The Dumb House

by John Burnside

  Now that same sickness had returned with the twins. There was something about them that transcended the gap between human and animal. They seemed to exist in both states at once, plugged into a current of instinct and blood-knowledge, communicating through song, each enjoying the other’s warmth and scent, as an animal might, with the same creature subtlety. In one sense, they weren’t human. They were aware of things that I could not detect; they lived on a different plane. I couldn’t even guess at the nature of their world. I had already decided that I would never be able to decipher their songs. Perhaps they were meaningless; perhaps their meaning was so different from what I would think of as meaning, that it could hardly be seen as meaning at all. Yet they seemed to know me: even when they had ignored me, during those first months, they must have been watching me all along. That night I woke and found them at my bedroom door, gazing at me in silence, I was aware of a new self-assurance, a contained malevolence that gave them real, animal pleasure. And, suddenly, I understood that I was afraid of them. It was fear that caused the sensation in the pit of my stomach, fear that made me dizzy, just as it was fear that had sickened me when my father brought Rusty home. I can see, now, that it was quite irrational, but after that night, I was always afraid the twins would attack me in some unexpected way, just as I had been afraid that my father’s cat might, at any time and without provocation, steal into my bed and sink its teeth into my throat.

  It was too hot to sleep. I had lain awake for over two hours, under a single white sheet: the heat had made me a little feverish, every time I moved, the entire surface of my skin rippled with tiny shivers and waves of sensation. I kept imagining I could hear the twins, deep in the basement, singing to one another, or climbing the stairs quietly, making for my bed. Finally, I went down and fixed myself a cold drink; then I walked from room to room, peering into each moonlit space as if it were somewhere entirely new, a stranger’s house where I had woken up by chance. As long as I was moving, I heard nothing but the chinking of ice in my glass, a sound like tiny bells wrapped in the faint lapping of water; but every time I stopped, every time I paused to listen, I tuned in, once more, to an endless current of creaks and shifts, and that distant music which, the more I tried to convince myself it wasn’t there, the more I strained to hear it. I descended the basement stairs in the dark and stood at the door. I could see nothing through the grille. I switched on the microphone system. The twins were asleep: their breathing was soft and regular, and they were so attuned, each to the other, that it might have been one child sleeping in that dark pen. I think I was a little jealous of them then. Together, they were more individual than I would ever be. Even though they were totally dependent on one another, or perhaps because they were, they defined one another perfectly: for each of them, the world was filtered through the other’s eyes. There could be no sensation that was not tinged by their feelings for one another. I had been sure of that ever since I’d heard them laughing together. They were complicit. Maybe that was the reason for their singing – they weren’t conversing, as such, they were simply performing a ritual of confirmation, a celebration of their combined existence. The complicity that existed between them suggested a world that I was incapable of experiencing, and some of the pleasure of being in that world, part of their private joy, was predicated upon my exclusion. It was as if I was the one who could not speak; as if, for me, the world was nothing more than a jumble of meaningless and disquieting sensations – and it came to me, then, that I was the one who had been placed in the Dumb House.

  After that, I was ill for several days. At some point, I fell asleep in a chair, and sat drifting between the day’s long heat and some distant winter of the mind, a journey through dark woods fuzzed with snow and strange, miniature towns, like the towns in naive paintings, all iced bridges and steeples and people skating on the rivers. I had some idea in my head, something to do with parallel lines, and how they meet at infinity. It was as if I was trying to formulate an idea, some hypothesis that would explain the very order of the world, how it was inherent in all things, yet was essentially inexpressible, or transparent to common sense, like the finer points of mathematics. I suppose I was suffering from a kind of fever. Yet, somewhere in my mind, these wanderings seemed part of the experiment to me, a vital stage, as vital as the records I kept, or the hypotheses I had formed.

  When I woke, the room was buzzing with flies. I had been asleep a long time, perhaps days: the lamp was still lit, the dust burning slightly, and I caught a trace of a faint fleshy smell, like the smell of a hospital sick room. No doubt the flies had been drawn to the light, sensing an escape then finding only another room, another set of walls, another puzzling window to beat against. My fever was going now, but my throat and mouth were very dry, as if I had swallowed sand, and I still felt disoriented. I had the sensation of having been wrenched out of my body, of only just finding a way back. For a few seconds, I had the strong impression that I had just seen myself from the outside, a man sitting in a chair, like a character in a film – and I didn’t know who it was I was looking at. The image stayed in my mind a moment, still vivid, still real, then it faded. Yet, even for that short time, I was aware of something else, aware of myself, listening for the twins, before I even remembered their existence. That was when I realised fully that they were responsible for my fever, they were the ones who had made me ill, that night, when they came to my room. It was wholly illogical, but I was sure, in that moment, that they had willed my sickness. I could still see their eyes watching me, their silence held; I could feel their complicity against me, utterly malevolent and vengeful. There was no question that their development had been unnaturally rapid over the last two or three months. As they grew, their minds were becoming stronger, more united and I knew, if I did not break their power, they would become too powerful to contain.

