Lullaby

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘Theo. You asked me if I thought there was a moment when he knew he was dying. It upsets you, doesn’t it, the thought of that.’

  ‘Of course it upsets me.’

  ‘Why?’

  Two hours before, I would have refused to answer. ‘I should have been there.’

  ‘You couldn’t have saved him.’

  ‘But he shouldn’t have been alone. Not then.’

  ‘We die alone,’ Maggie said. ‘That’s how it is.’

  ‘It would make a difference to me, to have him there, holding me. Give me something to focus on.’

  ‘Something other than what?’ She was relentless. But she had to ask.

  ‘The fear.’

  ‘And what is it we are afraid of? Why does death terrify us?’

  ‘Because, it’s…’ I looked for the right words, and discarded every option.

  I will miss it. In that instant of leaving, I will miss the life that I am to be deprived of, but that will quickly pass. I will be desperately sorry, that I cannot stay, that my love has reduced to its last measly portions, too meagre to go around. Knowing that they will cry, when I am gone, and I will not be able to reach out and hold them, that makes me desperately sad. I will regret all that I have not done, all that can not be done, all that can not be undone. All of that is awful, unbearably awful, but none of it is frightening.

  So what is there to fear? I could think of nothing but the nothingness. The inconceivability of a world in which I did not exist. The inevitable impossibility of no longer being.

  ‘My fear got worse and worse, until eventually I was staying awake most of the night,’ Maggie said. ‘My mother took me to see her brother, who was a deeply religious man. My mother didn’t believe in God, but she thought her brother might be able to help me. Perhaps she thought that he would convert me, and it would last just long enough to get me past my problem. A temporary inoculation.

  ‘My uncle listened to my story, and then he said: I can’t help you with your fear, Margaret. I can only tell you why I don’t share it. You see, I believe I have a soul, and that soul is part of what helps me see and feel and know the world. I am not frightened of dying, because I believe the soul will outlast the body, and I am not frightened of sleeping, because when I sleep, my soul sleeps beside me.

  ‘I thought about it for a moment, and then I said to him, my mother doesn’t believe in the soul, but when she goes to bed, she isn’t frightened. Why is that, do you think?

  ‘I remember he reached out to me. He was a big man, and his hand covered my head like a helmet. A smile spread beneath his thick beard.

  Maybe your mother just uses a different word, he said.

  What word?

  She doesn’t believe in her soul, but she believes in her self. You believe in your self, don’t you Maggie? You believe you exist?

  I nodded.

  Then sleeping isn’t dying, my uncle said. It can’t be.’

  Maggie stopped, as if there was nothing left to say.

  ‘Think about that,’ she said.

  ‘Think about what?’ I whispered. I didn’t want her to leave.

  ‘The stories we use to talk ourselves into existence.’

  Questions queued, jostled, foundered. Fragments of understanding jigsawed together, then dissolved. My mouth hung open. I could hear my own breathing: heavy, laborious.

  ‘I don’t even know what—’

  There was a knock at the door. I jumped backwards and the tap handle bruised my spine.

  16

  ‘Are you all right in there, Rene?’ Doctor Huxley’s voice.

  ‘Yeah, just finished, thanks.’

  I stared at Maggie. We both listened for his footsteps, but he didn’t move away. Maggie eased back, and quietly pulled the shower curtain across. I unlocked the door and slid it open, just enough to pass through. If Doctor Huxley had looked past me, there was no hiding the shape behind the curtain.

  ‘Have you decided?’ he asked.

  ‘I need more time.’ It was the truth.

  ‘There’s not much.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ll take you back to Maggie’s office. I’ll call again in thirty minutes, that’s the most I can give you.’

  He must have been tempted, in that moment, to try to sway me. To his credit, he left me with my thoughts, and thirty dwindling minutes.

  The first five I wasted, waiting for Maggie to come back and explain herself. The next three I spent telling myself I needed to concentrate. Don’t panic. Don’t screw up. Don’t think of a polar bear. My father’s voice reached out through the years. If you don’t understand something, write down everything you think you know about it. It was all I had.

  I turned to Maggie’s desk and selected a keyboard. Life and death, as best I understood it, reduced to bullet points.

  • I want to save him.

  • I can’t save him.

  • I might be able to save something.

  • Trying might kill me.

  • It might not.

  • Even if I do not die, I might lose my mind.

  • If the operation is successful, I will wake twice: identical but apart, separate, both me.

  • I cannot imagine it.

  The list took me fifteen minutes to write.

  Seven minutes left to decide.

  I was eighteen, and my brother was dying. Or dead—a cat in a box, a matter of perspective. I looked at the screen. I read over the points, hoping to read something new there, something important. They might as well have been written by a stranger.

