Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

‘When there is a mismatch between the two sets of signals, one giving movement, the other none, my brain concludes that the hand in question is not my own. The lack of a movement signal overrides the mirror signal.’ Maggie smiled, realising she had taken over. ‘Sorry, it was my research topic, at university. There are simple experiments you can do that…’

  ‘The mirror box,’ I said. ‘We had one at school.’

  ‘What did they do with it?’ Maggie asked.

  This was a good place to hide: no death at our shoulder, no tests, no decisions to make.

  ‘You put one of your arms outside the box, behind the mirror. And in that mirror, exactly where your own arm should have been, there was the reflection of another person’s arm. Then they got you to move the arm you couldn’t see, and the reflection person would mimic those movements, so the reflection was moving in exactly the same way your arm was moving, and you saw it exactly where you expected your own arm to be. So your brain believed the reflected arm was its own. It was an amazing feeling, like…’

  ‘Magic?’

  ‘After a minute or so—we were drawing, with a pencil I think—the reflection person was told to do something different. It just felt crazy, as if suddenly you’d lost control of your own hand and it was doing its own thing.’

  ‘It’s a most unusual feeling, isn’t it.’

  ‘Me and Theo tried to make our own box at home, but there were two mirrors involved, and we could never get the angle right.’

  ‘And you think that’s what happened when you swapped places? It was like a mirror box?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Somehow, the fact that she knew about these things only made explaining more difficult. I needed vagueness for the idea to work. I needed her to get the taste of the thing, not the detail.

  ‘You mentioned feedback. That it’s how we build our picture of ourselves, by compiling the incoming data, and the feedback loops we use to test them. But what if that’s all there is, feedback loops. What if feedback loops aren’t the way we discover ourselves, but rather they are the self? What if we are nothing more than the process by which we discover ourselves?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘No, neither do I.’

  I’d lost sight of the point I was trying to make, and in my eagerness to impress her, my mouth had got away on me.

  ‘There were some interesting cases, in the documentary about Jennifer’s father and his operation: soldiers who grew new arms, but the arms never felt as if they were their own. They demanded they were removed, because it felt hideous, to have this lump of meat attached to them. Or the one I really remember, a man who had lost his leg, and in the hospital bed next door was another soldier who had lost his sight. And because he knew the other guy was blind, the amputee didn’t feel bad about watching him all the time. But then he became obsessed with the blind man’s leg, and began to believe it was own missing leg, and that the blind man had stolen it. That sounds crazy—it is crazy—but it got to the stage where, when the nurses came to bathe the blind man, the amputee could feel the water trickling down his missing limb. They had to move him in the end, because he tried to steal the leg back. At night, when he wouldn’t be seen, although given the guy was blind…It was that sort of a documentary, funny and sad all at once.’

  Maggie waited the polite length of time before asking, ‘How does this relate to you and Theo?’

  ‘Where we begin and end: it’s not as simple as it looks.’

  ‘You think you and Theo are the same person?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  I was beginning to get frustrated. She intimidated me, that was the problem, and all my thoughts shrunk foolishly small before her. And I was scared that if she knew what was happening inside my head, she could never tell them I wasn’t crazy. Because the thing I was thinking was craziness itself. My balance was gone; everything I reached for was moving. There was no place to stand.

  ‘I’m an actor,’ I said. ‘Well I’m trying to be. It’s what I’m training for. And on a good night, when everything falls into place, I can feel the audience’s absolute belief in the person I’m pretending to be. The actor can’t do that alone, it takes a collective act of imagination. That’s what I’m trying to explain.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow.’

  ‘We exist because the world tells us we exist, it sends us constant signals, to assure us we have been noticed. I was never Theo, and he was never me, but the more feedback we shared, the more the line between us blurred. That’s where the magic lies. Theo’s been helping me write a monologue about it for drama school. It’s about a guy who wakes up and discovers he’s the last person alive. He doesn’t die, he just fades away. The only feedback he gets is from the sun and the wind and the rain, no more than a tree could expect, and, bit by bit, he disappears into the landscape.’

  ‘It would be difficult to do that on stage, I would think.’

  ‘That’s what my tutor said. She said it’s more of a film. But I don’t like film.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No feedback.’

  Something was puzzling Maggie. She tried to hide it by smiling at my joke, but I noticed. She apologised and swivelled back to her desk, to flick through her screen, or maybe just to regather. I watched her closely.

