The Divide

12

Maxim Kyriakides paid the taxi driver and watched as the automobile sped away, leaving him alone in the gravel driveway of the house north of Toronto in which he would be spending the next few months.

The house was a whitewashed pseudo-Georgian structure, isolated from its neighbors by groves of trees. Maxim had never seen it before. It belonged to a colleague, a University of Toronto professor named Collingwood, who was a member of what they had called “The Network” many years ago. The house was to have gone up for sale a week ago, but Collingwood had offered it to Maxim when Maxim explained the problem he was facing.

The house was suitably large. Maxim walked up the driveway to the big portico, fished a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock on the double doors. Open, they admitted a wash of December sunlight into the tiled foyer. The house was cold; the heat had been turned off for some days.

But the electricity had been restored yesterday. Maxim flicked a switch and the lights winked on. The entrance hall yielded to a kitchen, a living room, a library. These were furnished, though sparsely—valuables had been removed and there were blank, pale spaces where paintings had been taken from the walls.

Well, he thought, that was appropriate, too. We shall all be entering a new, unfamiliar space. All three of us … all four, counting the French-Canadian girl Susan had mentioned. No, even more than that. Five, he thought, if you allowed Benjamin as a separate entity.

Maxim ascended the staircase carefully. He was healthy enough to pass for ten or fifteen years younger than his age. He was large but not fat; he had always walked for pleasure, sometimes great distances, and he supposed that habit had helped preserve his health. Still, he was conscious of his age. At sixty-eight, stairs were a chore to be undertaken with some seriousness. He remembered his Uncle Constantine moving through the house in Macedonia at this same solemn, considered pace. Constantine had been a schoolteacher and a cynical Communist, a friend of the rebel Veloukhiotis. Maxim was then a teenager and already an ideologue; he had read Marx with great determination. Now … is it possible, he wondered, that as children we’re already learning how to be old? Had he been studying for infirmity under his uncle’s slow tutelage?

The second floor of the house on the outskirts of Toronto exuded a closed-in, musty atmosphere. He wanted to open a window but dared not; that would only make it more difficult to heat these rooms when the furnace kicked on again. He stood by a bedroom window and gazed through its double panes across a wooded ravine. The ravine was stark and bare, a swath of perhaps a hundred yards between the house and a housing project crowded up against a major highway. The ravine afforded at least a little privacy, and that was good. The house, he thought, was as close to stateliness as one could achieve in such a prefabricated landscape.

He paused to scold himself for this momentary class snobbery, to which he was not even entitled. Maxim, though no longer a Communist like poor dead Constantine, had once considered himself a socialist; certainly he had never been wealthy.

But the important thing, he thought, is that I can work here.

It was John who had insisted on staying in Toronto. Maxim had wanted him to fly to Chicago with Susan. But John believed he would be safer on this side of the border—which might even be true, though Maxim had no evidence to suggest it—and certainly he would be more comfortable, less disoriented, in a familiar setting. So Maxim had arranged a sudden sabbatical, ostensibly for reasons of health (no one inquired too closely—one of the advantages of seniority and tenure), and borrowed this house from his friend.

Everything was in place except for the people, and they would be arriving tomorrow. Susan, this young woman Amelie … and John, whom Maxim had not set eyes upon for many years.

Resting a moment in the darkened hallway, he silently framed the forbidden words:My son.

Not literally, of course. Maxim had never married, never produced any children. Even his most intimate friends—possibly excepting those in the so-called Network—took him for an elderly bachelor of the generic sort, married to his research and his teaching. And that was, in fact, largely true. But no one’s life is as simple as his friends believe.

In a real sense, Maxim thought, I created John. What else is fatherhood? This was, if anything, even more profound. A virgin fatherhood.

He thought, I could have raised him.

It was one of those thoughts that came to him periodically, unbidden and unwelcome. Ordinarily, he would have shunted it aside. It was not useful. But now, with the prospect of facing John once again, there was no avoiding it.

If they hadn’t taken him away—

If I hadn’t allowed them to take him away—

But, no. He was too old to regret his life. You do what you do. And then you do what you can.

He sat down in a chair in the entranceway to wait for the deliveries he had been told to expect: a few pharmaceuticals, a tape recorder, his notebooks. Bundled in a huge coat and away from the wind, he was warm enough—except for his feet. Warm enough, anyway, to drift toward sleep.

Drifting, he was briefly assailed by a dream-image of John standing before him, John grown unnaturally tall, pointing a finger of accusation and pronouncing the word “Liar!” The vision was disturbing and it startled him awake; he sat up blinking.

The afternoon light had dimmed. The house was dark.

He rubbed his face, sighing. Traitorous sleep. But he supposed there was some truth in his dream. He had implied to Susan that there was some treatment available for John; presumably she had passed this implication on. Poor trusting Susan, who believed in his miraculous powers. In fact there was nothing for John in this house but a warm bed in which to endure his crisis. And my notebook, Maxim thought. My obdurate curiosity, and my guilt.

Tests would be run, of course, and there was dopamine, which had relieved some symptoms in the animal studies. But there was nothing to forestall the ultimate resolution. Unwillingly, Maxim recalled his laboratory chimps, the animals prostrate and comatose or consumed by fever. In the initial tests—before John was born—the beasts had not been allowed to live long enough to exhibit symptoms; they were grotesques, capable of understanding a few words of written English and copying the alphabet from children’s books; they were destroyed as a potential embarrassment. But Dr. Kyriakides had allowed his second animals, his private experiment, to live to maturity—caged homunculi with enlarged skulls and wizened, cynical faces. He had watched them live out their truncated lives, scratching apple and orange onto yellow copypaper or probing their fur with the pencils, and dropping into recurrent fevers which he mistook at first for some form of malaria; then battering themselves against their cages and screeching, as if they had suffered some unendurable insight into their own condition—collapsing at last into a febrile unconsciousness.

Most died. Some recovered, but never fully. Never regained their facility with the pencil, never remembered how to operate the infant toys. The ones who survived lived on as lab animals, caged and listless … though an x-ray or an autopsy might reveal certain unusual cerebral lesions. Whatever its outcome, the affliction was universal.

And now John.

I didn’t mean this to happen.

But it had happened anyway.

Maxim stood up, groaning. Old bones. But his feet were not as cold as they had been, and he realized that the gas must have been turned on while he slept; the house had begun to warm around him.

13

Roch said he was going out for the day—looking for work, he said. Amelie watched from the kitchen window as he drove off in his battered green Chevy van. Then she telephoned Susan.

“Today,” she said. “Can you pick me up?”

“All right,” Susan said.

Amelie hurried to pack her things.

Not that there was much to pack. A suitcase full of clothes; the stereo, the TV set. None of the furniture was worth hanging on to; if there had been time she would have sent it back to the Salvation Army depot where she’d found it. But the arrangements had to be made in secret, and quickly, so that Roch wouldn’t find out. He had been in a tolerable mood through Christmas and Amelie didn’t want to provoke anything before she left. Above all, she didn’t want him to find out where she was going.

Susan had said she would come by with the car around noon. At eleven forty-five Amelie hiked her belongings out to the curb where they sat in a small, unimpressive heap. She wrapped herself in a jacket and stood shivering next to the luggage. It was a cold January day and the clouds had begun to wring out a few flakes of snow. The sidewalk was clear but cold; ice stood in pockets in the grassy verge. It was at least not one of those hideously cold days you sometimes get in January and February, when the air steals your breath and even the short walk to the bus stop is an endurance test—but it felt like those days were coming. Amelie decided she would need a new winter coat, not just this jacket. She used to own a parka (from the Thrift Village over on Augusta), but she’d thrown it away when the seams ripped under the arms.

She looked up and down the street anxiously, but there was no sign of Susan’s car.

It felt funny, leaving the apartment behind … leaving it to Roch, who would probably have to be evicted. But she’d left so much behind already. Her job at the restaurant, for instance. Susan claimed that Dr. Kyriakides would be able to find her another job soon, and maybe that was true or maybe not; but she couldn’t stay on at the Goodtime, because Roch would be sure to find her there. She had no illusions about Roch. She had lived with her brother for most of the past month and she understood that whatever was wrong with him—she thought of it as a kind of broken wheel inside him—was getting worse. The wheel was running loose; it had come free of all the gears and governors and pretty soon it might wreck the machine entirely. You could tell by the noise, by the smell of hot metal and simmering oil.

Amelie, who smoked cigarettes very occasionally, fished one out of her purse now and lit it. It made her feel warmer. But then she coughed and felt mildly guilty—felt the pressure of all those Public Health ads on TV. She took a last drag and butted out the cigarette against the icy ground. Her watch said 11:58. She whispered, “Come on, Susan!” Her breath made clouds in the cold air.

She tried to remember what Susan Christopher was driving these days. She had seen the car a couple of times: a rented Honda, she recalled, some drab color—beige or brown? Kind of box-shaped. Maybe that was it, at the corner?

But no, the distant grey automobile rolled on without turning. There was a stillness in the air, the eerie calm of a cold weekday noon. Everybody was inside having lunch. Amelie thought randomly of the Ecole in Montreal, bag lunches in the dingy cafeteria and pale winter light through the mullioned windows. Dead hours like this. Behind closed eyes she pictured the Honda, willing it to arrive. Susan, goddamn! This was dangerous.

She opened her eyes then and looked down the street. A vehicle turned the comer. But it was not Susan’s Honda.

It was Roch’s green van.

She stood up, panicked. But what was there to do? Hide in the apartment? How was she supposed to explain this—the little Sony TV, the stereo, taped Tourister luggage, all sitting at the curb in a neat pile? She wanted to run but couldn’t make her feet move. Susan will come, she thought, and I’ll jump into the car and we’ll zoom away…

But Susan didn’t come. The van rolled to a stop beside her.

Oh, Amelie thought, oh, shit!

Roch cracked open the door on the passenger side. She saw him peering out from the dimness inside, and the expression on his face was stony and opaque. He said, “Going somewhere?”

It was like being back in school. Latin class, she thought dizzily. Inevitably, the Sister would ask her to decline some verb. And Amelie, who could not get a grip on Latin, would stand beside her desk in mute humiliation. This same wordlessness overtook her now. She could not run. She could not speak.

Roch said disgustedly, “Get in.”

Meekly, Amelie obeyed.

Susan turned the corner and saw Amelie’s possessions piled on the curb … then registered the green van idling ahead. It was Roch’s van. Susan had seen it parked at the building before; Amelie had pointed it out. No, she thought—and pulled the Honda over before she could be spotted.

She watched Amelie climb into the van.

Susan’s mind was racing. She wished John was here, or Dr. Kyriakides. She remembered the bruise Amelie had showed her … remembered Amelie’s description of Roch.

She was what, five minutes late? She shouldn’t have stopped for coffee at the hotel. Shouldn’t have come up Yonge Street; the traffic was bad. Shouldn’t have—

But that was stupid. Not helpful at all.

She watched the green van roll away. It turned right at the next comer.

Now or never, Susan thought.

She gunned the Honda down the street.

Pretty soon, Amelie understood where Roch was taking her.

When she was young and on the street in Toronto she had heard about Cherry Beach. It was a bleak strip of shoreline east of the harbor, and if a cop picked you up after midnight, for vagrancy, say, or trespassing, or prostitution, and if you said the wrong thing, then the cop might drive you out to Cherry Beach and do some work on your attitude. It was called Cherry Beach Express, and although Amelie had never experienced it she knew people who had. She was always afraid it was Roch who would end up out there—permanently damaged, maybe, because he did not know when to shut up and lie down.

Now Roch was driving her past the peeling towers of grain silos and the shadows of lake freighters, down industrial alleys and across rusted railway sidings. Cherry Beach Express. Because Roch understood how punishment worked. Obviously it was punishment he had on his mind right now.

But it’s daylight, she thought, someone will see us—

But that was stupid. She knew better.

She looked at Roch, a careful sideways glance. His lips were compressed and pale. He was nodding to himself, as if he had expected this all along, ratty old Amelie showing her true colors at last. This was not even hatred, Amelie thought; it was something much colder and vaster than that.

She said, “Roch, I—”

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Shut up.”

She bit her lip.

The van rolled to a stop far along the isolated shoreline, obscured from the road by a stand of leafless maples. Roch reached across and opened Amelie’s door, then pushed her out. She stumbled onto the cold, compacted sand. The air was brittle with moisture and she could hear the waves lapping at the shore. Far off, somewhere in the harbor, a freighter sounded its horn.

Roch climbed down after her. Amelie fought the urge to run. There was nowhere to go; Roch was fast and she would only make him mad. She stood with her hands at her side, breathing hard.

Roch stood in front of her, close enough for her to smell his breath.

He said, “You don’t trust me.”

She said, “That’s not true!”

