I’ve been wondering how many bodies a person needs. This is not a question that would normally interest me as a scientist, yet it has crept into my consciousness lately, and I find I’m no longer sure of the answer.
One afternoon I watched someone inhabit two bodies. Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist famed as much for his progressive paralysis from Lou Gehrig’s disease as for his work, had come to my graduate school to lecture on the beginning and end of time. This was a decade ago, when Hawking could still move his mouth a bit, generating a gargly, incomprehensible voice. Though we didn’t expect to understand the lecture with our rudimentary physics, we packed the auditorium, biochemists and physiologists and geneticists, to bear witness to Hawking’s body melted by disease and his mind knowing when, or whether, time began.
Four physics professors, none of them young, carried Hawking onto the stage. They panted visibly, but it seemed as if only they could perform this task, that if you did not understand special relativity and you touched his wheelchair, you might be vaporized. After placing their burden, chair and all, with his back to us, the professors fled. Then, in the stillness, the electric wheelchair whirred and rotated, revealing a shriveled husk that stared out from behind horn-rimmed glasses.
As we sat there, paralyzed by awe at this mummy brain from the crypt, a tousled young guy in jeans sauntered onstage. He looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed and was still preoccupied with whomever he had left there. He walked up behind Hawking, tossed his head to adjust his blond mane, and suddenly shoved the wheelchair forward.
Jesus, Hawking is going to roll off the stage. This rock star assassin is murdering the great Stephen Hawking. At the last second the kid reaches out, barely stopping the wheelchair. He faces Hawking toward the audience and bends over the microphone. In an arrogant English public school accent he says, You know, you’re not in church.
