’m—I don’t know if you’ve heard of it or not, but there’s this process they’ve got now. It’s been covered on all the news shows…” I trailed off, as if I’d given her enough clues to guess what I was talking about. “It’s by a company called Immortex. They transfer a person’s consciousness into an artificial body.”

She looked at me silently.

I continued. “And, well, I’m going to do it.”

Mom spoke slowly, as if digesting the idea a word at a time. “You’re going to … transfer your … your consciousness…”

“That’s right.”

“Into a … an … artificial body.”

“Yes.”

She said nothing more, and, just like when I was a little kid, I felt a need to fill the void, to explain myself. “My body’s no good—you know that. It’s almost certainly going to kill me”—if I’m lucky, I thought—“or I’ll end up like Dad. I’m doomed if I stay in this…” I laid a splayed hand over my chest, sought a word “…this shell.”

“Does it work?” she asked. “This process—does it really work?”

I smiled my best reassuring smile. “Yes.”

She looked over at her husband, and the anxious expression on her face was heartbreaking. “Could they … could Cliff…”

Oh, Christ, what a moron I am. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she would connect this to Dad. “No,” I said. “No, they copy the mind as it is. They can’t … they can’t undo…”

She took a deep breath, clearly trying to calm herself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was some way, but…”

She nodded.

“But they can do something for me—before it’s too late.”

“So, they move … they move your soul?”

I looked at my mother, totally surprised. Maybe that’s why she still came to visit Dad—she thought, somewhere under all the damage, his soul was still there.

I’d read so much about this, and wanted to tell it all to her, make her see. Before the twentieth century, people had believed there was an elan vital—a life force, some special ingredient that distinguished living matter from regular stuff. But as biologists and chemists found mundane natural explanations for every aspect of life, the notion of an elan vital had been discarded as superfluous.

But the idea that there was an ineffable something that composes mind—a soul, a spirit, a divine spark, call it what you will—still persisted in the popular imagination in some places, even though science could now explain almost every aspect of brain activity without recourse to anything but fully understood physics and chemistry; my mother’s invocation of a soul was as silly as trying to cling to the notion of an elan vital.

But to tell her that was to tell her that her husband was totally, irretrievably gone. Of course, maybe it would be a kindness to make her understand that. But I didn’t have it in my heart to be that kind.

“No,” I said, “they don’t move your soul. They just copy the patterns that compose your consciousness.”

“Copy? Then what happens to the original?”

“They—see, you transfer the legal rights of personhood to the copy. And then, after that, the biological you has to retire from society.”

“Retire where?”

“It’s called High Eden.”

“Where’s that?”

I wished there was some other way to say it. “On the moon.”

“The moon!”

“The far side of the moon, yes.”

She shook her head. “When would you do this?”

“Soon,” I said. “Very soon. I just—I just can’t take it any longer. Being afraid if I sneeze or bend over or do nothing at all that I might end up brain damaged or a quadriplegic or dead. It’s tearing me apart.”

She sighed, a long, whispery sound. “Come and say good-bye before you leave for the moon.”

“This is good-bye,” I said. “I’m going to have the process done tomorrow. But the new me will still come to visit regularly.”

My mother looked at her husband, then back at me. “The new you,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t take losing—”

She stopped herself, but I knew what she’d been going to say: “I can’t take losing the only other person in my life.”

“You’re not losing me,” I said. “I’ll still come to visit you.” I gestured at Dad, who gurgled, perhaps even in response. “I’ll still come to visit Dad.”

My mother shook her head slightly, unbelieving.

I drove sadly to my house in North York, thinking.

I hated seeing my mother like that. She’d put her whole life on hold, hoping that somehow my father would come back. Of course, she knew intellectually that the brain damage was permanent. But the intellect and the emotions don’t always end up in synch. In some ways, what had happened to my mother affected me more profoundly than what had happened to my father. She loved him the way I’d always hoped someone would love me.

And there was someone special in my life, a woman I cared about deeply, and who, I think, felt the same way about me. Rebecca Chong was forty-one, just a little younger than me. She was a bigwig at IBM Canada, worth a lot of money in her own right. We’d known each other for about five years, and saw each other often socially, although mostly with a few other friends. But there was always something special between just the two of us.

I remember the party last New Year’s Eve. Like many of our little group’s get-togethers, this one was held at Rebecca’s place, a luxury penthouse at Eglinton and Yonge. Rebecca loved to entertain, and her home was central for everyone in our group—and her building had direct access to the subway.

I always brought Rebecca flowers when I visited. She loved flowers, and I loved giving them to her. On New Year’s Eve, I took her a dozen red roses—I asked the guy in the flower shop to make sure the color was perfect, since I couldn’t tell myself. When I arrived, I gave Rebecca the flowers, and, as was our habit, we kissed on the lips. It wasn’t a long kiss—we were, at least overtly, just good friends—but it always attenuated a bit more than it needed to, our lips pressed against each other’s for a lingering few seconds.

I’d had lots of sex in my life, but those kisses truly excited me more. And yet—

And yet, Rebecca and I had never gone any further. Oh, her hand would occasionally rest on my arm, or even my thigh—gentle, warm touches in response to a joke or a comment or, sometimes, best of all, to nothing at all.

I did so want her, and I think—no, I knew: I did know it, beyond any doubt—that she wanted me, too.

But then…

But then I’d go with my mother to see my father again.

And it would break my heart. Not just because my mother’s life had been ruined by what had happened to him. But also because it was likely that I was going to have the same thing happen to me … and I couldn’t allow a situation to develop between Rebecca and me in which she’d end up like my mother, burdened with someone whose mind was damaged, having to put her own wonderful, vibrant life on hold to look after the husk of what had once been me.

Isn’t that what love’s all about, after all? Putting the needs of the other person before your own?

And yet, last New Year’s Eve, when the pot had been plentiful and the wine had been flowing freely, Rebecca and I had snuggled more than usual on the couch. Of course, midnight on New Year’s Eve is always special to me—it precisely marks my birthday, after all—but this one was fabulous. Our lips locked at the stroke of twelve, and we kept kissing and petting for long after that, and once Rebecca’s other guests all had left, we adjourned to her bedroom, and finally, after years of flirting and fantasizing, we made love.

It had been spectacular—everything I’d imagined it might be—kissing her, touching her, caressing her, being inside her. Even in January, Toronto is never that cold anymore, and we lay in each other’s arms with the bedroom window open, listening to the revelers on the street far, far below, and I for the first and only time in my life had some sense of what heaven must be like.

New Year’s Day this year had fallen on a Sunday. The next day, I’d gone with my mother to see my father, and it had been very much like this afternoon’s visit had been.

And even though, ever since January, I thought about Rebecca constantly, and wanted her more than I would have believed possible, I’d let things cool between us.

Because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Be more concerned about that other person’s happiness?

That’s what you’re supposed to do.