Jim Grimsley - Unbending Eye.pdf - Jim Grimsley - allforjesus2001

Unbending Eye by Jim Grimsley

Jim Grimsley tells us, "I'm working on a novel that carries forward characters from a couple of my stories

from Asimov's, "Into Greenwood" (September 2001) and "The 120 Hours of Sodom" (February 2005);

I'm not incorporating those stories into the book, but I am following the characters out of the stories into

the next phase of their lives. In May, I won an Academy Award in Literature from the American

Academy of Arts and Letters and in June I won a Lambda Award for my last novel, The Ordinary." He

returns to our pages with a philosophical look at what it means to be caught in the glare of the...

* * * *

Seeing Roger Dennis again at all was the surprise, much less finding him in a bar on Chartres Street that I

visited nearly every evening. I had heard he was dead some time ago. As I remembered the story, he

died suddenly in an emergency room in Canada after some kind of accident the details of which I had

forgotten, having listened at the time with only a polite modicum of attention, since I had not kept up with

Roger after college. Yet here he was in my neighborhood bar where I came most evenings after supper,

where the bartender had already seen me enter and poured out my favorite armagnac.

There was no mistaking Roger for anyone else. When I had known him in college, he possessed a

singular, odd beauty that drew others to him, the face of Helen but made masculine--pale blue eyes, dark

hair, lips like ripe fruit. We had shared a couple of classes in New Testament Greek. For a while I

studied vocabulary with him, and we debated pronunciation and drilled each other in the conjugation of

present tense verbs. In appearance he had aged since then, but not in such a way as to change him much.

So when I saw him sitting by the window on a stool I thought to myself, well, it must have been

somebody else who died, because here he is.

I took my brandy to join him, of course, thinking nothing peculiar, only that I ought to remember who told

me he was dead so that I could correct the misinformation. But when I approached, he looked up at me

and registered a jolt of shock; then he composed himself and greeted me with a handshake. But I could

see that my appearance had frightened him. We greeted each other and the fear passed, but after we had

spoken a few moments he began to glance at the window and then suggested we move to the back of the

bar, where there were a few stools in a shadowed corner. There he seemed more relaxed and we spoke

pleasantly on ordinary topics--what we had done since school, when we had last seen each other, the

pains we had shared translating passages from Paul's epistles. I sipped the armagnac and let my nostrils

linger in the rich aroma while he mentioned that he was looking to get out of the country on a ship here in

New Orleans but had not yet booked any passage. My family had any number of ships in port at the

moment, some cargo vessels with room for a few passengers, and when I mentioned this, his eyes lit up

and he nearly lunged toward me to take my arm. "I need to leave the country very quietly," he said, "can

you help me do that?"

I assured him that no one was in a better position to offer such help than I, and at his deep relief I was

struck by the strangeness of the situation--that here he was alive when I had heard otherwise, yes, very

much alive but needing to exit the country in secret. "Of course I'll help you," I said, "but you've made me

very curious. Not just this business." I waved my hand a bit, feeling the liquor, but instinctively I kept my

voice low. "I heard you were dead years ago."

He stared into his glass and said nothing.

"You must admit that it's very curious. And now here you are, wanting to sail away without a trace.

Unless it really wasn't you I heard about. Unless I'm mistaken, unless it was someone else."

Something narrowed in his gaze, as if he were coming suddenly to focus, all of him drawn to a point.

When he looked into my eyes I felt the gaze so far inside me that I shivered. "No," he said, "it was me

who died," and ordered another drink, and when it arrived he told me this story.

* * * *

I will begin, he said, with the last scene I remember before I died: I was looking up from the emergency

room examining table, listening to the doctor order a tomographic scan of my head, and somehow I

knew, I must have heard, the fact that I had been injured. I had fallen down steps, crashing head first

against a wall. I remember the fall only as a flash of something rushing toward me and a force on the top

of my head. Nausea rushed through me in the emergency room and I felt my head pounding and my

stomach heaved and someone propped me up and helped me to vomit and something split inside my

skull and everything after that was hazy.

