The Mobius Man

by M. S. Karl

  “But, of course, when the police came and got you, you could hardly say that. Meanwhile, in Langley, nobody knew what had happened. And that was where Adrian Kestering had his idea. The idea for the trap to catch an ambitious and troublesome subordinate. And he’d use both of us for bait. You were in jail, I was still undergoing a fictitious rehabilitation. You see his idea now? He’d made Leah stake her reputation on this. Now he had the impossible mission: Make me confront the man who bore my name without having the whole personality job collapse. Make me see myself and not remember. Now I understand why Leah was so opposed to my going, so furious with Kestering. She’d probably smelled a trap from the very first, but nothing like this. When she realized the mission he was feeding me, she pulled all the stops to make me refuse it. She was in a spot. She couldn’t beg for more time. But if I simply refused to go, well, even a few days would be enough. Any other mission would be better than this one. She tried everything, the bitch. One of the benefits of pretending to be my wife. Maximum access to the guinea pig. I understand a lot now. Why I was impotent with her, for instance. It was because I was impotent. Powerless in every sense. I had been raped, my mind had been raped by those bastards and somewhere deep down I knew it.” The sweat was dripping off my face like drops of blood and I didn’t know how long I could stay conscious.

  “So now you see. It was all for nothing, my chasing around asking questions and playing detective. That’s why I wasn’t very good at it. But they gave me motivation. I was a good agent. That’s what Kestering told me. The one little lie in all the big lies, that kept me going. All a part of their plan. Provide a test to see if I’d break and remember. They knew all about the amnesia, of course. They’d caused it, but they’d also make me watch a bunch of scenes from my fictitious previous life while I was in a drugged state, half awake, half asleep. They gave me just enough so I’d think they were real memories. But deep down I knew, and I sensed it consciously, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, because they’d blocked me from dealing with that part of myself. All that came through were dreams and images, and I couldn’t put them together. I needed a trigger, something that would start the process of analysis. It was the one thing that could kill Leah. In this case, it was a talk I had with a lieutenant of police. He has a theory, you see. About the Russians and Oswald and Kennedy. Not a very unique theory. But when I heard it, it triggered the process, set everything in motion. From that moment it was only a question of time.”

  His voice spoke from the darkness. “A very interesting story, I have to admit. But maybe you’d better save it. Talking isn’t doing you any good.”

  “I’d better talk while I can. You asked for answers and now I’m giving them to you. You waste your whole life, you can’t even find the questions, let alone the answers, and then one night in the goddamn Guatemala jungle, with a bullet in you … Never mind. Answers.” I was having trouble focusing my mind now. I bit a finger until I felt the pain competing with the ache in my leg. “Let’s see, why I didn’t let you rot in jail. Because I don’t, didn’t like to see somebody innocent suffer. Don’t ask me if they programmed that in or whether it was part of me before. I think it was just the only way to react to events. Like my job orientation. Do the job, stay on the job, no matter what. Has something to do with convincing yourself you matter, if that makes sense. Not a hell of a lot makes sense right now, but that’ll have to do. Number two, why I broke you out tonight when I could be back in Tenosique right now with the woman. Maybe you won’t believe me, but it had something to do with your motives.”

  “My motives?”

  “That’s right. Jesus, don’t ever get shot in the leg. Motives. The kind of person you were. That he was. No, I mean I was. I’m talking about Bassett. Don’t you see? He never did a fucking thing on principle. I hated what I saw of you. I was looking in the mirror, only I didn’t know it. You’re good, or did I tell you that? Have to sit down for a drink sometime when this is over. We should be so lucky. You did something Bassett, I mean myself, can’t get out of the third person—me, I—did something he—I—never could have done. Change ideals. He didn’t have any ideals. You do.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Yeah. Look. You told ’em all in Langley to go take a flying fuck. You found something better. I don’t know what it offers, but it means something to you, that’s all that counts.” I struggled to focus the words but it was hard. “A man lives without believing in anything. You believe in something. You became Harold Bassett, so he believes in something, even if it’s only pretend. When this is over, you’re going to Havana or maybe Surinam, I don’t know where, and then take a flight that’ll end up in the USSR Never thought I’d like it there myself, but that’s because I’m who I am. And I don’t know who you are, but you borrowed my life for a little while and you’re doing something I’m glad of. Harold Bassett is going to defect.” It was out now and I laid my head in my hands. The pain had become a background like the roaring of a waterfall, steady and loud. I had trouble hearing his voice.

