Dr Jew

though I might make a run for the door while they remained behind in a flabbergasted daze and I laughed ("bwahaha") and slammed them in for an icy eternity and dementia, until the silence came.
    That is what I saw in their eyes, so I made my movements slow and deliberate to assuage their fears and proceed to revelation. There was nothing up my sleeve that day. In the cold icy back of that small room I hobbled, and awaiting us was a covered slab with a bumpy body underneath. This is what they came to see. We were each frozen – appropriately – unwilling and unready to lift the veil, yes, I, even I, who had lowered it many days before.
    "We might still turn back," I said. "There is nothing here that might instead be viewed with words alone. Knowledge is power, but it can be painful."
    "There is too much," said Adam, "too much for words alone."
    "Okey dokey," I said.
    I gripped the sheet upon her and paused, as much for dramatic effect as to steel my nerves. It was ghastly. When I finally removed it, I gave my attention to the two men. I knew of the horrible contents under that sheet, the browned, bulging body without a face, and had no need to revisit my labor. Instead I studied them , and this is what I saw.
    Adam: not so much horror as confusion. He had expected to find the match to the face he'd left up on my desk, the iceberg below the surface of his fair Eve, she whom he had longed for all this time, she who was now piecemeal across a city. Whose body was this? It was not Eve's. It was not an answer. Not for him. The face on this body was also peeled away, skinned and gone. But whose body this? Whose body?
    Sergio: he looked closer. He saw. He knew. You do not forget a body that has birthed your children and been filled with love and semen again and again as years piled on. This body that he took for the first time when she was still his secretary and they met in secret to conceal from his then-wife Barbara, until the divorce was complete and secrecy was no longer relevant, and he had filled that delicious body so much. It was different, the warty refuse of Swine-AIDS, different, but never so different he would forget what it was, who it was. Lise. Here. Her identity – her face, stolen off her with a scalpel just as Eve's had departed, the muscle below the face, the eyes, remaining. Sergio looked at those eyes, what had been missing from his wife since I had returned her to him, the eyes he had looked into for so long, and which he thought he'd never see again. It was the eyes that had been wrong. I saw that.
    He was going to be sick.
    "Oh, Sergio, that old schtick? Yes, let it out. I'll let it freeze and spatula it away on the morrow."
    His puke flowed , and I saw that oatmeal with raisins was a favorite of his, but a bad way to start this day, aye.
    "Never you mind about the cleanup."
    He coughed and I lent him my arm to help him rise.
    "This is Lise," he finally said.
    "Of course," I said.
    "Then how is she… alive in my home?"
    "Why… haven 't you been listening? Eve's body… Adam didn't tell you, but you must see how it is now. I certainly wouldn't know how to trade brains in human bodies. But copying Lise's brain to something else… apparently it worked."
    "Something else ?" said Sergio. "You expect me to believe that Eve was a robot? I saw her. She was human."
    " Not just Eve," I said. "Adam too. And I believe android is the term. Oh, for God's sake, just show him, Adam." I reached across to Adam's arm and pressed the release on his elbow where his funny bone would be in a normal man. The skin on his underarm crawled away, revealing his circuitous innards.
    "Hey – what?" said Adam. "I didn't know that could happen."
    "Of course not," I said.
    "He's really not human," said Sergio. "A machine. Amazing."
    "I prefer to think of him as some kind of human, not quite machine. Both him and Eve. And now your wife."
    This made him silent, and it was good to finally have some silence.
    Adam spoke: "So if the face of Sergio's wife is on Eve's body, does that mean it's just Eve with a mask?"
    "No, Adam. Eve wanted oblivion and I gave it to her. Her memories and personality are overwritten. Eve is gone. Lise is inside her now. Sort of."
    "A robot with Lise 's memories and Lise's face," said Sergio. "That's what you're telling me. You copied Lise's mind to a machine, made her a robot, and gave her back hoping I wouldn't notice her body was different, but even more than that, that she behaved differently."
    "I