Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  Burnell was sunk in introspection. His gaze fixed itself on a malevolent square of cherry fruit cake lying on the white plate before him. He became convinced that he could read its mind: and somewhere in the warped mental processes of the fruit was an ambition to eat him, rather than vice versa. Only with an effort did he manage to look away and stare into the friendly black face by the bedside.

  “I can’t remember where I was before I found myself running on Salisbury Plain.”

  This time, she put her hand reassuringly over his. “We shall find out all about you. Don’t worry. Tomorrow, our psychotherapist, Rebecca Rosebottom, will see you. And she is an absolute guru.”

  Smiling, she rose to go.

  “Would you take this piece of fruit cake away with you?” he bleated.

  Searching about in his head proved to be a strange process. He could recall his early life easily. The death of his mother was vivid. It was possible to trace the chain of events until he was in his mid-twenties, when he had grown a small moustache to impress a girlfriend. That would mean the memory was probably ten years old. After that, nothing.

  The last thing he could remember clearly was standing in a building in a foreign city waiting for a lift. He was in the foyer of an ornate hotel, all white and gilt and potted cheese plants. The lift cage descended from an upper floor. He walked into it and pressed a button to go up. After that—nothing. The dreaded white-out, the feared abyss. The thieves had got the rest.

  The following morning, Dr. Kepepwe entered Ward One with a broad smile on her face and her hands behind her broad back.

  Burnell was propped up in bed, having just finished breakfast. She came and contemplated him for a moment before speaking.

  “You are Dr. Roy Edward Burnell, AIBA. Those are letters after your name. You have been a university lecturer. You are a specialist in the architecture of religious structures such as cathedrals. You are currently an Area Supervisor for the World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage organization in Frankfurt in Germany. You have responsibility for threatened buildings of architectural and religious merit over a wide area.

  “And how do I know all this? Because you have also published a learned book, in which you contrast human aspirations with human-designed structures. The book is called Architrave and Archetype and—” she brought her hands from behind her—“here’s a copy, just tracked down!”

  He took the book from her. It carried his photograph on the inner flap of the dust-jacket. He stared at it as if the title were written in letters of fire. In the photograph he had no moustache, praise be.

  “We’re getting somewhere,” Dr. Kepepwe said proudly. “We hope to contact your wife next.”

  He smote his forehead. “My God, don’t say I’m married.”

  She laughed. “Well, you certainly were. Current marital status unknown.”

  He closed his eyes, trying to think. No memory came through, only the tears under the eyelids. Whoever his wife might be, she constituted a vital part of the vault the memory-thieves had robbed. It was lonely, knowing nothing about her. Leafing through the copy of the book Dr. Kepepwe had brought, he found her name. There it stood, alone on the printed page, the dedication page:

  For

  STEPHANIE

  “Nothing is superlative that has its like”

  Michel de Montaigne

  Tears came again. He had a wife. Stephanie Burnell. The line from Montaigne, if it was more than mere courtesy, suggested love and admiration. How was it he was unable, with his memory of her gone, to feel no love and admiration?

  “We can’t have you moping,” said Dr. Kepepwe, bustling in, to find him staring into space. “Are you well enough for a game of tennis? There’s a good indoor court on the top floor. I’m a demon. I’ll play you when I’m off duty at five-thirty.”

  To kill the afternoon, he wandered about the great white memorial to human sickness. The few staff he encountered were Asiatics. He found his way into what the hospital called its library, where ping pong was played. The room was deserted; but the whole hospital was strangely deserted, as if the world’s sick had miraculously healed themselves. The library shelves, like the shelves of a derelict pantry, held nothing by way of sustenance. Almost no non-fiction, books on dieting excluded, no travel worth a second look. Fiction of the poorest quality, all formula stuff—romances chiefly, thrillers, also fantasy: The Dragon at Rainbow Bridge and similar tides, featuring pictures of brave men, women, and gnomes in funny armor.

