Transmigration

by J. T. McIntosh

  --I doubt it.

  --Why do you think I asked if Fletcher committed suicide?

  --It struck me as a reasonable question.

  --Think I didn't know you were there? I've felt you all along, pale ghost of a pale poltroon. You didn't bother me, Fletcher. Not till now. I knew you had no power. Why didn't I guess that if you had anything it would be negative power? Power to stop me doing something . . . That's all you've got.

  --Perhaps you're right. I'll think about it.

  --Get out, Fletcher! Get off my backl

  --I can't, just like that. I'm sorry, but there it is. I've tried.

  --I know you were Judy. She kicked you out. Even she kicked you out. Till now, I let you be, not seeing any harm you could do. Now I'm going to kick you out.

  --Go ahead.

  There was a brief struggle. Ross went on walking, directed by Fletcher.

  Fletcher remarked gently:

  --It's not as easy as you seem to think.

  --That kid got rid of you . . .

  --Yes, but I was desperately keen to oblige her. I hated being a girl. I'm not so sure I want to leave you.

  Another struggle left Ross-Fletcher steadily walking under Fletcher's total control. Fletcher observed:

  --One thing I've found is that I'm either up or down. It's a see-saw. When I was Judy, I was in total command. Yet when I let her speak to me, she took over. In the end, I was a ghost, as you said. With you, it was the other way. I didn't know you even suspected my existence. You were in control. But in the last few minutes . . . Ross, here's a turning. I want to go left, back to your digs. See if you can go right.

  Ross could not go right.

  He blustered:

  --I want to go this way too.

  If Ross had been a decent man, Fletcher thought, I'd have been ashamed of myself, horrified of myself, as I was in Judy's body, knowing myself to be a blight, a disease, a scourge, an excrescence. But with me in command, this Ian Ross can't be any worse than he's been. He's bound to be better. With me in him, the world is a better place.

  --I heard that, said Ross. But there was fear in his response. He didn't know if he could get his own body back. His earlier confidence was gone. The see-saw was up, and he was down.

  I was good for Judy, Fletcher thought with satisfaction. That was a pure accident, but an accident that worked out all right. I've no idea what I did . . . maybe merely sending messages along channels that have always been closed opens the circuit permanently. I stepped into a brain that was almost entirely switched off, and I switched it on. Apparently it stayed switched on . . .

  --You're sensational, Ross snarled. --Now will you get the hell out of my mind?

  --No. I don't think, as of this moment, I would if I could.

  Ross reached his lodgings. For a moment or two, after he and Fletcher in one body reached his apartment, it seemed that a battle royal would take place.

  But Ross had drunk a lot of beer. He could scarcely keep his eyes open. He managed to hang his clothes up on the floor and get his pajama trousers on.

  Then the beer caught up with both of them, and they slept.

  Fletcher, awakening first, pondered idly and more contentedly than usual on the strange mechanisms of possession.

  He could be Ross, but why? Was there any purpose? He had not particularly wanted to be John Fletcher, and he could see no point in being Ian Ross.

  That he might possibly do some good as a parasite -- many natural parasites performed valuable functions -- gave him some hope. He could not help being what he was now, any more than a human being could help being born. Yet he loathed and despised his role as a disembodied Master, dominating some unfortunate person who surely had a right to live his own life, however badly.

  Only the case of Judy gave him any real grounds for hope. She was his Galatea: he had made that girl, or at least given her the chance to make herself. Of course at present she was a weird mixture, partly a thirteen-year-old with little or no experience of life, partly an ascetic academician . . . even he could not guess all the elements that were in her. But she could amount to something; he felt sure she was going to amount to something, and that was something that had been beyond the capacity of either John Fletcher or Judy MacDonald of a few days ago.

  Unfortunately he could not see any possibility of being able to make anything of Ian Ross.

  Gradually Fletcher became aware that Ross was with him; a sober, subdued Ross.

  --Is it to be a fight for my body? Ross asked.

  --I hope not. I'm perfectly prepared to die, you know. The trouble is, I can't.

  --We can't live together in peace, obviously. It's got to be war between us.

  --If you can think of any way to get rid of me, as Judy did, I won't resist.

  --You'll hop into some other body and take another poor devil's life from him.

  --That I don't know. I'll try not to. Anyway, what's that to you? All you want is to get rid of me.

