Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “A tradition …?” Helene said. “I don’t understand.”

  Dr. Perrault smiled his myopic, blurry smile, as if seeking out Helene in a dimension that was not real to him, a kind of dream. “I mean that belief in it is a tradition. It is a belief that dies hard.”

  A few moments of silence. Perrault continued to smile toward Helene. Jesse realized slowly that the old man did not believe in women, in their existence. They did not matter. They could not understand, it was hopeless to talk to them; and yet one had to talk to them out of politeness. That, too, was a tradition. And perhaps Jesse himself did not believe in women the way he believed in men.… Perrault was saying argumentatively, “What is the personality, then, that we encounter in those we think we love? I will tell you this also: It is a pattern of attitudes that are expressed in certain language patterns we recognize because we are accustomed to them, you might say conditioned to them, to be technical, the attitudes being a barrier to protect these people and ourselves against the infinite. The original chaos. Who can deny this? I am not contradicting you, Benjamin, but simply expanding upon what you obviously believe. There’s no surprise in this. We each have a hidden obsession, I suppose, a kind of monster that has made our facial structures what they are on the surface, the facial mask that is our own, uniquely in the universe, and we try to keep this monster secret, except perhaps to ourselves. And some of us never see the monsters in ourselves.… This is the personality people defend. But it is only ephemeral. With a tiny pin in my fingers,” he said, raising his hand and touching his forefinger to his thumb, “I can destroy any personality in about thirty seconds, sixty seconds at the most.”

  Helene was staring at him. Jesse felt a strange thrill of certainty in what Perrault had said.

  “I don’t understand that,” Helene said. “Do you mean … what do you mean …?”

  “My daughter is very sentimental,” Cady teased. He patted Helene’s arm. But Jesse could see that he himself was doubtful.

  “What you’re saying is terrible,” Helene said.

  “The truth can’t be terrible,” said Jesse.

  Perrault looked at him, pleased. Triumphant.

  “Ah, Jesse! Yes, Jesse, absolutely yes, yes—the truth can’t be terrible—that’s the first law of science! What is terrible can be true or not true, but what is true cannot be terrible. You’re reading my mind, Jesse.”

  Jesse felt his face grow warm.

  Helene was watching him with a still, small smile. He felt the hysteria rising in her.

  “What did you say, Jesse?” she asked.

  Dr. Cady, trying to make a joke of this, turned to Helene. “I think my little girl is nervous tonight. She isn’t herself tonight. Maybe you’re worried about Jeannie …?”

  “Jeannie? No.”

  “Maybe you should call the baby-sitter and check with her …?”

  “Why? I’m not worried. Jesse is the one who worries about our daughter, not I,” Helene said evenly. “I don’t worry. No, I’m thinking about what Dr. Perrault said just now, about the pin … the pin and the personality that can be destroyed with the pin.…”

  “Your wife is a very serious young woman,” Perrault said to Jesse, with that special look he shot Jesse whenever one of the less able assistants blundered during an operation. “She should consider the fate of the personality when the brain is lifted out of its encasement and placed in another substance, when it is hooked up to another system. What then? Without its senses, is the brain any longer a personality?”

  “Yes,” said Helene.

  “What do you mean, yes?”

  “Yes. It is a personality.”

  Perrault laughed. He lifted his hands as if to show that he could not argue, he had no interest in arguing.

  Cady said at once, “You mean the transplanting of brains. Yes, that’s good. A good point. It seems to me that the brain would still be a personality because it would have a memory; a personality is largely memory, conscious or unconscious. An unfathomable number of memory units. So it would hold in these units its shattered ‘personality,’ unless that personality could be wiped out.”

  “Hooked up to another body, let’s say,” Perrault said, “and with the demands of the new body’s senses, what then? The same personality, a new one belonging to the body, or a synthesis of the two?”

  “It depends upon the memory.…”

  “We will allow the memory.”

  Helene said sharply, “But this can’t be done.”

