Читать книгу Shadow Casting - Paul Kane - Страница 12

BIORHYTHMS

If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.

Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric.”

In the middle of the glade he sat.

Kyle Stanton, crossed-legged, upturned hands on each knee, his eyes closed and his breathing shallow. He moved not one muscle: perfectly still like some kind of waxwork of himself. He had been in this position since sun up—two, maybe three hours—and would remain just so until the sun descended once again.

He ate very little and always first thing in the morning. Never during the day. The same went for ablutions. Kyle toileted once, just before adopting the lotus. He slept in a cave a short walk from here, but only for seven hours a night precisely—Kyle had no need for alarm clocks, he simply wakened himself when it was time to get up.

His body, naked to the four winds, was perfectly relaxed. Insects crawled over him: he didn’t flinch. Animals came to sniff at him: he took no notice. A rainstorm yesterday had saturated him: he let it. For his mind was focused on other things. His will was strong and a determination to succeed coursed through him.

Kyle had always been curious about his physical form, even at an early age. He lost count of the amount of times he’d examined himself, casting a quizzical eye over his flesh and wondering just what the hell he was, what this did and what that did. He was extremely lucky to have had such liberal-minded parents, ageing hippies as a point of fact (turned joiner and seamstress to earn a crust). They were far from ashamed of their own bodies and happily wandered around the small house they rented with not a stitch on. His mum and dad taught him not to have any hang-ups and for this he would always be grateful. How many people went through their lives not really understanding themselves, embarrassed like Adam and Eve after the apple? Kyle soon came to realise that, like everyone else on the planet, he was a remarkable biological machine. Something unique.

He began to hone his body to physical perfection. At school he excelled in sports. Athletics, football, rugby, tennis, cross-country running ... He had medals for them all. Exercise was very important and he made sure he stuck to a workable regimen. But he also developed his mind. With literature, sciences (especially biology), the arts and mathematics. Kyle was the only boy he knew who set himself extra homework, who would visit the library on a regular basis and use up every ticket he had. He was the star pupil, an all-rounder. The powers that be had big plans for him.

However, as he told them in no uncertain terms, his destiny lay in another direction. No diplomas or university degrees for Kyle Stanton. That’s not to say he didn’t continue with his studies. His fascination with the human body—both inside and out—encouraged him to learn all there was to learn about its functions. And limitations. Starting with Gray’s Anatomy, he absorbed enormous amounts of information about the structure of the mortal coil. He memorised tremendous chunks of text, diagrams, names. By the end of his self-taught course, he could have passed as a doctor—specialising in any one of a dozen areas—with flying colours.

But his investigations were not limited merely to such dry technical fields. He was far too active an individual to be tied down to a desk all day, every day. In addition to his theoretical research, Kyle also took up more practical pursuits. First he learnt Yoga (hero posture—both upright and reclining—dog posture, extended triangle, sitting spine twist, bridge posture, plough posture, shoulder stand, corpse ...), then massage. He became an expert in Reflexology, Shiatsu, Acupressure, Do-in, Osteopathy and so on and so forth. If there were classes being run at the local college, Kyle was there. Indeed, that’s how he made his living at the beginning. The teachers were so impressed with his flair for these relaxation and healing techniques, he was soon being offered a part-time, then later full-time, position instructing others. No one knew their way around the human body like Kyle did.

From here he branched out into legitimate massage parlours and total fitness centres. The loans from the bank were quickly paid back as word spread and his empire grew. This, of course, gave Kyle the freedom to experience even more, travelling to foreign parts to sit at the right hand of adepts. He quickly added Acupuncture to his repertoire, then Polarity Therapy devised by Dr Randolph Stone, an amalgamation of notions from East and West allowing the practitioner to balance up prana (as they called the body’s energy flow in India), before re-examining Chinese Taoist teachings which posited the view that such energy, here called chi, travelled along well-defined circuits—making full use of his extensive knowledge of meridian lines.

