I, Etcetera

by Susan Sontag

  Outdoors, thoughts of Utterson spring less frequently to mind. Other risks become more attractive. Jekyll saunters through the woods, as carefree as he’s ever likely to be, the astringent taste of liberty in his mouth. By three, breaking a halfhearted promise to his wife not to attempt anything dangerous in the way of mountaineering, he is almost to the top of a steep mountain. This climb would normally be no grand exploit for Jekyll, a competent Alpinist since his year as a postgraduate medical student in Vienna. What does make a mishap possible is that Jekyll is taking someone much less experienced up with him: Richard Enfield, his wife’s cousin, who is sharing the cabin with them for the first week.

  Jekyll advances nimbly, hand over hand, with Enfield following, dogged will power firmly in control of his neglected suburban body. Glancing below, Jekyll spies Enfield absorbed in a duel with a boulder, slowed to a crawl. Jekyll stops instantly, to maintain the right degree of slackness in the rope tying them together. Sure that his cousin-in-law is not in serious trouble, Jekyll isn’t going to embarrass Enfield by pointing out an easy way to clamber past the obstacle, and turns away, splendidly vertical.

  Jekyll inhales joyously. His torso is free as long as his left elbow stays braced in a crevasse in the rock face. His feet feel reassuringly heavy, sure, the soles of his climbing boots secured, almost welded to the narrow ledge on which he stands, waiting for Enfield to heave his other leg over the boulder and scramble up beside him. He checks the tautness of the rope that rises from his waist to the loop he’s thrown to a cornice above, then yanks hard. The loop holds. He looks upward. The sun is still high. Dry-mouthed, contemptuous of his craving for a cigarette, Jekyll pulls more clean air into his long, robust body. He is not thinking of Utterson. He would be, though, if a substitution could be made, if Utterson were in Enfield’s place, tied waist to waist to Jekyll, equally inept. For then Jekyll could imagine cutting the rope and letting Utterson fend for himself during this last, most strenuous part of the ascent. But he would be unlikely to go so far as to imagine Utterson panicking, losing his grip, scraping the air, shrieking like a flayed pig, hurtling from rock to rock down to the fjord below.

  Tanned and fit, back from his Canadian holiday, Jekyll is loitering on an empty street below the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He’s waiting for Hyde, who is supposed to bring a message. Hyde is usually late, but not this late. Jekyll has skipped lunch to keep this date with Hyde, who, by insisting on meeting at the World Trade Center, which is out of everyone’s way, and on a Sunday, shows that he hasn’t lost his yen for the picturesque rendezvous. Utterson, who drove into town this morning with a sample entourage and has not skipped one meal in the past thirty years, is mid-lunch at the Russian Tea Room. He is sucking on an unlit pipe, hungry-eyed, truculently waiting for his second order of borscht and pirojkis. It is possible that a line extends from the flattish back of Utterson’s head to Jekyll’s striped tie or the laces of his new oxfords. But Jekyll doesn’t consider this possibility. He’s too preoccupied with Hyde.

  The young man Jekyll expects to materialize at any moment no longer makes it into town often; today, if he comes, it’s as a special favor to his respectable would-be alter ego. Also, if he comes, he won’t look the way he is usually pictured. In the old days, the days of his citified wickedness, Hyde got the reputation of being big and hulking. But this was a fantasy concocted from nineteenth-century middle-class nightmares about the immigrant urban poor, and diffused in our own century by Hollywood monster movies. The truth, which once perplexed Jekyll, is that Hyde is small, sickly, and younger than he is. “Naturally,” Utterson has explained. “The evil part of your nature is less developed than the good part.” Jekyll is not convinced by Utterson’s allegorical view of their physical disparity. For one thing, he finds it too flattering to himself, too dismissive of Hyde. Jekyll has not been all that good. And hasn’t Hyde been delinquent enough? Jekyll suspects that Hyde’s dwarfish stature and feeble stamina have a more banal, simply physical cause: a bad case of childhood rheumatic fever that was misdiagnosed by the school pediatrician and neglected by his ignorant parents. Hyde looks more underprivileged than monstrous. His fanglike teeth are not so much bestial as bad, despite extensive dental work done in his early twenties, which Jekyll paid for; and he still suffers from bleeding gums. The quantity and distribution of Hyde’s body hair have also been exaggerated. It’s true that Hyde is hirsute and Jekyll is, for a Caucasian male, relatively hairless. However, while Jekyll has a well-barbered head of thick brown hair with no white hairs showing, which hasn’t begun to recede at the forehead and temples, the younger man’s greasy black shoulder-length hair is already starting to fall out. Utterson is bald, entirely bald. Jekyll is not wearing a hat, for if he were it would be blown away.

