The Peacock Cloak

you have left,” you said, reaching down and squeezing my hand reassuringly.
    I think this is probably the only kind of intimacy you ever get, isn’t it? I think the only time in which you’re able to feel close to another human being is when you have some wretch like me strapped down in front of you and are about to begin eviscerating them. You really believe that you’re being respectful and kind, don’t you? You really believe you are doing your best by us. I think you even experience an emotion that seems to you like love.
    “How long have you been up here?” I asked.
    “I live here all the time,” you said. “This is where I’ll end my days.”

    “We’re part of the problem,” you told me another time.
    I’d been put in shackles by two technicians and made to walk around a bit, then strapped back on the bed where you’d given me some knock-out pills and left me alone for a period of artificial sleep. I’ve no way of knowing how long the sleep was for, or whether it corresponded in any way with what we would normally call a night. I had a drip to feed me, a catheter to carry away my wastes.
    After I woke, you removed one of my kidneys under a local anaesthetic and had a technician carry it off to histology to be sliced up for tests. There was a screen on the wall of the room and, at my request, you’d set it to show the view of the great globe below us.
    “We doctors are part of the problem, Juan my friend,” you said as you stood beside me contemplating our half-burnt and half-drowned planet. “Medical science is one of the main reasons that on Earth got so bad. The things that are normally blamed – excessive carbon dioxide, pollution, deforestation – they’re really all secondary factors. You could cut down trees and drive around in cars without doing any harm at all if there were only a few million people on the planet. But when the population gets up to over a billion and a half and then goes on to quadruple itself less than a century later… Well, how can that be viable? How can it? The human race needed pestilence. Doctors, in their arrogance, took it away.”
    You looked round at me.
    “I came up here to do this work,” you said, “because, in my own small way, I wanted to atone for the harm we doctors had done by dedicating my medical knowledge to true service of the human race. I know it’s horrible what I do here. It is wretched for you people, of course, but, believe me, it’s wretched for me as well. It eats away at me. I’m slowly destroying myself. But I keep doing it because I believe it’s vital for humanity to find a way of making a new start. I’m sacrificing myself for this cause as much as I’m sacrificing you.”
    You glanced down at me, hoping for a response. Nombre de Dios! I thought Pham was bad enough with his preposterous attempts at brotherhood, but this was something else . What were you expecting from me, Dr Brennan? Pity?
    Well I said nothing, and you sighed, and you carefully explained to me about the next stage in my dismantling, to begin in twenty-four hours after another chemically induced rest. It was almost as if you were a proper doctor and were trying to make me better.

    I suppose it can’t be long now until I’m just matter again, like I was until only a few days ago, when a soup of unconnected particles was temporarily gathered together by a resonance field and moulded into a replica of Juan Fernandez. This body will be broken back down into plasma, and then you’ll set up a new resonance field, and it will pull those particles back together again, this time in the shape of someone else. Some stranger who I’ll never know will be formed out of this very same stuff that now forms me.
    I’m not really Juan Fernandez, I know that. I’m not really anyone at all. But I still think about Suzanne and Maria and the real Juan on their boat, crossing the wide ocean to Greenland. I can’t help wondering if Suzanne is grateful to Juan for what he’s done, and whether she wriggles up warm and soft against him in their little berth with the cold sea forgotten outside, and whether she melts and moans and sighs like she once used to? And if so, I wonder, does it ever occur to either of them to think of this doomed prisoner up here, this eviscerated amputee, who really paid the price? (For what did he pay? What did he have to give up?)
    Well I doubt it. It’s not that they’re heartless monsters, really. It’s just that people never worry all