So, it was no longer exotic or quaint to be afflicted, but frightening.
The shop foreman had everything well in hand, and practically ran the place anyway, so I awarded myself a permanent vacation until I found a cure.
The family doctor directed me to a specialist, who recommended a program of dieting and healthy exercise. And, when nothing changed, I went to other specialists.
One recommended I avoid eating meals in the evenings, or anything that might cause stress. The next had me lie on a couch and reminiscence about any hidden feelings of hate or guilt about my father. The next suggested that my sleep should be interrupted one hour before and again one hour after midnight, which was a strain on Roberts and on me, since neither of us got an uninterrupted night’s rest.
The next and last was a doctor named Fish. He had me put a bell on my bedroom door, and proscribed trazodone hydrochloride. He said, “I have a patient down in Coventry, lovely girl, with the same problem. Sleepwalking. Seems she was in a coma for six months, after half-drowning in a boating accident, and woke up of a sudden for no reason I could find. Now she is normal, except for these fugue states.”
One day in April, I found myself suddenly awake wandering the streets of Coventry, over an hour away by train or motor, with a black bag in my hand.
My wristwatch, which I was wearing on the wrong wrist, said it was two in the morning. I opened the bag. There was a little stoppered bottle of brown glass, a rag, a screwdriver, pliers, a crowbar, several yards of rope, a roll of duct tape. There was also, oddly enough, a number of magnets, including an electromagnet shaped like a flashlight whose current could be adjusted.
Obviously the doctor’s mention of a similar case provoked something odd in my subconscious mind. I thought he was more dangerous than the disease.
I lost my specialist and hired a detective. I found a man named Braun to watch my movements and follow me. He was a big, buff fellow in a loud checkered green coat and a yellow hat with a frightening mass of red side-whiskers, but he said I would not see him shadowing me. He had a chubby and cheerful face, and the cold, dead eyes of a killer.
Braun also talked to shopkeepers and confirmed that I had bought the contents of the bag with my own money. The brown bottle came from a shop that catered to butterfly collectors. It was chloroform.
I only had two more episodes after that: the first was when Roberts stopped me from calling a hansom at one in the morning. By then, I was really curious as to where I was going, so I asked him, if it happened again, to let me on my way, trusting Braun to follow. The second episode was when I awoke on the night-train to Coventry.
He said I would not spot him, but I did. Braun was seated in the next car, dressed very nondescriptly. Braun was holding up a newspaper to hide his face, just like something out of the motion pictures, but now shorn of his noticeable red whiskers, which apparently had been fake to begin with. There was no sign of his green suit or yellow hat.
I sat down in the seat opposite, and he folded the newspaper. Without a word, he took a photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to me.
For a moment, I could not breathe. It was a picture of the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. In the photograph, she was wearing a simple white dress, standing by a tall, half-open door, and smiling. There was a bow in her hair, large enough that the fabric could be seen on either side of her ears. She had an oval face, large eyes, and a mass of dark hair worn simply. The doorposts were marble carved to look like tree trunks twined with ivy leaves: a somewhat eccentric style.
“Who is she?” I spoke loudly enough for Braun to hear me over the sound of the train wheels clattering, but not enough to wake any passengers napping in a nearby seat.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said. “Seems you hired a dick named Dooley to find her. This was on March 27th. I know old Dooley. Sure, there aren’t that many Pinkertons in the Yellow Pages. When I found out we had the same client, I met him after hours to swap drinks and swap gab.”
“Can this Dooley give me her name and address? I have to see her!” I blurted this out before looking from the photo to his face, which had a look of scorn and skepticism on it.
“Her name is Mary Ward, same last name as yours, but Jane’s Families of New England, or Black’s Who’s Who does not show any connection with you, nor do any courthouse records. She lives with her father, Lester, and younger sister, Vivian, at Ivy House, Coventry. It was built by Artemas Ward. That is, General Ward, later, Senator Ward.”
