Watson, Ian - SSC (15 page)

 
          
“That’s
preposterous!”

 
          
“Cancer
isn’t the alien enemy we think. It’s an old, old friend. Part of the Grand
Conservative Administration presiding over our whole genetic inheritance,
keeping it intact! It’s a bloody- minded administration, I’ll grant you that.
It has to be, to keep in power for a billion years and more. Thibaud was
fascinated when I outlined my theory. It casts a whole new light on his genetic
dream idea—particularly on the class we’re calling ‘immune dreams’. Cancer’s
catastrophe for the individual, right enough. But for the species it’s the
staff of life.”

 
          
‘‘Your
health,” Thibaud grinned broadly: a farmer clinching a cattle deal. Marguerite
Ponty smiled more dryly as she raised her glass, clicking her fingernails
against it in lieu of touching glasses. Her earpieces shone in the neon light,
priestesslike. Were they genuine gold?
Probably.
Her
joke about Mondrian referred to her father’s private collection, it transpired.
Rich bourgeois gamine that she was, she’d chosen the role of a latterday Madame
Curie of the dream lab— as someone else might have become a Party member,
rather than a party-goer. There was something cruelly self- centered in the way
she regarded Rosen now. Of the two, Thibaud was much more vulgarly persuasive
. . .

 
          
Thibaud
also looked genuinely embarrassed about the wording of his toast when the words
caught up with him.

 
          
‘‘A
figure of speech,” he mumbled. ‘‘Sorry.”

 
          
“It
doesn’t matter,” said Rosen. “It’s the logic of life—the cruel dialectic, as
you
say
. Thesis: gene fixation. Antithesis: gene
diversification.
Synthesis: ma
sante
—the sanity of my body, my cancer.”

 
          
“Yours
is such a remarkable offer,” Thibaud blustered, beaming absurd, anxious
goodwill. “You say that an English specialist has already confirmed your
condition?”

           
“Of course,” Rosen produced the case
notes and passed them over. He’d experienced no difficulty forging them. It was
his field after all. And if Thibaud suspects anything odd, thought Adrian, odds
are he’s only too willing to be fooled . . .

 
          
Still,
Thibaud spent an unconscionably long time studying the file; till Marguerite
Ponty began flicking her gold earpieces impatiently, and tapping her foot. Then
Rosen understood who had paid for much of Thibaud’s video tape equipment and
computer time. He and the woman regarded one another briefly, eye to eye,
knowingly and ruthlessly. Finally, hesitantly, Thibaud raised the subject of
the clinic in Morocco.

 
          
“It
will take a little time to arrange. Are you sure you have time—to revisit
England before you come back here?”

 
          
“Certainly,”
nodded Rosen. “I need to explain some more details of the theory to my
colleagues. The cancer isn’t terminal yet. I have at least two months . . .”

 
          
They
sat in Mary’s convertible, watching other gliders being winched into the air:
close enqugh to receive a friendly wave from one of the pilots, with whom Mary
had been out to dinner lately.
A surveyor or estate agent or
some such.
Adrian hadn’t paid much attention when she told him.

 
          
Or
was he a chartered accountant?

 
          
The
winch hummed like a swarm of bees, tugging the man up and launching him over
the vale. Geologically speaking you’d classify it as a “mature” valley. In a few
more tens of thousands of years, weather action would have mellowed it beyond
the point where gliders could usefully take advantage of its contours. But at
this point in time there was still a well-defined edge: enough to cut the vale
off from the hill, discontinuing, then resuming as the landscape below.

 
          
Mary
lounged in the passenger seat. She was letting Adrian drive the car today. It
was the least she could do, to show some residual confidence—since Geraghty’s
suspension of him; though it was some while since they’d actually been up in a
glider together.

 
          
Softly,
without her noticing, he reached down and released the handbrake.

 
          
Once
she realized the car was moving of
its own
volition
towards the edge, he trapped her hands and held them.