I woke up in another room, lying with a sheet pulled over my face. The thought occurred to me that I

might be dead, in a morgue, maybe, and I lay there for a long time while a square of sunlight moved

slowly down my body. I lay still until the room began to get dark. Feeling as if I had been drugged. Near

sundown, for some reason the thought occurred to me that I should try to move, and I found I could

move and sat up and looked out the window. A view of pink light in the sky and the tops of some fir

trees, more tops of trees stretching away on all sides. Hill country.

While I was lying under the sheet I had thought vaguely I would find myself in a hospital but now I saw

quite clearly I was in some other kind of place. I was sitting on a hospital bed, it was true, and there was

some monitoring equipment beside me. On either side of my bed, rolling screens blocked my view. I sat

up and faced the window with the emptiness of the room behind me, all silence, a stillness that struck me

as eerie. My head began to throb.

When I touched my head I remembered that I had fallen and hurt myself but at this point my head had

been shaved and there was not a wound to be found on it. But still I had the pounding headache that was

the last thing I remembered, so I lay down again and the throbbing subsided. At the back of my head

something plucked at the fabric of the pillow and I touched the skin at the base of my skull--a small

round hardness there, not a blood clot but plastic, it felt, like the cap on a catheter. Worrying at it with

my finger, I lay quietly till my head stopped hurting and I could breathe calmly again.

Presently I smelled an odor in the room and slowly stood. Pervasive in the air, as if a gas had been

discharged. The doors and windows appeared to have been carefully sealed; the room had never been

designed as air-tight, but someone had attempted to make it so. The throbbing surged in my head but not

so fiercely this time, and soon subsided. A long narrow room, many beds, an aisle down the center, walls

of a nondescript brown tile. As I have been all my life, I was conscious then of the need to remain calm,

but for the first time, I reached a state of quietude without any effort, even as I surveyed the two rows of

beds, maybe twenty in all.

The beds were all separated by rolling screens, and each was attended by the same type of monitoring

equipment. On each of the beds lay a body, covered by the same sort of white sheet that I held to my

waist at the moment. As I walked slowly down the center aisle, I could make out the peak of each nose

cutting across each face. Perhaps, gazing at these bodies, I felt a bit colder, though only for a moment.

So I had been correct in my first impression. This was a morgue, apparently, since these people were all

dead.

The nearest of the bodies was a woman, perhaps in her late twenties, naked as I was, head shaven like

mine. Her body had no odor of decay, and she had died in rather good shape with no obvious wounds.

She was well preserved. When I laid my fingers between her breasts, the moist cleavage yielded no trace

of a heartbeat. The flesh was soft and slightly cool. I leaned close to her, and smelled a sweet aroma

rising out of her, the same over her head as over her torso, her feet. As if she had been dipped in a bath.

It occurred to me that she had died a beautiful woman. I say occurred to me because the thought did not

enter naturally, as it would have in the past. I gazed down at this woman, took the sheet off her, to see all

her nakedness at once. Feeling hardly anything at all.

Without hurry I examined all the bodies, uncovering their faces, their torsos, sometimes letting the sheet

drop to the floor beside the bed. Once, when I noted that the sheet covering a particular body was

completely white and clean, I exchanged it for my own, which was marred by several dull brown stains,

perhaps old blood stains that had been laundered many times but nevertheless remained clearly visible.

This left bare the fair-complexioned man whose grave I was, in a sense, robbing, his bronze fingers

curled gracefully against his thigh, soft, the shadow like a Chinese ideogram. I felt nothing for this man,

any more than I had for the lovely dead woman several beds away, and I was certain he no longer

minded much of anything, including the fact that I wanted his sheet.

Nineteen bodies I counted, ten female and nine male. All appeared approximately the same age, which

was approximately my age; all were in rather good physical condition, as I was; all had the same sweet

smell, except me, who smelled his own ordinary body odor. All had shaven heads.

I would not say I was surprised by any of this, but there was one thing more. I chose a young woman.

