identification tag. It was a tag in long shot, fixed to a plastic wristband. He knew, he sensed that a zoom shot would follow. He thought of covering the watch but then did not. He saw the tag in tight close-up now and read the legend printed there. Male Z. He knew what this meant. He didn't know how he knew this. How do we know anything? How do we know the wall we're looking at is white? What is white? He covered the watch with his good hand. He knew that Male Z was the designation for the bodies of unidentified men in hospital morgues.
O shit I'm dead.
He'd always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.
The technology was imminent or not. It was semimythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment.
But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that's not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.
He looked at the far wall, which was white. The insect was still on the wire. He looked at the insect coming down the dangling wire. Then he took his good hand off the watchface. He looked at the watch. The legend remained on-screen, reading Male Z.
There was a trace of enzyme left, the old biochemistry of the ego, his saturated self. He imagined Kendra Hays, his bodyguard and lover, washing his viscera in palm wine in a ceremony of embalming. She had the face for it, the bone structure and skin color, the tapered planes. It was a face from a wall painting in some mortuary temple buried in sand for four thousand years, with dog-headed gods in attendance.
He thought of his chief of finance and touchless lover, Jane Melman, masturbating quietly in the last row of the funeral chapel, in a dark blue dress with a cinched waist, during the whispery dimness of the vigil.
There was something else to consider, that he'd married when he'd married in order to have a widow to leave behind. He imagined his wife, his widow, shaving her head, perhaps, in response to his death, and choosing to wear black for a year, and watching the burial in isolated desert terrain, from a distance, with her mother and the media.
He wanted to be buried in his nuclear bomber, his Blackjack A. Not buried but cremated, conflagrated, but buried as well. He wanted to be solarized. He wanted the plane flown by remote control with his embalmed body aboard, suit, tie and turban, and the bodies of his dead dogs, his tall silky Russian wolfhounds, reaching maximum altitude and leveling at supersonic dash speed and then sent plunging into the sand, fireballed one and all, leaving a work of land art, scorched earth art that would interact with the desert and be held in perpetual trust under the auspices of his dealer and executor, Didi Fancher, and longtime lover, for the respectful contemplation of preapproved groups and enlightened individuals under exempt-status section 501(c) (3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.
What did the doctor say?
It's fine, it's nothing, it's normal.
Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.
His murderer, Richard Sheets, sits facing him. He has lost interest in the man. His hand contains the pain of his life, all of it, emotional and other, and he closes his eyes one more time. This is not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound.
