Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

  Talk to me.

  How?

  I waited fifteen minutes, not for a better idea, but for a suitable interval that my first, desperate plan might appear credible. I pushed the call button. Maggie and the Doctor arrived together. Huxley appeared slightly harried. Perhaps I had interrupted his preparations. I was counting on it.

  ‘I need a toilet,’ I told them. Technically, the truth. A toilet, or some other place where two people might talk undetected, and unrecorded. I hoped she understood. Now, as I think back, I can’t say exactly why I needed to hear from her. It seems strange to me, from this distance. Part curiosity, I am sure, and part, although it speaks poorly of me, infatuation.

  ‘I’ll show you.’ The doctor stood back and let me pass.

  I didn’t dare look at Maggie.

  I hoped the doctor would be too busy or self-important to stand guard in the corridor.

  ‘You know the way back?’ he asked. And then, as if an afterthought, ‘Are you all right, Rene?’

  ‘As could be expected, in the circumstances.’

  Doctor Huxley nodded, apparently satisfied. I had no excuse to linger so I entered the bathroom while he hovered at the door. Perhaps he would wait, perhaps he wouldn’t. That was how it would be.

  15

  The bathroom held no surprises: a large shower-room-and-toilet in one, with sturdy support rails screwed into the wall. A plain rectangular mirror was fixed above the basin. Beside it was a poster instructing users in the thorough washing of hands. My reflection had red, puffy eyes and blotchy skin. The lighting was honest and cruel. My hair, usually neat, had been anxiously fingered into shapelessness. I looked like death.

  There was nothing to do but wait. I played unthinkingly with a shower control and was reprimanded by a burst of cold water, soaking my shoulder and neck.

  There was a quiet knock.

  Maggie moved into the room. She locked the door behind her.

  ‘You could lose your job for this,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not altogether clear I’ll be keeping it after today, anyway,’ she replied.

  A short pause, although we both knew we couldn’t afford it.

  ‘So, here we are, then.’ I spoke too loudly, and whispered an apology; it sounded puny and comical. I wondered if I should turn on a tap, to mask our conversation, the way they did in the movies. Like every other thing I could think of, it felt instantly foolish.

  ‘You shouldn’t do it.’ Maggie leaned against the basin. I stood in the middle of the room, unsupported. An orange shower curtain hung limply by my side.

  ‘You could have found me incompetent,’ I said.

  ‘They have the recording. It would have been clear to them I’d interfered.’

  ‘Really? I lied to you, the whole way through. I’m not doing this for them, I’m doing it to save my brother.’

  ‘I know you are.’

  ‘And I can’t. That’s what they say, isn’t it? It won’t be him who comes back. So how can I be in my right mind, when I’m taking this risk to achieve something that is impossible?’

  ‘How can you be insane, when you understand your own motives so clearly?’

  It could have been a trick, I suppose. The whole thing might have been set up to get this very confession from me, one last check. But I had come to believe they weren’t that interested in checks and balances.

  ‘By the time they reviewed the interview, it would have been too late,’ I said.

  ‘Not for retribution.’

  ‘So you would let me risk my life for the sake of your own career?’

  ‘I’m here aren’t I?’

  I nodded. She was. It was my turn to watch and wait. Her pulled-back hair made her forehead appear unnaturally large. I imagined her bald, as Emily had been. She would have looked like an alien.

  ‘I don’t think you understand what it is you’re being asked to do,’ she said.

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand either.’

  The way she looked at me was different now, as if my face was a surprise to her, a new thing to be considered.

  ‘I don’t think they’re going to let me stay in here very long,’ I said.

  Maggie frowned, paused. The caution I had taken to be part of her technique was in fact native to her.

  ‘I would like to ask you some more questions, questions I wasn’t able to ask you in the interview. Is that all right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry if I am blunt, but time is— Assume the operation is a success.’

  ‘Do you think it will be?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Probably, yes. I don’t think they have lied to you about that.’

  ‘What have they lied to me about?’

  I gathered the bottom of the curtain in my hand and twisted it. I felt the moisture pool in my palm: water, sweat, dirt, dead skin cells, bacteria. Mostly, we are bacteria.

  ‘When the operation is over, they have told you they will take Theo away, is that right?’

  ‘At first. For twelve months. So that we are apart.’