He slapped her. It was a hard, stinging, open-handed slap; it rocked her head to the right. Roch was strong … he still worked out in the gym twice a week. Amelie knew this, because he had borrowed money from her to keep his membership current.

“You don’t trust me,” he said, “and you’re lying to me. What kind of thing is that to do? Christ, I’m your brother! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

He expected an answer. Amelie was rigid, frightened. “Sure it means something to me.”

“Liar,” Roch said sadly.

“No, I mean it! I mean—Jesus Christ, Roch!”

He grabbed her wrists; his grip was powerful. “You were running away.”

Amelie could not hold his gaze. She looked at the lake, instead, grey under grey clouds.

“Running away from home,” Roch elaborated. “Look at me, goddammit!”

He took her jaw in his right hand and forced her to face him. His hand traveled up along her cheek in a gesture that was almost a caress; then he took a handful of her hair and twisted it. Amelie said, “Ow!” and began to cry.

“You were going somewhere,” he said.

“I was moving out,” she said. “All right? I’m sick of that place!”

“You didn’t tell me,” Roch said patiently. “You could have told me.”

“I thought you’d get mad!”

He seemed puzzled. “Why? Why would I get mad? I mean, maybe you’re right. We need a bigger place. Hey, I’m reasonable.” His grip tightened on her hair. “But that’s not all of it—right?”

“Shit,” Amelie said.

“Don’t use bad language,” Roch said. “It makes you sound cheap.” He was thinking; his face was contorted with the effort of it. “You wanted to get rid of me. That’s it, isn’t it? Or else—it’s that guy you shacked up with, right? He’s back—right?”

Amelie hated it when Roch talked about Benjamin. Dirty, dangerous words. “Shut up,” she said.

He slapped her again. This time, with his left hand firmly tangled in her hair, it was worse.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” he said.

She moaned.

“He’s back—right?”

After a long pause, Amelie nodded.

“You were going to stay with him.”

Pause, nod again. Snow was falling gently now. She felt the flakes against her burning cheek.

“Well, you can go,” Roch said. Amelie looked up. Roch smiled. “You can go if you want to. Sure! Go with him! I’m on your side! All I want—I just want you to prove you trust me. I just want you to tell me where I can find you.”

“No,” Amelie said instantly.

“No? You won’t tell me?”

“I—I don’t know, Roch, we haven’t—”

But she did know. Susan had given her the address of the house; Amelie had written it down and hidden it in her purse. Roch understood this, of course. He always knew when she was lying.

This time, though, he didn’t slap her. This time he jerked his knee up into her belly and at the same time released her hair, put his hand in a frightening grip around her face and pushed. Amelie fell to the ground, doubled over and gasping for breath. The pain was enormous.

Roch said, in a tone of weary patience, “All you have to do is tell me.”

Amelie blinked. She felt like throwing up. She rose to her knees, and then—past Roch, a great distance back the way they’d come along the shore road—she saw a flicker of light. It was a reflection from a car window, and the car was rolling along in slow motion, and it was grey—a grey Honda.

It was Susan, Amelie realized, who must have followed them from the rooming house.

She looked up at Roch, trying hard to disguise her emotion.

He took her hair and dragged her up. Amelie grabbed a double handful of cold, gritty beach sand … and then she was on her feet.

She had seen this in movies. You took a handful of dirt—

Roch frowned. “What now?” Reading her face.

Amelie brought both hands up and thrust them forward, spraying the beach sand into Roch’s eyes.

“What the fuck—!” he screamed.

Amelie ducked past his groping hands toward the Honda. She saw Susan accelerate suddenly down the gritty tarmac. Hurry, Susan!

But the sand-in-the-eyes thing was not as paralyzing as it looked on TV. Roch turned and scrambled after her. She could hear the thump of his big feet against the beach. The sandy beach slowed her down; it was like running in a dream … but maybe it would slow Roch down, too. Amelie saw the Honda speeding toward her as Susan realized what had happened. Amelie drew in great ragged gasps of frigid air.

The Honda veered away from the road and ran a few yards along the verge. It wavered, and Amelie saw Susan groping across the passenger seat to unlock the far door. The door swung open as the Honda curved back to the road. Amelie focused all her attention on that door. It was her only way out of here. Because Roch was mad enough now that he might kill her … maybe not on purpose; but he was strong; she was not.

He was right behind her now. She could hear his angry breathing. She didn’t look back, because surely that would be the end; because he might be right there with his arms outstretched; she might freeze in her tracks, seeing him. She watched the Honda roll forward in lazy dream-time and thought, Here I am, okay, right here, Susan!

Then she felt a tug as Roch closed his hand on her jacket. She pulled away, but only briefly. She stumbled, and Roch tackled her—a football tackle; she went down winded and breathless.

When she opened her eyes he was kneeling over her. But the look on his face was not triumphant; it was queerly mechanical, a vacant gaze that was focused on her only approximately. But his fist was raised and it was obvious what he meant to do. Amelie tried to squirm away but his other hand was clamped in a fierce grip around her neck.

Amelie twisted her head to one side in time to see the front tires of the Honda spitting sand as the car braked beside her. Susan! Amelie thought. But it wasn’t Susan who saved her, really; it was the passenger-side door, which flew open as the Honda stopped and caught Roch across the head and shoulders. Roch slumped forward and his weight was immense, but the grip around her neck had loosened and Amelie slid out from under the limp bulk of her brother.

Susan pulled her inside the car. Amelie slammed the door and hammered down the lock. Susan stepped down on the accelerator. The little car revved against the sand for a long, heartstopping moment; then the rear wheels seemed to bite down and the Honda shot forward. The car missed a leafless maple by inches … Amelie cringed … then they were back on solid tarmac and rocketing down the lakeshore road.

Amelie knelt on the vinyl carseat and peered through the rear window. She saw Roch stand up. He shook himself—she thought of a wet dog shaking itself dry—then stumbled toward his van.

“He’s coming after us,” she said.

Susan said, “Relax,” though she was breathing hard. The Honda turned left and roared through the industrial wasteland. Amelie watched vigilantly but saw no sign of Roch. Then they were into traffic and there was no chance of him following; Amelie sighed and slumped down in the seat.

“Thanks,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Susan said.

Amelie stared vacantly through the window. The snow was falling harder now. The afternoon was turning dark.

“Are you all right?” Susan asked.

Amelie touched the sore part of her cheek. It would swell and bruise; it would look shitty. She was bruised down around her belly, too. But it was nothing terrible. She told Susan so.

“Nice guy,” Susan commented.

Amelie shrugged.

“I guess he wanted to know where you were going?”

“Yes,” Amelie said.

“Did you tell him?”

“No.”

“That’s why he hit you.”

Amelie nodded.

Susan said, “That was pretty brave—not telling him.”

“Brave?” Amelie said. She almost laughed. “Jesus, Susan!—for a smart person, you’re not very bright sometimes.”

They took a long route back to make sure Roch hadn’t managed to follow. Coming up on Amelie’s rooming house, Susan slowed. There was no sign of the van… Roch wasn’t here.

But he had been. He must not have tried to follow at all; he must have come straight back. Amelie’s things had been trashed. “Oh, no,” Susan said. She waited for some response from Amelie, but there was none. Amelie only looked morosely at the pile of wreckage that had been her stereo, the little TV, a suitcase full of clothes. “Stop,” she said, as the Honda rolled past. She opened the passenger door and leaned out to collect a couple of blouses, some tapes, a pair of Levis from the snowy gutter. She held these on her lap.

“All that other stuff,” Susan said, “you know, we can replace all that.”

Amelie shrugged and closed the door. She did not look back as Susan drove away.

Amelie was silent during most of the ride to the house Dr. Kyriakides had rented, seeming to watch the snow that had begun to accumulate across the brown farm fields and the cold marshes north of the city. Susan drove carefully, grateful for the silence and the chance to begin to assimilate everything that had happened. That terrible man … and, my God, she had almost killed him, slamming the car door into him … !

“The thing is,” Amelie said quietly, “I just don’t know.”

Susan looked across at her. “Know what?”

Amelie studied her fingernails.

“About Roch,” she said. “I don’t know whether we can do something like that to him. I mean, and get away with it.” She turned her large, shiny eyes on Susan. “I don’t know if he’ll let us.”

14

From the notebooks of Maxim Kyriakides:

From the taped transcripts of their meetings: Maxim Kyriakides and John Shaw, January 12:

Kyriakides: Hello, John. Please, sit down. [The sound of a chair being pulled up.] This is the room I’ve set aside for my work. I hope we’ll be meeting here often. [A long pause.] You’re staring at me. … Is something wrong?

John: [His voice firm but somewhat subdued.] I’m wondering what you want from me.

Kyriakides: Well, that’s a complicated question. I won’t attempt to lie to you. Let’s say—for the moment, I’m your doctor.

John: You won’t lie, but you will condescend to me.

Kyriakides: Is that what I’m doing?

John: I know you, Max. It’s been years, obviously. But I haven’t forgotten.

Kyriakides: You understand, this is difficult for me, too. I know you. I know what you’re capable of. I know what you could do as a child. … I can guess what you’re capable of now. So there’s an element of caution.

John: Of fear.

Kyriakides: If you like. Does that make you happy?

John: Is this psychoanalysis?

Kyriakides: I suppose, on one level, it is. I can be a better judge of what’s happening if we’re able to talk to one another.

John: You can judge my deterioration, you mean.

Kyriakides: If it happens that way. I hope to be able to prevent it. [A pause.] We’re being honest, here.

John: All those years …

Kyriakides: You resented me.

John: No, Max. I hated you.

John: Tell me about the treatment.

Kyriakides: Treatment can’t begin until we have more information. I have an arrangement with Dr. Collingwood—he’s a neurologist. He’ll be examining you, and he has connections at the University and at Toronto General, so we’ll have access to PET scanners and that sort of thing. We need a complete neurological workup before we can proceed.

John: In other words, you don’t have any treatment in mind.

Kyriakides: What I mean is that I won’t discuss treatment until we know more. I don’t want you second-guessing me.

John: Even if my guesses are better than yours.

Kyriakides: It isn’t a question of pride. I admit that I need a certain amount of elbow-room—emotional, intellectual.

John: You did animal studies.

Kyriakides: Yes …

John: The animals experienced loss of cortical tissue.

Kyriakides: They did.

John: Did they die? [Pause.] Max? Did the animals die?

Kyriakides: Some of them—yes.

Kyriakides: I think we have to begin by talking about Benjamin.

John: I won’t submit to amateur psychoanalysis—I thought I’d made that clear. The problem is physiological.

Kyriakides: The symptoms may not be. This is relevant, John. You do accept the implication that Benjamin—his manifestation over the last year or two—is a symptom?

John: Of something. Are you asking me to diagnose myself?

Kyriakides: I’m trying to justify my interest.

John: You’re suggesting Benjamin began to manifest as a result of cortical disfunction. Maybe so, maybe not. Sometimes I think I just … lost interest. When I invented him, you know, it was a willful act—I wanted someone to run all the routine chores, to gratify all the expectations I couldn’t fulfill. He was a kind of autopilot. Do you understand? But I think that’s the danger. I created an autonomous cortical subroutine and allowed it access to my voluntary motor activity. That must have created profound neural channeling—it’s not the sort of thing you can simply erase. And when being John Shaw became too difficult, Benjamin was there. He was waiting.

Kyriakides: Why was it difficult to be John Shaw?

John: Maybe I was sick. Maybe I was just … tired.

Kyriakides: But it was a conscious decision.

John: To resurrect Benjamin? No—it was not.

Kyriakides: Therefore we have to examine it.

John: This is still parlor Freudianism, Max. Benjamin as the unconscious mind of John Shaw. The Three Faces of Eve. But it isn’t like that. You should know better. Freud was a bourgeois apologist, wasn’t he?

Kyriakides: I’m not a Marxist anymore, John.

John: How they fade—the passions of our youth.

Kyriakides: You’re trying to nettle me. Is that why you keep calling me “Max”?

John: That’s what they used to call you, isn’t it? Your colleagues in the Network?

Kyriakides: You know about that?

John: I overheard things—even as a child. I’m sorry if it bothers you, calling you Max. I would feel a little odd about using formal titles, I’m afraid.

Kyriakides: Your conscious mind is exceptional, John. I haven’t made the mistake of assuming your unconscious mind is any less prodigious. Nor should you.

John: Superman and superego.

Kyriakides: Obviously I can’t force you to talk about Benjamin. But the implication is that you find the topic disturbing.

John: I’m about to be evicted from my body, Max. Or lose my mind. Of course it’s disturbing.

Kyriakides: Yes, but there may be another way to think about it. I wonder if Benjamin isn’t a kind of survival instinct? Unconscious—I’m forced to use the word. But profound. Maybe you’ve resurrected him for a reason. He’s your creation, after all. He may be the key to your survival.

John: A rapprochement. We learn to love each other. It’s a cliche.

