Our Life in the Forest Read online

  I’m cold.

  It was around this time that, as well as my eye issues, I was diagnosed with a renal problem. I didn’t want any talk of a new transplant, but after a month of nonstop dialysis at the hospital I resigned myself to it. I had the operation. I have no memory of it, which is normal, what with all the anaesthetics. And they say it’s better not to remember. I can’t say they’re wrong. After treating lots and lots of traumatised cases, with only moderate success in the medium term, I’m convinced in the end that it’s better not to remember. Bad memories are like toxic organ grafts, difficult to uproot; at best they can be fenced off so you can’t go and graze on them. Bad memories = weeds. Best not to have them at all, or to invent good memories for yourself instead, so you can reprogram your brain. So you can plant a new garden.

  I was in pain during the post-operative fog of my kidney transplant. I thought, here we go, I know all about chronic pain, here comes more of the same to plague me. I went along with having an electrical box implanted. I’m sure some of you have them too. It’s an electro-neuronal device that sends little corrective charges into the neural circuits. Not so different from the implants we’ve all already got. It calmed me down. Get a grip, I told myself. And obviously I had new medications to help the kidney transplant to take. Even though the kidney was Marie’s flesh and blood, and therefore identical to my flesh and blood, I still had to take a pile of medications. The electrical box apparently reduced the amount, as well as the side-effects.

  Anyway. The pain has almost completely disappeared. And the transplant wasn’t rejected. They just told me to drink a lot of water. But it contributed to my break-up with Romero. It wasn’t the pain or the transplant or anything. It was the electrical box. One unfortunate remark from him. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘a robot like the others!’ He didn’t mean that everyone is a robot. No. He meant that, despite my training as a shrink and my three therapeutic methods for curing trauma, and the way I prattled on the whole time, I caved in like everyone else. As they say, I abandoned my principles. I agreed to be hybridised. Something like that. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know anymore why I reacted so violently to his remark.

  A terrible time.

  On top of that, Romero didn’t like dogs. He refused to have Wolf at his place. Wolf, my dog, my supportive relationship. Romero thought that, whether they were robots or not, dogs were a disappointment. I understand that you could get annoyed at seeing a dog robot, even a perfect imitation, always doing the same tricks with his ball and always placing his head in the same affectionate and clichéd way on your knee. I understand that. Robotics has a hard time reproducing the unexpected side of dogs. But Wolf was a real dog. Modified, of course, but a real, biological dog. Romero had already had a dog permit, and a real dog, which had lived for two years. But he didn’t get another one. He used to joke that in two years the dog never learned to speak. You put a lot into a dog, he said: you walk it, you feed it, you look after it, you teach it to be clean and to heel—but that’s it. It will never learn more than that. It will never become human. He was joking, for sure, but something about the whole thing bothered him. Like a lot of us, Romero had lost his parents at a young age—I don’t know whether one thing explains the other. He used to say that, at two, his dog was probably a lot stupider than a newborn baby. We argued about the word stupid. And we wondered: were our halves stupider than dogs? We tried to make sense of it all as best we could.

  Romero was whole apart from his teeth. It took me a while to realise. We hardly ever spent the night together. I mean, I never slept at his place because he got up so early to train. One evening, however, there was something or other, an attack or a blackout, and a lockdown, so I was stuck at his place. What with the noises from the street and the fact of not being in my normal environment, I couldn’t sleep; my whole memory of that night has been reduced to the sight of Romero’s dentures in a glass of effervescent liquid. A row of teeth mounted on a pink base that resembled gums. All his lower teeth were false. He slept peacefully beside me, in a sportsman’s restorative slumber, deep and sound. I resisted the urge to push apart his lips like you do on a horse. To see. His bottom lip did in fact shrink into his mouth with every breath. It wasn’t very sexy. Above all, I wondered what was going on with his half? Did his half have the same depression under his lip? Why hadn’t they transplanted the half’s bottom teeth onto Romero?

