Time passed. Cody measured his progress in small triumphs of independence—learning how to empty the urine bag strapped to his right leg, doing his own bowel care, learning to open his own mail when there was any, mostly from his mother in Texas. His father was dead. Jenny’s letters were returned unopened until they stopped coming. His mother sent him a clipping out of the local paper about the engagement. Jenny still looked pretty, he thought, and he knew he had done the right thing, closing that door. His mother had always been a clipping sender, but now he wished she would stop. He didn’t care to hear what his old school buddies were doing these days. They weren’t running in the same league, so to speak. He had endured one long tearful visit from his mother while he was still in the VA hospital and he could do without any more of those, too. He’d chosen to settle in California. At least there he was familiar with the nurses and a lot of the faces he’d come to know since entering his new world. California made space for “his kind,” he thought. Building laws had been passed that helped make minor matters a bit more convenient, like drinking fountains he could reach, and more curbs with ramps he could use in his electric wheelchair. And too, California weather suited him. To survive Texas summers one needed to be able to sweat and that was something else his body no longer could do.

  He started having preferences again. He learned to eat in public, ignoring stares. He decided to go to school. Mostly, however, he listened, and watched, and read. And thought. To escape. He got good at escaping. He could sit in the sun out on the patio and Go Away. That’s what he called it for lack of a better term. He wasn’t sure exactly where it was he went, but it felt good, and he didn’t like coming back.

  It was in his second semester at the local community college that he fitted a pencil into his hand brace and started doodling. He had rather enjoyed drawing in high school, but this was his first attempt at it since the accident. He drew a naked woman with fantasy breasts. He liked it. He drew faces. Then went back to bodies. He liked bodies. Female bodies specifically. Sketching wasn’t easy. He had to tell shoulder and arm muscles how to compensate for fingers that could no longer so much as pick his nose. Shading was hard because he couldn’t feel how much pressure he was putting on the pencil point except by looking.

  Bushnell, Fielding, and Sharkey, the three other quads in the house, admired his work. They asked him to draw them some female bodies with fantasy breasts, too. Some preferred bigger fantasies than others. Sharkey wanted his fantasy in chains. He was into chains. He had been into motorcycles before he broke his neck running his Harley into a truck. Now, mostly he was into beer—and chains. Cody couldn’t understand why Sharkey preferred his fantasy women bound until he began taking psychology courses. Then he still wasn’t sure.

  He began to think of life in terms of semesters. He chose courses because they mildly appealed to him, not because he had any particular goals in mind. He was one hundred percent disabled, according to his medical records. If he fell out of his chair he would have to lie there until somebody rescued him. Uncle Sam sheltered him somewhat financially, since he had given the bloom of his youth to scraping paint off of battleships down in San Diego. It was lucky he had gotten his yen for traveling out of his system, he thought. He had seen the world, at least most of the seaports of the world, but as Sharkey had said, that was a little like judging a woman only by her fanny. You couldn’t judge the whole world by its sea. You had to go inland to get perspective.

  Cody began to notice that his semesters gravitated toward the arts. He had tried a geology course but the field trip was out of the question. He’d had to do a term paper instead and he hated typing—one letter at a time with a typing stick on an electric typewriter. Art was better.

  He bought a drafting table and his art supplies started looking professional. He had a multitude of pencils and knew how to use them with finely honed expertise.

  Seasons passed with a kind of sameness, but Cody finally had a passion—his art. Sharkey would sit and watch him draw, opening flip-top beer cans with his teeth until he passed out, sliding out of his chair and onto the floor if his seat belt wasn’t fastened. Adam would hoist the man over his shoulder and carry him off to bed.

  “He needs a woman,” Adam said, “but he ain’t got a mind big enough. You got a mind big enough,” he said to Cody.

  Cody understood what he meant. His inner landscapes were busy. And his woman didn’t have chains. There were a few real ones who talked to him on campus, and called him once in a while, but Cody let it go at that. There were phone numbers, passed from quad to pare, for women with special qualities, and there had been times he had used the numbers. But his inner universe was infinitely more appealing. The art consumed him. He would surface from hours of deep concentration on a piece of work and know only that he had been content for a little while.

