I am afraid of becoming something else. A hybrid. The fear is not the change, it is the loss of, well, one’s personal past. It is quite like the fear of becoming a machine, in fact. I grieve for Chris now in a way I could not before, and it is precious to me, this new old grief. I fear losing him again in losing myself. I know what you will say. You’ll say, Alec, the “I” is always there. The “I” does not disappear if you change its data or its sex—its experiences and memories. It is there in the background, the ground stuff. And even if a clever doctor were able gradually to mechanize it all, and erase my past, he would not have killed me. It’s Russell’s “neutral stuff” of the mental and physical worlds, isn’t it, but oh, June, it is no neutral matter being caught between them!
It may be that the feeling of free will which we all have is an illusion. Or it may be that we really have got free will, but yet there is no way of telling from our behaviour that this is so… I do not know how we can ever decide between these alternatives…
The Class of All Unthinkable Things
Dear Alec,
Well, you’re right. I would say that you’re you, whatever ghastly things have happened or are happening, and the reason I know that is that I have letters from you, every week, despite everything, which are full of the Alec I know.
Your last letter worries me only in that it is pretty unguarded and, given your predicament, I should be a poor friend if I didn’t say: be careful. I am not surprised you feel your dreams leaking into your waking life, but perhaps stay out of Trentham’s way? He is your work colleague and colleagues talk. Remember, the Stilboestrol you’re taking—being given—is poisonous. Bill says he thinks the effects are probably reversible. You mustn’t think too far ahead. I know that’s easy for me to say.
Of course I’m playing devil’s advocate. You’ve always been honest with me, Alec, and that hasn’t always been easy. Not even Bill has your candor and intuition. Few have. I think your Dr. Stallbrook is fortunate in his patient. (You make me laugh when you say mirror-man has turned him into a schoolmaster. Imagine me telling the nuns my dreams! I think it would be very dull for them. Last night I dreamt that I was eating a potato in a garden. I recall, or make believe I recall, being frustrated by the situation.)
So, you worry about the people and the things you see at night, and whether you are turning into someone different. I wonder if you would worry as much if it were a transformation chosen by you and under your control. I think what’s frightening about your punishment is precisely that it’s so dreamlike—you can’t snap out of it. It disturbs me that you have to go somewhere and be injected, like a patient who’s really a prisoner. It doesn’t make sense. How can you be the blameless sufferer from a condition and a criminal—and a sinner—at the same time?
But I’ve been thinking—maybe there’s a happier way of coming at this dreaminess.
So what if you feel yourself slipping and sliding! Don’t we all bundle away bits of the past? Bits of ourselves, even. I wonder if it may not be a mistake to cling on to our identity. Look, if you can bear it, at us. Look at me. Alec, we were going to be married! You proposed on a stile and made me a chess set out of baked mud that fell apart as soon as we tried playing on it at the Crown. Most of the others in Hut 8 thought we were married and we both entertained the idea for a while. Being held fast to others’ expectations has its attractions in a time of crisis, but I had to relinquish that particular view of myself. Who knows what sort of husband and wife we would have made? Good? Bad? What of it, now? The Eastern philosophers, about whom Bill is so serenely passionate, say that the ego is an illusion, fostered by other people’s opinions and points of view. There is plenty in that.
But you’re right. Something remains, something real but not necessarily physical in the common sense, and in my dull way I’d say that it is a quality of thought. A tactic. Fair play, decency, humor, subtlety. The things that (I know you will disagree with this) slip off the table of behavior but nevertheless dictate how we behave.
Is that an antinomy? Almost. Such a good word. Antinomies ought to be flowers.
The Law has had its say, but the bit of you that is unreachable, darling, will survive. Max N. tells me you cooked him dinner last week and that the other guest at your table was your probation officer. I can hear you laughing now.
You, a machine? The factories would grind to a halt.
PS Trentham’s paper arrived from Trentham himself, in the end. I presume you gave him our address. Did you ask him to send it? Where does he come from, again? Princeton? Don’t flaunt your Alec-ness. People who can’t judge ability will judge character instead. Bill’s impression of T. is that he is rigorous but slippery-pole inclined.
Autumn turns the backs into cloud fields. I’m lifted from the perishing slabs into a sitting position, my head about level with fog beyond the Fellows’ trees. For one moment, I see myself severed or served on a white cloth, exsanguinating like a heretic. I’m cold beneath the cloud. My legs are sediment. “That’s it.” A voice I recognize. “That’s it.” I’m being held.
It comes to me that I have been away or ill and I am ready to see Christopher again, whose arm around my neck implies a face waiting to show itself.
“You had another trip, Alec.” The voice is bright. A hand waving in front of me. “Alec? Trentham, from T. I saw you fall over the scraper at the gates. ‘The Scraper at the Gates’—sounds like a play. Alec?”
But everything is swimming. I can only let myself be hoisted up. Trentham is kind. I do not know him, then I do, then I do not. He smiles, willing me back. We shuffle through the poplars’ sovereign leaves, over the bridge. Ahead of us fog floods Gibbs’ arch and rowers, halved, not holding but strangely accompanied by blades, laugh at their own weird truncation. We turn into Bodley’s.
The air is bitter cold, the world real. T staircase, creaking like a ship, a hint of earth closet about the damp entrance, my door right at the top, its open oak, the set of rooms, Trentham breathing, busy with coals and tongs, paper, matches, his hairless cheeks, the raised pores on his neck (the only place he has to shave)—all of it’s real except the halt in time as I sit by the window making my inventory, which loops round and around and doesn’t seem to want to end.
“Your rooms look different in the light,” Trentham begins, then stops, colors, and hurries on. “I didn’t notice that trophy before.” Trophy. “Above your desk. Majestic beast! Your spoils?”
Antlers are growing from the wall, no head, the rest of the stag glassed over.
“Or Mrs. Packlehurst’s tiger. You know, the one she thought she shot but really it just died of fright… Alec?”
“I’m not too sure myself,” I say.
I’m like this when I’ve had a faint. I know that I went for a run, early, and tripped at the back gates, gashed my ankle, and didn’t mind the pain but saw the blood… The sight of blood drains everything of its familiarity. The rooms are mine, but shifted out of alignment. Like parallels on a Riemannian plane becoming rings on spheres that meet again. I seem to hear a voice inside my head.