by Adam Roberts
‘Who is Josef?’ This voice was a child’s.
‘Joe, SF,’ I said. ‘Sf, sff, ssff.’
‘Hold still.’ A child’s voice, or a woman’s.
‘Joe-s-f Vissarionovich Stalin,’ I said, with a great effort, as if forcing something from my chest.
‘You are mistaken,’ said the voice.
Then came the god Hypnos. You know him as Sleep. He came with skin as grey as exhaustion, and huge black slumbrous eyes, almond-shaped and ink-black, and he was the size of a child, because children sleep much more than adults, sleep being the proper realm of children, and so of course Hypnos is child-like. The proper realm. He flew through the air, as Hypnos may, and clutched about my head and my neck with elongated fingers. I wanted to ask him: but am I dead? Am I truly dead, or am I only transformed into an existence of pure radiation? But all he whispered, insistently, like a heartbeat - exactly like a heartbeat, with the thrum of the muscle and the afterhiss of blood slipping silkily along the arteries - was: Joe SF. Joe SF. Joe SF.
PART FOUR
‘In many heads everything has become confused.’
Aleksandr Gelman, addressing the party assembly of the board of the
Russian Union of Cinematographers, 1986
‘The main thing needed now is work, work, work.’
Mikhail Gorbachev in Khabarovsk, 1986
‘Doctor Bello,’ she said, again.
I was lying on my back.
This was a new voice. I had not heard this voice before, or I had. Either I had heard this voice before or I had not, or there was a third option.
‘Doctor Bello,’ she said again.
I contemplated this name for a long time. It seemed to have some mystery attached to it.
‘Can you speak?’
‘Of course,’ I said. It was my voice. It was a little croaky, but it was perfectly functional. I was dead, or. I was either dead or I was alive or there was some third option.
I had no idea who I was. I could not think what my name might be, where I was lying, what had happened to me, or anything like that. The most I could remember was meeting Josef Stalin. But I had only the vaguest memories of what he had said to me. But - had I not actually met Stalin, once upon a time?
I was lying on my back, and I was lying in bed. Lying on and in at the same time. I was not at the dacha at all. Stalin was not there. I was in a hospital room. Dr Bello was a doctor, and she was standing beside the bed.
The quality of light was completely different in this place. It was subdued, filtered, and ordinary. Bearable, I thought. Light was coming through the window over in the far wall.
‘Have you ever heard of Egas Monis?’ the doctor asked me.
‘It is a place on Mars,’ I said, raspily, but with confidence.
‘No, no. It is the name of a human being.’
‘Is he a science fiction writer?’ I asked. ‘I believe I have heard of his name, and it is the name of a science fiction writer.’
‘He won the Nobel prize.’
‘Well then he cannot be a science fiction writer. No writer of science fiction would be awarded such a prize.’
‘His was a prize for medicine. He was awarded it in 1949 for his work with the surgical operation called pre-frontal lobotomy. Why would you think he wrote science fiction? Why would you think such a thing?’
I considered this. ‘Perhaps,’ I answered, upping something from deep memory, ‘because I am myself a science fiction writer?’ Retrieving this was like pulling through my gullet and out of my throat a long piece of string I had, for some reason, swallowed. It was not, that is to say, pleasant.
‘Really? How very interesting.’
‘Do you read science fiction?’
‘Not at all. Not ever. Science fiction is for adolescent boys and people who make models of aircraft from plastic and glue. I am a mature woman, which is to say, the opposite of a science fiction fan.’ She considered for a bit. ‘You science fiction writers write about the future, don’t you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘That may be a problem.’
‘In what way?’
‘What I mean is this: you may find it harder conceptualising the future in, ah, the future. Can you write about something else? The present, say? The past?’
‘I could try.’
