Stories

by Susan Sontag

  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.

  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 fireplace (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, miserable, 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 hitchhiked 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 b
rothers,” 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.