Текст книги "The Divide"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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4

John Shaw left Susan at the hotel and began the walk back to St. Jamestown. He understood that he was losing himself in this bright, cool autumn dusk—that he was fading with the light.

He’d been fortunate this time. He had been lucid for more than a day and a half. That was uncommon and—if what the girl said was true—it would be increasingly rare.

He could feel the good time ending now. The sky was a luminous, inky blue; the trees in the park looked etched in charcoal. This was always the first sign of the change: this sudden, heightened vividness of things. For most of his life he had lived in a universe of symbols, language and memory, nouns and verbs; strange to have the world itself, its crude essence, suddenly crowding into his mind. Strange to look at an arc of cloud across the cold sky and lose awareness of it as a meteorological event, to lose all the taxonomy of clouds—the word “cloud” itself—it all being washed away by naked vision, as if some vital boundary had been erased; as if he had somehow become the cloud.

He stood immobilized on the sidewalk with his head canted up until the feeling passed. Then he frowned and walked on, hands burrowing deep into his pockets.

Fading, he felt more alive than ever.

Cling to it, he thought. It was a clear, cold evening and he didn’t want to give it up. For a time he was tempted to turn back to the hotel, knock on Susan Christopher’s door and say to her, Yes, if you can cure me, if Max can cure me, I’ll do what you want … I’ve lost too much of my life already.

But he didn’t turn back. That direction was the past: Kyriakides, the Woodwards, the gulf island. Too much to embrace. In any case, he doubted that Max had any real answers. Susan had admitted as much. Max was the perennial scientist, still anxious—but not admitting it, perhaps not even to himself—to see his most important experiment through to a conclusion.

The thought evoked a vivid memory of Max as he must have looked to a five-year-old: stubbled, huge, wise, and aloof. Glints of light off his wire-rimmed glasses, which he would sometimes allow John to wear. The lenses turning Kyriakides into a looming, distorted monster. Angles of light through crystal: the laws of diffraction.

But the daylight was failing now. The streetlights winked on. Almost home, John told himself, if you could call it that, the two dingy rooms Benjamin shared with Amelie. It was Benjamin who made the serious decisions now, such as where to live and with whom. He was Benjamin most of the time, and it was like a dream, these long days of absence, not an utter loss of consciousness but a cloudy capitulation: floating underwater down some dark, twisting conduit. Occasionally he would blink at the world through Benjamin’s eyes, wake up and think, I, I, I. And then sink back into the darkness, one more lost thing.

He did feel some sympathy for Amelie, even though she regarded him as an illness of Benjamin’s—and that was strange, too, to be considered a disease. He remembered frightening away the man who had attacked her the night before. Her shame and her anger. But maybe she was right; maybe he had made things worse.

But he couldn’t worry about that now. He hurried up the steps and through the door, down the gray stucco hallway into the apartment, closing himself in. Amelie was off at work. John locked the door and turned on the TV. The babble of voices rose up like a physical presence and he gazed without comprehension at the screen: rioting on the West Bank, the arc and explosion of tear-gas canisters.

Thinking: Hold on.

But it was like falling asleep. You couldn’t resist forever. Couldn’t stay awake forever.

Faltering, he thought about Susan.

He had liked talking to her. She knew what he was, and that stripped away the burden of pretense. There was the inevitable chasm between them, the biochemical and physiological gap—what Max had once called an evolutionary gulf. But that was inevitable, and she was at least aware of it … and acknowledging the gulf seemed somehow to narrow it.

The talk had been good. But the talk had also evoked old, unpleasant memories; memories that were difficult to suppress at the best of times. And these were not the best of times.

He knew what to do about Susan Christopher. Tell her firmly that he wasn’t interested. Hope that Max wouldn’t press the matter.

Fade, if fading was inevitable.

That was what John Shaw meant to do.

But it occurred to him, closing his eyes, that Benjamin might have other plans.

He groped after the thought and lost it. Too late now. The space behind his eyelids seemed to fill with a bright and unforgiving light. His head throbbed and ached. The change was coming, too fast and fiercely to resist. Memories surfaced like phosphorescent sea-creatures: Susan’s face, their conversation, Kyriakides and the Woodwards, the shimmering veneer on the face of a handmade guitar … all these pieces of himself, fragile as a china cup for one weightless moment … and then gone, shattered, dispersed.

