Where was Susan? She should be there by now. She knew he was nervous about the anesthetic; the threat of loss of consciousness for whatever reason still troubled him, and probably always would. So she had arranged to be present throughout the operation, not performing the surgery but as a medically qualified observer. The thought that she would be with him greatly reassured Charlie.
Suddenly he saw her hurrying down the corridor toward him, already in green surgical gown and cap. She pushed her mask down to her chin and bent over him on the gurney where he lay. “I thought you’d forgotten,” he said weakly, with a smile on his face that he knew must look pretty silly because of the way his head was going pleasantly around and around after that last injection.
“Of course I didn’t forget,” she said, taking his hand in hers. “I was on the phone with your lawyer. He says it’s not official yet, but you’re definitely going to get a presidential pardon for any criminal acts you may have committed. I thought you’d like to know that before you went in.”
“That’s great,” he said, and saw her face light up with pleasure at the relief her news had brought him.
The gurney began to move. She walked alongside, still holding his hand as they turned sharply and went in through the doors of the operating room. She let go of him now and pulled up her mask so that it covered her face, like all the other faces around him. He could only tell who was who from the eyes. His surgeon—he recognized him. The anesthesiologist, a pleasant woman he’d met once. The nurse…yes, that was the nurse he remembered….
And there was Susan, her eyes on him, full of reassurance and encouragement… it was going to be all right… everything was going to be fine….
He was about to open his mouth when he felt another little jab in his arm. Whatever he’d wanted to say vanished from his mind as he fell almost at once into a deep, luxurious oblivion….
He awoke with no sense of time having passed. Of course it must have: at least several hours. He was alone now, staring at a white ceiling. Looking to his right and left he saw white walls, the lower halves of which were made of tiles, also white and slightly old-fashioned looking. There didn’t seem to be any windows.
It was a good-sized room, plenty of space on both sides of his bed and between its foot and the far wall. But it was entirely bare. There wasn’t a stick of furniture apart from the bed itself, but if he turned his head as far to the left as it would go he could see a white washbasin fixed to the wall with a mirror above it. Whether there was anything behind his bed, or even anybody, he couldn’t see at all. He would need to sit up for that.
He tried, but found it strangely difficult. It wasn’t pain or stiffness, it was just that his movements were somehow restricted. He tried to figure out what was wrong. He could move his legs a little, but the problem was his arms. In fact his whole upper body felt paralyzed.
Had something gone terribly wrong? Why was nobody there to tell him what had happened? Where was Susan?
He experienced a moment’s panic. How could he be paralyzed? He felt as though his arms should move; they just didn’t. He began to struggle, and only then did he realize that he was strapped into something that restrained his movements.
Why had they done that? Nobody had warned him that this would be necessary. Just a small incision, they said. Fairly deep, but it would leave only the tiniest scar. Nothing about having to be bandaged up like a mummy.
He had to fight to sit up. It was hard without the use of his arms, though his stomach muscles were in good shape, iron hard. At least, they used to be. They felt a little soft now. Which was strange. How could they degenerate so quickly? They were fine yesterday. He’d worked out in the gym as usual.
It was yesterday, wasn’t it? Or at the most the day before. Before the operation.
How long could he have been here?
The pain of sitting up was agonizing, but he made it through sheer determination. He had to pause to get his breath back. He could feel his face red and hot, suffused with blood from the effort.
That wasn’t like him. He never felt like this. What had they done to him?
Something moved to his left. He turned and realized that his head was now level with the mirror above the small sink. He could see his reflection.
Except it wasn’t him. He was looking at another man. Middle-aged, gray-haired, with staring, frightened eyes, slack-mouthed. He’d never seen this man before.
It wasn’t a mirror. It couldn’t be. It had to be some kind of trick.
He moved to the right. The reflection moved. He moved left. The reflection did the same.
How? Why?
He looked down at himself and saw he wasn’t bandaged at all. He was strapped into a straitjacket, white like the rest of the room, his arms bound tight across his chest and the sleeves secured behind his back.
What in hell…?
There was a sound. He turned. A door had opened in the far wall. He hadn’t noticed it before; there was no handle on the inside. But now—thank God, at last—Susan came in. She wore a long white coat and had a serious expression. She looked like a doctor. A silly thought, of course: She was a doctor.