  ‘Why does that matter?’ Maggie asked. ‘Did they say?’

  ‘They think, if we are left together, both with the same memories, both thinking we’re me, that it might, it might be confusing for us. But if we’ve had twelve months to accumulate our own histories, become our own people…It’s an unknown, that’s how they put it to me. They’re controlling an unknown.’

  ‘Won’t you want to see him?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘They’ll bring him back eventually.’

  ‘Yes, and there’s the problem.’

  She’d tried to lead me here before. I can see that now.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Let me ask another question. What if, during the operation, there was a mix up, and Theo was left here, with Emily, and you were taken away, to be rehabilitated? How would you feel about that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Well, not good. I’d prefer to be back here. But, I suppose it depends upon what they have planned for the rehabilitation, perhaps it would be—’

  ‘You’re not listening to me.’ Frustration squeezed her voice. ‘You’re not thinking about this.’

  ‘Then tell me.’

  But understanding doesn’t work like that. You have to put the puzzle together yourself. There is no other way.

  ‘You’re smart. If you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t want to.’ She moved her weight off the rim of the basin, as if she was about to leave. I felt a surge of anxiety froth into anger.

  ‘And that’s it, that’s all you’re giving me?’

  She moved toward the door. ‘I need to get back, before they notice I’m gone.’

  ‘You can’t.’ I grasped her arm. ‘You think not knowing who I am is going to do my head in.’

  ‘No, not head.’ She paused for a moment, the way an actor might, in the moment before they exit. ‘Heads.’

&nbs
p; There are some things, when finally you understand them, it is as if you have always known them, as if a place had been set aside for their arrival. I turned to the basin and gripped its rim. I stared down the plughole.

  ‘The elephant in the room,’ I muttered.

  ‘Two rooms,’ Maggie said. ‘One elephant. One elephant in two rooms.’

  I felt her hand on the top of my back. I think, if understanding had come some other way, I might have resisted it. But coming this late, by the time I turned to fight it, it was already a part of me.

  ‘You see now, don’t you?’ Maggie asked.

  I looked up at the mirror. Her face was small at my shoulder, watching intently.

  ‘You said it once, when I was with him. You said I need to stop thinking of it being about him and me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have,’ she said. ‘It was a risk.’

  ‘If it works, and we both wake up—’ my voice was small, as if spoken by somebody else, coming to us from across a great distance ‘—then I wake up twice. I wake up as two different people.’

  So obvious, so inevitable. It’s not that I hadn’t known, it was an inescapable part of the deal. What I hadn’t done, though, was experience the great coming apart of the self that would surely follow. You will wake up twice. I tried to imagine it, but it was like trying to imagine a round square, or a colour bigger than sadness.

  ‘What will that be like, do you think?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I could see the deliberate patience on Maggie’s face, waiting for me to round the final bend. I turned to her. The mirror had been deceptive, we were almost touching. The space between us felt compressed, resistant. ‘Will I know what he is thinking?’

  As I asked the question, I knew how inadequate it was.

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘I said he. I said will I know what he is thinking.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘It’s because, I don’t know how else to think of it, except to think of it in a way that is wrong.’ I would get there, soon, arrive at that place where the emptiness expanding within me would have a name. First though, the terror. I saw Maggie’s relief. She had done what she needed to. I was informed.

  ‘That’s what you’ve been saying, isn’t it? Not head, but heads. After the operation, I will wake up in my own body, and I will wake up in Theo’s, and…which one will I be? Who will I be?’

  It was like a tangle of string with only one end: apparently simple, yet insoluble. ‘I’m frightened.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘You think I should be, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do.’

  ‘Tell me honestly, what will this do to me?’

  She looked away, spoke to the floor. ‘I can only guess. It’s not as if there are…’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘You’ll lose your mind.’

  ‘Minds.’

  ‘Yes. You’ll lose your minds.’

  I could feel the warmth of her words in my face. My back was to the basin now. It was up to her to step away.

  ‘Explain that.’

  So close I could see the flaws in her perfect skin, could finally imagine her and I walking the same street without one of us looking out of place.