He slept. And someone else awoke.

5

“He’s refusing treatment?”

Dr. Kyriakides sounded angry, his voice growling through the phone lines from Illinois.

Susan said, “At the moment—yes.”

“He’s not aware of the problem?”

“He’s very aware of it.” She repeated the list of symptoms John had recited, the recurrence of “Benjamin.”

“That’s not what I would have predicted,” Dr. Kyriakides said. “But it might be a positive sign.”

“You think so? How could it be?”

“He’s capable of tremendous things, Susan—both his conscious and his unconscious mind. He’s resurrected Benjamin for a reason, even if he’s not aware of it. It’s a response to the disease, I suspect … as if one suit of clothes has begun to wear out, and he’s preparing to put on a second.”

“But it’s not the same,” Susan said. “It’s not him.”

“But in some sense it must be him. Benjamin is his creation. It’s not something new—it can’t be. Only an aspect of himself.”

“But it isn’t John Shaw. The John Shaw part of him is dying.”

There was a pause. “Possibly,” Dr. Kyriakides admitted. “In one way or another.”

“Then we have to help him.”

“I agree! But if he’s refusing treatment—”

“He could change his mind. He said he might call back. I want to stay—at least another week. I need to talk to him again.”

There was another crackling silence through the long exchange from Chicago. “I don’t remember you being this enthusiastic.”

“I suppose … it never seemed real before.”

“Then you must have felt it, too.”

“I’m sorry?”

“His specialness. There’s something unique about John. I mean, beyond the obvious. There always has been.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

“Take whatever time you need.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you want a suggestion?”

“Anything.”

“Talk to the other one. Talk to Benjamin.”

“I’ll try,” Susan said.

But she had thought of that already.

* * *

The problem was how to begin.

She wasn’t much good with people. Susan had figured that out a long time ago. She was a book-reader and she had always been good with words, but that facility did not extend to her tongue. For most of her adolescence she had been a stutterer. She loved words but could not gracefully pronounce them; people often laughed when she tried. She had retreated into muteness and spoke only when it was unavoidable. Her mother took her for sessions with a “teen counselor,” who linked Susan’s stuttering with her parents’ divorce: a traumatic event for a twelve-year-old, yes, she guessed so. Privately, she connected the stutter with her father’s grim refusal to discuss anything connected with the event, though he picked her up every weekend in his car and drove her places: the beach, park picnics, Disneyland, his apartment. Day trips, rituals of silence. How are things at school, Susie? Fuh-fuh-fine. Then his cancer erupted, a fierce Round One: in this corner, Laryngeal Nodes; in that corner, the Surgeon’s Knife. He recovered, or seemed to, except for his voice. His conversation dimmed to a whisper. The doctors said there were devices he could use, but he refused. To Susan he seemed to have achieved a whole new identity, more gaunt and wholly withdrawn. After the surgery, she was afraid to talk to him. Afraid that her own voice might strike him as a rebuke or a taunt: See, I still have my tuh-tongue.

She felt infected by his silence and determined to overcome her own. She performed speech exercises. She joined the yearbook staff at high school and studied back issues of Seventeen for clues to the social graces. It was a scientific project—as solemn as that. She was not John Shaw, inventing a new self; but the inspiration was similar … a willful disguise. And it was effective; it worked; but she remained painfully conscious of the creaking machinery behind the proscenium. People would look at her oddly and she would think Oh! I made a mistake.

Approaching John Shaw had been hard enough, even under the cloak of impartiality. Approaching Benjamin would be even harder. Because she wasn’t just a messenger from Dr. Kyriakides anymore. This had become, in a way, her own project now. And she needed her own words.

* * *

She began by renting a car. She chose a late-model Volvo and spent a day with her city map, learning the downtown. Then back to the hotel to shower, followed by cheap Chinese food on Spadina Avenue and another evening with Travis McGee. No one called; no one left a message.

She set her wristwatch alarm for 5 a.m. and slept with it under her pillow.

By the time it annoyed her awake there was morning light coming through the big plate-glass window. Not sunlight, but only a grey, tepid half-light and a few flakes of snow. She stood under the hot water of the shower until her skin hurt, then dressed in Levis, a cotton shirt, and a jacket. She rode the elevator down to the parking level, coaxed the Volvo to life, and drove into St. Jamestown.