  Jekyll steadies himself against the unseasonable July wind to keep from being pushed over to the tower wall. Perhaps a hurricane is blowing up prematurely from the Caribbean. Just as he is about to give up and go home, he glimpses the puny figure of his old protégé, who still affects the black cape he stole years ago from an East Village boutique, stumping along at a good walk. Jekyll waves. Hyde hurries near, then nearer, then speeds right past him—as if he didn’t see him at all. “Wait!” Jekyll shouts, grabbing for the billowing black cape. Hyde breaks into a lope, but Jekyll catches up with him at the far corner.

  “I’m in a jam,” Hyde whines. “I can’t stop.”

  “I must talk to you,” says Jekyll.

  “Then come on up to my country place,” Hyde barks hoarsely. He seems winded. “This dude is waiting for me now—”

  “It’s Utterson. Right?”

  “Hell, no! Stop hassling me!” Hyde feints, eludes Jekyll’s grasp, and lunges around the corner. Disappointed, Jekyll lets him escape. He crosses the street thoughtfully, enters a cafeteria, sits at a window table, and asks for an iced coffee. At the moment the waitress arrives with his order, he sees the bony figure in the cape veering around the block again, panting, but still keeping the same rapid pace. Jekyll lights a cigarette, then stubs it out (he’s almost quit smoking), sips his coffee, and waits. The drink is two-thirds ice, most of which he removes with his fingers and drops into the ashtray. A few minutes later, Hyde rounds the corner again.

  Jekyll is willing to suppose that Hyde will keep circling the block all afternoon, and feels like watching a while longer. But the waitress has come over and presented him with the check so that he will vacate his table. Indignant, Jekyll points out that the cafeteria is almost deserted. She won’t be budged. “One beverage is worth fifteen minutes,” she recites. “It’s a rule of the management. I don’t make the rules around here.”

  “But you can break the rules,” Jekyll says.

  “How can I do that?” she answers.

  Jekyll pauses, debating whether he should stick to his principles or order another undrinkable iced coffee. It is conceivable that, with the cord that might extend from the harness of a parachute that Jekyll could be wearing (in case he might be so foolish as to be tempted to leap from the top of the World Trade Center) to Utterson’s left wrist, provided that at this moment Utterson is at the estate out at Oyster Bay (but he isn’t; he is noisily drinking his third bowl of borscht and munching his eighth pirojki in midtown Manhattan), something could happen that would stop Hyde dead in his tracks. For if the rope were properly tied and Utterson were in the place where he usually is, which would put him north-northwest of the cafeteria where Jekyll sits, then he, Jekyll, could trip Hyde the next time he rushed around the block. But for this feat he would need Utterson’s help, and Jekyll is never sure how well disposed toward him Utterson really is.

  “What’s happened to your confidence in me?” That’s Utterson speaking. It is the first word he has directed to Jekyll since Jekyll took a seat at the long oval table in the pseudo-medieval refectory out at Oyster Bay. Utterson is entertaining a Mr. Carew, ambivalent admirer and prospective pupil, who, being a senior trade-book editor at an important publishing house, is arr
anging for the paperback reissue of Utterson’s long-out-of-print, thousand-page summum, The Strange Case of Cain and Abel; and Jekyll, along with three staff members and a handful of pupils in residence at the Institute, has been convened for lunch. Utterson is in his usual chair. Toward the end of the meal, he has been garrulously calculating the huge royalties the book is going to earn and lamenting his debts. Jekyll sits in one of the straight-backed chairs designed by Utterson for his pupils.