“Not our branch of the family,” I said. “And this Dooley says that I—”
“That you hired him. You paid him by barter, using your mother’s diamond earrings, as if you had forgotten how to write a check on the checkbook that he saw in your pocket. He also says that, two weeks ago, in a stolen tuxedo, you tried a little bit of gatecrashing to break into Vivian Ward’s debutante ball in Boston, being held in the Ritz-Carlton, no less. That’s when Dooley washed his hands of you. He thinks you are up to something, some elaborate scam or scheme—”
“I am a sleepwalker,” I said. “I have been in what the doctor calls a fugue state, and afterward I don’t remember—”
“Su-ure. If that is the story you are going to tell the coppers when you get caught, good luck to you! As an alibi, on the other hand, it stinks. You put me on the witness stand, and I tell the jury I think you are faking the whole time.”
“You have to believe me!”
The look of skepticism darkened and settled on his face, as if moving in for permanent residence. “It took me less than two hours at the public library to bone up on sleepwalking: it lasts a few minutes, and people do not get dressed, look up names in the phone book, take a cab across town, and have a forty-five minute meeting with a private detective. You can pay me what you owe, including the price of this train ticket, and then we are quits.”
Yes, I did go see Dooley the next day. He did not want to see me at first, but I offered him one hundred dollars per hour just to talk to me. Dooley was an older man, bald and wrinkled, quiet and sedate in his motions. I mean he made no more noise than a cat walking over the floorboards of his clean but tiny little office. I could well believe him expert at his job: his face was one I have already forgotten.
Dooley added some details to Braun’s account. He showed me my signature on his work memorandum, except….
“That is not my signature.”
“Whose might it be, now, that being the case, sir?” Said he with a mild lift of one eyebrow, and a mild half-smile.
“Leonardo’s,” I muttered.
When I was young, the schoolteacher forced me to do all my writing with my right hand. But I heard that Leonardo Da Vinci kept a diary with his left hand, written in mirror writing, backward, so for a long time I kept a left-hand diary, like him, and learned to sign my name that way. The left-handed signature matched.
Dooley also said that my voice had been strange. I spoke in a higher pitched tone, as if I were trying to sound like a child, or a girl, and had odd ticks or twitches when it came to my words.
“Well,” said Dooley, “F’rinstance, when you did not shake hands, and you did not stand up when Miss Floret, my secretary, came in, and you said ‘I think every person is entitled to his or her own opinion, to suit him- or her-self’—sounds a bit odd on the ear, don’t it? But I don’t think it is enough to make out an insanity plea, or whatever business you are trying to pull off.”
And no other private detective after that would take the case: as Braun had said, they swapped drinks and gossip, and had been told to steer clear of me.
So I lost my detective and hired a guru. That is surely a sign of some sort of mental degradation. I began to wonder what sort of horrible crime I was no doubt about to commit.
His name was Ashwathama. He was thin as a rail and brown as a nut, but he had the kindest eyes I have ever looked into.
I would sit on the porch on a straw mat, going through the routine of breathing, of meditation, of au
to-hypnosis. The guru made me wear a magnet on my forehead. Said it would balance my internal energy flows or something. I mounted it on my mother’s tiara, since that was the only way I could get it to sit right above my eyes in the spot where he wanted.
Ashwathama said to me in his calm, singsong voice, “You might think this is some ancient Eastern art of my people. Put that thought away from your head! The power of magnets to influence the mind and body is well attested by modern physicians, that is, those who are willing to look beyond what they know for a deeper truth. Maximillian Hell was a Jesuit from Vienna who investigated the properties of energy disturbances that can be magnetically corrected. Anton Mesmer perfected the art. He called it animal magnetism. It can be used to plant suggestions in the mind, but that is not its true purpose. It opens the mind, silences the noisiness of conscious thought, allows you to hear the whispers.”
“Whispers from where?”
Ashwathama said, “There are worlds beyond this world, and souls who move through them. You will find your answers within. The one who is haunting you—is you!”
