For my father
Scalpel, please.
The damage is much worse than we thought.
When I open my eyes I see blue. Blue everywhere. Blue beyond the dreams of Picasso. When I close my eyes I see everything.
Scalpel, please.
You can’t plan for something like this.
It’s far more difficult than the boys upstairs could ever anticipate.
I don’t know where that came from. That name. It means nothing to me. Picasso. Pic…ass…o. The blue is hex #2956B2. I don’t know what Picasso’s hex number is. The blue is everywhere. I am nowhere. I keep looking for my name, but I can only find Picasso, Picasso floating in all that blue.
Scalpel, please.
Patient vitals are slipping. Prep .5 cc’s of adrenaline.
There it is. Down there. Covered in blue like a fish. A name. My name. Jumping and leaping around below me. I cast for it, standing waist deep in a Michigan river with my grandfather, wearing a hat that’s too big for me, holding a pole too long for me, trying to make the line snap out as gracefully and perfectly as Grand-dad’s line.
Scalpel, please.
If he wakes up, pump him full of Ativan and hold on to your goddamned hat.
Something takes the bait. My heart feels like it’s going to catch on fire. I pull the name out of the water, dripping. It is my name. My name is Desmond Wright.
Scalpel, please.
The damage is much worse.
It’s far more difficult.
You can’t plan, please.
It’s much slipping.
If he wakes up, pump him full of goddamned hat.
.5 cc’s of vitals, please.
We thought patient. Hold on to anticipate. Prep the boys upstairs. Scalpel adrenaline.
Full consciousness during installation would cause a catastrophic shut-down of all systems.
How about you just let me do my job and make your little laws about it later?
None of that is really happening. It’s just background radiation. The noise of my own personal Big Bang still echoing around, bouncing off nothing. Static. Don’t listen to them, Desmond Wright. Focus on the blue. The blue is always happening.
This has all taken a lot of adjustment. I still wake up screaming and reach for my wife. I wake up screaming and reach out across a bed that doesn’t exist for a wife who is long gone. But I’m not really waking up, either. Not really screaming.
Oh! Picasso was a painter. The information looks like a child finger-painting, squishing blue paint between her little fists, crying for me:
Daddy, Daddy, look what I made!
Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, born 1881 Malaga, Spain, died 1973 in France. It must have been nice to be Picasso 1881 to 1973. To be finite.
I can access his life easily now, faster than cell mitosis. I am beginning to form permanent pathways through my neurotic geography. I understand this represents good progress. But it frightens me. My basic functions are depth-mined with memories ready to detonate. I can’t stop myself remembering, or predict when it will happen, or even understand it. All I know is that my mind is somehow sticky. I reach into my psyche for something—wife, name, blue, Picasso, scalpel—and when I pull it out some image, some memory is clinging to the fact I wanted. Like the fish in the Michigan river. Like the finger-paint oozing between tiny fingers.