  “Certainly it can be done, Helene,” said Cady. “It will be done in the next decade.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Kidneys will be transplanted, hearts will be transplanted, everything,” Cady said. “The body is a jumble of mechanical parts, some of which work well and some of which rattle. The parts can be detached and exchanged for new ones. Is this evil? Helene, you know all this, you’re just pretending to be shocked. I think it’s that baby you’re going to have … you’re rehearsing innocence for it, the innocence of a young mother.…”

  “Don’t upset the young lady. What good does it do to talk about these things? Just go and do them according to your plans, complete them and write your reports and collect your prizes,” Mrs. Perrault said lightly. She might have been talking to children. She got to her feet and asked if anyone wanted coffee.

  Perrault ignored her. He turned peevishly to Jesse. “I’ll put it to Dr. Vogel. Are you going to be transplanting brains in your lifetime, Dr. Vogel?”

  “I suppose so,” Jesse said.

  “Will it be so terrible?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Because nothing is terrible any longer. “Because … because it will have to be done … someone will have to do it,” Jesse said.

  “Yes, and if not Dr. Vogel, then who?” Perrault said triumphantly. “Who else? I admire your son-in-law, Benjamin, beyond any other man I know. This isn’t flattery. It’s a fact. He has part of my brain right now, memorized in his fingertips. That, too, is a tradition, the old tradition of training, of ritual. It will do for another generation or two. But then—the future—well, the future is going to be very interesting.”

  “The future.…” Cady said slowly.

  “Yes, we’re making the future very interesting,” Perrault laughed.

  Helene was staring across the table at Jesse.

  “You … you plan on doing that kind of work?” she whispered.

  Jesse shrugged his shoulders.

  “The brain might be better off without a body,” Perrault said. “It wouldn’t be so distracted then by the senses. It would be pure. Whatever its function might be, it would respond more quickly.”

  Helene turned to him. “But why do such a thing?”

  “That’s a strange question.”

  Helene smiled thinly at him. Jesse could see the strain in her face. “To preserve life at such a cost.… And what kind of life would it be? Your services go to the highest bidder, don’t they?”

  “But the highest bidder would be the United States government,” Perrault said, again with that raising of his hands, as if this were all beyond his control. “A great mind doesn’t belong simply to the body it happens to have been born in. It belongs to its culture, its physical and mental environment. Therefore we can say that no man owns himself, no personality owns the brain it inhabits, any more than we can own other people. It’s taken us many centuries to understand that we can’t own other people—I mean, in private life, in private relationships. We are all unique and free. Why, then, should we own ourselves? The government may have a perfect right to demand that certain brains be preserved.”

  “Preserved—why?” Helene asked.

  “For the good of the nation.”

  “And the brains themselves would have no choice about it …?”

  “Now, when you talk about brains, and not about old-fashioned personalities, now you are speaking a language I can understand,” Perrault said politely. “Of course
the brains would not have any ultimate decision concerning their own disposal. When you consider the enormous value of the brain of, let’s say, Benjamin Cady, who is worth more than all the computers that exist—his brain is absolutely priceless and could not be discarded because of any whim of his. But I would imagine brains will enthusiastically will themselves to science just as people today will their organs or their entire bodies. The brains will be honored, they will be truly resurrected, the first forms of life on this planet to be really resurrected! Maybe this is what was meant by Christ’s promise to us, or by that teasing little statement: The Kingdom of God is within you.”

  Helene brought her hand to her face. The lights of the chandelier were too bright, and her features looked stark, strained. Her distress communicated itself to Jesse, to his body. “But there isn’t any choice.…” she said.