Whatever had been added to these bodies to preserve them in this way, with this light scent of roses, of

jasmine, of honeysuckle, had left the flesh soft, if cool, and rendered the joints limber, so that it was easy

to raise her head. I had expected some hindrance of rigor mortis and was relieved, though puzzled, for

she was clearly dead, but it was as though she had died only a moment ago.

At the back of her head, just at the base of her skull but slightly off center, a neat square in blue had been

tattooed onto the flesh and at the center of the square nested a small white cap. I could not remove the

cap in the one easy tug I gave it, and to do more seemed morbid.

Replacing her head gently on the bed, I covered her with the sheet again, and then, because I hardly

knew anything else to do, I replaced the sheets over all the bodies, till everything was just as it had been

before. As I was finishing this task, I heard a door open, followed by the sound of a number of people

entering. Overhead, rows of fluorescent lamps flooded the room with harsh light. Though I had been able

to see perfectly well without it, every detail.

I turned unhurriedly to face the people who were waiting, drawing the sheet more closely around me,

determined to make the best appearance possible. A group of men and women, dressed in dark suits or

lab coats, approached me. Now one of them stepped forward, an older woman with a long, crooked

nose, bad skin, a smell of too much powder, and she was raising her hands to greet me, to tell me what

had happened to me, but I was tired already.

* * * *

The doctors were very proud of their project, however, and so, after I had dressed in the awful clothes

they offered me, they took me to a conference room with all the latest electronic equipment, including a

projection screen that they could all write on at the same time, when they could get the electronic pens to

work. Video-conferencing cameras in the four corners of the room, in case they should need to video

conference with somebody, and microphones at each chair, small and round. So much extremely modern

equipment housed in what looked like an old hospital from the forties, plaster walls and tile wainscoting,

crank windows and steam radiator pipes. In the conference room they introduced themselves; there

were, I learned, five doctors and four security people, as they termed themselves. Their chief, the woman

who had spoken to me, introduced herself as Dr. Carla Lucas, and after we had been served coffee and

sweet doughnuts, nearly inedible, she proceeded to deliver a brief lecture on the nature and purpose of

this apparently dilapidated installation. Research into a means for suspending the effects of decay on

recently-deceased bodies, an attempt to extend the viability of the organs for transplant or other use. The

research was based on early success with the use of hyperoxigenated compounds injected into the

corpses of laboratory animals just after death. This had led them to an unexpected bit of serendipity:

certain laboratory mice when freshly dead and preserved in this way had actually come back to life when

stimulated internally with an electrical charge. The viable percentage had increased dramatically when a

preparation that included a massive number of fetal neural cells was injected directly into the brain of the

dead mouse, and when the mouse's tissues were kept under one and one-half atmospheres of pressure in

a mix of gases more rich in oxygen than the usual.

I endeavored to listen to the details but could not for the life of me take my eyes off the doctors, all of

whom were dressed in quite shabby clothes, tattered sleeves, and worn elbows, holes in the soles of their

shoes. The security people were also wearing really awful outfits, some sort of blend of fabrics that

ballooned out stiffly from the thighs, like jodhpurs. The doctors were endeavoring to convince me that

this research was being conducted by some branch of our Canadian government and the security people

were agreeing with this, but I had great difficulty believing that federal officials could be so badly dressed.

They looked as though they had all been hired by the local school board.

I should try to remember all of what they told me in this conference room because I have a feeling it was

important, but for the life of me, little of it made any impression on me whatsoever. I understood that they

were very excited by the fact that I was walking around, breathing, and that they meant to do a lot of

tests on me to make sure my body was functioning as it had before I died.

Dr. Lucas flashed on the screen a diagram of the human skull, and her hand hung slackly at the point at

the base of the skull labeled, "Point Alpha," with some attempt at grandeur. The researchers had injected

their neural stew into this point, and this had apparently jump-started the brain--my brain, she

meant--while at another insertion at Point Beta, into a vein in the chest near the heart, they injected a

small, ingeniously devised matrix of electrically charged proteins, a kind of organic lightning bolt, she said

(and had said this phrase many times before, I intuited, from her pleased expression). This biological

battery was designed to lodge along the heart wall and send electrical pulses through the muscle,

stimulating the heart to beat. As it had done, in my case. There was more, but I was never good with

very many polysyllables at once.

