“Jacked, sí. But not with someone who’s never done it before. Not with someone you love.” He pointed. “Bring that chair here and sit.”
While I was doing that, he rummaged through a couple of drawers. “Roll up your sleeve.”
I did that and he buzzed off a little patch of hair with a razor, then unwrapped a ’derm and slapped it on.
“What’s that, a trank?”
“Not exactly. It does trank, tranquilize, in a way. It softens the blow, the shock of first contact.”
“But I’ve done first contact a dozen times.”
“Yes, but only while your army had control over your . . . what? System of circulation. You were drugged then, and now you will be drugged as well.”
It hit me like a soft slap. He heard my sudden intake of breath.
“¿Listo?”
“Go ahead.” He uncoiled the cable and slipped the jack into my socket with a metallic click. Nothing happened. Then he turned on a switch.
Amelia suddenly turned to look at me and I had the familiar double-vision sensation, seeing myself while I looked at her. Of course it wasn’t familiar to her, and I was seized with secondhand confusion and panic. It gets easy dear hold on! I tried to show her how to separate the two pictures, a mental twist really no harder than defocusing your eyes. After a moment she got it, calmed, and tried to make words.
You don’t have to verbalize, I felt at her. Just think what you want to say.
She asked me to touch my face and run my hand slowly down my chest to my lap, my genitals.
“Ninety seconds,” the doctor said. “Tenga prisa.”
I basked in the wonder of discovery. It wasn’t like the difference between blindness and sight, exactly, but it was as if all your life you’d been wearing thick tinted glasses, one lens opaque, and suddenly they were gone. A world full of brilliance, depth and color.
I’m afraid you get used to it, I felt. It becomes just another way of seeing. Of being, she answered.
In one burst of gestalt I told her what her options were, and of the danger of staying jacked too long. After a silence, she answered in individual words. I transferred her questions to Dr. Spencer, speaking with robotic slowness.
“If I have the jack removed, and the brain damage is such that I can’t work, can I have the jack reinstalled?”
“If somebody pays for it, yes. Though your perceptions would be diminished.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“Which one are you?”
“Julian.”
The pause seemed very long. She spoke through me: “I’ll do it, then. But on one condition. First we make love this way. Have sex. Jacked.”
“Absolutely not. Every second you talk is increasing the risk. If you do that you might never return to normal.”
I saw him reaching for the switch and grabbed his wrist. “One second.” I stood and kissed Amelia, one hand on her breast. There was a momentary storm of shared joy and then she disappeared as I heard the switch click, and I was kissing an inert simulacrum, tears mingling. I sat back down like a sack falling. He unplugged us and didn’t say anything, but gave me a stern look and shook his head.
Part of that surge of emotion had been “Whatever the risk, this is worth it,” but whether that came from her or me or both of us together, I couldn’t say.
A man and a woman dressed in green pushed a cart of equipment into the room. “You two have to go now. Come back in ten, twelve hours.”
“I’d like to scrub and watch,” Marty said.
“Very well.” In Spanish, he asked the woman to find Marty a gown and show him to the limpiador.
I went down to the lobby and out. The sky was reddish-orange with pollution; I used the last of my Mexican money to buy a mask from a vending machine.
I figured I would walk until I found a moneychanger and a city map. I’d never been to Guadalajara before and didn’t even know which direction downtown was. In a city twice the size of New York, it probably didn’t make much difference. I walked away from the sun.
This hospital area was thick with beggars who claimed they needed money for medicine or treatment; who thrust their sick children at you or showed sores or stumps. Some of the men were aggressive. I snarled back in bad Spanish and was glad I’d bribed the border guard ten dollars to let me bring the puttyknife through.