  There was a long pause during which Ross carefully guarded his thoughts. They could both do that. Fletcher was puzzled, somehow aware that Ross was not doing the obvious thing, considering ways and means of ridding himself of Fletcher.

  At last Ross said:

  --Talk to Anita for me.

  Astonished, Fletcher made no reply.

  Ross went on fiercely.

  --I've got to have that girl. I'd have had her last night if . . . No, don't turn away in disgust. What right have you to be disgusted at me? Fletcher, I know most of your sorry history. The broad outline has leaked through from you, if not the details. You could have been saved if only you'd met the right girl and had the guts to go all out for her.

  --For you, of course, the answer to everything is sex.

  --Hell, didn't your forty-three wasted years teach you anything? What was the keynote of that unregretted character John Fletcher? Not just failure. Not really failure at all -- you couldn't have failed in everything even if you tried, which I suspect you did. You got a First, didn't you? What was wrong with you was loneliness.

  Again Fletcher made no reply, wishing Ross would change the subject.

  --And fear, Ross added.

  Fletcher, acutely uncomfortable, was at the same time surprised and discomfited. Ross was not after all entirely selfish and insensitive. His judgments could be disconcertingly penetrating.

  --Fear?

  --Well, caution, self-consciousness, wishing the earth would open up and swallow you, that kind of thing. And another thing -- inability to communicate. You didn't even talk well, do you know that?

  --I know that.

  --I was surprised to learn you were a graduate. You mumbled and hesitated like a skid row wino. Yet it seems you were fluent in French and German, so much so that Judy liked to hear you talk French even though she couldn't understand it. . . .

  This was intolerable. Fletcher would have been uncomfortable under analysis by Anita, but he could have stood it. To be analyzed by Ross was torture.

  Fortunately the analysis was over, at least for the moment. Ross went on:

  --Anita liked you. That kid Judy obviously loved you, as far as she was capable of it. She's not so sure now, but that's understandable. I don't suppose once you've been right in anybody's mind, or vice versa, love is possible any more. Man and wife are supposed to be one flesh, but they're still supposed to have two heads . . .

  --Why do you want me to talk to Anita?

  --Hell, Fletcher, try to see what I'm getting at. I've never found any way of getting what I wanted except going out and taking it. But that's not going to work with Anita. We all know it, you, me and her. You talk to her.

  --On your behalf?

  --Fletcher, I'm going to show you something. I'm going to show you me. After that, maybe we'll understand each other.

  That was all the warning Fletcher got. Then, in the mind of Ian Ross, he was suddenly enveloped in, surrounded by, submerged in the nineteen years of Ross.

  Ross was an orphan. His par
ents were killed in a car crash three weeks after his birth, on their first night out together in more than six months.

  They would have loved him. They were very young and devoted to each other, but not very wise. Their crash and death had been entirely their own fault; the responsibility of Harry Ross, then eighteen, a year younger than Ian Ross was now.

  The baby passed to the care of an aunt and her husband, dutiful, childless people who could never have slept in peace again if they allowed the child of Harry and Mary Ross to go to a Home.

  But they failed to give him one.

  They found little Ian, chiefly, dirty. He was always soiling himself and had to be cleaned by one of them. Up until the baby's arrival, the house of Meredith and Gastone Doyle had been one of the most immaculate dwellings in the civilized world. Later, when Ian began to walk he always managed to find puddles to fall into, animal excrement to tread on, and disgusting objects to trail back with him.

  They tried hard and patiently to train him, and, of course, they succeeded. On his first day at school he was the cleanest, shiniest, most immaculate small boy the teachers and the other pupils had ever set eyes on. He was also a precocious prig, begging to be punctured.

  Little Ian was punctured many times in the next ten years. He asked for it. Uncritical of the standards of Meredith and Gastone Doyle, he was critical of everything he encountered outside them.

  All this might not have mattered, but the most signal failure of the Ross aunt and uncle was their failure to exhibit (and probably to feel) any affection for the child they had never wanted and had accepted only owing to their strong sense of duty. They were not only always correct, they were very fair. Later on, when they knew a little more about growing children, they congratulated Ian on every success and chided him only for failure he could and should have avoided. But they never took pride in his success.