“Hello, Brian,” she said, stopping just short of his bed. “How are you feeling now?”
It took a moment for his brain to register what she’d said, and then to form the question.
“Brian? Did you call me Brian?”
“It’s your name. You’re Brian Kay.”
He stared at her, his brain too paralyzed by shock to function. “Susan, what have you…what have they…?”
His eyes returned to the mirror on the wall, to the reflection of that unknown, frightened man. He could see the image of Susan standing behind him. There was nothing wrong with her reflection. She was herself.
“Susan, what’s happened to me? Why do I look like that… ?”
Her reflection took a step closer to his in the mirror, then laid a hand on his shoulder. He felt its gentle pressure, reassuring,kind, but strangely impersonal. There was no intimacy in the touch. It wasn’t Susan’s touch.
“It’s all right, Brian,” she said. “Try to stay calm.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“Listen to me. You’ve been ill, Brian, but you’re better now. However, the virus has affected your memory…”
He turned his head sharply to look up at her—at Susan, not her reflection.
“I’m Charlie Monk! I’m not… I’m not this man! Why do I look like…?”
“It’s you. You’re Brian Kay. We’ve partly cured your memory, but now you’re suffering from some side effects that we hadn’t anticipated. But don’t worry, we’ll take care of them in time.”
“Side effects? What side effects? I don’t know what you—”
“Just listen to me, please. Try to trust me. These side effects of your treatment take the form of various fantasies, sometimes quite complex ones. They only last a split second in real time, but to you they seem to go on for hours, days, even months sometimes. You’ve just had one, actually quite a bad one. That’s why you’ve had to be restrained. But you’re all right now, back where you belong. The memory will fade in a few minutes, even though it still seems so real now.”
She paused a moment, then sat on the edge of his bed, bringing her eyes level with his.
“The most important thing, Brian, is that the memory we were trying to give you, and which we’ve now successfully implanted in your brain, has proved resistant to either fading or variation. And to show you how true that is, your wife’s here to see you…”
She turned back toward the door. He followed her gaze. A woman had entered—middle-aged, with an anxious, careworn face that must have been quite pretty once. He had no idea who she was or what she was doing there.
And yet, somehow—what was happening to him?—somehow he felt he should know who she was. Why was that? A name began playing on the tip of his tongue. Her name. What was it?
Then he remembered. It burst from him sp
ontaneously.
“Dorothy!”
“What did you say, darling?”
He opened his eyes. He was breathing hard, perspiring. Then he heard her voice again, distantly.
“Darling? Are you all right?”
A shaft of electric light fell across the carpet from the bathroom where she was. The sky outside was almost dark. Was it dusk or dawn? A window was half open and a curtain rippled in a light breeze.
“Charlie?”
“I’m fine.”
“You sounded strange.”
“I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?”
“Almost seven. You’d better get ready, we have to leave in half an hour.”
Of course—they were going to dinner with those people who wanted to make the film of his life. To that fashionable new restaurant in TriBeCa. They’d been in New York for a week—he could hear the traffic now, far below—doing press and TV interviews about the book they’d written together. It had gone straight to number one and looked set to stay there for some time.
He pushed himself up on his elbow, savoring the relief at being himself again, the nightmare over. The sheets were soft and clean against his skin. He wanted to enjoy the feeling a few moments more, remembering how he and Susan had come in around five after taping a TV show. They had made love and then fallen asleep in each other’s arms. It had been perfect.
There was a long mirror on the wall. He rolled over to see himself in it. His reflection stared back at him, reassuringly familiar in every detail, right down to the tiny scar on his chest, which was the only sign that remained of the operation he’d had six months earlier to remove the implant.
Life had been good since then, better than he’d ever dreamed it could be. He thought back to how Susan had got to the hospital only moments before he lost consciousness, just in time to tell him about the presidential pardon.