  Besides beer and bondage, Sharkey’s other main occupation was as a volunteer guinea pig for a medical research laboratory in L.A. Bushnell, who got his diving into a sunken log while on leave, and Fielding, another van roll, both looked upon Sharkey as a madman.

  “I got no government sugar daddy,” Sharkey belched, blowing a long strand of copper hair off his nose. They were sitting around watching a Lakers game on TV and Adam was filling out forms that Sharkey would need for the next project.

  “I still say you’re fuckin’ nuts,” Bushnell said. “You don’t even know what they’re going to do, and you’re signing your name on the dotted line.”

  “Did you read that fine print?” Fielding asked.

  “It don’t matter,” Sharkey smiled. “What the hell can they do to me? It’s all been done, right? Ain’t nothin’ else they can do to make it any worse. Sure can’t hurt.” He laughed at his own joke. Sharkey had burned his left calf badly the previous winter when he leaned his leg against a wall heater in the bathroom. His first hint that all was not well was the smell of scorched flesh. The result was a curiously graceful brand in the shape of a spiral, for that had been the design on the heater grillwork. Since his arms were already well-tattooed, he was considering ways to brand his right calf with a skull and crossbones before the others talked him out of it. Pain was only a memory. From the neck down anyway.

  Cody pulled a No. 2H pencil out of his hand brace with his teeth and inserted a No. 6B. He was working on a large portrait of Stravinsky, using a small black and white photo as a guide. One of the students in his music theory class had commissioned the work and he was pleased with the way it was turning out. Sharkey had been disappointed. He quickly lost interest if Cody’s subject was not female, preferably nude and taut in all the right places.

  “What’s the name of this project?” Cody asked. Sharkey’s last experimental undertaking was called PROJECT IRON-FLEX. It had involved intricately-geared hand and finger braces. His left arm—for he had been lefthanded prior to the smash-up—was encased in something that looked like chromed armor. It was designed to create movement through carefully flexed shoulder muscles. It had worked a little too well. Beer cans, once clutched, were crushed before Sharkey could get them to his lips. One night in a bar he had pinched a girl’s bottom and almost caused a riot because the bottom was property claimed by a member of a motorcycle gang. The man had bristled and slung a few epithets at Sharkey who in turn flexed a muscle that raised his middle finger. Later, in the hospital, he said, “I never thought he’d hit a guy in a wheelchair, man.” PROJECT IRON-FLEX was scrapped soon after. Cody thought it was just as well. He had an aversion to metal gadgets. He was melded to mechanical devices too much as it was. Watching Sharkey in his hardware reminded him of the artist H.R. Giger’s biomechanoids, nightmares that were half human, half metallic torture machines. He could never have become a beneficiary of PROJECT IRON-FLEX.

  Sharkey cruised over to Cody’s drafting table to check on the drawing.

  “When are you gonna get back to tits?”

  “Soon. So what’s the name of the new project?” Cody asked again.

  “R.A.B.B.”

  Fielding, in the kitchen getting another beer, laughed. “Rab? Like in Rabbit Test? Hey, Bushnell,” he hooted, “they’re gonna kill Sharkey to find out if some lady’s pregnant.”

  “R-A-B-B,” Sharkey spelled.

  “What’s it mean?” Bushnell asked, rolling over. He preferred using a manual chair for the arm exercise. He was impressive for a quad, Cody thought. Bushnell could lift his butt off his chair with his arms for minutes at a time. It helped keep his skin from breaking down. Decubitus ulcers from lack of circulation were a constant worry. Cody had a terrible time with pressure sores and he envied Bushnell’s agility.

  “I don’t remember what it means,” Sharkey muttered. “It don’t matter what it means. I can’t talk about it. It’s top secret.”

  “A regular threat to national security, huh?” said Bushnell. “God forbid the Russians get quads on their feet before we do. Come on, what’s R.A.B.B. mean?”

  “Rockabye Baby,” Adam read, holding up one of Sharkey’s forms.

  “Hey, that’s secret, man!” Sharkey yelled, zipping over to snatch the document away from the aide.

  “I knew it was a rabbit test,” Fielding said. “Shark, they’re gonna cut you open and—”

  “No, they’re not!”

