Priya's Recording

The drive had one folder on it and one file in the folder, which Priya Ranganathan, who said one sentence too many in every meeting, had labeled for the record, in case I'm not.

It was thirty-one minutes of audio. It began with the sound of a chair.

I am Priya Ranganathan, MD, licensed in Washington State, and I am recording this on the twelfth of August at eleven-forty at night because I have been asked to witness something and I have decided that my terms are that he does not get to decide what is remembered.

He is sitting in the chair in the clean room. He has the injector. He has asked me to stay in case of a reaction, which is a joke that we both understand.

He has taken his jacket off. He has rolled his sleeve. I want you to understand that there is nothing dignified about this. This is a sixty-one-year-old man in a white room doing something to himself that he has done a hundred times and cannot stop doing, and he does it the way he does everything now, which is quickly, and without looking at me.

There. It takes eleven seconds.

There is no convulsion. There is no scream, whatever the movies say. There is a sound, and the sound is the worst part, and the sound is that of a person being politely interrupted. He goes still. The machinery of him idles. And then he stands up, and he is not the man who sat down, and he is — I have to be accurate here, my license is in this file — he is not pretending to be someone else. He is someone else. He knows me. He knows what I am afraid of. He is talking to me about the clinic's lease and my mother's hip.

I asked him, in March, what happens to Adrian when the other one is here, and he told me: Adrian is not waiting anywhere. Adrian is simply not. Every time you press the plunger you kill a man and make a man, and the second one gets the first one's memories and none of his character, which is what he told me the trick was, and which I no longer believe. The reason it looks like a transformation, he said, is that the two of them have nineteen years of habit between them, and the second one can mimic every minute of it.

He came back four hours later. It always takes four hours and he always comes back and every time he comes back he is a little worse and it takes a little longer.

He keeps saying he has a correction. I have stopped asking what he means by it.

I'm going to end this now. I have said the part that matters.

Nora listened to it twice, late, with the lights on, and then went through the drive a second time in case there was more on it, and there was not.