It was as easy as asking. Easy as buying a used Corvette. Look deep into my eyes and see precisely what you want, a tall westbound stranger with no attachments and big hands, see our dovetailed needs. He took her to his room and undressed her in the dark, pronouncing the words she wanted so desperately to hear, disguising himself so that she would not recoil and leave. Dangerous, this eager merging of skin and skin, sudden loss of surface tension; this knocking loose of props inside him until, delirious with orgasm and fatigue, he was no longer sure who or where he was. After a time she stood and dressed in the faint light—the light that comes through motel windows in prairie towns on cold nights after midnight—a glimmer of wet on her thigh, and John was startled by the immediacy of the vision (or was it a symptom of his decline?), the absolute solidity of white shoulder and cascade of hair. A sudden longing radiated through him like a pulse. She turned toward him momentarily and he waited for the revulsion in her eyes, her dawning sense of his alienness, but there was none: only a flicker of curiosity. She smiled. “Who’s Susan?”
John sat up on the bed, wordless.
“You said her name. I guess you didn’t even know it. Girlfriend? Wife? Well, it doesn’t matter.”
He managed, “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m flattered. You must love her a lot.”
She left him staring at the door.
* * *
Sleeping, he dreamed of his first sexual encounter.
He was sixteen and he had abandoned Benjamin and he was about to abandon the Woodwards; as an experiment, he seduced a female classmate. He selected his target and approached her methodically. She was a fragile bundle of neuroses and exposed nerves, therefore easy to manipulate. Which he did: he flattered and provoked and humiliated her into a motel bedroom, and he fucked her there—there was no other word for it. He obtained her passive submission and he fucked her.
Was it satisfying?
On the most elementary level, yes, it was. As an experiment, it was wholly successful. Fucking this schoolgirl in the dark was a confirmation of everything he had learned about himself, about his superiority. She was a lesser creature, which rendered any ethical objections moot. The sin, if there was a sin here, was not rape but bestiality, surely excusable under the circumstances.
Two things bothered him, however, and made him reluctant to repeat the experiment.
The first was that, while he was with her, while he was hovering at the brink of orgasm, some subterranean and scary impulse caused him to mouth the words “I love you” against her ear. She hadn’t noticed, thank God. But it troubled John immensely. The words weren’t his words! And words were his environment: words were where he lived. If this brick could collapse, how secure was the structure he had made of his life?
The second disturbing thing was the way she looked at him when they were finished. He switched on the bedside lamp and began to dress. He turned and caught her eyes fixed on him, and the expression on her face was one of silent shock:What am I doing here? Christ, what have I done?
He recognized the look.
He hated it.
It was far too familiar.
* * *
When he awoke it was five-fifteen of the next evening and the last daylight was bleeding away in a steely grey sky.
He checked out at the desk. There was another woman at the counter, middle-aged, lumpily overweight. She smiled and totaled his bill. “Late to be leaving,” she observed. “Are you one of those night drivers?”
He nodded.
“Yeah,” she said, “we get a few of those. Some people prefer it. Me, I think it’s lonely going down the highway all by yourself in the dark. Oh well … I guess people are different that way.”
He looked at the bill. “What’s this charge?”
“Why, that’s your phone call. Long distance to Toronto about 11 a.m. this morning. You came in the office and asked me how to get a line out, and I—hey, mister, is something wrong? What’s the matter—you don’t remember?”
* * *
In the Corvette he swallowed two pills and washed them down with coffee from a thermos, then gunned the engine and sailed west.
He passed the arena on his way out of Atelier. According to the billboard, the Reverend Belweather had canceled for tonight.
* * *
There was fresh-fallen snow in the Rockies but the roads were clear. The Corvette labored up and through a world of pine and snow and rock and cold blue sky; he was closing in on his objective now. John especially did not want to sleep—the sleep might revive his twin, if only momentarily, as it had in Atelier—and so he began to rely on the amphetamines when he felt fatigue settling in. This effectively killed his appetite, which in turn eliminated restaurant stops and saved a little time, though he did periodically force himself to stop for food. He was running the physical machine hard and he was conscious of the dangers that imposed.
He was careful; but even so, coming down the slope of the Rockies into coastal British Columbia, he began to hallucinate.
Rockfaces and switchbacks took on a sinister, knife-sharp significance. One looming wall of granite, where the mountain had been blasted to accommodate the road, compressed itself into a sudden likeness of Maxim Kyriakides—the rugged features, fierce brows, flat gray eyes. Max as he had appeared to John as a child. This immense, this unshakable. Well, he thought, as Amelie might say, Fuck you, Max. Get thee behind me.
It was the pills, he thought. They were responsible for this, the eruption of metaphor into his visual field. He shook his head and worked hard at concentrating on the road.
Of course, he thought, it might be the dissolution that Susan Christopher had warned him about. The cortical locus of his ego, the John Shaw part of his brain, misfiring in the dark of the skull … as it had when he almost allowed the Corvette to cartwheel on the highway out of Toronto. But that was not an allowable thought.