At a certain point the lecture stopped and they waited for something. I studied Point Alpha carefully, no

less expectant than they. After a moment, Dr. Lucas asked, "Do you have any questions, Mr. Dennis?"

They had been waiting for me. To show some interest. Smiling politely, I shook my head. "No."

The doctors all seemed mildly surprised, and the security people appeared particularly put out. Dr.

Lucas, however, gave me a patient, motherly look. As a scientist, she could afford to be generous to me,

a layman. "You have understood everything, just as I have explained?"

"Yes, you've been very clear."

She adjusted her reading glasses. "I'm glad to hear it. I was afraid my explanation was too technical."

Simply to reassure her, I said, "Oh no, you've been so helpful." I was sitting at the conference table,

trying to appear cheerful, but they were all watching me as if I were saying something wrong. "I suppose I

do have one question. How long has it been since I died?"

Dr. Lucas consulted with one of her colleagues, a man named Potter with a lot of papers and a palm

computer, who needed someone to repeat my name to him, and I heard it, my name, with such a curious

detachment. "Roger Dennis." After some checking he was able to announce, with complete satisfaction,

that I had been dead about two years, preserved by the hyperoxigenated refrigerant and held in a

hyperbaric chamber till the recent procedure had been performed, the various injections in the

oxygen-rich gas, which had proven so successful.

"We can't preserve a body much longer than two years, even with the gamma serum," Dr. Potter

continued, "so it was a good thing for you we were ready."

"I was getting a little ripe, was I?"

He tittered nervously, and they all looked at one another, as if they wanted to laugh but were uncertain.

Dr. Lucas still smiled at me, but I detected a rising level of discomfort in her stiff expression. "I must say,

I find your reaction to all this to be very unexpected."

"My reaction?"

"You hardly show any surprise at all. And yet you're alive again, after dying."

"Well, I don't remember much about being dead."

They laughed a bit at that, then the room got silent. Dr. Lucas was still watching me. To console herself,

she entered into another long explanation, about the need for further tests, for, as it turned out, they were

puzzled by the fact that I was the only one of the twenty dead people to wake up. "Dead subjects," as

she termed them. So many more tests would be needed on me, and on the failures as well, and she

hoped I would be willing to undergo them. "We have a mission, now that we know our technique can be

successful. We need to know why it is that you've come back to life, the only one of twenty."

"But have I come back to that?" I asked.

Poor dears, all puzzled again. I should not have been so smug, I suppose; it would haunt me later.

"Back to what?" Dr. Lucas asked.

"To life. I only mean to ask if you're sure that's what this is."

* * * *

My question hardly ruffled them, I think, though it would echo for a while. The philosophical

underpinnings of our situation never interested them, that I could detect, then or later. We were finished

with the briefing, I could go. One of the doctors conducted me to my rooms, which were actually rather

pleasant, if nondescript. A small bedroom adjoined a small sitting room, with a bathroom tucked

between. Windows with old fashioned, and rather yellowed, venetian blinds. Clean down to the last

corner, a state so conspicuous I wondered if they were worried I might be susceptible to bacteria or

contagion, me in my freshly dead state. Or post-dead, rather.

Dr. Potter stopped by to suggest that I rest, as in the morning I would be having several imaging studies,

under the supervision of Dr. Lucas herself. He asked me some questions, took my vital signs, noted the

strength of my reflexes, all the while making neat notations into his computer. Dr. Potter expressed his

hope that I understood the importance of the work in which he and his colleagues were engaged.

"I believe I am engaged in it, too," I said.

"What? You are, of course, you are. And you play the most vital role of all. One might say that, even."

"I believe you could say that."

He lingered another moment and finally came to the point. "Do you remember your past life? Do you

know who you were?"

"I was--I suppose I am--Roger Dennis, a systems analyst for a small software company in Montreal. Is

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