  In a neglected corner where ping pong ball could not reach lay a clutch of Penguin Classics. Zola, Carpentier, Balzac, Ibsen, Dostoevsky. He remembered the names. Also the Essays of Montaigne.

  Burnell picked up the volume almost with a sense of destiny, having so recently come across Montaigne’s name in his own book. Carrying it over to a bench, he read undisturbed while the best part of an hour stole away, drowsy and silent. He believed he had heard the cadences of Montaigne’s prose before. Nostalgia rose in him, to think he might once have read it in the company of the unknown Stephanie. They must have enjoyed the way the sixteenth-century Frenchman spoke directly to his reader:

  I admire the assurance and confidence that everyone has in himself, while there is hardly anything that I am sure of knowing, or that I dare answer to myself that I can do. I never have my means marshalled and at my service, and am aware of them only after the event… For in my studies, the subject of which is man, I find an extreme variety of opinions, an intricate labyrinth of difficulties, one on top of another, and a very great uncertainty and diversity in the school of wisdom itself…

  Perhaps that is how I was, Burnell thought. Uncertain. Perhaps it was my nature—and not despicable in Montaigne’s eyes. In which case, my dilemma at present is but a special instance of a more general one. He turned the word “certain” over in his mind, as if it were a curious stone found on a seashore. The great conquerors of history had all been certain. Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor of China. He wasn’t sure but he thought he had never been built in that mold. His father’s tyranny had been enough.

  One sign of his lack of the tyrannical gene was that he could not beat Dr. Kepepwe at tennis.

  After they had played in the echoing court, they drank lemonade together in a deserted canteen. She said she must get along home, but seemed in no hurry to go. On the contrary, she tried to discover how much he knew of recent history, exclaiming with a mixture of delight and dismay when he did not know who was Britain’s Prime Minister, or what had happened recently to the royal family.

  Her view of England was that it had now become like Ireland, a country with so much unemployment and such a lack of manufacturing base that many people were forced to go abroad for a living. Blacks and Asiatics, in consequence, claimed a greater role in running the country; it was they, by and large, who were fighting a Muslim insurrection in the Midlands. Dr. Kepepwe portrayed the Midlands as an alien land; she was, she explained, a Southerner.

  When she asked Burnell what he could remember, he told her of a boyhood trekking holiday in Iceland on which his father had taken him and his brother. It remained as a landmark in misery and humiliation.

  She asked him how he enjoyed working in Germany. She had a fear of Germany. Did he not think continually of Hitler’s Final Solution and the terrible crime of murdering six million Jews, gipsies, blacks, and other harmless people?

  “I used to think about it, I suppose,” Burnell told her. “But your question is part of a wider question. Watch the TV news. Terrible slaughter is taking place today in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Bosnia, and elsewhere. The wider question is why humanity is so appallingly cruel—man against man, man against woman, individually and en masse. If there were a God, he would have thrown up his hands in despair by now.”

  “No, no,” said Dr. Kepepwe, shaking her head and much of her body. “God never gives up.”

  As she was leaving, the doctor said, “I’m alone at present while my husband David is away. How
I miss him.” She represented him as the best husband a woman could have, saying proudly that he had won the Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy two years in succession. He was a brain surgeon and everyone respected him.

  David Kepepwe had volunteered to serve under General Stalinbrass in Russia, where surgeons and doctors were badly needed; he was in the Crimea at present. She hoped he was still alive.

  “Well, maybe I’ve talked too much to my prize patient. Tell me honestly how you feel in yourself.”

  Without thinking, he said, “An ocean, Doctor. A wide ocean with only a small island here and there. No continents. The continents have sunk into the depths…”

  That quizzical regard again. “FOAM, that’s what they call it. ‘Free of All Memory.’ You were lucky the villains didn’t steal everything. And there are advantages. I have bad things I’d like to forget. Think of the foam on that private ocean of yours. Remember, ‘oceanic’ has good connotations, so don’t worry. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  In her office, Dr. Kepepwe kept a well-behaved dog which waited patiently for her throughout her spells of duty. It was at least in part a long-haired terrier. Burnell learned later its name was Barker. He saw the doctor collect Barker as she picked up her things to go home. The dog needed no lead. It was a dignified little animal, and gave Burnell a hard sidelong look to indicate that any patting would be regarded as condescending: also somewhat animalist.

