Susan looked at her hands.
John said, “I don’t want sympathy. You asked about symptoms. This is relevant. For years I had thought of myself as ”John‘ while the Woodwards were calling me “Benjamin.” After that day… for them, I
was
Benjamin. I became what they wanted. Normal, adequate, pliant, and wholly unimpressive. You understand, it was an act. They noticed it, this change, but they never questioned it. They didn’t want to. They welcomed it. I worked my body the way a puppeteer works a marionette. I
made up
Benjamin. He was my invention. In a way, he was as meticulous a piece of work as that guitar. I made him out of people I knew, out of what the Woodwards seemed to want. He was their natural child—maybe the child they deserved. I played Benjamin for almost three years, one thousand and eighty-five days. And when I turned sixteen I took my birth certificate and a hundred-dollar bill James Woodward kept in his sock drawer, and I left. Didn’t look back, didn’t leave a forwarding address… and I dropped Benjamin like a stone.“ He took a sip of cappucino. ”At least I thought I did.“
“What are you saying—that
Benjamin
was a symptom?”
“He
is
a symptom. He came back.”
The cool air made Susan shiver. She watched three teenagers in leather jackets and spike haircuts stroll past, eyes obscure behind Roy Orbison sunglasses.
John said, “I noticed other problems first. Minor but disturbing. Auditory hallucinations, brief fugue states—”
“When was this?”
“Three years ago, more or less. I was living in a cabin on a gulf island off the coast of British Columbia. I blamed a lot of it on that—on the isolation. But then, without any kind of warning, I lost two calendar days. Went to bed on Sunday, woke up Wednesday morning. Well, that was frightening. But I was methodical about it. I tried to reconstruct the time I’d lost, pick up on any clues I’d left. I found a receipt in a shirt pocket, nine dollars and fifty-five cents for groceries at a supply store in town, a place I never shopped. It was a family grocery not much bigger than my cabin, and when I went in to ask some questions the woman back of the check-out desk nodded at me and said, ”Hello, Benjamin! Back again?“”
“And the fugues persisted?”
“I’m lucky to have a day like this… a day to myself.”
Susan didn’t know what to say.
He drained his cappucino and turned the cup over. “You want to know what it feels like? It’s like learning to do a puppet act… and then forgetting which one of you is which. The boundaries fold away. Suddenly you’re inside the mirror looking out.”
“I see.”
He regarded her steadily. “Is that what you expected—you and Max?”
“Not exactly.”
He stood up. He said, “I think I’m dying because I can’t remember how to be John Shaw anymore.”
He walked her back to the hotel.
He was quieter now, almost reticent, as if he had said more than he meant to. He walked with big, impatient strides and Susan had to struggle to keep up. She was panting for breath by the time they reached the lobby.
He turned to face her at the door, wrapped in his jacket, almost lost in it. What had he said?
The boundaries fold away.
… He said, “You’ve done your job. You can go home with a clear conscience.”
“That wasn’t the idea. We hoped—Dr. Kyriakides thought—if you came to Chicago—”
“Why? So he can watch me fade away?”
“He has some ideas that might help.”
“He has a pathological curiosity and a bad conscience.”
“You haven’t spoken to him for twenty years.”
“I don’t want to speak to him.”
“Well,
what,
then? You stay here? You curl up in that cheap apartment until you disappear?”
She was startled by her own words—John seemed to be, too. He said, “I’m glad we talked. I’m glad you listened. You want to help. That’s nice. And you have. But I’m not ready to leave here.”
“You don’t have to make that decision now. I’ll be in town for a week.” She could extend her reservation at the hotel. Surely Dr. Kyriakides would pay for it? “We can talk again.”
John looked closely at her and this time, Susan thought, it was very bad, that X-ray vision stare, the sense of being scanned. But she stood up to it. She stared back without blinking.
He said, “I… it might not be possible.”
“Because of Benjamin?”
He nodded.
“But if it
is
possible?”
“Then,” he said quietly, “I know where you are.”
He turned and stalked away into the cool air.
She watched him go. Her heart was beating hard.
Because, she realized, it
matters
now.
She had come here determined to do a job… to intercede for Dr. Kyriakides, to find John Shaw and say her piece and get it over with.
But that had changed.
Now she wanted something else.
She wanted him to live.
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.
“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.