I, Etcetera

by Susan Sontag

  Flashback, to less troubled days—days in which Jekyll found Utterson’s conversation extremely funny, when it was not breathstoppingly wise. Once, years ago, when Jekyll was severely depressed, possibly suicidal, he drove out—without telephoning first—to Oyster Bay. Utterson, extraordinarily gentle, fatherly that day, received his visitor in his bedroom. Seeing him, Jekyll felt excited, feverish; his head began to pound, as it’s doing tonight, in bed with his wife.

  “You’re sick.” Utterson put one arm around Jekyll’s shoulder. “Don’t talk.” He put Jekyll in a chair. “I’ll give you coffee,” he said, all imaginable tenderness in his voice. “Drink it as hot as you can.”

  Jekyll remembers sitting at a table while Utterson poured coffee into a saucepan from the old thermos he used to keep beside his bed and put the saucepan on a hot plate. Jekyll remembers being unable to take his eyes off Utterson, and realizing that Utterson looked desperately weary: he’d never seen anyone look so tired. Jekyll remembers slouching over the table, sipping at his coffee, when he became aware of a sudden uprising of energy within himself. It was as if a violent electric blue light flowed outward from Utterson and entered him. But as Jekyll felt the tiredness leach out of him, Utterson’s preposterous heavy body sagged and his face turned gray as if it were being drained of blood. Jekyll looked at him, amazed.

  Jekyll remembers Utterson muttering, an urgent tone in his voice: “You’re all right now. I must go.” Jekyll remembers leaping to his feet to help him, and Utterson waving Jekyll away and hobbling slowly from the room.

  Jekyll remembers waiting for Utterson, blankly savoring an exquisite sense of well-being. He was convinced then (and is convinced now) that when Utterson transmits energy from himself to others, it can be done only at great cost to himself. But it became obvious that Utterson knew how to renew his own energy quickly, for Jekyll remembers being equally amazed by the change in him when he returned to the bedroom fifteen minutes later. Utterson looked almost like a young man, alert, smiling, and full of good spirits. He said that this was a fortunate meeting, and that while Jekyll had forced him to make an almost impossible effort, it had been a positive experience for both of them. He then announced that he and Jekyll would eat together, alone: an enormous lunch, for which he would break open his best bottle of fine old Armagnac.

  Jekyll remembers that as they ate this lavish meal, Utterson told Jekyll to talk about whatever had been troubling him. Jekyll remembers finding it difficult to begin, for at that moment he felt he had no problems at all. He had never felt better in his life. And Jekyll remembers that when he finally managed to explain his griefs and fears, Utterson listened without comment and said finally that what Jekyll had told him was of no real importance, nothing to worry about. End of flashback.

  Jekyll feels weary now, as he holds his wife. Conceivably, he could throw a line to Utterson that would run from his solar plexus to Utterson’s burly right hand. He would tug on that line, a signal of distress, and Utterson, wherever he is—in Oyster Bay or in the city—would feel the pressure, would realize that Jekyll is in trouble, would turn on that violent electric blue light, whose rays would be transmitted along the cord straight back to Jekyll’s chest, and he would feel a new, pure uprising of energy, he would feel wonderful, he would feel that his problems were of no importance. But for this to happen, Utterson would have to be not too busy with whatever he’s doing, sacred or profane, right now. And he would have to understand the exact sense of Jekyll’s signal as well as who it was from, who among his many rebellious ex-pupils. And Utterson would have to be willing, at least for a while, to imperil his own forces. To be himself, at least for a while, very very tired.

  Still in his surgeon’s overalls, Jekyll tilts backward in a chair in the third-floor staff lounge of the clinic, having just come from two hours in the operating room that have saved his patient’s life. He allows himself one cigarette. While somewhere else a war is going on, bombs are falling, flesh is being punctured and burned, hospitals with bamboo walls and thatched roofs are being targeted for more bombing, Jekyll looks at the backs of his capable hands, at the short pale hairs sprouting from each pore, at the intricate tiny lines connecting each pore that make a web, like an aerial map—or a game.

