The Divide

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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.

  PART 3

  UNCONTROLLED EXPERIMENTS

  21

  In the morning Susan re-packed her luggage (most of it untouched since her return from California) and went looking for Dr. Kyriakides.

  She found him in the study. He was bent over his desk, making notes in a loose-leaf binder. He looked up when she opened the door. How old he seems, Susan thought—suddenly old and humorless.

  “We’re leaving today,” she said. “John and I. We’re going to find Amelie.”

  Dr. Kyriakides did not react at once. Slowly, he peeled away his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. The silence was professorial, devastating; Susan wanted to cringe.

  He said, “That’s absurd.”

  “You can’t stop us.”

  “Of course I can’t. You’re both adults. You can do what you like. But surely you must see—well, for one thing, Susan, consider the weather! You’d be lucky to get a mile down the road. And I’m certain neither of you know where to find Amelie, wherever she might be. We can’t even be certain she wants to be found. All we know is that she left the house without warning last Saturday—which is her privilege, as it is yours.” He shook his head. “It might be understandable that John conceived this idea. He’s ill, after all. He has a neurological illness. But you, Susan! I thought you were interested in his welfare! Not coddling his disease,”

  In spite of herself, Susan blushed. “That’s not what I’m doing. John is perfectly lucid.”

  “It was his idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t it seem a little out of character?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “He has no interest in Amelie! It was Benjamin who cared about her. John is as far beyond Amelie Desjardins as we are advanced beyond the starfish. And you know it. Why would he want to risk his life for her? Because that’s what this would mean, after all. He seems fine, but the crisis could come at any moment. Fever and disorientation and possibly unconsciousness—possibly death. Can you cope with that? Do you want that to happen while your car is buried in a snowdrift miles from here?”

  “It’s important to him.”

  “Is it? Has he told you why? Or is this your own conclusion?”

  Susan shook her head. “I don’t want to have this discussion. I just thought you should know we’re leaving.”

  She turned away.

  “Wait,” Dr. Kyriakides said, and Susan was embarrassed to discover she could not resist the command.

  She hesitated at the doorway.

  “John talked about me—didn’t he? That’s what this is all about.”

  “He talked about himself,” Susan said.

  “You know I never meant this to happen.”

  His voice was suddenly chastened and tentative. He stood up, stepped out from behind the desk. He’s a small man, Susan thought. He’s shorter than I am. Another brand-new observation.

  “I had no idea things would turn out the way they did. At every step—please try to understand—I made what I thought was the best decision. The wisest decision. Even when I was tampering with John inutero, even when I was dealing with his mother. She was a stupid woman, Susan. She would have had a stupid child and they would have lived stupid, ordinary lives. She was the kind of passive and amoral creature that allowed a Hitler to come to power—a Stalin.” The words were fervent and his expression was utterly sincere; Susan was transfixed. “When I created John,” he said, “I meant to break that chain. I was funded by a mercenary organization for a mercenary purpose, it’s true, but I never believed the government would benefit from my work in any substantial way. If anything, the opposite. I meant to create a better human being, for whom they would therefore have no use. Not just ‘more intelligent’ in the obvious sense. Authentically better.” He shook his head. “But it’s a terrible burden, and I should not have imposed it on John. I understand that now. I—”

  “God damn your pious self-pity!”

  She had not planned to say this; the words came spilling out. Her fists were clenched and her fingernails bit into her palms. Dr. Kyri
akides gaped at her. “That’s all we are to you—all of us—just stupid, ordinary people! You took a child and you fed him all that contempt, that arrogance! Christ, of course it was a burden! Isn’t it obvious? That’s why he had to invent Benjamin.” She turned away. No more hesitation. “That’s why we have to leave.”

  * * *

  She was too shaken to drive. John slid behind the wheel of the Honda. He had excavated the car from a mound of snow, but the driveway was still solid—Susan wondered whether they would get as far as the road. But she put her faith in John and curled up into the private space of her winter coat. The snow tires whined and finally bit against the blacktop; the Honda struggled forward.

