The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  This little speech wasn’t doing anything for my levels of anxiety. ‘I knew Roy before he was banged up. Hospitalised, I mean. I know this isn’t a prison.’

  She looked at me suspiciously. ‘He’s been inside a lo-o-ong time.’

  ‘It was a good while ago when I knew him,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe the Roy I used to know has changed a little. But he’s hardly Hannibal Lecter.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ she said, starting off down a polished-floor corridor. ‘He’s much more dangerous than that.’

  I padded after her in silence, considerably discommoded by this assessment. We turned a corner and into a nurse station that could have been transplanted from a regular hospital. Two orderlies stood, leaning on the counter. A male nurse sat behind, with a mug of tea in his hand. ‘This one’s orange,’ said my chaperone. ‘Here to see Curtius.’

  All three facial expressions shifted in unison. ‘Oh,’ said the nurse.

  ‘Hi there!’ I tried. ‘My name’s Charles.’

  ‘Charles,’ said the smaller of the two orderlies. ‘That’s the feller.’

  ‘That’s?’ I prompted.

  ‘He’s been talking about you. Curtius. He is expecting you.’

  ‘Of course he is,’ I said brightly. The Institute had been in touch with him, evidently, telling him that I was coming. Or he had been in touch with them. Either way, it might have been nice to keep me in the loop. I stood up straighter. ‘Don’t look so doomy,’ I said. ‘I knew Roy before he was admitted. He’s only a little feller. How much damage can he do me?’

  All four of them looked at me: the only word to describe it would be agog. ‘You been briefed?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘He says he’s been briefed,’ said the guard who had brought me over. ‘Orange,’ she said again.

  ‘I was briefed,’ I lied, again.

  ‘Look,’ said the larger of the two orderlies, in a voice like a laden sack being dragged over gravel. ‘You look like you’re no stranger to a fight.’ He nodded at my face. He wasn’t the first person to misread the significance of the scars in this manner; though the truth is I’ve never once been in a fight in my life. ‘You’re confident you can handle yourself. Fine. What I’m saying is: don’t trust that confidence. His manner of fighting is …’ He looked at his colleague for help, and when he shrugged he rolled his eyes.

  ‘Don’t touch him, don’t give him anything, don’t even think of touching his restraints,’ said the nurse, getting to his feet.

  ‘Restraints?’

  ‘You want one of us in there with you?’ asked the smaller of the orderlies.

  ‘He’s orange,’ said the guard, before I could answer. Apparently this meant no.

  The nurse led me down a corridor of hefty, locked doors, and stopped at the end. Slapped on the door with a meaty palm. ‘Roy, it’s your visitor?’

  Barely audible through the door I heard: ‘Charles?’

  ‘That’s the geezer.’ The long key went in, and the lock turned, and the nurse caught my eye. ‘Don’t know why we bother with these locks,’ he said to me, gnomically. It was, I suppose, his way of saying good luck.

  I stepped through, and the door thudded behind me.

  ‘Hello, Charles,’ said Roy.

  ‘Roy,’ I said, and nodded.

  He was sitting on his bed, with a book on his lap. There were, I saw, a lot of books: fat copies of philosophical tomes, some in German. There was a round-shouldered desk, but no computer. The room was fitted with a single window with a view across a down-sloping lawn interrupted by its white metal bars. There was a commode in the corner. And there was Roy himself, seated, looking expectantly at me.

  I experienced two related reactions. One was surprise at how different he looked. For one thing, all his hair was gone, and his face had collapsed into a series of lines and wrinkles, like cross-hatching in a line drawing. His bald head showed off the big dent he had acquired in Antarctica, and the declivity was not advantageous as far as improving his good looks. His body, never large, seemed to have shrunk into itself: skinny arms and legs, though his belly was round as a cannonball. It had been decades, of course, since I had last seen him; and I daresay I looked as weird and shrivelled to him as he did to me. And as soon as I registered how old he looked, a second realisation hustled up upon me: it was obvious from one glimpse that, in essence, he hadn’t changed at all. His sly eyes twinkled up at me.

  ‘Oh my dear fellow,’ he said, setting his book aside. ‘Those scars! Are they down to me?’

  ‘To be fair,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am sorry. Please, sit down.’

