“Isn’t it a little late for this? I’m an actor, not a mystic.”

I noticed a lack of respect in Ralph. I was a puling twenty-five-yearold rather than a distinguished author. It hadn’t taken long before I was confronted with the losses involved in gaining prolonged youth.

I said, “I need to know more about my body. It was Mark’s face they were seeing when they looked at me. It was his childhood experience they were partly taking in, not yours or mine.”

“You want to know why he snuffed himself out? I’m telling you, Leo, face it, this is the truth and you know it already. Your guy’s going to have died in some grisly fashion.”

“What sort of thing are we talking about?”

“If he’s young, it’s not going to be pleasant. No young death is a relief. The whole world works by exploitation. We all know the clothes we wear, the food, it’s packed by Third World peasants.”

“Ralph, I am not just wearing this guy’s shoes.”

“He was definitely ‘obscure,’ your man. There’s no way I’m going to let them give you shoddy goods. Anyway, it’s impossible, at the moment, to just go and kill someone for their body. Their family, the police, the press, everyone’s going to be looking for them. The body has to be ‘cleared,’ and then it has to be prepared for new use by a doctor who knows what he is doing. It’s a long and complicated process. You can’t just plug your brain into any skull, thank Christ. Imagine what a freak show we’d have then.”

“If he’s been ‘cleared,’ I think that at least you should tell me what you know,” I said. “I presume he was homosexual.”

“Why else would he be in such good shape? Most hets, apart from actors, have the bodies of corpses. You object to homosexuality?”

“Not in principle, and not yet. I haven’t had time to take it in. I’m at the beginning here. I need to know what all this might mean.”

Ralph said, “As far as I know, he was nutty but not druggy. A suicide, I think, by carbon monoxide poisoning. They had to fix up his lungs. I looked into it for you, Adam—Leo, I mean. I asked them to give you the best. Some of those women were in great shape.”

“I told you, I’m not ready to be a woman. I’m not even used to being a man.”

“That was your choice, then. Your man had something like clinical depression. Obviously a lot of young people suffer from it. They can’t get the help they need. Even in the long run they don’t come round. Antidepressants, therapy, all that, it never works. They’re never going to be doers and getters like us, man. Better to be rid of them altogether and let the healthy ones live.”

“Live in the bodies of the discarded, you mean? The neglected, the failures?”

“Right.”