Not yet.
He blinked away the mutant landscape and reached for his baggie of pills.
* * *
He abandoned the Corvette in the vast parking lot at Tsawassen, where the ferries left the mainland of British Columbia for the Gulf Islands.
It was a bright, clear autumn day. The ferry dock was at the end of a long artificial spit of land; the waiting room windows looked over the placid blue water. John stood in the sunlight watching as the Victoria ferry eased into dock. Peaceful here, but he was wound up with drug energy. Twitchy restlessness and fatigue poisons, strange little seretonin rushes from his overworked neurochemistry. He made his body calm, tried to suppress the raw-nerve tingling in his arms and legs. He thought of Susan Christopher.
The thought was unbidden but very strong. Another eruption out of his past, he thought, this one more recent. Another face. Well, he liked her face. He held it in his mind for a moment, and the influence was soothing. Her face was uncommonly revealing and it was possible to read every flicker of her psyche in it. Her timidity, of course, and her fear of him, and under that something else, a fresh grief … but these things did not define her. There was also an openness, a willfulness. Intelligence. And she liked him; she felt some connection with him.
A dim sexual urge fought through the amphetamine haze. But that was inappropriate … now and maybe forever. Sudden associative memories of old experiments, encounters in the dark. And this cynical, familiar thought: A man may be raised by apes. But does he love the apes?
In the blue Gulf water a ferry sounded its horn. John shouldered his knapsack and shuffled aboard.
The afternoon faded toward evening. Crossing the Gulf, standing alone on the windswept outer deck, he watched the peak of Mount Hood, ancient volcanic cinder cone, fading to red on the horizon.
* * *
He had come to Canada fifteen years ago. Memories of that time unreeled behind his eyes.
After he left the Woodwards, after a few years in transient jobs from Detroit to San Francisco, he decided he would be safer in Canada. Safer or, at least, harder to find. Joh
n understood certain facts about his past. He knew that his creation had been overseen by the American government in one of its more macabre incarnations—the CIA’s MK-ULTRA or some related institution—and that this agency had lost interest in him shortly before he was delivered to the Woodwards. He was also aware that he was a potential embarrassment to these powerful people and that he would be safer if he could become anonymous. Canada seemed like a good place to do that.
Money had never been a problem. He was able to bluff his way into almost any kind of work. He paid for fabricated ID and began with a typesetting job in Vancouver. He put his savings into small, solid investments; he anticipated the city’s urban growth cycles throughout the volatile 1970s and turned that insight into capital. He wasn’t wealthy—wealth invites attention—but within a few years he was at least independent. For a time, his most permanent address had been a houseboat anchored on the North Shore. In the summers, when he could afford the time, he used the boat to explore the B.C. coastline.
Those journeys had satisfied his appetite for isolation, at least for a while. But it was an appetite that, once briefly whetted, began to grow beyond all bounds.
The ocean fed it. The ocean was indifferent, calm and vast. The ocean did not pay John Shaw any particular attention; the coastal rocks and piney inlets ignored his passage. There were places where he could land, come ashore, and move among the dark trees as quietly as the Haida or the Kwakiutl of a thousand years ago. The isolation was a new discovery for him, a thrilling one. Alone, he could become what he was meant to be: a new thing, a fresh creature on the earth.
In the spring of 1984 he had liquidated the bulk of his savings and bought property on one of the more obscure and inaccessible of the inhabited Gulf Islands, a chain of rocky prominences paralleling the inner coast of Vancouver Island. The smallest of these were unmapped rocks and shoals that disappeared with the tide; the one he came to think of as his own was hardly larger. The entire southern tip of this island was in effect his property: a domain; a kingdom, though he did not think of himself as its owner or ruler. He was its citizen—its subject. He had ransomed his savings for that privilege. There was enough money left to keep him in provisions, to pay for a cabin and a wind generator, for the books and the PC terminal he ferried in from the mainland.
Alone, he had immersed himself in cellular biology. He recognized the irony: he was adopting Max’s specialty. But it was suddenly and overwhelmingly important to establish the link between himself and the rock pine, the sea otter, the sea itself. At the most basic level they were all very much alike, ribosomes and rysosomes, hydrogen and oxygen. Evolutionary history was inscribed into the substance of itself—organelles, once independent creatures, were imbedded in the cellular structure like the effigies of saints in the wall of a cathedral. Climbing among the shore rocks in late summer he observed blue-green algae in the glassy tide pools, prokaryotic cells, filaments of DNA floating free in the cytoplasm: primitive protein inventions. He handled shells washed up by storms, calciate rocks with the Fibonacci series imposed upon their shapes as if the clay itself had been possessed by mathematics.