She parked in front of the rooming house where John Shaw lived.

The snow evolved into a cold, steady drizzle as Susan shivered in the car. She watched the people who emerged from the rooming house, made ghostly by the condensation on the Volvo’s windows. None of them was John Shaw—or Benjamin. Seven o’clock slid past. At seven-thirty she was beginning to feel not merely misguided but embarrassed—playing espionage games before breakfast. She pulled her jacket closer around her and decided she would go for coffee and a croissant—she had seen a place on Yonge Street—at, say, eight o’clock. If nothing had happened.

Moments before her deadline, Benjamin left the rooming house.

She almost missed him. Dr. Kyriakides had warned her about the possibility that Benjamin might not look much like John Shaw. Obviously his features were the same, but there were subtler clues of posture and style and movement, and from this distance—through the rain—he might have been another person altogether. He walked differently. He held himself differently. He stepped into the October morning, his face disguised by the hood of a yellow raincoat, and this was not John’s long, impatient stride but something more diffident, careful, reserved. He paused at the sidewalk and looked both ways. His glance slid over the little Volvo without hesitation, but Susan pressed herself back into the seat.

He turned and walked westward through the rain.

Susan waited until he reached the corner; then she turned the key in the ignition and eased the Volvo into traffic.

He walked to work, which made it easier. By negotiating slowly through a couple of troublesome intersections she was able to follow him all the way to University Avenue, where he vanished into the lobby of a tall, anonymous Government of Ontario building.

She continued up the street, parked, bought herself breakfast at a fast-food restaurant. A sign on the wall announced a thirty-minute limit, but Susan found the table attendant, a Jamaican woman, and said she had an appointment at eleven-thirty—was it okay if she sat here out of the rain? The woman smiled and said, “We don’t get a big rush till noon. Make yourself comfortable, dear.”

She finished the Travis McGee while nursing a cup of coffee. A steady rain washed over the tinted atrium-style windows. The air was steamy and warm.

At ten she ran across the street for a copy of Time magazine, came back for a second coffee and left the lid on.

At eleven-thirty she left the restaurant and walked a block and a half to the building where Benjamin worked.

She stationed herself in the lobby as the lunch crowd began to flow past. No sign of Benjamin. She wondered if there was a second exit. But she hadn’t seen one.

At twelve-ten she asked the guard by the elevator whether there was a cafeteria in the building.

“Third floor,” he said.

“Do I need a badge?”

He smiled. “No, ma’am. I don’t believe it’s considered a privilege to eat there.”

She took a deep breath and punched the Up button.

* * *

“You’re not yourself today, Benjamin,” the secretary at Unemployment Insurance said; but Benjamin sailed on past, deaf to the obvious, pushing his mail cart. It was true, he was not himself; he was full of disquieting thoughts, thoughts he could barely contain.

He had missed a lot of work recently—more evidence that things were not as they should be. Today he had noticed his supervisor Mr. Gill eyeing him from the office behind the mail desk … maybe wondering whether to launch a complaint or to say something to Benjamin first; in the Provincial Government, with its labyrinths of employee protection, the process of firing someone could be tortuous. The absences were unusual, though, because Benjamin genuinely liked his job. He liked sorting the mail and pushing the cart twice a day; when the work ended he liked coming home to Amelie, at least when she had the evening off. He had fallen into the routines of his life like a sleepwalker caught up in an especially happy, luminous dream, and he would have been content to dream on forever. But something had begun to interfere with the dream—a waking-up; or perhaps a deeper, dreamless sleep.

Trouble, Benjamin thought. Trouble all around him, trouble inside him. He felt its pulse beat at his temples with every step. Trouble trouble trouble.

All the office clocks were creeping toward noon. He had nearly finished his run, half of the building on Bay Street, room to room and up the elevators, dropping off mail with the pretty, brightly dressed secretaries who smiled and thanked him from behind their reception desks, their barricades of computer terminals and hanging plants—their perfume mingling with the smell of broadloom and Xerography to create what Benjamin thought of as the Government Office Smell. Shouldering past the men in suits who nodded or ignored him, he was rendered invisible by his open collar: the Invisible Man. He wheeled down the corridor from Unemployment Insurance to Social Welfare with the unanswered statement now echoing in his head (I’m not myself—I’m not—I’m not myself) in time with the squeak of the left rear wheel of the cart (must oil that). It was not the sort of idea he was accustomed to having. It was troubling and strange, and he knew (but did not want to acknowledge) its obvious source.