  “Told you to read the fine print, didn’t I? Sucker.”

  “It’s somethin’ else. No cuttin’. I’m done with cuttin’.” Sharkey had reluctantly agreed a year earlier to have the tendons in his legs cut to try to subdue violent leg spasms. The decision had somehow also severed his last hope of any miracle recovery. It was soon after that that he had turned his body over to the researchers.

  On Monday a blue van with a hydraulic lift in back came to collect Sharkey, wheelchair and all. He waved goodbye to everyone on the porch as if he were headed for a trip to Disneyland.

  “See you turkeys Friday,” he said as the lift clanged shut behind him. Cody felt a flicker of nausea. He was reminded of cages. Traps and cages.

  Adam picked up the morning paper from the lawn after the van had departed. “I’m not cooking nothing extra on Friday ’til I see his face, I can tell you that. First legal-type paper I ever seen that laid out funeral arrangements, in case.”

  Fielding and Bushnell looked at each other. “I told him he should have read the fine print,” said Fielding.

  Cody found his thoughts wandering all week and it irritated him. Sharkey’s absence was intruding on his work, blocking his escape. Instead of dissolving into his nameless space, he found himself mulling over mental playbacks of episodes with his quirky housemate. Sharkey had come to their small commune more as a charity case than anything else. He’d had no place to go after leaving the hospital, a nurse had told Cody, except a county home. To be twenty-two and parked in a corridor between the elderly senile was Cody’s notion of purgatory. So they had voted and sent for him. There were times they had been sorry. Sharkey’s maniacal sense of the absurd bordered on true lunacy. Huck Finn with a pinch of strange. There was the time he tried to enter his electric wheelchair in a dirt bike scramble. And the time he had gotten a ticket for tooling around town in rush hour traffic. The officer had been embarrassed but determined after Sharkey ran the red light in his wheelchair.

  But the man had brought some humor back into Cody’s life. He had made them all laugh. The house was subdued without the stereo blasting country and western. They ate in silence.

  “He’ll be back Friday. This is stupid,” Bushnell said. “It’s like he said, it’s no big deal.”

  “We shoulda read the fine print,” Fielding mumbled.

  On Thursday Cody did a pen and ink cartoon of Sharkey crawling up a Mt. Everest-sized breast. He placed it on the man’s bed in preparation for his home-coming. Sharkey’s room was a hodge-podge of interrupted projects, from his beer can collection to dead marijuana plants in a terrarium that had once housed a garter snake nobody could find. Motorcycle magazines and magazines full of naked beauties were stacked everywhere. A guitar hung on one wall and Cody wondered if Sharkey had been as good on the instrument as he claimed. His voice in the shower wasn’t half bad, with a slight Louisiana inflection. Sharkey was always happy in the shower until the water ran cold. “It’s never goddamn long enough,” he would complain as Adam lifted him from the shower chair, dripping and shivering. It occurred to Cody that maybe that was Sharkey’s escape. He reached up and stroked the guitar strings with a thumbnail. The strings were out of tune. He wondered if Mac had ever learned how to play his guitar. He hoped so. He hoped it was the center of smoky parties and good times as it had been once, long ago. He wanted its amber wood saturated with music, layered with melodies, not hung on a wall like a decorative icon.

  On Friday the blue van pulled up and opened its metal mouth to disgorge Project R.A.B.B. It wasn’t exactly a confetti and ticker tape return. Sharkey looked no different than he had when he left on Monday. He wasn’t sporting any new mechanical devices. His wild copper hair was caught in a sloppy ponytail which was the way he always wore it. His Van Dyke beard was the same, the chipped front tooth from an ancient brawl was still there—nothing at all was changed. And yet Cody sensed a difference. Sharkey rolled up the ramp and into the house and asked what was for dinner.

  “Missed your cookin’,” he told Adam. “Never thought I’d hear me say that.”

  Bushnell offered him a beer. “So, how was Project Rockabye Baby? You cover any new terrain?”

  Sharkey maneuvered his long lifeless fingers through the plastic mug handle and hoisted it to his mouth, spilling beer down the front of his T-shirt. “God, I been cravin’ a beer all week,” he sighed, belching.

