Transmigration

by J. T. McIntosh

  Suddenly he took full control of her for the very first time, apart from the momentary interferences which had led to this accusatory demonstration, and snatched up a wrap, threw it on and belted it. She protested:

  --I made you look at what you're doing to me, but surely I'm not as hideous as all that yet?

  --We're about to have a visitor.

  --You have a private alarm system?

  She turned to the door.

  --Not that way.

  When she realized he meant the window, and guessed that the visitor could only be Ross, she wanted to scream, set the window catch, or run from the room.

  --It's not like last time, Fletcher told her. --He won't hit you.

  Ross was outside, and he saw her looking at him. He saw, too, that she made no attempt to stop him opening the window and climbing in.

  "How romantic!" said Anita drily.

  "I have to talk to you," he said, "and if I called and rang the bell you wouldn't see me."

  "So you came in by the window. I agree it's logical. Somewhat unnecessarily dramatic, but . . . "

  "Anita," he said, leaning back against the window, "I love you and I always have."

  She was silent, having no answer to this. Her heart started to hammer and she felt her color rising.

  "Nothing quite like this ever happened before," he went on. "You know what happened to me, don't you? You know it, and believe it?"

  She nodded.

  "Men have told girls 'I've changed' before, but never with such cause. I don't blame you for not being impressed by the Ian Ross that was . . . "

  "But you feel I should be greatly impressed by the Ian Ross that is?"

  "Not that. But give me a chance, Anita."

  "Sometimes," she said with a good pretense of coolness, "a traveling salesman must hate the customer who won't listen. Yet surely everybody has a right to opt out of being a customer? Suppose I just don't want to buy?"

  "That's just it. You don't know whether you want to buy or not. And you're refusing to try and find out."

  He was right, and she knew it.

  Pressing his momentary advantage, he said. "I want you, Anita, and I'm not such a fool as to pretend I don't, just because you won't make up your mind. Think for a moment and then give me a straight answer. Am I really wasting my time?"

  He was making it hard for her to temporize. He was doing all he could to force her to say yes or no.

  "Yes," she said.

  "You mean it?" he said steadily.

  "Of course I mean it."

  "I'm going to ask you again. Do you want me to go out through this window and never come near you again?"

  "Yes."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes, yes, yes!"

  He hesitated, then nodded. "Goodbye, Anita," he said, and opened the window.

  She didn't move. As Ross climbed out and closed the window, she sent out a frantic, wordless appeal to Fletcher.

  Fletcher entirely ignored it. He had interfered in the lives of all his hosts, but at this moment he must not interfere, and he knew it.

  --Please! she begged. --Help me!

  Fletcher turned his back on her.

  She knew Ross had meant what he said. He had pride. He had demanded a final answer, and predictably she had chosen the status quo. But now it was clear that her answer could not leave things as they were. Though she didn't want Ross, she even less wented to lose him.

  And in her irrationality Fletcher suddenly saw his own.

  Searle had said he couldn't fail. Well, Searle was crazy. What Searle had done to him could never be justified, even by Searle's conviction that it had to be done. Searle had meddled mistakenly and unforgivably in his early childhood.

  Yet, in dying, Searle had given him valuable clues which he had resolutely refused to look at.

  Failure was what he expected, so he failed.

  Loneliness was what he expected, so he was lonely.

  Although since John Fletcher died -- and perhaps it was significant and relevant, after all, that John Fletcher had had to die anyway -- he had achieved what gave some appearance of success with the lives of others, it was still very hard for him to face the idea that if he changed what he expected, he could change what he achieved.

  He did not want vast power.

  He did not want the responsibility of exerting it.

  It was simpler to deny that he possessed it.

  And Anita said, when the man she loved asked her if she wanted him never to come near her again: "Yes."

  Anita ran to the window and threw it up.

  "Ian!" she called. In the bright moonlight she saw him clearly in the yard below. He had not taken the chance of jumping from the coal cellar roof to the wall.

  Without conscious thought she started to climb out of the window. The fact that Ross had twice reached and left her roof by that route made it an obviously practical one. Although she was not a militant feminist she was an active girl who believed that within reason she could do anything a man could. Suddenly reckless, she had every intention of climbing out on the roof and down to Ross.