Kyle learnt to master his breathing, a trick actually taught to him by one of America’s most famous magicians, who used it when he did those impressively dangerous underwater stunts. Kyle could control his bladder and bowels with no effort whatsoever. And he soon regulated his eating and sleeping habits to suit. No food with artificial additives, no preservatives. Just fresh fruit and vegetables, and meat from his own personal reserves. He drank only water; not one drop of alcohol poisoned his system. Plus he refused to smoke, exiting a room if he so much as glimpsed a person lighting up. Accordingly, he took no drugs of any kind, including steroids or “performance-enhancing” pills. So while the majority of his peers were either stoned or whacked out on E or Coke, he settled for the highs that only his particular lifestyle choice could grant him.

For example, Kyle applied what he’d discovered to his activities in the bedroom. His awareness of the main Chakras allowed him to practise Tantric sex, which sometimes went on for many hours, his “dabblings” in Taoist traditions giving him the ability to have multiple—or even full-body—orgasms. And, of course, his broad grounding in female as well as male physiology proved invaluable for satisfying whichever partner, or partners, he happened to be entertaining that week (Sharon, Brenda, Tracy, Natalie, Angelica, Louise, Elsa ... the list went on and on). Along with the monetary wealth he’d accumulated, something his parents never really approved of, this made him one of the most eligible bachelors in the world.

Yet he still wasn’t happy. Kyle could walk across hot coals, nap on a bed of six-inch nails (thanks to a fakir he once met in Bombay), swim underwater for almost a quarter of an hour with no compulsion for air, and climb the very highest of mountains without safety ropes or fear of breaking into a sweat. He was the perfect physical specimen; a superman in some senses ... But it was nowhere near enough for him.

He lacked that certain something. No matter how far he pushed himself, nor how much power he commanded over the various parts of his body, he was still not fully in charge. Kyle would always be at the mercy of his deep-rooted natural instincts.

His dreams were a case in point. Every single night he had to recharge himself, involuntarily yielding to the mercies of sleep and his subconscious. Kyle wanted to be able to shut his body down himself, as a computer does, or go to standby mode like a TV. Re-energise his body and mind without completely going under. Sure, he’d practised entering a coma-like state by reducing his heartbeat—virtually dead to the casual observer—but it was hardly the same thing. It took all of his energy to perform, to dig himself out of the blackness and wake again. He usually needed a good night’s sleep just to get over it.

By his account this was systematic of the same problem. His body was doing things like this all the time without his permission, without his cognisance or authority. Each time he drank his water or ate his chemical-less food, his body took over. He could do things to help the digestion processes along—stimulating the major reflex points for one—but in the end it passed through him without so much as a by your leave. A please or thank you. The same was true of electrical impulses from his brain. He could tell his hand or his arm or his leg to move, and this would happen almost instantaneously, a fraction of a second between thought and action. But this still made him a puppet, working his own body with strings. He wanted to be those strings. To have direct access to the puppet; and not have to communicate through a third party.

It was a ridiculous idea, he told himself. No one in the history of all creation had ever achieved anything like it. But isn’t that what people had said about flight? Couldn’t be done, no way. If man had been meant to fly, he would have been born with wings. Kyle had already come so far, already achieved so much. To a Stone Age man crawling around in the dirt, the feats he could perform might seem like magic. Jesus, it seemed like magic to most people he knew today.

But that would be nothing compared to holding total sway over his substance. Matter and spirit in absolute unison: there was no telling where it would end. He could even be the next stage in human evolution. Just imagine it! Imagine what he could accomplish ...

With this in mind he determined to at least try. His businesses were being run by competent managers, his stocks and shares in capable hands. His girlfriends would be left disappointed for a while—however long it took—but that couldn’t be helped. His parents hardly saw him these days anyway, now he’d tucked them away in a nice “little” naturist complex, and wouldn’t miss him all that much.

