Murmur Page 6

  I’m breathing hard; the knowledge that this is me breathing makes my heart gallop. It is my heart, my breath. I’m being held—held down, and looking up. I’ve stopped breathing. My mouth is full. My heart has stopped. A hand closes—is this a hand I know? Has it a face? A hand closes the eyelids in my face.

  *

  Dear June,

  Dr. Anthony Stallbrook, my pleasant Jungian (v.s.), quite surprised me the other day. I told him I was growing breasts and he dropped his notebook and said in a low voice that it was no doubt unprofessional of him to say anything but that he “found all of this personally disgusting.” I assumed he meant not just the breasts, but my whole predicament, sexual relations with men, etc.—and I was prepared to be disappointed in him, because he is an intelligent person—but not a bit of it. He said that it was the punitive measures he found disgusting, that they were an overcompensation (his word) and that he regarded me, very neutrally, as a “natural homosexual.” “As opposed to a mechanical one,” I replied, and he laughed: “I thought you were going to say ‘unnatural.’” And then he stumped me. “Is sex mechanical, Alec, for you?”

  Well, I had to think. Of course I’ve given some thought to the advantages (and disadvantages) of function divorced from feeling. As which of us has not? After all, beyond a certain point in life, one does not want to go on being hurt. Still, our joshing presented this “natural” instinct for self-preservation in another light, and I began to have a sense of many aspects of my life as, indeed, some kind of overcompensation—for the loss of C.C.M., I mean, which was to others at the time no more than the loss of a friend.

  If I were to put it in my own terms of the period, Chris’s death and the whole routine of burial were the set of “instructions” I received. And what I made of them constituted a changed “state of mind.” I changed, I think, from someone into some thing. A something that had lost a soul mate—maybe even a soul.

  Talking it over with A.S. reminded me of an evening with Chris, when he’d already won his scholarship to Trinity and I had yet to make an impression on King’s, or anywhere else for that matter. We were on the river. I was punting, sending the boat first too far to the right and then too far to the left, never in a straight line. Chris said I overcompensated, trying to correct a wrong steer, and I, being distractible, said that there was something in that—that I was convinced there existed some law of overcompensation in motion—which I should like to go into properly some day. So I took us into a tree and Chris and I ended up in the water. I went back to Wargrave. The next I heard was from Edith Molyneaux, his mother. Chris suffered from TB, about which I knew nothing. He was a very fair-skinned boy, that’s all I’d ever thought, and by this point it was a fairness invested by me with his own integrity and delicacy of mind. It seemed to me a definite strength and not a weakness. One wanted to be more like him. He had an attack on the way home from Cambridge, went to hospital, and died. Much later on, Edith told me he’d been in great pain for six whole days before the end.

  Soon after Chris died, a boy at school stole my locked diary. He never divulged the diary’s contents, which were hardly shocking—positions of stars, Euclidean parallels, “neutral” records of chemistry experiments, his (Chris’s) attempts to get me to listen to Beethoven—but I was outraged. I read it the other day. There is one mention of my hand brushing against Chris’s while we were hanging a pendulum. I suppose I might have blushed for that. I’m sorry to say that I beat that boy rather hard.

  At Bletchley, too, didn’t we overcompensate for the extra rotor the Germans put in the machine? All that work! All the work, June, it requires to be sure!

  I have been dreaming of Chris every night since that last session with A.S., and of course it strikes me forcibly that these dreams are themselves a coded overcompensation, the price paid for a suppressed reality. But—and this is what the man in the mirror appears to be saying—perhaps it is not that way round. Perhaps it is not the code of the dream that has to be broken. Perhaps the dream is not a result of suppression, or anything like that—but is itself a set of instructions, which makes possible the next bit of life.

  Sleep allows us to go away and forget about work, and dreams are the way in which we tell ourselves in the meantime how to pick up the thread. A dream is a stored program. A dream configures me. I wake into a new function.

