Peripheral Visions: Let None Put Asunder

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Let None Put Asunder

"You're nothing but human filth!"

Rex startled awake. He'd been dozing in his hospital bed, a book on his chest. The book slid and fell, hitting the floor with a loud noise.

He was alone in the room. It had been a dream... no, more like an auditory hallucination. Rex debated pressing the call button to summon the nurse. The doctor had encouraged him to report any strange sensations he might have; did this qualify?

Just a dream, Rex told himself. Not worth bothering anyone about.

All the same, he might make mention of it when the doctor stopped in during his rounds in the morning.

Rex considered getting out of bed to retrieve the book but decided against it. He was too tired; he also had suffered an alarming dizzy spell when he'd gotten up earlier in the evening to use the private bathroom that came with the room.

Rex took off his reading glasses and set them on the stand next to the bed, then reached for the lamp cord and the small switch that would turn out the light. Darkness fell over the room, except for thin strips of silver light gleaming through the window blinds. The moon? A street lamp? Rex wasn't sure.

He'd woken up in this same bed earlier in the day. The doctor had been standing there with an electronic note pad. The doctor had made reassuring noises while shining a penlight in his eyes and asking him the questions that doctors in movies always asked: What's your name? (Reginal Baxter Phillips.) Where are you? (A hospital, duh. Other than that... Rex wasn't too sure.) What day is it? (Rex had no idea.) Who was the president of the United States? (Rex had started laughing at that, and the doctor had joined him: Winfield Kirsch might have the title of president, but in truth he was a dictator, and everyone knew it. There hadn't even been an election in almost seven years.)

Rex settled back and lay quietly, relaxing into the bed. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it didn't seem right. He longed to be in his own bed, next to...

Jake, he thought.

Jake, his husband.

Rex felt a thrill of something... fear? Excitement?

Where was Jake? Why wouldn't his husband be here at his bedside? Had something happened to him?

The doctor's explanation came back to Rex: He was in the hospital following some sort of neurological procedure...

The doctor hadn't said it, but Rex knew that it had something to do with Jake. He wasn't here due to an injury or illness, but because of something equally debilitating...

Grief, he realized. He was here because Jake had died four months ago, and he'd been plunged into a bottomless, suffocating depression. But Jake's sister, a neurologist, had told him about... about...

What was it? Something experimental. Something he and Jake had discussed, more than once, in the last few years. Something important...

His forehead itched. Rex reached up and scratched, then marveled anew that the procedure... whatever it had been... didn't seem to have involved any cutting. There were no bandages wrapped around his head, even though the doctor had told him that the procedure had been a lengthy and invasive one, and that it had involved several different brain regions.

Rex sighed, missing Jake, and let his memories drift back over their time together. The day they met; their courtship, joyous and free, during a time when the country seemed bathed in light and liberty; the way the two of them sought and found comfort in one another as the nation darkened, turned hostile, turned cruel. The way they both survived, even as friends and colleagues suffered the brunt of sadistic laws and social pressures. Around them, marriages ended as gay men pretended to find religion... the religion of their oppressors... and then, somehow, pretended to fall in love with women. Others fled the nation – or tried; it was as criminal offense to try to leave the country, to seek asylum abroad. Their fiery friends, unafraid and committed to being seen and heard even now, had disappeared... or had been disappeared. Others had sunk into despair and taken their own lives.

A dark thought crossed Rex's mind: Whatever the problem had been – grief, suicidal ideation, whatever the reason he was here – maybe the doctor shouldn't have bothered. Without Jake, Rex could hardly imagine a reason for living.

"You're going to die," the voice declared, ringing through the room. "And you're going to burn in Hell!"

Rex sat up quickly – too quickly; vertigo washed over him, and pinpoint sparkles flashed in his eyes as he struggled to find the lamp switch. When the light came on, the room was still empty.