So, a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday, in the middle of August, Kyle set off on his journey of discovery without telling a soul where he was going. He knew of the perfect place. A retreat he’d used before when he’d needed to get away from it all. Quiet, tranquil, miles from any hint of civilisation. The best way to concentrate. He took with him no supplies. There was a clear spring that ran nearby and as far as victuals went, he intended to live off the land as much as was humanly possible: just as the primitives had done—he was conscious of the irony. Fruit from the trees, animal meat in the traps he laid; it would suffice at the rate he consumed food.

His birthday came and went. Kyle barely noted the date (soon he would be born again anyway). Time seemed to stand still for him out here as he laboured day in, day out. Attempting to wrestle control of his body from nature itself. He wanted out of the loop, to be completely autonomous. An arbitrary entity disconnected from the rest of his race, from the rest of his world.

Kyle thought about none of this, though. Not the past, not the future. Not even who he was. His mind was engaged in a battle for supremacy.

And today he was about to win.

It happened so quickly, it took Kyle a little by surprise. One second everything was how it had been since his birth, the next it was as if nature had suddenly said: “Okay, you want it so badly, you got it!” and given up the ghost. Just like that.

A good thing Kyle was ready. Prepared. How could he not have been after all this waiting, all this fighting? He took on the mantle with glee, filling the emptiness practically straight away.

He was in total control now, and it was fantastic. He could feel the rhythms of his body like never before. He could do anything he wanted. Could be anything he wanted ...

But wait, he had items to attend to first. Using the information he’d picked up about his body from textbooks and encyclopaedias, he began to take over the many necessary functions he must perform in order to survive. First he had to tap into the labyrinthine network that sent messages to his brain—take stock of the hundred million neurones in there, the branches of each one connecting to thousands of others in kind. Like an old-fashioned telephone operator, he must plug in lines here, then switch to there. Kyle had to get the nervous system up and running again in order to receive messages from around the body and dish out his own instructions manually, firing electrical pulses along the neurones at four-hundred kilometres an hour. Within seconds he was getting reports from a multitude of different locations at once. Kyle had to deal with them all, and fast.

Best to start with the heart and lungs initially. Keep the heart beating to stay alive and the lungs pumping air in and out. Kyle had to maintain a rhythm of at least sixty to eighty beats of his heart muscle a minute whilst in this state (the figure would go up eventually when he moved). Each beat had to start off in a small knot of tissue—the sinoatrial node—in the rear wall of the upper-right atrium, which generated low-intensity electrical signals that passed along nerve-like tracts, stimulating muscle fibres as they went, to end up at the bottom of the right atrium—the atrioventricular node, located between the atria and ventricles. After delaying the impulse slightly, Kyle then had to relay the signals along a bulky conducting tract, the bundle of His, and through its left and right branches to splinter again into a tangle of fibres in the walls of the ventricles. Once each surge of electrical energy from the sinoatrial node arrived at these muscle fibres they contracted, causing the heart to pump blood—through hundreds of miles of linked arteries, veins and capillaries, eight to nine pints shunted around the body each minute, seventy-five millilitres a beat, carrying oxygen and nutrients to Kyle’s tissues and removing any waste products. Kyle had to keep the blood flowing to his heart to supply the cardiac muscle with the oxygen and glucose needed to remove waste products from there. In addition, he had to constantly create new blood cells to replace those that were dying off (on average two hundred billion each day). No blood, no blood flow to the heart.

At the same time it was necessary to supervise the extraction of oxygen from the air, sucked in through his nose and mouth. Inside his ribcage, he had to direct his sponge-like lungs to remove the oxygen so it could be transferred into his blood supply, the superfluous carbon dioxide taken from the blood to be expelled when he breathed out again: a process usually handled automatically by his nervous system. Each time he inhaled, Kyle followed the air down the trachea, kept open by cartilage rings, heating it as it went. He then ushered it down either the left or right bronchus, before pushing it into one of his lungs. And, of course, he had to keep the inner lining of his pulmonary system moistened with secretions of mucus from epithelial cells, and make certain the cilia moved the said mucus along so it could remove any unwanted dust particles that had accidentally found their way into his lungs when he took a breath. But that wasn’t all. Each time he did take in air, Kyle was obliged to work the muscles in his chest to elevate and distend the ribcage and contract the diaphragm to increase the pleural cavity, so his lungs could work properly in the first place.