 
          
“Look,”
he whispered urgently, “the genetic landscape.”

 
          
“Adrian!
This isn’t a dream, you fool. You aren’t asleep!”

 
          
“That’s
what they always say in dreams, Mary.”

 
          
He
pinned her back in her seat quite easily with dreamlike elastic strength while
she cursed and fought him—plainly a dream creature.

 
          
Soon
the ground leapt away from the car’s tires; and he could twist round to stare
back at the face of the hill.

 
          
As
he’d suspected, it betrayed the infolded overhang of catastrophe. The shape of
a letter S. Naturally no one could freewheel down such a hill. . . .

 
          
Later,
he woke briefly in hospital, his head tur- baned in bandages, as seemed only
reasonable after an operation to excise the posterior pons area of the brain.
He found himself hooked up to rather more equipment than he’d bargained for:
catheters, intravenous tubing, wires and gauges proliferating wildly round
him.

 
          
He
stared at all this surgical paraphernalia, curiously paralyzed.
Funny that he couldn’t seem to move any part of him.

 
          
The
nurse sitting by his bedside had jet-black hair, brown skin, dark eyes. He
couldn’t see her nose and mouth properly—a yashmak-like mask hid the lower part
of her face. She was obviously an Arab girl. What else?

 
          
He
shut his eyes again, and found himself dreaming: of, scrambling up a cliff-face
only to slide down again from the overhang. Scrambling and sliding.
A spider in a brandy glass.

 
          
This terrible cough.
It tears me apart every morning when I
rise, like a dawn wind: the cold of morning meeting the warmth of the night and
sucking it out of me. That’s the picture I have of it, as though I’m sleeping
in some yak tent on the high steppes somewhere, not in a town flat. It’s been
happening for over a week now: ten, fifteen minutes of convulsive, hacking
strain; irritating to Mary, who thinks it’s deliberate, a mannerism, a parody
of middle years, a protest. It’s all dry; nothing comes of it.

 
          
The
Doctor tapped my chest last night, harkened to his stethoscope, peered down my
throat.
Nothing.
Congestion?
Something stuck in my windpipe? No.
Tonsillitis?
No.
Digestive troubles, tickling the coughing reflex misleadingly?
None that I’ve noticed.
He has me booked for an X-ray, but
the possibility remains, as Mary believes: habit spasm, hysteria.
Myself doing it.
To protest at something in our lives, in my
life.

 
          
So
it comes.
In the bathroom, the awful hurricane from within.
And I grip the firm white washbasin with both hands, as lungs implode and eyes
bulge, as I shed tears of blood (so I fancy). Will I burst a blood vessel this
time? Will I have a heart attack?

           
 
 
 
 
 
And at last,
at last
, this morning I do cough up something.
Something
quite large.
Rotund, the size of a thumb nail.
It lies squirming on the white enamel.
Phlegm alive.

 
          
What
is it? I wonder in disgust as the tears clear.
Part of my
lung?
A living gob of lung, still breathing the
air—fresher air out here than in my chest?
It pulses gently, wobbles,
throbs. It’s alive. What on earth is it?

 
          
A cancer, a tumorous growth, still growing fresh cells, unaware
that it has lost its host?
Some other unknown parasite
that has been living in me?
Surely no such thing is known. Look, it
still quivers with undoubted independent life.

 
          
An
abortion, a thumbnail foetus has erupted not from the womb (which obviously I
don’t have) but from my chest, and rests there, still alive. Some spirit of
sickness, finally exorcised, which my bloodshot overstrained eyes somehow
perceive—in the style of some juju witchdoctor who spies out the soul of the
disease. The Philippine faith healers supposedly pull impossibilities,
nodules, out of the body to cure it. . . Have I, then, become a healer in
extremis
? Can I march up to sick people
now, plunge my hand into their bellies and chests and tubes, and haul out their
diseases, alive and squirming? I prod it with my finger. Wormlike, it
contracts, bulging another way. Yes, it’s a living being—or antibeing. Dare I
wash it away? Or should I shuffle it into a matchbox, keep it prisoner?