‘That might be a good idea. One of the things Egas Monis discovered is that the frontal lobes of the brain are where we imagine the future. Where we plan and project ourselves imaginatively forward in time. Because the future makes some people anxious - what might happen, and so on - Monis discovered that destroying portions of this lobe reduced people’s levels of anxiety. Do you feel anxious?’
‘No.’ And I really didn’t.
‘That’s good.’
‘Are you saying that you have performed a pre-frontal lobotomy upon me, Doctor?’
‘I have not. Although such an operation, if it is going to take place, really should be performed by a medically trained professional.’
The curiosity I felt on this matter was of a generalised, rather pleasant sort. There was no urgency in it. ‘Has some other doctor lobotomisied me?’
‘As to the medical expertise of Leo Alexeivich Trofim, I cannot say.’
My memories of Trofim were bright and immediate. I knew who he was. ‘Trofim! - I never knew his first name before! He is a Leo, is he? Like Tolstoy! For some reason that pleases me.’
‘As your doctor I am pleased to see you pleased. You will recover more quickly if you have a positive mental attitude.’
‘Is Trofim here?’
‘He is not far from here. Although he is no longer in a state of coherent bodily assemblage.’
‘Where is here?’
‘Kiev.’
‘In the Ukraine?’
‘Is there another Kiev?’
‘I mean: the Ukraine on the planet Earth?’
There was a few seconds’ silence. ‘As your doctor,’ she repeated, shortly, ‘I am pleased that you have not lost your sense of humour. A sense of humour will be helpful to you as you convalesce.’
‘I meant the question,’ I said, feeling momentarily confused, ‘seriously.’
‘Seriously has a different interpretation in the realm of science fiction, perhaps.’
There was a sort of mental spasm, another memorial regurgitation inside my brain, like a mamma seagull splurting half-digested fish through her beak for her young. ‘I was in the Chernobyl nuclear facility,’ I said.
‘Reactor Four,’ she said.
‘The reactor exploded,’ I said.
‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘Unless the reactor is your nickname for your young friend. He certainly was, according to the autopsy reports, a well-built individual.’
‘Chernobyl is still intact?’
‘It is generating the electricity that powers this hospital,’ she said. ‘So we must be grateful that your friend’s grenade did not inconvenience it.’
There was a cut, as if in a film. The doctor was no longer there, and instead a nurse - a very tall, thin young man with a bald head and the podgy, ingenuous face of a child - was taking my blood pressure. I had been asleep, or time had slipped, or something else had happened. ‘I was talking to the doctor.’
‘Were you?’
‘Doctor Bello.’
‘That’s her name.’
‘She was the middle of telling me something? I think I zoned out.’
At this point I think I zoned out. I was alone in the room. The window was very tall and thin, and admitted a perspective across a courtyard to a flank of rectangles, like the grid at the bottom of the spent fuel pool, only arrayed vertically rather than horizontally at the bottom of the pool. It took me a while to recognise these as blank windows. There was a tree somewhere in the space between my window and these windows, for a broomstick of branches poked out from the right side of the rectangle. These branches were usually motionless protrusions into the field of view, rather jagged and unpleasant, but ev
ery now and again a breeze would insinuate itself down into the courtyard and elate the twigs to a flurry of waving.
Now the window was dark, and the only illumination was a nightlight above the door. It shone with a gorgeous jade-green light; delicate and dim.
The nurse was coming in through the door. It occurred to me that he unlocked the door before stepping through it, and relocked it when he was through. For some reason this action snagged my attention. He was carrying a tray. On the tray was a bowl of broth and a small boulder of bread.
‘How long have I been here?’ I asked, between sips, as he spooned the soup into my mouth.
‘You know what I reckon about time?’ the nurse replied. ‘I figure that the passage of time is subjective. I don’t know much about frontal lobe injury, but I know it can do strange things to your sense of the passage of time. Does it feel like you’ve been here for a long time?’
‘Months.’
‘Ha!’ This pleased him. ‘Two days - three now. Or is it months? A philosopher might be able to tell us the difference. And why, anyway, should we submit to the tyranny of the calendar? The clock? Days? Months?’