  I knew nothing. I felt nothing but thrumming despair. Nature abhors a vacuum. A memory washed in, so sweet that it hurt. The hot sun burnt a hole in the sky. Seagulls wheeled and screeched: ugly, greedy creatures, freed from thoughts and memories. My skin was the deep brown of late summer. The salt from the sea had dried prickly on my back. My red shorts flapped as I ran. My feet reached, arched, flexed and sprang. My lungs burned. My body sang the song of youth, of possibility, of striving.

  He ran beside me. My brother, my other. In the fast approaching distance, the log that was our finish line. I pulled ahead, turned to him, felt invincible. He came up again, his smile wide, his stomach ripped by exertion. He looked good, my mirror. Fit and beautiful. It was inconceivable that we would ever grow old. Sweat stung my eyes. My pace slipped; I had underestimated the distance. He pumped the air. I pushed forward, too late. He hurdled the log and his whoop swept ahead of him, up the headlands, past the windswept kanuka, tickling the blood red bloom of the Christmas pohutukawa. I followed him into the water. We dove together beneath the first set of waves. My lungs were empty but I held on, determined to outlast him. We broke the surface together. He hit me just below the chest, a shoulder charge that took us both off our feet. We wrestled, snorted oceans. We laughed. That moment lives inside me, still.

  I watched the bullet points fade to an empty abstraction, while my brother’s body lay warm and ready. I did not feel the decision happen.
One moment I did not know, and the next I did. We would run again, along that beach. Him and me, or we or them, it didn’t matter. They told me I couldn’t save him, but there was one thing I could never make them understand. What it is to run together, in sunshine and laughter. We would run again.

  That much I would save. I loved him. I love him. It is enough.

  17

  There were forms to sign and then the doctors took over, swarming about with strange instruments, talking to each other in code. I let it happen. It was a relief, to have handed responsibility on. I was exhausted, and even before they gave me the first shot, I could feel myself drifting away. Sleep. I just wanted to sleep.

  Somewhere, in the last moments before they wheeled me away, Emily came to say goodbye. I know now how she managed to convince them. It was either that or she would run to the media with the hospital’s identity mistake. She’s little Emily, and she can make you think she’s so vulnerable, but she has the trick of turning exactly as tough as she needs to.

  Emily leaned over the bed. Around us the medical staff continued their excited worker-bee dances. She kissed me lightly on the forehead. It drew me out of sleep and we hovered together at the surface.

  She said, ‘You know I don’t want you to do this?’

  I nodded.

  Her eyes burned with determination. ‘But you also know, I want you to be okay.’

  My grasp of the situation was so tenuous, all I could do was nod and smile. Other thoughts—how beautiful she was, how much I wanted this to be over so I could hold her again—drifted as fragments.

  Emily pulled herself against me. I felt her hand slip inside my hospital gown. As if in a dream, or waking slowly together, the way it had been. And then, so strange, between her fingers, metal, cold and sharp. A razor blade. She cut me, a single stinging line in my armpit. The world was too busy to notice. Somehow I knew not to wince.

  ‘Keep your elbow in,’ Emily whispered, ‘to stop the bleeding.’

  I did as I was told, marvelled at her strength, her cunning. She got off the bed, turned and blew me a last kiss. I did the same, using the wrong hand. I felt the first trickle of blood, and squeezed my arm against my ribs to keep the treacherous liquid from escaping. Both bodies would remember the blade, but only one would carry the scar.

  I smiled to myself and faded into sleep. Disappeared.

  I’m told there were fifteen surgeons involved in the procedure, working in shifts of five. The head of one of the teams, a woman in her fifties with her grey hair tied back the way my mother used to wear it, delivered the news. By then I’d been knocking on the door of wakefulness for hours, struggling to sort the remembered from the dreamt, the fantastic from the necessary. Not yet lucid enough to scream.

  ‘Hello Rene, how are you?’

  ‘My head hurts.’

  ‘There’ll be more painkillers coming soon.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘We were able to get a good copy of your data, Rene. That part was tremendously successful. The whole team is delighted.’

  ‘And Theo?’

  Her eyes dipped. ‘We managed the transfer, there were strong initial signs that the connectome embedded, but we experienced complications. There was stem damage that hadn’t been apparent in the initial scans. Related to the electrical shock. But we’ve learned more than we expected. Your contribution to medical history, your brother’s contribution, it won’t be forgotten.’

  ‘Theo’s dead?’

  And somehow, it was as if I’d always known, as if there had never been any other possibility.

