“I was nearly thirteen years old. I had never so much as touched his woodworking tools. ‘Show me,’ I said. He said, ‘You’ll never manage it. It’s not a beginner’s project.’ I said, ‘Let me try.’ And I think now he saw it as his big opportunity … maybe this would teach me a lesson. So he agreed. He showed me how to work the tools and he gave me some books on luthiery. He even took me to lumberyards, helped me pick out decent woods.”
John paused to sip his cappucino. “I worked on the guitar that summer whenever he was out of the house. Because it was an experiment—you understand? This would be the communication, he would see this and love me for doing it, and if he didn’t—all bets were off. So I took it very seriously. I cut and sanded, I routed the neck, I installed the fretwire and the tuning machinery. I was possessed by that guitar. There was not a weekday afternoon through July or August I was out of the house. I was dizzy with lacquer fumes half the time. And when he came home I would hide the project … I didn’t want him to see it until it was ready. I cleaned the tools and the workshop every day; I was meticulous. I think he forgot about it. Thought I’d given up. Until I showed it to him.”
Susan said, “Oh, no.”
“It was perfect, of course. Max probably told you what his research had suggested, long before it was fashionable science—that the neocortical functions aren’t just ‘intelligence.’ It’s also dexterity, timing, the attention span, the sense of pitch, eye-hand coordination—things as pertinent to music or luthiery as they are to, say, mathematics. Jim Woodward thought he’d found a task that was beyond me. In fact, he could hardly have picked one I was better suited to. Maybe that guitar wasn’t flawless, but it was close. It was a work of art.”
Susan said, “He hated it.”
John smiled his humorless, raw smile. “He took it personally. I showed him the guitar. The last varnish was barely dry. I strummed a G chord. I handed it to him … the final evidence that I was worthy of him. To him it must have been, I don’t know, a slap in the face, a gesture of contempt. He took the guitar, checked it out. He sighted down the neck. He inspected the frets. Then he broke it over his knee.”
Susan looked at her hands.
John said, “I don’t want sympathy. You asked about symptoms. This is relevant. For years I had thought of myself as ‘John’ while the Woodwards were calling me ‘Benjamin.’ After that day … for them, I was Benjamin. I became what they wanted. Normal, adequate, pliant, and wholly unimpressive. You understand, it was an act. They noticed it, this change, but they never questioned it. They didn’t want to. They welcomed it. I worked my body the way a puppeteer works a marionette. I made up Benjamin. He was my invention. In a way, he was as meticulous a piece of work as that guitar. I made him out of people I knew, out of what the Woodwards seemed to want. He was their natural child—maybe the child they deserved. I played Benjamin for almost three years, one thousand and eighty-five days. And when I turned sixteen I took my birth certificate and a hundred-dollar bill James Woodward kept in his sock drawer, and I left. Didn’t look back, didn’t leave a forwarding address … and I dropped Benjamin like a stone.” He took a sip of cappucino. “At least I thought I did.”
“What are you saying-that Benjamin was a symptom?”
“He is a symptom. He came back.”
The cool air made Susan shiver. She watched three teenagers in leather jackets and spike haircuts stroll past, eyes obscure behind Roy Orbison sunglasses.
John said, “I noticed other problems first. Minor but disturbing. Auditory hallucinations, brief fugue states—”
“When was this?”
“Three years ago, more or less. I was living in a cabin on a gulf island off the coast of British Columbia. I blamed a lot of it on that—on the isolation. But then, without any kind of warning, I lost two calendar days.
Went to bed on Sunday, woke up Wednesday morning. Well, that was frightening. But I was methodical about it. I tried to reconstruct the time I’d lost, pick up on any clues I’d left. I found a receipt in a shirt pocket, nine dollars and fifty-five cents for groceries at a supply store in town, a place I never shopped. It was a family grocery not much bigger than my cabin, and when I went in to ask some questions the woman back of the check-out desk nodded at me and said, ‘Hello, Benjamin! Back again?’”
“And the fugues persisted?”
“I’m lucky to have a day like this … a day to myself.”
Susan didn’t know what to say.
He drained his cappucino and turned the cup over. “You want to know what it feels like? It’s like learning to do a puppet act … and then forgetting which one of you is which. The boundaries fold away. Suddenly you’re inside the mirror looking out.”
“I see.”
He regarded her steadily. “Is that what you expected—you and Max?”
“Not exactly.”
He stood up. He said, “I think I’m dying because I can’t remember how to be John Shaw anymore.”
He walked her back to the hotel.
He was quieter now, almost reticent, as if he had said more than he meant to. He walked with big, impatient strides and Susan had to struggle to keep up. She was panting for breath by the time they reached the lobby.
He turned to face her at the door, wrapped in his jacket, almost lost in it. What had he said?The boundaries fold away. … He said, “You’ve done your job. You can go home with a clear conscience.”
“That wasn’t the idea. We hoped—Dr. Kyriakides thought—if you came to Chicago—”
“Why? So he can watch me fade away?”
“He has some ideas that might help.”
“He has a pathological curiosity and a bad conscience.”
“You haven’t spoken to him for twenty years.”
“I don’t want to speak to him.”
“Well, what, then? You stay here? You curl up in that cheap apartment until you disappear?”
She was startled by her own words—John seemed to be, too. He said, “I’m glad we talked. I’m glad you listened. You want to help. That’s nice. And you have. But I’m not ready to leave here.”
“You don’t have to make that decision now. I’ll be in town for a week.” She could extend her reservation at the hotel. Surely Dr. Kyriakides would pay for it? “We can talk again.”
John looked closely at her and this time, Susan thought, it was very bad, that X-ray vision stare, the sense of being scanned. But she stood up to it. She stared back without blinking.
He said, “I … it might not be possible.”
“Because of Benjamin?”
He nodded.
“But if it is possible?”
“Then,” he said quietly, “I know where you are.”
He turned and stalked away into the cool air.
She watched him go. Her heart was beating hard.