The Affirmation

by Christopher Priest

  “We all have to die in the end,” I said defensively. “Even with the treatment. All it does is delay it a bit.”

  “No one’s died yet.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “I can’t be completely, of course. But in the office we got annual reports on all the people who have been treated. The records go back to the beginning, and the list always got longer. There were people on Muriseay. When they came in for their check-ups, they always said how well they felt.”

  I said: “What check-ups?”

  In the darkness I could see Seri was facing me, but I could not make out her expression.

  “There’s an option. You can monitor your health afterwards.”

  “So they’re not even sure the treatment works!”

  “The Lotterie is, but sometimes the patients aren’t sure. I suppose it’s a form of psychological reassurance, that the Lotterie does not abandon them once they leave here.”

  “They cure everything except hypochondria,” I said, remembering a friend of mine who had become a doctor. She used to say that at least half her patients came to the surgery for the company. Illness was a habit.

  Seri had taken my hand. “It’s got to be your decision, Peter. If I was in your position, perhaps I’d feel the same. But I wouldn’t want to regret turning down the chance.”

  “It just doesn’t feel real,” I said. “I’ve never worried about death because I’ve never had to face it. Do other people feel that?”

  “I don’t know.” Seri was looking away now, staring at the dark trees.

  “Seri, I realize I’m going to die one day…but I don’t believe that, except cerebrally. Because I’m alive now I feel I always will be. It’s as if there’s a sort of life force in me, something strong enough to fend off death.”

  “The classic illusion.”

  “I know it’s not logical,” I said. “But it means something.”

  “Are your parents still alive?”

  “My father is. My mother died several years ago. Why?”

  “It’s not important. Go on.”

  I said: “A couple of years ago I wrote my autobiography. I didn’t really know why I was doing it at the time. I was going through something, a kind of identity crisis. Once I started writing I began to discover things about myself, and one of them was the fact that memory has continuity. It became one of the main reasons for writing. As long as I could remember myself, then I existed. When I woke up in the mornings the first thing I’d do would be to think back to what I’d done just before going to bed. If the continuity was there, I still existed. And I think it works the other way…there’s a space ahead that I can anticipate. It’s like a balance. I discovered that memory was like a psychic force behind me, and therefore there must be some kind of life force spreading out in front. The human mind, consciousness, exists at the centre. I know that so long as there is one there will always be the other. While I can remember, I am defined.”

  Seri said: “But when you die in the end, because you will…when that happens your identity will cease. When you die you lose your memory with everything else.”

  “But that’s unconsciousness. I’m not scared of that because I won’t experience it.”

  “You assume you have no soul.”

  “I’m not trying to argue a theory. I’m trying to explain what I feel. I know that one day I will die, but that’s different from actually believing it. The athanasia treatment exists to cure me of something I don’t believe I have. Mortality.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you suffered from cancer.”

  “So far as I know, I don’t. I know it’s possible I might contract it, but I don’t really believe, deep down, that I will. It doesn’t scare me.”

  “It does me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m scared of death. I don’t want to die.”

  Her voice had gone very quiet, and her head was bent.

  “Is that why you’re here with me? Because of that?”

  “I just want to know if it’s possible. I want to be with you when it happens, I want to see you live forever. I can’t help that. You asked me what I would do if I won the prize…well, I’d take the treatment and not ask why. You say you have never faced death, but I know all about it.”

  “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 be mine. Because I looked to Seri for an answer I dodged the uncertainty in my own mind.

  Like that hous
e 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 car 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 beer 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.

  “Have you had breakfast yet, Peter?” she said.

  “No.”

  She reached behind a curtain beside the desk and pulled forward a telephone receiver I had not known was there.

  “Two breakfasts for Chalet 24, please.”

  “Would you make that three?” I said.

  Lareen looked at me inquisitively, and I explained briefly about Seri. She changed the order, then hung up.

  “Is she a close friend?” Lareen said.

  “Fairly close. Why?”

  “We sometimes find that the presence of someone else can be distressing. Most people come here alone.”

  “Well, I haven’t decided—”

  “On the other hand, from our point of view the rehabilitation process can be greatly assisted. How long have you known Seri?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “And do you expect the relationship to go on?”

