Darwin's Ghosts

by Ariel Dorfman

  There, awaiting me, imperturbable, was all that I had abandoned a mere few hours ago, each pillow and poster and book and piece of clothing and drawings and mathematical equations on my desk. And Cam’s glorious photo snapped by her father, as crazy about taking pictures as my own dad—“my parents decided that when they called me Cameron,” he would joke, “so what else could we name our daughter but Camilla, huh?, be sure to take good care of her, Fitz, or I’ll snap something else, eh, come and shoot you with something heftier than a camera, right?,” oh if he had known what we had been up to in her bedroom just the night before. And also there, on top of my sheets, the cover to the Peter Gabriel album, containing the song that had started it all this morning. I had fallen in love with that cover by Hipgnosis as soon as I had glimpsed it in a store and loved it all the more because my father hated the artwork. The designers had used a Polaroid shot of the singer to deform his face, melt half of it ferociously—Cool, I thought, terrifyingly perfect, was Camilla’s reaction—but now that I was the monster, now that “Games Without Frontiers” was associated and always would be with this disease, I felt disgust, the intuition that I had brought this upon myself, not just the solitary sex, but the fact that before the act itself I had dabbled in this fascination with the monstrous without fully understanding what was behind it, that I had let myself be caught in something that was not a game, that I had passed a frontier, was discovering that if looks could kill they probably will.

  I vomited on the cover. There was not much in my stomach but enough bile to smear the side of Peter Gabriel’s face that was whole and intact, and I immediately realized that this was wrong, that the singer had nothing to do with my cataclysm. I had to hold onto something from my former life, could not destroy everything I cared for as that indigenous invader wanted—but what, what, what did he want?

  I took the cover to the bathroom where eighteen hours before I had burst my innocence and entered the world of adulthood with a joy I no longer felt, I cleaned the artwork, scrubbed Peter Gabriel’s face spotless, returned the album to its venerable place in my room.

  And descended the stairs for the second time on that fateful birthday.

  Dad and Mom had attained a truce.

  Mom agreed that we should not go public. And Dad had consented to my seeing our family doctor—we’d tell him that I was assailed by sudden blinding headaches, so that a barrage of tests could be ordered. Strange how they were deciding my fate, the next decades of my life, without consulting me, treating me more like a captive than a minor. And Mom had won another battle: she would keep all the offending images, save them from incineration under lock and key up in the attic, and furthermore she was given permission to surreptitiously investigate the possible identity of this devil who had come to disturb the peace and quiet of a happy and law-abiding American family.

  The next days brought me a taste of what my life would be like from now on.

  Being probed by machines, that’s what.

  Medical devices of all sorts, including, of course, X-rays. Though the savage seemed to specialize in exteriors and skin, we feared that his real, cavernous habitat was deep inside me, that he’d somehow infiltrated my brain, leering out from the skull or the stomach, we feared he was hidden in some cancerous growth. The X-rays came back absolutely normal, incongruous that this should be about the only normal thing in my existence, the inside of my vulnerable body.

  I was also one of the first humans to be scanned by an MRI machine, not yet available to the public. But Cameron Wood had been the liaison between Polaroid and General Electric on several military projects, and when my dad told him that I was ill, he responded that he’d be glad to get me tested up at the medical facility in Schenectady, New York, and added, So that’s why Cam’s been so depressed lately. Again, the sonar waves revealed no problems. Other medical tests were equally noncommittal—they measured every last limb and protuberance, length of fingers, arms, thighs, cranium, nose, mouth, and checked my blood for sugar, cholesterol, mineral content, liver function, triglyceride levels, possible drug use. My cells were analyzed in petri dishes, electrocardiograms monitored my heart, the screenings seemed endless, all returning negative, each of them telling the truth about my health, that there was no visible cause for my condition. Not a surprise, as we had lied about what was really ailing me, insisting to staff and doctors and our health insurance company that the headaches would not go away, elaborating ever grander untruths to secure further assessments, inventing hallucinations that made me see monkeys and gorillas in the place of people. Until they finally gave up, certified me in perfect physical health and recommended psychiatry. Could they be right? Was I crazy? No. The monster I was forbidden from divulging to the world, he was the crazy one, crazy with rage, envy, vindictiveness.

