The Janus Replacement

This story was inspired by the movie Seconds from 1966. I wanted to write a political satire without promoting a side. It stays rather broad because of that, but I think it has some good humor.

Enjoy!

(1)

When the time came for the transfer the incumbent President was giddy with excitement, so unaffected by the operation about to take place as to seem innocent.

Only very young people and those who dwell under rocks could have been as ignorant of the old man as his feeble appearance belied, notorious as he’d become over the years with various insider trading scandals. So far his life had been a series of mercurial shifts. This was just the latest of those shifts in a long line of worn out guises meant to keep up appearances and procure power. Either that or the old man had actually lost it, his rheumy eyes staring wondrously at the aged ceiling’s warp in the old manor. He looked like a babe in the woods after being left to die, which is why the operation was happening-he was dying.

They wheeled him into the operating theatre.

 The doctors had to isolate the mind’s microtubules, to prepare for extraction. They waited for the drugs to take their effect, which would also be the end of the President’s life in his body.

His mind took a plunge into the final moments of awareness, close to severing itself from the corpus.

(2)

In another part of the building was an operating room the verisimilitude of the first room housing the dying POTUS. On the operating table was a man who had undergone extensive facial reconstruction over the past several months to become the spitting image of POTUS. He was selected for having a very similar appearance to the President with minor alterations to skin and teeth, height & weight. His hair was made to look as bare as the President’s shiny noggin. He was given a set of wrinkles to match after his wrinkles were laser smoothed away. If he had seen himself wrinkle free, as so many people seem to desire at his age, they would have seen a piebald toad-looking figure staring at them. The operation was very messy, indeed.

(3)

During phase one of the operation the cabinet had kept the replacement body on ice, so to speak. They hid him away, close to the hospital erected next to the sprawling estate, where the rest of this coup was to manifest before Election Day.

The Replacement barely had time to settle in after arriving before he received a phone call. A woman’s voice. With very little effort she convinced the lonely old man to come over and look at her work. She told him she liked to get second opinions anyway. 

The woman was in a bungalow that looked exactly as the one they had put the Replacement in, save for the art supplies strewn about the living room.

“What is that you’re painting?” the Replacement asked her.

“It’s called the Red Bird of Paradise.” The painter looked back and forth between the unfinished flower and the replacement standing just off to the left of the easel by the sliding glass door of the bungalow.

“Like you!” She marveled. “You are the Red Bird of Paradise. It’s named after the Phoenix. You’re here to live again, isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” he confessed, cautiously, wondering how much this painter knew about the operation he was to be the subject of.

“We’re all part of your journey. You didn’t know?”

“No, I didn’t. Should I have?”

The painter giggled in response before continuing with the painting.

(4)

Every night during the Replacement’s stay at the bungalow, before the actual operation, he was visited by the stranger painter woman who was enchanted with him. After all, he was the new POTUS.

The drunken revelry lasted until early in the morning. Many of the partakers lay sprawled on the open lawns of the compound, which as it turned out was very close to the manor where the Replacement would soon be taken.

He remembered lots of drinking in the woods. Festive music playing on baroque flutes and small hand drums.

They were also screwing like mad, all of them. A cabal of drunkenness like he had never been a part of, like what “free love” must have been like in the 1960’s. It lasted and lasted until all the lust had been drained away, and there was nothing more to do but sleep like a king.

(5)

At the moment of the transfer, when one man died and two became something else entirely, the lights flickered as in a seance with ancient beings. There was no reversal, no turning back. If this did not work then they had just killed the President and would likely be killed themselves.

The winds of change howled through the tunnels of reality’s dimensions, as both men felt themselves being sucked from one locus in space and time to another.

A piezometer used for measuring gas pressure, microscopic in size, was instrumental in forcing one consciousness on top of the other, compressing the replacement down to his bare thoughts, while POTUS got to stay on top and run the show. Think of it like playing chicken in a swimming pool with one partner atop the other’s shoulders. 

Lucky for all involved the transfer was a success.

(6)

For several days the President’s new clothes felt extremely heavy and wet to the relocated men. Neither could sense much apart from general self awareness and an intense tingling numbness pulsating in the Replacement’s body. Everything they felt was measured with serious precision. This was the bleeding edge of neuroscience. To the doctors they looked like a vacant eyed fish, which, apparently, at this stage, was to be expected, and more importantly, a good thing.