 
          
I
tap the plug in the sink, wash warm water in—and it floats, swims around like a
sluggish tadpole.

           
“Mary! Come and see! I’ve coughed
something up. It’s alive!”

 
          
She
comes to the bathroom, then, and peers into the bowl.

 
          
“Can
you see it, Mary? Here!’’ I poke it, and it tumbles over in the warm water,
rights itself. “You do see it, don’t you? Say you do. It came out of me just
now. It lives.’’

 
          
“Oh
I can see it.’’

 
          
“Maybe
that’s the spirit of the sickness. I’ve coughed it out at last?’’

 
          
“It
isn’t that, Tom.” She backs off, her expression diffident. “Don’t you realize?
It’s your soul. You’ve lost your soul.”

 
          
“
My.
. . soul? You’re joking! How can it be my soul?”

 
          
She
retreats from me.
Detaches herself.
The bathroom is
very white and clean and clinical, like a surgery. The thing in the sink
circles, executes a flip.

 
          
“What
else can it be, Tom? What else lives in you? What else could you lose?” She
peers at me. “You’re soulless now. The soul’s quite a little thing, you see. It
hides inside everyone. Nobody ever finds
it,
it’s a
master of disguise. It doesn’t have to be all together so long as its atoms are
spread out around the body in the right order, one in this cell,
one
in that. But yours has clotted together, it’s condensed
itself—and you’ve just ejected it.
Lost it.”

 
          
“But,”
I poke the thing gingerly, “what gives you such certainty?
Such
conviction!”

 
          
“You
don’t feel certainty any more? That’s because you’ve lost the thing that gives
conviction, faith,
belief
. I know. Because I still
have mine, spread throughout the whole of me. But yours has been narrowing and
congealing for months now. It went from your lips, your heart,
your
fingers. It went from your eyes, from your belly, from
your penis. It’s been retreating, pulling in on itself all these months. I know
,dear
/’

 
          
“Supposing,”
I grip the bowl, “for the sake of argument this is my
soul,
do I scoop it up and gulp it down? Do I get it back inside me that way?” The
living object somersaults, ducks under water, surfaces lazily. It seems to
have no particular sense organs or organs of any sort or limbs. It’s all just
one and the same
thing
.
A living
blob.
Does it eat? Does it absorb energy?

 
          
“Can
I reincorporate it?”

 
         
 
“Unlikely. It’s too dense now.
You’d only eat it, dissolve it in your stomach acids, excrete it out. Parents
lose their children, mothers lose their babies from their wombs, you’ve lost
your . . . Well,” she shrugs, “it’s gone its own way now, Tom. It’s outside
you.”

 
          
“Is
this some cruel joke of yours? Do you really hate me so much? Have you
been hating
me all these years without telling me?”

 
          
“Hatred,
dear, doesn’t apply if the soul is gone; nor love. Besides, how could I
possibly love or hate
that?
But life
goes on, obviously. You’ll have to look after it, Tom.”

 
          
 
 
We have
what used to be, once, a goldfish bowl on top of the drinks cabinet in the
dining space; now a flower bowl with a posy of anemones, artificial ones of
silk. The goldfish died after a few months.
Of loneliness
perhaps—if a fish can feel lonely.
Of emptiness, and
the horror of the empty world being so bent round upon itself.
I can’t
very well flush my soul down the drain, like an abortion, can I? Even if
there’s only the merest suspicion that it really is my soul. So I take the
bowl, laying the posy on the dining table—then rush back in panic in case Mary
pulls one on me. My soul’s still there. Mary’s back in the bedroom, humming,
putting on makeup. I scoop my soul carefully into the bowl, add more water,
remove
it to the safety of the drinks cabinet beside the
little drum of daphnae, undiscarded year in year out. Do I feed it on daphnae?
It appears not to possess a mouth.