  As the cameras proved in the many secret photographic sessions that ran parallel to those medical exams. The morning after my birthday, I was greeted by my parents, at last united in their strategy. While I had slept well, visited by nothing other than the usual bizarre dreams entertained by our species for the last two million years, they had been up all night compiling a list of questions that my increasingly unwilling body had to answer. Would a similar invasion be inscribed on film or on the video recorders that were being tested by Sony and JVC, according to Polaroid’s spies? Did anything change if the photos were in black and white? With one flash, with two flashes, with green lights and red lights and filters and black drapes? At different locations and landscapes? At night, when I was asleep and the prowler might be less vigilant? Beneath a canopy of trees or at the zoo or at an ethnographical museum? Wouldn’t a more natural habitat, the sort the Neanderthal was accustomed to, placate whatever bloodthirsty reasons he had for this foray? What if I closed my eyes? Covered my face with one hand, with two hands, only with a few fingers? Disfigured myself with clown makeup, made my countenance cartoonish with the sort of moustache and scars and heavy eyebrows I had carved into his image by the Charles River? What if I wore a mask like Zorro or Flash Gordon, placed my heroes Spider-Man or Batman between us? Foiled him with Porky Pig or Mickey Mouse? Entirely disappeared inside a burlap bag?

  Of all the alternatives, only the latter stopped this unknown native’s intrusions. He ignored every obstacle we put in place, every modified circumstance, every shift from Konica to Minolta to Kodak and back to Polaroid and its multiple models. Only when I was entirely ensconced away, not one inch of skin visible, did he refuse to impose his features on mine. Much help that was—I couldn’t go stumbling through the rest of life inside a bag. Though one ephemeral pleasure was afforded to me: as he seemed to tolerate the two slits for my eyes, six weeks after my catastrophic fourteenth birthday, I was able to freely roam the streets for Halloween. This was eight months before Spielberg’s E.T. was released in the States, the movie where the cute little alien, walks a California suburb without calling attention to himself. My mom snuck me into the Cineplex to see it with my brothers, and there it was, the same trick I had anticipated in my own life.

  But I never wandered freely like that again. It had been so exhilarating while I was trick-or-treating—telling one and all that I was dressed up as a simple burlap bag, a shopping bag hungry for candy—when what I was hungry for was company and normalcy, the anonymous liberty to play with other boys, fantasize that I was like them, that tomorrow I would go to school like them and kiss girls like them and play baseball like them and attend dances and picnics and beach parties, like them, like them. Except I wasn’t. I returned home and saw it as my prison, its walls and windows the true limits of my world. So that taste of freedom was bitter. The momentary experience—not even affording a glimpse of Camilla, unless she was hiding her sorrow under a mask of her own—was not thrilling enough to compensate for the next 364 days of misery and simulation.

  Better to accept that real captives were not given a day’s surcease. All those kids out there could play at being monsters for one night because they were nothing like me, this para
noid shadow whose every Kodak moment was a Walpurgis night, the hallowed evening when the dead rise from the grave—every day and every one of my nights haunted by that dead man, ruining my existence.

  Because that is what he had come to do, that is what I thought for many years.

  I had dropped out of school, of course. Something decided by my parents that first weekend, not even letting me go there to say goodbye to friends and teachers, coaches and swimming pool and baseball field. Homeschooling from now on, my mom explained, until I got better. Not just school forbidden but everywhere and anywhere that ubiquitous cameras roamed, each last inhabitant of this planet a potential predator. The planet! As if I could get anywhere on my own, without a driver’s license or a passport. Confined and cocooned, much like someone indeed suffering from the plague. My parents systematically turned away friends who came to check out what might have gone wrong, why was the most popular and boldest boy in the class suddenly a pariah?

