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Part Three
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Sky-Fallers
Documented cases of cellular memory being transferred to heart transplant recipients:
CASE 1) A Spanish-speaking vegetarian receives the heart of an English speaker and begins using English words that were not part of his vocabulary but were words habitually used by the donor. The recipient also begins craving, and eventually eating, meat and greasy foods, which were mainstays of the donor’s diet.
CASE 2) An eight-year-old girl receives the heart of a ten-year-old girl who was murdered. The recipient begins having nightmares about the murder, remembering details that only the victim could know, such as when and how it happened and the identity of the murderer. Her entire testimony turns out to be true, and the murderer is caught.
CASE 3) A three-year-old Arab child receives the heart of a Jewish child, and upon waking, asks for a Jewish candy the child had never heard of before.
CASE 4) A man in his forties receives a heart from a teenaged boy and suddenly develops an intense love of classical music. The donor had been killed in a drive-by shooting, clutching his violin case as he died.
CASE 5) A five-year-old boy receives the heart of a three-year-old. He talks to him like an imaginary friend, calling him Timmy. After some investigation, the parents discovered the name of the donor was Thomas. But his family called him Timmy.
A total of 150 anecdotal cases have been documented by neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, PhD.
http://www.paulpearsall.com/info/press/index.html
The Rheinschilds
She’s worried about him. He’s always been obsessed with their work, but she’s never seen him like this. The hours he spends in his research lab, the dark circles beneath his eyes, all the mumbling in his sleep. He’s losing weight, and no wonder; he seems to never eat anymore.
“He’s like this superbrain with no body,” says Austin, his research assistant, who has grown from an emaciated beanpole to a much more healthy weight since Janson hired him six months ago.
“Will you tell me what he’s working on?” Sonia asks.
“He said you didn’t want any part of it.”
“I don’t. But I have a right to know what he’s doing, don’t I?” It’s so like Janson to take everything she says literally. Shutting her out to spite her, like a child.
“He says he’ll tell you when he’s ready.”
It’s no sense trying to get anything out of the boy—he’s got the loyalty of a German shepherd.
She supposes this obsession of Janson’s is better than the despair he felt before. At least now he has something to focus on, something to take his thoughts away from the cascade of events that the Unwind Accord has brought about. Their new reality includes clinics that have popped up nationwide like mushrooms on an overwatered lawn, each of them advertising young, healthy parts. “Live to 120 and beyond!” the ads say. “Out with the old and in with the new!” No one asks where the parts are coming from, but everyone knows. And now it’s not just ferals that are being unwound—the Juvenile Authority has actually come up with a form that parents can use to send their “incorrigible” teen off for unwinding. At first she doubted anyone would use the form. She was convinced its very existence would finally spark the outcry she’d been waiting for. It didn’t. In fact, within a month, there was a kid in their own neighborhood who had been taken away to be unwound.
“Well, I think they did the right thing,” one of her neighbors confided. “That kid was a tragedy waiting to happen.”
Sonia doesn’t talk to either of those neighbors anymore.
Day to day, Sonia watches her husband waste away, and none of her pleas for him to take care of himself get through. She even threatens to leave him, but they both know it’s an empty threat.
“It’s almost ready,” he tells her one evening as he moves his fork around a plate of pasta, barely putting any into his mouth. “This’ll do it, Sonia—this will change everything.”
But he still won’t share with her exactly what he’s doing. Her only clue comes from his research assistant. Not from anything the boy says, but because he began his employment with three fingers on his left hand. And now he has five.
18 • Lev
He bounds through a dense forest canopy, high up where the leaves touch the sky. It’s night, but the moon is as bright as the sun. There is no earth, only trees. Or maybe it’s that the ground matters so little, it might as well not exist. Stirred by a warm breeze, the forest canopy rolls like ocean waves beneath the clear sky.
There is a creature leaping through the foliage in front of him, turning back to look at Lev every once in a while. It has huge cartoonish eyes in its small furred face. It’s not fleeing from Lev, he realizes; it’s leading him. This way, it seems to say with those soulful eyes that reflect twin images of the moon.
Where are you leading me? Lev wants to ask, but he can’t speak. Even if he could, he knows he won’t get an answer.
Branch to branch Lev leaps with an inborn skill that he did not possess in life. This is how he knows he’s dead. The experience is too clear, too vivid to be anything else. When he was alive, Lev never cared much for climbing trees. As a child, it was discouraged by his parents. Tithes need to protect their precious bodies, he was told, and climbing trees can lead to broken bones.
