He screamed silently.
It was not over. It would never be over. He could not die. Always he had to begin again.
Yet he was himself. This time no one challenged his dominion, whatever his dominion was.
Obviously he was not in the dead brain of John Fletcher. Equally obviously, as sensation returned, he was in a living body . . . that of a dog or cat, perhaps? He was the proof of the possibility of transmigration of souls. He faced the possibility that all that was unusual about him was that he was conscious of the changes as they came, as no one else was.
He still could not see or hear. As time passed he could feel, but could not move. He was totally paralyzed.
Since there was nothing else he could do, he slept.
He awoke and sat up. Looking around, he could scarcely have had less to see anywhere in the world. There were four gray walls, with a barred window in one and a door with another barred window in the opposite wall. There was the bed he lay on, and nothing else.
He was in a cell.
The curiosity which had killed the cat would never kill John Fletcher, the unkillable. At first he had been impatient to learn as soon as possible all about his new situation, but he was impatient no longer. In time he would know it, and apparently for him time had no stop.
He looked down at himself. He wore blue jeans and a blue check shirt. His body was lean, curiously lean . . . remembering Anita had been starving herself he wondered for a moment if he had projected himself into another starved body. But he was not hungry at all. The curious taste in his mouth might explain that: he had been drugged, he suspected, and that was why he had been paralyzed at first and had had to sleep it off. Closer examination of his new body showed that its leanness was that of extreme youth.
He was not more than twelve or thirteen.
Jumping up, he went to the door and tried it. It was locked. When he tapped on it, nothing happened. He banged loudly on it, and still nothing happened. So he stopped banging, looked out of the window and saw nothing but a blank wall only a few feet away. It was getting dark, and this reoriented his time sense. Anita had collapsed in midmorning. (He didn't worry about her -- free of him she would end her hunger strike and be as good as new in a couple of days.) Presumably the switch was instantaneous, though he had never made any attempt to check. If that was so he had been in the cell from midmorning, drugged, until late evening. This made him wonder what kind of institution he could be in. Not an ordinary jail, certainly: he was too young. For a moment he had the fantastic thought that he had shot back in time to his own adolescence. Cheerless as the various Homes had been, however, none had been as cheerless as this.
At last a blank-faced woman looked into the cell, and he caught her eye and smiled at her. She remained blank faced.
"Hello," he said.
If he had turned into a dragon before her eyes and spat flame at her she could not have been more startled. She ran for her life.
In saying two syllables, Fletcher discovered the difficulty of saying anything at all. His jaws and mouth seemed to be constructed of very hard rubber, not immovable but insufficiently flexible.
He said:
Earth hath not anything to show more fair Dull would he be . . .
It was a labor of Hercules. The words came out, but chopped, mangled and very slow.
He tried a bit of German.
Noch ist die blühende, goldene Zeit, O du schöne Welt, wie bist du so welt! Und so weit ist mein Herz . . .
Predictably this was far worse. He had found already that although he did not entirely lose his knowledge of languages in transfer, it was only when his host had similar knowledge, as in the case of Ian Ross, that it was fluent.
Yet already he had a little more control of his lips and tongue. His voice he found rather pleasant, deep and youthful. It would be a finer instrument than he had ever had at his command before to express himself, once he learned to control it.
He wished the cell contained a mirror so that he could see what he was like. He was obviously tall and strong and young; past puberty but only just, still growing,
Earth hath not anything . . .
He stopped.
He was in a borstal, approved school, young offenders' institution or asylum, so much was obvious. Perhaps, young as he was, he had committed some crime so terrible that he would never be allowed out. He found he feared this more than he had lately feared death. The thought was so dreadful to contemplate that he ceased thinking about it.
His choice of the gay German lyric, though unconscious, had been significant. That was how he felt: for the first time ready and eager to face the world. What, most of all, had brought this about was the glorious sense of release, of being alone in a mind which had room only for one personality.
All minds had room only for one personality.
He could do nothing about what the boy he now was had done. It was ironic that now that he at last was a whole human being, his future, or whether he had a future at all, depended on what the youth he now was had done.
It was puzzling . . . what had happened? Where was the mind which had once inhabited the brain that was now his? Had he unknowingly killed it? Could a brain die while the body it inhabited lived on?
