A Prisoner In Flesh

Chapter 2

I open my eyes and the familiar sight of my padded room greets me as usual. I instinctively go to move my arms, only to feel the canvas material of my straitjacket restraining them. I awkwardly sit up, feeling the still-extant seam on my head rub against the wall behind me. Up above me in the ceiling corner is a TV blaring mindless daytime nonsense, and in the corner opposite is a CCTV camera silently observing me.

It's been nearly 2 months since I first woke up in my new, misshapen form, and every day since then has been a waking nightmare.

Suffice to say that it didn't take long for the rest of the people at the university to learn I existed, and, naturally I caused a stir. The not-even-a-doctor who put me together, naturally, didn't come out of the whole situation looking too great either. Smuggling body parts out of a morgue and then putting them together like some demented jigsaw puzzle before sticking my brain into it wasn't going to look good on his permanent record.

Last they'd told me, he was in prison awaiting trial for the crime of removing body parts from corpses, which seemed rather quaint considering how heinous he came across from my perspective. At the same time, they were also desperately interrogating him in an effort to get him to explain how he had achieved it, because for god knows what reason he hadn't kept any records they could consult; the entire procedure that gave birth to me was completely in his head, and they wanted it.

I was "a medical miracle", they kept saying, and they wanted to understand how I had come to be. That alone betrayed how they saw me just as he did: a lab animal.

After I was prevented from ending my own existence in the lab, the next month or so was an endless barrage of medical procedures, poking and prodding and withdrawing various fluids and tissue samples for me in a futile attempt to understand and potentially replicate what had been done with me. No one could fathom how all my various body parts and organs, all sourced from different people (dead people, mind you) could possibly be bound together and function as well as they could, to say nothing of the successful brain transplant, which had literally no precedent in medical history. They wanted answers.

Not that I was able or willing to give any. I barely understood what was going on with my body myself, and answering their questions was pure torture. I still wasn't used to my new mouth and vocal cords, and every syllable that came out of them was alien to me: just a constant reminder of what had been stolen from me. Eventually, I just stopped talking altogether. I didn't care any more by that point.

I look back up at the TV in the corner of the ceiling, which is now playing some infomercial. They'd originally arranged for it to play stuff I enjoyed, but all watching it with my unfamiliar eyes made it look all wrong. Everything I interacted with now just served as some horrible reminder of what had been done to me, and it was torturous.

In fact, the whole eye situation apparently betrayed what a messed-up person that not-quite-a-doctor (I knew his name by this point, but refused to dignify him with it) was: he could have just taken out a whole entire head and not altered anything there, but he'd gone the extra mile and taken a pair of eyeballs separately from another person altogether and switched them out, for seemingly no other reason than to prove he could. It was sickening.

My memories had become less fragmented over the course of my time here, and they'd been able to track down who I was before my desecration: I had a family, who were naturally shocked to learn that I was alive again, and even more shocked to learn what I looked like now. They saw me in the pictures that had been taken of me in the aftermath of my discovery, but I didn't want to see them: I didn't need yet another reminder of what I'd lost in my metamorphosis.

Even my name... it didn't register anymore. It was nothing but a random collection of syllables that felt wrong to apply to me in my grotesque new form. The person whose memories I have, whose family I share, whose name I bear... feels like a stranger now. Against all my better instincts, my spirit is capitulating to how everyone else is viewing me now. I'm not a person. I'm not a man, or a woman, or anything in between. I'm just a thing; an object of interest. I'm an "it".

I'd already made several further attempts to end my own pitiful existence, hence my being in a padded room and restrained, since the medical establishment wanted me alive, regardless of how I felt. Incredibly, they'd left the massive stitches in all across my body, convinced that it was a good measure to prevent me from deliberately tearing my surgical wounds open again, leaving me looking like a patchwork corpse for my entire new state of being. I had tried starving myself, but they'd just shoved a tube down my throat and force-fed me this gross concoction of nutrients. By hook or by crook, they were going to keep me alive and find out what made me tick.

As I slumped against the wall and did my regular routine of just hoping that my brain would inexplicably give out and end it all on its own, the lock on the door rattled and the door swung inwards. I turned my head to see who it was, and a small glimmer of happiness managed to emerge in my psyche.

It was one of the doctors who would come in every so often to administer my "medication", though that term was a bit misleading: it mostly consisted of a bunch of sedatives and hard antidepressants that were supposed to keep me stable and not trying to kill myself. Most of the doctors, well... they treated me in a way that seemed counterproductive to that end. They would just come in, force the pills down my throat and leave as quickly as possible, as if being in the same room as me was sickening to them.

The one who had just come in, though, didn't do that. His name was Dr. Austin, and, to put it bluntly, he seemed like he actually gave a crap about my well-being that went beyond cramming pills down my throat. Sure, he had the same repulsed reaction as everyone did when they first caught sight of me, but he actually seemed to recognise that this was unfair and made an effort to accommodate himself to me.

He knelt down next to me and gently rotated me so I was facing him. I still wasn't too comfortable with other people touching me, but he at least tried to be compassionate in his approach. He smiled at me.

"Heya ****, how're you doing today?"

I tensed up at the mention of my old name. Dr. Austin noticed.

"Oh, geez: I'm so sorry. I forgot you're not a fan of that. Or this." He held up the cup with my pills in it. "I know it sucks, but you're going to have to take them."

I sighed and opened my mouth, and he tipped them in, before giving me some water to wash them down. Even that was more than the other doctors were willing to offer. He adjusted his glasses, checked my mouth, and then smiled again. "You know, your hair is growing back, just so you know."

I rub my head on the padding on the walls, and sure enough I could feel a short layer of fuzz on my scalp. Dr. Austin ran his hand through his own dull ginger hair.

"I'd offer a mirror so you can see, but I remember you're not a fan of that." I look away. "Honestly, I wish I could do more than just give you your pills. They say you're a suicide risk... I just want you to know that I hope you can find a reason to go on."

I sigh internally. According to everyone around me, I'm already legally dead, and it didn't stick the first time. Why shouldn't I be allowed to have a second go at it?

I hear his partner outside yell at him. "Hey, Cas, get a move on! You can talk to the freak another time!"

He cringes, and looks at me apologetically. "I'm so sorry about him, and everyone else." I give a half-hearted attempt at a shrug with my uneven shoulders; after all, it's what I've come to expect. "No, it's not okay: I don't know how you got this way, but you don't deserve to be treated like this."

He moves to leave, but stops before heading out the door and looks back at me. "Tell you what: I know you don't like your old name, but I don't want to think of you as some nameless patient. How about you come up with a new one for yourself?" I think he could see my approximation of a surprised look at this unexpected offer of agency. "Just a thought; let me know what you come up with."

He leaves, and for the first time, I regret not speaking up. He, at least, seems like he would be worth speaking to. And a name for myself? Since I first woke up in this form, it hadn't taken long for me to write off any possibility of a functional existence. The reason their treatment of me barely seemed to bother me anymore is that it felt easier to just internalise it and accept my being what they saw me as.

The concept that I deserved to be treated like a person felt borderline-foreign to me at this point, and yet it had already been shown that it was possible for at least one person to do. Maybe, just maybe...

I lie down on my back as the pills take effect and let various words roll around my brain as the TV blares in the background.

A new name...