He broke off some of the bread, dipped it in the broth, and poked one end in between my lips. I disliked the texture of it.
‘Which is it?’ I asked, annoyed, or tried to. I wanted solidity. But he wasn’t there anymore. I was alone in the room as the rectangular photographic print that was the window yielded the effects of the chemical wash in which it had been immersed and very slowly went from black to purple, to grey, to a yeasty paleness.
No.
Actually I wasn’t in the room, I was on a trolley, flowing along the longest corridor in the world. Actually it wasn’t a corridor, and those weren’t lights set at intervals into the ceiling; it was a liftshaft and those were floors. I was falling. Actually I wasn’t in a corridor, I was back in the womb, and the womb was a metal sac, like the interior of a toothpaste tube.
The doctor was helping me sit up in bed. I was in my room again. ‘Did I have a scan? Was that what that was? I assume that is what has just happened to me.’
‘As we discussed,’ she said. But I had no memory of such a discussion. ‘You used to be a smoker, I think’
‘A smoker?’
‘A smoker of cigarettes.’
And her words unlocked that whole storeroom of memory. I had been entirely oblivious to cigarettes until she uttered those words; and then, suddenly, I craved a smoke. I knew once again that stretched, physiological need for nicotine. ‘Do you have any cigarettes? ’ I asked. ‘I feel the need for one, right now, very acutely.’
‘Smoking is not permitted in here,’ she said.
That reminded me of something.
‘It is obvious,’ the doctor was saying, ‘from even the most cursory examination of your body, that you have smoked far too much for far too long. But I knew you were a smoker even before I examined you. Do you know how I knew? I shall tell you. You had a cigarette in your mouth. When they pulled you out of the pool, at the plant, they said your lips were set fast about the stub of a cigarette.’
‘I remember that cigarette,’ I said, fondly.
‘It played a part,’ she said, ‘in saving your life. There’s an irony there, perhaps. As a medical practitioner I spend much of my working life telling people not to smoke. I spend a lot of time telling them that. Almost as much time as I spend telling them not to drink. But in this case . . .’
‘That cigarette saved my life?’ I said.
‘It relaxed your muscles. Your friend, Mr Nuclear Reactor, your friend Leo-as-in-Tolstoy, his muscles were tensed tight. The shrapnel cut through him like snapping harpstrings. He went to pieces.’ She chuckled, and then stopped herself. ‘If you see what I mean. You, though, you were relaxed. Sometimes people come into the hospital here having fallen from, say, a high building. Adults, but also, sometimes, babies. The babies have a greater chance of surviving, because they don’t tense themselves in anticipation of the impact. They don’t know any better. They hit the ground as soft sacks, and so don’t shatter.’
‘I believe I have heard something of the like,’ I said.
‘Your muscles were slack, so some of the shrapnel passed straight through without causing too much damage. Pieces went through your legs, and arms, and there is a hole through your stomach and out the other side. It was a good job that none of the pieces had a trajectory that intersected your spine. A piece got stuck in your ribs, and another inside your head, but we were able to get both of those pieces out.’
I looked at my own left hand. I was wearing a stigmata. Turning the hand over, I saw the matching scar on the back. I flexed my fingers; they were stiff, and a little sore, but they worked.
‘Is this how a grenade works?’ I said, amazed.
She looked at me. Her face was a series of regular curves, regularly arranged, but there was a professional blankness in her expression that reduced what might otherwise have been beauty. ‘Weren’t you in the army?’
‘I was in the army,’ I said, with another internal wrench of memorialising regurgitation.
‘Then you should know how a grenade works. It is usually a fatal device, a grenade. Don’t misunderstand me. But, luckily for you, you were relaxed. And luckily you were blown into the pool, which extinguished and cooled your burns. You were partially in the pool. And a quantity of water had been blown about. There was much water in the air, and it rained back down upon you. So you didn’t burn.’