The cabinet members who were allowed in post op were agog at the sight of the Replacement’s body.

“He’s going to get...better...right?”

“Yes, this is just a part of the process.”

“What part are we in now?”

“We’re waiting for them to become acquainted,” said the head doctor.

“Acquainted?” The cabinet sung in unison, incredulous of the head doctor’s colloquialism.

“That is correct,” the doctor replied smoothly. “It will take a few weeks. Just in time for the vote.”

“So he’s not paralyzed or something?”

“Not at all,” laughed the Doctor.

The cabinet looked icily at the doctor and his coterie before leaving. They came back at the same time every day.

(7)

Following the operation the Replacement felt a sensation like he was being stepped on. A phantom foot and buttocks were cramming themselves into his head and solar plexus, but there was only his own presence in his body that he could see or notice. At first.The stepping and sitting became more of a dance and a run as time wore on between the neighboring minds.

What the Replacement decided to do next was exactly the kind of thing the doctors had warned against in the early days of the transfer. They told him POTUS would likely be sensitive to any and all friction between them. The doctors had told POTUS the same about the Replacement.

The president didn’t care, choosing to play rough with his new body.

“Would you please stop running around in here!?”

The activity came to an abrupt end with the yelling like they were dealing with a child and not an aged man, two aged men, in fact.

Silence lasted just long enough for the Replacement to feel calm.

“Why don’t you make me!” Bellowed a second voice recognized by every American from tv, except it was now coming from inside the replacement’s throat.

Very quickly it became obvious to the Replacement the saturnalia that had been going on prior to the operation was not intended for him to have one last shebang before losing control of his body, but to blunt him into falling quickly in line with the will of POTUS. Almost like they knew he would fight against his new neighbor in a more sober state of mind. Even now he felt a grogginess the POTUS was not experiencing himself inside of the replacement. The doctors had told him time and again that he will no longer be just a single man alone to do as he wants. This would be like schizophrenia with dissociative identity disorder. At the time he didn’t care. He had lived the life he wanted. Without any children and his wife having passed almost a decade earlier, why not?

(8)

During phase two they were strapped to the hospital bed the following day and the day after that. The doctors were monitoring the vitals and mood of the two minded man, mostly looking for strange or psychotic behaviors and paroxysms that would look bad optically.

They seemed to be getting along with each other quite well after the third day. Hallelujah! The cabinet thought. The doctors were going to allow them outside very soon.

The Replacement was not getting along so much as feeling himself being forced out of his own home and didn’t have the mental wherewithal to do anything. The treatments were numbing him out like he was a bad dream the doctors could drug away with enough cheap street dope.

            The Replacement was a big proponent of irony, but not at his own expense. Always pointed disaffectedly at some other, far away from him. Which was the issue with this terrible situation. The irony was so wonderful he couldn’t keep tears from his eyes thinking of the fantastic absurdity he’d let happen to himself. He could not stop laughing even after he lost his ability to speak, though he could still react like a paralytic with pinky movement and some blinking. So he laughed with tears. The ever present twinkle in POTUS’s eyes.

The Replacement had only begun to understand the extent of his subservience to POTUS as it was never explained fully before when the doctors briefed him on the procedure and recovery. What could and couldn’t be expected. The doctors and the cabinet both willfully failed to mention that from now on he would be a 100% total passenger sitting backseat to POTUS’s driving. Once the operation had taken full effect. It was all in the fine print of the contract, the possibility of being accidentally deleted from POTUS’s consciousness and on and on, that he sort of looked at before signing. He knew that he didn’t own his body anymore. That was about it. He was three cocktails in at the time.

(9)

The pie was sweeter than any the President had thought he’d ever tasted before. Overhead, a heavy canopy of oaks hid them from the sun.

The Replacement was, as usual, a constant observer. He would never have thought POTUS to be as boring as this man seemed to be. An absolute dullard if ever there was one. When the two spoke it was never for more than a few incendiary moments, as though it was he who was intruding on the President’s body and not the other way around. Not only boorish, but a hothead. So hot they would get headaches. POTUS would take regular trips to the men’s room to splash water in their eyes at the Replacement’s insistence. They swallowed more than enough aspirin to last two lifetimes.

The last time they spoke was a day ago…

“It’s your worthless addition to my body that’s causing this sluggishness,” POTUS complained to his head-mate.

