The Changed Man Read online

“Of course not. Started getting fat, and she couldn’t cope.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “That I was getting fat? It was obvious.”

  “About us, I mean.”

  “I’m not a fool.”

  Anderson looked relieved. “Can’t have rumors getting around among the thin and young, you know.”

  “Still, I think I’ll look her up again, afterward. She did things to me a woman shouldn’t be able to do. And I thought I was jaded.”

  Anderson placed a tight-fitting rubber cap over Barth’s head.

  “Think your key thought,” Anderson reminded him.

  Key thought. At first that had been such a comfort, to make sure that not one iota of his memory would be lost. Now it was boring, almost juvenile. Key thought. Do you have your own Captain Aardvark secret decoder ring? Be the first on your block. The only thing Barth had been the first on his block to do was reach puberty. He had also been the first on his block to reach one hundred fifty kilos.

  How many times have I been here? he wondered as the tingling in his scalp began. This is the eighth time. Eight times, and my fortune is larger than ever, the kind of wealth that takes on a life on its own. I can keep this up forever, he thought, with relish. Forever at the supper table with neither worries nor restraints. “It’s dangerous to gain so much weight,” Lynette had said. “Heart attacks, you know.” But the only things that Barth worried about were hemorrhoids and impotence. The former was a nuisance, but the latter made life unbearable and drove him back to Anderson.

  Key thought. What else? Lynette, standing naked on the edge of the cliff with the wind blowing. She was courting death, and he admired her for it, almost hoped that she would find it. She despised safety precautions. Like clothing, they were restrictions to be cast aside. She had once talked him into playing tag with her on a construction site, racing along the girders in the darkness, until the police came and made them leave. That had been when Barth was still thin from his last time at Anderson’s. But it was not Lynette on the girders that he held in his mind. It was Lynette, fragile and beautiful Lynette, daring the wind to snatch her from the cliff and break up her body on the rocks by the river.

  Even that, Barth thought, would be a kind of pleasure. A new kind of pleasure, to taste a grief so magnificently, so admirably earned.

  And then the tingling in his head stopped. Anderson came back in.

  “Already?” Barth asked.

  “We’ve streamlined the process.” Anderson carefully peeled the cap from Barth’s head, helped the immense man lift himself from the couch.

  “I can’t understand why it’s illegal,” Barth said. “Such a simple thing.”

  “Oh, there are reasons. Population control, that sort of thing. This is a kind of immortality, you know. But it’s mostly the repugnance most people feel. They can’t face the thought. You’re a man of rare courage.”

  But it was not courage, Barth knew. It was pleasure. He eagerly anticipated seeing, and they did not make him wait.

  “Mr. Barth, meet Mr. Barth.”

  It nearly broke his heart to see his own body young and strong and beautiful again, as it never had been the first time through his life. It was unquestionably himself, however, that they led into the room. Except that the belly was firm, the thighs well muscled but slender enough that they did not meet, even at the crotch. They brought him in naked, of course. Barth insisted on it.

  He tried to remember the last time. Then he had been the one coming from the learning room, emerging to see the immense fat man that all his memories told him was himself. Barth remembered that it had been a double pleasure, to see the mountain he had made of himself, yet to view it from inside this beautiful young body.

  “Come here,” Barth said, his own voice arousing echoes of the last time, when it had been the other Barth who had said it. And just as that other had done the last time, he touched the naked young Barth, stroked the smooth and lovely skin, and finally embraced him.

  And the young Barth embraced him back, for that was the way of it. No one loved Barth as much as Barth did, thin or fat, young or old. Life was a celebration of Barth; the sight of himself was his strongest nostalgia.

  “What did I think of?” Barth asked.

  The young Barth smiled into his eyes. “Lynette,” he said. “Naked on a cliff. The wind blowing. And the thought of her thrown to her death.”

  “Will you go back to her?” Barth asked his young self eagerly.

  “Perhaps. Or to someone like her.” And Barth saw with delight that the mere thought of it had aroused his young self more than a little.

  “He’ll do,” Barth said, and Anderson handed him the simple papers to sign—papers that would never be seen in a court of law because they attested to Barth’s own compliance in and initiation of an act that was second only to murder in the lawbooks of every state.

  “That’s it, then,” Anderson said, turning from the fat Barth to the young, thin one. “You’re Mr. Barth now, in control of his wealth and his life. Your clothing is in the next room.”

  “I know where it is,” the young Barth said with a smile, and his footsteps were buoyant as he left the room. He would dress quickly and leave the Fitness Center briskly, hardly noticing the rather plain-looking receptionist, except to take note of her wistful look after him, a tall, slender, beautiful man who had, only moments before, been lying mindless in storage, waiting to be given a mind and a memory, waiting for a fat man to move out of the way so he could fill his space.

  In the memory room Barth sat on the edge of the couch, looking at the door, and then realized, with surprise, that he had no idea what came next.

  “My memories run out here,” Barth said to Anderson. “The agreement was—what was the agreement?”

  “The agreement was tender care of you until you passed away.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “The agreement isn’t worth a damn thing,” Anderson said, smiling.