  I went to bed. I needed to recover my strength, so I could deal with the problem. After all, I told myself, there was no point in becoming hysterical. I understood the dangers of total solitude, coupled with prolonged exposure to some extremely irritating stimulus. I’d read about experiments on war prisoners, where a subject would be kept in solitary confinement for weeks at a time, with no other ambient sound than a tape loop of white noise. Much sooner than expected, the subject begins to experience hallucinations, delusions, prolonged bouts of hysteria. He hears voices. He loses all sense of himself; there are no boundaries between him and the rest of the world. After a few days, the experimenters could turn off the tape and the subject would go on hearing the same sounds, only now his anxiety increases, because there are moments when he becomes aware of the silence, because he no longer knows what is true and what is false. What I needed was to break out of that cycle. I was even on the point of leaving the twins in the basement for a few days, just to get away, to drive to the coast and listen to the sea, or go for a long walk in the hills, to hear the wind, the sheep in the fields, the skylarks. But I couldn’t leave them. It was a ridiculous fear but, even though I knew they were nothing more than a pair of small children, I was certain that if I abandoned them to their own devices they would escape, and the experiment would be exposed.

  That was when it came to me – that night, as I lay, in the still heat, straining to hear something that wasn’t there. It made perfect sense: it would be a new stage of the experiment, it might even provide a new insight, the very breakthrough I needed. The question was: what would happen if one of the twins could no longer sing, if one voice was suddenly turned off? How would they react? Would they try to devise some other means of communication? Was it communication? As far as turning off a voice went, I knew it could be done. I could crush the larynx from the outside, or I could open the neck and sever the vocal cords, or even remove the larynx entirely. I knew that much from my medical text books. I also knew the experiment would be hazardous: crushing might cause asphyxiation, and my skills as a surgeon were limited, in spite of my experience in dissection. Even if the operation was successful, there
was a possibility that the children would lapse into that state of apathy I had observed when I tried to part them. By now I believed, with utter conviction, that their continued existence depended on their ability to communicate with one another. They weren’t individuals in their own right; they were the two parts of a single entity. That would always be so. That was the reason for my lack of progress: the twins were isolated in their own fortress of sound, and I could not enter, no matter how hard I tried. If one of them could no longer speak, they might try some other method of communicating, something I could interpret; or the one who remained might turn to me, in order to go on living, and then I might break the code, if any code was there. Besides, if things went wrong, if the experiment failed, nothing would be lost. The twins’ song had become unbearable to me.

  Of course, I probably knew the outcome all along. By then, I could not escape the feeling that I had failed. It was a completely unscientific attitude: no experiment ever fails, it can only be conducted, observed and recorded. I thought of Michelson and Morley, whose work on the speed of light and the nature of the ether led to Einstein’s discovery of relativity. In science, there are no dead ends. Yet Michelson and Morley were horrified by what they considered the failure of their enterprise; they were Christian men, horrified at the vacuum, the flaw in the fabric of the universe that their observations seemed to expose. There were nights when I lay awake for hours, thinking of opportunities I had missed. There is no more powerful fantasy than the fantasy of what might have been. I could see, with regard to the experiment, that any fault was mine, but now I wanted to destroy the twins and begin again, with a single subject, as the experiment had demanded all along. My mistake had been to keep the two of them together. It was time to resolve the situation, to clear the way for something new.

  I began work the following morning. I decided B would be the better subject for surgery. She was physically stronger, and I thought she would have a better chance of survival. I had several books on human anatomy and surgery in the library and I studied them carefully before I started. In my nocturnal meanderings, I had already realised that there were really only three options to consider: temporary disabling of the vocal cords, for example, by the exertion of pressure around the larynx, with the attendant danger of asphyxiation; a laryngotomy, where the vocal cords are severed in situ; or a full laryngectomy, in which the entire larynx is removed. There was no doubt in my mind that the latter would prove fatal to a child. The simplest approach would be to crush the larynx in some way, effecting a temporary, or even permanent loss of speech, but that seemed too crude, too ugly. I decided to investigate the laryngotomy option further. It seemed within my capabilities, no more difficult than some of the experiments I had carried out on mice and rabbits, and there was something attractive about the idea of opening the child’s larynx and looking inside.