  Camilla herself did not stop by—she knew I would turn her away—but her father did, to inquire how the tests had gone in upstate New York. Not friends, our two dads, though they respected each other, complemented each other. Cameron Wood specialized in the long-term architecture of the eye and how it could be projected onto paper and Jerry Foster tried to make sure the eyes of millions of consumers instantly fell in love with the images on those pieces of paper. On that visit, Dr. Wood informed them that his daughter, though heartbroken, wanted the Fosters to know she was ready to help if they needed her.

  I didn’t come down to speak to him, didn’t send a message back. I had made the mistake of trusting her with my secret. I wasn’t going down that road again. And even if I had wanted to reconnect, each day that I was caged and she was free pushed her farther away. She had asked for me, of course she had—how else to salve her conscience as she tasted life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but soon, like someone sent into the ice of exile, I would fade from her memory, not even a silhouette on her horizon. She would find another swimming partner, other lips under other trees and the same stars, other hands to soften her muscles and explore her sex.

  Depression started to set in. Staved off during the initial month and a half by collaborating voraciously in the medical and photographic sessions, as eager as my parents for some reprieve, animated by the ever fainter hope that some dawn the savage would decamp as abruptly as he had arrived. Perhaps it was fatigue that punctured that transitory elation—or just the dejected aftermath of my Halloween outing, which forced me to accept that my habitual, receding self was not going to return to anything resembling that photo pinned to my desk.

  It was to shield myself from the sting of incessant regrets that I rebelled.

  Not by demanding to go out. My parents had convinced me that such audacity could lead to far worse forms of incarceration than the bittersweet safety of our own home. No, what I insisted on was some order in those photo opps, a reasonable schedule.

  “I feel like an animal in a zoo,” I protested—yes, I really did use that term of comparison, “always on call, you guys looking at me through the viewfinder whenever you feel like it, snapping pictures, turned into a souvenir. I hate that moment when we hold our breath to see if we’ll win this time—and we never do!”

  Once a week, once a week and no more.

  My parents pleaded with me—why make it easy for the ghoul, why give him a timetable he could count on? What if we were missing an opportunity to surprise him, evade his vigilance, seize the odd moment in the day when he dozed off or his attention wandered?

  I was deaf to their entreaties. By then I was certain that the visitor did not sleep. He was burrowed inside, irremediably there, under my skin or wafting over me like a malevolent mist. I did not share that disquieting intuition with my progenitors, telling them, instead, that I needed to govern something in my own life, limit his influence to one hour a week, pretend that he had no access to me the rest of the time. It might be an illusion, but at least it would offer him the gift of existence solely in the brief interlude when he inserted his image between me and the camera.

  It was almost like a pact.

  He would know when he was expected to show up—and I would know that he would keep his appointment, no longer scheming to trick him. We’d each settle into our assigned role: he as a ghost that could not be mollified, poor Fitzroy Foster as the victim who could not escape.

  Not entirely true, that I could not escape.

  Like a werewolf, I came to love the night, though I preferred my nights moonless and dark. My dad and mom didn’t know it, but I would often sneak out, slink down abandoned alleyways, learning the arts of infinite stealth, careful not to tread near streets patrolled by the police. It would have been disastrous to be caught and photographed at the precinct station, though I savored the astonishment I’d cause, how I would caution the officer not to snap my picture, that he didn’t know what he was getting into. But no matter how much I relished the imaginary dialogue where I played the tough guy and the police the pansies about to be horrified by my devilish cohort, it made sense to stay away from trouble.

  I didn’t want to imperil the entrancement and independence that nightfall provided—joining all the monsters of history who creep out into the crevices of society when they believe nobody is watching. Those hours under the starlit or overcast skies with nobody to bother me, no importune camera to nail me to its lens.

  Not the only rules I broke.

  On those autumn junkets, I would find myself irresistibly drawn to a range of self-service photo booths that Polaroid had strewn in the grittier parts of town. I’d enter that neon cubicle, stupidly read the instructions as if I had never before registered them, feed the coins into the slot, let the camera do its job, and wait for my image to be coughed up.