And he touched me lightly on the chest, just above my heart.
I became diligent in my practice of meditation and auto-hypnosis. I was searching for a buried memory or a hidden split personality or a dream—I don’t know what damned thing I was searching for.
I did it day and night, six days a week. By day, I would stare at the lake water. It was a long and narrow lake, and I could see the houses and trees on the far side. I would watch sailboats or canoes float by. There was a big red Irish Setter that would sit beneath the trees, hidden by the bushes, to one side of the broad back lawn leading to the lakeside. He came every day just at the same time I did: I thought of him as a friend and wondered who owned him. I suppose I would not have noticed him in this distance were it not for the meditation, and the clarity of mind it brought.
At night I did my exercises and stared at the sky or its reflection. My eyes were getting more sensitive. The stars seemed so bright to my eyesight it was astonishing. I could see their colors and pick out individual stars in the band of the Milky Way.
On the first day of May, without moving or closing my eyes, I had a dream.
-3-
They are going to kill the girl I love, the girl I have lived with, and with whom I have shared my life for three years. I still remember the day when we exchanged dormitory keys. I knelt and handed her my key in a little square velvet box, just like some romantic cis-male from the bad old days, the time of darkness, proffering a ring to his or her mate-for-life, back when life-partnership was still allowed.
You know, at times I wonder how dark those times of darkness were.
It was Rob who told me, the clerk from the Sharing, Caring and Giving Department. His name had originally been Roberts, but now was Property-is-Robbery. He had been my downie during Gender Clarification in education camp, just enough to fulfill our non-hetero requirement, but he liked girls as much as I did, and we were the only two boys in camp not proscribed to take Ritalin or soma, so he was the only guy I could have an intelligent conversation with. I know that sounds totally smart-ist, but there it is.
He slid into the seat opposite mine in the cafeteria, holding his gray plastic tray of gray health gruel. “Like a cabbage juice?” he said, passing the gray canister to me. I said no, but he shoved it into my hand anyway, and reached over and popped top open, so that the loud, grinning, blaring music of the health-and-nonviolent-nutrition announcement came ringing from the little can, and enthused and cheery voices of young people reciting various government warnings and advice in gushingly jolly words, carefully pitched so that it was not clear if the speaker were male, female, cismale, shemale, transmale, ubermale, undermale, othermale, antimale, nomale, everymale, or one of the other approved gender selections.
I noticed that the song was the same as the recording on the carrot juice cans, and no one bothered to change the word from carrot to cabbage.
Beneath the blanket of the noise, he whispered, “Dice, they’re going to mum your Ho.”
Mum was slang for mummify, that is, deprive her of fluids until she was dry as a mummy and died of thirst. Ho was slang for any female or he-male of the feminine gender role, a downie rather than topper.
“Mary! It cannot be!” Unthinkingly, I used our little private love-name we shared. That was the name on her birth certificate, before the Naming Inequality and Community Equality Act. Names that came from particular ethnic or self-identification groups were thought to be exclusionary and discriminatory, and so Mary was assigned the name Crusading-for-Womens-Equality, or Lity for short. Mine was Workmans-Paradise, or just Dice.
I lowered my voice and lowered my head toward him, “How do you know?”
“Share, Care and Give tracks all the supplies. The Death Panel kills someone, you can see it on the invoice lists, what equipment gets checked out. Name on the tag was her doctor’s name, Nonagression-something-or-other.”
I felt as if my skull were a balloon ready to burst under a terrible internal pressure. The sensation that everything was unreal, a nightmare, was choking. Lity is an Agent of Otherwhere, like me, a Great Dreamer. We were in the Revision corps. She and I were immune from the population cull, and the organlegger lottery.
Someone walked by carrying a tray. Since having private conversations is exclusionary, I had to shove my face into Rob’s face and kiss him, so it looked like we were engaging in a public display of affection, as we have a right to do.
