Human Sister

consciousness. A mangled mass of rabbit lay beside me, and I sensed, without yet knowing, how intermingled all living creatures are, how they caress and devour each other, just as the Earth I live on and love waits patiently to ingest me.
    Tearful, I headed back home. Lily romped in the mustard along the way.

    When we returned to Michael’s area after Elio had finished his first breakfast in his new home, Elio asked whether he could see Michael and me connect through our braincord.
    Michael nodded eagerly. “It’s wonderful being brainjoined with Sara,” he said. “The connection allows me to feel her sensations and conscious experiences. When we’re connected, I’m no longer cut off from her feelings, as others are through the multiple translations of the language of her neurons into English, then English into the language of their neurons. Much is lost in such translations. I have a sense of occupying her body, just as you have a sense, I imagine, of occupying your body. And hers is a wonderful body to occupy. Her interpretations of experiences and memories, how she thinks and feels, fill me with awe and joy.”
    Elio looked bewildered, so I took one of his hands in mine. “Let me give you an example, okay?”
    “Sure,” he said. “An example would be good.”
    “Suppose you are unable to smell due to a defect in the olfactory nerves in your nose, but the olfactory interpretation areas of your brain are in perfect condition. Suppose further that you and I walk into Grandma’s kitchen, and my olfactory system senses a pattern consistent with past experiences of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven.”
    “Sara says chocolate chip cookies are your favorites,” Michael added. “I love them, too.”
    “In my brain,” I continued, “this neural recognition of a pattern consistent with the aroma of chocolate chip cookies engenders conscious associations with my unique history of experiencing such cookies. These conscious feelings might be translated into English, so that I might think to myself or say to you, ‘Mmm, I smell chocolate chip cookies baking.’
    “Two serious communication problems are highlighted by this example. First, the essence of my feeling of sensing and recognizing chocolate chip cookies is lost in translating from my neural language to English. This points out why speech is inherently unsatisfactory: words, being nothing more than components of instructions to guide the reader’s or listener’s imagination toward the targeted feelings, images, or thoughts, expose only themselves; our feelings remain locked inside, never to be felt directly by another. That is the general rule. But because of the braincord, I have become a part of Michael as no one has ever become a part of anyone else before, though our braincord system only pushes back the solipsistic problem by one. Now, it is Michael and I together, as a unit, that is like everyone else: a being that feels but cannot be felt. The drive to overcome this experiential disconnection is undoubtedly the foundation of our desire for love, for literature and other forms of art, and for the infinity that it would take to succeed.
    “The second communication problem this example exposes is that under the circumstances we have hypothesized, you would have no way of translating my English utterance about chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven into something experientially meaningful to you, since you would never have had the experience of smelling anything.
    “However, if we could directly connect my olfactory nerves to yours at a place beyond the defects in the nerves of your nose, then, after some amazingly new and wonderful experiences for you in which you would learn about the world of smell, we could, so connected, walk into the kitchen when Grandma’s baking chocolate chip cookies, and you would sense the aroma along with me. Then it might be you who would exclaim, ‘How wonderful! My favorite—chocolate chip!’”
    I looked at Elio for a response, but he just stared at me blankly.
    “So, what do you think of that?” I asked.
    “I think I just arrived yesterday, and because of jetlag my head feels clogged with wool. Most of what you just said sailed right over me.”

First Brother

    She takes hold of the doorknob and pushes the door farther open. The dog tries to enter by squeezing in between her left leg and the door. She catches the dog’s collar with her left hand. “No, Rusty. Sit. Good boy. Now, stay.