  While a nurse brings Jekyll the latest report on the patient’s condition (good) and stays long enough to flirt with him, the war goes on—an ache in the bones, an ache in the gut, an ache in the heart. To supplement the televised daily doses of atrocity, tours by helicopter are available for civilians to observe it at first hand. Countless small-boned, fine-featured people, the men with smooth hairless faces, the women with black hair down their backs, still youthful-looking in middle age, carrying rifles and spears, get massacred day after day. How are they replenished?

  Jekyll, monogamous as ever, thinks about his wife’s legs and decides they are not just shapelier than the nurse’s but may be the prettiest legs he has ever seen. The nurse leaves the room with instructions about 5 cc. of a new medication for the patient still lying unconscious in the recovery room.

  Utterson declares that it is a waste of spirit to fret about the war; that human folly will always persist; that most people being idiots who sleep through their lives, the sole duty of the few who struggle to awake is self-cultivation. For the treatment of melancholia brought on by thinking about the war, Utterson recommends several strenuous exercises, spiritual and physical, and a rereading of chapter 109 of The Strange Case of Cain and Abel. Deciding that he is tired of trying to tune his aching instrument of a self, Jekyll also decides that even if he can’t be Hyde, he can still seek his help.

  “Hey, look who’s slumming!” Hyde shrieks gaily through a broken windowpane, as the taxi deposits Jekyll next to the mailbox by the road, just outside of Plattsburg, New York. The gaping mailbox, flag down, is crammed with ads and brochures. Jekyll strides across the large square of crabgrass, gains the porch, then steps over a heap of wet newspapers, each folded and held together by a rubber band, decaying into one another at the threshold of the blistered front door. Another windy day, and rain in the wind.

  Hyde spins about at the open door (equipped with neither bell nor knocker), seizing Jekyll’s gabardine raincoat and flinging it onto a hook next to his black cape in the corner of his seedy lair. When Hyde slams the door shut, Jekyll half expects to hear the clank of a lock and chain.

  “Let’s take a look at you, buddy,” Hyde growls. “Just as good-looking and uptight as ever. You haven’t changed a bit!”

  Jekyll can’t return the compliment, if it is a compliment. In the three months since Jekyll last saw Hyde, trotting around and around the World Trade Center, the younger man has aged fearfully. More of his thinning stringy hair has fallen out. Right this minute, with several days’ growth of beard on his haggard face, he looks as old as Jekyll actually is. Jekyll feels a pang of paternal concern.

  With extraordinary quickness, Hyde shoves Jekyll onto the top of a packing crate, then pours some orange juice into two tall bluish glasses, lacing both with what Jekyll soon discovers to be gin (it comes from a turpentine bottle), then crouches gleefully on another crate.

  “What’s up, doc?” he cackles.

  Those two bluish glasses placed on a broken rattan table strike Jekyll as odd. As Jekyll knows, Hyde has lived alone since his girlfriend walked out on him; the glasses suggest that he was expecting someone. Himself? Jekyll has neither written nor wired Hyde (who has no telephone) about his visit this evening. Could someone have informed Hyde that he was coming?

  Jekyll, taking a sip of his drink, asks about Hyde’s house.

  “You didn’t come all the way up here to rap about my crummy house!”

  Jekyll wonders if living in the country bores Hyde, after the glamorous dangers of city life: the thrill of pursuing his victims, the excitement of being chased by the cops. “Don’t rush me,” says Jekyll.

  “Sorry, man,” Hyde croaks. “I guess I’m just bouncing off my own peeling walls, panting to hear wh
at’s on your mind.”

  “You’re acting as if you already knew what it was,” Jekyll ventures—in case Hyde should have acquired some of Utterson’s gift of clairvoyance.

  “I do.”

  Jekyll fights down his anxiety. “Then you’ve no reason to be impatient.”

  “Shit, that don’t mean I know every last word,” Hyde squeaks plaintively.

  “I’m still wondering why you stay up here,” says Jekyll.

  “Don’t knock it, man. You should have seen this dump when I moved in.” Hyde sounds almost wistful. “I did all the work myself, just like at the Institute. With my own two hands.”

  “I know,” Jekyll murmurs distractedly, gazing at Hyde’s corded, predator’s hands, their backs sheathed with dusky fur, and noting that the tranquillity of country life has not helped Hyde to stop biting his nails.

  “See,” Hyde croaks, a triumphant gleam in his small eyes. “You know everything, too.”