  There was only one chair, so I pulled it away from the bed, away from him, and sat down. My heart was pounding like the drum intro to the Clash’s version of ‘I Fought the Law’. After what happened to my face, many of my pores were sealed up, and that fact means I’m more prone to sweat under the arms and across my back than I used to be. I could feel the tickling sensation.

  Roy swung his legs out and sat on the edge of the bed. Turning through ninety degrees, which this entailed, revealed just how extensive was the valley in his skull. I also noticed for the first time that he was chained to the bedhead. It was a long chain, presumably to give him the latitude to reach the commode and the desk. But, weirdly, it went from the bed not to a handcuff, but to what looked like a piercing in the side of Roy’s wrist. He saw me staring at this, and held the wrist up. ‘Pretty, no? They anaesthetised me before they did the piercing. I’m not an expert on tattoos and piercings and so on, but I believe they are usually administered without pain relief.’

  ‘I’ve heard as much,’ I said.

  He peered at the piercing. ‘It goes right through. Through the space between the radius and ulna, near the point of distal radio-ulnar articulation.’

  ‘And they preferred this to a regular handcuff, because …?’

  He blinked, slowly. Looked at me, snake-like. Blinked again. ‘I fear they don’t trust their handcuffs to hold me,’ he said. His voice was exactly what it had always been. Hearing it again, after all these years, took me right back to that base. The half-year-long austral night, and Roy’s weird tics and mannerisms. I had a brief dizzying sense of faintness. Even after all my time at the Institute, I hadn’t really taken what I had learned and reflected it back upon the Antarctic events. But, looking at Roy now, I thought to myself: did he really do it, back then? Did he get close to the thing in itself? Was that what I saw? The horror, the horror.

  ‘They, uh, looking after you here?’ I said. ‘Like a nice hotel?’ It was a fatuous thing to say; but my heart was hammering inside me. The voice in my head was saying: get out, get out, get out.

  Roy smiled thinly. ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ he said. ‘They certainly attend to me. Provide for all eventualities. Although, as the man himself says: Ich habe nicht nöthig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann.’

  ‘No idea what that means, Roy.’

  At this he made a gun-shape out of his right hand, and aimed it at me. ‘Charles, Charles. They didn’t send you down here to shoot—’ and he pretended to fire off his imaginary gun ‘—the breeze, now, did they?’ I flinched, I confess it.

  ‘They were pretty bloody oblique about the whole thing,’ I said, in a louder-than-I-intended voice. ‘Look. You know what they’re about – research-wise, I mean. They seemed to think that you could help them.’

  ‘So I can. They’ve often approached me. I’m not boasting when I say they need my help very badly. But I wouldn’t speak to them. For years I simply ignored them. Then I decided: I would speak – but only to you. So they found you for me! Can’t fault them for effort.’

  ‘Jesus, Roy,’ I said, a tremor troubling my left leg. I kicked the heel down on to the floor to try and rid myself of it. ‘Why me? Finish what you started, is that it?’

  He looked very grave at this, and said, ‘That’s a hurtful thing to say, Charles,’ and he pouted. ‘To apologise, of course. I thought – back then, down there – I though
t I needed to be solus to access it – them, the thing – the thing itself. I thought two consciousnesses would muddle the approach. But I know a lot more about it now, and I see I was wrong. There was no need to dispose of you.’

  ‘So it was all a misunderstanding,’ I said, in a tight voice. ‘That’s heartening.’

  ‘Don’t be snide! You and I have shared something, Charles. We’re the only two in the entire world! There will always be that link. As for the Institute …’ He trailed off.

  ‘Go on,’ I prompted him. ‘What am I to tell them?’

  ‘Well,’ he said gloomily. ‘A deal’s a deal. They located you. I suppose I must help them.’ He ran the fingers of his unchained hand up and down his tether.

  ‘Great. They’ll be delighted to hear that. I’m sure.’ I found myself wondering how to get out. Did I just bang on the inside of the door and call for it to be unlocked? Could I do that without sounding desperate? ‘Well: it’s— I was going to say good to see you again. But good. I don’t know if that’s. That’s the. Mot juste. Let’s settle instead on, well, it’s certainly been interesting.’

