The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4: Trips: 1972-73

by Robert Silverberg

  What a strange resemblance there is, at times, between April and Irene!

  How confusing for me to confuse them. How dangerous for me.

  —It’s the riskiest kind of therapy you could have chosen, Dr. Bjornstrand.

  —Risky for me, or risky for her?

  —Risky both for you and for your patient, I’d say.

  —So what else is new?

  —You asked me for an impartial evaluation, Dr. Bjornstrand. If you don’t care to accept my opinion—

  —I value your opinion highly, Erik.

  —But you’re going to go through with the therapy as presently planned?

  —Of course I am.

  This is the moment of splashdown.

  I hit the water perfectly and go slicing through the sea’s shining surface with surgical precision, knifing fifty meters deep, eighty, a hundred, cutting smoothly through the oceanic epithelium and the sturdy musculature beneath. Very well done, Dr. Bjornstrand. High marks for form.

  Perhaps this is deep enough.

  I pivot, kick, turn upward, clutch at the brightness above me. I may have overextended myself, I realize. My lungs are on fire and the sky, so recently my home, seems terribly far away. But with vigorous strokes I pull myself up and come popping into the air like a stubborn cork.

  I float idly a moment, catching my breath. Then I look around. The ferocious eye of the sun regards me from a late-morning height. The sea is warm and gentle, undulating seductively. There is an island only a few hundred meters away: an inviting beach of bright sand, a row of slender palms farther back. I swim toward it. As I near the shore, the bottomless dark depths give way to a sandy outlying sunken shelf, and the hue of the sea changes from deep blue to light green. Yet it is taking longer to reach land than I had expected. Perhaps my estimate of the distance was overly optimistic; for all my efforts, the island seems to be getting no closer. At moments it actually appears to be retreating from me. My arms grow heavy. My kick becomes sluggish. I am panting, wheezing, sputtering; something throbs behind my forehead. Suddenly, though, I see sun-streaked sand just below me. My feet touch bottom. I wade wearily ashore and fall to my knees on the margin of the beach.

  —Can I call you April, Miss Lowry?

  —Whatever.

  —I don’t think that that’s a very threatening level of therapist-patient intimacy, do you?

  —Not really.

  —Do you always shrug every time you answer a question?

  —I didn’t know I did.

  —You shrug. You also studiously avoid any show of facial expression. You try to be very unreadable, April.

  —Maybe I feel safer that way.

  —But who’s the enemy?

  —You’d know more about that than I would, doctor.

  —Do you actually think so? I’m all the way over here. You’re right there inside your own head. You’ll know more than I ever will about you.

  —You could always come inside my head if you wanted to.

  —Wouldn’t that frighten you?

  —It would kill me.

  —I wonder, April. You’re much stronger than you think you are. You’re also very beautiful, April. I know, it’s beside the point. But you are.

  It’s just a small island. I can tell that by the way the shoreline curves rapidly away from me. I lie sprawled near the water’s edge, face down, exhausted, fingers digging tensely into the warm moist sand. The sun is strong; I feel waves of heat going thratata thratata on my bare back. I wear only a ragged pair of faded blue jeans, very tight, cut off choppily at the knee. My belt is waterlogged and salt-cracked, as though I was adrift for days before making landfall. Perhaps I was. It’s hard to maintain a reliable sense of time in this place.

  I should get up. I should explore.

  Yes. Getting up, now. A little dizzy, eh? Yes. But I walk steadily up the gentle slope of the beach. Fifty meters inland, the sand shades into sandy soil, loose, shallow; rounded white coral boulders poke through from below. Thirsty soil. Nevertheless, how lush everything is here. A wall of tangled vines and creepers. Long glossy tropical green leaves, smooth-edged, big-veined. The corrugated trunks of the palms. The soft sound of the surf, fwissh, fwissh, underlying all other textures. How blue the sea. How green the sky. Fwissh.

  Is that the image of a face in the sky?