  ‘Are you going to stay like that?’ I asked him in the morning. ‘Aren’t they going to give you a teeth transplant?’ As if it was the first time his body had been violated (and it probably was, but this time it was horribly visible), he got angry: it didn’t diminish him in any way; I was not supposed to see it; he’d have the transplant after the Olympic Games, blah, blah, blah, otherwise he wouldn’t be fit enough. On and on.

  The whole nation pinned their hopes, big time, on Romero in the pentathlon. And when he lost, wiped out in the heats, he died a few days later from a heart attack. He had just requested, at my insistence, to be scheduled for a teeth transplant.

  It’s too bad about teeth. They’re too conspicuous. But still, less so than hands. I don’t know if you noticed that those of the Generation who have to undergo hand grafts disappear pretty quickly after the amputation—well, I knew of a case. A postoperative complication. Eyes are risky too. And the heart too, obviously—invisible but deadly. Ha!

  Romero and I split up immediately after that incident. I mean, after our argument. I really liked making love with him but I think that, at the time, I wasn’t capable of truly loving at all. Of loving a person. They call it attachment disorder. Attachment disorder, my arse.

  I told you I was a sexologist: one of my special areas along with the treatment of trauma. ‘Sexuality for fulfilment. Sexology for understanding’ read one of the little posters on the wall in my consulting room. Couples came to see me. I tried to get them to relax. That’s what it’s all about: relaxation. Clear the mind. Light the scented candles. Put on the mood music. In general, a couple’s sexuality doesn’t last long. It’s no doubt due to their environment, to stress, et cetera. Take your lovemaking into new spaces. Even if it only means doing it in the living room rather than the bedroom, if you have a one-bedroom place. Men have no idea what to do with a clitoris, and women have no idea what to do with a penis. I knew. Romero was happy. The only problem was that I didn’t like to be naked because of my scars. Anyway. I showed drawings and anatomical cross-sections to the couples, my patients. I devised programs for them: gentle foreplay, sweet nothings to whisper. You have to be in tune with each other. Find a shared rhythm. Singing lessons are not a bad idea. Breathe in and breathe out. This part of my job often helped me clear my head.

  Get a grip.

  Where was I?

  The final sessions with my clicker. I’d told him about my upcoming transplant, the eye exchange. That I would be away for about a week, so they could carry out the excision of my bad eye and replace it. He seemed to bristle a little. These stories must disgust him, I said to myself. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ he said. I didn’t understand. With enigmatic remarks like that, you’d have thought he was a shrink. He was wary of all forms of recording, even the routine ones done in the medical psychological centres. I said, ‘So?’ He said, ‘Well, there you go.’ And he started tapping beneath his eye, like when you want to tell someone to keep an eye out.

  I was thirsty all the time. The kidney transplant should have improved my condition. The doctors blamed the heatwave. But there was a heatwave every year. They told me to drink lots of water, but I was always thirsty. And as usual there were signs everywhere, all over the city and in the apartments, reminding us to stay hydrated. We were deluged with instructions, ha!

  The persistent rumour that there is something in the water has always seemed to me like a conspiracy theory. But, session after session, my clicker refused every single glass of water I offered him, all of them. Silently, he produced his own flask. They were coming back into circul
ation, those metal flasks like the ones our grandparents took on camping trips. They made the water taste a bit salty. And, frankly, a bit like wine. Addresses of mineral springs and wine cellars were being passed around. As well as water filters to attach directly onto the tap. Well, anyway, that’s what I started with, a pirated filter. It was my first course of action: basically, find something to drink.