Now what? Oh yes, more major work to be done with his digestive system. Although he hadn’t eaten for a few hours or so, his body was still processing the fuel. He had to finish breaking it down using a mixture of enzymes and hydrochloric acid (gastric juice), then the partially digested food (now technically known as chyme) had to be passed carefully through the pylorus sphincter into the upper-portion of the small intestine, the duodenum, where secretions from the pancreas neutralised the acid and bile was added to break down fats. From here the digestion process must continue on into the small and large intestine proper, and nutrients absorbed into the body, the unusable residue being fed into the colon (where most of the water was absorbed into the bloodstream) before passing into the rectum just prior to excretion.

Meanwhile, using his kidneys, he had to filter water and other soluble molecules from his blood, casting aside any unnecessary waste matter and toxins to be released through his urine: the final incarnation of the spring water he’d drunk. But before that could happen, urine had to be created in the kidneys by filtrating plasma, the liquid in which blood cells were suspended, and fed down the ureters into the bladder in peristaltic waves, to be stored up in preparation for discharge.

As for his liver, residing at the top of the abdominal cavity, underneath the diaphragm, this organ had to be appropriated to ship nutrients to wherever they were needed and perform other vital metabolic processes, such as taking glucose from the blood coming from his intestines then transforming it into carbohydrate glycogen, put aside in reserve (to be converted back into glucose when levels in the blood happened to fall). Kyle had to fathom how to convert the amino acids and fats stored there into glucose, and how to form urea from waste proteins and amino acids, and mass-produce key molecules (like phospholipids and lipoproteins) that fashioned cell membranes. This organ was also utilised to generate digestive enzymes to be introduced into the small intestine and last, but not least, to warm the blood that passed through its internal regions which helped sustain a constant body temperature.

Kyle did all this and more, thousands of tasks every second: handling production of cells (for skin, muscle, the major organs ... for his brain) as well as maintaining the fifty thousand billion already in operation; seeing to the replacement of dead tissue; the stimulation of saliva in the mouth; hair and nail growth; the preservation of his bones; organising the vital chemical reactions throughout his form, draining off excess fluid from tissues using the lymphatic system; shifting material about the body, in and out, up and down, left and right. Even ensuring that sperm production continued on apace in his testes—one thousand every second ...

But it was unbelievably hard work. Kyle had no idea it would be so tiring, that taking over all his automated functions would demand his utmost attention, and would continue to do so forever. He started to worry ... How will I cope? What if I forget to do something important—one mistake and I’m dead! And he hadn’t even begun to think about things like getting up and walking, or somehow keeping all these plates in the air while he slept. Sleep, hah! Forget about that for the time being.

Kyle tried to compose himself. These random thoughts were no good. Too distracting. It would all become easier the more he did it. Soon it would be like ... Like what, second nature?

But he was right. It was becoming simpler with every duty he performed. Kyle proceeded to lose his doubts, his inhibitions. He could cope, no problem. The more ambitious stuff would come later on. For now Kyle allowed himself a small congratulations on achieving what he set out to do. He was at last in total contr—

Kyle hadn’t noticed the invader until it was too late. A virus. A common cold virus, brought on by sitting through that rainstorm yesterday. Kyle ordered his antibodies to intercept, but even before they could set to work he began getting strange signals from his nervous system. A tingling sensation in ...

In his nose.

He couldn’t help himself, he had to relieve the pressure and sneezing was the only way to do it. The rush of air threw him completely, leaving his nose at precisely one-hundred mph, sending him into a panic as he felt himself wobbling backwards. Kyle endeavoured to compensate, tried to work his muscles in teams of twenty or thirty at a time, contracting the meat in his arms to move the bones and put out his hand.