  Then, with one knee on the sill and the other stretching for the roof below, she remembered she was naked but for a thin robe. She made a violent gesture to draw her wrap about her, lost her balance, lost her grip, and found herself facing the dark sky, falling face upward.

  Fletcher had heard that a dying man sometimes saw his whole life parade past him in a split second. In the fraction more than a second of the fall, he saw not only his own life, but what had happened since.

  Falling or fear of falling had dominated his life and afterlife. There was no doubt some deep symbolism attached to it: falling equaled failing, perhaps?

  The drop was not the terrifying one from the top of the Scott Monument or the Westfield skyscraper or the office building from which Sheila had fallen to her death. But it was twice the drop that had killed Fletcher. It was interminable. It lasted a million years.

  Anita was going to die. She was screaming and Fletcher realized she knew that she was going to die. Curiously, Fletcher felt no fear, only surprise that he was still inside of Anita's body. Why had he not escaped as usual? But then, apart from the time when his own fear had made him leave Judy, he had often escaped only at the moment of death. Perhaps the same would happen again.

  Another thing which possibly assuaged his terror was the fact that Anita was falling backward, facing the night sky. She could not see the ground rushing to meet her.

  But she was terrified. She did not want to die. And she, independently, looked back on her own life and was horrified to see what a wasteland it was.

  That was her own reaction to her life.

  The fall at last ended.

  Anita knew nothing about how it ended until she found herself on her feet, dazed, but otherwise unharmed. For long seconds she could not understand what had happened.

  Then she saw Ross leaning against the wall of the house, barely able to stand. His face was an ashen blur of agony. His right arm hung in a way which showed it was broken, and even in the gloom there was something terribly wrong about his left shoulder. "You caught me," she breathed.

  He managed to grin. "Maiden, before I carry you across the threshold you'll have to lose about two hundred pounds. You must weigh a ton at least."

  "You saved my life."

  "Think nothing of it. I'd have done the same for anybody. Now, before I actually expire, what about getting some help?"

  Anita's landlady, many years before, had been a nurse. She coped competently, while Anita rang for an ambulance. Ross's arm was broken in two places at least, and his left shoulder, as well as being dislocated, was probably fractured.

  Sensing the landlady's curiosity and disapproval, Anita said: "I've been a fool, but not in the way you think."

  Mrs. Sandford said: "I always thought you were a quiet, sensible girl."

  "Too quiet and too sensible. That's why this happened."

  When the ambulance ca
me it took them both away. Anita, after finding herself miraculously on her feet, had forgotten about herself altogether. But of course she had bruises, and the ambulance men insisted on taking her for X-rays.

  She was allowed to see. Ross some hours later.

  "Ian," she said. "That was a wonderful thing you did."

  He frowned. "Look, Anita, don't let's get this all wrong. I was down there when you fell. Whoever it was, even a stranger, I'd have had to try to help."

  She nodded. "All right, have it your way. But remember, even before that, I was coming after you."

  She leaned over and kissed him.

  After that Anita's views on the continued presence of Fletcher were very similar to those of Gerry.

  --Why don't you find some lonely shepherd who's pining for company? Someone who likes voices in his head?

  --I never do the finding. And if you want to be rid of me, it's up to you.

  --Yes, I know about that. It's not a situation without precedent any more. Well, anything Judy and Ian can do, I can do.

  --Do you have any ideas?

  --I wouldn't have opened the subject if I hadn't.

  --What are you going to do?

  --You'll find out. You won't like it.

  She told Mrs. Sandford that for the next week at least she would be having all her meals out.

  Mrs. Sandford, friendly again, nodded. The hospital. I understand."

  Although Ross would not have been detained on account of his broken arm, the fractured shoulder was more serious and he would have to be in the hospital for several weeks. Rules at the small convalescent home to which he had been sent were not strict. Anita could get in to see him at almost any time.

  Anita did visit Ross very frequently. But she did not have her meals out. She didn't have them at all.