He pulled away, a look of impatience on his face. I suspect he is not thrilled by non-bio-binary stuff, but I do not judge. That would be biologist.
I said, “There must be some mistake. I would have been informed! I am her husb—I mean, I am her partner. The US Constitution says we have rights! That amendment that they passed last year, it says we have rights! All of them!”
The UN permitted the United States to pass an amendment just last year, despite the opposition of the wreckers and saboteurs, which provided that everyone, male and female, etc., man and animal, had each and all and every right both legally and morally to everything and anything. It was called the Perfect Amendment, because there was no more need to pass any more Amendments, or even laws.
Everyone had all the rights they could imagine. Special agents, called Notification of Amnesty and Noncompliance officers, but which everyone called Nannies, just made an on-the-spot decision based on the circumstances without being tied down by precedent, or written law. It was amazing to me that such a simple solution to the complex problem of how to govern people had never been tried before.
Oddly enough, the cheerful tones of the singing can of cabbage juice is what gave me the heart I needed to fight this thing. The people all cared for each other: that was our law! Everyone voted, everyone made all the laws, everyone had all the rights! Lity was immune from the normal rationing of medical care. Ours was a wonderful and progressive country, and any society that cared enough to tell me the calorie count and the salt content and the allergy sensitivity number of a can of juice, to force every can to tell everyone who opened it exactly how much and how fast he should drink it—that society would not allow such cruelty to occur.
I was able to bribe a guy on the waiting list with my recreational pharmacy chit, because I didn’t use the stuff (not that I judge anyone who does! That would be druggist!), so it was only three weeks later that I got the chance to see my supervisor, Do-Your-Best. He is an older man, (not that I am ageist or mannist) who walks without making noise. He is gray and balding (but I am not hirsuteist or colorist).
He sat at his gray desk in his cubicular gray room, which was much larger than mine. He even had a window view, looking out onto the gray concrete wall across the alleyway.
He said, “There is no evidence she is still alive. If there is no parallel version of her in the target line, she could never have made the insertion in the first place. And the host always rejects the influence of the possessor after a month or two:
the brain cannot hold two active minds. Logically, it is not possible that her host both exists and has no brain!”
I said, “But there are cases where the possessor was inserted into a host who was not a pure parallel! It happened when there are twins in the target line! There was that case of Rudolf Rassendyll, where our agent landed not in his own body, but the body of his cousin. And I have heard that the Tibetans can insert into the bodies of people unrelated to them! That fellow we sent to Alcatraz, Ashwathama, he said he could possess the body of an ape, or—”
“Cases of twin possession are very rare, and that guru—well, it would be an act of cultural exploitation to discuss the results of Tibetan research. As for agent Crusading-for-Womens-Equality, her glands and nervous system may enable some other candidate to achieve the insertion across the paracontinuum. We cannot be selfish when others are in need!”
I said, “Her contract with the recruiting office says she is safe from organ donation if she goes comatose in the line of duty.”
Do-Your-Best fitted his fingertips together. “Ah, that is as that may be. Certainly that is what the words on the contract say.” He gave me a quirky half-grin, tilting his head forward and gazing at me archly as if peering over the upper rims of imaginary eyeglasses. It was the expression of a man who shares an unspoken joke.
I said, “I—of course that is what the words say—she and I are in the corps. We go to other parallel worlds for you. Our bodies are empty while we are gone, and need life support. You cannot just kill her.”
Do-Your-Best’s face kind of closed up. He looked disappointed, as if I were supposed to catch on to the unspoken idea without imposing on him the task of speaking it. “The attorneys have gone over her contract. It appears that there are certain emanations from a penumbra of rights to which she is entitled, including the right to die with dignity. And the panel, of course, has the right to help her make that hard decision in the fashion that is best for everyone. The contract is a fluid and living document, subject to change as circumstances require. She cannot hide behind that flimsy bit of paper!”
Forbidden Thoughts Page 17