Darwin Alone in the Universe - M.A.C. Farrant

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There was no harm in this. Everyone thought the stand-in was the groom.

      As for the real groom, he was never seen again.

      “What lucre!” cried the bride.

      Now she gives talks on wedding preparations to dazed young wits. They all want a white satire like hers.

      “White satires are essentially harmless and delightful,” the bride tells them. “Setting is important, of course, but anything loose will do—a hallucination, the great outrageous. A reluctant groom is useful for the photographs but if one isn’t available, a stand-in will do. After that … pfft! And make sure the minister is novel.”

      The young wits are taking notes. “Reluctant groom,” they write. “Novel!” “Hallucination!” “Outrageous!“ “Delight!”

      AN ELEPHANT AS LARGE AS A MOUNTAIN is tethered to the centre of the world, a desert where white horses lie dead on their backs, their legs pointing stiffly upwards. The elephant moves slowly; he is the engine that turns the world.

      Always in this world there are people laughing together, oblivious of the elephant’s patient work. In this instance it is two women, arm in arm, wearing cotton summer dresses and carrying parasols, speaking excitedly while they traverse the desert.

      “But surely,” one says, “there must be one true reality!”

      “Yes,” replies her friend. “Some place not decorated by vision but simply there, like an enormous blank canvas.”

      “But then we’d paint upon that canvas and a vision would be created.”

      “Or we’d speak of it and confine it with our words.”

      “It’s a problem, certainly,” says the first woman. “But what I wouldn’t give for one good truth, one large understanding that I could hold onto!”

      “How about this?” the second woman offers. And she closes her eyes, reciting, as if from memory. “An elephant turns the world. White horses die. We walk around them.”

      And then skip together across sand and stone.

      IT’S OFFICIAL. I’ve seriously decided to freeze my brain.

      I couldn’t wait to tell Mother. I was so excited I raced over to the Cormac McCarthy Retirement Commune, the place she co-founded for elderly freaks. She was in her room, beading another necklace. Cannabis smoke hung in the air like an incredibly hip deodorizer.

      Once again I marveled at how good Mother looked: tall and slim and tanned like an aged version of The Girl From Impanema. She was barefoot in her purple tie-dyed caftan; feathers and beads were twined through her long grey hair.

      “Freezing brains!” I could hardly contain my glee. “It’s the latest hope. Technology will make us eternal.”

      “Why go on suffering forever?” Mother asked, bored. “I thought the whole point was to end the cycle of birth and rebirth.”

      “That’s your point, not mine,” I said.

      She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Again,” she said, “What’s the big deal about eternal?”

      “Are you serious?” I screamed. “When you end your first life cycle, you get to have another one! Nanotechnology will make it possible. Scientists freeze your brain now, when you die, and then, when the technology’s fully developed, they thaw it out. Just like that! In fifty years or five hundred. Then they grow a replacement body for your thawed out head. I want my next body to look like a 24-year-old starlet.”

      Mother laughed so hard she choked.

      Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

      I wrote in my journal: It’s official. I’ve seriously decided to freeze my brain.

      Why?

      —Because my name is Willow, like a bad joke. I’m fat but not obese, chunky but not gross. I don’t yet require two stools at a lunch counter.

      —Because I’m thirty-one years old and was home-schooled in communes. I excel at playing in the woods and making God’s Eyes out of wool and sticks. Try putting that on a resume.

      —Because the best job I can get is for minimum wage at Video Madness. My supervisor’s a seventeen-year-old drug dealer named Conner who specializes in Rave drugs, the speedy chemicals, buying empty gelatin capsules and filling them in the bathroom during his shifts. His pair of mongrels go everywhere with him. They’re called Crystal and Meth.

      —Because I live with a forty-year-old auto body repairman named Walter who’s idea of enlightenment is watching plane crash marathons on TV. If only he could repair this body of mine.

      —Because marijuana gives me anxiety attacks and meditation makes my nose bleed.

      —Because I’ve searched for my bliss and found it was sleep.

      —Because when I try to plump up my sagging self-esteem like it was a satin cushion there’s nothing there to plump. My body may be thick but my inner life is as thin as a cracker.

      —Because Mother says, “Call me Rayna!” her new name based on numerological principles. Before that she was Rose, then Athena, then Starshine. Names based on something else, mythology, the zodiac, TV commercials.

      Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

      So it’s official. I’ve seriously decided to freeze my brain.

      Mother’s dying wish is to be stoned for the trip to the “Big Beyond.” She says, “I want to go out like Aldous Huxley and be injected with acid. I don’t want to face death with only this puny consciousness for company.”

      My dying wish is to get another life and avoid death altogether.

      Mother says her final trip will be a mind fuck. I say fucking with my mind will be the least of it. It’s my brain in a new body that I’m after. A new body meaning a new me. Don’t believe the other hype. It really is the package that counts. Our brains will adapt. It’ll be the ultimate makeover, a technological morph spanning centuries. Packed along with my frozen head will be a “before” picture of the ancient, flabby Willow which I’ll look at from my fabulous new body for exactly ten seconds before ripping it to shreds.

      Two hundred years from now the world will still go berserk over a beautiful woman. I’m counting on it. I want to be that woman. I have an internet lover who thinks I’m that woman, now. His name is Donald Thomas and he’s into freezing brains big time. Even though he says he’s got a body like the star of Tarzan, even though he says he sells insurance and is obscenely rich, he’s a dedicated man. He spends his free time fighting off the pessimists and trying to start a Movement.

      Walter spends his free time lying on the couch in his boxer shorts and wife-beater T-shirt drinking beer and watching disaster shows. “Wilma!”—he calls me Wilma, like he was Fred and we’re the Flintstones.

      “Wilma, come see this!” And I’ll go running and it’ll be another boring killer tornado wrecking a trailer park.

      Things are livelier with Donald. He believes my name is Kimmie. Cybernetic Kimmie is the first step towards the flesh and blood model existing somewhere down the road to Eternity.

      Donald and me have what he calls “brain sex.” That’s the incredible thrill you get from the true linking of minds. So far he’s been the only one getting the thrills because I don’t understand half of what he says. But that’s okay. I just play along being the blonde, willowy Slimmy Kimmie with the showgirl legs and the theoretically eye-popping breasts.

      Dear

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