Kyriakides: Something more subtle than that. What if, neurologically speaking, Benjamin is a sort of life-raft? The scrap of wood that survives the disaster?

John: Then I should cling to him?

Kyriakides: You should become him. You should colonize him.

John: You can’t put all your cargo on a raft, Max. It sinks.

Kyriakides: No … but perhaps you can save what’s most valuable.

John: I’m tired—I’d like to go back to my room.

Kyriakides: I won’t keep you. Only one more question. You’ve been remarkably successful at restraining Benjamin ever since Susan contacted you—

John: That’s why I’m tired, Max.

Kyriakides: Do you expect him to manifest his presence soon?

John: It wouldn’t surprise me. I’m not sure how to keep him away. In Indonesia, they chase away evil spirits by banging pots and pans. Would that work, Max? Stimulants are also good. But I don’t suppose Dr. Collingwood would be willing to write a prescription. [A pause.] You want to meet him—is that it?

Kyriakides: Is that difficult to understand?

John: You think he can help you?

Kyriakides: Susan says he’s been helpful.

John: Cooperating in his own annihilation?

Kyriakides: If that’s what it means. It may not. Do you despise him so much? You created him, after all. He’s a part of you.

John: I don’t think even Shakespeare would enjoy having Hamlet compete for the control of his body—do you, Max?

Kyriakides: Hamlet was imaginary—

John: So was Benjamin.

Kyriakides: But he isn’t any longer. Surely that’s the point? You’ve created a living human being. You have to live with the consequences.

John: I yield to your experience in the matter.

From the notebooks of Maxim Kyriakides:

15

Susan drove everyone into the city in her Honda—she thought of it as hers, though it was Dr. Kyriakides who had taken out the lease. Dr. Kyriakides didn’t drive; the task had fallen to Susan by default; therefore, it was her car.

It was a cold, clear January day, the sun bright but barely strong enough to warm the tarmac. Snowplows had left huge hills of snow on each side of the highway. It had been a snowy winter and the indications were that it would get worse. No snow today but lots of icy runoff; Susan was cautious on turns; downtown, she parked in an underground lot.

Today was the day John was scheduled for tests at Toronto General. TGH was the city’s central hospital, and as she passed through the lobby Susan was reminded of every other hospital she had ever seen. The corridors were pastel green and blue, the paint abraded where gurney carts had bumped against the walls; mysterious doors opened into mysterious rooms; doctors and interns bustled past with fixed, distant expressions. Dr. Kyriakides introduced John to another doctor, a man named Collingwood, while Susan and Amelie staked out chairs in a waiting room. Collingwood was grey-haired, bearded, stout. He spoke in a subdued tone, then led John away down the corridor. Dr. Kyriakides sighed, and rooted out a copy of Newsweek from the sidetable. Amelie had found People. Susan could not concentrate on reading; she kept her eyes on the corridor beyond the waiting-room door.

She glimpsed John when he passed a second time, without stopping, as he followed Dr. Collingwood down the hall. He had changed into a green hospital gown and paper slippers, and the effect, Susan thought, was of an immense indignity.

When Susan was fourteen years old she had decided to become a doctor. It was a serious ambition, but in the end she realized she didn’t have the stomach for it. Undergraduate biology courses offered confirming evidence that her squeamishness was fundamental, inarguable, and permanent. That was when she detoured into cellular biology. She could deal with living systems as whole entities or as specimens on a slide; it was only that queasy middle ground, the surgeon’s world of pumping blood and palpitating organs, that repelled her. That was the world where her father’s cancer had lived. Of all the ugly facets of his death she resented this perhaps most of all, that he had become an ecology for a virulent and alien growth. It struck her now that what she missed most was the illusion of his sturdiness. Fathers should be solid, front to back, Susan thought. Otherwise nothing was certain. Anything could happen.

Maybe that was how John felt about Dr. Kyriakides.

But, disappointingly, she hadn’t been able to talk to John much in the few days he had been back from Vancouver. He was moody; he had isolated himself in his room. Susan had passed his door and seen him pecking at a computer terminal, curious (but vaguely familiar) symbols flowing across the monitor. She wanted to go in, talk to him, say something that would make him happy. But it was not a privilege she had earned. No real intimacy had passed between them and Susan felt ashamed of her feelings, the schoolgirl crush she had obviously developed. John was, as Dr. Kyriakides continued to insist, in some sense not even truly human.

But Susan knew what it was like to feel set apart, to feel different. Growing up in a California suburb, bookish and shy, citizen of an invisible country somewhere between Fantasyland and Pasadena, she would have welcomed the idea of a gentle superhuman sweeping her off her feet.

Except that he did not sweep. And “superhuman” didn’t mean what it should. And he was not even especially gentle.

And worse—unless Dr. Kyriakides could do something about it—he might be dying, or at the very least losing himself …leaving me, Susan thought childishly; voyaging off, like her father, wherever people go when they leave their sullen, grieving families abandoned by the graveside.

But these were hospital thoughts. Susan walked down the corridor to a vending-machine cafeteria and bought herself a cup of coffee, hoping to shake the mood. Machine coffee in a styrofoam cup, cloyingly sweet and hot enough to raise blisters. She liked it.

When she got back to the waiting room Dr. Collingwood was there. He was a bear-shaped man, but not really large; he was only just as tall as Susan and the effect, as he turned to face her, was of some stern but basically amiable big animal. “This is Susan?” he asked.

Dr. Kyriakides nodded.

Collingwood said, “We have John in a room upstairs while we wait for time on the scanner. He asked for you to come up.”

Susan was a little flattered, a little frightened. She followed Collingwood to the elevators and up two floors, then down an identical corridor to a small room in which John was sitting in his hospital gown.

Collingwood closed the door and left them alone.

John motioned to a chair. Susan sat with her hands primly in her lap.

He said, “You look more nervous than I am.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Not about the PET scan. Apprehensive about the results, obviously. Hospitals frighten you?”

“Yes.” She didn’t explain why.

He said, “I brought this.”

He reached into a day bag beside his chair and lifted out a portable chess set in a folding wooden box. “We have some time to kill while they warm up the machinery. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d like a game.”

She smiled. “You’ll win.”

“But that’s not why I play.” He sounded almost sheepish. “I like the patterns. It’s like a dance. I like to watch it unfold. Is it all right?”

“Of course,” Susan said.

He cleared away a stack of magazines from the courtesy table and set up the game. Susan opened with her king’s pawn; John replied in kind. It was a gentle opening, a Giuco Piano, the so-called Quiet Game.

She studied the board. He said, “You think I’ve been avoiding you.”

She was startled out of her thoughts. “Well, I—”

“Because I have been. Not avoiding you personally. It’s just that I didn’t want to face the questions.”

She could only echo, “Questions?”

“The questions you never asked because you were afraid of what I might say. Questions about what I am. About what it’s like, being what I am.”

Susan felt herself blushing. What kind of monster are you?—it was true; the question had never been far away, had it?

She moved a knight, mainly to conceal her nervousness.

“I thought we should talk about it now,” John said. “If you want to.”

“I’ve thought about it,” she admitted. “I’ve tried to imagine it.”

“Did Max ever talk about me—about his work, in any detail?”

“I was never even allowed to see his lab animals. Nothing beyond the cellular level. Not much theory.”

“Part of the problem is that we don’t have an adequate vocabulary. People talk about ‘intelligence’ as if it consisted of certain discrete acts—solving problems, acquiring knowledge and storing it. Most of the standard tests reflect that. But it’s really a superstition. When you talk about intelligence what you’re dealing with is human consciousness, which is not simple or schematic. I think even Max knows better now.”

He advanced his queen’s knight pawn. Susan gazed at the board abstractly; she couldn’t concentrate on the game.

He said, “There’s an evolutionary question about intelligence, what it’s for and how it arose. There’s a theory that intelligence evolved along with the upright posture, and for a similar reason. Among other things, Susan, a neuron is a clock—a timing device. But a single neuron has a widely variable firing time—it’s a clock but not a very good one.” He brought out his king’s knight. “Two neurons are a little better, because the errors begin to average out. Three neurons are better still, and so on. And clocks are good for operations involving timing. For instance, a dog: a dog is fairly good at catching things. But a dog couldn’t throw a rock at a moving target even if the dog were anatomically equipped to do so. Taking aim at a moving target makes demands on the neural clock the dog just can’t meet. Even the primates: you can’t train an ape to throw a baseball with any accuracy. Making an accurate baseball pitch means solving a complex differential equation, and doing it on the molecular level. It takes neurons.”

Susan marched her king’s bishop down the ranks.

“If the theory is correct,” John said, “then we evolved all this neocortical tissue so that we could stand on our hind legs and throw stones. Consciousness—intelligence—was the unforeseen side effect. Because the very calculation, the act of estimating speed and distance, of picking up the stone and taking aim, it exiles you from time. You understand, Susan? ‘If the antelope is there, and I aim over there’—it implies I and thou, self and other, birth and mortality. Makes you human. Not just I am but I was and I will be. Fruit of the tree of knowledge. It makes you the animal that stands just a little bit outside of time.”

His own bishop came rolling out. It was as if his hands were playing chess for him while he spoke. Susan responded with a reflexive pawn move, awed by this outrush of words.

“When Max was doing his work, of course, no one thought of intelligence this way. It was all much more linear: brains were calculating machines and we had better calculators than the apes. And there was no theoretical cap on it—you might imagine building a better brain the way the cybernetics people were upgrading Univac. Building a better human being. I think what Max imagined was a kind of ultimate Socialist Man, rational and benevolent.” John advanced his queen’s pawn a square, smiling to himself. “It didn’t occur to him that he might be creating the more perfect baseball player. Or that a man with more cortical tissue might have more terrifying dreams. Or that ‘intelligence’ is a kind of exile from temporal experience—that he might be engineering a creature more wholly alienated than anything that had walked the earth before. Lost in time. Your queen’s pawn.”

“What?” Susan was startled.

“You’re thinking of moving your queen’s pawn. Not a bad move, actually.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“There are only so many reasonable moves available—and you’re a reasonable player. But cautious, sometimes timid. That rules out a few things. Also, it’s not hard to tell what part of the board you’re focused on. And there are clues when you’re about to move. You lean forward a little. You clench your right hand. Yes, it’s that obvious.”

“I don’t like the idea of being so—transparent.”

“No one does.”

She hesitated, then pushed the pawn anyway. He continued, “This is by way of a warning.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You see, I know why you’re here. Here in this room, here with me. You’re here because you have the unusual perversion of falling in love with amiable monsters. And that’s what you mistook me for.”

This is the kind of monster I am, he was saying: a genuine one, and not amiable at all.

She should have answered with something polite and distancing (to reassure him); or she should have stood up and walked out (because he was right). She did neither. She was feeling reckless and disoriented; she obeyed a momentary impulse and stared back at him. “What about you? You don’t feel anything? You’re so g-goddamn aloof! That’s why you told me your life story that day in Kensington Market? That’s why you came back from your island?” She clenched her fists under the table. “Tell the truth: do you at least l-like me?”

He blinked—it wasn’t the question he had been expecting. Maybe, she thought, that was a good sign.

The room was silent for a moment; she could hear the ventilators humming.

“I could lie,” John said slowly. “How would you know?”

“I wouldn’t. I would trust you.”

“I’ve lied to other people. Cheated other people. Stolen from them.” He looked away. “Once I made love to a woman and left the bed wondering whether I’d committed an act of bestiality. That’s a stunningly arrogant question to ask yourself. The terrible thing is, I don’t know the answer.”

“Then answer my question.”

He looked back at the board. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I like you.” Regarded her calmly. “You’re thinking of moving your queen’s bishop.”

Damn his infuriating confidence! “No,” she said, “I’m not”

“No?”

Obeying another impulse: “My knight. There—see? If I move him back into the first rank I uncover the rook’s threat on your queen. While you’re getting her out of harm’s way, the knight takes the black bishop.” She lifted the knight and thumped it down defiantly.

John stared at the board. Surprised him again, Susan thought. Finally he advanced his queen, developing a threat toward her rook … but the rook was defended; his bishop was not. She took the piece.

Seven moves later he had cut through her pawn ranks and opened the white king to attack. But his own defenses were a shambles; his castled king was locked in by her rooks. She was coordinating a strong final assault when he advanced his queen through an opening she had not noticed. “Mate,” he said breathlessly.

But he was sweating. He looked up at her, and the look on his face now was the expression of a frightened child.

Susan understood suddenly what this tepid victory implied.

“Oh,” she said. She reached for his hand across the table; it was feverishly warm. “John—”

But then the door opened: Dr. Collingwood, with Dr. Kyriakides behind him.

Collingwood cleared his throat. “We’re ready now.”

