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The talk had been good. But the talk had also evoked old, unpleasant memories; memories that were difficult to suppress at the best of times. And these were not the best of times.
He knew what to do about Susan Christopher. Tell her firmly that he wasn’t interested. Hope that Max wouldn’t press the matter.
Fade, if fading was inevitable.
That was what John Shaw meant to do.
But it occurred to him, closing his eyes, that Benjamin might have other plans.
He groped after the thought and lost it. Too late now. The space behind his eyelids seemed to fill with a bright and unforgiving light. His head throbbed and ached. The change was coming, too fast and fiercely to resist. Memories surfaced like phosphorescent sea-creatures: Susan’s face, their conversation, Kyriakides and the Woodwards, the shimmering veneer on the face of a handmade guitar … all these pieces of himself, fragile as a china cup for one weightless moment … and then gone, shattered, dispersed.
He slept. And someone else awoke.
5
“He’s refusing treatment?”
Dr. Kyriakides sounded angry, his voice growling through the phone lines from Illinois.
Susan said, “At the moment—yes.”
“He’s not aware of the problem?”
“He’s very aware of it.” She repeated the list of symptoms John had recited, the recurrence of “Benjamin.”
“That’s not what I would have predicted,” Dr. Kyriakides said. “But it might be a positive sign.”
“You think so? How could it be?”
“He’s capable of tremendous things, Susan—both his conscious and his unconscious mind. He’s resurrected Benjamin for a reason, even if he’s not aware of it. It’s a response to the disease, I suspect … as if one suit of clothes has begun to wear out, and he’s preparing to put on a second.”
“But it’s not the same,” Susan said. “It’s not him.”
“But in some sense it must be him. Benjamin is his creation. It’s not something new—it can’t be. Only an aspect of himself.”
“But it isn’t John Shaw. The John Shaw part of him is dying.”
There was a pause. “Possibly,” Dr. Kyriakides admitted. “In one way or another.”
“Then we have to help him.”
“I agree! But if he’s refusing treatment—”
“He could change his mind. He said he might call back. I want to stay—at least another week. I need to talk to him again.”
There was another crackling silence through the long exchange from Chicago. “I don’t remember you being this enthusiastic.”
“I suppose … it never seemed real before.”
“Then you must have felt it, too.”
“I’m sorry?”
“His specialness. There’s something unique about John. I mean, beyond the obvious. There always has been.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know what you mean.”
“Take whatever time you need.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you want a suggestion?”
“Anything.”
“Talk to the other one. Talk to Benjamin.”
“I’ll try,” Susan said.
But she had thought of that already.
The problem was how to begin.
She wasn’t much good with people. Susan had figured that out a long time ago. She was a book-reader and she had always been good with words, but that facility did not extend to her tongue. For most of her adolescence she had been a stutterer. She loved words but could not gracefully pronounce them; people often laughed when she tried. She had retreated into muteness and spoke only when it was unavoidable. Her mother took her for sessions with a “teen counselor,” who linked Susan’s stuttering with her parents’ divorce: a traumatic event for a twelve-year-old, yes, she guessed so. Privately, she co
She felt infected by his silence and determined to overcome her own. She performed speech exercises. She joined the yearbook staff at high school and studied back issues of Seventeen for clues to the social graces. It was a scientific project—as solemn as that. She was not John Shaw, inventing a new self; but the inspiration was similar … a willful disguise. And it was effective; it worked; but she remained painfully conscious of the creaking machinery behind the proscenium. People would look at her oddly and she would think Oh! I made a mistake.
Approaching John Shaw had been hard enough, even under the cloak of impartiality. Approaching Benjamin would be even harder. Because she wasn’t just a messenger from Dr. Kyriakides anymore. This had become, in a way, her own project now. And she needed her own words.
She began by renting a car. She chose a late-model Volvo and spent a day with her city map, learning the downtown. Then back to the hotel to shower, followed by cheap Chinese food on Spadina Avenue and another evening with Travis McGee. No one called; no one left a message.
She set her wristwatch alarm for 5 a.m. and slept with it under her pillow.
By the time it a
She parked in front of the rooming house where John Shaw lived.
The snow evolved into a cold, steady drizzle as Susan shivered in the car. She watched the people who emerged from the rooming house, made ghostly by the condensation on the Volvo’s windows. None of them was John Shaw—or Benjamin. Seven o’clock slid past. At seven-thirty she was begi
Moments before her deadline, Benjamin left the rooming house.
She almost missed him. Dr. Kyriakides had warned her about the possibility that Benjamin might not look much like John Shaw. Obviously his features were the same, but there were subtler clues of posture and style and movement, and from this distance—through the rain—he might have been another person altogether. He walked differently. He held himself differently. He stepped into the October morning, his face disguised by the hood of a yellow raincoat, and this was not John’s long, impatient stride but something more diffident, careful, reserved. He paused at the sidewalk and looked both ways. His glance slid over the little Volvo without hesitation, but Susan pressed herself back into the seat.
He turned and walked westward through the rain.
Susan waited until he reached the corner; then she turned the key in the ignition and eased the Volvo into traffic.
He walked to work, which made it easier. By negotiating slowly through a couple of troublesome intersections she was able to follow him all the way to University Avenue, where he vanished into the lobby of a tall, anonymous Government of Ontario building.