‘Thrice lucky,’ I said.
‘More than thrice. Your face was exposed to the blast, and your skin should have been badly burned. It was, in fact, burned. But your face has been burned before, hasn’t it?’
‘I can’t remember,’ I said.
‘Your chin and cheeks, some of your nose and much of your brow is covered with old scar tissue. The scarring indicates what must have been a fairly severe prior burn.’
‘I can’t remember,’ I said again.
‘Scar tissue is in some senses weaker than ordinary tissue; but it has a higher concentration of collagen, which makes it structurally tougher.’
‘I see.’
‘There is, furthermore, another piece of luck here,’ she said.
‘I’ve lost count now,’ I said.
‘The grenade was fairly radioactive. It had been left in a radioactive environment for perhaps a week, and had become itself fairly radioactive.’
I considered this. ‘That’s lucky?’
‘Normally, no. Normally that is no more lucky than smoking a cigarette is healthy. Normally the fact that this grenade was radioactive would be extremely unlucky. You had a fragment of this radioactive grenade stuck inside your skull for two and a half days. We have just operated to remove it. It entered through the left temple - your left, that is - so that’s how we retrieved it; out through the hole it made going in.’
I put my hand up to my head, and felt, on the left side, the enormous fabric excrescence of a surgical dressing, clamped to the side of my skull like an alien facehugger that had missed its target. ‘Don’t fiddle with that,’ said the doctor, severely. ‘There’s a tap under there.’
‘Tap,’ I said. I am not sure why I added. ‘The American word is [faucet].’
‘That’s as may be. Our tap is designed to relieve intercranial pressure, and must not be meddled with.’
‘Meddled with,’ I repeated.
‘Comrade Skvorecky,’ said the doctor. ‘Did you know you have cancer?’
‘Cancer,’ I said, as if leafing through the medical textbook of my memory. Most of the pages were blank. But I remembered this: ‘Because I was in Chernobyl?’
‘No no. Judging by its growth, I would say you have had cancer growing inside your brain for several years.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I pondered this. It sounded like news, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel any anxiety. ‘I may have known that. I may not. I can’t remember if I knew or not.’
‘Located on the border between
the perifrontal lobe and the midbrain. Under normal circumstances I would describe such a growth as inoperable.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Does that mean I am going to die?’
‘Everybody dies, comrade.’
‘True of course,’ I agreed. I felt remarkably placid about this news.
‘You should ask: Am I to die soon?’
‘Am I?’
‘As to that, I can’t say. We took out some of the growth when we were in your skull, but wholly to excise it would require us to remove more brain tissue than would be compatible with your continuing mental function.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said again, passionlessly.
‘On the other hand, the grenade fragment was lodged in such a way as to be, in fact, in contact with the tumour.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said once more.
‘Not oh dear, comrade. The grenade itself had been irradiated by, it seems, a week or more in close proximity to depleted uranium. It was itself therefore radioactive. It therefore itself irradiated the tumour for two days. We’ve taken the shrapnel out now, but there’s little doubt that it has done you good.’
‘Done me good,’ I said, as if testing the word on my tongue. ‘Good.’
‘Cancer cells are more susceptible to radiation than ordinary cells. That, combined with the limited surgical excision, has, I believe, materially lengthened your life expectancy.’
‘To be clear,’ I said. ‘By smoking a cigarette, inside a nuclear facility, whilst having my skull blown up by a radioactive RGD-5 I have extended my life expectancy?’
‘A strange chance, indeed. You have months of convalescence ahead of you, of course. Your shrapnel damage amounts to having been shot in the body and head half a dozen times, in addition to being concussed and burned. I would be concerned about such injuries in a young, healthy man; but in a man of your advanced years and poor health it is much more alarming. How old are you, exactly?’
I thought about this. ‘Old,’ I said.
‘When were you born.’
‘I can’t remember.’