Maxim Kyriakides watched through a glass dividing wall as a nurse installed John in the bone-white ring of the PET scanner and administered an injection of glucose laced with fluorine-18, a radioactive isotope. The isotope would diffuse through the tissues of his body, breaking down and releasing tiny bursts of radioactivity. The video monitor, over which Collingwood was hovering like a protective parent, would then translate this radiation into a picture of John’s brain. Rather, Maxim thought, of the activity of his brain, not specifically the physical structure; this was the superiority of the PET scanner over a CAT. Maxim had never operated such a device; he was more strictly a creature of the test tube, the laboratory animal, the microscope. Consequently he watched from a respectful distance as the images began to scroll up.

“Interesting,” Collingwood said.

“Butterflies,” Kyriakides said quietly.

“Hm?”

“Or Rorschach tests. Like the ones they gave us as undergraduates. Ink blots. Except these are red and blue.”

In fact they were images of John’s functioning brain, and Maxim was able to recognize the left and right occipitals, the temporal lobes, as the scanner read its sequential slices through the skull. But the vivid colors meant nothing to him.

Res externa and res cogita Matter and the mind. Both those categories had lost some of their firmness since Maxim’s college days. Res externa, the notion of the solid body in physical space, had receded into the conceptual fog of modern particle physics. And res cogita—well, we didn’t really believe in it, did we? Maxim had never been a radical reductionist, like Skinner. But it had never occurred to him to doubt that every mental event had its precise physical parallel in the brain; that a “thought” was simply a neuronal twitch of one kind or another.

Today all that had changed. Neurological science was a wasteland of warring theories; the brain was everything from a quantum-event amplifier to a chaotic equilibrium. Every step toward understanding, the discovery of this or that chemical neurotransmitter, seemed to unfold a Chinese puzzle of increasingly complex questions. Some researchers had even concluded that the effort to understand the brain was necessarily doomed—that consciousness cannot comprehend consciousness any more than a box may contain itself.

“This is really an extraordinary amount of activity,” Collingwood said. “There’s no question that what we have here is not a normal scan. It’s all lit up—it’s a bloody Christmas tree. I mean, look at the occipitals. Ordinarily, the only time you’d find that much activity is in a subject who’s hallucinating.” Collingwood looked over his shoulder. “Does he hallucinate?”

“Occasionally.”

“But not just the occipitals. It’s everything! He must be burning glucose at a tremendous rate.”

Maxim said, “No sign of pathology?”

“Hard to say. We don’t have a baseline, do we? I mean, what’s it supposed to look like? However—” Collingwood squinted at the monitor. “There are these shadowy patches scattered through the frontal cortex. If you insist on a sign of pathology, maybe that. But I wouldn’t stake a diagnosis on it.” He frowned. “What did your animal studies show?”

“In a mature chimp with induced cortical growth, a decline over time. Periodic fever, convulsions, then accelerated deterioration of the induced cerebral tissue.”

“Fatal?”

“Often. The decline was always permanent.”

“I don’t suppose you ran PETs.”

“I didn’t have access to a machine. You know what it’s been like.” Funding had dried up decades ago and the work he had performed in the fifties was still tightly classified. Following the cortical growth into maturity and old age in a primate population had been his own idea—an impulse; it would not only satisfy his curiosity, but would be useful if the publication bans were ever lifted. “We did autopsies,” he told Collingwood. “The symptoms were vaguely Alzheimer’s-like, but there was no specific loss of acetylcholine neurons, no neurofibrillary plaques. Our suspicion was that the new cortical growth was sufficiently distinct—in some way—that it eventually triggered an autoimmune response. Mortality depended on how essential the new growth had become to the organism.”

Collingwood shook his head. “All those years ago, doing synthesis protocols—I never really imagined we would have to face this. Him, I mean—a human being, an enhanced adult human being. Are his symptoms severe?”

“Intermittently.”

“Advanced?”

Maxim shrugged.

“Well,” Collingwood said, “we might be looking at tiny lesions, peppered over the frontal lobes. But there’s so much activity, Max, it’s just difficult to say.” He turned back to the video display. Maxim saw him stand suddenly erect as something caught his attention. “Hold on—wait a minute—”

The attending nurse in the PET room picked up a microphone; her voice was relayed to the speaker grille over Collingwood’s head. “Doctor,” she said, “the patient is convulsing—shall I pull him out?”

Maxim hurried to the window. He could see John lying with his head in the mouth of the PET scanner, as if he were being devoured by the machine. His pale, long limbs were trembling slightly.

Collingwood looked at Maxim; Maxim shook his head.

Collingwood said, “Hold him steady a few more minutes.”

There was silence, punctuated by the whirring of disc drives. Maxim looked over Collingwood’s shoulder at the video display.

The butterfly-wing image of John’s brain was changing, subtly but distinctly. The bright colors began to fade; in particular, the hot band of the frontal lobes faded toward shadow. Watching, Maxim felt a cold hollowness at the pit of his stomach. “What’s happening?”

“His glucose economy is suddenly down. Behaviorally, you mean? Jesus, I don’t know—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Maxim said, “He’s changing.”

“That’s obvious!”

“I mean, he’s not John anymore. I think he’s becoming Benjamin.”

“The secondary personality you mentioned?”

“I believe so.”

“This is radical,” Collingwood said. “I’ve never seen this kind of bottoming-out. Is this voluntary?”

Maxim began to shake his head, then reconsidered. It was a tremendous coincidence, that Benjamin should manifest just as John was in the PET scanner. It was as if John wanted to show us this, Maxim thought. John’s way of cooperating with the test.

Or Benjamin’s.

“Not exactly voluntary,” he told Collingwood, “not on the conscious level. But John is a unique individual. Not voluntary, but perhaps not an accident.”

“The patient is febrile and convulsive,” the nurse reported, “but he seems to be coming around… Doctor?”

“Pull him out,” Collingwood said.

He switched off the intercom and looked at Maxim. Video images were still cycling through on the monitor behind him. Cool blue butterfly wings. Icy Rorschach blots. “Jesus Christ, Max,” Collingwood said tonelessly. “What did we do to this man? Just what kind of thing is he?”

16

Benjamin was back. But Benjamin had changed.

Amelie was deeply pleased, at first, to be with him again. She realized how much she had cherished the time before Benjamin went away—before Roch moved in and took his place. Having even a fraction of that life restored was like an answered prayer. She worried that there might be some conflict with Susan or Dr. Kyriakides, but there was not; aside from the time Benjamin spent in therapy sessions with Kyriakides and a few medical tests, Amelie was allowed to have him to herself. Susan maintained a polite, somber distance; and after a few days she left the city on some mission for Dr. Kyriakides.

In the beginning, Amelie was shy with him. Things had changed, after all. She knew so much more than she used to … maybe too much. She knew what Dr. Kyriakides had told her: that Benjamin was an invention of John’s, a puppet creation that had somehow, like Pinocchio in the old Disney movie, come to life. She accepted that this was true; but she couldn’t bring herself to believe it … not really believe it … certainly not when she was with Benjamin, who was, after all, a person, a living human being; more alive, she thought privately, than John Shaw had ever been.

But this new knowledge saddened her and made her timid; it meant that things were different now.

Mostly, she waited for Benjamin to come to her.

He did, one cold Wednesday after a therapy session with Kyriakides. Benjamin came to her room. He touched her shoulder. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

The snow had drifted into blue mounds and dunes across the lawn. Benjamin took her by the hand and led her down the front path to a lane that wound in from the main road, along a column of snowy birches. “It’s pretty here,” he said.

Amelie smiled. He was always saying things like that. Simple things. She nodded.

He walked a few more paces. “You know all about me now.”

“Not all about,” she amended. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“About John and me.”

“A little, I guess.”

“About what I am.”

She nodded.

He said, “I never lied to you, you know. But it was hard to explain.”

“John wasn’t around much in those days,” Amelie said.

“A few nights at the doughnut shop. I remember some of that now.” He looked at her somberly. “More of John’s memories are spilling over. Getting mixed up with mine. Dr. Kyriakides thinks that’s a good thing.”

Amelie didn’t respond.

“Back then,” Benjamin said, “I thought he might just fade away. Otherwise—if I’d known what was going to happen—I would have told you more. I guess I thought one day he’d just be gone. There would just be me.”

“It’s hard to understand,” Amelie ventured. “How that must feel.”

“I remember a lot of John’s childhood. I think those memories were always there … but they’re closer now. I remember his time with the Woodwards. They were good people. Ordinary people. John was never what they expected—but how could he be? In a way, they were always my parents. Never his.”

“Is it true what Kyriakides said, that John invented you?”

“That I’m a figment of his imagination?” Benjamin smiled, not altogether happily. “It doesn’t feel that way.”

“How does it feel?”

“It feels like I live inside him. It feels like I’ve always lived inside him. You know what ‘Benjamin’ means? It’s an old Hebrew name. It means ‘son of the left hand.’ In a way, that’s how it feels.”

“You are left-handed,” Amelie observed.

“And John’s right-handed. I suppose it’s true, he ‘invented’ me. But I think I’m more than that. Dr. Kyriakides agrees. It’s like invoking a spirit. John believes he made me up, but maybe he just found me … maybe I’d been there all along, and he just opened the door and said, ‘All right—come out’ ”

Amelie looked at Benjamin with dismay—not because of what he said, which seemed true and obvious, but because of the way he said it.

Benjamin had never talked about himself this way. It wasn’t like him.

He’s different, Amelie thought.

He’s changing.

She went to his bed that night, cuddled with him under the blankets. The furnace was roaring away in the basement, but this old house was hard to heat. She liked his warmth; she liked being held.

They made love. But when he was inside her, and she was looking up at him, at his big eyes strangely radiant in the dim light, Amelie felt suddenly afraid. She could not explain it, even to herself. It was not just the fear that he might be John, or partly John. It was the depth of his eyes. She was afraid of what she might see there. Something unfamiliar. Something she would not recognize. Something no one would ever recognize.

Afterward, she slept with her back to him. He curled around her with his arm across her belly, and her apprehension vanished into sleep.

Really, she had been living with two men all along, John and Benjamin. The thing was that she had never admitted it to herself.

She would wake up some mornings with a stranger beside her. She always knew at once when John was manifesting. He looked different; he had a different face. But he manifested seldom, and she had learned to anticipate his appearances. Even so, inevitably, there were times when she would wake up and find John in bed with her; and then she would feel frightened and confused. It was nothing she could ever explain to anyone. It was not a topic that came up on Donahue—“What to do when your lover is actually two people!” There was no one she had even tried to explain it to—except Susan, who was a special case. But Susan, when you came right down to it, was a pampered California preppie who could not help condescending even when she tried to be Amelie’s friend. Amelie forgave this … it was predictable … but she despaired of any real contact. Besides, Susan was obviously messed up over John.

So I’m alone.

Amelie awoke with this bleak thought echoing in her head. She turned and regarded the face of the man beside her. It was Benjamin. Absolutely no question. But the uneasiness lingered. She stood up, pulled her nightgown on, walked back down the silent corridor to the room Dr. Kyriakides had assigned to her.

There was a little Sanyo stereo they’d bought to replace the one Roch had trashed. Amelie slid a Doors tape into the player and plugged the headphones into the jack. The tape was L.A. Woman. She boosted the volume and flopped down onto the bed.

Thinking of Benjamin. Thinking of last summer, when they’d been together—before Roch, before Susan. Hot days in that crummy little apartment. Hot nights.

Thinking of wrapping her legs around him. Of his weight against her … of his gentleness, even when he was close to coming. Of the way he laid his hand alongside her cheek, intimate as a kiss.

Thinking of his eyes.

Wondering where she would go … because it was over, wasn’t it? No way to crank back the seasons. No way to make it be new again.

Morrison performed his familiar death wail. The sound seemed to come from inside her head. She reached over to slide the volume up but her hand slipped and she hit the reject button instead. The tape popped out. The silence was eerie and sudden.

She went to the window and stood gazing out, without music or thoughts … as empty as she could make herself, watching the snow fall.

Dr. Kyriakides: Do you remember your childhood?

Benjamin: Yes.

Kyriakides: But it wasn’t your childhood.

Benjamin: It was a shadow. I remember faces. I remember moments. Is it so different for everyone else?

Kyriakides: You were another person then.

Benjamin: No. That doesn’t make sense. I can’t say, ‘I was John.’ I was there all along … with him. In the shadows.

Kyriakides: And then you came into the light.

Benjamin: Yes.

Kyriakides: When he created you.

Benjamin: If you say so.

Kyriakides: You were always yourself—is that how it seems?

Benjamin: I was always myself. I came into the light, I lived at home. I went to school. Then I was back in the dark awhile. And then I woke up and I was on the island, John’s island. I knew what he’d been doing and why he was there.

Kyriakides: And why you were there?

Benjamin: I knew that, too. [Pause.] You have to understand, it was the end of his road. He’d gone as far as he could. [Pause.] He wanted to die, but he didn’t want to kill himself.

Kyriakides: I can’t imagine John saying that.

