Something Wild is Loose, page 44
Fig. 7. The course of a patient who received antilymphocyte globulin (ALG) before and for the first four months after renal homotransplantation. The donor was an older brother. There was no early rejection. Prednisone therapy was started forty days postoperatively. Note the insidious onset of late rejection after cessation of globulin therapy. This was treated by a moderate increase in the maintenance doses of steroids. This delayed complication occurred in only two of the first twenty recipients of intrafamilial homografts who were treated with ALG. It has been seen with about the same low frequency in subsequent cases. (By permission of Surg. Gynec. Obstet. 126 (1968): p. 1023.)
So I went down to Transplant House today, right on schedule, to take my physical. A couple of my friends thought I was making a tactical mistake by reporting at all; if you’re going to resist, they said, resist at every point along the line. Make them drag you in for the physical. In purely idealistic (and ideological) terms I suppose they’re right. But there’s no need yet for me to start kicking up a fuss. Wait till they actually say, We need your kidney, young man. Then I can resist, if resistance is the course I ultimately choose. (Why am I wavering? Am I afraid of the damage to my career plans that resisting might do? Am I not entirely convinced of the injustice of the entire organ-draft system? I don’t know. I’m not even sure that I am wavering. Reporting for your physical isn’t really a sellout to the system.) I went, anyway. They tapped this and X-rayed that and peered into the other thing. Yawn, please. Bend over, please. Cough, please. Hold out your left arm, please. They marched me in front of a battery of diagnostat machines and I stood there hoping for the red light to flash—tilt, get out of here!—but I was, as expected, in perfect physical shape, and I qualified for call. Afterward I met Kate and we walked in the park and held hands and watched the glories of the sunset and discussed what I’ll do, when and if the call comes. If? Wishful thinking, boy!
If your number is called you become exempt from military ser- vice, and they credit you with a special $750 tax deduction every year. Big deal.
Another thing they’re very proud of is the program of voluntary donation of unpaired organs. This has nothing to do with the draft, which—thus far, at least—requisitions only paired organs, organs that can be spared without loss of life. For the last twelve years it’s been possible to walk into any hospital in the United States and sign a simple release form allowing the surgeons to slice you up. Eyes, lungs, heart, intestines, pancreas, liver, anything, you give it all to them. This process used to be known as suicide in a simpler era and it was socially disapproved of, especially in times of labor shortages. Now we have a labor surplus, because even though our population growth has been fairly slow since the middle of the century, the growth of labor-eliminating mechanical devices and processes has been quite rapid, even exponential. Therefore, to volunteer for this kind of total donation is considered a deed of the highest social utility, removing as it does a healthy young body from the overcrowded labor force and at the same time providing some elder statesman with the assurance that the supply of vital organs will not unduly diminish. Of course you have to be crazy to volunteer, but there’s never been any shortage of lunatics in our society.
If you’re not drafted by the age of twenty-one, through some lucky fluke, you’re safe. And a few of us do slip through the net, I’m told. So far there are more of us in the total draft pool than there are patients in need of transplants. But the ratios are changing rapidly. The draft legislation is still relatively new. Before long they’ll have drained the pool of eligible draftees, and then what? Birth rates nowadays are low; the supply of potential draftees is finite. But death rates are even lower; the demand for organs is essentially infinite. I can give you only one of my kidneys, if I am to survive; but you, as you live on and on, may require more than one kidney transplant. Some recipients may need five or six sets of kidneys or lungs before they finally get beyond hope of repair at age 170 or so. As those who’ve given organs come to requisition organs later on in life, the pressure on the under-21 group will get even greater. Those in need of transplants will come to outnumber those who can donate organs, and everybody in the pool will get clipped. And then? Well, they could lower the draft age to 17 or 16 or even 14. But even that’s only a short-term solution. Sooner or later, there won’t be enough spare organs to go around.
Will I stay? Will I flee? Will I go to court? Time’s running out. My call is sure to come up in another few weeks. I feel a tickling sensation in my back, now and then, as though somebody’s quietly sawing at my kidneys.