  My dreams are candid with me: they say I am chemically altered. They are full of magical symbolism! At the same time, they are enormously clear—where there is high reason and much thought, there will be much desire and many imaginings. Urges. I can be given drugs and hormones but they will only work as drugs and hormones work. They cannot get at the excess desire. Take out libido and another drive replaces it. Materialism and determinism define me through and through, and yet there is more than they allow. And if that illusion of more—call it free will—is itself a mere effect, then an “effect” suggests, does it not, a real cause, as a film “suggests” a projector?

  When I dream, I am observing myself. Then I come back into myself when I open my eyes and I wonder what I’ve done, where I’ve been. In the latest installments, Stallbrook got transposed into a schoolmaster, as far as I can recall, and I acquired strange powers. But do I come back, June? Or is a trace of me left in that other world? Does something of the dreamer come back into this one? What of the dead, in dreams? They speak, but are they just my projections, or do they also exist? Do they project?

  My breasts at least do not. Though that is the fault of expectation. (Because one does not expect a man to have breasts, they do not appear to resemble them. They are flattish, pouch-like, and red; the nipples enlarged, oblate.) I asked Trentham if he would like to see them, and he fairly ran off. I can’t say that I blame him.

  I am afraid of becoming something else. A hybrid. The fear is not the change, it is the loss of, well, one’s personal past. It is quite like the fear of becoming a machine, in fact. I grieve for Chris now in a way I could not before, and it is precious to me, this new old grief. I fear losing him again in losing myself. I know what you will say. You’ll say, Alec, the “I” is always there. The “I” does not disappear if you change its data or its sex—its experiences and memories. It is there in the background, the ground stuff. And even if a clever doctor were able gradually to mechanize it all, and erase my past, he would not have killed me. It’s Russell’s “neutral stuff” of the mental and physical worlds, isn’t it, but oh, June, it is no neutral matter being caught between them!

  In distress,

  A.

  It may be that the feeling of free will which we all have is an illusion. Or it may be that we really have got free will, but yet there is no way of telling from our behaviour that this is so … I do not know how we can ever decide between these alternatives …

  —A. M. Turing, “Can Digital Computers Think?” (1951)

  The Class of All Unthinkable Things

  Dear Alec,

  Well, you’re right. I would say that you’re you, whatever ghastly things have happened or are happening, and the reason I know that is that I have letters from you, every week, despite everything, which are full of the Alec I know.

  Your last letter worries me only in that it is pretty unguarded and, given your predicament, I should be a poor friend if I didn’t say: be careful. I am not surprised you feel your dreams leaking into your waking life, but perhaps stay out of Trentham’s way? He is your work colleague and colleagues talk. Remember, the Stilboestrol you’re taking—being given—is poisonous. Bill says he thinks the effects are probably reversible. You mustn’t think too far ahead. I know that’s easy for me to say.

  Of course I’m playing devil’s advocate. You’ve always been honest with me, Alec, and that hasn’t always been easy. Not even Bill has your candor and intuition. Few have. I think your Dr. Stallbrook is fortunate in his patient. (You make me laugh when you say mirror-man has turned him into a schoolmaster. Imagine me telling the nuns my dreams! I think it would be very dull for them. Last n
ight I dreamt that I was eating a potato in a garden. I recall, or make believe I recall, being frustrated by the situation.)

  So, you worry about the people and the things you see at night, and whether you are turning into someone different. I wonder if you would worry as much if it were a transformation chosen by you and under your control. I think what’s frightening about your punishment is precisely that it’s so dreamlike—you can’t snap out of it. It disturbs me that you have to go somewhere and be injected, like a patient who’s really a prisoner. It doesn’t make sense. How can you be the blameless sufferer from a condition and a criminal—and a sinner—at the same time?

  But I’ve been thinking—maybe there’s a happier way of coming at this dreaminess.