  “My boy, I’m going to tell you something that, really, you are not eligible to know. Only those who are more developed, who have advanced further in the Work, know it.” Two pupils lingering at the table stare avidly at Utterson, enviously at Jekyll. Without glancing at their side of the table, Utterson instructs one to wait for him in the Study House and the other to mow the front lawns, and doesn’t continue until after they push back their chairs carefully, get up, and leave. “I receive messages from the future.”

  Even when frustrated by Utterson’s habit of claiming anterior knowledge of everything that others tell him, Jekyll can’t be as skeptical as he might like, because Utterson has so often demonstrated cool, inexplicable powers of clairvoyance. But he has never heard Utterson state his claim so impudently.

  “Well?” says Utterson.

  “I’m flattered…”

  “You think too much about the body, Henry,” Utterson says impatiently. “That feels natural to a doctor, but it’s one-sided. You’ve never grasped a spiritual truth.”

  Jekyll bows his head at Utterson’s reproach, while stubbornly continuing to think it unjust. This position gives him a mild cramp in his shoulder muscles, so he straightens up. “And the secret?” he says.

  Utterson is sitting cross-legged on the raised platform in the center of the circular Study House, addressing some pupils. “Do what you will,” he says, “and you’ll find out how little you can will.”

  To English, which isn’t his native language (as Utterson was not his name), he imparts a solemn and musical intonation. “Only a tiny part of your life is under your control,” he declares. “As you are, you have no will.”

  He also says: “Try to know what you’re feeling.” He explains: “Observe yourself, yes. But as if you were a machine. You are nothing but your behavior.”

  Changing the metaphor, he adds: “And your behavior, your words are all aped.”

  And later: “Introspection is bad. You have nothing to look into.”

  And still later: “Begin with the body. It’s the only tool you have.”

  Meanwhile, having finished his afternoon stint at the clinic, Jekyll is down to sweat pants and shower clogs and is working out in a private gym on Lexington Avenue. From the other side of the room, the Nicaraguan coach compliments him on his skill with the punching bag. With each punch that he throws, Jekyll feels the blood circulating more happily in his body. He thinks of Hyde, who was rarely able to overwhelm his victims by sheer physical force, but usually had to use some nasty weapon; and, even then, needed first to weaken them with the shock of his tense, misbegotten face, his stooped, undernourished figure, his outlandish, neo-diabolical garb. He had always expected Hyde to fill out, to become bigger, taller—if not simply with passing time, then as the result of gymnastics (“movements,” Utterson calls them) that Hyde did when he was briefly in residence at the Institute. Spiritual gymnastics is not enough, Jekyll concludes, hardly for the first time, throwing a last vicious right hook at the punching bag. Utterson, his broad face turning brick pink from an hour’s nonstop talking in the Study House, ducks slightly, rubs his shiny hard scalp, then sways with laughter. He, in his turn, concludes that he is getting careless. And that from now on he’d better give more thought to Jekyll.

  As Hyde takes Jekyll for granted, the indifference of the ugly to the genteel, Jekyll envies Hyde, the envy of the almost middle-aged for the young. In spite of his confident, responsive body and a driving schedule of work, Jekyll regards himself as low in vitality (“fifty watts,” Utterson once jeered behind his back); no matter how exemplary a physician he becomes, he accuses himself of a chronic deficit of initiative. Hyde agrees. Utterson’s Institute for Deprogramming Potential Human Beings attracts far too many people of this type.

  Hyde, of course, so far as he could be counted as having passed through Utterson’s hands, would be an exception. Despite his frail build and chronic colds, Hyde is someone who always finds his second wind. He has always been enterprising. When he first came to Jekyll’s attention, referred to the clinic for a skin disease by a psychiatrist at the High School of Industrial Trades, Hyde already seemed grownup, though he was only stealing cars then, and was just assembling his lucrative stable of thirteen-year-old boy and girl prostitutes. Raised in an impoverished family (his father is a janitor) with many children, he had to learn early to fight for whatever he wanted. Jekyll comes from a prosperous home (his father still commutes every day from Darien to Wall Street) and has one sister, who is an eminent biochemist, and no brothers. Utterson, who long ago changed his name to Gabriel Utterson from Gavril Uniades, claims to be a foundling. He denies indignantly that he could have had any sisters or brothers (other than his spiritual brethren in faraway Tibet, where he studied Transcendental Medicine forty years ago) but is given to boasting on almost any occasion about the swarm of illegitimate children he’s fathered in the State of New York. Jekyll assumes that Poole, the very young pupil trembling on the brink of puberty, who sleeps on a cot in the hall outside Utterson’s door and acts as his valet, is actually one of these bastards.

