The Dumb House (22 page)

I went to bed. I needed to recover my strength, so I could deal with the problem. After all, I told myself, there was no point in becoming hysterical. I understood the dangers of total solitude, coupled with prolonged exposure to some extremely irritating stimulus. I'd read about experiments on war prisoners, where a subject would be kept in solitary confinement for weeks at a time, with no other ambient sound than a tape loop of white noise. Much sooner than expected, the subject begins to experience hallucinations, delusions, prolonged bouts of hysteria. He hears voices. He loses all sense of himself; there are no boundaries between him and the rest of the world. After a few days, the experimenters could turn off the tape and the subject would go on hearing the same sounds, only now his anxiety increases, because there are moments when he becomes aware of the silence, because he no longer knows what is true and what is false. What I needed was to break out of that cycle. I was even on the point of leaving the twins in the basement for a few days, just to get away, to drive to the coast and listen to the sea, or go for a long walk in the hills, to hear the wind, the sheep in the fields, the skylarks. But I couldn't leave them. It was a ridiculous fear but, even though I knew they were nothing more than a pair of small children, I was certain that if I abandoned them to their own devices they would escape, and the experiment would be exposed.

That was when it came to me – that night, as I lay, in the still heat, straining to hear something that wasn't there. It made perfect sense: it would be a new stage of the experiment, it might even provide a new insight, the very breakthrough I needed. The question was: what would happen if one of the twins could no longer sing, if one voice was suddenly turned off? How would they react? Would they try to devise some other means of communication? Was it communication? As
far as turning off a voice went, I knew it could be done. I could crush the larynx from the outside, or I could open the neck and sever the vocal cords, or even remove the larynx entirely. I knew that much from my medical text books. I also knew the experiment would be hazardous: crushing might cause asphyxiation, and my skills as a surgeon were limited, in spite of my experience in dissection. Even if the operation was successful, there was a possibility that the children would lapse into that state of apathy I had observed when I tried to part them. By now I believed, with utter conviction, that their continued existence depended on their ability to communicate with one another. They weren't individuals in their own right; they were the two parts of a single entity. That would always be so. That was the reason for my lack of progress: the twins were isolated in their own fortress of sound, and I could not enter, no matter how hard I tried. If one of them could no longer speak, they might try some other method of communicating, something I could interpret; or the one who remained might turn to me, in order to go on living, and then I might break the code, if any code was there. Besides, if things went wrong, if the experiment failed, nothing would be lost. The twins' song had become unbearable to me.

Of course, I probably knew the outcome all along. By then, I could not escape the feeling that I had failed. It was a completely unscientific attitude: no experiment ever fails, it can only be conducted, observed and recorded. I thought of Michelson and Morley, whose work on the speed of light and the nature of the ether led to Einstein's discovery of relativity. In science, there are no dead ends. Yet Michelson and Morley were horrified by what they considered the failure of their enterprise; they were Christian men, horrified at the vacuum, the flaw in the fabric of the universe that their observations seemed to expose.
There were nights when I lay awake for hours, thinking of opportunities I had missed. There is no more powerful fantasy than the fantasy of what might have been. I could see, with regard to the experiment, that any fault was mine, but now I wanted to destroy the twins and begin again, with a single subject, as the experiment had demanded all along. My mistake had been to keep the two of them together. It was time to resolve the situation, to clear the way for something new.

I began work the following morning. I decided B would be the better subject for surgery. She was physically stronger, and I thought she would have a better chance of survival. I had several books on human anatomy and surgery in the library and I studied them carefully before I started. In my nocturnal meanderings, I had already realised that there were really only three options to consider: temporary disabling of the vocal cords, for example, by the exertion of pressure around the larynx, with the attendant danger of asphyxiation; a laryngotomy, where the vocal cords are severed
in situ;
or a full laryngectomy, in which the entire larynx is removed. There was no doubt in my mind that the latter would prove fatal to a child. The simplest approach would be to crush the larynx in some way, effecting a temporary, or even permanent loss of speech, but that seemed too crude, too ugly. I decided to investigate the laryngotomy option further. It seemed within my capabilities, no more difficult than some of the experiments I had carried out on mice and rabbits, and there was something attractive about the idea of opening the child's larynx and looking inside.

