The New Residence

Dr. Vernon Roscoe Polk had to be the only person capable of doing it. Given what history in the year 2016 allows us to reconstruct, he was probably the only person who would consider such a feat in the first place. Thirty-nine years a surgeon in the finest Illinois health center, unequaled in his knowledge of transplant surgery (in fact a major impetus behind the breakthrough of regenerating nerve tissue) Dr. Polk had forsaken his own body to dissolve among the miraculous wonders of the scalpel and the diseased. He was a man who had made few friends in his many years at the hospital, scuffling in and out of operating rooms like a mole, cowering in the rear of elevators, his small round nose pink with drops of sweat, the bright ceiling lights shinning off his near bald head. Eccentric and quiet, if his hands weren't as quick and delicate around the table, if his expertise in medicine weren't so encompassing, the park bench would have found him long ago. It was a fact: away from the open chest of the anesthetized he was creepy.

He owned a two-story house just blocks from the hospital, a building that appeared from the outside very similar to many of the homes in the area. It had been green once, but now the paint was cracked and peeled so that beneath the crumbling surface the grayish-brown color of wood and previous coats of paint were visible. The mixture of hues gave the home a color without name, a muddy complexion without feature. To the front of the house stood a porch, boards missing here and there or deteriorated to the point of hazard, and an old porch swing hung clumsily by a single rusted chain. The windows were covered by what were once yellow curtains. Time and sunlight had turned them almost translucent, so that at night anyone moving about in the house looked from the street like figures from a dream, indistinct and hazy. It was astonishing the house could even be inhabited after so many years of neglect.

From the interior one might have thought the place a library. There was not a room in the house not entirely filled with books. Medical manuals sat everywhere, beside physics textbooks and scientific works of every sort. Classics of philosophy shared space with complete medical journals from the 1940's to the present, and filling almost one solid wall were books on all the world's religions. They sat in the house now for the most part unused, ghostly silent, hunched beside themselves, pages fading out, turning brown, warping the shelves they sat on, floor to ceiling, or eaten throughout by worms where they lay stacked in some damp corner.

In the basement Dr. Polk had devised an expensive laboratory. When Dr. Polk had first submitted his idea to his housekeeper she had looked at him without speaking, standing bow-legged in the hall, rubbing her hands, on the verge of shaking. He had laid his entire scheme before her, detailing it in scientific terms that she neither understood nor could believe. She had always considered him perverse (even secretly believed he held conferences with spirits), but this proposal seemed to her wholly unnatural and thus, doomed by powers much higher than both of them. By the end of the first year, however, she knew he was serious.

It was the scars that told her for certain something was happening. She'd see them when Dr. Polk bathed, bringing him a book, or coffee. Four times in that first year Dr. Polk had had to leave his post a' Sebastian Health Center. For another doctor such disappearances would have aroused great suspicion, subjecting the doctor to overwhelming scrutiny. Though it was true Nurse Pine, another long-timer at the center, joked about OR 6 losing some of its chill during the weeks he was gone, surgeons as a rule have a low threshold for gossip and the absences were given less and less thought. Dr. Polk returned to surgery rotation with few hitches and his workmanship remained notably precise. It was only after his fifth trip that several of Sebastian's surgeons brought his name into conversation. They were sitting in the cafeteria, their hands on coffee cups, watching the white Formica of the table between them.

"Never missed a day that I can recall," Dr. Franklin said, looking straight ahead, blank of concrete thought. His mind was full of bloody images and condomish rubber gloves. Dr. Morler rubbed his face. "Strange man. You think he's losing it? Getting rest. Easing himself away?" Dr. Rawls growled, "Don't know. I worked with him on the kidney transfer Thursday. Impeccable. You should have seen him work around the anterior tissue. Like a damn machine. I've never seen him work as well. It's reasonable to believe him. I'm sure there's a lot of hospitals that could use his instruction." Dr. Morler cleared his throat. "Yes," he said, but I can't see Polk being interested in anything except his own surgery and his books." Dr. Rawls came back, "Well, wherever he's going, it's his business." Dr. Morler shook his head. "Until it interferes with his work here," and he jammed a pointed finger down on the table. They agreed on that point and silenced for a moment, then shifted the conversation to the latest events in the stock market.

As the second year of Dr. Polk's scheme began to play out things began to fall in all around him. For one thing his housekeeper quit. 'She had finally been overcome by his strange manner, his tilted smile, his eyes lit up like coals each time she walked by him. One rainy afternoon as he sat upstairs in the bath she slipped from the house and never returned. At the health center the chief surgeon had twice called in Dr. Polk to interrogate him on his mysterious absences. As they talked the chief surgeon felt positive Polk was lying, but his answers were impossible to corner. When finally the evasiveness ate through him he insinuated, finger waving, face red, that Polk had falsified administrative reports and he brought him before the board on charges of malpractice. Dr. Polk took the fifth and retired.

Physically, Dr. Polk had never felt better. Suddenly free from the health center, he had more time for the exercises he knew were necessary. Though the operations had cost him a great sum, his accounting had been exact and his money set aside, so his schedule continued unchanged. At night he would sit in his easy chair, a soft lamp above his shoulder, a book resting in his lap, squeezing an electronic muscle tensor methodically. From time to time as he cleaned his glasses, he would ponder questions put forth by Buddha on the journeys of the soul, muttering aloud to the room. Sitting in his bathrobe the scars on his flesh were so numerous a clear distinction between scar tissue and normal skin was impossible.

He resembled, in the yellow light, a vase that had fallen from the mantle and had its pieces glued back together. Occasionally, when some odd thought s truck him, his face would light up like a child and he'd laugh, a noise like bats, and the mice would scurry in the laboratory and the wind would moan outside. His books, looking on helplessly, would shudder.

The press release passed through the Chicago Tribune shuffled to the inside pages, bordered by human-interest stories and advertisements. It read like this:

On Wednesday, September 28, 2016, Dr. Vernon Roscoe Polk will revise Mankind's place in life, as it is known. The expense, both in sweat and heart, has been extensive, but the achievement has reached its apex. Under the absolutely premium care of Doctor's Kelsburg and Rawls, the final operation of the process will be made. The brain of a forty-six year male will be transplanted into the cranial space of the aforementioned Dr. Polk. Because the resultant organism will no longer in fact be Dr. Polk, it is with pleasure that he announces his triumph before the fact. A soul, for the first time in human history, will have been successfully removed from its tome by removing and replacing each and every bore, vein, organ and tissue of a human body.

Please treat him well.

Dr. V.R. Polk