  Cleaning up after Utterson occupies most of Poole’s day, which starts when, each morning, Utterson shouts for him to enter, and Poole does, to find the bed in violent, wet disarray. There are acrid, heavy stains on the other furniture and on the carpet. There is excrement on the walls of his dressing room. As for the bathroom!—Poole has visions of great involuntary physiological epics enacted nightly in the dressing room and bathroom. Or Utterson may be aiming consciously to destroy these rooms—perhaps to test the development of Poole’s will, his “true will,” as Utterson would put it, as the boy labors in his service. But either way, there would be no point in beginning the actual cleaning until Utterson has finished his breakfast, which is always taken in bed, for merely drinking coffee can produce a holocaust: coffee spattered all over the room as well as in the bed. When, as he sometimes does, Utterson takes his late-afternoon coffee in his room in the presence of members of his staff and a few pupils, the bed must be remade with fresh sheets a second time. Though often questioned by the irreverent and the curious, Poole—conscious of the great honor of serving Utterson—refuses to describe the exact state of Utterson’s quarters. And it is doubtful whether the details would give much precision to the persistent rumors that far more goes on there than the consumption of coffee and the denouement of Utterson’s digestive dramas. All that Poole could truthfully testify to—from the evidence of each morning’s disorder, its variety, its thickness—is that almost any human activity could have taken place there the night before.

  Utterson is being served eggs, steak, and coffee on a tray. Someone is lying next to Utterson, buried under the heap of blankets and befouled sheets, but Poole can’t make out who it is. Well trained, he does not guess. The boy goes into the dressing room and surveys the walls to see if he’ll need a stepladder this morning. Meanwhile, Jekyll gets out of bed delicately so as not to wake his wife, tiptoes across their bedroom, and goes through the apartment to the kitchen to make breakfast. He is walking barefoot not for fear of disturbing Utterson in Oyster Bay, who’s already awake anyway, gulping his coffee directly from the battered old thermos bottle, but because he, Jekyll, revels in the feel of the pile carpet under his feet.

  Sweating, white-lipped, Jekyll is jogging in Central Park. It’s just twilight. A thin clay-colored pall lowers over the trees, but the wind is continually slicing into and redistributing the smog, so that Jekyll runs metronomically through many degrees and hues of twilight, some black, some
dark green, some reddish-brown, all back-lit by the cubes of electric brightness multiplying minute by minute on the stolid ramparts along Fifth Avenue. Jekyll continues, paralleling the Reservoir. The gravel sounds under his sneakers, and it would be foolish to think that someone is following him; other people jog in the park, too. It’s in the park that Hyde used to lurk, preying on strollers, crazies, baby nurses, and joggers. But Jekyll will stroll or jog here at any hour. He is not afraid. Ultimately, Jekyll has learned, one is only afraid of oneself. He has mastered the terror of Hyde, he has mastered himself. In Jekyll’s schedule, as in the normal schedule of any alert city dwellers, there are always slots for danger. Jekyll keeps jogging. Then the voice speaks to him.

  Is this a voice in my mind, Jekyll asks himself.

  Once there were other voices that came and accused him, but Jekyll had decided—after a complex procedure in which he demanded that each voice accredit itself—that all these voices were interior voices. He dismissed them. They went. Now, with this one, he is not so sure.

  Jekyll slows down. He has glimpsed a pair of feet in high heels between two bushes. Run! No, stop. He retraces his steps, grim-mouthed, his pulse leaping. Face down behind the bushes, moaning, is a black woman in a tight red skirt and pink satin blouse. Jekyll kneels next to the open purse lying at her side, and turns her over. She looks about forty-five, shows the usual signs of Cushing’s syndrome, and is bleeding from a ragged cut on her face and a deep slash on her left arm. Jekyll stands and steps back onto the path, looking about to see if there is anyone to assist him. The woman moans. The twilight is advancing languidly into darkness. Nobody is in sight.