No Do-Overs
by Ada Fetters
Part 1 appears
in this issue.
conclusion
By the time they reached Arvada, the sun was a rippling red ball on the horizon. The highway stretching away through the desert was lit up white and red. Zeezie gestured, directing him off the strip and through several right angles, into the neighborhoods.
The block smelled like grit, exhaust and fast food from the strip. Country music bawled from a bar down the street. One former bar was abandoned, with wildflowers overflowing the windowsills, porch roof and rotting piano in the yard.
Zeezie saw Cam looking. “The last night at the Happy Daze got crazy.” Then she pointed him toward the two-story building beside it. The door was open. A heavyset kid in cowboy boots and greenish sleeve tattoos was smoking out front. The tip of his cigarette glowed in the gust of wind that seemed to push Cam and Zeezie through the door.
The place looked like a basement: scuffed floors, brick walls, and battered glass display cases. The jewelry inside them was made of metal, glass and wood. There were intricate patterns, uncut chunks of crystal set in beaten silver.
The spray-painted mural on the back wall of the place showed an androgynous figure with webs of tiny chains from rings in her ears, nose and fingers. The painted links shone against a fall of black curls. To the sides of the figure, in scorched letters, were the words Dreamsicle Bomb.
Cam knew the figure’s wide mouth and angular face. He raised an eyebrow at Zeezie.
“I told you I knew a guy.” She clicked the jewel in her tongue against her front teeth. “Hey, Redd.”
At the sound of her voice, the proprietor looked up from pecking at his boxy computer. Then he was out from behind the glass counter and tagging Zeezie’s shoulder. “Are you looking for a new piece of jewelry? I just got some green amber that looks wild and smells like pine.”
Sandy dreadlocks spilled down either side of Redd’s foxlike face. Chunky swirls of jade stretched his earlobes.
Zeezie glanced around the place, looking for other customers who might overhear her illegal request. There were none. Her voice rasped in the silence. “I was thinking more of a neural burn.”
Redd’s expression changed in a way that made Cam like him. It was concern for her, not anger at whatever surrounded her. “What happened?”
“Oh... no, for him.” His niece actually looked flustered. She tugged the sleeve of Cam’s jacket.
Redd relaxed and shook Cam’s hand. “What if I don’t do that? Why not get that done at Do-Over?”
Cam felt as if he was buying weed in a new city, at the end of a grinding tour. He was almost too tired to engage in the illegal dance. “I don’t want a company line. I don’t want someone taking my money so I can chant the same line as a thousand others.” Almost word-for-word what he’d said to Tara when she’d insisted he come with her to Accord services. “I don’t want to sign up for that.”
“Can’t blame you. I used to work in Do-Over’s Detroit branch. Oh, the stories I could tell. C’mon back.”
Cam and Zeezie followed Redd past the counter where body jewelry glittered under scratched glass.
In the back room was a padded chair with wax paper stretched across it. The place smelled like antiseptic and latex.
Do-Over had already recorded Cam’s account of the patterns he wanted changed and tracked his brain activity while he was doing it. He’d gone alone. At first he thought it was just a preliminary screening, no big deal.
Now he was glad he’d never have to see those people again. The sales rep and neurologist had tried too hard to charm him, put him at glassy-eyed and malleable ease.
“Everybody wants a do-over, right bro? It’s super hassle-free,” said the sales rep with too much hair gel. He wore so much of the stuff Cam could smell it.
”It’s a thoroughly tested and approved procedure.” The guy in a lab coat had shoved a clipboard at Cam.
Their pushiness made him walk away, and his despair had nearly driven him back. The process felt like Do-Over was trying to sell him a car.
Redd uploaded the scans to a monitor much more streamlined than the one out front. He clicked through the scans of Cam’s brain activity. Red, yellow and blue flared and swelled in a loop. In another window on the monitor, intricate patterns glittered in specific magnified areas. All this from when Cam had told the story to the Do-Over prelim people.
“I change a person’s neural network, and the emotions follow,” said Redd. “Then the conscious thoughts, then all the actions that come with ’em. It’s as permanent as any other kind of body work. Changing this stuff doesn’t just change the memories, it changes the way you interpret them and the way you act. You’ll be a man of different habits.”