  A woman’s face, yes. Irene? April? The features are indistinct. But I definitely see it, yes, hovering a few hundred meters above the water as if projected from the sun-streaked sheet that is the skin of the ocean: a glow, a radiance, having the form of a delicate face—nostrils, lips, brows, cheeks, certainly a face, and not just one, either, for in the intensity of my stare I cause it to split and then to split again, so that a row of them hangs in the air, ten faces, a hundred, a thousand faces, faces all about me, a sea of faces. They seem quite grave. Smile! On command, the faces smile. Much better. The air itself is brighter for that smile. The faces merge, blur, sharpen, blur again, overlap in part, dance, shimmer, melt, flow. Illusions born of the heat. Daughters of the sun. Sweet mirages. I look past them, higher, into the clear reaches of the cloudless heavens.

  Hawks!

  Hawks here? Shouldn’t I be seeing gulls? The birds whirl and swoop, dark figures against the blinding sky, wings outspread, feathers like fingers. I see their fierce hooked beaks. They snap great beetles from the steaming air and soar away, digesting. Then there are no birds, only the faces, still smiling. I turn my back on them and slowly move off through the underbrush to see what sort of place the sea has given me.

  So long as I stay near the shore, I have no difficulty in walking; cutting through the densely vegetated interior might be a different matter. I sidle off to the left, following the nibbled line of beach. Before I have walked a hundred paces I have made a new discovery: the island is adrift.

  Glancing seaward, I notice that on the horizon there lies a dark shore rimmed by black triangular mountains, one or two days’ sail distant. Minutes ago I saw only open sea in that direction. Maybe the mountains have just this moment sprouted, but more likely the island, spinning slowly in the currents, has only now turned to reveal them. That must be the answer. I stand quite still for a long while and it seems to me that I behold those mountains now from one angle, now from a slightly different one. How else to explain such effects of parallax? The island freely drifts. It moves, and I move with it, upon the breast of the changeless unbounded sea.

  The celebrated young American therapist Richard Bjornstrand commenced his experimental treatment of Miss April Lowry on the third of August, 1987. Within fifteen days the locus of disturbance had been identified, and Dr. Bjornstrand had recommended consciousness-penetration treatment, a technique increasingly popular in the United States. Miss Lowry’s physician was initially opposed to the suggestion, but further consultations demonstrated the potential value of such an approach, and on the nineteenth of September the entry procedures were initiated. We expect further reports from Dr. Bjornstrand as the project develops.

  Leonie said, “But what if you fall in love with her?”

  “What of it?” I asked. “Therapists are always falling in love with their patients. Reich married one of his patients, and so did Fenichel, and dozens of the early analysts had affairs with their patients, and even Freud, who didn’t, was known to observe—”

  “Freud lived a long time ago,” Leonie said.

  I have now walked entirely around the island. The circumambulation took me four hours, I estimate, since the sun was almost directly overhead when I began it and is now more than halfway toward the horizon. In these latitudes I suppose sunset comes quite early, perhaps by half past six, even in summer.

  All during my walk this afternoon the island remained on a steady course, keeping one side constantly toward the sea, the other toward that dark mountain-girt shore. Yet it has continued to drift, for there are minor oscillations in the position of the mountains relative to the island, and the shore itself appears gradually to grow closer. (Alt
hough that may be an illusion.) Faces appear and vanish and reappear in the lower reaches of the sky according to no predictable schedule of event or identity: April, Irene, April, Irene, Irene, April, April, Irene. Sometimes they smile at me. Sometimes they do not. I thought I saw one of the Irenes wink; I looked again and the face was April’s.

  The island, though quite small, has several distinct geographical zones. On the side where I first came ashore there is a row of close-set palms, crown to crown, beyond which the beach slopes toward the sea. I have arbitrarily labeled that side of the island as east. The western side is low and parched, and the vegetation is a tangle of scrub. On the north side is a high coral ridge, flat-faced and involute, descending steeply into the water. White wavelets batter tirelessly against the rounded spires and domes of that pocked coral wall. The island’s southern shore has dunes, quite Saharaesque, their yellowish pink crests actually shifting ever so slightly as I watch. Inland, the island rises to a peak perhaps fifty meters above sea level, and evidently there are deep pockets of retained rainwater in the porous, decayed limestone of the undersurface, for the vegetation is profuse and vigorous. At several points I made brief forays to the interior, coming upon a swampy region of noisy sucking quicksand in one place, a cool dark glade interpenetrated with the tunnels and mounds of termites in another, a copse of wide-branching little fruit-bearing trees elsewhere.