  Obtaining liquid supplies is a problem. Water storage takes up too much space. And you can’t drink wine all day long—in my case, it stops me from working. I’m not trying to say there’s some spectacular change once you stop drinking water, standard water. But, little by little, as you wean yourself off it, you feel things more intensely. Sometimes it even amounts to pain: it becomes unbearable to watch footage of the attacks, what with the organs, the blood. You have to close your eyes. Traumatic memories also return more vividly. And dreams. But good things too. Taste, for example. You become more discriminating, better at detecting factory-processed fruit—you can spot a strawberry from a plant that has actually been in the earth. And it’s a more intense experience with other people, with nice people. I laugh at my clicker patient’s jokes. I hold his gaze in silence.

  When you stop drinking water, I mean the water delivered to us, it has the same effect in the long term as logging out. I suppose you’ve all tried to log yourselves out, for at least a few minutes, as my poor mother did inexpertly back when most of the devices remained on the outside of our bodies anyway. But it’s possible to log out from inside as well. You just have to find your interior chamber. Don’t think about anything at all, nothing, for a few minutes—this starts to disrupt the connection. Don’t respond to any requests, don’t install any upgrades, don’t process any data, don’t react to any error even when it becomes unbearable, even when the problem morphs into physical pain. Get beyond that point. (I’m not saying it’s easy.) Let your brain zone out. And find the source of the network within you. Unfortunately, with the rudimentary surgical equipment we have in the forest, my electrical box can’t be removed. I’m not having anyone drill into my skull without some basic precautions. I don’t want to be hacked to pieces like Apollinaire. (Apollinaire was a twentieth-century poet.) The nanny state we fled occasionally had its good points, like the precaution principle and state-of-the-art surgery. Anyway. The electrical box is still inside my head. ‘A robot like the others.’ But I manage to isolate it. Restrict it to its zone. I isolate its impulses. I’m used to its rhythm of transmission, and I ready myself. A bit like in martial arts: I return the energy to the adversary. Bit by bit, I’m sure I’m destroying the unit.

  My clicker is not so sure. He really wants me to have it removed. He says if I keep it they’ll be able to trip me out like a toaster. Finish me off remotely. I tell him that I’m falling to bits in any case, so there. Then we both collapse into each other’s arms. Ha!

  Where was I? I have to tell you everything about my clicker, I know. But before that: one of the first habits you have to lose in order to log out is to stop using your hands like computer mice. I know, it’s difficult. Someone should write a story about it, I mean a historical story, on the cognitive function of our hands, how their function is linked to knowledge and to writing. Writing here in a notebook, and with only one hand (the right one, in my case), must surely have undone mental habits that were linked to the two-handed use of the keyboard, and to my two hands functioning as mice. To stop producing in space—like windmills—these never-ending repetitive actions of ignition and guidance of our devices, our headsets, our vehicles, for those who have them, our dogs, et cetera, is nothing less than a radical detoxification of our world. You exit the world. You end up in the forest, digging with shovels and picks. We stoke the braziers by blowing on them. We buttress the tunnels by hand, we fold the tents, we start all over again. We stir our stews ourselves, with a spoon. We scrub our dishes or we ask our halves to do it. We use our hands to hold objects.

  The brain scans of people who log out reveal a brain that is fresher, with decreased and more evenly distributed activity: the image is more uniformly blue than red. The medial prefrontal cortex disconnects from the amygdala—that is, the ego centre is no longer linked to the fight-or-flight centre. It’s also disconnected from the emotional centre (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex = thought processes, worries). These two areas of the cortex process information about people we consider similar to us (management of family relationships / depression), and people we consider different from us (management of social relations / anxiety). In a nutshell, we stop taking things too personally.

  I’ve just remembered watching halves capering around in my psychology lessons. Once they’re up on their feet, they caper around, literally. We have to come down hard on them. Halves learn quite quickly how to walk and to speak—and to read and to write, if we take the time to teach them (most of our halves are illiterate). Those adults who are woken up suddenly, however, are difficult to discipline. But our life in the forest calls for very strict regulation. And the halves only care about having fun. As if they wanted to catch up on all that time when they were asleep. All they think about is having sex, and the last thing we need is babies, so we sterilise as many of them as we can. Contrary to received opinion, clones can reproduce. Dolly the sheep (Dolly was the first mammal to be born not from a sperm and an egg, but from the transfer of a cell nucleus into an unfertilised egg cell) produced six biological lambs when she was bred with a Welsh mountain ram.

