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
déjà
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.