The prevalent dream in Steve Guttman’s graduate program was of eternal life by way of exiting one’s body.
“What’s wrong with the idea of uploading our minds into a computer program?” asked his colleague, Amy Hurt, as she and Steve waited for their meals.
Steve stared at the restaurant table that separated them. Looking at Amy was painful.
“I know,” she said. “You’re thinking it’s crazy that I, of all people, would want to escape my body.”
Steve glanced at her and turned his eyes back to the table.
“I’ll admit it,” she said. “I’m so hot that spontaneous combustion is possible.”
Steve wondered what he would do if she caught fire in front of him. He searched the walls of the busy restaurant for a fire extinguisher.
“I put the odds of that happening in the next five years, when I’m at my physical peak, at twelve percent.”
“Which is eighty-eight percent against,” Steve pointed out.
“Still,” she shrugged. “But how hot will I be in twenty years?”
He forced himself to look at her again.
“I put your picture into an aging program the other night,” he said. “Bear in mind that it was your driver’s license picture.”
She made a face.
“And I added twenty-five years, not twenty,” he said. “You still came out hot enough to melt the polar ice caps.”
“Which is already happening.”
“So you don’t need to accelerate it. I’m just glad you’re not into arctic exploration.”
“Then forty years,” she said. “How hot will I be then?”
“Point taken: physical beauty is ephemeral.”
Their meals arrived. That made Steve happy. Having the lasagna in front of him would make it easier to keep his eyes off of Amy.
“Let’s see if the food here is as good as everyone says.”
“I’m a fundamentalist,” Steve said. “Physical contact with the world is important to me, and for that I need a body.”
She’d ordered spaghetti. He listened to her suck the noodles from her fork.
“Oh my God,” she said. “I bet they made this pasta, like, ten minutes ago.”
He listened to her suck and tried not to imagine the slight parting of her lips.
“I guess we can agree to disagree,” she said.
She covered her mouth as she both spoke and chewed even though she could see that he wasn’t watching.
“I want the ghost in the machine,” he said.
“Your mind not one with your body but separate, occupying it and driving it like a car. But how’s that better than occupying a program any computer can access?”
“I guess the problem is the body I have now.”
Amy examined Steve’s body openly while he focused on the lasagna. He only came up to her eyes. He wore long-sleeved shirts because he had arms like sticks.
“I think the ghost idea comes from wanting to slip out of this body so I can slide into another one,” he said.
He dared to look at her and regretted it.
“If I had another body I’d be happy to feel at one with it,” he said.
“Whose body would you want?”
“That’s for you to say.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“You can save me some work,” he said. “Obviously I could input pictures of different men into a thermometric program. Or you could just share your intuitions about who’s the hottest.”
She sucked in the last of her noodles and began mopping up the sauce with her French bread.
“The fallibility of intuition explains why we have science,” she said, “and I’m pretty sure that People magazine uses a thermometric program to determine the Sexiest Man Alive. Right now it’s Idris Elba.”
Steve was pretty sure that some of People’s recent choices proved that their thermometric program was primitive. He made a mental note to email People about the affordability of the two or three most advanced programs.
“But the fact that they name a different Sexiest Man almost every year,” she continued, “implies that usually they just pick somebody from the top five.”
He stole another glance.
“And it’s a virtual mathematical certainty that their method for picking from the top five isn’t randomizing, or David Beckham would have been Sexiest Man several times.”
So she was willing to use her intuition after all. The hypocrisy bothered Steve.
“Though if you go farther back, Hugh Jackman’s failure to win more than once had already proved that they weren’t randomizing.”
More hypocrisy, Steve thought. He would need time to get over his disappointment. But Elba, Beckham, and Jackman weren’t options, anyway. The next step in executing his plan would be to identify his realistic choices. Clint Eastwood wasn’t realistic either—especially since that would introduce the problem of time travel—but he had to ask.
“What about Clint Eastwood?”
“Maybe back in the day,” she said. “Lasagna no good?”
She’d cleaned her plate. Steve always chewed his food until it had liquefied in his mouth.
“What about him?” he said.
Steve nodded toward a man of about thirty who’d just walked in.
“Could be a twelve-percenter, like you.”
Amy looked.
“Maybe a ten,” she said.
Steve looked around, only in part because he hadn’t located the fire extinguisher before. For the first time in his life, he’d felt a stirring in his loins when looking at a man. But he hadn’t looked away from the tall, well-dressed sandy-haired man because he was unwilling to question his heterosexuality. He believed his heterosexuality was beyond doubt. He’d looked away because he wanted to reflect on what else the stirring in his loins might signify. Coincidentally, the explanation came to him at the precise moment when he finally saw the fire extinguisher. He realized that the stirring indicated a compulsion to enter the tall man’s body, though not by everyday sexual means.