  As Dr. Kepepwe left with a wave of the hand, Barker followed at unhurried pace, walking stiffly, looking terribly English. Burnell could imagine it with a copy of The Times tucked under one arm. It and its mistress vanished into the dark to her car and a little unknown nook somewhere.

  “Whatever crimes and errors I committed over the past ten years, they’ve been wiped cleaner than if I’d been in a confessional. The Catholics should rig up EMV in all their confessionals. The forgiveness of sins could then be followed by the forgetfulness of sins… Which might make human life easier…”

  Once the doctor and her dog had left, loneliness overcame him. He knew no one, not even himself.

  Switching on his TV set, he found the movie channel was about to show a fantasy film of ancient vintage. Obispo Artists presented Brute of Kerinth, which he began indolently to watch. The film had immediate appeal in his anomic condition since the action was set on a planet and its moon far from Earth. The special effects pleased him, but the happenings, centering on a lost heir and a throne, were those of an historic costume drama. He lost interest, switched off, and gazed at the ceiling instead.

  When a half-hour had dragged by, he got himself on the move.

  Walking about the echoing hospital in his white gown, calm, savoring his own ghostliness, he imagined himself in an empty fishtank. Active steps were being taken to trace anyone who had known him during those ten lost years. Colleagues, parents. The confusions of war, the tight security now covering Britain, made ordinary communication difficult. But all would be well. He would be reunited with Stephanie in due course.

  In the long antiseptic corridors, green LCDs winked, often accompanied by hums and growls. The entrails of a glacier received him.

  Under cover of his ghostliness, he invaded Rosemary Kepepwe’s office. All there was neat and anonymous, conventional down to the stained coffee mug on the filing cabinet. On the desk beside a monitor screen stood a framed photograph of husband David. Shining black, he smiled into the camera, standing beside a large fish on a weighing-scale. Burnell recognized an Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy when he saw one. Another photograph showed two smiling boys in their early teens, with Barker standing meditatively beside them. He wondered about their lives. There was small ground on which to speculate. Dr. Kepepwe was little more than an embodiment of kindness and a fast backhand.

  Burnell’s steps were solitary on the antiseptic tiled stairs. No use to question who had lived, survived, faded away under pain-killers, within these walls. The quota of patients had been cleared out. He was almost alone.

  The news was bad. The hospital awaited a new intake: dying and wounded from a fatal engagement in the Crimea. Military men from all the armies involved were being flown here for treatment. Together with the soldiers heading for the Radioactivity Unit would be sick scientists—scientists, Burnell had been told, who had flown out to Bulgaria to deal with a nuclear plant going critical, and had suffered high doses of radiation. The emergency militarization of the hospital was being carried out under a cloak of secrecy, as all Swindon knew.

  Taking a service lift up to the roof, he reflected that at any day now the wards would be filled with men harpooned by their wounds, poised on the brink of final white-out. What of the dead Larry? Had something in his cannonball head been moved to imitate the wider carnage taking place across the Crimea, Georgia and elsewhere? Had poor Larry mistaken Bishops Linctus for Stavropol, and died believing in his own gallantry?

  On the roof of the hospital stood air-conditioning plants, breathing out their stale breath. The grimy air of Swindon had painted them black. Burnell went to the parapet and looked over. In the darkness, evidence for the town was mainly electric; lines of street lights, glows from houses, beams of car headlights. By such tokens, the presence of humanity could be hypothesized.

  A cat approached him, daintily balancing along the parapet. It came without fear, to maneuver under one of his arms. As soon as he stroked it, the cat began to purr. Burnell put a cheek against the neat little head and addressed it affectionately.