  Annoyed by the frankness of the question, I said nothing. Seri was within earshot, had she chosen to listen, and anyway I could not see what it had to do with this woman. She stared at me, until I looked away. In the shower cubicle I heard Seri turn off the water.

  “All right, I understand,” Lareen said. “Maybe you find it difficult to trust me.”

  “Are you trying to psychoanalyse me?”

  “No. I’m trying to learn what I can about you, so I can help you later.”

  I knew I was wasting this woman’s time. Whether or not I “trusted” her was not the issue; the confidence I lacked was in myself. I no longer wanted what her organization offered me.

  Just then, Seri came in from the shower cubicle. She had a towel wrapped around her body and another about her head. She glanced at Lareen, then went to the other end of the chalet and pulled the screen across.

  Knowing that Seri could hear me, I said: “I might as well be honest with you, Lareen. I’ve decided not to accept the treatment.”

  “Yes, I see. Are your reasons ethical or religious?”

  “Neither…well, ethical I suppose.” The promptness of the question had again taken me by surprise.

  “Did you have these feelings when you bought the ticket?” Her tone was interested, not inquisitive.

  “No, they came later.” Lareen was waiting, so I went on, noting subconsciously that she was expert at manipulating a response out of me. Now that I had stated my decision I felt a strong compulsion to explain myself. “I can’t really describe what it is, except that my being here feels wrong. I keep thinking of other people who need the treatment more urgently than I do, and that I don’t really deserve it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with athanasia. I’m just going to waste it, I think.” Still Lareen said nothing. “Then yesterday, when we arrived here. It’s like a hospital, and I’m not ill.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “Don’t try to talk me into it, please. I’ve made up my mind.”

  I could hear Seri moving around behind the screen, brushing her hair out.

  “You know you are dying, Peter?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything to me. We’re all dying.”

  “Some of us sooner than others.”

  “That’s why it doesn’t seem to matter. I’ll die in the end, whether or not I take the treatment.”

  Lareen had made a note on the pad of paper she carried. Somehow it indicated that she had not accepted my rejection of the treatment.

  “Have you ever heard of a writer called Deloinne?” she said.

  “Yes, of course. Renunciation.”

  “Have you read the book recently?”

  “When I was at school.”

  “We’ve got copies here. Why don’t you borrow one?”

  “
I wouldn’t have thought that was approved reading here,” I said. “It doesn’t exactly agree with your treatment.”

  “You said you didn’t want to be talked out of your decision. If you’re not going to change your mind, I want you to be sure you’ve not made a mistake.”

  “All right,” I said. “Why did you mention it?”

  “Because the central point of Deloinne’s argument is that the irony of life is its finite nature, and that the terror of death is caused by its infinitude. When death comes, there is no reversing it. A human being can therefore only achieve whatever it is he aspires to in a relatively brief time. Deloinne argues—mistakenly, in my personal opinion—that it is the temporary nature of life that makes it worth living. If life is prolonged, as we can prolong it here, then life’s achievements become attenuated. Deloinne also points out, correctly, that Lotterie-Collago has never made guarantees against eventual death. He therefore comes to the conclusion that a short, rich life is preferable to a long and impoverished one.”

  “That’s how I see it,” I said.

  “So you prefer to live your normal span?”

  “Until I won the prize, I’d never even thought about it.”

  “What would you call a normal span? Thirty years? Forty?”

  “More than that, of course,” I said. “Isn’t normal life expectancy somewhere around seventy-five years?”

  “On average, yes. How old are you, Peter? Thirty-one, isn’t it?”

  “No. Twenty-nine.”

  “Your records say thirty-one. But it doesn’t matter.”

  Seri came out from behind the screen, fully dressed but with her hair hanging loose and wet. She had a towel around her shoulders, and a comb in her hand. Lareen took no notice of her as she sat down in the other seat, but instead unclipped a large fold of computer print-out paper and examined the top sheet.

  “Peter, I’m afraid I’ve got some rather hard news for you. Deloinne was a philosopher but you try to take him literally. Whatever you say, you believe instinctively that you will live forever. The facts are rather different.” She was moving her pencil over the sheet. “Here we are. Your life expectancy, at present, is put at just under four and a half years.”