John.

The name arose unbidden, a sort of greyness. The name John Shaw was associated in Benjamin’s mind with things hard, drab, and unyielding. Asphalt, concrete, slate. John was a dim memory, a ghost impulse, as ephemeral as the sense of deja vu. But he was also a real presence, suddenly more real than he had been for years, a demanding presence … dangerous. Not just because I might lose my job, Benjamin thought, but because I might lose, might lose … no, but oh well, admit it, might lose Amelie.

Might lose that touch, voice, smile, night presence, that (yes, say it) love, which had entered into his life so suddenly … those eyes, which regarded him and in some sense created him: confirmed his suspicion that he existed. If Amelie can love Benjamin then Benjamin is real. He understood this about himself. He possessed only a few scraps of a past, some of them illusory. But the present was real. This moment, this now. And especially his moments with Amelie. What he felt for her was uncreated, was whole, was beyond suspicion.

He didn’t want to lose her.

He would not allow her to be taken away…

But how to stop it?

Things were happening. Things beyond his control.

Trouble, he thought, as he parked the mail cart behind the sorting desk in the basement. He rode the elevator up to the employee cafeteria, bought himself a ham-on-a-kaiser and a carton of milk; then stood petrified with the tray in his hand, staring at the woman across the room, familiar but unfamiliar, who was staring at him—and the only thought in his head was trouble trouble trouble.

* * *

Trembling, he carried his tray to her table. She gestured for him to sit down.

They regarded each other for a long moment, Benjamin arriving at the understanding that she was frightened, too; though he couldn’t guess why. She was a small, nervous woman with short dark hair and brittle eyeglasses and a can of Diet Pepsi in front of her. “I’m Susan,” she said.

“Do I know you?”

“I’m a friend of John’s.”

Benjamin doubted it. Sometimes, scraps of memory would cross the barrier between Benjamin and John—more often now than ever before. That was how he had recognized the woman in the first place. But the recognition did not signal “friend”; instead it evoked a more complex reaction, fear and hunger and hope and an old, vast disappointment almost too big to contain.

“I only have an hour for lunch,” he said.

She sipped her Pepsi. “You work here?”

“In the mail room. I sort and deliver.”

“Interesting work?”

“I like it.” He unwrapped his sandwich but left it alone. He wasn’t hungry anymore. “This is about John,” he said. “Something’s happening to John.”

* * *

John my real father, he thought, John who invented me, John who created me. No, not quite that; but there was no obvious word for what John had done or Benjamin had become; no word that Benjamin knew.

He knew about John. It was a shadow knowledge, ghostly, and for a long time Benjamin had tried to ignore it. But the knowledge wouldn’t go away. Useless to pretend, for instance, that he had had a childhood. For a long time he had remembered growing up with the Woodwards, but most of that was false memory, no more substantial than the picture on a TV screen. His “real” childhood was John’s childhood, a confusion of threatening images (a woman named Marga, a man named Kyriakides); in fact his childhood was no childhood at all, because “Benjamin” had never been a child. Benjamin was born a teenager and only gradually acquired a substantial existence, imitation deepening into reflex—the mask growing roots into the skull, he thought, startled: because it was a John thought more than a Benjamin thought. Maybe John was coming back again.

So soon. Too soon.

“I was sent here by Dr. Kyriakides,” Susan said, and the name sent a shockwave up his spine. “Dr. Kyriakides thinks John might be sick. Might be dying.”

This was not the kind of information he could assimilate all at once. His stomach was churning. He looked at his watch. “I have to go back to work.”

“I can wait,” Susan said. “I have my car—I can drive you home.”

Trouble! But there was no avoiding it now.

He stood. “I get off at four.”

“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Susan Christopher said.

* * *

Rain all day, grey down the big office windows as he wheeled his cart around; rain when he followed Susan Christopher out to her car, red-blinking rain all up and down the dark rush-hour streets. Benjamin sank into the front passenger seat as Susan pulled out into the traffic. She said, “Do you know about John, about what he is?”