  So what if you feel yourself slipping and sliding! Don’t we all bundle away bits of the past? Bits of ourselves, even. I wonder if it may not be a mistake to cling on to our identity. Look, if you can bear it, at us. Look at me. Alec, we were going to be married! You proposed on a stile and made me a chess set out of baked mud that fell apart as soon as we tried playing on it at the Crown. Most of the others in Hut 8 thought we were married and we both entertained the idea for a while. Being held fast to others’ expectations has its attractions in a time of crisis, but I had to relinquish that particular view of myself. Who knows what sort of husband and wife we would have made? Good? Bad? What of it, now? The Eastern philosophers, about whom Bill is so serenely passionate, say that the ego is an illusion, fostered by other people’s opinions and points of view. There is plenty in that.

  But you’re right. Something remains, something real but not necessarily physical in the common sense, and in my dull way I’d say that it is a quality of thought. A tactic. Fair play, decency, humor, subtlety. The things that (I know you will disagree with this) slip off the table of behavior but nevertheless dictate how we behave.

  Is that an antinomy? Almost. Such a good word. Antinomies ought to be flowers.

  The Law has had its say, but the bit of you that is unreachable, darling, will survive. Max N. tells me you cooked him dinner last week and that the other guest at your table was your probation officer. I can hear you laughing now.

  You, a machine? The factories would grind to a halt.

  Love,

  June

  PS Trentham’s paper arrived from Trentham himself, in the end. I presume you gave him our address. Did you ask him to send it? Where does he come from, again? Princeton? Don’t flaunt your Alec-ness. People who can’t judge ability will judge character instead. Bill’s impression of T. is that he is rigorous but slippery-pole inclined.

  *

  Autumn turns the backs into cloud fields. I’m lifted from the perishing slabs into a sitting position, my head about level with fog beyond the Fellows’ trees. For one moment, I see myself severed or served on a white cloth, exsanguinating like a heretic. I’m cold beneath the cloud. My legs are sediment. “That’s it.” A voice I recognize. “That’s it.” I’m being held.

  It comes to me that I have been away or ill and I am ready to see Christopher again, whose arm around my neck implies a face waiting to show itself.

  “You had another trip, Alec.” The voice is bright. A hand waving in front of me. “Alec? Trentham, from T. I saw you fall over the scraper at the gates. ‘The Scraper at the Gates’—sounds like a play. Alec?”

  But everything is swimming. I can only let myself be hoisted up. Trentham is kind. I do not know him, then I do, then I do not. He smiles, willing me back. We shuffle through the poplars’ sovereign leaves, over the bridge. Ahead of us fog floods Gibbs’ arch and rowers, halved, not holding but strangely accompanied by blades, laugh at their own weird truncation. We turn into Bodley’s.

  The air is bitter cold, the world real. T staircase, creaking like a ship, a hint of earth closet about the damp entrance, my door right at the top, its open oak, the set of rooms, Trentham breathing, busy with coals and tongs, paper, matches, his hairless cheeks, the raised pores on his neck (the only place he has to shave)—all of it’s real except the halt in time as I sit by the window making my inventory, which loops round and around and doesn’t seem to want to end.

  “Your rooms look different in the light,” Trentham begins, then stops, colors, and hurries on. “I didn’t notice that trophy before.” Trophy. “Above your desk. Majestic beast! Your spoils?”

  Antlers are growing from the wall, no head, the rest of the stag glassed over.

  “Or Mrs. Packlehurst’s tiger. You know, the one she thought she shot but really it just died of fright … Alec?”

  “I’m not too sure myself,” I say.

  I’m like this when I’ve had a faint. I know that I went for a run, early, and tripped at the back gates, gashed my ankle, and didn’t mind the pain but saw the blood … The sight of blood drains everything of its familiarity. The rooms are mine, but shifted out of alignment. Like parallels on a Riemannian plane becoming rings on spheres that meet again. I seem to hear a voice inside my head.

  Trentham, meanwhile, is chattering.

  I must recall, he says. Surely I’d know if I shot something so—so beautiful. Trentham’s a pacifist—“I couldn’t even hold a gun, much less fire one”—and talkative. Eddington says he’d make a first-class wrangler if only he kept quiet. Instead, he’s just an able computer. The talkative are more alone than they realize. It is their talk that drives listeners away. The mirror underneath the antlers shows a listening room.