Cannibalism. At Chou-kou-tien, Dragon Bone Hill, twenty-five miles south-west of Peking, paleontologists excavating a cave early in the twentieth century discovered the fossil skulls of Peking Man, Pithecanthropus pekinensis. The skulls had been broken away at the base, which led Franz Weidenreich, the director of the Dragon Bone Hill digs, to speculate that Peking Man was a cannibal who had killed his own kind, extracted the brains of his victims through openings in the base of their skulls, cooked and feasted on the cerebral meat—there were hearths and fragments of charcoal at the site—and left the skulls behind in the cave as trophies. To eat your enemy’s flesh: to absorb his skills, his strengths, his knowledge, his achievements, his virtues. It took mankind five hundred thousand years to struggle upward from cannibalism. But we never lost the old craving, did we? There’s still easy comfort to gain by devouring those who are younger, stronger, more agile than you. We’ve improved the techniques, is all. And so now they eat us raw, the old ones, they gobble us up, organ by throbbing organ. Is that really an improvement? At least Peking Man cooked his meat.
Our brave new society, where all share equally in the triumphs of medicine, and the deserving senior citizens need not feel that their merits and prestige will be rewarded only by a cold grave—we sing its praises all the time. How pleased everyone is about the organ draft! Except, of course, a few disgruntled draftees.
The ticklish question of priorities. Who gets the stockpiled organs? They have an elaborate system by which hierarchies are defined. Supposedly a big computer drew it up, thus assuring absolute godlike impartiality. You earn salvation through good works: accomplishments in career and benevolence in daily life win you points that nudge you up the ladder until you reach one of the high-priority classifications, 4-G or better. No doubt the classification system is impartial and is administered justly. But is it rational? Whose needs does it serve? In 1943, during World War II, there was a shortage of the newly discovered drug penicillin among the American military forces in North Africa. Two groups of soldiers were most in need of its bene-fits: those who were suffering from infected battle wounds and those who had contracted venereal disease. A junior medical officer, working from self-evident moral principles, ruled that the wounded heroes were more deserving of treatment than the self- indulgent syphilitics. He was overruled by the medical officer in charge, who observed that the VD cases could be restored to active duty more quickly, if treated; besides, if they remained untreated they served as vectors of further infection. Therefore he gave them the penicillin and left the wounded groaning on their beds of pain. The logic of the battlefield, incontrovertible, unassailable.
The great chain of life. Little creatures in the plankton are eaten by larger ones, and the greater plankton falls prey to little fishes, and little fishes to bigger fishes, and so on up to the tuna and the dolphin and the shark. I eat the flesh of the tuna and I thrive and flourish and grow fat, and store up energy in my vital organs. And am eaten in turn by the shriveled wizened seniors. All life is linked. I see my destiny.
In the early days, rejection of the transplanted organ was the big problem. Such a waste! The body failed to distinguish between a beneficial though alien organ and an intrusive, hostile microorganism. The mechanism known as the immune response was mobilized to drive out the invader. At the point of invasion enzymes came into play, a brush-fire war designed to rip down and dissolve the foreign substances. White corpuscles poured in via the circulatory system, vigilant phagocytes on the march. Through the lymphatic network carne antibodies, high-powered protein missiles. Before any technology of organ grafts could be developed, methods had to be devised to suppress the immune response. Drugs, radiation treatment, metabolic shock—one way or another, the organ-rejection problem was long ago conquered. I can’t conquer my draft-rejection problem. Aged and rapacious legislators, I reject you and your legislation.
My call notice came today. They’ll need one of my kidneys. The usual request. “You’re lucky,” somebody said at lunchtime. “They might have wanted a lung.”
Kate and I walk into the green glistening hills and stand among the blossoming oleanders and corianders and frangipani and whatever. How good it is to be alive, to breathe this fragrance, to show our bodies to the bright sun! Her skin is tawny and glowing. Her beauty makes me weep. She will not be spared. None of us will be spared. I go first, then she, or is it she ahead of me? Where will they make the incision? Here, on her smooth rounded back? Here, on the flat taut belly? I can see the high priest standing over the altar. At the first blaze of dawn his shadow falls across her. The obsidian knife that is clutched in his upraised hand has a terrible fiery sparkle. The choir offers up a discordant hymn to the god of blood. The knife descends.