  Barth looked at him with surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “There are two options, Barth. A needle within the next fifteen minutes. Or employment.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t think we’d waste time and effort feeding you the ridiculous amounts of food you require, did you?”

  Barth felt himself sink inside. This was not what he had expected, though he had not honestly expected anything. Barth was not the kind to anticipate trouble. Life had never given him much trouble.

  “A needle?”

  “Cyanide, if you insist, though we’d rather be able to vivisect you and get as many useful body parts as we can. Your body’s still fairly young. We can get incredible amounts of money for your pelvis and your glands, but they have to be taken from you alive.”

  “What are you talking about? This isn’t what we agreed.”

  “I agreed to nothing with you, my friend,” Anderson said, smiling. “I agreed with Barth. And Barth just left the room.”

  “Call him back! I insist—”

  “Barth doesn’t give a damn what happens to you.”

  And he knew that it was true.

  “You said something about employment.”

  “Indeed.”

  “What kind of employment?”

  Anderson shook his head. “It all depends,” he said.

  “On what?”

  “On what kind of work turns up. There are several assignments every year that must be performed by a living human being, for which no volunteer can be found. No person, not even a criminal, can be compelled to do them.”

  “And I?”

  “Will do them. Or one of them, rather, since you rarely get a second job.”

  “How can you do this? I’m a human being!”

  Anderson shook his head. “The law says that there is only one possible Barth in all the world. And you aren’t it. You’re just a number. And a letter. The letter H.”

  “Why H?”

  “Because you’re such a disgusti
ng glutton, my friend. Even our first customers haven’t got past C yet.”

  Anderson left then, and Barth was alone in the room. Why hadn’t he anticipated this? Of course, of course, he shouted to himself now. Of course they wouldn’t keep him pleasantly alive. He wanted to get up and try to run. But walking was difficult for him; running would be impossible. He sat there, his belly pressing heavily on his thighs, which were spread wide by the fat. He stood, with great effort, and could only waddle because his legs were so far apart, so constrained in their movement.

  This has happened every time, Barth thought. Every damn time I’ve walked out of this place young and thin, I’ve left behind someone like me, and they’ve had their way, haven’t they? His hands trembled badly.

  He wondered what he had decided before and knew immediately that there was no decision to make at all. Some fat people might hate themselves and choose death for the sake of having a thin version of themselves live on. But not Barth. Barth could never choose to cause himself any pain. And to obliterate even an illegal, clandestine version of himself—impossible. Whatever else he might be, he was still Barth. The man who walked out of the memory room a few minutes before had not taken over Barth’s identity. He had only duplicated it. They’ve stolen my soul with mirrors, Barth told himself. I have to get it back.

  “Anderson!” Barth shouted. “Anderson! I’ve made up my mind.”

  It was not Anderson who entered, of course. Barth would never see Anderson again. It would have been too tempting to try to kill him.

  “Get to work, H!” the old man shouted from the other side of the field.

  Barth leaned on his hoe a moment more, then got back to work, scraping weeds from between the potato plants. The calluses on his hands had long since shaped themselves to fit the wooden handle, and his muscles knew how to perform the work without Barth’s having to think about it at all. Yet that made the labor no easier. When he first realized that they meant him to be a potato farmer, he had asked, “Is this my assignment? Is this all?” And they had laughed and told him no. “It’s just preparation,” they said, “to get you in shape.” So for two years he had worked in the potato fields, and now he began to doubt that they would ever come back, that the potatoes would ever end.

  The old man was watching, he knew. His gaze always burned worse than the sun. The old man was watching, and if Barth rested too long or too often, the old man would come to him, whip in hand, to scar him deeply, to hurt him to the soul.

  He dug into the ground, chopping at a stubborn plant whose root seemed to cling to the foundation of the world. “Come up, damn you,” he muttered. He thought his arms were too weak to strike harder, but he struck harder anyway. The root split, and the impact shattered him to the bone.

  He was naked and brown to the point of blackness from the sun. The flesh hung loosely on him in great folds, a memory of the mountain he had been. Under the loose skin, however, he was tight and hard. It might have given him pleasure, for every muscle had been earned by hard labor and the pain of the lash. But there was no pleasure in it. The price was too high.

  I’ll kill myself, he often thought and thought again now with his arms trembling with exhaustion. I’ll kill myself so they can’t use my body and can’t use my soul.

  But he would never kill himself. Even now, Barth was incapable of ending it.

  The farm he worked on was unfenced, but the time he had gotten away he had walked and walked and walked for three days and had not once seen any sign of human habitation other than an occasional jeep track in the sagebrush-and-grass desert. Then they found him and brought him back, weary and despairing, and forced him to finish a day’s work in the field before letting him rest. And even then the lash had bitten deep, the old man laying it on with a relish that spoke of sadism or a deep, personal hatred.

  But why should the old man hate me? Barth wondered. I don’t know him. He finally decided that it was because he had been so fat, so obviously soft, while the old man was wiry to the point of being gaunt, his face pinched by years of exposure to the sunlight. Yet the old man’s hatred had not diminished as the months went by and the fat melted away in the sweat and sunlight of the potato field.

