by Susan Sontag
Stooping, Jekyll gathers the woman into his arms, then falls to his knees, then manages to stand up. Since recently he has lifted patients as heavy as she with ease, Jekyll wonders if he is getting out of condition. Still, he is doing better than Utterson would, if Utterson were here, stooping beside a bush, trying to pick up a heavy body. Utterson looks strong, but that’s mainly because he’s fat. And the carbuncle embedded in his right side must pain him sometimes. Should Utterson, because he likes to show off, be trying right now to lift one of his docile pupils above his head, he’d probably keel over, Jekyll thinks with tense pleasure. Jekyll slowly makes his way to the road with his inert burden, looking for a squad car or a taxi.
Jekyll is sitting to one side of the twelve-foot-high fire-place (under the bogus heraldic arms) of the great hall—the main building of the Oyster Bay estate being a Languedoc castle built in the 1920s by a Long Island faucet millionaire, and the rent for the whole property being a sum paid annually by one of Utterson’s most generous admirers, a Texas oil magnate’s widow now living in Bermuda. Utterson, in dinner clothes and a starched shirt, his haunches filling the big upholstered chair opposite Jekyll, is toying with a water pistol. In the far shadows of the room, under an Art Deco stained-glass window depicting the Grail saga in ten panes, a pupil is taking notes. Jekyll has come out to complain about being spied on. He’s sure that his phone is tapped and his mail is being opened.
Utterson, who never expresses astonishment at anything others tell him, and rarely disagrees, smiles ironically this time. “Perhaps you’ve done something to get you in trouble with the civil authorities. Your views on the war, for instance. Or some irregularity in your practice, like prescribing illegal drugs, or not doing enough to prolong the life of a patient with terminal cancer, or—”
“No.” Jekyll shakes his head. “Nothing like that. I’m sure it’s being done by people from the Institute.”
“Wouldn’t I know about it, if that were so?”
“Would you?” asks Jekyll.
“If I can see into the future”—glancing at the pupil in the corner bent over his notebook, Utterson winks at Jekyll—“you might assume that I can see into the present, too.”
“And you don’t see any danger, anyone shadowing me, keeping track of my movements, trying to scare me into giving up what I’d like to do?”
Utterson lets fly one of his celebrated scornful looks. “What about your friend Hyde? I’ve told you he’s dangerous company for you.”
“Nonsense,” says Jekyll. “I never see Hyde any more. And besides, you know what he’s become now. Why, he just”—he pauses—“just goes round and round in circles.”
“Don’t grin like an idiot. You didn’t say anything funny.”
“I did,” says Jekyll.
“I, I, I,” Utterson roars. “Do you hear yourself?” He aims the water pistol at Jekyll. “Who has the right to say ‘I’?” He slams it to the floor. “Not you! Do you hear? That’s a right that has to be earned!”
Jekyll stares back at him defiantly. “And Ed Hyde?” he says. “Can Hyde say ‘I’?”
“Why not?” Utterson replies. “As long as he keeps—as you say—going around in circles. You understand now?”
Jekyll doesn’t understand. Something better than understanding has happened. Utterson has put an idea in Jekyll’s head. But since it’s not an idea he intended to put there, it doesn’t make his large bald head any lighter; it only makes Jekyll’s head heavier. If Jekyll bounded out of his chair, flung himself onto the upholstered chair with the man in it opposite him, and knocked his heavy head against Utterson’s—but he must do it right now, while the balance of physical forces has tilted ever so slightly in his, Jekyll’s, favor—it is conceivable that Utterson’s head might crack open, all his ideas spill out, and Jekyll, not Utterson, possess the secrets of the harmonious development of humankind. But Jekyll is not sure he wants the responsibility of having all that wisdom in his keeping. Look at the repulsively contradictory, heathen creature it’s made of Utterson: someone both taciturn and voluble, mercenary and ascetic, glib and wise, plebeian and princely, obscene and pure, indolent and energetic, cunning and naïve, snobbish and democratic, unfeeling and compassionate, impractical and shrewd, irritable and patient, capricious and reliable, sickly and sturdy, young and old, empty and full, heavy as cement and light as helium.