Benjamin: Oh, he would never say it. Especially not to you. He doesn’t trust you. He’s never forgiven you.

Kyriakides: For making him what he is?

Benjamin: For leaving him alone.

Kyriakides: But surely—it’s possible now that he is dying. And yet he fights it.

Benjamin: The funny thing is that he’s changed his mind. He thinks maybe there is a reason to go on living.

Kyriakides: Can you tell me that reason?

Benjamin: No.

Kyriakides: He doesn’t want you to.

Benjamin: Right.

Kyriakides: You know that about him?

Benjamin: I know a lot of things about him.

Kyriakides: Have you always known these things?

Benjamin: Known them, maybe. Never thought about them much. Never used to do this much thinking!

Kyriakides: Is that because of the way you’re changing?

Benjamin: Could be. [Another pause.] He’s all through me now, you know. We’re sort of mixed together. There used to be a kind of wall. But that’s breaking down.

Kyriakides: Well, I think that’s good, Benjamin. I think that needs to happen.

Benjamin: Well, it isn’t easy for him. He’s fighting it.

Kyriakides: That’s unfortunate. Why is he fighting it?

Benjamin: The same reason he wanted to die, back on the island. Because he hates me. Didn’t you know that? He hates all of us. [A longer pause.] Almost all.

Benjamin came into the room while Amelie was packing.

Amelie ignored him—just went on emptying the big chest of drawers into her ragged Salvation Army suitcase, pretending he wasn’t there.

After a time, watching her, he said, “Where will you go?”

It was a very Benjamin thing to say. Straight to the point, no bullshit, kind of little-boy innocent. It reminded her of what she had loved about him and what she still loved, and that was painful; she winced. She looked up at him. “I don’t know. Maybe back to Montreal. It doesn’t matter.”

He said, “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

She turned to the window. The snow was still falling. Fucking horrible winter. That was the thing about winter in this city. It was likely to do any fucking thing. If you were ready for snow you got rain; if you were ready for rain you got ice. “I thought you understood.”

“You’re leaving me.”

She turned to him. “So? You left me.”

“No. John left you.”

“But you were talking about leaving. Even before that. And when you finally called, you called Susan.”

He shrugged, as if to say: Yes, that’s so.

She said, “Things had already started to change, hadn’t they? Even then. You knew we couldn’t stay together. You knew what was happening.” He did not answer, which was answer enough. Amelie nodded. “Yeah—you knew.”

“I know a lot of things I don’t want to know. A lot of it is John. There’s more John now than there used to be.” His frown was huge. “I wish you would stay a while longer.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s cold out. Because you don’t have anywhere to go.” That helpless look. “Because there’s nothing anyone can do about this, about what’s happening to me.”

Amelie narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”

“John knows. Kyriakides was lying all along. He lied to Susan about it. But John can tell. Kyriakides wanted to do the tests, and maybe he thought there was a chance that something would happen, something miraculous. But there’s nothing. He knows it, John knows it. That’s not why they’re here.”

“Why, then?”

“Kyriakides is here to finish his experiment, and because he feels guilty. John is here—well, it’s an experiment of his own. But for me, I think it’s only the end. I’m scared of that.”

“Goddammit, Benjamin!”

She held out her arms for him. He put his head against her shoulder.

She was blinking away tears. But who was she sorry for? Herself or him? Maybe both of us, Amelie thought. Two fucked-up losers. She just felt so sad.

“Nothing is the way it used to be,” he said. “I love you.”

“I’ll stay a while longer,” Amelie said. “It’ll be okay.”

Not believing either of these things.

After some time had passed he helped her unpack again. He was about to leave the room when he reached into his back pocket and said, “Almost forgot—this came for you today.”

It was a thick manila envelope bearing the return address of the Goodtime Grill on Yonge Street.

He held it out.

Amelie took it from him, frowning.

17

After the humiliation involving his sister, Roch had checked himself in at the Family Practice Clinic at Toronto General Hospital. A few days later and he might have run into Amelie while she was in town for John’s PET scan. But he wasn’t looking for Amelie—at least, not yet.

His chest was a mass of bruises where the car door had slammed into it. The clinic sent him up for X-rays, but there was no evidence of any significant fracture to the ribs, which was good; it meant he wouldn’t have to be taped. Hurt like shit all the same, though. The doctor, a woman about as tall as Roch’s collarbone, asked whether he’d been in a fight. He said, “A fight with a fucking Honda.”

In return she flashed him a skeptical, condescending look … which burned, but Roch kept carefully silent; this was not the place or the time. He was getting older, developing an instinct for these things—when to hold his tongue and when to act. He merely stared into the female doctor’s wide green eyes until she frowned and looked away. Roch smiled to himself.

She cleared her throat. “Warm baths might help with that bruising. Maybe Tylenol for the pain. You’ll be fine in a couple of weeks. If you stay away from Hondas.”

“It wasn’t a joke.”

“What?”

“About the Honda. It wasn’t a joke.”

“No … I guess it wasn’t.” She bowed her head and made a notation in his file folder. “Is there anything else?”

Roch stood up and left the office.

The landlady had wanted to kick him out of Amelie’s apartment, but she backed off when he paid two months rent in cash and promised to clean the place up. He told her he was working as a clerk for the provincial government. Which was a lie, of course; he’d picked up the rent money doing day labor. His life savings, ha-ha. The fucking check had taken two weeks to clear, or else he’d have spent it by now. But it was important to have a place to sleep.

Though he hated being alone.

It was getting harder all the time.

At night, especially. With Amelie gone he didn’t have to sleep on the sofa, but the bedroom was like a big box with its single square, soot-darkened window. He would lie awake in this cold, dark room and feel the city pressing in at him. The city made a noise, as familiar as his own heartbeat but more disturbing. Sirens, motors, tires gritting down cold night streets. This noise was amplified by the winter air and beat against Roch’s eardrums until he could not distinguish it from the singing of the radiators or the rush of his own blood.

He resented the sound. It was the sound of everything he could not have: pleasure, companionship, confidence. He couldn’t walk those streets except as an outcast. He had learned that lesson when he was very young. Nowadays he did not attract much immediate attention; he was older and less physically grotesque; he worked out in the gym. He was not the puddingy, froglike thing he had been as a child. But he was not one of those ordinary people, either. He could not move among these handsome men and confident, smiling women except as an impostor. He might have been a creature from outer space, disguised as human. He knew that.

He was alone in the dark and his ribs hurt and he had been humiliated.

And he was angry.

He thought about getting drunk. But, oddly, the impulse wasn’t really there. When he thought about drinking he pictured his father coming home on winter nights like this, screaming out curses in peasant French and beating Roch with his stubby fists. Big man’s hands with dark hair and callused knuckles: Roch remembered those hands.

Lying in bed, he looked at his own right-hand fist—a shadow in the dim light. It was his best friend, his lover, the instrument of justice.

His anger was like a cold, uncomfortable stone that had lodged in his chest.

And he understood, then, why he didn’t want to get drunk. This was a pressure that drinking would not have relieved. He needed all his energy for planning, because he was going to fucking do something about this thing with Amelie. Roch understood revenge in intricate detail. The rules were basic. When you were humiliated, you had to eat it—or else enforce a punishment. And he knew all about punishment. Punishment was like a big, simple machine. It was easy to operate once you got it going, and terribly difficult to stop. And all it took to work that machine was some careful planning.

And he was good at that. It was the only kind of abstract thinking Roch enjoyed. It shut out the night sounds of the city. He could spend hours working out the details and the necessary steps, the payoff being some act … it was not yet specific … some final and irretrievable moment of equalization. An orgasm of justice.

This new purpose seemed to seize him all at once, utterly.

He was not smart, but he had a goal. And he was methodical. And determined. And perhaps best of all, he knew a secret. He thought of all those people out there in the lively darkness of the city, thought about how they were bound to one another with sticky ropes of loyalty, love, duty, guilt—how these impediments constrained them and restricted their movement. And Roch smiled in the dark, because here was his deepest and most profound knowledge about himself: that he was not bound by any of these things. He could do things that ordinary people could not even imagine. He was utterly alone, and therefore he was utterly free.

The first step was to locate Amelie.

He had never been to the restaurant where she used to work, the Goodtime Grill, mainly because her employment there had always rankled him. It was scutwork and she deserved it, but it had given her an independence from him that Roch resented deeply. This was back when they were on the street, when she was shaving her hair and wearing that old leather jacket with the sleeves down over her hands so that only her fingers poked out, how whorish she had looked and how she resented it when he suggested the logical and obvious way of bringing in some money. As if she liked sleeping in abandoned buildings, for Christ’s sake. He savored for a moment the memory of her in that jacket and how the cars would cruise by and sometimes stop and men would call her over and how she would come back sometimes with a little money and that expression on her face, which he could not decipher—of some deep, secret grief. But then she got the restaurant job and the crappy St. Jamestown apartment, and Roch got involved with some guys boosting cars out in the suburbs, and he forgot about her for a while. That was the basic mistake he’d made—letting her get away from him.

So he’d never been inside this particular restaurant. But maybe that was a good thing. Nobody here would know him.

He stood a second on the Yonge Street sidewalk staring up at the “Goodtime” sign. Cold noon sun on cheap faded plastic, picture windows with bead curtains and a menu taped up: Souvlaki, Fish Chips, Burger Platter. Roch pushed his way through the door.

He took a table by the window. This was the hard part, he thought. Anything involving deception was difficult for him. He could not predict what people would say, and the thing she said often provoked strange, hostile reactions. But there was no need to hurry. This was only the first, the most basic step.

One of the waitresses brought him water. She was a tiny small-breasted woman who looked vaguely Oriental. According to the tag on her uniform, her name was TRACY. In a voice so timorous he barely made out the words, she asked him if he was ready to order.

He asked for the burger plate and a beer.

When she came back with the food, he said, “Tracy—is that your name?”

She ducked her head, which Roch took for a nod.

He said, “Tracy, listen, is Amelie around?”

“Oh—Amelie? Oh—she doesn’t work here anymore.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

“Are you one of her regulars? ’Cause I don’t recognize you. But I’ve only been here since summer.”

“I’m her brother,” Roch said.

He watched her face carefully. She narrowed her eyes and tensed up a little. Obviously this information meant something to her. Amelie had been talking.

Loudmouthed bitch.

But Roch felt a tingle of excitement.

“Oh, her brother, okay,” Tracy said, and turned away. Roch let her go. Slowly now, he instructed himself. He forced himself to eat, even though he wasn’t hungry. The food was tasteless; it had the texture of styrofoam.

When Tracy came back with his coffee, Roch smiled at her. “You a friend of Amelie’s?”

“I can’t talk,” she said. Her voice sounded like it had died in her throat. “I have other tables.”

“I know I haven’t been on good terms with her. Maybe she mentioned that? The thing is, she’s gone off and I don’t know where to find her.”

Tracy only stared at him, the carafe somewhat slack in her hands.

“Look, I’m not trying to hassle her. Is that the problem? You don’t have to tell me where she is. The thing is that I have some of her stuff. Mail and things like that. She didn’t leave a forwarding address. I just want to know whether, if I gave you some of this stuff, you could maybe get it to her.”

There was a long, delicate silence.

“I don’t know,” Tracy said finally.

But Roch had to struggle to contain his excitement, because this was all the confirmation he needed. Tracy knew how to find Amelie. Otherwise she would have said, “No,” or “I’m sorry.”

But he was improvising now. He didn’t really have a plan; only the glimmer of a possibility—an idea beginning to take shape at the back of his head. “Look,” he said, “if I packaged up some of this stuff and left it with you—would that be all right?”

“And bring it here to the restaurant?” Tracy said. “Because I can’t give out my address or anything.”

Christ, Roch thought, she thinks I’m after her! It was laughable. He imagined pinning down this goggle-eyed bitch and raping her. It was a joke. But some of the thought must have been reflected in his eyes or his expression, because she took a sudden, startled step backward. He restored his smile and aimed it at Tracy again. “Sure, I can bring the stuff here.”

“Well, maybe, I don’t know,” Tracy said, and put down the check and scurried away.

Roch left his money and a generous tip and went out into the street. He walked aimlessly for a while, breathing frost into the cold air. Really, this was turning out terrifically well. But he still had a lot of thinking to do.

Some days passed while he pondered the problem of extracting Amelie’s whereabouts from Tracy the waitress.

Roch approached the problem by stocking up on food, mainly TV dinners, and holing up in the apartment. He kept the television turned on, and insulated the windows with strips of hardware-store foam, so that the apartment absorbed as much heat as possible from the building’s big, laboring oil furnace. The combination of the dry heat and the staticky noise of the TV helped him think. Ideas came to him in harsh, glaring staccato, like commercials.

He thought about using force to extract the information from Tracy. Follow her home one of these nights. Beat it out of her, choke it out of her, whatever. She was scared of him already; it wouldn’t be hard.