  A sharp sting across his back, the sound of slapping leather on skin, and then an excruciating pain deep in his muscles. He had paused too long. The old man had come to him.

  The old man said nothing. Just raised the lash again, ready to strike. Barth lifted the hoe out of the ground, to start work again. It occurred to him, as it had a hundred times before, that the hoe could reach as far as the whip, with as good effect. But, as a hundred times before, Barth looked into the old man’s eyes, and what he saw there, while he did not understand it, was enough to stop him. He could not strike back. He could only endure.

  The lash did not fall again. Instead he and the old man just looked at each other. The sun burned where blood was coming from his back. Flies buzzed near him. He did not bother to brush them away.

  Finally the old man broke the silence.

  “H,” he said.

  Barth did not answer. Just waited.

  “They’ve come for you. First job,” said the old man.

  First job. It took Barth a moment to realize the implications. The end of the potato fields. The end of the sunlight. The end of the old man with the whip. The end of the loneliness or, at least, of the boredom.

  “Thank God,” Barth said. His throat was dry.

  “Go wash,” the old man said.

  Barth carried the hoe back to the shed. He remembered how heavy the hoe had seemed when he first arrived. How ten minutes in the sunlight had made him faint. Yet they had revived him in the field, and the old man had said, “Carry it back.” So he had carried back the heavy, heavy hoe, feeling for all the world like Christ bearing his cross. Soon enough the others had gone, and the old man and he had been alone together, but the ritual with the hoe never changed. They got to the shed, and the old man carefully took the hoe from him and locked it away, so that Barth couldn’t get it in the night and kill him with it.

  And then into the house, where Barth bathed painfully and the old man put an excruciating disinfectant on his back. Barth had long since given up on the idea of an anesthetic. It wasn’t in the old man’s nature to use an anesthetic.

  Clean clothes. A few minutes’ wait. And then the helicopter. A young, businesslike man emerged from it, looking unfamiliar in detail but very familiar in general. He was an echo of all the businesslike young men and women who had dealt with him before. The young man came to him, unsmilingly, and said, “H?”

  Barth nodded. It was the only name they used for him.

  “You have an assignment.”

  “What is it?” Barth asked.

  The young man did not answer. The old man, behind him, whispered, “They’ll tell you soon enough. And then you’ll wish you were back here, H. They’ll tell you, and you’ll pray for the potato fields.”

  But Barth doubted it. In two years there had not been a moment’s pleasure. The food was hideous, and there was never enough. There were no women, and he was usually too tired to amuse himself. Just pain and labor and loneliness, all excruciating. He would leave that now. Anything would be better, anything at all.

  “Whatever they assign you, though,” the old man said, “it can’t be any worse than my assignment.”

  Barth would have asked him what his assignment had been, but there was nothing in the old man’s voice that invited the question, and there was nothing in their relationship in the past that would allow the question to be asked. Instead, they stood in silence as the young man reached into the helicopter and helped a man get out. An immensely fat man, stark-naked and white as the flesh of a potato, looking petrified. The old man strode purposefully toward him.

  “Hello, I,” the old man said.

  “My name’s Barth,” the fat man answered, petulantly. The old man struck him hard across the mouth, hard enough that the tender lip split and blood dripped from where h
is teeth had cut into the skin.

  “I,” said the old man. “Your name is I.”

  The fat man nodded pitiably, but Barth—H—felt no pity for him. Two years this time. Only two damnable years and he was already in this condition. Barth could vaguely remember being proud of the mountain he had made of himself. But now he felt only contempt. Only a desire to go to the fat man, to scream in his face, “Why did you do it! Why did you let it happen again!”

  It would have meant nothing. To I, as to H, it was the first time, the first betrayal. There had been no others in his memory.

  Barth watched as the old man put a hoe in the fat man’s hands and drove him out into the field. Two more young men got out of the helicopter. Barth knew what they would do, could almost see them helping the old man for a few days, until I finally learned the hopelessness of resistance and delay.

  But Barth did not get to watch the replay of his own torture of two years before. The young man who had first emerged from the copter now led him to it, put him in a seat by a window, and sat beside him. The pilot speeded up the engines, and the copter began to rise.

  “The bastard,” Barth said, looking out the window at the old man as he slapped I across the face brutally.

  The young man chuckled. Then he told Barth his assignment.

  Barth clung to the window, looking out, feeling his life slip away from him even as the ground receded slowly. “I can’t do it.”

  “There are worse assignments,” the young man said.

  Barth did not believe it.

  “If I live,” he said, “if I live, I want to come back here.”

  “Love it that much?”

  “To kill him.”

  The young man looked at him blankly.

  “The old man,” Barth explained, then realized that the young man was ultimately incapable of understanding anything. He looked back out the window. The old man looked very small next to the huge lump of white flesh beside him. Barth felt a terrible loathing for I. A terrible despair in knowing that nothing could possibly be learned, that again and again his selves would replay this hideous scenario.

  Somewhere, the man who would be J was dancing, was playing polo, was seducing and perverting and being delighted by every woman and boy and, God knows, sheep that he could find; somewhere the man who would be J dined.