Rex reached for the call button but hesitated again. No, he decided; he'd try to get some rest. He didn't want the doctor shining the light in his eyes, peppering him with questions, maybe ordering scans or tests. He just wanted to go to sleep.

He could tell the doctor all about it in the morning.

***

"You're sure it was an hallucination, and not a dream?" the doctor asked, shining his penlight into Rex's eyes just as Rex knew he would.

Rex tried not to sigh with irritation. "Doctor, I wasn't even asleep when I heard it."

"I thought you said you'd started to doze off?"

"The first time I heard her, yes. Not the second time. The second time, I was wide awake."

" 'Her?' "

"It was definitely a woman's voice."

"Anyone you know?"

"No. The voice was unfamiliar."

The doctor put his penlight away. Rex blinked, scars of color streaked across his field of vision.

The doctor jotted with his stylus. Then he looked up. "This is probably a good sign," he said.

"An imaginary woman insulting me? How is that a good sign?"

The doctor nodded at the nurse, who left the room. She had other patients to see to. The doctor settled into a chair next to the bed. "You probably don't remember this yet..."

"I don't remember much."

"Yes," the doctor nodded, "that was as we expected. But your memory will come back. And so will Jake's."

"Jake's?"

"Yes, of course."

"Jake's memories are going to come back to me?"

The doctor looked puzzled. "You don't even remember the nature of the procedure?"

Rex shook his head.

"The temporary amnesia is more global than we would have thought," the doctor muttered, more to himself than to Rex. He started jotting again.

"Doctor, how can Jake's memories be in my head?"

The doctor finished scribbling and then looked away – across the room, at nothing, occupied with thoughts Rex was sure would be too technical or obscure to follow. Legs crossed, electronic notepad forgotten in his lap, a thoughtful look on his face, the doctor seemed, for a moment, far too young to be a neurological specialist. Even the permanent frown line next to his left eyebrow had disappeared. He looked more like a kid playing dress-up than a highly educated adult.

"You remind me of Tommy," Rex said, surprising himself with the words. He hadn't intended to say them; it was simply a thought that had popped into his head.

The doctor's eyes shifted back to him, and the look of concerted attention returned. So did the permanently etched frown line. "Tommy? You mean Jake's younger brother?"

Rex paused, confused. For a moment he'd had a clear, complete picture of Tommy: Who he was, a general biographical sense of his life. He'd seen a mental picture of Tommy as a child.

Which was impossible, of course, since Rex had never met Tommy, or anyone else from Jake's family.

"Do I recall from what you told me that Jake's family threw him out of the house when he was seventeen?"

"Yes. For being gay."

The doctor smiled a quick, rueful smile, and Rex suddenly grasped a newer memory: A news report about shanty towns made of up homeless young people, some of them not even in their teens. Kids who had been ejected from their homes because they were queer or transgender. Kids who, the news report had said, faced beatings from the police who descended in force to burn their tents and belongings and arrest them.

And those were the lucky ones. The report had detailed "conversion centers" where teens and children were tortured, starved... even in America, a land long since jaded toward the suffering of its most vulnerable people, felt a shudder of shock and conscience when one such center was found to have been vivisecting queer youth. The church operating the center had made a claim about it being their religious right to do so. The courts would have to decide.

Rex shook his head, trying to dispel the memory of the report, which seemed all at once to be shining in his eyes the way the doctor's penlight had... blaring in his ears... blotting out every other sensation...

"...with us?"

Rex looked at the doctor, who was now standing over him again.

"I'm all right now," he said. "There was a memory... it was overwhelming."

"A memory of Jake's?"

"No. From earlier this week, I think. Something I saw on the newsfeeds. That church-run conversion center... the one where they were cutting up kids alive, without even any anesthesia..."

The doctor's face registered disgust and dismay. "Looking to 'dislodge the demons.' Yes, I heard. That has to be the most reprehensible excuse I ever heard in defense of such an atrocity." He sighed. "That's what we're trying to combat in our clinic, but... with the new laws coming, and the Supreme Court cases we're facing next month... well, suffice it to say that you might be the first and only case for the procedure. For a gay couple, anyway."