  “There never was any choice about resurrection, was there?” Perrault said with a smile. “Men were judged whether they wanted to be judged or not. There was no possibility of escape. Why should we be any easier on men? Of course there can’t be any choice. Men live in both health and disease—they die in disease, unless they die suddenly. We could not tolerate a prodigious brain losing its health because of a sentimental attachment to its body. We cling to our bodies even when they are diseased because they are all we have known. We are terrified at the thought of losing them. It’s like the old terror of leaving one world and going to another, taking one’s chances with the next world. But, unlike that old cosmology, the new world—the new body—would always be superior to the old. Guaranteed. So resurrection would be real; you would wake up in paradise. The old body, the old earth: cast away for a true heaven. But first we must educate people out of the vicious sentimentality of loving the body, loving the personality, the personal self, the soul, that old illusion.… What is the old self, after all? Only the promise of disease. And disease is antisocial, mortal, private, rebellious, eccentric, unpredictable, useless, unimaginative, unprogressive, uncomely!”

  Self-conscious, he let his hands fall in his lap. Jesse had never heard Dr. Perrault speak at such length.

  “Disease is private.…” Helene murmured.

  “Yes, certainly. And to be utterly free is to be diseased. To go one’s own private way, that is a disease,” Perrault said. “Health is something else entirely—a relaxation of the ego, the self, the name on the card, the name on the birth certificate. Health is in the public domain, it always has been a matter of medical standards and regulations. It’s in the public domain the way outer space is. Inner space and outer space can’t belong to individuals. No brain owns itself; it resides in nature like the atmosphere, it rises out of nature and subsides back into it, and only a panel of scientists is equipped to decide when a superior brain must be taken from its old body.…”

  “When it must be taken?” Cady said.

  “Yes, when it must be taken, when there is no choice about waiting any longer,” Perrault said.

  “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Helene said. “It’s the same as murder, what you’ve been saying. Yes, it’s the same as murder.” Mrs. Perrault had gone to Helene’s place with a large silver coffee pot, but Helene did not seem to notice her. She was shaking her head, smiling. “You’re sick, a sick man, you’re crazy, you’re a killer, and it’s because you want to kill that you’ve thought all this out, you and men like you … you know that no one can stop you.…”

  “Helene!” Cady cried.

  She got to her feet, pushing back her chair. She pressed her hands against her face and pulled at the skin beneath her eyes, a curious, private gesture of utter weariness. Jesse hurried over to her. She turned from him as if she did not know who he was and walked away—toward the rear of the house, staggering. Jesse followed her. “Are you going to be sick?” he whispered. He put his arm around her shoulders and walked with her back to the Perraults’ bathroom—a tiny room with peeling walls and a dull, scuffed linoleum floor. “It’s all right, Helene. We can go home. As soon as you feel better we’ll go home.” His heart was pounding. Helene turned from him, gagging. She swayed. Her swollen stomach looked ripe and fragile to Jesse; he was afraid something terrible would happen to her. “Helene …?” he said. She would not look at him. He wondered if he hated her for what she had said to Perrault and what she was doing to herself and to him—

  “Leave me alone. Please,” she said.

  “But Helene—”

  “Leave me alone!”

  He left her. Back in the dining room everyone was standing—these old, aging people with their worried faces. Jesse stared angrily at them. Perrault’s face was reddened. “I’m sorry—” he began.

  Jesse nodded abruptly.

  He went to the front closet to get Helene’s coat. Perrault followed.

  “You’re upset,” he said flatly.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, you’re upset, your wife is very nervous. It’s her condition, isn’t it? This pregnancy?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Look at me, please. Look straight at me,” Perrault said.

  Jesse looked at him. He was such a short man, frail and meek in his body—Jesse could not think why he feared him so much.

  “Do you agree with her?” Perrault said.

  Jesse said nothing.

  “Your wife’s words, her accusation—do you agree?”

  Jesse stared at him and did not reply.

  “Then don’t answer. All right. I had invited you tonight for a certain reason … for a private, personal reason,” Perrault said quickly. His face was very red. “But now … now I … we … We can talk about it some other time.…”

  Jesse nodded slowly. His mind was a blank, even his anger and alarm had run down: he felt the terrible, open purity of his brain, which belonged to no one at all.