This was the estate from which he had been disinherited. He was not even a genetic sport—the cells in his body, his DNA, were no more unusual than anyone’s. His progeny, if he produced any, would not resemble him. Max had intervened after conception, in the womb; had performed chemical modifications that operated at the level of transcriptase and RNA, skewed protein messages carried through cellular reproduction in the zygote. In effect, his blueprints had been tampered with. Specifically, the protein code for the construction of a human forebrain had been altered; the basic human neural command—to build a more complex cerebrum—had been amplified. He was born with voluntary motor control and cutaneous sensation measurably greater than the norm. Other cortical functions—the generalized sensory threshold, language skills, abstract thought—registered beyond the curve of expectation as soon as they could be reasonably charted. By the age of five years he was way off scale on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. He was “smart.” He was also not entirely human.
He was not human, but he was protoplasm, and he guessed he had come to this isolated place to prove that to himself. We are all cast out from some kingdom, he thought. It was how the process worked. Chordates exiled from the world of the invertebrates, air-breathing vertebrates exiled from the sea. Mankind itself, cast out from the animal kingdom into the high, chilling air of self-awareness and the anticipation of personal mortality. I am not unique, he told himself. Merely alone.
It was a kind of consolation. But it had faded through the long winter and he was left with a growing sense of morbidity. Alone, he turned his attention to cellular pathology. He read research abstracts. He built an elaborate add-on memory system for his PC and tinkered with its program protocols until he could use it to generate elaborate models of metastatic 3LL carcinomas. He came to understand disease and aging as the agents of thermodynamic necessity—the spring of life unwinding on itself. The universe itself, he thought, was a broken symmetry in the unimaginable unmaterial from which it arose, an eruption of imperfection. And life was both a product of that process and a mirror of it. We carry our corruption from the womb, he thought. Max had believed in the perfectibility of mankind. But that was a superstition. Bad teleology and bad thermodynamics.
As time passed, he had traveled to the mainland less often. When he did, he began to attract attention. His Levis were thin and sun-faded; he had grown a beard. He was astonished at his own reflection in the window of the night ferry to Tsawassen. Here was some feral creature, sun-darkened and wild-eyed … where was John Shaw?
What was John Shaw?
But he knew the answer. John Shaw was an invention—the lifework of Dr. Kyriakides.
How strange it must be, he thought, to create a human being—or a facsimile of one.
But I’ve done that, he thought. I do know what it’s like.
He had invented Benjamin.
Waves of memory were triggered by the thought … memory, and the faint, disquieting sensation that something alive had moved inside him.
* * *
Coming back to this place now, it seemed as if he had never left.
He bought a week’s rental on an aluminum motor launch from one of the larger islands, and made his way directly to the cabin, avoiding the main docks at the civilized end of the small island and beaching the boat in a rocky inlet. He secured the boat against the incoming tide and followed a crude path to the cabin from the shore.
The cabin hadn’t changed much. The weather had pried up a few boards, and dry rot had taken out a corner of the porch stairs. A window was broken. Hikers had been here—he found a limp condom and the remains of a six-pack discarded in the back room. Forbidden pleasures.
Violation and trespass. He swept all this away, down the back steps into the bushes. There was a small storage closet built into the rear of the cabin, which no one had bothered to loot; it contained mainly maintenance supplies and he was able to mend the broken window with a sheet of polyethylene. Night was falling fast. John moved into the lengthening shadows of the pines beyond the cabin and gathered windfall for a fire. It had been a dry autumn and there was plenty of loose kindling. He startled a deer, which regarded him with wary eyes before it bolted into the bush.
He had a fire blazing in the stone fireplace before the sky was entirely dark, and enough kindling set aside to last the night. Come morning he would chop firewood. The weather was clear but very cold.
He rolled out his sleeping bag in front of the fire.
He was immensely tired.
He gave himself permission to sleep. Now, here, finally. But sleep wouldn’t come. Strange how it was possible to be crazed with fatigue and still wide awake. Too many amphetamines, he thought, for far too long. He was still, on some level, speeding.
He wrapped himself in his down jacket and went outside, walking a few feet down a dark path to a slab of granite overlooki
ng the water. He gazed at the cold, wholly transparent sky and listened to the rustle of dry leaves against the windward wall of the cabin. He felt his aloneness. And he understood—quite suddenly—that it was that once-glimpsed sense of connection that had brought him back here. The need—even if he was dying, especially if he was dying—to feel himself a part of something. If not humanity, then this. This stark, unforgiving, lovely night.
But there was nothing of him in this wilderness. He had expected to find at least an echo of himself, of his isolation, in sky and sea and stone; but the sky swallowed up his voice and the rock rejected his footprints.
He shuffled inside to wait for morning.
9
Amelie did her best to ignore the note on the kitchen cupboard. Problem was, it refused to go away.
She pretended it didn’t exist. When she came home from the restaurant and found it, that first time, the note was like something washed up in a bottle: indecipherable and strange. Must leave. Try to understand. What did that mean? It didn’t even look like Benjamin’s writing.
He had talked about going away. True. But this—
It was too weird.
She washed the dishes. George had given her the evening off. She watched Entertainment Tonight, followed by a game show and a detective show. The images slid on past, video Valium. One day, she thought, we’ll get cable. Then maybe there’ll be something good to watch.
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