Kyriakides: Obviously I can’t force you to talk about Benjamin. But the implication is that you find the topic disturbing.
John: I’m about to be evicted from my body, Max. Or lose my mind. Of course it’s disturbing.
Kyriakides: Yes, but there may be another way to think about it. I wonder if Benjamin isn’t a kind of survival instinct? Unconscious—I’m forced to use the word. But profound. Maybe you’ve resurrected him for a reason. He’s your creation, after all. He may be the key to your survival.
John: A rapprochement. We learn to love each other. It’s a cliche.
Kyriakides: Something more subtle than that. What if, neurologically speaking, Benjamin is a sort of life-raft? The scrap of wood that survives the disaster?
John: Then I should cling to him?
Kyriakides: You should become him. You should colonize him.
John: You can’t put all your cargo on a raft, Max. It sinks.
Kyriakides: No … but perhaps you can save what’s most valuable.
John: I’m tired—I’d like to go back to my room.
Kyriakides: I won’t keep you. Only one more question. You’ve been remarkably successful at restraining Benjamin ever since Susan contacted you—
John: That’s why I’m tired, Max.
Kyriakides: Do you expect him to manifest his presence soon?
John: It wouldn’t surprise me. I’m not sure how to keep him away. In Indonesia, they chase away evil spirits by banging pots and pans. Would that work, Max? Stimulants are also good. But I don’t suppose Dr. Collingwood would be willing to write a prescription. [A pause.] You want to meet him—is that it?
Kyriakides: Is that difficult to understand?
John: You think he can help you?
Kyriakides: Susan says he’s been helpful.
John: Cooperating in his own annihilation?
Kyriakides: If that’s what it means. It may not. Do you despise him so much? You created him, after all. He’s a part of you.
John: I don’t think even Shakespeare would enjoy having Hamlet compete for the control of his body—do you, Max?
Kyriakides: Hamlet was imaginary—
John: So was Benjamin.
Kyriakides: But he isn’t any longer. Surely that’s the point? You’ve created a living human being. You have to live with the consequences.
John: I yield to your experience in the matter.
From the notebooks of Maxim Kyriakides:
We live together in mutual isolation. The house is big enough that we are not forced into interaction; therefore that interaction has not yet begun. Susan and Amelie are nervous with each other—rivals, in a sense, though I don’t think either of them quite realize that I wonder about the wisdom of taking in Amelie, but Susan was insistent; and she may be useful in dealing with Benjamin … when Benjamin finally appears.
He is the ghost that hovers over this house. I do not know him. I do not know what role he has to play, or whether he will be willing to play it Tomorrow John enters the hospital for tests; perhaps after that we will have some useful approach to the problem—certainly we will all feel less aimless.
In the meantime I am chafing under John’s hostility. It is understandable and perhaps even therapeutic for him. Nevertheless it hurts. I am in every important sense his father. He must know I feel that way—it was always impossible to hide intense emotion from him. But he resents it, or uses it against me.
And I cannot blame him.
My God, that is the worst of it.
He believes I abandoned him.
He’s right.
15
Susan drove everyone into the city in her Honda—she thought of it as hers, though it was Dr. Kyriakides who had taken out the lease. Dr. Kyriakides didn’t drive; the task had fallen to Susan by default; therefore, it was her car.
It was a cold, clear January day, the sun bright but barely strong enough to warm the tarmac. Snowplows had left huge hills of snow on each side of the highway. It had been a snowy winter and the indications were that it would get worse. No snow today but lots of icy runoff; Susan was cautious on turns; downtown, she parked in an underground lot.
Today was the day John was scheduled for tests at Toronto General. TGH was the city’s central hospital, and as she passed through the lobby Susan was reminded of every other hospital she had ever seen. The corridors were pastel green and blue, the paint abraded where gurney carts had bumped against the walls; mysterious doors opened into mysterious rooms; doctors and interns bustled past with fixed, distant expressions. Dr. Kyriakides introduced John to another doctor, a man named Collingwood, while Susan and Amelie staked out chairs in a waiting room. Collingwood was grey-haired, bearded, stout. He spoke in a subdued tone, then led John away down the corridor. Dr. Kyriakides sighed, and rooted out a copy of Newsweek from the sidetable. Amelie had found People. Susan could not concentrate on reading; she kept her eyes on the corridor beyond the waiting-room door.
She glimpsed John when he passed a second time, without stopping, as he followed Dr. Collingwood down the hall. He had changed into a green hospital gown and paper slippers, and the effect, Susan thought, was of an immense indignity.
When Susan was fourteen years old she had decided to become a doctor. It was a serious ambition, but in the end she realized she didn’t have the stomach for it. Undergraduate biology courses offered confirming evidence that her squeamishness was fundamental, inarguable, and permanent. That was when she detoured into cellular biology. She could deal with living systems as whole entities or as specimens on a slide; it was only that queasy middle ground, the surgeon’s world of pumping blood and palpitating organs, that repelled her. That was the world where her father’s cancer had lived. Of all the ugly facets of his death she resented this perhaps most of all, that he had become an ecology for a virulent and alien growth. It struck her now that what she missed most was the illusion of his sturdiness. Fathers should be solid, front to back, Susan thought. Otherwise nothing was certain. Anything could happen.
Maybe that was how John felt about Dr. Kyriakides.
But, disappointingly, she hadn’t been able to talk to John much in the few days he had been back from Vancouver. He was moody; he had isolated himself in his room. Susan had passed his door and seen him pecking at a computer terminal, curious (but vaguely familiar) symbols flowing across the monitor. She wanted to go in, talk to him, say something that would make him happy. But it was not a privilege she had earned. No real intimacy had passed between them and Susan felt ashamed of her feelings, the schoolgirl crush she had obviously developed. John was, as Dr. Kyriakides continued to insist, in some sense not even truly human.
But Susan knew what it was like to feel set apart, to feel different. Growing up in a California suburb, bookish and shy, citizen of an invisible country somewhere between Fantasyland and Pasadena, she would have welcomed the idea of a gentle superhuman sweeping her off her feet.