"What happened?" I said.
"It was a long time ago." She leaned towards me and I put my arm around her shoulders. "I suppose it shouldn't matter anymore. It was when I was a child. My mother was an invalid and she was dying slowly for ten years. They said there was no cure for her, but she knew, and we all knew, that if the Lotterie had admitted her she would be alive now."
I remembered our walk in the village by the petrifying pool, when Seri had argued the Lotterie's case for turning away the sick. I had had no idea of the degree of her contradictions.
"I took the job because I'd heard a rumour that after some years the staff qualify for free treatment. It wasn't true, but I had to stay on. These people who win, who turn up at the office . . . I loathe them but I have to be near them. It's a kind of rapture, knowing that they will not die, that they can never be ill. Do you know what it is to be in real pain? I had to watch my mother die, knowing there was something that could save her! Every month my father went out and bought lottery tickets. Hundreds of them, whatever cash he had spare. And all that money came to this place, and the treatment that could have saved her is given to people like you and people like Mankinova, and all the other people who don't really need it."
I drew away from her, and picked stupidly at the grass with my fingers.
I had never known pain, beyond the transient agony of a neglected tooth, of a broken arm in childhood, a twisted ankle, a septic finger. I had never considered it before, never thought about death in any way except the abstract.
I failed to measure the value of the clinic's treatment, but this was only because I did not understand the alternative.
Life seemed long and untroubled because it had been so far. But good health was a deception, a variant from the norm. I remembered the hundreds of prosaic conversations I had heard throughout my life, snatches of dialogue in public transport and restaurants and shops: most of them seemed to be about illness or worries, their own or those of close ones. There had been a little shop near my apartment in Jethra where for a time I bought fruit. After a few weeks I had found somewhere else, because for some reason the shopkeeper encouraged his customers to talk about themselves, and waiting to buy fruit was always attended by nightmare glimpses into other people's lives. An operation, a seizure, an unexpected death.
I had shrunk away from that, as if by contagion I would suffer too.
"Then what do you think I should do?" I said at last.
"I still think you should go ahead. Isn't that obvious?"
"Frankly, no. You just contradict yourself. Everything you say makes it worse for me."
Seri sat in silence, staring at the ground. I realized that she and I were moving away from each other. We had never been close, except for affection and the temporary proximities of sex. I had always had some difficulty in relating to her, sensing that we had landed accidentally in each other's lives. For a time our lives were running parallel, but inevitably they would diverge. Once I had thought it would be the athanasia that would divide us, but perhaps it would take less than that to split us up. She would move on, I would move on.
"Peter, I'm getting cold." There was a wind from the sea, and the latitude was temperate. Here it was just the beginning of summer, as in Jethra it had been the first weeks of autumn.
"You haven't explained yourself," I said.
"Do I have to?"
"It would help me if you could. That's all."
We walked back to our chalet, and Seri linked her hand in my arm.
Nothing had been resolved, the decision would have to he mine. Because I looked to Seri for an answer I dodged the uncertainty in my own mind.
Like that house in the village, the chalet felt warm after the relative cool outside. Seri sprawled on one of the two narrow beds and began reading one of the magazines we had found. I went to the other end, where an area was furnished as a writing space. There was a desk and a chair, both well made and modern, a wastepaper basket, a typewriter, a stack of clean paper and a number of different pens and pencils. I had always had an enjoyable appreciation for clean stationery, and I sat at the desk for a few minutes, fingering the keys of the typewriter. It was much more efficiently designed and solidly built than the little portable I had used for my manuscript, and as you sometimes feel when you sit at the controls of an unfamiliar can that you could drive it fast and safely, so I got the impression that were I to work at this desk I could write fluently and well.
"Do you know why they've put all this stuff here?" I said to Seri.
"It's in the brochure," she said in an irritated voice, not looking up from her magazine.
"I'm not disturbing you, am I?"
"Would you just shut up for a while? I want a rest from you."
I took down my holdall and found the brochure. I flipped through it, glancing again at the photographs. One was of the interior of one of the chalets, brightly lit and unoccupied. There were no sandals scattered on the matting on the floor, no clothes thrown untidily on the ends of the beds, no empty been cans lined up on the shelf, no shadows on the brilliant white walls.
In the caption to this photograph it said: ". . . each of our chalets includes modern facilities for the writing of your private account, which is a crucial part of our exclusive treatment".
This must mean the questionnaire Seri had told me about. So I was to write of myself, to tell the story of my life, so that afterwards I could be made into the words I had written. No one here at the clinic could have known that this was something I had already done.
I mused for a while, thinking of the sort of people who had been on the ship with us, each tonight sitting at a desk like this one, contemplating their own lives. I wondered what they would find to say.
It was a return to the hubris I felt whenever I thought of the others.
What, indeed, had I found worth saying? While writing, I had been humbled by the discovery that very little of interest had happened to me.
Was this perhaps the real reason I had invented so much? Was it not, after all, that truth was best found through metaphor, but that self-deceit and self-embellishment were the principal motives?
I looked along the cabin at the top of Seri's head, bent over the magazine while she read. Her pale blonde hair fell forward, concealing her face. She was bored with me, wanted a break. I had become self-obsessed, introspective, endlessly questioning. My inner life was constantly externalizing itself, and Seri had always been there to bear the brunt of it.
I had spent too much time in my inner world; I too was tiring of it, wanted an end to it all.
Seri ignored me as I undressed and climbed into the other bed. Some time later she turned off the lights and crawled into her own bed. I listened to the sound of her breathing until I drifted off into sleep.
In the middle of the night, Seri came to lie with me. She held me tightly, kissed my face and neck and ear until I wakened, and then we made love.
14
The following morning, while Seri was taking a shower, the counsellor arrived at the chalet. Almost at once it was as if my doubts were focused.
Her name was Lareen Dobey; she introduced herself, invited me to use her first name, and sat down in the chair behind the desk. I was on my guard from the moment she arrived, sensing the momentum of the Lotterie's system behind her. She was here to counsel me, implying she was trained to persuade me.
She was middle-aged, married, and reminded me of a teacher I had had in my first year at senior school. This alone gave me the instinct to resist her influence, but on a more rational level it was clear she took it for granted that I would be going ahead to take the treatment. I now had an object for my doubts, and my thoughts clarified.
There was a brief, irrelevant conversation: Lareen asked me about my journey, what islands I had visited. I found myself taking a mental step back from her, secure in my new objectivity. Lareen was here to counsel me through the treatment, and I had at last reached my decision.