"I don't know. Some sort of repair on my head, I guess."
"Mr. Lee, this isn't going to be a matter of repair. We have found it
necessary to replace the entirety of what could roughly be called
your 'brain', as well as part of the spinal cord."
"My whole brain?" Lee sat, stunned, comprehension slowly filtering
into him. He voiced the only coherent thought which materialized. "Why
that will mean there won't be anything left of me at all."
Dr. Letzmiller regarded him. "What do you mean?"
"Doc, you've got my records there. At one time or another, since they
first put a new heart in me, every single inch of me has been replaced
by an artificial part. I mean all of me. There's not one bit of me,
heart, eyes, toenails, _nothing_, that is _me_. That bothered me quite
a bit when this left eye was put in. I mean I thought, 'Well, this
isn't me. This is my brain walking around in a jumble of artificial
flesh.' I tell you it bothered me. But I went to a doctor, you know, a
psychoanalyst, and he convinced me that as long as I had what he
called a 'sense of identity', that I was me." Lee stopped. How could
he explain it?
But Letzmiller seemed to understand. "And you think that your brain is
all that is left of 'you'?"
"Doc, it's a funny feeling. Like this." Lee raised his hands, brought
them together and touched his fingertips. "See that? I can raise those
hands. I can make them touch each other. I can feel them touching each
other. But it is just not quite right. It's just a little bit off key,
like one trumpet player out of twenty being about one-sixteenth of a
note flat. Know what I mean?"
"I think I do," said Letzmiller, nodding slowly. "Now, just what does
that have to do with your operation?"
"Doctor--" Lee had to stop, for the patchwork quilt of blank spaces
was dancing in his head. The helplessness went away, slowly, like
smoke drifting from a fire. As his mind cleared, he realized that he
didn't know why he was being interviewed by this doctor.
"Anything wrong?" Dr. Letzmiller asked.
Lee knew he wasn't being too coherent, jumping about with the
conversation this way, but he asked the question, anyway. "Doc, why am
I seeing you?"
"You haven't guessed?"
"No."
The doctor paused to light a half-gone cigar. "My job here at Merkins
Replacive is to deal with just such fears as you have expressed. I'm
an M.D. and a psychologist, and"--Letzmiller smiled to himself--"a
kind of historian."
"Historian?"
"Well, you see I was supposed to give you the regular formal lecture
on the history of replacive surgery when you first came in. Like to
hear it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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