Utterson once said, “I am a human being without quotation marks.” Jekyll holds no such exalted view of himself. It’s enough that Jekyll has pilfered his new idea about Hyde; and, in back of that, in case the first idea fails, another idea. About Hyde.
Jekyll is visiting his sister, who works at Rockefeller University, with his first idea. It’s to ask if she and her colleagues can devote some of their spare time to developing a formula (to be ingested as a pill, capsule, suppository, or syrup) that would sack the very fortress of identity. What he has in mind is a formula that would enable him occasionally to become his young friend Hyde. Become Hyde physically, he means. For Jekyll is willing—from time to time, when he thinks it might be useful or stimulating, or simply when he senses that he’s languishing—actually to inhabit Hyde’s runty body. The prize is the increment in energy: the different species of energy from his own that Hyde possesses. And he is willing, in a most brotherly spirit, provided that the length of the exchange be settled in advance, to let Hyde borrow his own intelligent, solid body. Nothing less than a real exchange would be fair, though Jekyll doesn’t intend to let Hyde put his hairy hands, with nicotine-stained fingers and nails chewed down to their moons, upon his beloved wife.
Understandably, it is the scoundrel of some years ago whom he wishes to become: Hyde of the prodigious crimes, Hyde before he was rehabilitated or lost his nerve, Hyde before he was tamed by Utterson, Hyde before he moved to a rural slum upstate. Certainly Hyde before he fell in love, with a redheaded ex-go-go dancer recently turned respectable who was a stewardess on Mohawk Airlines and who, two years later, fatigued by Hyde’s amorous abuses, left him for a Volvo dealer in Great Neck. Jekyll supposes that Hyde’s unexpected fall into love—invulnerable, lascivious, jaded, heartless Hyde, in love!—was what finally broke his spirit, and not the ministrations of Utterson, as is so often claimed. Jekyll longs to see the old Hyde again, careering through the dark dockside streets of Chelsea on his Harley-Davidson, grinding his teeth, gunning his motor, an Andean Indian woman’s bowler on his small head, his ridiculous black cape blowing behind him in the wind, bearing against his slight back the weight of some leather-jacketed apprentice hoodlum with three switchblades who hugs him around the waist, running down old ladies, delivering dope, tossing Molotov cocktails through the windows of anti-war organizations.
Jekyll is explaining how much preliminary work on the potion he’s done in his own laboratory, why he is unable to push his research to a conclusion, and exactly how his sister, who has the newest and best technology for genetic code-breaking at her disposal, can help. His sister, wearing a white smock, her firm back (like Jekyll’s) aligned with the metal doorframe of her shiny laboratory, is turning him down cordially. With the new Defense Department grant, the team is too busy now. She looks pretty, reminding Jekyll that good looks run in their family. He lingers a moment longer, more chagrined by the nature of his request than by her refusal, hoping to cover it with a joke. “Professor Guest. My brother Dr. Jekyll,” she murmurs as one of her assistants squeezes past them through the doorway, bearing a rack of test tubes filled with reddish, dark purple, and watery green liquids. While shaking Guest’s free hand, Jekyll remembers that he has promised to drop by to see Lanyon and give him a quick examination and a shot before checking back at the clinic. In Lanyon’s midtown office thirty minutes later, bending over the elderly lawyer with his stethoscope, he imagines it is Utterson’s heart that he hears thumping.
Somewhere else, in a suburb of London, a once famous opera singer is explaining Utterson to a skeptical friend. “Though he could make one frantic, furious, miserabl
e, whenever there was a real contact everything seemed justified.”
“But he’s a pig! My God, when I think of that appalling story you told me about his asking you to—”
“Yes, yes,” the ex-pupil interrupts. “I know it’s hard to understand…” She sighs. “How can I explain? From the beginning … the first time I ever saw Mr. Utterson, I sensed a deep bond with him, a bond that grew stronger with the years. It was never a hypnotic tie, believe me. Mr. Utterson’s teaching helps one be free of suggestion. This inner tie (I suppose you could call it a magnetic tie), this invisible bond with him, made Mr. Utterson the person nearest to one, in the true sense of the word. That proximity was … painful, much of the time. Once in a while, one got to see the ‘real’ Mr. Utterson, with whom one wished to stay forever. This was not the ‘everyday’ Mr. Utterson, who sometimes was gentle and sometimes very disagreeable, and whom you often wished to run away from.”