  I’ve never known whether women understand the way we look at them. Theo thought they did, but I’m not so sure. When I hear women talking about the male gaze, it seems to me they get it all wrong. When we were fourteen, there was a fashion for writing quotes across our shoulder bags, things we thought made us look clever. Theo had ‘The only thing we can know is that we do not know, and it is important that we know this.’ Socrates, I think. I had ‘A poet looks at the world in the same way a man looks at a woman’. I didn’t understand it then, I just liked the feel of it across my ribs. Now, I think it’s a bad way of explaining poetry, but a good way of explaining men.

  Looking at Maggie was like looking at a poem. I imagined her stretching out, reaching over to the back of the desk. She would have been the perfect shape to paint on a vase.

  Maggie turned back, and I looked away.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ But a frown formed. ‘Remind me to ask you more about drama school, later.’

  ‘I can tell you now if…’

  At the time, I wondered if it wasn’t just another part of the game, designed to unsettle me. I could never have guessed the truth.

  ‘When you were being Theo,’ Maggie returned to her task. ‘When you were acting being Theo, did it ever feel better than being you? Did you ever think it would be more fun not to go back?’

  ‘You’re always you, even on stage.’ It would have been easier, explaining it to an actor.

  ‘When you swapped. Was it always for the whole day?’

  ‘Those were the rules.’

  ‘Whose rules?’

  ‘Ours. Theo’s. Apart from one time.’

  She didn’t ask. I suppose she knew we’d get back to it.

  ‘And you agreed to these rules?’

  ‘I d
idn’t always want to. One time there was a test in class. I did better at tests than he did. So it didn’t seem fair.’

  ‘What happened?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Being him made me worse at tests; being me made him better. It was the only time we ever got the same grade.’

  ‘How much better did you usually do?’

  It wasn’t important. They were only tests.

  ‘Theo wasn’t stupid. He was in the top half of the class, and it was a good school. Nationally he was on the 85th percentile, most of the time.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘95th was a bad day.’

  She understood. She’d had days like that too, although probably not as many.

  ‘How often did these swaps occur?’

  ‘Not often. Maybe three times a year. Theo thinks the number’s higher, but when we try to remember them, that’s all we ever come up with. It sounds right to me.’

  ‘Did either of you ever use it as a chance to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do? I mean, did you ever use the fact that you wouldn’t be the one getting in trouble?’

  ‘Not on purpose.’

  ‘Tell me about the time it happened by accident, then.’

  ‘I don’t know. There was nothing really.’

  I felt myself closing down. Anger, as unannounced as vomit, rose up in me.

  ‘Why are you only interested in us being twins? What about me? What about how I’m feeling about all of this? Isn’t that what you’re meant to be finding out?’

  ‘You’re raising your voice,’ she said. Calm and steady. Exactly the way we were taught, in conflict-resolution classes. As if she thought I might hit her.

  ‘I’m angry,’ I said.

  ‘I know you are. I would be too.’

  ‘Why? Why would you be?’

  ‘Your brother’s dying,’ she said.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘That’s a lovely way of putting it.’

  I knew it was mistake, to let her see my rage.

  ‘I didn’t do it, Rene,’ she said.

  The same trained voice. I wanted to take hold of it, twist it until it broke.

  ‘I’m not to blame,’ she said.

  ‘You’re all I have to work with.’

  ‘We can take a break, if you like,’ she said. ‘Would you like to take a break?’

  ‘No.’

  She turned away anyway, and pretended to flick through her screen. On the wall was a slide of pamphlets, the kind you find in any hospital office: genomic diets, how to wash your hands, grief and resilience. The last one reminded me of the introductory week of drama school, a live-in workshop where we slept side by side on the floor at night, and by day pretended we were pairs of lovers. The script had us in a hotel room, trying to decide whether to tell our partners about the infidelity or break off the affair. We were told to reinterpret the scene using the five stages of grief, an old twentieth-century model of loss. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. I worked with Christy, a mature-age student, who confided in me that she’d hoped the course would give her a new lease of life, but being around so many young people was making her feel old and ugly. She didn’t say how old, maybe thirty-five, me and Theo added together. I told her she was pretty, and she laughed at me.

  On the last night, after our shared meal and breathing exercises, we performed back to the class. Christy decided that we’d end the piece with my hands on her breasts and her hands on my wrists: a frozen ambiguity, she called it. She didn’t warn me that during the scene she would undress in front of me. She’d lied about feeling old and ugly; she was as vain, and as terrified, as the rest of us.