  Overhead the stars shone, remotely promising something better than the brief rush of biological existence. Engines sounded somewhere below them. Three heavy transport planes passed over Swindon, heading from the West toward the eastern stars. Burnell kept an arm protectively round the cat in case it was scared.

  When he returned to his ward, to his nest in the glacier, the cat followed. In clear light, the animal was seen to be a bundle of long black fur. From its forward extremity, like glowworms in a thicket, the odd eye or two winked out now and again. Burnell stroked its more accessible parts, and it spent the night on his bed. He slept badly, harassed by thoughts of Larry and his mother.

  In a fit of loneliness in the small hours, he held the warm body of the cat to his chest, comforted by it. He consoled himself by telling himself that the days would pass.

  And so they did. And they brought Stephanie to him.

  5

  Some Expensive Bullets

  By the time Stephanie arrived, Burnell was acclimatized to hospital routine. He exercised early in the morning before visiting the psychotherapist and underwent tests in the afternoon. In the evenings he read. To awaken and find the stray cat had gone was the least of Burnell’s worries. Yet the animal’s absence reinforced a sense of emptiness. The humble creature, unable to bear his company, he supposed, had disappeared into the warren of the building.

  After much hesitation, he phoned his father in Norfolk. It was Laura, his step-mother, who answered the call.

  “Your father is somewhere in the garden, dear, talking to the gardener, showing him what’s what. He had to sack the last man. They’re so unreliable. The new man seems rather promising. He comes with wide experience, although he’s lame. I suppose that doesn’t matter. I’ve spoken to his wife.

  “The garden’s not at its best, though the iris bed looks splendid. Irises don’t mind the drought so much. We need rain badly.”

  He listened to that precise theatrical voice. It conjured up the distant world of Diddisham Abbey, and the life lived by his father and Laura. When he had the chance, he explained to Laura what had happened to him.

  “Oh dear!” she exclaimed. “What pickles people do get into. To have one’s memory stolen. Well, you’ll just have to try and get it back, dear. Do you want me to come over and visit you? I suppose I could do that. I suppose I should. You know your father isn’t able to come.”

  “That’s all right, Laura, thanks. I’ll manage.”

  “You do sound terribly depressed. I don’t wonder.
Poor soul. Look, ring me again soon, is that a promise?”

  The visits to Dr. Rebecca Rosebottom were no more comforting. To maintain his morale, Burnell woke early and exercised in the empty gym for an hour. He showered, shaved, and breakfasted, to present himself in the Rosebottom clinic on the second floor at nine-thirty.

  Burnell sat on one side of her cold hearth, Rosebottom on the other, in not particularly uncomfortable chairs.

  Rebecca Rosebottom reeked of ancient wisdom and more recent things. She dressed, she mentioned in an aside, in astrological fashion. Old portions of embroidered curtain material were draped across her body in contradictory directions, presumably to indicate this in the ascendant and that in the descendant, and the other undecided over the bosom. She could have been in her fifties or sixties, her head being spare of flesh and of an apple-and-thyme jelly color, above which rose a wreath of matted gray hair. Her disinclination for movement reinforced a mummified appearance.

  She told Burnell on the second morning that she knew he was a Buddhist.

  “I don’t think so, Rebecca.”

  She encouraged him to talk. Burnell had always regarded himself as a listener. His architectural pursuits had not been an encouragement to conversation. After his mother had died, he had never been able to get close to his father. He had thought his father always involved with international business affairs. Unexpectedly, he now found himself pouring out the troubles of those adolescent years: how his brother had been classified as schizophrenic, how his father had married again, how confused he was about the new wife.

  “You felt it was natural that you should feel antagonistic to Laura.”

  He plunged into his complicated feelings for the beautiful actress his father had brought home unannounced. Laura was kind and amusing; yet to accept a replacement for his mother was disloyal. Then came his father’s accident in Rome, when he had broken his spine in a car crash and lost the use of both legs.