This was what had unsettled him so deeply about Do-Over. Cam felt the tendons in his hands creak. He made a conscious effort to uncurl them. “Ayuh.”
“But the reason you came to me — the real reason — is that there’s a balance to this process. It’s an art as well as a science. It’s not just one memory that needs to change,” said Redd. “Here’s the deal. You might have one major event that sent your life on a different course, but that event was only the reason you made the next choice. After that you made another choice, and another. See what I mean? Fortunately for you, I don’t have to change every neuron. Higher-up areas requisition and coordinate various patterns lower down. Change the higher areas and the lower ones will fire in different patterns.”
Redd had only four instruments laid out on blue cloth: two long needles, a thin blade, and what looked like an old-fashioned computer joystick. Redd picked up the needle.
“I’m going to give you an antihemorrhagic first. That’s so you won’t lose more blood than you have to. Also, I can see what I’m doing if you’re not bleeding all over the place from a head wound. You want me to see what I’m doing?”
Cam nodded.
“I’ll also give you a shot of local unless you don’t want it. The brain itself doesn’t have pain receptors but there are plenty in the coverings and meninges, especially the dura. Plenty of pain receptors in the scalp, too. Some people don’t want anesthetic. They want to feel it.”
“Nope. I’ll take it.”
“Deep breath in, guy. Then let it out slow.”
Redd slipped the needle under his skin. Despite the deep breath, the room began to spin.
“Yeah, needles are invasive,” Redd agreed. “It’s strange, having a foreign substance injected under your skin, right? Not like lasers. These are precise down to an nth of a micron, baby.” Redd tapped what looked like a joystick between the two monitors. “I’ll use this and a high-def camera to make minute, targeted laser hits.”
The worst of the dizziness was already gone. Cam was just glad the guy hadn’t made the usual musician joke.
“You might feel some tugging or pressure, ” Redd murmured.
And burn. Redd moved his joystick, guiding the laser into the hippocampus, the main memory center, guiding the laser through a field of neurons microns long. On the monitor above, synapses burned. Dendrites curled and withered.
Watching his own brain cells rearranged made the room spin. Cam took a shuddery breath.
“Doing okay?”
Cam caught himself before he nodded. “I’ve had worse.” Color spasmed across his vision. “Ah, why am I seeing my voice? It’s purple.” The sound was strange too, like he was hearing someone else’s frayed baritone on a long-ago recording. Gordon Lightfoot maybe, or Steve Gunn.
“Your mind is what your brain does. If your brain can’t recreate the same pattern of memory, or the story you tell yourself about the memory, because those pathways aren’t there anymore, it’ll try to use other cells. Then it tells itself a new story about the new thing going on. Like a purple voice.”
“Trippy.” Cam found that his fingers had curled around Zeezie’s hand. “Am I going to see this way for long? It’s like I drank a bottle of cough syrup.”
“No, only until I can rearrange this. Can you think about what happened?”
He could, but Tara’s face was faded as if she were a grainy photo. Behind her, the village looked reduced and abandoned. Blue zigzag shadows from the water tower stretched across the drive. The lake looked like wrinkled tinfoil, so bright the sky seemed dark when he glanced up.
The questions that used to drive him crazy — what she’d say if she spoke, the idiosyncratic motions of the two men with her, the few stilted phrases they used — didn’t mean a damn thing.
What was she expecting him to feel when she glared at him from between the two strange men? Were they guards? Did she believe her own line enough to “send” him a plea for help? Or was she trying to radiate hostility, send him away?
No tide of pain rose up under his ribs at the memory. Nothing. He felt exactly the same about this memory as he did about his memory of their first New Year’s Eve together, when Tara flung open their door on the stroke of midnight and ran down to the shore of the lake. They’d charged together into the frigid, starry water. He couldn’t remember the shock of cold, nor was he moved by Tara’s shriek of laughter. He knew they’d warmed up by the fire afterward, but it failed to excite him.