  Altogether the place is beautiful. I will have enough food and drink, and there are shelters. Nevertheless I long already for an end to the voyage. The bare sharp-tipped mountains of the mainland grow ever nearer; someday I will reach the shore, and my real work will begin.

  The essence of this kind of therapy is risk. The therapist must be prepared to encounter forces well beyond his own strength, and to grapple with them in the knowledge that they might readily triumph over him. The patient, for her part, must accept the knowledge that the intrusion of the therapist into her consciousness may cause extensive alterations of the personality, not all of them for the better.

  A bewildering day. The dawn was red stained with purple veins—a swollen, grotesque, traumatic sky. Then came high winds; the palms rippled and swayed and great fronds were torn loose. A lull followed. I feared toppling trees and tidal waves, and pressed inland for half an hour, settling finally in a kind of natural amphitheater of dead old coral, a weathered bowl thrust up from the sea millennia ago. Here I waited out the morning. Toward noon thick dark clouds obscured the heavens. I felt a sense of menace, of irresistible powers gathering their strength, such as I sometimes feel when I hear that tense little orchestral passage late in the Agnus Dei of the Missa Solemnis, and instants later there descended on me hail, rain, sleet, high wind, furious heat, even snow, all weathers at once. I thought the earth would crack open and pour forth magma upon me. It was all over in five minutes, and every trace of the storm vanished. The clouds parted; the sun emerged, looking gentle and innocent; birds of many plumages wheeled in the air, warbling sweetly. The faces of Irene and April, infinitely reduplicated, blinked on and off against the backdrop of the sky. The mountainous shore hung fixed on the horizon, growing no nearer, getting no farther away, as though the day’s turmoils had caused the frightened island to put down roots.

  Rain during the night, warm and steamy. Clouds of gnats. An evil humming sound, greasily resonant, pervading everything. I slept, finally, and was awakened by a sound like a mighty thunderclap, and saw an enormous distorted sun rising slowly in the west.

  We sat by the redwood table on Donald’s patio: Irene, Donald, Erik, Paul, Anna, Leonie, me. Paul and Erik drank bourbon, and the rest of us sipped Shine, the new drink, essence of cannabis mixed with (I think) ginger beer and strawberry syrup. We were very high. “There’s no reason,” I said, “why we shouldn’t avail ourselves of the latest technological developments. Here’s this unfortunate girl suffering from an undeterminable but crippling psychological malady, and the chance exists for me to enter her soul and—”

  “Enter her what?” Donald asked.

  “Her consciousness, her anima, her spirit, her mind, her whatever you want to call it.”

  “Don’t interrupt him,” Leonie said to Donald.

  Irene said, “Will you bring her to Erik for an impartial opinion first, at least?”

  “What makes you think Erik is impartial?” Anna asked.

  “He tries to be,” said Erik coolly. “Yes, bring her to me, Dr. Bjornstrand.”

  “I know what you’ll tell me.”

  “Still. Even so.”

  “Isn’t this terribly dangerous?” Leonie asked. “I mean, suppose your mind became stuck inside her, Richard.”

  “Stuck?”

  “Isn’t that possible? I don’t actually know anything about the process, but—”

  “I’ll be entering her only in the most metaphorical sense,” I said.

  Irene laughed. Anna said, “Do you actually believe that?” and gave Irene a sly look.

  Irene merely shook her head. “I don’t worry about Richard’s fidelity,” she said, drawling her words.

  Her face fills the sky today.

  April. Irene. Whoever she is. She eclipses the sun, and lights the day with her own supernal radiance.

  The course of the island has been reversed, and now it drifts out to sea. For three days I have watched the mountains of the mainland growing smaller. Evidently the currents have changed; or perhaps there are zones of resistance close to the shore, designed to keep at bay such wandering islands as mine. I must find a way to deal with this. I am convinced that I can do nothing for April unless I reach the mainland.