  “Considering my problem,” Jekyll retorts gloomily, “that wisecrack is in awfully bad taste.”

  “Bad taste”—Hyde’s voice becomes strident—“is my specialty, man.” He clenches his shrunken fists. “Want to make something of it?”

  “No,” says Jekyll.

  Bad taste is Utterson’s specialty, too. But whereas it seems natural with Hyde, given his slum background and his aggressive lack of aspiration to virtue, Utterson’s case presents a problem for Jekyll—for everyone, probably, who has come under Utterson’s authority. Utterson’s ribald, sadistic sense of humor must be reconciled with the gravity of his claim to spiritual leadership, just as his frank animal smells are blended with the sly but undeniable odor of sanctity. With Hyde there is no problem. That his dingy living room reeks of urine doesn’t at all disturb Jekyll, who, as a doctor, can’t afford to be squeamish. Hyde is Hyde. But Utterson is always more than Utterson. Or less. And Utterson insists that his admirers accept everything about him. They’re not permitted to subtract or add.

  It’s the same with the words that stream from Utterson’s mouth, which never quite closes even when he’s not speaking. Long smutty stories. Platitudes and truisms about the good life. And genuine, subtle, almost inhuman wisdom. But Utterson doesn’t let you throw out the first two parts and keep the third. You have to keep it all. Is that the secret of harmonious development, of the well-rounded personality, of not being one-sided? If it is, Jekyll will never find the way: he is incapable. And most likely that isn’t the secret. Utterson never encourages anyone to imitate him. On the contrary, his sardonic bullying of his disciples suggests that the liberties he grants himself are definitely not for them. Otherwise, why does Utterson lie in bed late, wallowing in his breakfast, while everyone else at the Institute, pupils and staff alike, rises at 6 a.m. and spends most of the day pruning trees, tending the vegetable gardens, milking cows, preparing meals, sewing clothes, mowing lawns, paving driveways, constructing new buildings. “Work,” Utterson’s basic teaching method, for them; capricious potency, afloat on the sea of liberty, for himself.

  Jekyll notices a whip hanging on the wall of the bleak room, presumably a souvenir of Hyde’s S-M escapades. Utterson handles his disciples as if he were a wild-animal tamer. But Utterson, who is no stranger to sadism, physical and mental, disapproves of whips. Having observed that each person gives off radiations and emanations (which constitute, according to Utterson, the person’s essence), Utterson uses the octave upon octave of emanations that he is capable of emitting—to subdue, subjugate, harass, harness, and finally liberate each of his disciples, near and far, to become a true will. Jekyll would prefer the whip.

  In the meantime, Jekyll has sedately abandoned his packing crate for a mauve plastic couch scarred with cigarette burns across the room, while Hyde, who has great difficulty in keeping still and can’t remain seated in one place for more than a few minutes, hops off his crate. He is getting more orange juice, pouring more gin: more gin than orange juice this time. While taking note of Hyde’s taste and what it reveals about his deterioration—from satanic to eccentric—Jekyll approves of the orange juice, since Hyde has always suffered from a vitamin C deficiency. With a wave of his hand he refuses a second round for himself.

  “God damn love,” wails Hyde.

  “What did you say?” Jekyll asks.

  “I said”—Hyde lowers his raucous voice to a growl—“God damn love.”

  Hyde empties his glass in two gulps. Not only does Hyde seem to have lost most of his flair for moral turpitude, but this vehement drinking indicates that he is going soft. Jekyll is discouraged. “God damn love,” he thinks he hears Hyde hiss once more.

  Hyde can’t seem to keep still, darting about the living room from the bottle on the rattan table to his packing crate and back again, like a morose gorilla. Jekyll leans back on the mauve couch, tired from watching him move so much. He feels drowsy, under water. How long must he go on chasing after Hyde? Are they to go around and around, continuous as a frieze on an urn? He’ll never overtake him. Hyde, despite his odd gait, is incredibly light, mobile. You couldn’t catch him with a rope, as one could imagine catching Utterson—a bull-like man who moves with ponderous slowness and prefers to be enthroned in a chair or, whenever possible, to lie in bed. Jekyll imagines how he might lasso Utterson and drag him here, to continue the conversation. It’s not with Utterson, though, but with this manic lout circling the room that he must try to communicate.