“Your body, my ass!” The Replacement intoned. “What the hell are you gonna do anyway other than line your pockets even more? What the hell was I thinking?”

“Yeah, I know what you’ve been thinking. I know it because I’m in here with you. Anything you think is passed over.”

“At least, you still remember that.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t try to hide it, old man. Your mind is sloppy. This is only getting you so far. Even with my body’s help. No matter what, you're slipping away.” 

“Ungrateful bastard. Should have you investigated.”

“PFffff. You did. What, you’re going to incarcerate yourself? Old Fool, I’m the chosen one. Squeaky clean living and no living family. This is my destiny, not yours. I get to have your life now.”

“You think you’re real slick, old man, but you don’t get it. All those treatments will put you out of commission. Don’t YOU know that? You hate anyone like me. Is that it. The go-getters. The shakers and the movers. Nothing but sour grapes. Enjoy getting to watch me use your body.”

The Replacement went quiet again.

Now The Replacement’s body was situated under the oaks eating dessert at a bench near to the facility they were laid up in for the past few weeks, making sure POTUS could ambulate and talk appropriately.

Mixed mannerisms from the two turned out to be the most difficult aspect of the coup for which the doctors could not be relied upon.

One would want to tear at their cuticles while the other endlessly cleared their shared throat. Or one would try to crack their knuckles while the other tried to keep their hands separate. They were endlessly fussing with their body and it was weird. Everyone agreed. And weird was not a good optic.

Occasionally the replacement would get overwhelmed to the point of panicking underneath his Presidential albatross. He had stopped speaking so much after learning about the nature of POTUS’s conversational ability. Whenever the anxiety whelmed to a great enough degree the shared body would twitch or sometimes even spasm, relinquishing a modicum of control back to the Replacement for an instant before vanishing from them both. Maybe it looked like petit mal seizures; so he avoided such outbursts for both their sakes, to take leave from the hospital as quickly as they could.

Was the tastiness of the pie a result of this body being more sensitive than his own had been? It certainly wasn’t a case of youth? POTUS couldn’t remember if he had been as interested in food before, but he was now. Nor could he recall many such delicate trivialities to be recalled. He wasn’t worried, however, because after all, he was still alive and kicking. He had lost most of his mind before the transfer, so what did he have to lose now?

(10)

One day POTUS began chirping at the blank tv screen like an excited cat birdwatching. A weird primal response the president could only identify as “stark fear” when the doctors later inquired about the derealization he had experienced.

What did he see?

A reflection; his own, but not just.

There was the reflection of the two. For no matter how much he still felt himself to be the same old POTUS occupying the same old body, this was not so. No longer was he able to see himself for who he really was a lifetime ago, seeing only the body he now co-inhabited with the Replacement standing right behind his thoughts.

The moron’s losing his mind, thought the Replacement, quiet in his corner of the brain.

(11)

The security detail came in swiftly to jettison POTUS to the next rendezvous where phase 3 of operation Enduring POTUS was to commence.

A sprawling manor had been preselected for the Replacement’s convalescence. There the two minded man would engage in various social activities rehearsing first the Election Day celebration and, of course, the victory speech being carefully composed by several top aides and a team of writers.

POTUS learned to ignore what the doctors told him to refer to as his alter, a term usually applied to auditory hallucinations having taken on the form of a persona separate but a part of the person in question. This was to the Replacement’s mind an absolute affront to his good name and to his body.

“How dare they try to convince the enfeebled old POTUS that I was only a mental apparition!” The Replacement thought to himself, in his vestige of shared cranial space. He was the original owner of their body after all. What once was a commodious area free from other people if only too close one’s eyes was no longer an option. For no door could be shut, no phone unplugged, no electricity current to turn off.

The two could see bits and pieces of abstracted and fragmented memory piecemeal themselves into strange, nightmarish tableaux of predatory behavior. The overwhelming imagination of the as yet unsatisfied desires of POTUS.

(12)

One issue that was still bothering the cabinet was how weepy the Replacement’s eyes had become ever since waking up post op.

No matter the context POTUS could not stop crying. The detail wasn’t too quick to act after it was decided that they would just let it ride out.

“Who knows? Maybe it will look beautiful on election night.”

“Yes! All the hullabaloo and pomp and circumstance and our POTUS glistening in the warm night lights. It will be practically divine.”

“Then we leave the eyes alone. He can carry tissues.”