But it would be messy and it might get him in trouble. Even worse—unless he could frighten her into silence—she might be able to warn Amelie. Dangerous.

But how else?

He was frustrated, thinking about it. He did a set of pushups, ate a frozen dinner, and watched a Movie of the Week on TV. Nothing. He went to bed.

Inspiration came with the morning mail.

He had begun collecting Amelie’s mail, what there was of it, in case he needed it to flesh out the story he’d told at the Goodtime. The problem was that his sister had been getting junk mail and subscription ads and dunning letters from the credit department of a downtown department store, but not much else—not the sort of thing anyone would go out of his way to pass on.

Today, however, there was an envelope with an illegible return address and a Montreal postmark … and Roch, sensing its importance, sat down to think before he tried to open it.

Amelie’s name and address were written in an arthritic scrawl across the front. Think, he instructed himself. Who did she know in Montreal? Somebody from school? But Amelie hadn’t been that tight with friends. Anyway, it looked like an old woman’s writing.

“Jesus,” Roch said out loud. “Mama?”

He held the letter in his hand as if it were a religious relic. The letter was important. It was the key. Roch was suddenly, intuitively certain of that. He could use this letter to pry Amelie out of her hiding place … somehow … but he had to be cautious; he bad to make plans.

He deliberately set aside the letter and watched TV for a while. He couldn’t concentrate, of course. Morning game shows flickered and vanished; the news came on. He forced his eyes to focus on the screen. It was an exercise in discipline.

The question occurred to him: was it really possible to steam open a letter?

He had heard about “steaming open” mail. But he had no idea how to go about it. And, of course, he couldn’t risk destroying the letter itself.

He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, put it on the stove to boil. While he waited he went through the mail he’d been collecting and selected three pieces: a book-club flyer, a phone bill, and a sweepstakes ad. All three were addressed to Amelie; all three were sealed. He cradled them in his hand, thinking hard.

The kettle whistled as it came up to steam. It was a hard, shrill whistle but Roch didn’t mind; he liked the sound. He took the book-club flyer and grasped it in a pair of kitchen tongs, then held it so that the gummed flap took the brunt of the steam. He held it there while thirty seconds ticked off on his wristwatch.

He realized as soon as he pulled it away that this had been a mistake; the envelope was a sodden mass. He waved it in the air to cool it and then tried the flap. The glue had been steamed away, sure enough. But the paper was drenched.

He tried again with the phone bill. This time he passed the envelope quickly through the steam, a little farther from the spout. He managed not to damage the paper, but the glue was still firm. After a second pass he was able to pry up an edge without tearing anything. A third pass and the envelope peeled open in his hand; it was damp but would probably dry to its original condition.

He practiced again on the sweepstakes flyer and did a little better this time. He figured he had the hang of it.

Now the letter from Montreal.

He carried it carefully into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He dried the tongs and then grasped the envelope. The kettle was still screaming. He turned to center it on the burner and then—disaster!—the Montreal letter slipped through the pincer-end of the tongs toward a sink full of dirty dishwater. “Shit!” Roch screamed. He clenched the tongs convulsively and managed to catch a corner of the envelope; it dangled over the water until he could snatch it away with his free hand.

His heart was beating a mile a minute. He forced himself to stand still, calm down.

The kettle continued to shriek, inches from his ear.

He took a deep breath and started again.

The second time was lucky. It worked like a charm. He worried out the letter from the envelope, unfolded it, and sat down to read.

The kettle dried up and fell silent. Roch stood up to turn the heat off, but too late: the cheap aluminum was red hot and brittle. He threw the kettle in the sink, where it hissed and generated a white, astringent-smelling cloud. The kitchen was already tropical; the whole apartment was as humid as a hothouse. He imagined spores taking root in the old wallpaper, fungus breaking out in the dark comers of these narrow rooms. He was troubled by this thought, but only briefly. He sat down and concentrated on the letter. He had important things to do.

The letter was typewritten, pecked out on an ancient, faded ribbon. Roch had a hard time reconciling the text with his memories of his mother. Mama was a big woman who had often been drunk and sometimes aggressive. One time he’d seen her get into a fight with a shoe clerk at Ogilvy’s—she tore a flap of skin off the guy’s cheek. Whereas this letter was a whining, pathetic document, mainly about the lousy neighborhood she was forced to live in and how long it had been since Amelie wrote back.

Screw the old bitch, Roch thought. She never wrote tome.

But the bulk of his plan was already beginning to take its final shape. It was a grand, glowing edifice, and he was its architect. A brace here, a capstone there. He smiled and set the letter aside.

In the afternoon he rode a bus down to the Salvation Army thrift shop and spent ten dollars on a clapped-out Underwood Noiseless typewriter. He took it home and discovered that the ribbon wouldn’t advance, but that he could produce legible copy if he cranked the spool by hand every line or two. He typed The quick brown fox and compared this with the letter from Mama.

The specimen was similar but far from identical. Still, Roch thought, who notices these things? He doubted that Amelie would have an older letter to compare it with or that she would bother if she did, as long as the counterfeit seemed authentic.

He inserted a piece of plain white bond into the Underwood and sat before it, sweating. He could not think of a way to begin … then realized that he could copy Mama’s letter as written, with a few critical amendments of his own. He smiled at the ingenuity of this and began pecking.

The cap came off the “e” key before he was finished, but he managed to wangle it back on without too much mess. He typed the penultimate paragraph from the original, then dropped the “you never write” complaints and added:

Because I want to see you I have bought bus tickets to Toronto and will be arriving Saturday Feb 10. Hope you can meet me at the Bus Station as I do not know how to find your Apartment exactly. I would call you but unfortunately the Phone has been take out again by those Bastards at the Phone Co.

Roch sat back and smiled at this, especially the bit about the telephone, which not only solved a potential problem but sounded a lot like Mama. He typed, Your Loving Mother, and duplicated her signature with a blue Bic pen.

Masterpiece.

The only remaining problem was re-sealing the envelope. Amelie had left a jar of mucilage in the kitchen drawer, and Roch discovered that a very thin layer of this would pass for the original glue. He sealed the envelope and set it aside. Good enough for today. He turned on the TV and watched Wheel of Fortune, content with the state of the world.

On his way back to the Goodtime Grill the next morning, a troubling thought occurred to him:

What if Amelie didn’t take the bait?

There was no love lost between those two, after all. Roch did not hate either of his parents—except his father, sporadically; hating them was a waste of time. But he knew that Amelie harbored deeper feelings, mostly negative. Amelie sometimes talked about Mama sympathetically, but with her fists clenched and her nails digging into her palms. Maybe she wouldn’t show up at the bus depot.

Or maybe—another new thought—she was too far away. Maybe she’d left the city. She might be in fucking Timbuktu, although Roch suspected not; it wasn’t her style. But who knew? Anything was possible.

No, he thought, better not to borrow trouble. If the letter arrangement fell through, he’d try something else. He had the connection through Tracy; that was secure and that was enough for now.

Tracy recognized him when he sat down at the table by the window. He saw her say something to the manager, who looked impatient and sent her scooting over with a glass of water and the order pad. Roch smiled his biggest smile and ordered lunch. When she came back with the food he reached into his jacket pocket, very casually, and brought out a wad of mail including the spiked envelope.

“I remembered to bring these,” he said. “Thought maybe you’d want to pass ’em on.”

Tracy took the envelopes but held them at a distance, as if they might be radioactive. “Oh,” she said. “Well, okay, I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

“If it’s convenient,” Roch said.

“Oh,” Tracy said.

One more thing, one more small item to take care of, and then he’d be ready. Everything would be in place.

That night he walked down Wellesley to the corner where Tony Morriseau, the drug dealer, was hanging out.

Roch didn’t know Tony too well. Roch didn’t believe in doing drugs; drugs fucked up your mind. He had, admittedly, sometimes scored a little of this or that from Tony, when the inclination took him or he wanted to impress somebody. But he was not a regular customer.

Tony stood on the snowy streetcorner done up in a khaki green parka with a big hood, his breath steaming out in clouds. He regarded Roch from this sheltered space with an expression Roch could not decipher. Tony seemed more paranoid these days, Roch had observed.

Tony rubbed his hands together and said, “It’s fucking cold, so tell me what you want.”

“Something serious,” Roch said.

“Speak English,” Tony said.

Roch mimed the act of holding a hypodermic needle against his arm and pressing the plunger.

Tony looked ill. “Christ,” he said, “don’t do that, all right? You don’t know who’s looking.” He seemed to withdraw into the depths of the parka. “I don’t deal with that.”

“You know where to get it,” Roch said.

“Matter of fact I don’t.”

“If you can’t sell it to me, tell me who can.”

“I don’t like your tone of voice,” Tony said. “I don’t have to do you any favors. Christ!”

Roch stood up straight and looked down at Tony, who was at least a head shorter. “Tone of voice?”

Tony cringed.

Then Tony looked at his watch. “Oh, well … from now on you don’t come to me for this. Go to the source, okay? It’s really not my territory.”

Roch nodded.

They walked down the street to Tony’s car—a battered Buick. “Hey, Tony,” Roch said. “What happened to the famous Corvette?”

Tony scowled and shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

18

It was a cool Southern California winter day, but Susan was comfortable with a sweater wrapped around her. She was able to stand for a long time on the exposed, sunny hillside where her father was buried.

She had been given a week-long leave of absence from the big house north of Toronto and she wasn’t sure whether to resent this or not. Dr. Kyriakides had practically hustled her onto the airplane, claimed that the trip would be good for her, that she had driven herself to the point of nervous exhaustion—that “Benjamin” would probably be around for a while longer and there was nothing helpful she could do. “We’ll need you more later,” he said. During the crisis, he meant. When John’s neurological breakdown reached its apex.

But no one could say for sure when that crisis would come, or what the final resolution might be. Therefore, Susan thought, it was a terrible risk to be away from him. But Dr. Kyriakides had been persuasive … and it was true that she owed her mother a visit. Susan had promised at the funeral that she would be home every Christmas. A promise she’d broken this year.

So she had spent five days in this quiet suburb, driving to the malls with her sixty-five-year-old mother and-dodging questions about her work. She said she was doing “an exchange project” with the University of Toronto, to explain her Canadian address. Fluid transfer in mitochondria. Too complex to explain. Her mother nodded dubiously.

And today—the last day of Susan’s visit—they had come here to this grave, where Susan had stood frowning for the last forty-five minutes, poised on the brink of a mystery.

She was distressed to discover that she could not summon up a concrete image of her father. She tried and failed. She could remember only the things she associated with him—his clothes, the mirror polish on his shoes, the brown sample cases he had carried to work. The rest was either hopelessly vague or, worse, deathbed images, his emaciated body and hollow eyes. She remembered the sound of his voice, the soothing rumble of it, but that was a childhood memory. His laryngeal cancer had ended all that, of course; but it seemed to Susan that he had fallen mute years before the operation, a functional silence in which anything meaningful must never be pronounced. His way of protecting her from the divorce, from his own fears, from adulthood. She was trying hard not to hate him for it.

How awful that sounded. But it was true: she had never forgiven him for his silence, for his cancer, for his callous descent into the grave. It was a monumentally selfish thought. A childish thought … but maybe that was the heart of the matter: she could never come to this place except as a child, suspended in time by his withdrawal and his death. She would never be his “grown-up daughter.” She couldn’t say any of the things she needed to say, because he couldn’t listen.

She was startled by the touch of her mother’s hand on her shoulder.

“Come on, Susan. We’ve been here long enough.”

Have we? Susan climbed into the car dutifully, a child, thinking: Maybe not Maybe if she stayed long enough, the right words would come to her. Talking to herself, she would talk to Daddy. And Daddy would answer. His buried words would rise up from the ground and hover in the cool, sunlit air.

But she couldn’t stay forever. And so the car carried her down the hillside in the long light of the afternoon, away from the stubbornly silent ground.

Her flight out of Los Angeles left an hour and forty minutes late, which meant she missed her connection at O’Hare. The next available seat to Toronto was on a red-eye flight; she had an afternoon and evening to kill in Chicago.

She phoned Toronto with this news and then—on an impulse—rented a car for the day. She did not want to stray too far from the airport; Susan distrusted official scheduling and usually preferred to lurk near the departure gates. But she knew her way around this city and she recalled that John’s old neighborhood, the neighborhood where he had grown up with the Woodwards, was only a short drive from the airport.

Winter hadn’t affected the city too severely. There was a glaze of snow along the highway embankments, but the air was clear, with faint trails of wintery cirrus clouds running down to a powder blue horizon. But it was cold, the kind of cold that made the tires crackle against the blacktop.