  ‘Don’t be in such a hurry, Charles,’ Roy said, with reptilian suavity. ‘Don’t you have something for me?’

  ‘My liver and nice bottle of Chianti? No early Christmas presents I’m afraid.’

  ‘The phone,’ he said.

  Almost as if impelled by a force other than my conscious mind, my hand went to my pocket and brought out the phone.

  ‘They expressly told me not to give you this,’ I said.

  ‘They did?’ Roy replied, looking puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean the staff here did. Well of course, they did!’

  For some reason, this has a mollifying effect upon my anxiety. Slowly, with a fuzzy sense of the oddity of my own action, I held the phone out to Roy, holding it by one corner between thumb and forefinger. Roy reached out and took hold of the opposite corner with the same digits. For a moment we were in proxy contact, like Michelangelo’s Sistine God and Adam. But no spark ran through the metal, or plastic, or whatever the phone was made of. Then I relinquished my hold, and Roy slipped the phone into the chest pocket of his uniform.

  ‘Most kind,’ he said, in a bored voice. ‘I’m going to have to go over there now.’ He gestured with his head. ‘Back on the bed up, right up I mean, by the wall, so Reggie can see I’m not near the door when he looks through the peephole. Rat-a-tat and say you’re finished here, and he’ll unlock.’

  ‘That’s it?’ I said, sitting back, feeling a weird gush of relief in my breast. ‘Are we over?’

  ‘Dear, dear Charles,’ said Roy, staring ahead by way of pointedly not looking at me. ‘After what we shared we can never really be over. Au revoir, my friend. Auf Wiedersehen. And sehen we shall, sooner than you think.’

  ‘Not if I sehen you first.’

  Roy went back to the bed. I stood and stepped over to the door. Knocked. After a hiatus, the nurse let me out. The guard was there, and she led me back through all the various locked doors. Not a word was spoken. In a sort of daze I discovered myself in the car park. I felt rather discombobulated, but also – frankly – relieved. I was still alive, at any rate.

  So I climbed back in the car and drove out of the complex. It was a ten-minute drive through early afternoon Bracknell streets to my flat. I parked on the road, and walked away from the immaculate brand-new automobile with an unprecedented sense of dread. What if it got nicked? I’d never had a car worth any kind of money, before, and mine was a rough sort of area. What if sheer envy keyed it, daggered the tyres, scratched the windscreen? Not that there was anything I could do to prevent such eventuality, except trust to luck.

  I let myself in to my flat, and breathed the unfamiliar air. An English July afternoon. The light coming through the big windows an aquarium light. I turned on my laptop, and waited for it to boot – slowly, slowly. Whilst it was working its way, its fan wheezy, almost visibly spitting dust out of its side, I thought to check the wallet they had given me. Eight hundred pounds in fifties and twenties. I counted it twice, I was so surprised. I googled Roy; but there was nothing very much online, except old stories concerning our Antarctic misadventure, and a few newer rehashes of those old stories.

  I took a nap, and when I awoke it was dark outside. There was nothing to eat in the flat, so I got back in the car and drove to Reading. There were, at that time, no restaurants in Bracknell, it being in the process of being comprehensively redeveloped, with more than half the town centre a muddy building site. And since I had £800 in cash in my pocket I didn’t feel like a McDonald’s or take-away pizza. So I parked and ate at a posh restaurant, and even treated myself – the first alcohol to cross my lips in years – to a glass of wine. I wandered about Reading for a while watching the romantic couples arm in arm, the groups of lads on a pub crawl, the office parties shrieking and laughing. None of this had anything to do with me. I kept thinking of my encounter with Roy. Though I’d walked away with a light heart, it occurred to me that there was some significant residuum of dread at the encounter.

  I got back in my car and drove home and watched the telly.

  Sleep was elusive, in part because there was a childish Christmas-is-coming sense bubbling somewhere in my torso. Absurd in a man my age. In the morning I tidied the flat and rather ostentatiously turned everything off at the plugs. I even draped a spare sheet over the table, the laptop under it. As far as I could see there was going to be no reason for me to return to that place for a very long time. My base now was the Institute, and the countryside outside Bristol, and Irma – if not every night, then at least as many nights as she could be prevailed upon to visit.