My last chance to escape across the border. I’ve been up all night, weighing the options. There’s no hope of appeal. Running away leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Father, friends, even Kate, all say stay, stay, stay, face the music. The hour of decision. Do I really have a choice? I have no choice. When the time comes, I’ll surrender peacefully.
I report to Transplant House for conscriptive donative surgery in three hours.
After all, he said coolly, what’s a kidney? I’ll still have another one, you know. And if that one malfunctions, I can always get a replacement. I’ll have Preferred Recipient status, 6-A, for what that’s worth. But I won’t settle for my automatic 6-A. I know what’s going to happen to the priority system; I’d better protect myself. I’ll go into politics. I’ll climb. I’ll attain upward mobility out of enlightened self-interest, right? Right. I’ll become so important that society will owe me a thousand transplants. And one of these years I’ll get that kidney back. Three or four kidneys, fifty kidneys, as many as I need. A heart or two. A few lungs. A pancreas, a spleen, a liver. They won’t be able to refuse me anything. I’ll show them. I’ll show them. I’ll out-senior the seniors. There’s your Bodily Sanctity activist for you, eh? I suppose I’ll have to resign from the League. Goodbye, idealism. Goodbye, moral superiority. Goodbye, kidney. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
It’s done. I’ve paid my debt to society. I’ve given up unto the powers that be my humble pound of flesh. When I leave the hospital in a couple of days, I’ll carry a card testifying to my new 6-A status.
Top priority for the rest of my life.
Why, I might live for a thousand years.
Many Mansions
Here’s an example of mainstream contemporary-literature modes carried over into science fiction, something I’ve done now and again throughout my entire career. (A very early story called “The Songs of Summer” owed a great deal to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I’ve channeled Joseph Conrad on a number of occasions. One passage in my novel Son of Man employs William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. And so forth.) This is another, and I think it was a successful transplantation.
Somewhere in the mid-1960s Robert Coover wrote a funny, frantic story called “The Babysitter,” in which a narrative situation is dissected and refracted in an almost Cubist fashion into dozens of short scenes, some of which are deliberately contradictory of others. I read it and admired it and saw what Coover had done as a perfect way to approach the paradoxes of the time-travel story, in which a single act of transit through time can generate a host of parallel time-tracks. I had written plenty of time-travel stories before—the theme is a particular favorite of mine—but Coover had shown me a completely new way to do it.
So off I went, killing off grandfathers and having characters meeting themselves both coming and going, in what is probably the most complex short story of temporal confusion since Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps.” (Or Heinlein’s much later “All You Zombies—”). I had a wonderful time doing it, which was important, because in that complicated segment of my life—this was February, 1972, when I was midway through the chaotic transition from a lifetime in New York to a wholly new incarnation as a Californian—writing usually was neither easy nor particularly pleasant for me. Terry Carr published the story in the third of his Universe anthologies, and it has been reprinted several times since. I can’t read it even now without chuckling over its dizzy pace and lunatic inventiveness.
The debt to Coover’s original story, I thought, was obvious. But over the past thirty-plus years a grand total of one reader has asked me whether I had had “The Babysitter” in mind when I wrote “Many Mansions.” (I never do learn. Many years later, when I wrote a story called “The Secret Sharer” that translated the plot of Conrad’s classic novella into science-fictional terms, and hung Conrad’s original title on my story just so everyone would understand what I was doing, a reader wrote an angry letter to the editor of the magazine where my story appeared, complaining that I had stolen the title of a famous story by Joseph Conrad. Maybe I should attach explanatory footnotes to these things.)
~
It’s been a rough day. Everything gone wrong. A tremendous tie -up on the freeway going to work, two accounts cancelled before lunch, now some inconceivable botch by the weather programmers. It’s snowing outside. Actually snowing. He’ll have to go out and clear the driveway in the morning. He can’t remember when it last snowed. And of course a fight with Alice again. She never lets him alone. She’s at her most deadly when she sees him come home exhausted from the office. Ted why don’t you this, Ted get me that. Now, waiting for dinner, working on his third drink in forty minutes, he feels one of his headaches coming on. Those miserable killer headaches that can destroy a whole evening. What a life! He toys with murderous fantasies. Take her out by the reservoir for a friendly little stroll, give her a quick hard shove with his shoulder. She can’t swim. Down, down, down. Glub. Goodbye, Alice. Free at last.