“At least he’s stopped making those cat noises.”

“It’s settled.”

Meanwhile, across the courtyard from where the cabinet was being housed, the Replacement and POTUS were learning to tie their shoes. POTUS had butterfingers his whole life. He was a child learning for the first time, again. A child the Replacement wanted nothing to do with after being transformed into cognitive bunk mates.

“Damnit! Shitheal! Come on, man!”

POTUS was fond of cursing at himself, which amused the Replacement, making up for all the nonsensical thoughts ever emerging from their shared frontal lobe. The worse POTUS performed, the angrier he became. Then, the next breath would be full of self adulation.

Consistency in POTUS’s shared mind was that of undercooked yams, which was also something POTUS found very appetizing.

They continued to work out the tiny knots POTUS had made in the laces of his shoes through tears of joy, frustration, and amusement.

(13)

Most days were spent socializing with the staff on site of the manor. If not socializing then working on activities of daily living, if not ADL then something to do with the election night speech.

The cabinet decided to make the election evening as easy as possible for POTUS, which meant that for them it would be one of their most stressful of the year, as he was incapable of memorizing the various drafts issued by the writing team.

He would have to be teleprompted with an in-ear monitor.

Among the several exams administered at the manor the ABC’s proved to be the most interesting litmus tests given to POTUS. The idea being to recall words beginning with each letter. For instance, A is for apple, etc…

POTUS was unable to find words with more than an expletive function throughout the testing process. A was for ass, B for bitch, C for crap, D for dick, (omitting the letters without obvious associations), P for pussy, etc…

He said he was only saying what came to mind.

“Was he always so juvenile?”

“Well...,” the cabinet supposed. “At least he still has a sense of humor.”

(14)

On rare occasions the Replacement was happy with POTUS’s decisions: how he-POTUS-chose to react to the staff, the food they ate, the clothes they wore. Very cheerful. After so many weeks living together he was baffled from such extreme poverty of spontaneity, as if the old President was inert as a bump on a log. They were supposed to be practically the same person physically. Maybe the old man was losing strength, even with all the slack and support he was being given in their mental chambers?

The sapience that was second nature to the Replacement was not so natural for POTUS, almost as though he needed guidance from one moment to the next from an authentic human being.

“Well,” thought the Replacement, “he certainly won’t be getting any encouragement from me. I’ve given up everything already.”

Whenever POTUS became despondent the Replacement felt the same vulnerability, and would try to get them to go outside for a walk. These moments of irresolute indifference were the purchase from where the Replacement would someday find his advantage.

(15)

They were going to be late for their daily smiling lessons when POTUS was swept away with music from beyond. No, from the unconscious.

POTUS and his captive Replacement’s mind were sometimes sharing the terror of oblivion in the dreamscape, odd as it may seem for all of POTUS’s rapacity at their advanced age to consider one’s end is common, if not obsessed over.

It was Handel streaming on the radio.

They woke up to the pious chorus of Handel’s Messiah from a restless night’s sleep.

POTUS would have made his smiling teacher, (an acting coach hired for the coup, selected after a rigorous vetting process, and shown to be one of those itinerant “artist spooks’ perseverating all over the place) happy.

Music was still, always and forever a precious thing, no matter how many lives have been lived, or how corruptly. Rhythm and melody perform never ending musical tales from which the universe continually becomes.

Even POTUS could feel that much.

(16)

It was when POTUS was weakened from his physical therapy back at the master bedroom where the Replacement would make his first attempt on their lives.

Truly, POTUS was feeling too slack like he was becoming soupy from the inside. His skin became softer and crepe within six weeks of the operation.

POTUS imagined in his sleep, thus sharing his nightmare with the replacement, a vexing scene of their demise as the Replacement’s body slowly became putty-like, then like jelly, until the two minded man was a puddle of human mud.

They woke up kvetching in screaming verse.

When the incumbent President shambled into the bathroom the Replacement’s mind tried his hand.

“No more,” thought the Replacement. “Never again will this cretin infect my mind, body, and soul!” He was going to break contract just as soon as the sonofabitch was under the sink. He had thought about it and decided he didn’t care. His mistake was thinking he would still have a life worth living.

When POTUS, bleary eyed, stooped to place his head under the faucet the Replacement came charging forth in their shared mind with his darkness’s vestigial energy. 

He plunged them downward into the sink basin so that their nostrils and mouth were submerged underwater.