  “There’s only one problem with all this. I can prove I’m Harold Bassett and you can’t.”

  “Wrong,” I rasped. “You may have a few fake documents, but those aren’t proof. I’ll tell what proof is. Proof is knowing something only Harold Bassett could know. You probably spent a month reading the basic background works on the order Lepidoptera, the butterflies. They probably taught you some memory tricks to keep as much as possible in your mind. It could fool most people. But not an entomologist. Because a trained entomologist knows more than just the class insecta; he knows something about biology in general. Suppose I ask you about the role of drosophila in evolutionary studies? Where did Cuvier stand on the question of polygenesis? What’s meant by the term balanced polymorphism?”

  “Nobody who knew his subject would submit to this king of interrogation,” he said evenly.

  “And nobody who didn’t could answer.” I rubbed the sweat out of my eyes. “It’s no good, you know that. You made a basic mistake at the very beginning, the kind you get from reading the books rather than doing. I realized it when I was in your workroom and I saw your killing jar. I knew instinctively there was something wrong, but the thought wasn’t ready, my mind wasn’t free just yet. You see, no professional lepidopterist I know uses a killing jar. It’s too much paraphernalia. What you do is just pinch the thorax. It kills instantly; doesn’t mess up the exoskeleton. Only the books talk about killing bottles and chemicals. Oh, Jesus.” I started to laugh and found it hard to stop. “No wonder you felt guilty about chloroforming them. When a simple pinch would do.” The macabre irony seemed to grab hold of me and my body shook with hysterical laughter until the pain struck back. I sensed his eyes on me, calculating.

  “Well, we have a long wait until morning. Believe what you want. But let me ask you something: Just for the sake of argument, suppose I were this impostor.” He chuckled. “For the sake of argument, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why in the hell would I want to go to Cuba, much less Russia?”

  “Where else would you go?”

  “Well.” He exhaled. Somewhere in the trees a night bird gave a raucous cry. “I might be inclined, if I were this person, to just go to, say, Brazil and forget the whole thing.”

  “You mean, drop out?” It was something I had not considered, and it hovered suddenly in my mind like a sinister cloud.

  “Sure. I mean, if I were this person, then I would have squirreled away a little money in a few bank accounts here and there, right? Why would I trade one form of slavery for another? If this were all true?”

  A new weakness was added to the pain. “You mean not defect? Not get back at them?”

  “Why would I—if I were this person—why would I want to get back at anybody? Why wouldn’t I just take what I could get from both systems and then conveniently disappear? There are some very pretty beaches at Rio. Beautiful women, too. With enough money, a man could live a very comfortable lif
e there. Find a plastic surgeon for a little facial alteration.” He let the words sink in, and I felt a nausea growing in the bottom of my stomach. “That’s if I were this person you’re talking about. Of course, I’m not.”

  The texture of the darkness changed and I realized he had gotten up. “I’d like my property now.”

  “Your getaway kit?”

  “My private, personal possessions.”

  “What’s in there?” I demanded.

  “Just things.”

  “What things.”

  “My things. Now hand it over. If you don’t mind.”

  I heard a twig snap and grabbed the revolver from my waistband. “Don’t come any closer.”

  His voice came down from somewhere over me, “Don’t be stupid. The gun’s wet. It probably won’t even fire. Anyway, you probably used up your ammunition.”

  “Don’t press your luck.”

  “You don’t have any rights to withhold my property.”