  According to the radio, the snow might begin again tonight. A second front was pushing in from the high prairies. But for now the sky was a glassy, vacant blue, cold and clear. Susan scrubbed frost from the window next to her and peered out at a frigid rural landscape of frozen ponds and hydroelectric clearances. The highway had been ploughed during the night, but a morning wind had scattered snow back across the tarmac in serpentine dunes.

  Now the Honda picked up speed. It occurred to Susan that John was driving too fast for the road—but she looked at him and was reassured. His eyes had taken on an intense, powerful focus; his touch on the wheel was delicate and certain.

  The road sped away behind them. Susan was warm and calmer now; she sat up and stretched.

  “You told Max we were leaving?”

  She nodded. “He says it’s pointless. He says you don’t know how to find Amelie.”

  “I don’t, precisely. I think I know where to begin.”

  “You don’t really know that much about her, do you?”

  “No.”

  “But Benjamin does.”

  He nodded.

  “And you have access to that,” Susan said. “To his memories—his life.”

  “More than I used to. That makes it easier. But even Benjamin didn’t know all about Amelie.”

  “She told me about her brother,” Susan said. “He tried to kidnap her the day she moved. You think he’s involved in this?”

  “That would be an obvious suspicion. Nothing is certain, of course. All we really know is that she left without leaving a message.”

  “Maybe she just got tired of us all.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

  They crossed the city limits. Coming down Yonge Street, John slowed to deal with traffic. Susan watched a TTC bus slide into an intersection, its wheels locked. A pickup truck swerved to avoid it; John pumped the brake and kept the Honda a carlength back. A brisk wind peppered the windshield with crystals of yesterday’s snow, glittering in the sunlight.

  They were well into the city when Susan felt the Honda’s motion grow more erratic; she heard John catch his breath as they fishtailed coming around a curve. Just north of Eglinton he pulled into a parking lot. “Can you drive us the rest of the way? It shouldn’t be too hard. The roads have been cleared since morning.”

  He was sweating. Susan frowned. “Are you all right?”

  John held up his hand to show her the tremor, which was obvious and pronounced.

  Oh, God, Susan thought.

  “I think we’d be safer,” John said calmly, “if you took over for a while.”

  * * *

  There was this to deal with, too: his “change.”

  They rented a room at a downtown hotel not far from Yonge Street. They unpacked the few things they had brought, including the Woodward guitar Susan had carried back from Chicago. Meager fractions of their lives. She rested on the bed while John showered.

  “The change” was something she didn’t really want to think about. Dr. Kyriakides had intimated that John might die. John said that wasn’t really likely … but the question was open. And there was nothing that Susan or anyone else could do about it: no real treatment apart from the bottle of pills Dr. Collingwood had prescribed. There were questions she would have to begin to face, unpleasant as they were, such as: What would happen if John collapsed? Should she take him to a hospital?

  This was all beyond her.

  For now she was simply accommodating John’s wishes, helping him find Amelie. After that … well, it was impossible to predict. She remembered Dr. Kyriakides describing John’s illness as “a radical neurological retrenchment, a shedding of the induced growth … a one-time event, which he might survive in one form or another.”

  One form or another. As John or Benjamin. Or some unpredictable amalgamation of the two.

  And the event would be traumatic, Dr. Kyriakides had said: like a fever, it would run its course, would peak, would then be finished and its effects irrevocable.

  He’ll be different, Susan thought. He’ll want me with him. Or he won’t.

  He won’t be the same: something new will have been born … something will have died.

  But now he is John, she told herself sternly. The future was always the future, always mysterious. What mattered was that he was John and she was with him now.

  * * *

  He came out of the shower looking stronger, though there was a certain persistent hollowness about his eyes that Susan didn’t like.

  “It’s early,” he said. “We haven’t had lunch. Let’s head over to Yonge Street—the place Amelie used to work.”