In the kitchen she furiously taps the keys of the console, programming dinner just the way he likes it. Cold vichyssoise, baked potato with sour cream and chives, sirloin steak blood-rare inside and charcoal-charred outside. Don’t think it isn’t work to get the meal just right, even with the autochef. All for him. The bastard. Tell me, why do I sweat so hard to please him? Has he made me happy? What’s he ever done for me except waste the best years of my life? And he thinks I don’t know about his other women. Those lunchtime quickies. Oh, I wouldn’t mind at all if he dropped dead tomorrow. I’d be a great widow—so dignified at the funeral, so strong, hardly crying at all. And everybody thinks we’re such a close couple. Married eleven years and they’re still in love. I heard someone say that only last week. If they only knew the truth about us. If they only knew.
Martin peers out the window of his third-floor apartment in Sunset Village. Snow. I’ll be damned. He can’t remember the last time he saw snow. Thirty, forty years back, maybe, when Ted was a baby. He absolutely can’t remember. White stuff on the ground when? The mind gets wobbly when you’re past eighty. He still can’t believe he’s an old man. It rocks him to realize that his grandson Ted, Martha’s boy, is almost forty. I bounced that kid on my knee and he threw up all over my suit. Four years old then. Nixon was President. Nobody talks much about Tricky Dick these days. Ancient history. McKinley, Coolidge, Nixon. Time flies. Martin thinks of Ted’s wife, Alice. What a nice tight little ass she has. What a cute pair of jugs. I’d like to get my hands on them. I really would. You know something, Martin? You’re not such an old ruin yet. Not if you can get it up for your grandson’s wife.
His dreams of drowning her fade as quickly as they came. He is not a violent man by nature. He knows he could never do it. He can’t even bring himself to step on a spider; how then could he kill his wife? If she’d die some other way, of course, without the need of his taking direct action, that would solve everything. She’s driving to the hairdresser on one of those manual-access roads she likes to use, and her car swerves on an icy spot, and she goes into a tree at eighty kilometers an hour. Good. She’s shopping on Union Boulevard, and the bank is blown up by an activist; she’s nailed by flying debris. Good. The dentist gives her a new anaesthetic and it turns out she’s fatally allergic to it. Puffs up like a blowfish and dies in five minutes. Good. The police come, long faces, snuffly noses. Terribly sorry, Mr. Porter. There’s been an awful accident. Don’t tell me it’s my wife, he cries. They nod lugubriously. He bears up bravely under the loss, though.
“You can come in for dinner now,” she says. He’s sitting slouched on the sofa with another drink in his hand. He drinks more than any man she knows, not that she knows all that many. Maybe he’ll get cirrhosis and die. Do people still die of cirrhosis, she wonders, or do they give them liver transplants now? The funny thing is that he still turns her on, after eleven years. His eyes, his face, his hands. She despises him but he still turns her on.
The snow reminds him of his young manhood, of his days long ago in the East. He was quite the ladies’ man then. And it wasn’t so easy to get some action back in those days, either. The girls were always worried about what people would say if anyone found out. What people would say! As if doing it with a boy you liked was something shameful. Or they’d worry about getting knocked up. They made you wear a rubber. How awful that was: like wearing a sock. The pill was just starting to come in, the original pill, the old one-a-day kind. Imagine a world without the pill! (“Did they have dinosaurs when you were a boy, grandpa?”) Still, Martin had made out all right. Big muscular frame, strong earnest features, warm inquisitive eyes. You’d never know it to look at me now. I wonder if Alice realizes what kind of stud I used to be. If I had the money I’d rent one of those time machines they’ve got now and send her back to visit myself around 1950 or so. A little gift to my younger self. He’d really rip into her. It gives Martin a quick riffle of excitement to think of his younger self ripping into Alice. But of course he can’t afford any such thing.
