John.
The name arose unbidden, a sort of greyness. The name John Shaw was associated in Benjamin’s mind with things hard, drab, and unyielding. Asphalt, concrete, slate. John was a dim memory, a ghost impulse, as ephemeral as the sense of deja vu. But he was also a real presence, suddenly more real than he had been for years, a demanding presence … dangerous. Not just because I might lose my job, Benjamin thought, but because I might lose, might lose … no, but oh well, admit it, might lose Amelie.
Might lose that touch, voice, smile, night presence, that (yes, say it) love, which had entered into his life so suddenly … those eyes, which regarded him and in some sense created him: confirmed his suspicion that he existed. If Amelie can love Benjamin then Benjamin is real. He understood this about himself. He possessed only a few scraps of a past, some of them illusory. But the present was real. This moment, this now. And especially his moments with Amelie. What he felt for her was uncreated, was whole, was beyond suspicion.
He didn’t want to lose her.
He would not allow her to be taken away…
But how to stop it?
Things were happening. Things beyond his control.
Trouble, he thought, as he parked the mail cart behind the sorting desk in the basement. He rode the elevator up to the employee cafeteria, bought himself a ham-on-a-kaiser and a carton of milk; then stood petrified with the tray in his hand, staring at the woman across the room, familiar but unfamiliar, who was staring at him—and the only thought in his head was trouble trouble trouble.
Trembling, he carried his tray to her table. She gestured for him to sit down.
They regarded each other for a long moment, Benjamin arriving at the understanding that she was frightened, too; though he couldn’t guess why. She was a small, nervous woman with short dark hair and brittle eyeglasses and a can of Diet Pepsi in front of her. “I’m Susan,” she said.
“Do I know you?”
“I’m a friend of John’s.”
Benjamin doubted it. Sometimes, scraps of memory would cross the barrier between Benjamin and John—more often now than ever before. That was how he had recognized the woman in the first place. But the recognition did not signal “friend”; instead it evoked a more complex reaction, fear and hunger and hope and an old, vast disappointment almost too big to contain.
“I only have an hour for lunch,” he said.
She sipped her Pepsi. “You work here?”
“In the mail room. I sort and deliver.”
“Interesting work?”
“I like it.” He unwrapped his sandwich but left it alone. He wasn’t hungry anymore. “This is about John,” he said. “Something’s happening to John.”
John my real father, he thought, John who invented me, John who created me. No, not quite that; but there was no obvious word for what John had done or Benjamin had become; no word that Benjamin knew.
He knew about John. It was a shadow knowledge, ghostly, and for a long time Benjamin had tried to ignore it. But the knowledge wouldn’t go away. Useless to pretend, for instance, that he had had a childhood. For a long time he had remembered growing up with the Woodwards, but most of that was false memory, no more substantial than the picture on a TV screen. His “real” childhood was John’s childhood, a confusion of threatening images (a woman named Marga, a man named Kyriakides); in fact his childhood was no childhood at all, because “Benjamin” had never been a child. Benjamin was born a teenager and only gradually acquired a substantial existence, imitation deepening into reflex—the mask growing roots into the skull, he thought, startled: because it was a John thought more than a Benjamin thought. Maybe John was coming back again.
So soon. Too soon.
“I was sent here by Dr. Kyriakides,” Susan said, and the name sent a shockwave up his spine. “Dr. Kyriakides thinks John might be sick. Might be dying.”
This was not the kind of information he could assimilate all at once. His stomach was churning. He looked at his watch. “I have to go back to work.”
“I can wait,” Susan said. “I have my car—I can drive you home.”
Trouble! But there was no avoiding it now.
He stood. “I get off at four.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Susan Christopher said.
Rain all day, grey down the big office windows as he wheeled his cart around; rain when he followed Susan Christopher out to her car, red-blinking rain all up and down the dark rush-hour streets. Benjamin sank into the front passenger seat as Susan pulled out into the traffic. She said, “Do you know about John, about what he is?”
“A little,” Benjamin said. “I know more about him than I used to. His brain, right? His brain is different.” My brain, too, he thought: it’s where we live. Briefly, he imagined the kind of house called a “semi-detached,” two separate homes butted up against a common wall. Noisy neighbors, Benjamin thought. Used to be the wall was thicker; nothing came through. Now, when John was in control, Benjamin retained some sense of his own existence, as if he had retreated to an upstairs room where he could watch from the window, or just float and dream, while his raucous neighbor shouted and raved.
“His brain is unique,” Susan was saying. “He was made that way. There were hormones—drugs—that changed the way he grew.”
“Dr. Kyriakides.”
Susan nodded.
“And now that’s changing,” Benjamin guessed.
She gave him a second look, maybe surprised that he had guessed. She nodded. “The tissue in the brain is more fragile than anyone expected. It deteriorates—it may be doing that already.”
“A mental breakdown,” Benjamin said.
“Maybe. Maybe even worse than that. Not just for John—for you.
But he could not dispel the image of his brain (John’s brain) as a house, a cavernous mansion, strange and multichambered—now grown brittle, dry, drafty, and susceptible to flash fires. “You don’t really know what might happen.”
“No, not really.”
But something was happening; Benjamin knew it; and he guessed she was right, you couldn’t burn down half a house and leave the other half intact—what happened to John would surely happen to Benjamin, too. For years Benjamin had been John’s shadow, his half-self, a marionette. But in the last few months he had emerged into a real existence—a life; and when he said the word “I” it meant something; he had moved in with Amelie, who looked at him and saw Benjamin. “Benjamin,” she would say. Maybe he had let himself believe that this would go on forever … that John would fade; that John would become the shadow, reduced at last to “John,” a memory. But now maybe we both lose. Maybe we’re both memory.
Susan drove into the core of St. Jamestown, where the peeling apartment towers stood like sentinels. She pulled up at the curb opposite the rooming house, but neither of them moved to get out. Susan turned the heater up.