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8
Endings
It is time to come to the end of things and to the beginning.
I am standing in a room where there are two of me. One of them is who I have
always been as long as I
have had memory of myself. The other is who I will be, someone I will be
poured into to become who I
must be to start our lives together.
I cannot stop staring at her. I see myself in the curve of her cheek and the
line of her nose and the length of her limbs. Through her I will gain many
things I would not have.
I will gain a husband and a daughter and a new world, which I will not have to
meet at the end of a gun, and whose citizens I will not have to defend or
kill. I will gain a measure of peace and I will gain an identity that is my
own not one of a soldier or an officer or a killer, but simply Jane Sagan,
whoever she may be.
She offers me so many things, she who is not yet me. And all I have to do for
her to become me is to give up myself.
I give up myself in speed and strength; my new body has only what nature and
evolution saw fit to provide, limbs weak enough to force the brain to better
them, with spear and sword and bow, gun and gears and engines, every marvelous
creation made by man to compensate for a body barely competent to carry its
brain in its head.
I give up myself in mind, abandoning the fluid switch between machine and gray
matter that extends myself into others, to disconnect my thoughts to them and
theirs to me, to sever the connections that have sustained me. To shut myself
off in my own head. To live alone with my thoughts, their echoes muffled in
close quarters.
I give myself up in identity as a soldier and an officer and a killer, as a
friend and a colleague, and as one by whose hand humanity keeps its place in
the universe.
Make no mistake that I am weaker for the loss of each. Make no mistake that I
will have to learn again how to fit myself into a world that no longer works
like it should. Make no mistake that it will be through force of will alone,
that my frustration and anger at being less than what I was will not be
visited on you that even in my newly weakened state I am still dangerous and
liable to rage at what I have taken from myself, by becoming this new self.
The woman who opens her eyes in the body I see before me cannot be the same as
the one who closes her eyes in the body I have now. Too much changed to remain
intact, too much left behind that can t be brought over. I will hold my image
of myself to me, but there is only so much of me that will fit.
#
If you knew all of this I know you would ask me to consider what I was doing,
whether I was sure I was making the right decision, and that you would rather
face a life without me than to have me choose a life I
would not choose for myself. I know this is what you would say and do as well
as I know myself.
And this is why I say with all affection that sometimes you can be such a
stupid man. I wouldn t mind you
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feeling just a little bit greedy for me, that the idea of not having me would
make you angry, not heavy-hearted and accepting. There are things you still
have to learn about me and this is one of them. It is not that you are too
considerate but that I don t mind when you tell me what you want and put that
first instead of last.
I don t mind because that is what I am doing now. You should not think I do
any of this for you, that I
am committing a selfless act or an expression of slavish devotion, that I have
signed on for a mermaid s sacrifice and will walk on knives for dumb love. I
am too selfish for that. I want you to know that I am here not for you but for
me. I want you for my own. I want the life we will have together for my own. I
want the silence of peace and release from being the one who walks ten steps
ahead of Death. I want the honor of not being feared or hated, and of not
having those be the correct response to my presence.
I want to be able to say that I have done my part and I have done it well, but
that my part is over and now it is time for my reward, and that reward is you
and this life. I want all of this and I am willing to pay to get it.
But it is still hard.
In this I imagine that I am now your equal: You once gave up a life, leaving [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]