 
          
“Mary—I’ve
put it in the bowl. Please be careful, won’t you? God, the time! Do I go to
work on the day I lost my soul?”

 
          
“Don’t
worry, Tom, it’ll be safe. Today’s like any other. Better than a pet rock,
isn’t it—a pet soul?”

 
          
A pet.
But it looks nothing like a pet, any more than an
amoeba could be a pet. There it is, a huge amoeba, afloat, semimobile, doing
its own thing oblivious of me. Goodbye, Soul, for now; I’ll be home at six.
Don’t get
bored,
don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

 
          
It
circles, rotates, pulses a bit.

 
          
Mary
will get her hair done, then pick up the food and wine for the meal tonight;
Tony and Wanda Fitzgerald are coming round. Brittany artichokes, steak and
strawberries, I suppose.

 
          
So
off to work I go. While my soul stays at home.

 
          
If
Mary put the bowl on the cooker and heated the water up, I wonder would I feel
the searing pains of being burnt
alive?
Agonies at a distance?
I should have found a better place
for the anemones.

 
          
However,
no such agonies arrive. Indeed, all day long as I examine my sensations, I feel
very little sensation indeed. I coast in neutral. Things get done. I entertain
a client to lunch; does he notice that my soul is absent?
Apparently
not.
I wonder whether other people really have souls at all—perhaps I
was the only
one?
After lunch I call in on impulse at
a church. I ring the confessional bell, I pull the curtain. This is how I
believe one goes about it. I’ve no practical experience of such things.

 
          
“Yes,
my son?”

 
          
“Father,
I’m sorry but I don’t know the right routines.
The formulas.
What one
does.
I’ve never been in a confessional
before—”

 
          
“If
you suddenly feel the call, plainly there’s a need. What is it?”

 
          
“Father,
I’ve lost my soul.”

 
          
“No
soul is ever lost to God, my son.”

 
          
“Mine
is lost.
To me.
Well, not exactly lost. No—I still
have it in a sense, only it’s not in me any more—”

 
          
Useless.
I stumble out.

 
          
Work.

 
          
Home.

 
          
Mary’s
hair is exquisite, if over-precise. I smell the tarragon in the Breton sauce
prepared for the artichoke leaves, and hurry to the drinks cabinet, heart
thumping, absurdly fearful that my living soul is chopped into the sauce with
the tarragon leaves. So vulnerable I feel with my soul detached from me; yet at
the same time curiously I feel very little about it . . . But no. My soul still
circles slowly there, aloofly. I prod it. It ducks, bobs up again, like jelly.

 
          
Tony
and Wanda arrive. I pour gins and whiskies.

 
          
“Whatever’s
that?” asks Wanda, pointing.

 
          
Mary
smiles brightly. “Oh that’s Tom’s soul.”

 
          
Everyone
giggles, even me.

 
          
We
sit down. We eat, we drink. Conversation does its glassy best to glitter. Smoke
fills the air. Mary places the bowl with my soul in it on the dining table as
we drink coffee and some odd beetroot liqueur from
Rumania
. My soul circulates. Tony offers it a
stuffed olive on a skewer, the olive being the same size as it is. It butts
against it, declines the offering; how could it nibble it? When Tony withdraws
the olive I look twice to ensure that by some slight of hand he has not
exchanged my soul on a skewer for an olive bobbing in the bowl. But all is
well.

 
          
“It
really is his soul, you know,” says Mary. “But don’t imagine it feeds or thinks
or does very much! It’s just something that is.”

 
          
“An essence.
How existential,” nods
Tony.
After a while my soul is relegated to the top of the cabinet again.
Where it rotates, quite slowly, mutely in its bowl.

 
          
After
a while longer its presence seems to overcast the evening; Tony and Wanda
leave rather early, murmuring excuses. It’s disconcerting to see someone’s
soul, looking just like that and no more. If only it was radiant, with wings!
A hummingbird.
A butterfly . . . But it isn’t, alas. This