  “I want to know what’s in it. You borrowed my name. I have a right to know what else you may do with it.”

  “You can have your name back, if it means that much. All I want is what’s mine.”

  “Which is?”

  “A few travel documents, like you said, for chrissakes, and some money. Enough to get me out of here and bribe a few border guards if necessary.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then to Rio.”

  “So you admit it.”

  “I’m not admitting a goddamn thing except I want to get as far away from here as possible. Now I’m tired of this. Give me the gun.”

  I heard his clothes rustle as he bent down, and I forced the hammer back. The sharp click checked his movement. “One inch closer and I fire.”

  “You’re out of your mind. You’re dying. What are you going to do, get us both caught by the soldiers? That’s what’ll happen if you shoot.”

  “But I’m crazy enough to. I haven’t got a damn thing to lose. All I want to do is wait until morning, when I can see what’s in here and find out if you really are going to Rio.”

  “What the hell difference does it make?”

  “A quirk I have. Maybe I want to see if you’ve become Harold Bassett in the end. The real Harold Bassett.”

  “You’re rambling.”

  “Probably.”

  “All I have to do is wait here and you’ll lose consciousness. No hurry. It’ll happen before morning.”

  He was right, of course. I don’t know how I had held on that long. I let the pistol rest on the forest floor, with my hand on it. The darkness was a velvet cloud now, offering to embrace me. I wanted to go with it. I wanted to leave the pain and the sickness in my belly.

  “Maybe,” he said, “if I were this person, I’d just fly down to Rio and then take a flight on to Moscow.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so. You made a good case, too good a case. I know Bassett, see. I know what he’s like. And I know something I should have known before. That you can’t live like somebody twenty-four hours a day, think like him, be him, and not, in the end, become him. And that’s what’s happened, isn’t it? You’ve become a cynical, selfish bastard in the end.”

  “You’re out of your head. So what happens if you find out I have a Brazilian bankbook in there. Just for the sake of argument?”

  “I’ll kill you. And that’ll be the end of Bassett once and for all.”

  “I see.”

  His voice died away, and that was when I heard the sound, a buzzing, coming from somewhere inside my head and yet all around. Morning was hours away. I was not going to last but another few seconds. He knew it and I heard his footsteps coming toward me. With my last effort I raised the heavy gun and fired.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Once more I was looking down from far away at the little scene. I watched the men creep forward, their faces blackened by their beards. A quick probe from a flashlight hit my body and then darted away. It settled on a second body. One of the shadows came out of the jungle, machine gun at port arms, and kicked the form on the ground. I saw their camouflage uniforms and thought they were soldiers at first. Then one came and the toe of his boot sent sparks across my eyes. I came back into the body and found myself looking up into his face.

  “Este cabrón no está muerto,” the man said. “¿Qué haremos?”

  “Traele al campamento,” said the voice of Adolfo Santos.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I looked out of the thick window over the fields of high grass. The friendly man in the white coat smiled at me over the steeples of his fingertips. He was my age, but dark and with black, bushy hair.

  “It’s a perfectly understandable thing to have happen,” he said. Everything I had told him was understandable, he kept repeating. “Look, David, we all have different pressure points. But none of us can withstand stress indefinitely. We’re like steel girders. Too much weight and we snap. We’re like computers. When we get an overload, something has to give.”

  I looked down at my leg. It was healed now, but part of the skin was dead to the touch, where the nerves had been destroyed. I had been saved by Adolfo Santos and his band of guerrillas. I didn’t remember much of what had happened during that time, just bits and pieces of the airlift home and the arrival at the hospital. And then the beginning sessions with the bushy-haired young man named Dr. Adams who seemed concerned that I kept telling the same story.

  “You don’t believe me,” I said.

  “It isn’t that. I believe something happened down there. But what concerns me is what you think happened.”

  “I’ve told you. I was sent by the CIA to interrogate a man named Harold Bassett, except that he wasn’t Harold Bassett. I’m Harold Bassett.”