  12

  A week before Jesse’s thirty-first birthday, in October of 1956, his receptionist came back to his office and said, “There’s a young woman who wants to see you. Her name is Rita Smith.”

  “Who?”

  “Rita Smith. She says it’s very important that she talk with you. She doesn’t have an appointment.”

  “No referral?”

  “No. She says it’s very important.… I told her you were very busy, but she says she’ll wait, she says you know her.”

  Jesse tried to think: did he know anyone named Rita Smith? The name meant nothing to him. Some nervousness, some very slight resentment in the receptionist’s manner made Jesse wonder about this young woman.… Well, he couldn’t resist. He would have to see her.

  “Please show her in,” he said politely.

  The receptionist brought back Reva Denk.

  She came right up to him, leaned over his desk, and shook hands happily. “Dr. Vogel! It’s so nice of you to remember me!” she laughed. She laughed at his surprise, leaning across his large desk with a childlike pleasure at giving surprise. In the sharp sunlight of noon her beauty glared at him.

  “You—you came back—You’re here—” Jesse stammered.

  “And you remember me,” she said triumphantly.

  She stood back as if to give him time to look at her, to assess her. Lowering her gaze, she seemed to be assessing herself. Shorter than he remembered her appearing. More contained, petite. She was wearing high-heeled shoes and a dress of smooth, silky wool, a very light blue. Her hair was tied back from her face in two thick, loose clumps, tied with ordinary yarn, and it was parted in the middle in a long wavering line. Her face was clean of make-up and looked very young, younger than Jesse recalled. Her skin was smooth and a little shiny, accentuated by the sunlight of noon.

  That this woman should come to him at noon!

  “But what—how—How did you find me?” Jesse asked.

  “I looked you up in the directory. I’ve never forgotten you.”

  His heart had begun to pound heavily. He got to his feet, behind the desk—on which were arranged neat piles of letters, file
s, papers, an entire life, a maze of a life—as if fearful of coming out from behind it, of facing this woman directly. He stared at her face, her mouth. Her smiling mouth. It was artless, pleased, happy. The flash of her gums startled him; he might have glanced at something forbidden.

  What was she saying?

  Looking around his office. Smiling happily. “This is so high in the air, it’s like being in a tower—up in a castle—up in the air,” she said. “And what are all these things? Diplomas? Do they belong to you, all of them to one person? You? I can’t read that—is that Latin? I don’t know any foreign languages. Ah, what a wonderful place this is, so high up!—do you spend a lot of time standing at the window here, looking at the lake? I’d stand here all the time. I’d let my mind sail out the window and into the lake.…”

  He could not follow her words. He was so struck by her—the sudden intimacy of her presence, her being. That slender, lively body, those girlish legs, that head of blond hair now tied into two loose, swishing strands, the gleam of a gold bracelet on one arm, the constant movement of her eyes and lashes.… She was rhythmic, slowly moving, a slow delicate whirl of various shades and shallows of light, the gleam of her eyes, her moist lips, her very white teeth, the whorls of her ears, the pale, almost waxy whorls of her ears, the very tip of her fragile nose confused with the rhythmic whirl and dip of her words. Rises, hollows. The intense glare of the sunlight that seemed to make her skin opaque, poreless, smooth as flesh painted on a canvas. She was turning to him, teasing him, calling him to her. Didn’t he hear her voice beneath that chattering voice calling Jesse? Jesse?

  Or did he imagine her?

  He had been imagining her for many months, he had been dreaming and exaggerating her. Along with Helene he had dreamed of Reva: he had made love to Reva in the form of a husband of Helene’s. Two bodies had come together in love, a pantomime of love, and Jesse had manipulated them from a small sacred hollow somewhere in his own head, chaste and untouched, sending out the nerve impulses of love, wishing that love be made flesh. But the love was in honor of Reva and Jesse.