“A clown,” her friend interjects. “A drunk. A sadist. A charla—”
“But even then,” continues the ex-pupil, “one stayed with him, because one’s Work depended on it.”
“But finally you left,” says the friend.
“Mr. Utterson made me leave. He said I had enough energy now, and that I wasn’t likely to have any more.”
“You miss him.”
“Of course,” says the ex-pupil fiercely. “But I never want to see him again as long as I live.”
Meanwhile, on another day, Utterson is sitting in the great hall of the Oyster Bay estate, giving fifteen minutes to Ron Newcomen, a former Weatherman who has recently surfaced from underground and has hitch-hiked with all his possessions on his back from the Coast to the Institute in the hope of being admitted as a pupil. Utterson is refusing to take him on, telling him he is not fit for the Work: “You’ll go only so far and then you’ll quit.” Without giving Newcomen time to bleat out his protests and promises, Utterson continues. “Don’t plead with me. And don’t tell me you’re unhappy.”
“But I am! I’m desperate.”
“You’ll be much more unhappy if you start the Work with me. Right now you are sitting in a chair, comfortably.”
“I’m not comfortable,” shouts Newcomen.
Utterson waves his hand impatiently. “If you get up from the chair without being able to do this method’s Work, it is better not to get up. You’ll never get back to that first chair once you leave it. You’ll be standing all your life.”
And on still another day, in the same impressive room, a disciple—a journalist who lives in Washington, D.C.—is telling Utterson that he needs to put off his scheduled term of residence at the Institute until he finishes his book. “Forget about the book,” Utterson says, frowning. “If you don’t come now, later will be too late. Next spring you won’t be able to come any more than you can kiss your own elbow.”
At the same time, in the midst of examining a sobbing child in the emergency treatment room of his South Bronx clinic, Jekyll feels a sharp twinge in his elbow.
Pounding the floor with his bare feet, Jekyll stands in a circle with nine other disciples near a small door at one end of the vast, bare, lofty room known as the Exercise Hall. Built with trusses, it resembles an old airplane hangar. Beyond the door is a cubbyhole with a bed and a small window that allows a cheerful view of the orchard, where, years ago, a much-acclaimed Lithuanian poet spent the last months of her short life. Already, before coming to live at Oyster Bay, in an advanced stage of the tuberculosis she contracted during her years in Dachau, she was first assigned by Utterson to the cowshed; but when she became too weak to work, she was moved here, and the solitary beatitudes she experienced before her mouth completely filled with blood constitute one of the Institute’s most precious legends. Utterson, whom some dissident disciples held responsible for her death, still mentions her occasionally in his Wake-up Talks. “Remember our lost sisters and brothers,” he says. But Jekyll has no way of learning if her physical, as distinct from spiritual, health was really neglected. She died before he met Utterson or ever heard of the Institute.
The slow percussive rhythms continue. Jekyll (taking a weekend refresher at the Institute) is in a pantomime play that Utterson has devised, “The Struggle of the Magicians,” whose story calls for the ten participants to be divided into five Bad Magicians and five Good Magicians. Everyone works in absolute silence. The movements are not strenuous—the opposite of the exercises Jekyll does at the gym with punching bag and barbells, of which Utterson disapproves. At the far end of the room, Utterson sits on a folding chair. He is wearing his tinted bifocals, which diffuse the impact of his pale blue eyes. What kind of magician is he?
Jekyll, who is playing one of the Good Magicians, feels that Utterson is making fun of him. Jekyll wonders how good he really is. Speaking for goodness are all his good deeds, his coherent dignified habits, his dedication as a doctor, his delights as a husband and father. Speaking for at least a vicarious unworthiness is his undeniable complicity with Hyde. Inside the citadel of virtue that Jekyll has built for himself is a romantic, banal longing for life untrammeled which has even brought him to the point of covering for Hyde’s crimes. Jekyll curses the weakness that prevented him from loving his own virtue and has made him for so many years hanker after the thick-lipped siren’s call.
“That’s enough,” Utterson calls out softly. He gets up, walks across to the group, and puts his hand on Jekyll’s back. “You’re working too hard. Let your feet stay with the floor.” An eerie peace invades Jekyll’s body.