“You know who that is?” Amy said.
She looked away from the man as he returned her stare. He seemed unaware of Steve’s presence.
“No idea.”
“Haven’t seen him on the news?” Amy said.
Steve glanced at her. She was trying like a ventriloquist to speak without moving her lips. She didn’t want the tall man to know she was talking about him.
“They call him ‘Features’ because his features are so perfect. He’s also called—”
“He’s coming over,” Steve whispered.
“Jesus,” Amy said.
The tall man stopped beside their table. The stirring had subsided. Steve reasoned that this was because, having done the work of informing the decision he’d just made to move forward with his plan as soon as possible, his loins had earned a rest.
“You’re wondering if I’m—” the tall man said to Amy, who blurted out, “No, I don’t think you’re him.”
He smiled. Steve thought that perhaps he ought to be called ‘Teeth.’ His teeth, like his features, were perfect in every way.
“How’d you suddenly rouge your cheeks like that without touching your face?”
Amy blushed even more under the tall man’s teasing.
“Since I’m not the guy you didn’t think I was,” he said, “you might as well know that all the bad stuff the press says about him is fake.”
The luminous smile again.
“Until they prove it in court.”
The tall man slid Steve’s paper napkin toward Amy. He handed her a pen.
“Name and number,” he commanded.
He wrote on another part of the napkin. He tore it in half and pocketed the scrap that had Amy’s information.
“Call me, Sally,” he said as he turned away.
Steve waited for the tall man to go up to the counter to order his meal.
“Sally?” he said.
“That’s Vladimir Orlov. They call him ‘Features,’ but also ‘Vlad the Impaler.’ You heard about the way the Brooklyn Assistant D.A. was murdered last week?”
“That was him?”
“That’s the speculation in the press. The Brooklyn D.A.’s office has been going hard after the Russian Mafia, and supposedly Orlov has killed that way before.”
Her hands shook. Steve realized that he was able to look at her without pain because he’d become entirely focused on executing his plan.
Perfect, he thought. The other problem with using Elba, Beckham, or Jackman to execute his plan, besides the fact they’d be hard to get to, was that as far as Steve knew none of them would deserve it. But you probably couldn’t say that about a guy known as the Impaler.
#
On the afternoon that he decided Vladimir Orlov was his man, Steve remained at his table after Amy had excused herself to go to class. Orlov had taken a table at the front of the restaurant, where he could look out the window onto Cortlandt Street. Steve watched him leer at Amy as she hurried out the door.
He went up to the counter.
“Your food is fantastic,” he said to the young woman taking orders. “My girlfriend and I will definitely come back.”
“Your girlfriend?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
He brushed off her skepticism.
“Isn’t that Vladimir Orlov up front?” he whispered.
“Here for lunch every day,” she whispered back. “I’d poison him, but he’s a great tipper.”
“Poison him?”
Not manly enough, Steve thought.
“A regular.”
“In every way,” she laughed. “Uses the can at exactly five to one every day. A well-oiled machine.”
“That’s helpful,” he said, and she gave him a look.
“He’s scary, so the other customers let him have the whole men’s room to himself. He’s in there for like twenty minutes.”
She laughed again.
“So every guy in here uses the can at ten to one.”
#
Steve avoided the restaurant for a week. Then he went back alone. He ordered lasagna again. He kept his backpack on and watched Orlov. Orlov ate and looked out onto Cortlandt Street. The counter girl hadn’t been kidding about the ten-to-one stampede to the men’s room. When they’d all come out, there went Orlov. Steve counted to five before following him.
Orlov was using one of the two urinals. Steve took the other. He didn’t need to pee, but he unzipped for the sake of verisimilitude. He looked down at Orlov. Disappointing, but it didn’t make him change his mind. He’d heard that was over-rated, anyway.
“Hey,” Orlov said.
Orlov turned toward him exactly as Steve had hoped. He was ready with the plastic gun he’d built, like the one used by the killer that Clint Eastwood ultimately brings to justice in In the Line of Fire. Steve admired the work Eastwood had done at every stage of his career. Eastwood’s films had taught him courage, so he waited until Orlov had zipped up and was facing him directly.
“Go ahead, make my day,” he said.
He shot the so-called Impaler through the heart.