  They braved the cutting wind. Susan was afraid the Goodtime wouldn’t be open; a lot of places had closed because of the weather. But the lights were all on and the sign in the window said, OPEN REGULAR HOURS.

  Their waitress was a tiny, timid-looking woman named Tracy; the food was greasy but filling. When Tracy came back with their coffee, John asked about Amelie.

  Tracy gave him a wide-eyed stare. “I don’t know anything, anything about that!”

  She hurried off with the check still clutched in her hand.

  John looked at Susan. Susan shrugged.

  It was the manager who brought back the check. He wiped his hands on his apron and said, “What’s this about Amelie?”

  “She’s missing,” John said. “We’re looking for her.”

  “So? She’s not here.”

  “I know that. I thought she might have talked to somebody.”

  “Haven’t seen her. Haven’t talked to her.”

  “Well, all right.” John stood up. “Your waitress—Tracy—she seemed pretty nervous.”

  The manager began an answer, then hesitated and took a closer look at John. John returned it steadily. Susan wondered if this was John’s “hypnotic” power at work, though she could see no sign of it—saw instead maybe a calculated sincerity.

  Then the manager seemed to reach a decision. “There was somebody else here asking after Amelie. Tracy’s just skittish … she gets upset.”

  “Somebody else?”

  “Her brother, Tracy says. Big guy. Kind of strange. But he hasn’t been back for a while.”

  * * *

  Susan said, “It only confirms what we suspected.”

  “But that’s important,” John said. “That’s useful.”

  He led her back through the snowy streets—not to the hotel, but to the doughnut shop on Wellesley where she had discovered him all those months ago. Susan wondered if this was some kind of deliberate irony … but John was too serious for that. He took the table with the chessboard engraved on its surface; Susan sat opposite him. “What now?”

  “We sit here for a while. Carbohydrates and coffee. We look around.” “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “You want a game?”

  “Won’t that be distracting?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then.”

  They played twice. The first game was a rout. Susan’s mind wasn’t focused on the board—she was cold, and frightened by what the manager at the Goodtime had said—and John pried out her castled king with a bishop
sacrifice; checkmate came quickly.

  She took the second game more seriously. She played a King’s Indian defense and pondered each move scrupulously. By playing a combination of aggressive and defensive moves she was able to keep him at arm’s length. Her interest deepened. She saw a chance to open up his king—a knight fork that would force a pawn move; she would lose the knight, but it would leave her bishop and her queen in a single, powerful diagonal aimed at his broken pawn ranks. Was there a flaw in this reasoning? Well, probably … but Susan couldn’t find it. She shrugged and advanced the knight.

  John captured it with his pawn.

  Susan hunched down over the board. If she brought the bishop down—and then the queen, while his knight was still pinned—

  John said, “Look.”

  She raised her head.

  A man had just come through the door. A short man in a heavy coat, shivering. He bought a doughnut and coffee at the counter, turned and spotted John.

  Recognition flashed between them. The man muttered and turned toward the door.

  Susan whispered, “Who is he?”

  “His name is Tony Morriseau,” John said, “and we need to talk to him.”

  She stood up with John and cast a last glance at the chessboard.

  She was a move away from checkmate. He hadn’t noticed.

  * * *

  Chess, John had told her, was mainly a memory trick. The difference between a chess master and a “civilian” player was that the master had stored a vast internal library of potential positions and was able to recognize them as they developed on the board. That, plus a certain finely honed ability to concentrate attention, made all the difference.

  John was not technically a master because he had not played in enough tournaments to acquire a significant rating. His chess playing had been an amusement. (“An experiment,” he once called it.) He had played, at least in those days, to relish his easy superiority over his competitors. It was a cruel, private entertainment. Or so he claimed. But Susan remembered what he had said when they first met, across this table, when she asked why he went on playing when it was obvious that he would win: “One hopes,” he had said.