She had written down John’s old address in her notebook. The neighborhood was a Levittown, a postwar bungalow suburb, treeless and bleak in the winter light. She located the street—a cul-de-sac—and then the house, a pastel pink box indistinguishable from any of these others. THE WOODWARDS was printed on the mailbox. A sign posted on the front lawn said FOR SALE and a smaller one beside it announced a CONTENTS SALE—SATURDAY FEBRUARY 16.

Today.

Susan allowed the car to drift to a stop.

She didn’t think she would have the courage, but she did: she got out of the car and walked up the driveway and knocked on the door, shivering. She was about to turn away when the door opened a crack and a grey-haired, chunky man peered out.

“Mr. Woodward?”

“Yes?”

She took a breath. “I, uh—I saw the sign—”

“Sale ended at four o’clock,” he said, swinging the door wider, “but you might as well come in. Hardly anybody else showed up.”

Susan stepped inside.

The house had obviously been stripped down for moving. There were blank spaces where there should have been furniture, and curtain rods empty over the windows. It seemed to Susan that James Woodward had been similarly stripped down. He was not as big as she had pictured him; not nearly as imposing. He was a small, barrel-chested man with a fringe of grey hair and big, callused hands. He was friendly but distant, and Susan was careful to pretend an interest in this item or that as he conducted her in and out of these small rooms. What she really wanted was to find some ghost of John or even Benjamin lingering here; but there was nothing like that … only these mute, empty spaces. Coming down the stairs she said, “Is your wife home?” He shook his head. “She died. That’s why I’m moving. I tried looking after this place for a while, but it’s too big for one person.” He opened the basement door. “There’s a few things still stored down here—if you think it’s worth the look.”

“Please,” Susan said.

This was where his workshop had been, though most of the tools had been carried away. Not much left—a battered workbench with curls of pine and cedar still nesting under it; an ancient P.A. amplifier with its tubes pulled. In one shadowy corner, an acoustic guitar.

Susan went to it immediately.

“Oh, that,” Woodward said. “You don’t want that.”

“Maybe I do,” Susan said.

“You know, I sold some guitars earlier. I used to make ’em by hand. Like a hobby I guess you could say. But that one—see, the truss rod’s off true. You know guitars? Well, it means it’ll go off tune and be hard to fix. The action’s a little too high off the frets, too. It’s a bad instrument.”

“How much do you want for it?”

“Say, fifty bucks for the materials? If you’re serious. You play?”

“No,” Susan said. “But I have a friend who does.” She took the money out of her purse.

James Woodward accepted the payment; Susan picked up the guitar. It was heavier than she expected. The strings rang faintly under her fingers.

“I almost hate to sell the damn thing,” Woodward said. He looked past Susan, past these walls. “It’s funny,” he said. “It’s the broken things that stay on your mind. Broken, bent, half-made or bad-made. You take them to the grave with you.”

She climbed off the plane in Toronto weary and dazed, collected her suitcase and the guitar from the baggage carousel. Dr. Kyriakides was waiting in the crowded space beyond the customs checkpoint.

She understood by his hollow smile that something was wrong. She followed him up to the carpark and loaded her baggage into the trunk of the Honda, daunted by his silence.

“John is back,” he said finally.

“That’s good,” Susan responded.

Dr. Kyriakides opened the car door for her. Ever the European gentleman.

“But Amelie is missing,” he said.

19

It was a long drive back to the house. A snowstorm had settled in from the west and wasn’t leaving; the car radio warned people to stay off the roads. Susan was grateful that Dr. Kyriakides had been able to maneuver the Honda all the way to the airport; she was even more grateful that she was able to drive it back. Visibility had closed in and the road was blanked out north of the city; the headlights probed into a swirling wilderness. For the time, she was too preoccupied with driving to press for details about Amelie.

The weather grew steadily worse, but the tires were good and there wasn’t much traffic and they were back at the house before long. Kyriakides brushed the snow from the car while Susan headed for the kitchen and a hot cup of coffee.

John was there, waiting for her.

It was John—no doubt about it.

He looked up as she came through the door. His expression was somber and utterly focused.

“I need to do two things,” he said. “First, I need to talk to you. There are a lot of things I want to say while I still can.”

Susan nodded solemnly. She was too tired to be shocked by this sudden volley; she simply accepted it. “Second?”

He said, “I mean to find Amelie.”

Susan slept for five dreamless hours between three and eight o’clock in the morning.

She woke to find the window of her room laced with frost. She stood for a moment, touching the icy surface of the glass with one finger and wondering at the intensity of the cold. Outside, the world was a blurred grey-white wilderness. The snow had obscured the driveway. The highway was empty save for a plough inching southward under its strange blue safety light. The sky was dark and the snow was falling steadily. She dressed in the darkness of her room.

She carried her portable Sony tape recorder down the hall to John’s door, raised her hand to knock—and then paused.

John was playing the guitar. She had given him the instrument last night, had explained about the layover in Chicago and the sale at the Woodward house. He had taken the instrument wordlessly, his expression unreadable.

The music came softly through the closed door. He was good, Susan thought. She didn’t recognize the piece—something baroque. Not passionate music but subtle, a sad melody elaborated into a cathedral of notes. She waited until the last arpeggio had faded away.

He put down the guitar when she came through the door, looked questioningly at the tape recorder.

“It’s for me,” she said. “I don’t trust myself to remember.”

He nodded. She felt his sense of urgency: it was like something physical, a third presence in the room. Because of his impending neurological crisis, Susan thought, his “change”—or because of Amelie. Or both.

He’s changed. He’s different.

But she put the thought aside for now.

“Sit down,” John said.

She plugged a cassette into the recorder and switched it on.

All that morning he talked about his childhood.

They skipped breakfast. Twice, Susan paused to change tapes. She was afraid she would miss something. It was a fear John didn’t share, obviously. The words poured out of him like water from a broken jug. A cataract of words.

She understood what he was doing. He had explained it to her last night. These were things he had never said, small but vital fragments of his life, and he was afraid they would slip away uncommunicated. She was not expected to learn these things verbatim or play them back to him—the tape recorder was superfluous. It was the telling that mattered. “Nothing is permanent,” John said. “Everything is volatile. You, me, the world—everything. But it’s like throwing a stone into a pool of water. The stone disappears. But the ripples linger awhile.”

She was that pool. He was the stone.

He talked about his mother.

Her name was Marga Novak and she was working through her apprenticeship at a hairdressing salon in downtown Chicago when she answered a classified ad in the back pages of the Tribune: “Pregnant, single women wanted for privately funded medical study.”

She had recently become pregnant by a thirty-five-year-old shingle and siding salesman who had promised to many her but who left town, or was relocated, a couple of weeks after she announced the results of the pregnancy test. For Marga, answering the Trib ad was a last resort. But the salon was sure to fire her when she started to show, and she needed some kind of income.

She passed two screening interviews and was introduced to Dr. Kyriakides, who explained that the treatment—to prevent low birthweight and “give the child a healthy start”—might involve some discomfort in connection with the intrauterine injections but would be perfectly safe for both mother and child. Moreover, the follow-up study would include a fully paid private educational program for the baby and ongoing medical care for both of them. In the meantime all expenses would be taken care of and housing would be arranged.

She agreed, of course. Was there a choice? The injections were uncomfortable but the delivery was easy, even allowing for the infant’s exaggerated cranial size. Mother and child were installed in a two-bedroom town house near the university district, and John’s schooling began almost immediately.

“How do you know all this?” Susan asked.

“I broke into Max’s office one night. Came in from the Woodwards’ house in the suburbs. I was twelve years old. He kept his files and his notes in a little vault behind his desk. I’d seen it there a few years before. I’d seen him open it.”

“After all that time? You remembered the combination?”

John nodded and continued.

Marga’s parents were Czechs who had come to America before the war. She hadn’t spoken to her mother or father for fifteen years; she didn’t know whether they were still alive. This baby was in effect her only family.

Marga understood soon enough that John was a special child. Even the name “John”—she hadn’t chosen it herself. It had been Dr. Kyriakides’ suggestion. The doctor was polite but firm and Marga acquiesced because she was afraid of offending him. He paid all the bills, after all. In a very real sense, he owned her.

She hardly saw the baby. She tried to be a responsible mother, at least at first. But there were research people always coming to take the child away. He slept in a crib in Marga’s room most nights; they had that time together. But the doctors must have been doing something to him, she thought—something she didn’t understand.

He was a strange child.

He began talking too soon—at only a few months! But more than that. She sensed it every time she picked him up … every time she put him to her breast. There was a discomfort she once described to Dr. Kyriakides as something like the sound of a piano string gone off tune. (“Dissonance,” Kyriakides supplied.) And the baby’s eyes were too observant.

It wasn’t like touching a baby, she said. It was like touching … a dwarf.

After that confession, she saw even less of John. Marga pretended that this made her unhappy, but really it didn’t. … It was nice, having some time to herself for a change.

“I remember Max more clearly than I remember Marga. Marga is just a face. Small eyes. Big body, big shapeless dresses. She wore a perfume that smelled like linden flowers. Overpowering!

“Max was different then. He had more hair. A heavy Joe Stalin moustache and rimless glasses. It was frightening. I trusted him, of course. He was the central force, the operating engine. It was obvious that everything revolved around him, everybody followed his orders.

“He taught me more than anyone else. I had plenty of professional tutors. But it was Max who would really talk to me. If I asked a question, he took it seriously. Child questions, you know: how high is the sky and what comes after it? But he understood that I didn’t want trivial answers. I wanted the true answers.

“And there was the way he looked at me.

“You have to understand how the others treated me. The other research staff, even Marga. I would sit at a little table and they would run a Stanford-Binet or a Thematic Aperception and after a while they would start to register their disbelief—or their fear, or their resentment. I was strange, anomalous, different. I was scary. I learned to recognize it—I thought of it as ‘The Look.’ After I was a year old, Marga would never touch me, never wanted to pick me up. And when she did: The Look.

“But Max was different. Max knew what I was. Took pride in me. That meant a lot.

“I decided he was my real father. That Marga was only some kind of hired nurse. Eventually, of course, they took me away from Marga altogether; and then Max was my father, or the nearest thing.

“I trusted him.

“That was a mistake.”

Susan said, “Why did they take you away from Marga?”

“She came home from the Safeway one morning and found me taking apart the radio. I was doing a pretty good job of it. I had it sorted by component size—quarter-watt resistors on the left, power supply on the right. Desoldered the parts with a needle from her sewing kit—I heated it over a candle. Burned myself a couple of times, but I was beginning to make sense of it.”

“Marga was angry?”

“Marga was frightened, I think, and angry, and she was wearing The Look—which is really a kind of horror. Changeling in the crib, worm in the cornmeal …”

“She punished you,” Susan guessed.

“She turned on the left-front burner on the Hotpoint and held my hand over it. Second-degree burns. I healed up pretty fast. But they took me away from her—or vice versa.”

It wasn’t all bad (John explained). There was more luxury than torture. He was pampered, really. And in some ways, it was an ordinary childhood. He had toys to play with. He remembered the extraordinary vividness of colors and sensations … the radiant blue luster of a crib toy, the pale intricate pastels of a sun-faded beachball; he remembered the letters etched on glass storefronts like black cuneiform (“chicken-tracks,” Max called them), pleasing but mysterious.

He remembered the day he learned to read—acquiring the phonetics and the approximations of written English, puzzling out a newspaper headline to himself. He remembered riding into town on some errand with Dr. Kyriakides, and his amazement that the angular marks on signs and windows had resolved suddenly into words—A P, USED BOOKS, WOOLWORTHS—this pleasure mixed with frustration because, having recognized the words, he could no longer see the lovely strange chicken-tracks. The marks had turned into words and words they stubbornly remained. The abstraction had displaced the concrete. Story of his life.

One by one, category by category, the objects of his perception faded into language. A tree became “tree”; “tree” became “a noun.” Categorical hierarchies exploded around him, somehow more organic than the organic things they named. For instance, the oak in front of Marga’s town house: even when he tried to focus exclusively on the texture of its bark or the color of its leaves, he triggered a network of associative ideas—gymnosperm and angiosperm, xylem and cambium, seed and fruit—that displaced the thing itself. He became afraid that his vision—that the world itself—might dissolve into a manic crystal-growth of pattern and symbol.

“It’s an inevitable process,” Max told him. “It’s good. Nothing is lost.”

John wondered whether this was true.

He began to understand the way in which he was different, though no one would really explain it and even Dr. Kyriakides dodged the subject. He learned how to slip into the research unit’s snail medical library when his keepers weren’t looking, usually during lunch hours or bathroom breaks. The neurological tomes that resided there were too advanced for him, but he could divine a little of their subject. The brain. The mind. Intelligence.

On his fifth birthday he asked Dr. Kyriakides, “Did you make me the way I am?”

After a hesitation and a frown, Max admitted it. “Yes.”

“Then you’re my father.”

“I suppose … in a way. But Marga wouldn’t understand, if you told her.”

“I won’t tell her, then,” John said.