  Why did I subject myself to this ceremony, destined to incessant disappointment, allowing the figment of my invisibility to be demolished again and yet again? Did I truly think that, alone with the machine, he would find himself stymied? That he required human eyes to usher his face into existence? But it was only my solitary eyes he required, the frightened invitation of my face and the cold shuttering whir and clicks of the camera to snake himself onto me, with his sad black eyes and those thick inscrutable lips.

  Don’t let him beat you, my mother said, as I sank into the listlessness and docility of easy victimhood, rarely rising from my bed, paying only perfunctory consideration to her lessons in history, chemistry, English, or even my favorite of favorites, math. Of what use were they to someone like me, banned from everything a lad of my age should have been enjoying? Don’t let him beat me? What did she know? What did my father know when he urged me to fight back? Against an apparition? Dominating my every act?

  He rose with me at dawn and breakfasted by my side and snickered at the long conversations with my parents as we sought fruitlessly to outwit him, the timid and ridiculous suggestions of my brothers. He was there when I pissed and when I defecated and when I shut myself in my room for hours doodling with algorithms. And, of course, when I engaged in endless chess matches with myself. He dictated the moves of the other side, he whispered that I should sacrifice my bishop, save my knight for better times, he cheered my pawns as they were crowned queens, I checkmated him over and over, checkmated myself, lost even when I won. He was me. How could I beat him? There was no place to hide from his eyes of night—like a mouse or a chimpanzee in a laboratory, I was always under surveillance. No longer by doctors, but by his gaze, I could feel him measuring me, analyzing my cartilage and gait and elbows. My master. How to beat him?

  Only by ridding the world of the body he had infected.

  You want my life, you fucker? Well, here it is. I’m surrendering it to you, may it be as useless to you as it will soon be to me. My revenge: never again to be the vessel for your malice. Drown myself and drown him—and send a message to Cam. For some absurd reason I assumed she’d be the one to identify my corpse—oh would she feel sorry when s
he understood that the water that had blessed us together had now claimed me forever.

  And I knew just the place. That lost landscape of paradise next to the Charles River where I had attempted to erase the visitor’s image and had realized that only by destroying his face, and mine, and mine, could he be placated.

  What I should have done then.

  I waited for the family to fall asleep and revved up the motorbike for what I swore would be my last ride. It was cold that winter night—Christmas was only two weeks away—and I bundled a couple of blankets in my backpack. A decision that should have made me wary of how sincerely I was arranging my suicide. Why worry about catching a cold if you’re about to die by your own hand? And my suspicions should have redoubled when, upon arriving at that spot, I placed the blankets carefully on the ground and lay down—only for a few seconds I told myself, only to review my life, focus on one memory I wanted to take to the other world, one instant of pleasure that I could remember as I sank into the deep, rushing waters.

  And there it was, inside some zone of myself, the very last time I had been free of his atavistic face, and my hand knew what to do to bring that moment back. It crept furtively downward and strayed toward my genitals and nestled there, rummaged gently for a touch, ready to repeat the rhythm that had culminated with that initiation into manhood. Yes, that was it, one ultimate act of self-love to indulge in before terminating my life and his enigma, bring to a fitting close the infernal circle that had opened on the morning of my fourteenth birthday. What better way to say goodbye? After that final expiring orgasm I’d find the courage to slip, still panting and hot with my own fruitless sperm, into the icy river.

  And then, before my fingers could continue with their preliminary stroking, Camilla Wood came to me. Not true that she was gone forever. She had remained behind in some labyrinth of my brain, lingered like an aftertaste of perfume that refuses to dissipate. There, under that glacial wind, fighting against the desire to die, I held onto her image like a life raft. There was, in that memory of the woman I had lost, a breathtaking purity that returned me to who I had once been, someday might be, a glimmer of hope in the last corner of the last recess of my mind that things could change. Reminded that an alternative future still might await me somewhere at the confines of the earth. Like a prisoner remembers the mountain he once climbed and the glint of the sun falling into the sea. Like an animal in a zoo must recall the free scent of trees and light. Like a man struck blind evokes colors he will never see again. Where did those images come from? Had she been sending them to me so I could choose life and not death?