Some facts about the body.
One. From the beginning, there was always one inescapable problem when it came to transplant science. I take my kidney and put it inside you; your body panics, rejects, kills the foreign cells. I cut off my arm, your arm, swap them; transplanted hands have been known to slap their recipient, choke them. The first successful skin graft was only possible because the recipient’s body was so injured that his cells couldn’t fight it off. The body knows what’s yours and mine.
Two. You don’t need both kidneys to live. It’s a clever redundancy, why you have two testes, two ovaries, eyes, ears, etc. If one fails, you have the other, and the body runs just fine, if a little worse. But no one told the kidneys that. They tend to fail together. And when kidneys fail, it tends to be a sign that the rest of your organs are soon to follow. Meaning the body is a romantic.
Three. Mine misses yours. Despite the long years of knowing one another, we’ve met just once in person though soon it’ll be twice this November. I admit to having a hunger in me that I don’t think touch can satisfy. Friendship is an inadequate word because quite simply, I have never had a friend like you. A part of me rejects the idea that you don’t feel the same the way an immune system does a foreign organ. We exchange texts, calls, letters, poems, art, it covers my walls and my cabinets, and yet I sympathize with a lone kidney.
Some facts about the brain.
One. It is at once a horrifically simple and complex organ. At three pounds, the brain weighs less than a purse. It’s a gelatinous thing that contains a hundred billion nerves and also your entire being. You are your brain. I remove a heart, you’re still you. I remove a limb, you remain. I remove your brain, and you come with me as I carry less than a handbag of weight with me wherever I go.
Two. In theory, all you really need to live is a brain. Isolated organs, living tissue, can survive ad infinitum if you take care of them. Heart, lungs, liver; hooked up to a machine it takes a shockingly small amount of effort to keep them going. A heart needs electrical pulses; a pair of lungs, air pumps. A scientist in Ohio removed a monkey’s brain from its everything else and kept it alive for twenty-two hours. A scientist in Russia cut the head and forelegs off a dog and sewed them onto another, larger dog. Both heads, independently of one another, drank milk. They lived four days before the large dog’s body rejected the small’s. But the dogs were both alive and conscious. Meaning the monkey probably was too.
Three. You can transplant just about anything.
Some facts about us.
One. I have lost count of the number of times we have picked each other’s brains. We exchange our passions so freely I think we’re beginning to blur. You make me a playlist, I make you a song. Art for art, passion for passion. At a certain point, we are beginning to cannibalize. I don’t think I care. I don’t think you care either.
Two. If I’ve ever expressed to you what it means that you do that with me, I haven’t done so enough. The exchange, that you sit and listen to me ramble about the things I’ve learned, the books I’ve read, that you tell me what you’re working on, about your day. I live in the shadow of your art, a constellation of mediums surrounding me, enveloping me, and I think you do the same. You are everywhere I look. I was bitterly lonely before I met you. Now, it seems a foreign concept. I’m never alone. I just need to turn my head.
Three. You made a painting of us: you, laid out on a dining room table, head on a plate, me with a fork and knife ready to dig in. A reference to a show we both watched separately but talked about together. It’s hanging above my bed. The problem with consumption is that one of us would be gone. I’ve been reading about more elegant solutions to this distance between us.
Some facts about transplants.
One. The first successful transplant of anything was a kidney. A man was in renal failure and he had an identical twin. His body didn’t notice a difference between the kidneys, and ultimately, that was what killed him. The illness spread to the new kidney like it had always been there. In lieu of immune system-inhibiting drugs to make a transplant take, a donor really only needs to be so similar to the patient that the body can’t tell the difference.
Two. The doctor from Ohio who isolated a monkey’s brain had aspirations bigger than just isolation. He watched the first transplant and thought it was inefficient. If kidneys are canaries in the coal mine for total organ failure, why replace organs one at a time? Like the doctor, you’re from Ohio. I visit once a year, every year, then come right back. From your house to mine is around eight hours. Another inefficiency.
Three. The reason there hasn’t been a human head transplant isn’t ability. It’s not for lack of willing human participants. It’s not even moral qualms. Twenty years ago, the only reason a human head transplant didn’t occur was a lack of money. No one has tried it since.
Conclusion.
I am replete with facts, you know this about me. I talk endlessly about strange little discoveries I make, cool things I’ve seen, we have that in common. I yearn. I crave. I talk to you and ache. I don’t talk to you and I ache more. To transplant a head, you have to sever the spinal cord, keep the brain cold, knit together the nerves and blood vessels, revascularize. Critics of a hypothetical head transplant were often hung up about the inevitable paralysis, an inescapability when one messes with the spine. But I don’t need to move much, as long as you’re with me. It’s been done on monkeys, a number of them. They blink, they recognize people, they bite, they love and hate and live until the body rejects the foreign tissue of the new head. Somehow, when it comes to you, I don’t think that would be a problem.