The man upon the bed, gripping the herringbone coverlet holed by moths, the man bald but alive, amazed by his survival into planetary old age, is familiar. It is Alec. Or it is Molyneaux. Or both. It is a thing that needs a name.
The room’s not as it was before; the sequence of imagining has been altered, even—infinitesimally—the stirring in the drapes.
He lifts the glass of water by his bed and I am cast upon its surface as he drinks, close to the terror of his eye, the nostrils and the yellow skin, the chattering teeth, the white pill on his tongue.
But when he sets the glass down and I’m back in the mirror, I see an apple wobble into existence beside the glass, on a saucer. He picks it up, approaches me, and holds it up, offering the fruit of Deauville and the garden of mortality. “And sir,” he says, the voice remote, radio distressed, like something dialed, “what if you could really come back, be here in the future, knowing it, much more than if you’d merely conjured an image or cast the runes?”
He bites into the flesh of Malus pumila. His eyes roll up. Pale presences flush out from every wall to catch him as he falls. White violet skinny claws, warty and hand-painted. An eye, a cloak, a tremolo of creeps: cartoons, the imps and gristly disjecta of Disney, Bosch; a swarming substrate with a will.
Again the voice crackles across the years. It is the witch who calls him now, who calls through him to me. O! Dip the apple in the brew / Let the sleeping death seep through! / Dip the apple in…
My God, I’m holding it. The apple’s real. Green one side, red the other, heavy, bitter as a quince. The stars outside the room! They’re clustering. A shining host—
I’m breathing hard; the knowledge that this is me breathing makes my heart gallop. It is my heart, my breath. I’m being held—held down, and looking up. I’ve stopped breathing. My mouth is full. My heart has stopped. A hand closes—is this a hand I know? Has it a face? A hand closes the eyelids in my face.
Dear June,
Dr. Anthony Stallbrook, my pleasant Jungian (v.s.), quite surprised me the other day. I told him I was growing breasts and he dropped his notebook and said in a low voice that it was no doubt unprofessional of him to say anything but that he “found all of this personally disgusting.” I assumed he meant not just the breasts, but my whole predicament, sexual relations with men, etc.—and I was prepared to be disappointed in him, because he is an intelligent person—but not a bit of it. He said that it was the punitive measures he found disgusting, that they were an overcompensation (his word) and that he regarded me, very neutrally, as a “natural homosexual.” “As opposed to a mechanical one,” I replied, and he laughed: “I thought you were going to say ‘unnatural.’” And then he stumped me. “Is sex mechanical, Alec, for you?”
Well, I had to think. Of course I’ve given some thought to the advantages (and disadvantages) of function divorced from feeling. As which of us has not? After all, beyond a certain point in life, one does not want to go on being hurt. Still, our joshing presented this “natural” instinct for self-preservation in another light, and I began to have a sense of many aspects of my life as, indeed, some kind of overcompensation—for the loss of C.C.M., I mean, which was to others at the time no more than the loss of a friend.
If I were to put it in my own terms of the period, Chris’s death and the whole routine of burial were the set of “instructions” I received. And what I made of them constituted a changed “state of mind.” I changed, I think, from someone into some thing. A something that had lost a soul mate—maybe even a soul.
Talking it over with A.S. reminded me of an evening with Chris, when he’d already won his scholarship to Trinity and I had yet to make an impression on King’s, or anywhere else for that matter. We were on the river. I was punting, sending the boat first too far to the right and then too far to the left, never in a straight line. Chris said I overcompensated, trying to correct a wrong steer, and I, being distractible, said that there was something in that—that I was convinced there existed some law of overcompensation in motion—which I should like to go into properly some day. So I took us into a tree and Chris and I ended up in the water. I went back to Wargrave. The next I heard was from Edith Molyneaux, his mother. Chris suffered from TB, about which I knew nothing. He was a very fair-skinned boy, that’s all I’d ever thought, and by this point it was a fairness invested by me with his own integrity and delicacy of mind. It seemed to me a definite strength and not a weakness. One wanted to be more like him. He had an attack on the way home from Cambridge, went to hospital, and died. Much later on, Edith told me he’d been in great pain for six whole days before the end.
Soon after Chris died, a boy at school stole my locked diary. He never divulged the diary’s contents, which were hardly shocking—positions of stars, Euclidean parallels, “neutral” records of chemistry experiments, his (Chris’s) attempts to get me to listen to Beethoven—but I was outraged. I read it the other day. There is one mention of my hand brushing against Chris’s while we were hanging a pendulum. I suppose I might have blushed for that. I’m sorry to say that I beat that boy rather hard.
At Bletchley, too, didn’t we overcompensate for the extra rotor the Germans put in the machine? All that work! All the work, June, it requires to be sure!
I have been dreaming of Chris every night since that last session with A.S., and of course it strikes me forcibly that these dreams are themselves a coded overcompensation, the price paid for a suppressed reality. But—and this is what the man in the mirror appears to be saying—perhaps it is not that way round. Perhaps it is not the code of the dream that has to be broken. Perhaps the dream is not a result of suppression, or anything like that—but is itself a set of instructions, which makes possible the next bit of life.
Sleep allows us to go away and forget about work, and dreams are the way in which we tell ourselves in the meantime how to pick up the thread. A dream is a stored program. A dream configures me. I wake into a new function.
My dreams are candid with me: they say I am chemically altered. They are full of magical symbolism! At the same time, they are enormously clear—where there is high reason and much thought, there will be much desire and many imaginings. Urges. I can be given drugs and hormones but they will only work as drugs and hormones work. They cannot get at the excess desire. Take out libido and another drive replaces it. Materialism and determinism define me through and through, and yet there is more than they allow. And if that illusion of more—call it free will—is itself a mere effect, then an “effect” suggests, does it not, a real cause, as a film “suggests” a projector?
When I dream, I am observing myself. Then I come back into myself when I open my eyes and I wonder what I’ve done, where I’ve been. In the latest installments, Stallbrook got transposed into a schoolmaster, as far as I can recall, and I acquired strange powers. But do I come back, June? Or is a trace of me left in that other world? Does something of the dreamer come back into this one? What of the dead, in dreams? They speak, but are they just my projections, or do they also exist? Do they project?
My breasts at least do not. Though that is the fault of expectation. (Because one does not expect a man to have breasts, they do not appear to resemble them. They are flattish, pouch-like, and red; the nipples enlarged, oblate.) I asked Trentham if he would like to see them, and he fairly ran off. I can’t say that I blame him.