"What are you trying to do? Bring Jake back to life by installing his memories in me?"

The doctor smiled. "I never thought of it that way. But I suppose... maybe. Yes, maybe you could say that. But there's more to it. You came in here wanting to banish your grief by having Jake's mindbase merged into your own."

"His what?"

"Mindbase. His memories, thoughts, personality, outlook..."

"His soul?"

"That lies outside of my competency," the doctor said, "but because you and Jake had both had mindbase scans done... before the law came down forbidding such scans for gay people, because god forbid we have any queer digital clones bringing their 'gay afterlifestyles' to our nice Christian servers... we had Jake's entire mental inventory available. We're not permitted to put the two of you together in the digital afterlife, but... if this procedure works... we will have converted the digital information of Jake's mindbase back into protein sequences in your brain."

"And then I'll recall his life?"

"And then you and he will be, for all intents and purposes, the same. Two personalities that will settle into a single entity... a single sense of identity. You won't just have Jake back, you'll be him."

Rex remembered that now. Ever since they'd first fallen in love, more than forty years ago in their early twenties, he and Jake had amused themselves and each other by speculating on what it would be like if they could dissolve the walls of flesh that separated them. Making love had sometimes brought them to a place that seemed close to a oneness... a uniqueness of mind and spirit that enfolded them both... but it was a transient sensation.

And yet, in many ways, didn't it seem, as the years passed, that they were ever more of one mind, a single intent? Didn't they almost read each other's' thoughts? And when Jake died, hadn't it felt... in a physical sense... as though some part of his own body and being had disappeared?

Wasn't that at the root of Rex's terrible grief?

"So I wanted to be cured of missing him by becoming one with him," Rex said.

"Yes," the doctor said.

"I don't remember that... I don't remember making that decision, coming in to have the procedure done..."

"Not yet," the doctor told him, "but you will." He had resumed sitting in the chair; now he got to his feet again. "I'll be back in a few hours to check up on you, and then at two o'clock this afternoon we have a brain scan scheduled."

***

The woman hectored Rex with vicious anti-gay slurs for half an hour before the doctor returned.

"I can see her as well as hear her now," Rex told him.

"The woman from before?" the doctor asked. "Does she look familiar?"

Rex shook his head. "But I know who she is. Jake used to tell me a little bit about her once in a while. Mostly in our early years together, when I'd suggest that he reach out to his parents and see if they might be willing to talk to him."

"I see," the doctor told him. "So this woman – is she Jake's mother?"

The woman was standing over the doctor's shoulder, glaring hatefully at Rex. She was continuing to spout accusations, calling him a "predator," calling him a "groomer."

"Poor Jake," Rex said. "I didn't understand. The names she called him... she accused him of sexually assaulting children. He was still a child himself at the time. He had to endure her assaults, her lies. Surely she knew the things she was saying were false."

The doctor shrugged. "People then... like people now... didn't bother to think, didn't bother to ask. They just repeated whatever they told to repeat, and thought whatever they were told to think. Our clinic is accused all the time of being 'funded by Soros,' whatever that means."

Rex snorted. "George Soros was a billionaire who died decades ago. Somehow, his ghost continues to pay for countless 'liberal' causes."

The doctor chuckled. "The funny thing is, we really are funded entirely by one man. A trillionaire named Trimble." He shook his head. "He's got influence as well as money, but even he might not be able to keep us in operation for much longer."

The woman was pointing at Rex now, and still screaming accusations and curses at him. Somehow, though she was standing behind the doctor, he could see all of her – pointing, shaking finger and all. Jake's memory, superimposed on the sights and sounds of the current moment.

"No wonder he never even tried to contact them again," Rex sighed. "At least my parents loved him, and my sister, too."

The doctor looked closely at him. "Are you regretting it?"