According to my surgery textbook, laryngotomy is a relatively straightforward operation – technically, at least. The difficulties would arise during aftercare: B would experience some distress, and I would have to take measures to ensure the wound did not
become infected. There was also the problem of the anaesthetic. I could use some of the drugs Mother had been prescribed, or perhaps alcohol to at least immobilise the child during the operation, but I would have to research very carefully the amounts I could use without causing long-term damage. Also, the twins would have to be kept apart for several days arid I had no idea how they would take it. Nevertheless, the experiment was destined to end inconclusively if I did not act, and I was curious to see if B's larynx was different from the norm, if it had become altered by the constant singing, if there had been some kind of adaptation. However I looked at it, the decision was a reasonable one. Even if B died, I would still have A and, once he had recovered from the separation trauma, we could begin the experiment again, on a new basis. Then again, if he really could not live without his sister, or if I felt the experiment had been irretrievably compromised, there was no shortage of young, homeless women on the streets of every major city in the country. I reflected on how easy it had been to get Lillian to come with me: I had exerted no force, and very little persuasion. All I had to do was find someone similar, someone who was desperate for food and safety, and show her a modicum of kindness – and the experiment could begin again, with a new subject. I would learn from my mistakes with the twins. Nothing would be wasted.

I used some of mother's old drugs to put B to sleep. I administered them with her food, while she was still in the basement room then, when she was close to unconscious, I carried her upstairs to the study, where the operation would take place. A became distressed as soon as he saw B going under, even more so when I picked up what, for him, might have looked like her dead body, and carried her from the room. I was concerned,
of course, but there was nothing I could do to reassure him, and my time was limited. I have to confess, also, that I was excited by the prospect of performing the operation.

I remember once, in school, we were studying poetry for an examination. The teacher was telling us how the key to the poet's thinking lay in a single phrase, something about how dissection is murder; how, as soon as you chose to dissect a living thing, you lost its essence, something bled away, something invisible. The teacher, Miss Matheson, seemed to agree with the writer: the more she talked about nature, and the soul, and immortality, the happier she became. Finally, I raised my hand.

‘Luke?'

I liked Miss Matheson. She was pretty, and she had a way of saying your name in class, as if she was surprised at your very existence, as if the recognition that you were present was a real pleasure for her. There was a kind of appeal there, too; she wanted us all to join in, to feel the same way about poetry as she did. I asked my question.

‘Where is the soul, Miss Matheson?'

She smiled.

‘That's a good question, Luke,' she said. ‘That's exactly what the poet is trying to tell us.'

She paused for effect. I remember noticing how pretty she looked, standing by the window, in the afternoon sunlight. She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt, and a white blouse, with a red cardigan over her shoulders, hanging a little loosely, as if she had just pulled it on.

‘You can't pinpoint the soul,' she said. ‘You can't just cut a flower or a laboratory rat open and find its essence. All you will see are petals and sepals, bones and blood vessels and organs. The real life of things can't be seen under a microscope.'

‘Then how do you know it exists?' I asked.

She smiled again.

‘Well,' she said, ‘we all know there's more to life than bones and brain cells. There's thought. There's beauty. There's personality. What the poet is saying is, you can't take up a scalpel or a magnifying glass and go looking for those things. Science only shows us how the machinery works. It can't tell us why the machine exists, or anything about what lives inside.'

I nodded. I liked watching her talk, and I wanted her to continue, standing there with the light on her face and hair, her hands moving in the still air as if she were performing a magic trick. I didn't agree with a word she said; as far as I could see, that poet she admired so much was an aberration. The very image of the thinking individual, ever since the Renaissance, was of a mind overcome by curiosity, descending into crypts and cellars, risking death or exile in order to open and examine and draw the cadavers of suicides, or the newly-executed. Mother had given me books that showed the artists working by candlelight in the cold mortuaries. All anyone knew for sure about the human body was there, in Leonardo's drawings, or in the flayed bodies that Vesalius drew, as if they were statues, posing in classical landscapes with their tendons, or muscles, or arteries exposed. If the dissectors had obeyed the laws of their day, we would still be throwing our waste into the streets, people would still be dying of plague or diphtheria in Paris and Milan. The sick would die slowly, in dark, foul-smelling rooms, covered with leeches and lance-marks. Throughout history, the important discoveries were made by those who ventured upon the unspeakable. I knew it was so, even then, and I wanted to stay behind after the class, to tell Miss Matheson what I knew. I suppose I wanted to impress her, too. I can see that. Looking back, I understand that all I wanted from her was a reaction of some kind, even
if it was nothing more than shock, or dismay. Yet, when the moment came, all I could say was that I didn't agree with the poet, that I thought science was the most valuable tool we had, if we wanted to know the world. Miss Matheson smiled that smile of hers, and I fled in confusion.