  Fletcher expostulated:

  --This is crazy. You'll kill yourself. And short of that you won't dislodge me.

  --I think I will.

  She drank at will; tea, coffee, milk or soft drinks. She sometimes ate biscuits or dry toast, but nothing more substantial.

  --It's like trying to starve a tapeworm to deathl Fletcher exclaimed.

  --Methinks he doth protest too much.

  --What does that mean?

  --If it's nothing to you that I've stopped eating, why get so concerned about it?

  As the days passed, Fletcher had to admit to himself, though he did not admit to Anita, that her method was not wholly composed of madness. Even before she had lost the unwanted nine pounds, her primary objective, he was so ravenous he found himself incapable of thinking of anything but food, while she, never in the slightest concerned over eating for eating's sake, was almost indifferent to the missed meals.

  --Business girls often lunch on a glass of milk and a sandwich, she told him airily.

  --But you have the glass of milk and no sandwich.

  --Well, it saves money.

  Sometimes he tried to force her to take a solid meal, but with no success. She was determined, and he was prevented from exerting his full power by several considerations, including the fact that she was coming to no real harm.

  It was demonstrated beyond all argument that two minds in the same body reacted differently to the same stimuli. Food was relatively unimportant to Anita. She had a cup of tea and a piece of dry toast and if she still felt hungry, it didn't really matter, not compared with more important things like seeing Ross in twenty minutes, or getting rid of the cuckoo in her mind. But Fletcher ached for food, tormenting himself with visions of huge steaks, great plates of spaghetti and cheese, or vast mounds of curry and rice.

  His gluttony, cruelly exposed, disgusted him. Anita was certainly eating less than she should, and would harm herself if she went on as she was doing for long. Yet she was harming herself very little; she lost eleven pounds and then for a time seemed incapable of losing any more, partly because she never stinted her intake of fluids. Even after that, when she began to grow gaunt, her cheeks becoming hollow and her bones starting to protrude, she experienced few ill effects beyond lassitude.

  Fletcher, on the other hand, was cut down to size. Searle's grandiose conception of him prompted only hollow laughter. Because he could not stuff himself (or rather, Anita) with vast volumes of animal and vegetable matter, he became nothing. Even thinking, save of food, became impossible.

  He wanted to die, as Searle had wanted to die.

  Intercepting the thought, Anita took him to his nameless grave in the town's biggest cemetery.

  --There you are, under the soil. That's you, Fletcher. Have you finally made up your mind to go there, when I drive you out?

  He could not understand her lack of sympathy, the cruelty that he knew was quite foreign to her. He knew and understood that she wanted to be herself, without his interference, but her cruelty shocked him. This was not Anita.

  And then in one of the moments of clarity that were becoming less frequent, so tortured was his incorporate spirit by an entirely corporate weakness, he saw that the cruelty was part of her determination. She was locked in mortal combat with him, and she would never give in. Ross, who knew now what was going on, kept begging her to find another way. But she had made up her mind. If necessary, she would starve herself to death.

  In an unguarded moment, she let him see another reason for her cruelty. If affection were food to him, he must have none. She would give him neither food nor affection.

  The end was as unexpected to her as to him. She felt fine, except for the lassitude. She had just been to see Ross, and had to run to be in time for a class she could not afford to miss.

  In the middle of the lecture she collapsed. The doctor who was called in had no difficulty in diagnosing malnutrition. She was taken to hospital, not the one where Ross was, and would have been fed intravenously if necessary.

  But it wasn't necessary, for by this time Fletcher was gone.

  CHAPTER 8: FLETCHER

  In the first moment he knew he was himself again. He was with no other mind. He was at last alone: John Fletcher and no other.

  Then fear gripped him at the thought that he was alive, imprisoned, conscious, in a dead, rotting body weeks in the grave.

  He should be dead, and once again he was not.

  With an effort he calmed himself. Physically he had no existence; he could feel, see, hear, smell, taste nothing. Yet his mind was clear and he was very comfortable. If death was like this, it should be possible to become used to it.

  But he had scarcely sought physical sensations and failed to find them when they began to creep back.