  I have entered a calm place where the sea is a mirror and the sweltering air reflects the images in an infinitely baffling regression. I see no face but my own, now, and I see it everywhere. A million versions of myself dance in the steamy haze. My jaws are stubbled and there is a bright-red band of sunburn across my nose and upper cheeks. I grin and the multitudinous images grin at me. I reach toward them and they reach toward me. No land is in sight, no other islands, nothing, in fact, but this wall of reflections. I feel as though I am penned inside a box of polished metal. My shining image infests the burning atmosphere. I have a constant choking sensation; a terrible languor is coming over me; I pray for hurricanes, waterspouts, convulsions of the ocean bed, any sort of upheaval that will break the savage claustrophobic tension.

  Is Irene my wife? My lover? My companion? My friend? My sister?

  I am within April’s consciousness and Irene is a figment.

  It has begun to occur to me that this may be my therapy rather than April’s.

  I have set to work creating machinery to bring me back to the mainland. All this week I have painstakingly felled palm trees, using a series of blunt, soft hand-axes chipped from slabs of dead coral. Hauling the trees to a promontory of the island’s southern face, I lashed them loosely together with vines, setting them in the water so that they projected from both sides of the headland like the oars of a galley. By tugging at an unusually thick vine that runs down the spine of the whole construction, I am indeed able to make them operate like oars; and I have tied that master vine to an unusually massive palm that sprouts from the central ridge of the promontory. What I have built, in fact, is a kind of reciprocating engine; the currents, stirring the leafy crowns of my felled palms, impart a tension to the vines that link them, and the resistance of the huge central tree to the tug of the master vine causes the felled trees to sweep the water, driving the entire island shoreward. Through purposeful activity, said Goethe, we justify our existence in the eyes of God.

  The “oars” work well. I’m heading toward the mainland once again.

  Heading toward the mainland very rapidly. Too rapidly, it seems. I think I may be caught in a powerful current.

  The current definitely has seized my island and I’m being swept swiftly along, willy-nilly. I am approaching the isle where Scylla waits. That surely is Scylla: that creature just ahead. There is no avoiding her; the force of
the water is inexorable and my helpless oars dangle limply. The many-necked monster sits in plain sight on a barren rock, coiled into herself, waiting. Where shall I hide? Shall I scramble into the underbrush and huddle there until I am past her? Look, there: six heads, each with three rows of pointed teeth, and twelve snaky limbs. I suppose I could hide, but how cowardly, how useless. I will show myself to her. I stand exposed on the shore. I listen to her dread barking. How may I guard myself against Scylla’s fangs? Irene smiles out of the low fleecy clouds. There’s a way, she seems to be saying. I gather a cloud and fashion it into a simulacrum of myself. See: another Bjornstrand stands here, sunburned, half naked. I make a second replica, a third, complete to the stubble, complete to the blemishes. A dozen of them. Passive, empty, soulless. Will they deceive her? We’ll see. The barking is ferocious now. She’s close. My island whips through the channel. Strike, Scylla! Strike! The long necks rise and fall, rise and fall. I hear the screams of my other selves; I see their arms and legs thrashing as she seizes them and lifts them. Them she devours. Me she spares. I float safely past the hideous beast. April’s face, reduplicated infinitely in the blue vault above me, is smiling. I have gained power by this encounter. I need have no further fears: I have become invulnerable. Do your worst, ocean! Bring me the Charybdis. I’m ready. Yes. Bring me to Charybdis.

  The whole, D. H. Lawrence wrote, is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another. I agree. But of course the incongruity is apparent rather than real, else there would be no whole.

  I believe I have complete control over the island now. I can redesign it to serve my needs, and I have streamlined it, making it ship-shaped, pointed at the bow, blunt at the stern. My conglomeration of felled palms has been replaced; now flexible projections of island-stuff flail the sea, propelling me steadily toward the mainland. Broad-leafed shade trees make the heat of day more bearable. At my command fresh-water streams spring from the sand, cool, glistening.