Neither mind could breath; one was laughing, the other crying.

The Replacement continued to force them underwater using every bit of reserve he had, with all of his determination.

(17)

The plan had failed. The Replacement body was unable to remain forcibly in place long enough to suffocate them.

Life wants to live, as it turns out.

Just as one plan folds into nothing and the page is turned, another opportunity appeared to the Replacement.

This time in the park. A public park.

POTUS was now leaving the property once a week to come out and interact with strangers in a small town located in New England.

A bevy of families were picnicking in the park.

The idea was brilliant and quite daredevil, the replacement thought.

He would wait until POTUS was close to the families.

He had to find a family with large parents. The trouble was that POTUS was a tall man. So he looked for a family of obese people.

Magpies near the pond by a family of fatties, POTUS espied, as he gaily walked the promenade close by the pond edge. “I’ll go watch the birds.”

The magpies were an ornery bunch, squawking at the President who was now away from the detail on watch.

The guards were at the top of a knoll watching the activity below.

When the family began to encroach, the detail descended the hill drawing their firearms.

They yelled for the family to get back as POTUS began to grab their youngest child, dragging them further into the pond.

The parents began to yell and scream for the guards to do something.

The birds flew about the scene like a whirling dervish until a single round was expelled to disband them.

At the ring of the gunfire, the father thought he was shot and fainted, which caused his wife to squawk like one of the birds.

After that, POTUS apologized profusely to the obese family before he was escorted away from the park.

From then on the cabinet elected to keep POTUS away from water. But they could not keep him away from people. He was POTUS, after all.

(18)

A staff member was now giving them a regular evening and morning bath, something they would have never done for themselves, decrepit as they were.

It was the morning of the election.

The cabinet was on pins and needles working fastidiously, anxious to have this election be one to remember.

POTUS didn’t seem bothered with the attempts made by the Replacement’s mind. He was used to thinking of himself as the sole occupant of the Replacement’s body after only two months post op.

These little paroxysms, as the doctors liked to call them, were likened to the final breaths of the former owner of the Replacement body. A death rattle.

This was not untrue insofar as POTUS steadily grew in strength both physically and psychologically since the transfer. However, the replacement was still there, stuck to the surfaces of the hollows of his sold out brain, too sticky to be scrubbed and excoriated entirely.

Night approached as the ballot boxes were closed and votes tallied around the nation.

With every bit of his, not insignificant but still very minor, ability, the Replacement used it up, all of it in that one instance, to trip them down the stairs of the gala after the night had waned and they had become intoxicated on libations and appellations.

The pie-eyed POTUS never saw it coming; the sudden fall from the top of the staircase descending from his lofty heights after the awkward but still serviceable speech was given, tumbling downward, pulling on their shared corpus, as the replacement had tried several times before. Only now, this time, they were drunk and tired. 

But they had also won!

POTUS was popular again!

All the effort spent to make POTUS endure, to not succumb to the fate we all must share, as decreed by Nature.

From one moment to the next, the men occupying the same space in the same body experienced a complete shattering of experience and vexation of life; where the one man felt elation the other was abruptly and unavoidably mortified-as he so assiduously sought to avoid, as do all people who see death coming at the last second to fuck up their parade.

*********************************************

When they pulled the Replacement out at the morgue a strange juxtaposed look was frozen over the corpse’s features. Their death had been labeled a heart attack by the coroner.

“No death certificate for the old spook already made?”

“No need. He’s a spook, right? Just kidding. Yeah, labeled him a suicide a month back when he signed.” 

“Excellent.”

The coroner slid the dead President out of the stainless steel freezer compartment. Several members of the cabinet bent from disgust and reached for kerchiefs. Others covered their mouths with their bare hands.

“Broken neck. Really took a spill.” Said the coroner.

“Yes, medicine didn’t take.” The other doctors concurred dryly.

“Yes, I see why you wanted to go with the heart, Doctor,” the cabinet head observed.

“It’s the heart of the matter isn’t it, gentlemen?” The coroner smiled.

They shared a hearty laugh between their enormous bellies as the coroner went to shut the freezer door on the cold Replacement’s body.

A gloom was cast on one side of the dead Replacement’s face, absolute tranquility on the other. The coroner  had never seen such a Picasso-like contortion on any of her subjects before. Their mouth was frowning at their end and grinning at their escape, just like a Janus.