"The shit Jake had to deal with? Of course I am, especially now that I see it... remember it... as if it happened to me."

"No, I mean are you regretting the procedure?" the doctor asked. "You probably didn't bargain with having to recall Jake's traumatic experiences."

"No," Rex said, slowly. "I don't regret it. And in a way... though I see it, hear it... it's not real. I mean, it's not me. It's like experiencing a full-sense virt. It's not something in the core of my being, the way my own memories are."

"Like what?" the doctor asked. "Give me an example."

Rex smiled. "Like... the time Tommy and I went hunting crawdads. He was so excited because he wanted to make a terrarium. But then a crawdad pinched him, and..." Rex's smile flickered, then faded. "But wait... I don't have a little brother. That was... Tommy was Jake's little brother. That's... that's Jake's memory."

"Yes," the doctor nodded.

"It feels like happened to me. I mean, it feels rooted right into the center of my being, like something from my own early life."

"Yes," the doctor said again. "It's supposed to. That's the point. The other memories will start to feel that way, too, as they integrate."

The nurse appeared with a tray. "Lunch," she announced.

There was a cup of coffee and a wrapped square of chocolate on the tray, along with a slice of meat, mashed potatoes, a pile of green and orange vegetables, and a drizzle of gravy.

"You can take the coffee away," Rex told her. "I tried some at breakfast, and..." He made a face.

"You didn't like it?" the doctor asked, intrigued.

"I love coffee," Rex told him, "but Jake hated it. Said it was too bitter. And when I drank some this morning... it tasted just as I remember it tasting, but I still didn't like it." He eyed the square of chocolate. "I wonder if I'll still like chocolate? Jake hated that, too."

"People taste things differently, depending on certain genetic factors," the doctor said. "You still have the same genetics and the same sensory perceptions you had before, which are different than Jake's would have been... and yet, Jake's memories are having an effect on how you perceive certain sensory inputs." He shook his head. "There are so many scientific papers waiting to be written, so much knowledge to be gleaned from this."

"Yeah," Rex said, picking up the fork and worrying the slice of meat and the potatoes. "If they ever let you write them."

***

The brain scan took a long time – it had to, the doctor explained, because they needed the highest resolution possible. The results were a mystery to Rex, but he listened without comment or question as the doctor excitedly regaled him with figures, statistics, and a brief but comprehensive lecture on brain physiology. The only thing Rex comprehended was that, despite the emotional force of some of the memories he now possessed, Jake's traumatic memories wouldn't carry the same deep, primal sense of danger, wouldn't trigger the same strong responses in Rex as they had in Jake.

"For Jake, those memories were rooted partly in the hypothalamus," the doctor explained. "For you, they exist entirely in the cerebral cortex."

Was that a relief? Or did being spared the same deep anguish that Jake had lived with mean that Rex and Jake wouldn't truly be one identity after all?

***

It took about a week, but the day arrived when the doctor announced that the integration of memories was complete. He said it with a handsome grin on his face, Rex couldn't help but to notice; more evidence of Jake's psyche now living in him, since the doctor wasn't Rex's type, but Jake would have thought him cute.

Did think him cute, Rex smiled.

Jake lived, truly lived again. Lived in Rex.

***

But once he was home again, alone with his thoughts, left to sort through who he had become and no longer subjected to the doctor's thrice-daily visits and the questions and the lectures that were part of those visits, Rex grew uneasy.

"Do you regret it?" The doctor's query came back to Rex again and again.

No, he didn't regret it. But it wasn't what he'd hoped it would be.

Rex spent hours sitting in the chair next to the living room window, letting the late morning sun spill over him and slant into mid-afternoon before the light and its warmth moved away. He thought back to Jake's childhood, wincing and sometimes sobbing at the ways in which the love of his life had been mistreated by the people who were supposed to love him most – people who had embraced the evil dogma of a contemptible religion.