  Denial? No. From the first moment I got the call from the hospital, the accident had had the bitter taste of truth about it. Anger? Sure. Not the anger I used on stage: the clenched up, thrust out, anger-at variety. This was the internal, misty-red version. Anger-from. And it was coming on again, pushing me out of my chair.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not you,’ I said.

  Maggie kept her back to me, as if she thought she could wait it out.

  ‘I’m glad it isn’t my job to deal with people who need me to care, when all you’re allowed to do is pretend.’

  She turned back to me, her eyebrows raised above the rim of her glasses, more curious than surprised. ‘So why are you training to be an actor?’

  You can’t punch against funny. The fury hissed out of me. I said sorry, a twelve-year-old’s apology: back straight and hands folded on my lap, like in the family photo we had taken the one time my auntie visited (she slept inside a mosquito net).

  ‘I didn’t mean to be—’

  ‘I know you didn’t.’

  ‘It’s not you.’

  ‘No.’ She nodded. ‘I know that too.’

  ‘It’s grief.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘He’s dying,’ I said.

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Anger, the second of the five stages—’

  ‘We don’t believe in those anymore,’ Maggie said.

  ‘What have we replaced them with? Tell me it’s alcohol, and happiness.’

  She had a great smile.

  ‘Tell me about drama school,’ she said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I’ve seen your records. You were on an academic path. A very good academic path. Drama school seems a strange choice. People must have said that to you. They must have tried to talk you out of it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why didn’t you listen to them?’

  ‘Why do we do anything?’ I shrugged.

  ‘Various reasons, I suppose. What were yours?’

  ‘I just wanted to act,’ I lied. The truth was too ugly, too monstrous to admit just then, although I knew she would find a way of getting it out of me.

  4

  There was a knock at the door. Doctor Huxley stood before us, taking in the scene: my bloodshot eyes, the smeared floor, the way Maggie shifted in her chair when she saw him. He acknowledged us both with the slightest raise of his head, then dragged a chair forward, so we made up three spokes in a wheel.

  It was Doctor Huxley who’d first taken me in to see Theo. He was older than most of them, maybe in his sixties, his thick hair proudly white. His eyes were hooded, and there was a dimple at the centre of his chin that might have been a scar. He had the body of a thin man who’d grown heavy, the weight concentrated at his middle. When I first met him, I noticed how carefully he chose his words. I couldn’t imagine him dancing, or ordering a second dessert. Maggie didn’t bother with formalities. The time was his.

  ‘I would like to give you more details about the procedure.’

  ‘Me, or her?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Does she need to be here for this?’ I said. ‘Or can you tell me without her?’

  ‘It will be useful for Maggie to listen.’
r />   ‘And watch.’

  It was my default setting: pretending not to be impressed by people.

  ‘Transplants we all understand,’ the doctor began without preamble. ‘I see you and your brother each have your own stem cell bank. Had it been a case of him having damaged a heart, or a lung, there would have been little problem growing a replacement. The brain, however, presents a larger problem.’

  ‘It contains information.’

  I didn’t want him to think me stupid.

  ‘Perhaps more than contains.’

  A mild rebuke, a needless show of power.

  ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that our brain is information. The brain, more than any other organ, is constructed of its own past. Its key nutrient is experience: it grows through interaction with the outside world. Your brother’s brain is the way it is because of the life he has lived. And that means, unlike the heart or the lungs, we can not grow a substitute in the laboratory. Or rather, we can not grow a substitute that would function as Theo’s brain. When the brain is damaged, there seems to be no option for transplantation.’

  This much I already knew. It wasn’t complicated, and the project had been controversial enough to make it into the news. I was still my father’s boy: I liked the news.

  ‘As you are aware, your brother’s case is not our ultimate target. What has happened is a one in a million occurrence, so even if we could save him, the flow-on benefits would be very small. Forgive me if this sounds unsympathetic, but I must be clear on this point. We are not proposing the procedure to help your brother, nor indeed, to help you. Rather, we are asking you to participate, in the hope that it might one day help others. Do you understand that?’

  I did, at least in the abstract. But understanding is more than abstraction, and the other part of me, the part that grasps truth by taste alone, knew Theo was the only thing that mattered. The same part of me knew how important it was to keep this knowledge to myself.