Utterson goes to a plump, solemn girl, puts his arm around her waist, and murmurs a few words against her cheek. She bursts into tears and smiles. As Utterson moves away, the other eight crowd around her and touch her tentatively. Jekyll longs for Hyde to be here, so he could wrap him in some heavy fraternal embrace. They lift the sobbing girl, carry her to the center of the floor, lay her down, and sit around her. Someone begins to hum. Jekyll gazes at the girl’s radiant face. He pardons Hyde, he pardons himself. Utterson stands behind him.
Jekyll has not always felt so haunted. It was when he stopped working regularly with Utterson that he began to lose his nerve. He could not cut himself completely free from Utterson, either. But he has a horror of confinement, and most of Utterson’s pupils end up content to linger in one room. They come to Utterson to expand their energies, but the old man puts some kind of spell on them. Jekyll is struggling to free himself from the magician’s spell; but he needs help, he needs love, he needs touch.
In the stone bathhouse recently constructed on the precincts of the Oyster Bay estate, Utterson is telling dirty stories, an evening custom—and calling for more. His embarrassed disciples are doing their best to amuse him, their custom. In their apartment near Lincoln Center, Jekyll is gazing tenderly at his wife. He presses his moist face into her long blond hair. “I love you,” he gasps. “Have you any idea how much I love you?”
They lie interlaced on the living-room couch; the children are asleep. In the bathhouse a band of male pupils, under Utterson’s direction, have finished spreading their bodies with a special clay imported from Turkey that removes all hair and leaves the skin elastic and soft. Naked except for the towels around their hips, they file into the steam room. Loving means getting fat, Jekyll thinks. And loving means getting very, very thin.
Jekyll feels the energy leaking out of him. Then this is love, too. This slow but unremitting leakage, this sensation of lying with veins open in a bathtub filled with warm water. He gets up and dries himself. Meanwhile, Utterson whips one of his older pupils across the buttocks with his damp towel and breaks into volleys of laughter as the gray-haired, flabby man stumbles backward with the unexpected pain. “That’s what you’ve never learned,” shouts Utterson boisterously. “How to play!” The bewildered man, of a generally trusting nature, hovers in the steamy corner, not sure whether he’s about to laugh or to cry. “Don’t be so serious!” Utterson yells, brandishing the towel above his bald dome like a cowboy’s lasso
. “Play!” Jekyll fidgets, then sits down again on the edge of the couch. As he unbuttons his wife’s blouse with one hand, he would like to grab hold of that towel with the other hand, pull with all his might, and send Utterson sprawling face down onto the warm planks.
Lying down, heart’s ease, body’s home, floating, sleeping, touching, sliding, climbing. The darkness, the dazzle. Warm smells, worn sheets. But it doesn’t last.
In bed with his wife, Jekyll is seized by a fervid absence of mind. Needless to say, it is signaled by an absence of body. His wife, at first bemused by the failing rhythm of his embraces, adapts herself, and for a few moments it goes well this way, too. She clasps him tightly, gratefully. But Jekyll doesn’t seem to understand, and slows down even further. Now his wife is disheartened. Sighing, she whispers his name, then pulls his earlobes. “Where are you, darling?”
Utterson is straining over his nightly push-ups by the side of his enormous bed. For a man of his age and bulk, who eats and drinks as immoderately as he does, he’s in better shape than he ought to be, as Jekyll has often noticed. Jekyll cannot imagine who lies in the freshly made bed, waiting for Utterson.
“Darling!”
Jekyll, diffident now, smiles. “I thought I heard something,” he whispers.
“The baby?”
“No. In my head. Doesn’t matter.” He goes on smiling.
“But it does.”
“It’s only that I’m always thinking about you,” Jekyll says despondently. “Even when I’m near you.”
“But that’s just it,” she says. “You’re not close to me.”
Utterson, feeling sudden nibblings of pain on the left side of his chest, hastily climbs into bed. The figure under the covers rolls over expectantly, unfurling the blankets. Jekyll switches on the reading lamp and checks his watch.
Jekyll is thinking of the uncanny ability that Utterson has to transmit energy from himself to others. Jekyll has experienced this famous power several times, as well as witnessed Utterson practicing on others,