But he also remembered their life together... so many happy occasions, so many fearful moments as the last couple decades brought an increasing sense of suffocation and limited possibilities. It was strange to recall those familiar moments from Jake's perspective, to see himself as Jake had seen him. It filled him with joy to know from the inside out that Jake had loved him as profoundly as he had loved Jake; it pained him to realize that certain of his habits, certain attitudes had brought sorrow, and sometimes even anger and resentment, to Jake. Things he'd said thoughtlessly had hurt Jake's feelings, and those hurts had stuck like burrs, impossible to dislodge.

I'm so sorry, Rex thought. If only I had known...

Then again, Rex had his own memories of things Jake had said and done that had stuck in his own soul, memories that chafed.

The two perspectives didn't cancel each other out, but neither did they add up to something transcendent. And they didn't give Rex a sense that Jake was there with him. His memories, yes; his habits of thought, yes. Sometimes, watching the news feeds, he found himself thinking as Jake would have thought, making associations Jake would have made to his own life, or coming up with a bitter joke that arose from Jake's sense of humor.

But whether he was Rex ,or Jake, or a blend of both, he was still alone in the house, alone in his life.

He kept waiting for Jake's voice to call out the way the hallucinated memory of Jake's mother had called out; he kept waiting to see Jake manifest, visible and present, reactive in the moment...

...and apart, Rex realized. Separate. Not himself, not part of himself, not a graft of memories and feelings, but a different person with whom time and love had created a sense of connection. An illusion, perhaps, of sameness across the inevitable barriers between people. A friction; an agreement.

How did a man agree with himself? How did a man keep company with himself? Surprise himself? Console himself?

"Jake?" Rex asked aloud. "Are you here?"

Jake's memories were there. But his voice had disappeared into the silence of the empty house.

Jake? Are you here? Rex thought, in the stranded separateness of his own mind... a mind that echoed with Jake's personality and sentiments, but was still a lone mind, a singular self.

A lonely self.

The time came when Rex picked up his phone and chose the dating app he'd installed two months after Jake had died, looking for some human connection... looking not for a replacement, but a distraction.

The app flickered to life. Photos of body parts and profiles describing likes and wants and fetishes scrolled by.

Rex turned off the app.

"Let none put asunder," he whispered – words spoken at their marriage, a joining that the state had later tried to erase by declaring all marriages like their own to be null and void.

But the state had no power to erase their bond. Only death had done that... and even death didn't stop science from bringing some small part of Jake back to Rex.

A part of him from the past, though. Not his living self, evolving with every moment.

Oh, Jake, Rex thought, his heart thrilling with a desperate longing. How I wish you were here... not as me, but with me.

How had he not realized before he even went in for the procedure that those were totally different ways of being together?

Late afternoon slipped toward night, and Rex stood alone in the twilight.

Did he regret it?

No.

Was it enough?

No.

Rex made his way to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, and regarded himself in the mirror.

Just us, he thought, looking at his face and body... an old man's face; an old man's body.

Just you and me, he thought.

Then: Just me. Even if there's more to me now... it's still just me.

Rex smiled, then laughed. How could it have been otherwise?

Becoming one didn't erase the emptiness, he realized. It just made loneliness possible in a whole new way.

Tomorrow, or in a week, or a month from now... or never... he would find love again. If someone came his way. If was still capable of giving that much of himself to someone else. If the state let him live that long. The more radical voices in the House of Representatives were already talking about "purifying" the country, making it "beautiful before God." The terrifying, brutal things that those radical voices proposed had a way, in recent decades, of quickly becoming the norm, the accepted way of things.

But future, whatever it was – love, violence, hope, terror, death – all of that lay ahead.

For now, it was just him... them.

Him.

"Let none put asunder," Rex said again, and smiled.

Next week we close out with the story of a man who has long been at the top of his game and wants to finish in a moment of glory... a moment that will last forever. But can such moments endure? Or must the sun inevitably set on this "King for a Day?"