  The car was whole and undamaged in the bright morning light, and I got in. The only ointment-fly was the malfunction of the sat nav. I instructed it to return home, and it told me that the destination wasn’t logged. So I typed in ‘the Institute’ but this had no effect. On my way down I had driven through a small village almost immediately on leaving the Institute. I typed in its name: nothing. More than that I could not recall. I thought to google the postcode of the nearby village, but of course I had given my phone to Roy. I even debated with myself as to whether I should go back into my flat and boot up my laptop to search for the postcode, but then I decided that was foolish. I had driven down only the day before; surely I could remember the way back today.

  So, feeling a sunshiny sensation of joy in my breast (and how long it had been since I felt that), I pulled away and drove to the motorway. Traffic was light and I zipped along. The fullness, from which negation was poised to detract, filled me.

  I came off the M4 at the junction I had joined it, and for several miles drove recognisable roads. Then, rather frustratingly, I got lost. For twenty minutes I drove and turned, and drove, and turned back. Finally, annoyed at the selective memory of my supposed state-of-the-art sat nav, I pulled into a garage and bought a map of the local area. Using this, and with the attendant’s help in pinpointing the location of the petrol station, I made my way to the nearby village. I recognised the church, and the pub (the Poet’s Rest), but several forays into the surrounding country lanes drew blanks. I passed several farms and one large concrete water tower like a giant robot cock. But turn and turn about as I might, I didn’t seem to be able to locate the Institute. It was not marked on the map – since the thing was copyrighted to the 1990s this did not surprise me – but the buildings and grounds were very extensive, and surely the law of averages would mean I should eventually rub up against the perimeter wall. But nothing.

  Finding myself driving back into the village for the third time, I stopped and asked directions of an elderly man out walking his dog. But he had, he claimed, never heard of the Institute. ‘Do you live here?’ Man and boy, he replied; seventy years. His father had been a GI, his mother a local girl. He hadn’t seen his dad after his own eighteenth birthday. Not even once. Back in Missouri. ‘Surely,’ I interrupted him, ‘you’ve heard of the Institute? It’s a very large facility.
’ Never been nothing like that here.

  This was daft. I cruised around some more, and then dived back into the countryside. On this foray I was suddenly reminded of an H. G. Wells story I read once. The story is called ‘The Door in the Wall’, and concerns a nineteenth-century fellow, in, I dare say, frock coat and dour hat (I don’t believe the story specifies) who discovers a certain door in a certain wall that leads him to a blissful place. But he makes the mistake of coming back into the real world, and thereafter no matter how long he lives or how assiduously he searches he cannot find the door again. The tone of melancholy resignation with which the (now elderly) narrator tells his own story is the strength of Wells’s writing at his best. But, I told myself, it was daft. The story was a metaphor. My life was no metaphor. My life was the real thing. As I was having this thought, the words forming distinctly inside my head, that U2 song came on the radio, ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’. I swore at the radio.

  For the fourth time I found myself driving, despite myself, back into the village, after following the Ariadnean thread of the country roads. It was now noon, and a lanky youth was putting out a folding sign beside the door of the pub, so I parked and went inside. That strong stench of hops and last night’s beer. Sunlight shining through the windows and coming so brightly off the waxed tabletops it hurt the eyes. ‘It’ll be a minute,’ said the youth, in the gloom behind the bar. He aimed a remote control at a telly on a bracket high up the wall.

  I asked him about the Institute. He stared at me with half an inch of mouth showing between his lips. I tried him again. The set clicked and Sky Sports shone into life, the commentator mid-sentence. ‘Don’t know it,’ he said. ‘Though I’ve only lived here a year or so.’

  ‘Is there anyone around who knows the area better?’ I pressed.

  ‘I tell a lie,’ he said. ‘I’ve been here over eighteen months. In fact, nearer two years than one.’

  ‘I’ve been driving around,’ I told him. ‘Getting kind of lost. Any help would be much appreciated.’

  ‘It was early spring,’ he told me. ‘I remember, on account of I sowed some small salad in the garden out the back. So I suppose not so many as eighteen. Meant to do the same this year but forgot. It gets good sun, that little plot. Pint, is it?’