  According to my surgery textbook, laryngotomy is a relatively straightforward operation – technically, at least. The difficulties would arise during aftercare: B would experience some distress, and I would have to take measures to ensure the wound did not become infected. There was also the problem of the anaesthetic. I could use some of the drugs Mother had been prescribed, or perhaps alcohol to at least immobilise the child during the operation, but I would have to research very carefully the amounts I could use without causing long-term damage. Also, the twins would have to be kept apart for several days arid I had no idea how they would take it. Nevertheless, the experiment was destined to end inconclusively if I did not act, and I was curious to see if B’s larynx was different from the norm, if it had become altered by the constant singing, if there had been some kind of adaptation. However I looked at it, the decision was a reasonable one. Even if B died, I would still have A and, once he had recovered from the separation trauma, we could begin the experiment again, on a new basis. Then again, if he really could not live without his sister, or if I felt the experiment had been irretrievably compromised, there was no shortage of young, homeless women on the streets of every major city in the country. I reflected on how easy it had been to get Lillian to come with me: I had exerted no force, and very little persuasion. All I had to do was find someone similar, someone who was desperate for food and safety, and show her a modicum of kindness – and the experiment could begin again, with a new subject. I would learn from my mistakes with the twins. Nothing would be wasted.

  I used some of mother’s old drugs to put B to sleep. I administered them with her food, while she was still in the basement room then, when she was close to unconscious, I carried her upstairs to the study, where the operation would take place. A became distressed as soon as he saw B going under, even more so when I picked up what, for him, might have looked like her dead body, and carried her from the room. I was concerned, of course, but there was nothing I could do to reassure him, and my time was limited. I have to confess, also, that I was excited by the prospect of performing the operation.

  I remember once, in school, we were studying poetry for an examination. The teacher was telling us how the key to the poet’s thinking lay in a single phrase, something about how dissection is murder; how, as soon as you chose to dissect a living thing, you lost its essence, something bled away, something invisible. The teacher, Miss Matheson, seemed to agree with the writer: the more she talked about nature, and the soul, and immortality, the happier she became. Finally, I raised my hand.

  ‘Luke?’

  I liked Miss Matheson. She was pretty, and she had a way of saying your name in class, as if she was surprised at your very existence, as if the recognition that you were present was a real pleasure for her. There was a kind of appeal there, too; she wanted us all to join in, to feel the same way about poetry as she did. I asked my question.

  ‘Where is the soul, Miss Matheson?’

  She smiled.

  ‘That’s a good question, Luke,’ she said. ‘That’s exactly what the poet is trying to tell us.’

  She paused for effect. I remember noticing how pretty she looked, standing by the window, in the afternoon sunlight. She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt, and a white blouse, with a red cardigan over her shoulders, hanging a little loosely, as if she had just pulled it on.

  ‘You can’t pinpoint the soul,’ she said. ‘You can’t just cut a flower or a laboratory rat open and find its essence. All you will see are petals and sepals, bones and blood vessels and organs. The real life of things can’t be seen under a microscope.’

  ‘Then how do you know it exists?’ I asked.

  She smiled again.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we all know there’s more to life than bones and brain cells. There’s thought. There’s beauty. There’s personality. What the poet is saying is, you can’t take up a scalpel or a magnifying glass and go looking for those things. Science only shows us how the machinery works. It can’t tell us why the machine exists, or anything about what lives inside.’

  I nodded. I liked watching her talk, and I wanted her to continue, standing there with the light on her face and hair, her hands moving in the still air as if she were performing a magic trick. I didn’t agree with a word she said; as far as I could see, that poet she admired so much was an aberration. The very image of the thinking individual, ever since the Renaissance, was of a mind overcome by curiosity, descending into crypts and cellars, risking death or exile in order to open and examine and draw the cadavers of suicides, or the newly-executed. Mother had given me books that showed the artists working by candlelight in the cold mortuaries. All anyone knew for sure about the human body was there, in Leonardo’s drawings, or in the flayed bodies that Vesalius drew, as if they were statues, posing in classical landscapes with their tendons, or muscles, or arteries exposed. If the dissectors had obeyed the laws of their day, we would still be throwing our waste into the streets, people would still be dying of plague or diphtheria in Paris and Milan. The sick would die slowly, in dark, foul-smelling rooms, covered with leeches and lance-marks. Throughout history, the important disc
overies were made by those who ventured upon the unspeakable. I knew it was so, even then, and I wanted to stay behind after the class, to tell Miss Matheson what I knew. I suppose I wanted to impress her, too. I can see that. Looking back, I understand that all I wanted from her was a reaction of some kind, even if it was nothing more than shock, or dismay. Yet, when the moment came, all I could say was that I didn’t agree with the poet, that I thought science was the most valuable tool we had, if we wanted to know the world. Miss Matheson smiled that smile of hers, and I fled in confusion.