It didn’t matter. He understood.

Outside this small room in Toronto, the snow continued to fall. Susan wondered whether Amelie could see the snow. Whether Amelie was cold—wherever she was.

The tape recorder popped up a cassette. Susan inserted a new one.

“I trusted Max until he farmed me out to the Woodwards,” John said. “Even then—at first—I gave him the benefit of the doubt.”

The explanation was plain enough. Max had explained meticulously. The research was funded by the government and now the funding had been revoked. The legality of it was questionable and people were afraid of the truth getting out. John would have to be careful about what he told the Woodwards. “Also, we won’t be able to see each other for a while. I hope you understand.”

John didn’t answer.

Max had checked the family out and they were decent enough people, an older couple, childless, referred through a contact in an adoption agency. “Obviously, they don’t know what you are. You may have to conceal your nature. Do you understand? You’ll have to become at least passably ‘normal’—for everyone’s sake.”

John listened politely, watching Max across the barrier of his polished oak desk in this indifferent room, his book-lined office. “You have to do what the government tells you,” he said to Max. John was five years old.

“Yes, I do. In this case.”

“But you’re a Communist,” John said.

Max rose slightly in his chair. “What do you mean? Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me. I watch you when people talk about politics. I watched you when Kennedy came on TV and talked about Castro. Your face. Your eyes.”

Max laughed. John was pleased: even at this terrible moment, the hour of his exile, he was able to make Max happy. “I should never mistake you for a child,” Max said. “But I always do. No, I’m not a Communist. I was at one time. During the war. I gave it up when I came to this country. My uncle died fighting for Veloukhiotis, and it was pointless—completely futile. Now we have the Generals. Is there any sense in that? I don’t believe in revolution any more.”

“But you believe in the rest of it,” John pressed. “Marxism. Leninism.”

He had read the entry under “Communism” in the Columbia Encyclopedia and these questions had been on his mind.

“Not even that,” Max said, more soberly. “I gave it all up.”

“You stopped believing in Marxism?”

“Do you really want to know?”

John nodded.

“I stopped believing in ‘the people.’ I’m an apostate from that central faith. Marx believed that mankind was perfectible through economics. But it’s a childish idea. People talk about Stalinism, but Stalinism is only fascism with a different accent, and fascism is simply the politics of the monkey cage. The failure is here”—he thumped his chest—“in the mechanism of the cells. In our ontogeny. If you want to perfect mankind, that’s where you begin.”

“But you still believe in the perfectibility of mankind.”

“Wouldn’t you rather talk about the Woodwards? Your future?”

“I want to know,” John said.

“Whether I believe in the perfectibility of mankind? I will tell you this: human beings are cowards and thieves and torturers. That I believe. And yes, I believe the species can be improved. Why not? The only alternative is despair.”

But there’s a contradiction here, John wanted to say. How could you want to improve a thing when you despised it so entirely to begin with? What could you build out of that contempt?—especially if the contempt encompasses your own being?

But he didn’t ask. Max was going on about the Woodwards, about school—“Don’t trust anyone,” he said. “Anyone might be your enemy.”

It was a sweeping statement. Including you? John wondered. Should I mistrust you, too? Is that what this is all about?

But it was not a question he could bring himself to ask. He was not a child, Max was right; but neither was he old enough to endure the possibility that he might be fundamentally alone in the world.

Life with the Woodwards, then, began as a deception, a concealment, not always successful. But at least he understood the rules of the game. For years John chose to believe that Max would eventually come and get him.

Even if they couldn’t be together, Max was still his truest father; Max cared about him.

He banked this belief in the most private recesses of his mind; he never allowed the flame to flicker. But Max did not come. And on his twelfth birthday, after a perfunctory celebration with the Woodwards, John began to admit to himself that Max might never come.

So he broke a promise. He went looking for Max.

It was spring, and he rode a bus into the city through thawing snow-patches and muddy lots. He had packed a bag lunch, solemnly. He ate it sitting on a transit bench outside Marga’s old house, a couple of blocks from the university. Did he want to see Marga? He wasn’t sure. But no one entered or left the house. The shutters were closed and the siding had been painted eggshell blue. Maybe Marga had moved away.

He stood and walked through the raw spring air to the research complex, to Max’s office there.

He opened the door and walked in. Max looked up, maybe expecting to see an undergraduate, frowning when he recognized John. Max was older than John remembered him, fashionably shaggier; he had grown his sideburns long.

His eyes widened and then narrowed. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

“It’s good to see you, too.”

“Don’t be flippant. I could lose my tenure. People in this building have long memories.” He frowned at his watch. “Meet me in the parking lot. I have a car there—a black Ford.”

John left the building and waited twenty minutes in the pallid sunlight, shivering on the curb beside the automobile. Then Max came striding out and opened the passenger door for him. John climbed aboard. “I wanted to see you,” John said. “I wanted to talk.”

“It’s dangerous for both of us.”

“I understand. You don’t want to lose your job.”

“I don’t want to lose my job, and I presume you don’t want to be brought to the attention of any powerful interests. We’re privileged to be an inactive file in someone’s cabinet. I would like to keep it that way.”

“I thought you might try to see me. At least try.”

Max compressed his lips. “I’ve driven past the Woodwards’ house from time to time. Once I saw you walking to school. I have a contact at the Board of Education; he’s been forwarding your records—”

“But we haven’t talked.”

“We’re not allowed to talk.”

“Revolutionary,” John mocked.

“You know I’m not.”

“But you’re brave enough to bend your ethics from time to time. For instance, a little genetic manipulation.”

“Neurological, not genetic. Your genes are perfectly ordinary, I’m afraid. Do you resent it—being what you are?”

John shrugged.

Max said, “I rescued you from mediocrity.”

“You rescued me from the human race!”

“It amounts to the same thing.”

“Jesus, Max, how pathetically unimaginative!”

His rage took him by surprise: it was a sudden huge pressure in his chest. He said, “I’m more than you ever dreamed of. I could kill us both, you know. It’s been seven years. Things have changed. If I wanted you to you’d drive right off the retaining wall of this freeway. You don’t believe it? But just think, Max. Think how nice it would be. Like flying. Flying out into the void. A little gas, a little twist of the wheel. Like flying, Max—”

The words had spilled out of him. He stopped, aware of the sweat beading on Max’s brow, the way his fingers trembled on the wheel.

My God, he thought. It’s true. I could do that.

He felt suddenly cold.

“You can drop me at the off ramp,” he said.

Max pulled up obediently near a bus stop, wordless and wide-eyed. John climbed out without saying goodbye. He watched as the black Ford shuddered away from the curb and merged uncertainly with the traffic.

Twelve years old.

Alone on this empty, wide boulevard.

It was nighttime now, and very cold.

A week later, John retrieved the journals from Max’s safe.

He told the Woodwards he was sleeping over at a friend’s house. They were pleased to hear that he had finally made a friend and didn’t press him for details. He took the night bus into town and waited until the research unit was locked and dark. Then he shinnied up a maple tree and through one of the high access windows, hinged open to moderate the fierce heating system.

He took the documents from the safe under Max’s desk, photocopied them on the Xerox machine in the adjoining room, then returned the originals. He folded the copies and tucked them under his belt in order to keep his hands free.

In the corridor outside Max’s office he was surprised by a security guard.

The guard was a fat bald man in a blue suit with a pistol at his hip. He came around an angle in the hallway and stood gawking at John for a long instant before dashing forward.

John discovered that he was calm, that he was able to return the guard’s stare and stand his ground. He should have been frightened. Instead, he felt something else … a heady combination of power and contempt. Because the guard was transparent: every twitch betrayed his thoughts. He was a machine, John thought. A noisy engine of belligerence and fear.

He spoke up before the guard could find words, made his own voice calm and uninflected: “I want to leave. No one has to know I was here.” Then watched the wheels turning as the imperatives registered, uncertainty turning down the corners of the man’s mouth and narrowing his eyes. If I phone this in I’ll have to fill out a fucking report; it was as good as reading his mind. “I ought to kick your ass,” the guard began, but it was not so much a threat as a question: can I say this?

“Don’t,” John said.

The guard backed off a step.

Amazing. John knew about suggestibility and the phenomenon of hypnosis, but he was surprised at how effortless it was, how utterly pleasurable. He had bypassed all the barriers; he was talking now directly to the delicate core of self behind this uniform: he pictured something wet and pinkly quivering, an “ego.” It was an easy target.

He said, “Open the door at the back.”

The guard turned and led him down the hallway.

At the door the spell seemed to falter. “Thieving little bastard,” the guard said. “I ought to—”

But John silenced him with a look.

He transferred the thick manila folder of photocopies from his belt to his hand. The guard was standing directly behind him, but didn’t see—or didn’t want to.

John closed the door and listened as the lock slid home.

The night air was cold and bracing. He stood for a moment in the shadow of a tree, smiling. He felt good. Felt free. Freer than he had ever been before.

Reading the research notes, he was shocked to find Marga described as “an unemployed, gravid white female of doubtful morals”—shocked in general by the tone of callous indifference Max had assumed. But he supposed Max had already cast his lot with Homo Superior. This was contempt by proxy, the exploitation of the old order for the sake of the new. Max did not believe in “the people.” Presumably Marga was a thief and a torturer manqué.

The story of his genesis, however, the intrauterine injections and the forced cortical growth, made perfect sense. He had guessed much of this before.

In a way, the theft had been more revealing than the notes themselves. His commandeering of the security guard, his intimidation of Max a few days earlier, had forced a new discovery:he was not weak. He had allowed himself to be dominated by Max’s fears, by the idea that he was different and therefore vulnerable. How intoxicating now to suspect that he might be more than a freak: that he might be functionally superior, better at the things human beings were good at.

A better hunter. A better predator.

“But you still cared about the Woodwards,” Susan said.

Night had fallen. The window was dark, though the snow still beat against it. Susan switched on a lamp.

“I kept them separate in my mind,” John admitted. “I made a special exception for James Woodward. He was an ordinary man and there was nothing I owed him. But I harbored fantasies about pleasing him.”

“It mattered to you.”

“It shouldn’t have.”

“But it did.”

“I think—” He hesitated. “I think I just didn’t want to be disappointed again.”

They had missed lunch altogether, and now it was past dinnertime. Susan went down to the kitchen, fixed a couple of sandwiches and carried them upstairs.

After coffee, John switched on a portable radio for the weather forecast. The news wasn’t good. Record snowfall, schools closed until further notice, City Hall begging motorists to stay off the roads. John shook his head. “We can’t wait much longer.”

To find Amelie, he meant. As if it would be that simple.

But Susan sensed the urgency in his voice.

“No more talk,” he said.

The streetlights were a distant blur through the snow-crusted windows. A gust of wind rattled the panes, and Susan stood up to go to her room.

John reached for her hand.

She hesitated.

“Stay,” he said. “Please stay.”

It was a request, Susan thought. It was not a compulsion, not a demand. She could have left.

She didn’t.

20

It was his life. But not all his life.

He lay beside her in the darkness and wondered whether his sudden surfeit of conscience was actually Benjamin’s: a wisp of that other self. The touch of Susan’s skin against him was a rebuke, almost painful. She was asleep. He moved against her. She was warm and there was snow against the ice-laced window. He had gone cotton-mouthed laboring at the day’s intimacy, an intimacy of words; honest as far as it went … but oblique, polished, limited.

He hadn’t told her, for instance, about that first act of seduction, the act that had haunted him ever since—most recently in a motel room in Alberta. Seduction as bestiality—making love to the Look. Skin fucking skin, souls in absentia. The story of his life. Except for tonight, with Susan; tonight had been different.

But if this was Benjamin’s conscience that had begun to prick him, then here was an even more disturbing notion: maybe it was Benjamin who had allowed him this moment just past. Maybe it was Benjamin who had maneuvered around the Look; maybe it was Benjamin’s sincerity she had registered—Benjamin’s eyes she had looked into.

Maybe, all those years ago, when he bullied a girl into his bed for the first time, maybe it was Benjamin or some proto-Benjamin or shadow Benjamin who had roused from sleep and pronounced the traitorous words “I love you,” uncalled-for and unwanted, a tacit admission of absurdity, utterly unallowable.

Benjamin, not John, who provoked love. Benjamin who loved Amelie and was loved by Amelie. Benjamin the idiot, savant only in the mathematics of this fathomless emotion.

God damn you, he thought, you truncated false and stupid thing. You prosthetic imitation of a human being.

God damn you for succeeding at it.

A surfeit of conscience and a memory he could not suppress: this does not make for easy sleep.

He listened awhile to the beat of the snow against the window.

After a time, without thinking, he reached up and brushed away Susan’s hair from her ear. The ear was a pink, shadowy cusp in the darkness. He moved his lips, experimentally—hardly more than a whisper.

“I love you,” he said.

She didn’t stir.

But he was calmer now, and slept.