Anyway, until he knew more of the situation he had to be cautious. If he were found declaiming Milton sonnets and German lyrics, there might be questions to answer which he could not answer.
The door opened. A young man in a white coat looked at him cautiously. Behind the young man, who was small, were two male nurses who were large.
"Rodney," said the man in the white coat tentatively.
So he was Rodney, "You're a doctor?" said Rodney.
The doctor, although as surprised as the nurse, let it show but did not let it deter him. "I'm Dr. Brooke. You didn't know, Rodney? You don't remember me?"
"I don't remember anything"
That was a lie, but surely a permissible lie. The shadow who had been Fletcher remembered a great deal; Rodney remembered nothing.
His slow careful, unpracticed speech was in one way an advantage. He had plenty of time to think.
Brooke came closer. "What happened, Rodney?"
"I woke up. That's all I know."
"You never saw me before?"
"I don't remember seeing you before."
It was apparent that Rodney had, unfortunately, been violent. The male nurses were watching him with suspicion and the young doctor, though trying to be soothing and friendly, remained watchful.
"Would you like to come to my office?"
Rodney glanced around. "I certainly wouldn't mind a change of scene."
That, he realized at once, was a mistake if he wanted to go on being careful until he knew more. It was by no means a brilliant remark, yet it was the kind of remark that might enable Brooke to guess something of the fantastic truth -- and Rodney had not yet made up his mind if he was prepared to give anyone a chance to guess the fantastic truth. To say: "I don't remember anything" was one thing; a moron could say that. A moron would not say: "I certainly wouldn't mind a change of scene."
They marched, all four of them, alongl bleak corridors. There was no doubt about it, this was an asylum. It probably had a more polite name. Nevertheless, it was an institution for creatures society did not want but did not have the moral courage to exterminate.
At the door of his room the little doctor did a brave thing. "It's all right, Stevenson, Clark," he said. "I don't need you."
And Rodney was left alone with him.
It was a long, slow business.
If Rodney had been able to ask the questions, twice the progress could have been made in half the time. But it was the doctor who asked the questions, and Rodney gleaned only glimmers of what he wanted to know.
He had been classed as a low grade mental defective, far lower than Judy had ever been. Of course the doctor did not tell him this; he had to guess it. Compared with him, Judy at her worst had been a bright child.
Oc
casionally he had been violent, lashing out like a frightened animal. It was a relief to learn that he had killed no one and injured only without malice. Rodney (he had no other name) would have been quietly put to death in any primitive community. Given a healthy body at birth, he had been given at the same time only enough mental ability to learn to feed himself at the age of ten.
Dr. Brooke could not understand what was happening at all. Rodney had never learned to speak. That he should do so now, even haltingly, was astonishing. Brooke, a doctor and psychiatrist, could do only what so many doctors in history had had to do: accept the incredible (like spontaneous untreated recovery in a week from advanced leukemia) and try to explain it later. Of course Brooke selected the incredibility he was prepared to believe. He created several theories for himself, and would go on creating more, rather than believe the fairly obvious fact that Rodney had become possessed.
Realizing that Brooke would never believe the truth, Rodney became bolder. His speech was improving, too, though it was no more fluent.
"I've been here since birth?" he asked.
"Not since birth, no. I wonder if I should tell you . . . "
"I'm sure you should. And you can relax, doctor. I won't go for you with a meat cleaver."
Brooke, sandy haired and fleckled, grinned. "Two things: if I hadn't decided that already I wouldn't be sitting here so comfortably. And the second thing -- you must realize that in a place like this meat cleavers aren't left lying around for anybody to pick up."
"Touché," said Rodney.
"Dr. Dorne says that. You must have picked it up from him."
"I suppose I must."
They didn't know who he was. He was a foundling and had grown up in other institutions. It was only when his brain failed to develop as it should, when he proved unteachable and occasionally violent, that he began to be shuffled from one institution to another until he reached what Dr. Brooke called, ironically, Paradise.
Realizing he was talking to an intelligent human being, the doctor became half apologetic, half defensive about Paradise.
"The place is a hundred and ten years old," he said. "Funds are low. Even in the Welfare State there's never enough money for places like this. The staff . . . " He shrugged. "Well, who would be here voluntarily? I had an application in for another post, but they bribed me to stay by making me director. At my age, theoretically, it's a good job."