  The main problem with clones seems to be their premature ageing. Take Dolly: her genetic material was already six years old when she was born. I have no idea how old mine is. I’m forty and I’m not going to be around for much longer, especially with the body parts I’ve lost. Marie’s got a head start on me. They kept her in the Rest Centre, where she’d remain fresh and healthy, so they could use her for as long as possible after me. And it shows. She looks a lot more alive than I do. She has marvellous skin. And her innocence is marvellous too. I should have called her Dolly.

  But when you go looking for information about Dolly, you realise that perhaps, technically, she didn’t die from being a clone. She died a stupid death, from lung cancer, not because she smoked too much (ha!) but because (if I remember correctly everything I’ve read about her since I understood what the deal was with me) she slept inside and not outside like ordinary sheep do. They kept her inside for fear of her being stolen. The first ever clone. And when they’re inside, sheeps’ lungs rot or whatever. She was also riddled with arthritis, and they blamed her old gene pool. But perhaps it was also because, just like our halves, she didn’t get enough exercise. They didn’t keep Dolly asleep, but they coddled her.

  (I’m quoting all this from memory. In the forest, when an old clone dies, a whole library goes up in smoke. Ha!)

  You should see our halves when we wake them up after the initial period on the stretchers. When they take their first steps, they’re like newborn foals. And they have such pretty bodies, both the boys and the girls. It’s hard to tell how old they are: you’d think they had stepped out of a painting of angels or nymphs, if that gives you any idea. And little by little their hair grows back. (We had a vote on whether to keep their heads shaved, for hygiene reasons; the no vote prevailed.)

  Once a week, we take them for a compulsory swim in the river. Surreptitiously, we hold some cloth over the branches of a tree, to avoid the drones. We make them go in the river, otherwise they wallow in their own filth. We also teach them to swim. It’s a whole palaver. A few of us have the exclusive task of looking after the halves, of keeping an eye on them, of training them (we deal with the most urgent cases). When we have time, we go along on their bathing days. There’s a lot of laughter and squabbling and splashing around. It’s delightful. You’d think you were at a holiday camp for adults. We dress them all in the same grey outfit—we found some bolts of fabric in a rubbish tip—pants and top, otherwise there’s always the risk of treating the half as your owner. Well, we don’t say ‘owner’, but we
haven’t found the right word yet. We’re in discussion. Of course, when you see them all squatting together like a bunch of baboons, prattling away mindlessly, trying to be well-behaved, there’s no way you would think they were us, the ones who have accumulated so many experiences, endured so many ordeals, overcome so many obstacles. But you never know. You never know what could be going through their minds. We tie them up at night, so they won’t escape, or even—what a nightmare—go off and blow the whistle on us. We channel their energy by making them dig our tunnels. We have to teach them everything, even how to use a spade, but really, who among us still knows how to use a spade? We’d need more robots.

  I’m cold.

  I like Marie, that’s not the problem. But I thought we’d be together forever. When they set her free, I couldn’t stop holding her hands, kissing her, asking her if she was okay, what she wanted. And then I got sick of it. Or she rejected me, slowly but surely. She didn’t want anything. That’s the problem with halves. No, I mean, they do want lots of things: sugar, sex, food, sleep (as if they haven’t slept enough!) and to hunt like cats (in the forest, the halves are our best procurers of protein). But really. No political sensibility at all, no metaphysical yearnings, no impetus towards the future. Everything’s in the present for them. Admittedly, they don’t have a past. It’s hard to get your head around that. Some people expect us to show empathy for our halves. ‘They’re like us,’ they say. But that kind of talk is hard to swallow. We’re fed up with the old ‘like us’ drivel.