  ‘I’m so very sorry.’ She didn’t look sorry. She looked excited, the way I imagine Doctor Huxley must have looked. I wondered if they had already opened the champagne.

  I imagined it: his face red with sodden veins, looking down at the press contingent, spinning my loss into his victory.

  ‘We will help you with all the necessary arrangements. For now there is nothing you need to worry about, but getting well. This was, of course, a significant procedure. We’ll keep you here at first, just until we’re confident you’re ready to return to your normal life.

  ‘And Theo? Can I just…’

  ‘It’s not possible, I’m afraid.’

  The first hint of sympathy. For a moment I thought she might hug me. She offered me a tissue.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to…’

  ‘You’ve no need to apologise.’

  My eyes felt dry, despite the tears. The paper tissue rasped at them.

  ‘Can I have a mirror, please?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know if you really want…’

  She didn’t understand. She wasn’t a twin.

  I had to hold the mirror in my outstretched hand to see the extent of the damage. My head was swathed in white bandages, as if I’d been dragged from the set of a cheap horror movie. My eyes were an angry scribble of red, the skin around them darkly bruised. I thought of Theo, wondered if they’d bothered bandaging him. He looked back at me from the mirror, the way it had always been.

  The doctor watched me, and normally that would have made me self-conscious, but there was no normal in that room. I drew the mirror to my lips, kissed him. Whispered, ‘Goodbye.’

  She waited the polite length of time, then gently took the mirror from my hands.

  ‘Is there anybody you want to talk to? Our psychologist, Maggie, has come in today.’

  ‘Is Emily here?’ I asked. I was vaguely aware I should have been feeling something more than this slow inward collapse.

  ‘Yes,’ the surgeon said. ‘She is waiting to see you. An orderly is on his way.

  ‘I’d like to walk. Is that possible?’

  ‘We can try, if you like.’

  The orderly was short and wide. He helped me out of bed. There was a wheelchair waiting by the door.

  ‘He’d like to try to walk,’ the surgeon explained. The orderly nodded, and held my elbow to steady me. My legs shook, the feet were slow to respond, as if they didn’t belong to me at all. I shrugged him off. It felt right, to be stumbling alone. It was less than ten metres along the corridor to the waiting-room door, but I could see I’d have to do it in stages. My vision blurred, came clear, blurred again. A drop of sweat escaped my bandages and stung at my eye. I leaned against the wall. The orderly moved towards me, but I waved him away. I straightened, breathed in deeply and felt a crackling in my ribs. My hand went instinctively to the point of pain. I remembered.

  She must have heard me coming. She’d moved out into the corridor. Her face was set in a smile neither of us could believe. My fingers moved up slowly, from my ribs to under my arm. I found the spot where the blade had been, traced its line with my fingers. The skin was perfectly smooth, unblemished.

  Something made me turn. Somehow, I knew he was there. A glimpse, then another orderly, realising his mistake, trying to get between us. The lying bastards. I wanted to call out, but I couldn’t find my voice, and then he was being dragged away, we both were.

  I screamed out my protest, but too late for him to hear me. Emily moved forward to comfort
me, but I pushed her away.

  I struggled against the orderly’s grip, but the operation had left me weak.

  Then more orderlies arrived, security too, shouting their instructions, swarming all over us. They tore me apart.

  A voice came to me, a memory not my own.

  When this is done, what stories shall we tell ourselves?

  I’m told there were fifteen surgeons involved in the procedure, working in shifts of five. The head of one of the teams, a man in his fifties with his grey hair tied back the way my mother used to wear it, delivered the news. By then I’d been knocking on the door of wakefulness for hours, struggling to sort the remembered from the dreamt, the fantastic from the necessary. Not yet lucid enough to scream.

  ‘Hello Rene, how are you?’

  ‘My head hurts.’

  ‘There’ll be more painkillers coming soon.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘We were able to get a good copy of your data, Rene. That part was tremendously successful. The whole team is delighted.’

  ‘And Theo?’

  His eyes dipped. ‘We managed the transfer, there were strong initial signs that the connectome embedded, but we experienced complications. There was stem damage that hadn’t been apparent in the initial scans. Related to the electrical shock. But we’ve learned more than we expected. Your contribution to medical history, your brother’s contribution, it won’t be forgotten.’

  ‘Theo’s dead?’

  And somehow, it was as if I’d always known, as if there had never been any other possibility.

  ‘I’m so very sorry.’ He didn’t look sorry. He looked excited, the way I imagine Doctor Huxley must have looked. I wondered if they had already opened the champagne.

  I imagined it: his face red with sodden veins, looking down at the press contingent, spinning my loss into his victory.