“He’s part of you now, anyway,” the Colonel says, “and part of me.”
“And me,” Matron agrees.
“He’s gone into the world around us, into every phase of matter—gas, liquid, crystal.” He stoops to take a pinch of sand between finger and thumb and rubs the grains, which must be very light. They seem to drift in a spotlit current. “The great statistical mystery. And there is nothing you can name, and no one, he is not strangely equipped to be. The lake will see to that.”
I know I’m sleeping but I feel as if I haven’t slept. Perhaps it’s just the confusions of youth and middle age here on the shore, watching the poplars fill and sway, my toes trying to grip the grit. I’m at a point of division where I can’t tell the elements apart; the living and the dead are land and sea, the tessellations of a sphere.
Stallbrook and Matron walk me from the lakeside to the summerhouse, where I held Molyneaux last night. One pane of the French doors is sun. The others harbor darker images, three figures star-blinded, their features struck clear from the plate. We pause on the threshold. My guides have shed their institutional anger. They seem less obviously the stern authorities of Wargrave School, although I find their facelessness—they register beside me as mere shapes—distressing, too.
My suspicion is old. I swam here as a boy. Now I am changed. It is as if I watched myself cross over from the lake’s far side. Can that be so? Is this my living shape? I seem to see another version of myself in the dark glass, a glimpse of states I had, states that will come to be, an infinite progress of frames.
Into the summerhouse we pass and on the threshold, which, like all thresholds, exists only in light of what happens, the room in front of us deforms and rearranges its extent, as if to demonstrate a problem in topology. No more a sanctuary, its open aspect hardens into clinical austerity. Where there were once French doors and rugs, blankets, there’s now a bare table, a gurney in the far corner, its nondescript mattress panting with straps. The door behind me wears a small panel of wire-mesh glass like something glimpsed in the distance. It brings to mind detention, war, reports.
On one side of the table are two semi-childish classroom chairs. The nearest to me holds a subtly older version of the schoolboy Christopher, his uniform and shoes the same but indefinably unloved, speckled with dust, worn at the cuffs.
The other has a freak in it.
He is the spit of someone else. He’s naked, open-mouthed, the same age as his smart neighbor. He sits in the light-cone of one of those green-shaded lamps on chains that seem always to be caught in the act of lowering themselves. His lovely, unbelieving eyes follow Matron, moving behind the men. She scuttles off to fetch from the shadows a small trolley, on which the needles and neat swatches of white gauze are laid like so much cutlery and cake.
Thresholds, membranes, molecular illusions of separate things—and then the growling continuity of force, number, and medium. I am the universal lake. Out of me every living body slowly forms. I hold this room in my vision, and into that thin layer of contemplation everything I see falls steadily, fetal and desolate as a small bathysphere in the Atlantic night. The room begins to jolt and creak under pressure. It is an ordinary room. It is an egg in hot water, an air bubble upon that egg. It is the chained box in Houdini’s tank. And as Stallbrook paces the room, throwing glances, at me, at the low concrete-poured ceiling on which a massive boot begins to stamp, at his two prisoners, I feel the temperature rising—heat loss and fear. Is that water, sliding along a corridor outside, the voice that says “this, too; now this…”?
“Time is against us, gentlemen,” Stallbrook reveals, hands offered up in submission, the old familiar drifting voice graveled with care. Is his anxiety sincere, or faked? “A life has gone missing, and very possibly another is about to slip the net. Their rescue—their retrieval—must depend on what we can learn, here, today.”
Matron advances on the naked freak.
“I’m going to ask you some questions. Your answers may be right or wrong, halting or confident, knowingly false. Your task is to respond.”
As Stallbrook sets the terms—explains his test—she paddles fingers over a syringe, but settles for a swab of cotton wool and ethanol. What current of excitement shakes her hands? A trust in what she does, or has been asked to do?
“It is your interest in these questions that we prize,” the Colonel says. He moves his tie, palpates one side of his moustache, and scans the tree of life appearing in the cracked ceiling. “We wish to guard against a facile truth. We are hospitable to doubt, to fear, to the temptations of fancy. Try not to let your different… physical conditions deter you. Say simply what you think.”
The seasoned Molyneaux straightens his back and lays his hands upon his thighs, ready to play. He gives these mock-constraints credence. They are the rules he now obeys and in that moment of submission—while his companion stares agitatedly at me, searching for news, for sense (a last-minute reprieve, perhaps?)—chooses to overlook the shuddering of walls whose corners exhale dust, settle, but seem increasingly untrue.
A cry escapes the creature with brown hair and eyes, gray backward-sloping teeth, a dampened sex, and fat in hanging wads about his hips and chest.
“Such a great fuss,” Matron exclaims, wiping his upper arm.
Why does she pantomime her care? The freak communicates with me. A ripple in the air. Because, his houseless voice whispers, hers is a confusion of role and feeling she has long since lost. Surely my lake-dark vision is to blame, but now I see what’s wrong with my guardians. Their faces are unknown to them. Their eyes pure scar. They are the faces of people, or entities, to whom questions do not occur.
What will their questions be?
Matron inverts the vial of Stilboestrol and draws the fluid into her syringe. She draws too much—she sometimes stumbles upon generosity—and bites her lip, smiling. Depresses the plunger to bleed some drops… then, with a curious kind of voided puzzlement, but no self-consciousness at all, ignores the freak’s prepared deltoid and stabs his thigh instead.
His hands fly up. His body draws away at a steep angle from his leg so that he looks like someone squirming with embarrassment. White as the sky in cattle ponds. He briefly harmonizes with the squealing walls, and I remark on it, like this:
For I am mathematics and a page, the witness of a wilderness. I am the declined answer to all pain. A lake. A deer crossing the lake.
Somewhere, a mile above our heads, a red stag senses danger and abandons the reed bed. A glimpse of tusk, a scent: these are enough to warrant flight. Land is not safe. Water is risk. The perilous crossing confirms the life it takes away. The water is a strong master. I grip my prey.
The stag’s breath startles the surface, his snorting head a ragged system of vapor and spit. He needs to find the other shore; his antlers shake about their head-root like a brake of thorns. Everything acts on him, the cold, the deep, the motion of a boar’s tongue at the reed bed’s edge. He’s made by an unfeeling world, and yet how hard he swims. He bays at his reflection, not the picture of some imposed form but a form proposed by the moon and her reflected light.
I feel the animal’s shocked heart beneath my own. The force and course of change, the hormone spreading through his veins.
Deep down, below the wind-blown surface, in the box, the room from which nothing escapes, the Colonel asks, “Now, what is x?”