Kyle opened his eyes without comprehending the enormity of what he’d done. The light streaming in through his conjunctivae, corneas, irises, pupils, lenses, vitreous humour, and optic nerves overwhelmed him, sabotaging any attempt to close his eyelids again. He sought to process over a million colours: blues, greens, reds ... all bouncing into his brain far too quickly for him to differentiate, while he struggled to keep his heart, lungs, liver and the rest of his organs working properly. Kyle felt himself shouting out, a natural human reaction. But disastrous in his case, forcing him to draw in more breath, to change the tension in his vocal chords (tightening them to scream), to trouble his larynx, his tongue, needlessly—distracting him further.

The sound vibrated off his helix, tragus, concha and travelled down the external acoustic meatus on both sides of his head. Inside his ears it passed through the tympanum, stretched taut across the ear canal, caused the malleus (hammer) to strike the incus (anvil)—each bone no bigger than a grain of rice—taking the vibrations down to the stapes, fenestra ovalis, zipping through receptors in the cochlea and up through the acoustic nerve into his brain. More sensory input to collate.

By now the pads on his fingers were touching the grass, transmitting yet more data directly to his bulging grey matter—using up more than its fair share of energy firing overburdened neurones. His arm buckled under the weight of his body. His palm connected with the ground, sending shockwaves through his tendons, brachialis, biceps brachii and up into his pectoral and trapezius muscles.

Kyle needed to cough, but was having difficulty regulating his breathing. Saliva production fell and the dryness in his throat caused him to choke.

Hold it together, he told himself, you can do it ...

But he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. He was losing his grasp.

Kyle’s body cried thick, watery tears. Blood commingled with sweat and he had to release it through his pores or risk drowning in his own juices.

He concentrated on his lungs and heart again, sacrificing other vital systems. All he could think of was to keep that muscle pumping, to keep breathing.

To stay alive.

But now his eyes were open, he was compelled to try and focus. Using all of his might, Kyle tilted his head and looked down upon himself, finally flipping the inverted image projected onto his retina.

His body was losing coherence. His skin was rippling like washing hung out to dry. Blood was escaping down his nostrils. His bladder and sphincter nerve both went at the same time, expelling the waste he’d been so dutifully processing before—and twenty-five grams of dead cells at the same time. Mislaying what little strength it had left, his arm folded and he finally fell backwards. Kyle’s balance was shot. His knees pointed up at the sky a second before flopping down, as if his legs were made of rubber. Kyle felt his skin sliding off—the epidermis, dermal papillae, subcutaneous fat—cells disbanding, leaving him. Striking because they hated conditions under Kyle’s new management. The matrix of his bones was collapsing, his brain liquefying. His kidneys shut down, followed soon after by his liver.

Kyle fought to breathe, but his lungs were the next to go. His heart beat slowly in his chest; he didn’t have much time left before it turned to mulch.

I’m sorry, he “thought”. I’m so sorry ... Won’t you take me back? PLEASE!

He no longer wanted the responsibility that came with command. He’d proved himself unworthy of it. Thought he could do so easily what She did for him, without realising he was still Her creation—just like everything else. That if She abandoned him, it was all over. (She had many different names this archaic matriarch, this parthenogenetic parent—some ancient, some modern—many guises for many different cultures, in the East and in the West; though She was always credited with the same accomplishments.)

Kyle’s eyesight had gone. All he could feel was his heartbeat slowly ticking down the seconds until his death.

And at the very point of nothingness, as the final beat came—when he himself ultimately gave up the ghost—and he was gradually absorbed into the earth, his biodegradable marrow feeding the soil, he experienced a devastating guilt.

But he also knew great relief. Relief and exaltation.

For he could feel his biorhythms again, this time on an unprecedented scale. The grass growing in the fields, the animals coming up to sniff at his remains, the swaying movement of the trees. Turning every living thing, turning the whole world, into his body. The universe into his soul.

As She kindly—and graciously—forgave him his trespasses.

As Mother Nature welcomed her lost sheep back into the fold ...