  The fire is lit. Red-faced and self-conscious, he turns to me. “Now, don’t look down. I don’t want you to faint again.” Kneeling, he loosens my plimsolls. “Trust you to tie a frantic knot …” He pulls a large white handkerchief from his pocket and reaches for the safety pin fastening my shorts (“Sorry, but I need this.”). He works away, pulls off a blotchy sock. I look up hastily, assess the volutes in the ceiling rose. “No real damage.” The dressing’s comfortable. It is the sense of imposture that worries me, the feeling that I’ve changed; that I’m a variant, not altogether the same man who went out for a run; that Trentham isn’t Molyneaux; that it is difficult for manumitted souls to find a new body. But necessary. With no body, what is there for them to do?

  “Sorry,” he says, his voice soft now, considering the done and the undone, sliding both hands along my thighs. “I think I might need this as well.”

  After, he stretches out on the carpet. Arches and rolls onto his back, his hands and wrists pushing catlike at nothingness. He yawns, baring his teeth, showing the pink and yellow of a tongue coated with me. The trouser pleats, the creases on his white shirtsleeves are hewn. Only his tie, pulled down an inch and trailing on the carpet like a cinder path, seems lax. His ease at being animal blots out the deed. Function trumps memory. I hear the grate agree. The flames draw near. Somewhere inside them Salomé and cowled figures, grappling with every kind of ecstasy. A coal cracks. Bodies fall from smashed windows and footsteps scatter through the streets. Someone is pointing at a row of naked prisoners. The scene wavers, one flicker of one flame, and soars into the chimney breast. Gone, but the picture still exists, between the world and me. A glimpse of charnel seen from someone else’s point of view, perhaps.

  I think of all the many different points of view that are the plural aspects of a singular phenomenon. Chomolungma and Mount Everest—the same mountain from two valleys. Convergent perspective.

  Trentham is sorry, but not very, that he forced himself on me. I say I didn’t mind. It was his impression I couldn’t object—I looked half-paralyzed; I seemed numbly to want to be reduced to sheer reflex. It made him “terribly greedy.” He grins, swallows, and says:

  “What is it like, Alec—to come round from a faint?”

  I give the best answer I can, hasty and vague. The moment of the faint itself I can’t retrieve, whereas the waking up from it is revelatory and fresh, a sort of boundless reacquaintance with being. You were nothing and suddenly you find a form again, solid among the flagstones and the poplar trees.

  For
just a few moments, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to send messages to nerves or limbs. You don’t have to hunt, eat, survive. Nothing about you lying there, wherever you have fallen down, describes a need. The instant of repose floats on, a swan almost in flight, stroking the water with its feet. You’re tied to everything and everything is part of you, until you hear watery voices in the distance and the intersections of the poplar canopy express a thought: though there is only one river, it has two sides, and you’re on one of them.

  The feeling this is true, that you are separate, alone, brings you around. You give a short heave of responsibility for sensations. You shift and cry.

  Your mind has registered, or made, the whole wide world, in which it finds to its surprise it plays a very minor part. One lying by the scraper at the gates. How small you are. How limitless the earth and overarching sky.

  I make a glib comparison. “It’s rather like writing a book only to read the proofs and find yourself mentioned—dismissed—in the footnotes …”

  “I’ll open this window,” Trentham says airily, gets up and lets a pulse of organ music in: a cadence from Communion, the bourdon rolling wide and deep across the college lawn, rattling the glass. He frowns. “But no one thinks a character inside a book has actually written it?”

  “And yet the author is a part of his material. It’s paradoxical, that’s all.”

  The thing with fainting is, you feel abundantly aware, at first. You seem to have creative will, except you can’t do anything. And when you can, when you’ve a body to command again, your state of mind alters. It’s forced into moments, a step-by-step account, this foot goes here, then this foot over there …

  “I’m glad I’ve never fainted. It sounds horrible. Well, horribly mechanical.”

  It’s as if Trentham heard me thinking to myself.

  “Perhaps it is. Mechanical, I mean.”