Even after all the times Steve had watched In the Line of Fire, the noise surprised him. But it was Orlov. He didn’t worry that any of the cowards eating their spaghetti would come to check.
If the counter girl was right, he had at least fifteen minutes before anybody would get suspicious. He thought he’d probably need less than ten in order to do everything. He removed the device from his backpack and used it to connect himself to Orlov’s corpse. He switched it on. Faster than he’d expected, found himself looking out of Vladimir Orlov’s eyes at the lifeless body that had belonged for almost twenty-five years to Steve Guttman. The sense of oneness with Orlov’s body also came faster than Steve had expected. He had been ashamed of the body he’d occupied for so long. But now, examining it through Orlov’s eyes, his abhorrence went beyond shame. He had to avert his eyes.
He removed Orlov’s suit jacket. The bullet had gone through the back. He found the slug on the floor and put it in his backpack. Blood had lightly spattered the wall and the floor. He wetted some paper towels and cleaned up the blood. The wet towels went in his backpack after he’d wrapped them in dry ones.
He’d reserved one compartment of the backpack for a clean shirt and jacket. He took them out and replaced them in the backpack with the ruined shirt and jacket. He bandaged the hole in front of his heart. He knew he would need to see a surgeon soon, and he was glad that the pain signals from Orlov’s body were being suppressed by their absorption into his own consciousness. His pain was mild, considering he’d just been shot through the heart.
Bandaging the hole in his back wasn’t easy. He started in front with a long bandage. He reached it behind himself with one hand so he could pass it to his other hand to pull around to the front.
He put on the clean shirt and jacket. He’d done a pretty good job of estimating Orlov’s size.
He looked at the Rolex that now belonged to him. Twelve past one, so he’d taken longer than he expected.
He studied the lifeless body that had imprisoned little Steve Guttman for too long. He hadn’t thought about what a coroner might identify as the cause of death. It was a fascinating question. But even though everybody in the restaurant would have heard the shot, there was no gunshot wound so there’d be no way to link the man that the whole world would think was Vladimir Orlov to the mysterious death.
#
Steve had overestimated the rate at which the infusion of his living consciousness into the body of Vladimir Orlov would accelerate recovery from the gunshot wound. On the other hand, the weeks he spent in the hospital were far more diverting than any comparable hospital time that the old Steve Guttman would have experienced. The transformed Steve Guttman amused himself by seducing nurses and other hospital personnel, including the only one of the several cardiologists who visited him who happened to be a woman.
His greatest challenge while hospitalized was dealing with the handful of unsavory men, most with Russian accents, who visited with the expectation that Steve would know them and understand the things they said about “business.” But soon he realized that he simply needed to act the part of the Impaler. He would snarl that he wanted to be left alone and they would obey.
As his time to leave the hospital approached, he began to worry that he’d become too comfortable with pretending to be Vladimir Orlov. He wondered if the oneness of his mind with Orlov’s body was producing an undesired result. He wondered if, because of its unity with Orlov’s body, his mind was also becoming in some measure Orlovian.
He decided that his release from the hospital would solve the problem. He’d focused on the question of the mind/body relationship at the expense of neglecting the impact of the environment. In the hospital everyone believed he was Vladimir Orlov and he was visited only by Orlov’s disreputable associates. After his release he wouldn’t be able to go back to being Steve Guttman, but neither would he be Vlad the Impaler. He would invent a new name and move away from New York. He would go to California. He would take his revolutionary technology to Silicon Valley and meet with venture capitalists and become wealthy. He made a plan to contact Amy Hurt once he’d struck a deal with the money men. He would hire her for his company in Silicon Valley and make her rich, too. His plan was of course conditioned on not meeting a woman who was even hotter.
His first meeting with a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists went badly. They did not say no, but they didn’t say yes, either. They would need time to think.
Joshua Kramer, as he now called himself, was livid. He walked around the block in a vain attempt to cool off. Then he went back into the building where he’d met the men. He went to the room where he hoped he would still find them. Only one man remained. Joshua argued his case again. The man told Joshua he’d made a strong case but that it would be weeks before he could reconvene his colleagues. They were busy, and much of their business involved travel. Joshua would need to be patient.
Joshua struck the man in the face, knocking him down, and strangled him to death.
He walked away calmly because he’d learned courage. He first concluded that the oneness of his mind with Orlov’s body had indeed made his mind in some measure Orlovian. Then he remembered shooting Orlov to death and drew the different conclusion that perhaps his mind hadn’t been changed so much after all.
END
by 
Don Stoll
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