His apologies were premature. Rodney had seen nothing of what went on in Paradise. He had no rancor over the way he had been treated, not knowing how he had been treated. However, he no longer had to wonder about what kind of institution shot inmates full of dope in the morning became they were obstreperous and then left them all day in a locked cell. Such things happened in Paradise.
Dr. Brooke sent for tea and a plate of sandwiches, which Rodney wolfed ravenously. As the nausea left by the drug wore off, the old familiar hunger returned, merely titillated by the sandwiches. Probably he had more excuse for it than he had had since Fletcher was Rodney's age. This Paradise was no land flowing with milk and honey.
The doctor could not understand what had happened, and was honest enough to admit it to himself and to Rodney. The human brain was still comparatively unmapped territory. Rodney had never been operated on and there had been no real psychiatric treatment. It had been thought that he could not possibly respond to it, being capable of only a few meaningful sounds that meant he was hungry or thirsty. or wanted to go to the bathroom.
A normal brain could suddenly go wrong. This seemed to be a case of a brain that was not normal suddenly going right.
One thing was obvious, even at this stage. Rodney would have to leave Paradise. Indeed, the doctor was clearly reluctant to let him sleep even that night in his old cell.
What was coming should have been obvious, but Rodney was not thinking about what might be coming, being too concerned over setting the past and the present to rights to have time to consider the future.
Anyway, it was no surprise at all when Dr. Brooke said: "There's a place in Cumberland . . . "
Rodney stepped off the train at the station. He was alone. Showing more confidence than he probably felt, Dr. Brooke had said he was quite capable of traveling by himself. It was one of the trusting gestures made by psychiatrists which didn't always come off.
In his small suitcase he had only a few clothes and a toothbrush.
It was hot, and as he emerged from the station a crowd of screaming children in swimsuits ran past him, the girls chasing the boys. He looked at them with pleasure.
It could be no coincidence that he was once again a foundling without a name. There was no coincidence in his life.
Somehow he suddenly knew who Rodney was. There was no means of proving it, but it didn't matter. He needed no proof.
Paula Baudaker had had one fling in her uneventful life, and it was all tragedy. Rebelling against her humdrum life with Baudaker, she had an affair with another man, a worthless man, a subnormal man. And she didn't know what to do when she found herself pregnant.
She couldn't face Baudaker became her transgression was so utterly senseless, motiveless, so shamefully wrong. Besides, the baby would not be normal. She knew that from the start.
So she went away for six months and had the baby somewhere, left it in public care and went home to see Baudaker once more. Perhaps if he had been cruel it would have been kind. Instead, he was overpoweringly glad to see her back.
And she couldn't take it. She put her head in the gas oven.
Whether this was true or not was unimportant. In any case, Rodney would never tell Baudaker about it. It would not add to his happiness. But it fitted into Fletcher's cycle so neatly it had to be true.
Rodney did not hurry along the dusty, sunkissed street. It was wide, with small shops on both sides, cars parked on cobbles off the main road, pretty young mothers pushing prams and leaving them outside shops, children everywhere, running, shouting. Several people smiled at him and he smiled back.
It was true that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. This small town could be considered dirty, untidy, unattractive and unwelcoming if people were predisposed to see it like that. Or it could be. as Rodney saw it, an ideal place to grow up and find oneself, if such a thing were necessary.
The institution on the outskirts looked rather like an institution, but not unfriendly. At least the iron gates were wide open.
He should have gone straight to the front door and announced himself, but he did not. He wandered round the old building and found that at the rear the gardens were lovely. Several children passed him, staring at him curiously. They were, sadly, quite unlike the shrieking brown children in the town. They were too clean, too solitary, too cautious. Several of them had calipers on their legs, and some had wasted limbs. But most of them smiled back at him.
Joyful shouts from a field behind the gardens, screened by a high hedge, indicated that the children who could take pleasure in gregarious play were doing so. For the most part, he saw those who could not.
He saw no teachers or doctors or nurses, and was glad of it. There had to be freedom in a place like this, or it was valueless. Life, too, offered freedom. You took it or you put yourself in chains.
Of course the place could not be perfect. There would be stupidity and cruelty and intolerance and boredom and frustration. But these were the obstacles in the obstacle-filled race of life. Anyone lucky enough to get a second chance in life ought to be able to make light of circumstances twenty times worse than he was likely to encounter here.
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