“A little,” Benjamin said. “I know more about him than I used to. His brain, right? His brain is different.” My brain, too, he thought: it’s where we live. Briefly, he imagined the kind of house called a “semi-detached,” two separate homes butted up against a common wall. Noisy neighbors, Benjamin thought. Used to be the wall was thicker; nothing came through. Now, when John was in control, Benjamin retained some sense of his own existence, as if he had retreated to an upstairs room where he could watch from the window, or just float and dream, while his raucous neighbor shouted and raved.

“His brain is unique,” Susan was saying. “He was made that way. There were hormones—drugs—that changed the way he grew.”

“Dr. Kyriakides.”

Susan nodded.

“And now that’s changing,” Benjamin guessed.

She gave him a second look, maybe surprised that he had guessed. She nodded. “The tissue in the brain is more fragile than anyone expected. It deteriorates—it may be doing that already.”

“A mental breakdown,” Benjamin said.

“Maybe. Maybe even worse than that. Not just for John—for you.

But he could not dispel the image of his brain (John’s brain) as a house, a cavernous mansion, strange and multichambered—now grown brittle, dry, drafty, and susceptible to flash fires. “You don’t really know what might happen.”

“No, not really.”

But something was happening; Benjamin knew it; and he guessed she was right, you couldn’t burn down half a house and leave the other half intact—what happened to John would surely happen to Benjamin, too. For years Benjamin had been John’s shadow, his half-self, a marionette. But in the last few months he had emerged into a real existence—a life; and when he said the word “I” it meant something; he had moved in with Amelie, who looked at him and saw Benjamin. “Benjamin,” she would say. Maybe he had let himself believe that this would go on forever … that John would fade; that John would become the shadow, reduced at last to “John,” a memory. But now maybe we both lose. Maybe we’re both memory.

Susan drove into the core of St. Jamestown, where the peeling apartment towers stood like sentinels. She pulled up at the curb opposite the rooming house, but neither of them moved to get out. Susan turned the heater up.

Benjamin looked thoughtfully at her. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to help.”

“Help how?”

“I want you to see Dr. Kyriakides. I want you to let him treat you.”

“Can he change what’s happening?”

“We’re not sure. We’d like to find out.”

But the idea was disturbing. He felt a spasm of unease that was clearly John’s: as if John had rolled over inside him. “John doesn’t want me to do that.”

“He’s reluctant,” Susan admitted. “I’ve spoken to him.”

Benjamin gazed at the rain. “I don’t control him.”

“You control yourself.”

“I’m not sure—I don’t know if I could do something he didn’t really want. I mean, it’s never come to that.”

“I just want you to think about it,” Susan Christopher said. “That’s enough for now.”

“Oh, I’ll think about it.” Benjamin unlatched the door. “You can count on that.”

* * *

He crossed the rainy street to the boardinghouse, where the front door opened and Amelie stepped out, hugging herself, glancing a little nervously from Benjamin to the rental car and back. Benjamin was suddenly in love with the look of her under the wet porch awning in her tight jeans and a raggedy sweater and her breath steaming into the cold, wet air. Not for John, he thought: what Susan Christopher had asked for, his “help,” he might give, even if it meant an end to everything he had assembled here, his real life (which might be ending anyway); but not for John or even for himself. For her, he thought, for Amelie on the porch in her old clothes, Amelie who had drawn him out of the vacuum of himself with a word and a touch … because there was a chance, at least, that he might survive where John did not, and he owed her that chance; owed her the possibility of a happy ending; or—if that failed—if everything failed—at least the evidence of his courage.

* * *

Susan watched from the Volvo as Benjamin entered the rooming house.

Scary, she thought, how easy it was to accept him as Benjamin. “Multiple personality”—she had seen the movies, the PBS documentaries. But those people had always seemed just slightly untrustworthy, as if the whole thing might be—on some level—a sort of confidence trick, the nervous system’s way of committing a sin without taking the blame.

This was different. Benjamin was not the product of a normal mind pushed beyond its limits. He was an invention—a work of art, a wholly synthetic creation. A “normal” mind, Susan thought, can’t do that. It was a feat unique to John Shaw, as unpredictable and utterly new as the fiercely coiled cortical matter under his skull.

Unnerving.

A new disease, Susan thought. She put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. A new disease for a new species. Hypertrophy of the mind. A cancer of the imagination.