  When, much later, hn Ross studied psychology, as many others did because of his own need for reassurance and justification, he found many significant things in what he learned, as such people always do. What struck him most was the confirmation that the human mind often went perversely by opposites. The son of a miser was a spendthrift; the daughter of a nymphomaniac was frigid; the children of religious fanatics were pagans.

  Yet there were things that could not be reversed. In particular, a child who had never known warmth could not be warm.

  So Ross prospered at school and was correct and dutiful. Then Meredith and Gastone, who had always regarded Ian's parents' death as their own fault, were killed in a crash themselves. They left their not inconsiderable possessions to him.

  In other respects, Ross developed as far from the teachings and examples of Meredith and Gastone as possible. He drank, he gambled, he swore, he fornicated, he blasphemed, because they did not.

  Yet he could not love, because they did not. And now he ached for Anita.

  --Thank you, said Fletcher.

  --For what?

  --Honesty, said Fletcher.

  --I can't help it, Ross retorted. --I would if I could but I can't. That reminds me, have you ever heard the line from some nonsense poet "What would you do if you were me to prove that you were you?" It seems revoltingly relevant.

  --Anyway, there's no point in my talking to Anlta. You know my abysmal record.

  --You know mine.

  --You're young. You can change. I was beyond the point of no return.

  --So you returned, Ross sneered.

  --You can change.

  --I don't want to change.

  There it was. Ross didn't want to change, and he had every right not to change.

  Fletcher, who had briefly experienced hope, confidence and purpose, lost them again. Knowing Ross, he was no longer able to feel he had any right to be in Ross's mind.

  He was a man taking up space in a lifeboat while others drowned. He had no right to be in the lifeboat. His own drowning was receding into the past, yet he clung to a place in life, a place of refuge, that belonged to someone else.

  He shielded these thoughts from Ross, and Ross thought he was shielding something else.

  --You won't talk to Anita for me?

  --Understand: it's pointless.

  With characteristic, childish pique, Ross retorted --Then I'm damned if I'll talk to you.

  After that Ross sulked in a corner of his mind, leaving Fletcher to cope as best he could with "A Day in the Life of Ian Ross." Fletcher had no choice; Ross refused to answer. On the whole Fletcher coped better than either of them expected, largely because he had nothing to lose.

  When he encountered Eric Stirling, Eric said at once: "Well, what happened?"

  "Whatever happened or didn't happen, I wouldn't tell you."

  The reply was rude enough to be by Ross, but it wasn't in Ross's image. Eric was visibly startled.

  The girl who was pregnant by Ross, Sandra, waylaid him and started on a shrill complaint.

  "Now wait a minute," said Fletcher. "It's not my fault that when a man and a girl take a roll in the hay nothing can happen to the man and the girl may have a baby. All I know is that the roll in the hay was as much your idea as mine. If anything, more yours. So don't try to present me with the bill."

  "I might have known that's how you'd take it!"

  "Yes," he agreed cordially. "You might have known. Are you trying to tell me you didn't?"

  She was silenced. It bothered him a little to be so brutal, but he honestly believed it was a case of being cruel to be kind. The possibility that Ross would marry Sandra did not exist. The possibility that he would take any responsibility for her, after Fletcher ceased to be part of him, was almost equally theoretical. The sooner the girl realized this, the sooner she would begin to equip herself for her not uncommon situation.

  When he met Anita he said simply: "I'm sorry."

  "I'm not very interested." She tried to brush past him.

  "I'm not Ian Ross. I'm John Fletcher."

  The announcement, which he made briefly and bluntly in the hope of catching her interest, fell exceedingly flat. "Good. Any change must be for the better."

  "I have to talk to you."

  "But I don't have to talk to you."

  "Please, Anita -- "

  Although she had shown no surprise when he said he was Fletcher, this seemed to surprise her. Probably it was the first time Ross had been known to say "please."

  "I have to go to this lecture," she said, less coldly.

  "Afterward, then?"

  "Maybe . . . "

  That was enough. Fletcher stepped back, and that surprised her too.

  Fletcher was confused. He was in control. Ross was not speaking to him. Fletcher, too, was shielding his thoughts, his personal thoughts, from Ross.

  Yet he was not speaking or acting like either Ross or himself.

  Having no lecture, he called on his French tutor. He should have done so the day before, as Mr. Steen lost no time in pointing out.