  ‘My job is to help people stay intact, to keep them whole. That’s what I trained for. The first thing you learn about the mind is how delicate it is, how easily it can come apart. When we are well, the world feels solid, there are a thousand different certainties we can call upon to conjure up the self: that our memories are reliable, that our senses do not lie to us, that the world means us no harm, that we are loved, and capable of loving, that other minds share our world, that our words have meaning to them, that we can touch each other. That we exist. But the whole thing is a trick of balance and perspective, and knowing when to look away. The most surprising thing can trigger a crisis. In the old days we would have called it a crisis of faith, now we call it a crisis of being. Lose just one of those certainties, and you will quickly discover how many others it was holding in place.

  ‘I don’t know if this will destroy you, Rene. Perhaps you are particularly robust in your construction. But that, I have found, is highly unpredictable. If I had to guess, I would guess you will come apart.’

  ‘We will come apart.’

  ‘There’s no pronoun for what you will be. That in itself should serve as a warning.’

  ‘What certainties? What will I lose?’

  A frown crinkled her nose and forehead. ‘I don’t know I can name it, exactly. That’s the problem.’

  ‘But I should fear it anyway?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I should try to explain.’

  In some other place, time ticked on, but in the bathroom, it waited patiently. Maggie’s eyes narrowed. The lines around them were delicate, barely drawn.

  ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ she asked.

  ‘You said so yourself, the chance of anything going wrong—’

  ‘Not from the operation. I mean eventually. One day, you will be dead. The world will continue without you. Does that frighten you?’

  ‘I try not to think about it,’ I said.

  ‘And days like today, when you have no choice?’

  ‘It’s—’ I looked for the right word, knowing full well no such word existed. ‘I don’t like it.’

  She nodded, as if that was admission enough.

  ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘I developed a fear of falling asleep. I tried to explain it to my mother, but she didn’t understand. She thought I was just afraid I would never wake up, that I would die in my sleep. She told me how unlikely that was. But she’d missed the point.’

  ‘What point?’ Although I already knew. Doesn’t everybody?

  ‘I wasn’t afraid sleep would lead to my death. I was afraid sleep was death. That every night, I died.’

  ‘But we wake from sleep,’ I said.

  ‘Somebody wakes,’ she answered.

  ‘I wake.’

  ‘How do you know it’s you?’

  I shrugged, reluctant to take the only move she had left me.

  ‘It’s obvious.’

  Maggie’s voice dropped. Neither of us mentioned the way I was shaking.

  ‘If, during this procedure, you die, but your memories are saved, and transferred to your brother’s body, so when he wakes it is just obvious to him that he is you, does that mean you haven’t really died?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think you need to know. Before you decide what to do, you have to be comfortable with your answer to that question.’ She stared at me, as if expecting, there and then, I might reach some understanding. ‘He holds your memories. The doctors lie to him, say the operation was a failure and Theo is dead. He wakes, and believes he is you. So does everybody else. If you knew that was going to be the outcome, would that be like dying, or like falling asleep?’

  I said ‘dying’ but th
e word didn’t fit. I tried ‘sleep’. Same problem.

  Maggie pressed even closer. My certainty shrank before her.

  ‘I wouldn’t be afraid,’ I said. The words came first, then the shadow of belief. ‘If my memories survive, so do I.’

  ‘What if there are errors in the memories? If the replication is only approximate?’

  ‘All memory contains errors.’ My raised voice bounced back at me, as sharp and unwelcome as her questions.

  She pressed again.

  ‘So what if the transfer is unsuccessful, and you both die, but a madman wakes, having read your story, and believes he is you? He thinks the government has erased his memories, and left him to walk the streets. Now are you dead?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘My memories are gone.’

  ‘He knows a little bit about you. He has some of your memories, just with a lot of errors.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it is. Somewhere, a line is drawn, between us and the world. And this operation challenges that boundary. What about an amnesiac, who awakes having lost his memories and must learn of his past from scratch? Has he died? How can we be just memories? How does that leave us with enough?’

  ‘What else could we be?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know, but surely something. Hope demands it.’

  I wanted her to hold me. I wanted her words to stop, and my tears.

  ‘I think that’s what you’ll lose first. That hope,’ she said.

  I felt a first hint of what it might mean to come apart completely.

  ‘What if the glue that holds us together is a story?’ Maggie whispered. ‘Two people wake. The same, yet separate. A contradiction.’

  I couldn’t look at her.

  ‘You asked me if I thought he knew,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’