Now, as I prepared my instruments and set out the study for the operation, I saw that I had entered upon that domain of the unspeakable. I had always understood that the human skin was the true frontier. I had dissected animals, but I had never cut into human flesh. Now, as I strapped B to the table and applied the sterilant to the area around the larynx, I considered that immaculate, unbroken surface. I had planned everything. I intended to make the smallest possible incision, to open the skin and tissue around the larynx and, with the minimum of trauma, sever the vocal cords on both sides. This was the most delicate work, a surgical exercise in which I could take real satisfaction; also, the very act of breaking the skin, of entering another human body, intrigued and excited me. I could see why people might kill for that sensation, simply to enter and explore this forbidden region of blood and cartilage and tissue. Such people would be the victims of an exquisite curiosity. They would be haunted by the mystery that existed only a knife's depth away. As long as we imagine the body as wet and messy, a sack of offal and bile, this desire may never arise. It takes someone with faith in a near-angelic order of things to want to enter another body. Such a person would have to believe in a silent and imperceptible order: not God and his angels, nothing mystical – rather, something entirely scientific: an informing principle, the presence of a spirit that might be detected in every pattern the body revealed. Maybe Miss Matheson was right: there is a soul, there is something that inhabits the body, something that cannot be isolated in the meat of the brain, or the chambers of
the heart. Yet it would still be visible, in the sheer beauty and economy of the human body, in the sheer beauty and economy of all matter. Whatever you decided to call it – soul, or mind, or spirit – something as fine as mist was present in the flesh: not soul, but what the Greeks and the Gospel of Saint John called Logos, a universal and impersonal order, informing everything according to its nature. The key was there: order is neutral. The operation I was about to perform was more than a physical investigation, it was a metaphysical enquiry into that universal order. Perhaps this metaphysical – this religious – element is present in any act of dissection, if it is performed in the correct frame of mind. Perhaps it is even present in dismemberment. Perhaps every incision is an act of spiritual love. As I fastened B's head in place and raised my scalpel, I half-believed I would find something unexpected; some filament of preternatural warmth, some subtlety of design, lodged in her throat like a key.

Everything has its own, peculiar sound: skin; cartilage; vein; the natural flow of living blood. It surprised me. I had worked on living bodies before, but this time it was different. This time, the body was human. For minutes at a time, I felt as if I was working on my own body, slitting open my own skin and clamping it back, peering into my own larynx. Compared to this, every dissection and investigation I had ever performed was the exploration of inanimate matter. Now, for the first time, I felt I was working on a living soul. As soon as I made the incision – I was elated to discover that my hand was steady, that I made no errors – I was aware of the warmth and the movement within. Everything had its own sound and its own colour. Nothing was quite as I expected, despite my researches. Everything was lighter, finer, more distinct than I had thought possible. At the same time, I was more aware than ever of the meatiness of the flesh. When I saw the larynx – that beautiful
mechanism, almost birdlike in its delicacy – I was still aware that the nerves, the finely-modified cartilage, the perfectly-adapted muscles were immersed in flesh. At that moment I was aware of an overwhelming sympathy: no matter how carefully it was done, the severing of the vocal cords, with the attendant damage to the larynx itself, seemed more an act of violence than a piece of surgery. I had the sensation in my own throat, of two fine elastic strings, snapping with a sudden jolt, and I had to steady myself to make the next tiny incisions and finish the job. I had to remind myself of my purpose, then. Having come so far, I told myself, there was no stopping on what were, mostly, sentimental grounds.