Memoirs of a Skeleton Valet

11. Spain

I'm a little late to my monthly appointment with Dr. Roberts. Arrow and Gene leave me to it, heading back to the gas station. Brother Ridwan will be along later to pick me up and take me back to get my own bike. But I'm not looking forward to the leaving part.

Dr. Roberts has a variety of tests lined up. None of them are scary or painful--in fact, many involve devouring keys under various conditions. This might as well be Heaven. In one test, I sit down in a tank of water, fully submerged. She documents how my invisible lungs are able to extract oxygen out of the water at the molecular level, like a fish. In another test, she attaches the EEG electrodes to my arms and legs. They aren't supposed to pick up much of anything, but to everyone's surprise, they do. She can detect my brainwaves all along my skeletal frame. There seems to be a correlation between my thermal body and the presence of brain activity. Dr. Roberts says it's like amputees who have phantom limbs that they can still feel, even though they no longer exist. Only in my case, the phantom limbs are strengthened by the presence of the core of bone and somehow sustained by sheer presence of mind. I wish I could take credit for some kind of zen master focus, but I'm not aware of any conscious effort on my part to maintain this illusion. I simply am. Perhaps I'm just so in denial about being dead, that my body's in denial too. At least prescription drugs still work.

I demonstrate to her another curious consequence of my quasi-physical body; the everlasting voice. She clocks me at a three-minute sustained note, which we agree must be some kind of record. I have to say, her excitement is steadily building and she's much more open and friendly than our first session. In order to test a theory of hers, she has me sing a long note and then claps some dusty chalkboard erasers together near my ribs. She and a nurse both see the same thing; the chalkdust ever-so-slightly gets sucked through my ribs while I'm singing. So my thermal lungs are accessing air right through my ribcage, drawing it in omnidirectionally, before delivering it up to my thermal vocal chords. She doesn't have the right equipment to document it scientifically yet, but she can send out for it. Microphones and vibration membrane sensors are ordered as well, to try to understand the impressive volume of my voice.

"Why doesn't my voice crack?" I ask her. "Before the change, my voice couldn't do the higher registers without breaking into falsetto. Now," I do a scale, sliding my voice seamlessly from bottom to top, "I can hit every note."

"Your mind," she began, "which is somehow sustaining the illusion of your body, is keeping it up in a way that you remember, and yet without the physical limitations. It's like your ideal self. Like your body as it would be in a dream." I can see her thinking fiercely as she's staring at me. She must be hearing herself, how unscientific it sounds.

"Please, keep going," I implore her. "We can take every test in the world, even invent new ones. The technical data will back you up. But tell me what you're thinking."

She brushed her blond bangs out of her glasses, her eyes darting about anxiously. "Mallory, I think we may be seeing...consciousness itself."

She goes on to explain. My body is literally stripped down to the bare bones. The flesh is gone, but the awareness of my body remains. It's the product of trillions of cells working in concert--nerves and muscles and blood vessels and organs--without any of the cells actually being there. Or it's as if they do exist, but they aren't located here. Their physicality is stored 'off-site,' their output mapped perfectly back onto my frame, weakly interacting with my surroundings.

"Sort of like a motorcycle running without any gas," I say offhandedly.

"Yes," she agrees, latching onto my metaphor. "The gas is being burned, and it's powering the engine, but the tank is empty. The gas is elsewhere. Maybe it's folded in a higher dimension."