But the best moment of all had been when he woke up after the operation to find Susan sitting by his bed. She was holding his hand, and as soon as he’d opened his eyes he’d told her that he loved her. He probably wouldn’t have had the nerve except for the strange and agreeable feeling, left over no doubt from the anesthetic, that everything was possible—even that she was telling the truth when she said she felt the same way about him. They’d kissed right there in his hospital room for the first time. After that she’d picked up the phone and, throwing him a mischievous glance, had told someone on the other end that he wasn’t to be disturbed till further notice. Then they’d lain in each other’s arms for what seemed like an eternity and yet somehow no time at all. They’d been together ever since, Susan, Charlie, Christopher, and Buzz. And the baby they would eventually have if the tests said it was all right.
“Charlie—you’re not even out of bed yet.”
She came from the bathroom wearing only a light robe and with her hair swept back the way she sometimes wore it in the evenings now. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she took his face in her hands and prepared to scold him gently.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she said. “Are you so rich and famous now you think you can show up as late as you like?”
“I’ll be ready in five minutes. I just fell asleep and had that dream again.”
“What dream?”
“You know—where I think I’m Brian Kay. I’m in this hospital room, and you’re my doctor, then this woman comes in who’s supposed to be my wife though I’ve never seen her before, and suddenly I say ‘Dorothy!’”
A puzzled frown gathered on Susan’s face. “You’ve never told me about that dream before.”
He looked back at her disbelievingly. “What do you mean? Of course I’ve told you. I’ve been having it for the past six months.”
She took her hands from his face and sat back slightly, looking serious now and even worried. “Charlie,” she said, “not only have you never told me about this dream, but as far as I recall I’ve never even told you about Brian Kay. And I’m certain I’ve never told you his wife’s name.”
Charlie looked at her for some time before saying anything, searching her face for a clue to what was going on.
“You’re kidding—right?”
She didn’t answer, and he went on waiting for that curious expression of hers to resolve itself into a smile, a burst of laughter, a confession that she was teasing him.
Why didn’t she just lean over and kiss him on the lips? That was the way this was supposed to end.
Wasn’t it?
Acknowledgments
While researching the feasibility of creating Charlie Monk, I spoke with several geneticists and was startled by the casual way they accepted my premise. “We can’t do it yet,” was the general tenor of their response, “but go ahead and tell your story, and the details will catch up with you soon enough.”
On February 21, 1999, the London Sunday Times, in its “Chronicle of the Future” series for the new millennium, predicted that the first human-chimp hybrid would be created in a laboratory in 2012. “All you’d have to do,” said their expert, “would be to insert a gene sequence taken from a human embryo into a chimp embryo, and then implant the combination into a surrogate chimp mother.”
Whether we’ll have to wait till then only time will tell, but I can’t help remembering some play or film I saw a few years ago. At the start there was a statement of time and place. For “time” we were simply told, “Sooner than you think.”
When it came to virtual reality, I found a similar response from the experts I questioned. Although, so far as I am aware, nobody is yet capable of doing everything I describe in the novel, progress is accelerating daily and there is no obstacle in principle to our getting there. In his book The Fabric of Reality the Oxford physicist David Deutsch says:
We realists take the view that reality is out there: objective, physical and independent of what we believe about it. But we never experience that reality directly. Every last scrap of our external experience is of virtual reality. And every last scrap of our knowledge—including our knowledge of the nonphysical worlds of logic, mathematics and philosophy, and of imagination, fiction, art and fantasy — is encoded in the form of programs for the rendering of those worlds on our brain’s own virtual generator.
Other books that I found useful in research were Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, The Lives to Come by Philip Kitcher, and Ihe Language of the Genes and In the Blood by Steve Jones, who was also good enough to talk to me on the phone a couple of times.
Particularly useful in terms of chimpanzee behavior were Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal, Next of Kin by Roger Fouts with Stephen Mills, and Through Our Eyes Only? by Marian Stamp Dawkins. I am also indebted to Mick Carman, head keeper of monkeys and apes at London Zoo, for taking time to talk to me at length and introduce me around to some of his charges.
I am especially indebted to Professor Ian Craig of the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, for his generously given time and help.
Finally, a special thanks to my good friend Serge Lentz for his invaluable help with the scenes set in Russia.
D.A.
About the Author
DAVID AMBROSE began his career as a screen-writer. He read law at Oxford University and has worked internationally in films, theater, and television. His novels include Coincidence, Supersition, Mother of God, and The Man Who Turned into Himself. to learn more about the author, please visit www.DavidAmbrose.com.
«——THE END——»
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The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk Page 28