  At least the doctor in Jekyll remains undaunted by Hyde’s corrosive antics. Jekyll notes that Hyde’s constitution looks embattled now. From what can be glimpsed of Hyde’s chicken-breasted frame through his wrinkled work shirt, two of whose buttons are missing, he’s lost weight, and his cough rivals Camille’s.

  Making one more effort, Jekyll manages to rouse the eloquent, long-suffering aspirant to psychic unity; and from the couch he aims that part of himself, like a gun, at Hyde. Addressing Hyde, he begins a monologue. Hyde gulps down more gin while Jekyll names the main points on the map of his discontent, expounding on his heartfelt desire to change his life. Utterson comes in for heavy savaging, he and that motley crew of disciples and bastards camping out in Oyster Bay at the Institute for Deprogramming Potential Human Beings.

  “But the Work did you a lot of good, right?” Hyde mumbles, still on the run.

  How could Jekyll deny that the Work has helped him? That, without the Work, he wouldn’t have become as gifted a physician as he is today; that he wouldn’t be so calm, controlled, steady, self-observing; that he couldn’t so easily inspire trust in and impose his will on colleagues, subordinates, and patients. “Utterson isn’t the problem,” Jekyll admits. “It’s me.”

  “I don’t get it,” whines Hyde, abruptly dropping to all fours and crouching in a corner.

  “It’s … wanting to give everything up. I’d like to be … Don’t laugh! I’d like to be you.”

  “Wow!” Hyde claps the palm of his hand to his rodent-like forehead. “What a load of middle-class crap! You’d like to be me?” He lurches up, awkward as ever, from the floor. “You’d like to lead my trashy life? Man, you are clean out of your ever-loving skull!”

  “But,” says Jekyll, “if your life depresses you, why don’t you move back to the city?”

  “And get busted? Thanks a lot!”

  “But things can be arranged, you know that. I’ll tell Lanyon.”

  “That asshole?” Hyde pivots, the bottle in his claw. “He’s senile.”

  “He’s not. And you’re drunk.”

  “Just because you keep that shyster alive with these injections of yours, you don’t have to defend his health,” Hyde rants. “Lanyon couldn’t get a D.A. to reduce charges on a baby who landed in the Tombs for stealing a diaper.”

  “Don’t drink so much. I hate to think what your liver looks like.”

  “Cool it, man!” Hyde snarls, halting his lame progress around the room. “Want to see my tracks?” He fumbles with the left sleeve of his work shirt, tugging it up over his elb
ow. “Well, I’m clean now, see! And I owe it all to—good—old—booze!” He pats the bottle and then slams it down on the rattan table. Utterson raises his glass of Armagnac, scans the long oval table in the refectory, and proposes a toast. His favorite subject for a toast is a certain kind of idiot. During a high-spirited dinner several years ago, Utterson invented a whole taxonomy of spiritual retardedness; “idiots,” as he insisted on calling them, could be classified into ingenious categories and subcategories, the point being to determine into which category each person at the table fell. The game is still being played, with pupils nervously interrogating themselves, and Utterson reserving the right to pronounce the final verdict. Utterson sips the Armagnac and grins.

  Jekyll is continuing. “Well, if you won’t come back to the city, would you consider moving somewhere else? We could…” He hesitates, then plunges. “We could go somewhere together. I mean, I’d go with you.”

  That does stop Hyde’s gyrations, at least momentarily. “What would you want to do that for? Man, you have really flipped your wig!” Jekyll feels, through the strong roots of his hair, his scalp tingling.

  “I know it sounds crazy…” Jekyll pauses. “But we wouldn’t have to stay in one place. We could be on the road most of the year.”

  “Hey, what is this? A proposition? Don’t tell me that after umpteen years of happy marriage you’ve discovered you’re some kind of fruit. Oh, man, that would be too much!” He falls to the floor, flops over like a dog, then stretches out on his back, convulsed with laughter.

  “Cut it out, Eddy!” Jekyll, leaning forward on the couch, is embarrassed. “You know it’s not that. It’s because … I’ve realized I don’t have enough … enough imagination. You know what I mean?”

  Hyde waves his spindly legs in the air, while pushing both hands into his ribs to stop laughing. “And you think if you hang around with me”—choking and coughing, he sits up—“you’ll get more … imaginative?”