  “And in the end, you say, you killed this—this fake you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—because in the end he was me, acting like the real me, the real Harold Bassett.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He lowered his hands and leaned back. His office was a cool shade of green with a thick rug and central air. Books lined the shelves and there was a faint smell of cigarette smoke.

  “But the papers you had identified you as David Dennison,” he said. “And we checked up on you. There really is a David Dennison.” He picked up a manila folder and let me see that it was not empty. “A freelance writer. Married, no children. Publication credits with Argosy, True, a handful of other magazines. I’ve called some editors. They know you. A couple even know your wife.”

  “Then they’re lying or you’re lying, or both.”

  “Isn’t there another possibility? Isn’t it just possible—now wait, listen to what I have to say—isn’t it just possible that the pressure was too much and you sort of slipped into some of the stories you’ve been working on?” He held up a hand to cut me off and leaned forward. “Listen, David, you wife tells me that you’ve been terribly unhappy lately over the kind of work you’ve been doing. You feel like you’re never going to write that novel. You think of all the articles you’ve been doing as hackwork. You had an argument with her before you left for Mexico this time. She urged you to forget the article if it was so important for you to work on the novel. But you said you needed the money. Even though your wife tells me she makes thirty thousand a year in designing clothes. David, it’s a common-type of conflict. You feel impotent because your wife is making more money than you are. You feel like you have to prove something. You’re caught between your sense of machismo, the proving you can support the family, and your need to do something you consider really worthwhile. The result is a kind of writer’s block, and, ultimately, depersonalization and a—well—a loss of contact. It’s perfectly understandable.”

  “I’m glad it’s understandable,” I said. “But that’s not what happened. I guess there is no Adolfo Santos and I didn’t kill a man in Guatemala?”

  “Of course, it’s all true, it all happened. Just
on a different level.”

  “In my mind, you mean.”

  He nodded happily. “Right.” But he hastened to add: “Not that it makes these events seem any less real.”

  “Then how did I get here?”

  “I’ve told you. After the bandits left you for dead, Guatemalan soldiers found you and took you to a hospital. Our embassy did the rest.”

  “Of course. I forgot.”

  “You were badly hurt.”

  “And under pressure.”

  “Exactly. You went to Tabasco really looking for something more than this story on tourism. And when you heard about this man named Bassett and this murder, you decided that was it. But the mind is funny. It takes a thread sometimes and weaves an entire garment. The more you thought about it the more it became another story to you, a story that you were a part of. You went to talk to this police lieutenant, and when he made the reference to Kennedy it all began to come together for you, as you say. Except that it was an auto-suggestion, something your mind told you had to be true even though it had no basis in objective face. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Good. I think we’re making some progress now. Anyway, this man escaped, I think that’s what happened, right?” He pretended to refer to one of the papers in the dossier. “Yes. And you decided you had to find him. The whole game had become a question of life and death for you. You see, you had done something fairly common. Or, rather, your brain had: It had determined that many aspects of your past life were too difficult for you to handle consciously, so it repressed them. Amnesia. You couldn’t remember who you were, which helped with this fantasy world you were constructing. Since you didn’t know who you were, you began to adopt parts of the life of this other man. He had some elements of your own character, except that he was another person, so you could project these traits onto him without danger to your own ego. Thus, you were very ambivalent about him. You say you hated him for what he was. And yet, at another level, it’s clear that you intensely admired him. After all, he had been able to leave it all, say to hell with it and take off. That’s what would have been the ideal solution to your own problems, except that you realized, on a deeper level, that it would be irresponsible. Your ambivalence is reflected in the fact that you wanted to prove him innocent, but deep down it’s clear you really believed him guilty. And that was the source of your admiration for him. He’d done something that represented a positive blow at the world you both hated. He’d killed someone. Little by little, then, you incorporated parts of his life into your own, replaced your fantasy of being a secret agent with the fantasy of being him.”