  Cody watched him wipe his face on his arm. What was different? Something had changed. Sharkey glanced up at him and then he saw what it was. Fear. His face was rigid with fear.

  “So what did they do?” Fielding asked.

  “Nothin’. Just ran a bunch of tests.”

  “All week?”

  “All week.”

  “What kind of tests?”

  Sharkey belched again. “You name it, they ran it. Lot of, you know, head tests, I.Q. junk.”

  “And they found out you didn’t have an I.Q.” Bushnell said. “Hell, I could have told them that.”

  “Nutsy tests,” Sharkey went on. “What do you call ’em, those ink blot things. And a physical like you wouldn’t believe, man. Felt like I was gettin’ ready to go to the Moon.” He accepted another beer. “They said I passed.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Cody asked.

  “Good. I guess. Anyway, I got ’til next Wednesday to decide if I wanna do it.”

  “Do what?”

  Sharkey wiped at the beer stain on his T-shirt. “Can’t talk about it.”

  Bushnell lifted himself a few inches out of his chair to exercise. “Probably going to graft his head onto another body. If I was the body I’d sue. Nobody deserves a head like that. Total vacuum.”

  Suddenly Sharkey slung his beer mug at Bushnell, splashing the man and splitting his lip.

  Bushnell wiped at his mouth and saw the blood. “You sonovabitch.” In one swift move he rammed Sharkey’s chair and swung his arm, clipping him on the cheek before Adam shoved them apart.

  “You start poundin’ on each other and I’ll take your damned chairs away,” the man warned.

  Bushnell moved out onto the back patio to cool off. Sharkey departed for his room and asked to be put to bed. After he was settled Cody knocked on his open door. None of them ever closed their doors once they were in bed, for if they needed help Adam wouldn’t hear them yell.

  “This Project Rockabye Baby,” said Cody, “is it risky?”

  “All the kinks ain’t been worked out, so they tell me.” He hooked his arm through the bed rail and tried to roll to his side. “But, I swear to God, man, if it works…” His eyes were wet. “If it works…it could fuckin’ turn the world around.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t tell you. God, I wanna talk to somebody about it. You’d be the one I’d wanna tell, man…Cody…it could change everything. But they’re a long way off from gettin’ it perfect. There would be things…I’d have to forfeit they said, if I decide to do it. The way I look at it, it ain’t givin’ up much.”

  “My God, it’s not a head transplant is it?”

  Sharkey’s laugh was without humor, closer to hysteria, Cody thought, and the emptiness of it, the madness in it, chilled him.

  “No. I told you—no cuttin’. I just…go to sleep sort of, for a little while and…when I wake up—”

  “Oh shit, not cryogenics. They’re not going to freeze you until they figure out a way to regenerate a severed spinal cord in about two hundred years—”

  Sharkey stared at him. “No. No cryo…stuff. Cody…what if I told you…it ain’t gonna take two hundred years…that it’s now. They can do it now.”

  Cody heard himself swallow. It seemed to take a long time to remember how to breathe again. He could hear Adam in the kitchen whistling as he prepared supper.

  “I never told you,” Sharkey said finally. “I’ll call you a damn liar if you ever repeat it.”

  It took a minute to make his mouth and mind work again. “How…do you know it’s now? That they can regenerate nerves? There’s no way—”

  “There’s a way. But it ain’t all worked out. There’s a few…drawbacks…I can’t tell you no more. But if it works—” Sharkey waved an uncoordinated arm at his room, “they can have it all. It don’t matter to me, everything that went before…it’s nothin’ to give up…for what I could have—”

  He refused to elaborate further. Cody wondered if hopeless hope had finally broken him. Of the four of them, only Sharkey had refused to accept his body the way it was. Cody had, during his year in the VA hospital, gone through what the psychiatrist had called a “period of mourning” for his body. He had even contemplated suicide, hoarding the various pills proffered at night until he had a regular pharmaceutical company. But he had never been able to go through with it. Now, in spite of his limitations, there was a sense of peace within him. He savored every breath. He made plans. He…accomplished. His existence had meaning. All Sharkey had were memories of Before, and a pathetic collection of empty beer cans.