That was what had scared him off his flirtation with heroin; it threw off his sense of direction. If everything was flattened into high plateau, what made any chords better or worse than any other? What did he need listeners or lovers for? They faded into the landscape.
Cam didn’t want to lose her this way any more than he’d wanted to lose her at Accord Village. “I—” Purple throbbed across his vision, edged with crimson alarm.
Fluid drained down the back of his throat, bittersweet and sharp.
“The olfactory nerve plugs into the brain near the memory center,” Redd told him. “When I burn the hippocampus, fluid sometimes leaks through the nasal cavity.”
“It’s gone numb,” said Cam. His voice sounded the way Zeezie described hearing it a decade ago. He sounded like stranger mourning something she’d never known. Something long gone.
What was it he’d even wanted?
“I’ve got you,” said Redd. “Run through it one more time, okay?”
Tara again, picking at the splinters of the old wooden fence at the boundary of Accord Village. In this version the two of them were alone together. No guards. She still chose to be silent. Her expression was sad. For herself or for him? Was she still convinced she needed to persuade him into Accord Village, or was she unhappy with her choice?
“One more pathway.” Red glanced from one monitor to the other as he guided the laser across the tiny cells. “Gotcha.”
The memory snapped into startling clarity. “We were both saying goodbye,” Cam spoke aloud. “We both realized it couldn’t work.”
It was like an inspiration. He tested the insight the way he’d test out a new progression of chords, trying it different ways, seeing if it held up. Sometimes they fell apart. Other times came out sounding like he’d already known them, from long ago. They’d just been waiting to be played.
“We good?”
“I... yeah.”
Redd grinned at Cam’s bewildered tone.
The cleanup job was rapid, capped by a butterfly bandage across his temple. Pain was beginning to hover dully beyond the anesthetic but, for now, all Cam felt was exhausted. He could barely move the weight of his bones. When he got up, sweat ran down between his shoulder blades. He placed his hands on the scratched glass counter and dealt with wrapping up the transaction.
“Leave it alone for a while,” Redd told him. “Drink or smoke or whatever you usually do to forget for a night or two. It’s like any other work. If you don’t pick at the burn, it’ll heal more cleanly and integrate better. You might have some strange dreams for a few nights.”
Cam nodded carefully. Redd shook his hand and hugged Zeezie. The two exchanged a bright-eyed look.
Yellow sodium lights had come on outside. The kid with the green tattoos on his arms stared at them as they passed. No cigarette this time. He was hanging onto a bottle with one hand and the railing of the porch with the other. He bawled something about Zeezie’s long legs. She flipped him off over her free shoulder. Cam was trying not to lean too heavily on the other.
He was able to get into the truck but couldn’t imagine driving. Zeezie climbed into the driver’s seat. The town of Arvada was filled with white and red car lights, coming and going. He leaned his aching head back. He must have fallen asleep because, when he opened them again, they were cruising the blacktop under the stars. Blue dashboard light shone on Zeezie’s face. One curl was stretched into her mouth as she dealt with the big steering wheel. Her dark eyes glittered under the black slash of her eyebrows.
Wind ruffled the lake and lifted Cam’s curls off his neck. Muffled lightning flared on the horizon, way out across the lake.
He woke up again when rain hammered the roof of his place. He was in bed, and Zeezie had gone home.
* * *
Redd’s work healed quickly. Cam’s headache was gone after a couple of days and, after a while, it was all he could do not to scratch at the tiny, deep wound. It especially drove him crazy at night. At first he got out of bed and picked up his guitar just to take his mind off the itching.
At three in the morning it was cool enough to be outside. The moonlight was brighter than the sodium light in the yard. He liked the way dim light rippled across his 12-string.
The song he’d nearly given up in despair came easily now. It helped that he knew what he was writing about. If he could get his mind around what happened, he could create an experience for whoever might want to listen.
After an hour or so, he had it worked out. The song about the Order of Accord would make it to the album, he thought, but the melancholy progression wasn’t a title track and never had been.
Cam scribbled a new lyric onto the yellow pad of paper beside him. He had a better idea for the title track.
Copyright © 2018 by Ada Fetters
