Robert Silverberg - The Changeling

She made no reply. She was staring at him in an astounded way, and there seemed to be something else in her look, a volatility, an excitement, that led him to think he had somehow reached across the barrier of his lost world to touch her, this Judith, to arouse her and kindle in her some simulacrum of the love and passion that he knew they had had in another existence. A sudden wild fantasy erupted in him—getting free of Celia, getting Judith free of Ron, and reconstructing in this unfamiliar world the relationship that had been taken from him. But the idea faded as quickly as it had come. It was foolishness; it was nonsense; it was an impossibility.

She said finally, “Describe what you think happened to you?”

He told her in all the detail he could muster—the vertigo, the feeling of passing through a gateway, the gradual discovery of the wrongness of everything. “I want to believe this is all just a mental illness and that six lithium pills will make everything be right again. But I don’t think that’s how it is. I think what happened to me may be a lot wilder than a mere schizoid break. But I don’t want to believe that. I want to think it’s just a dissociative reaction.”

“Yes. I’m sure you do.”

“What do you think it is, Judith?”

“My opinion doesn’t matter, does it? What matters is proof.”

“Proof?”

She said, “What were you carrying on you when you experienced your moment of vertigo?”

“My camera.” He thought. “And my wallet.”

“Which had credit cards, driver’s license, all that stuff?”

“Yes,” he said, beginning to understand. He felt a stab of fear, cold, intense. Pulling his wallet out, he said, “Here—here—” He drew forth his driver’s license. It had the Third Avenue address. He took out his Diner’s Club card. Judith laid her own next to it. The cards were of different designs. He produced a twenty-dollar bill. She peered at the signatures on it and shook her head. Hilgard closed his eyes an instant and had a flashing vision of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the great heavy snouts of the serpents, the massive stone steps. Judith’s face was dark and grim, and Hilgard knew she had forced him to confront the final proof, and he had a sense of a mighty gate swinging shut forever behind him. He was not the victim of any psychosis. He had actually made the crossing, and it was irrevocable. His other life was gone—it was dead. Bitterly he said, “I forged all this stuff, right? While I was down in Mexico City I had it all printed up, counterfeit money, a fake driver’s license, to make the hoax look really convincing. Right? Right?” He remembered something else and went burrowing for it in his wallet and found it after a frantic search—Judith’s own business card, with Department of Neurobiology, Rockefeller University on it in shining engraved letters. The card was old and worn and creased. She looked at it as though he had put a basilisk in her hand. When she stared at him again, it was with a sad and tender look of pity.

At length she said, “Ted, I’ll give you all the help I can.”

“What kind of help?”

“Making the adaptation. Learning your role here. Celia and I, between us, ought to be able to fill you in on who you’re supposed to be. It’s the only thing I can imagine doing now. You’re right that lithium won’t fix anything.”

“No,” Hilgard said. “Don’t involve Celia.”

“We have to.”

“No,” he said. “She thinks I’m her husband and that I’m suffering from an unfortunate dissociative reaction, or whatever you call it. If she comes to realize I’m the complete stranger I’ve been insisting I am, I’m lost. She’ll throw me out and try to find ways of getting him back. And I have no way to function in this world except in the identity of Theodore Hilgard.”

“You are Theodore Hilgard.”

“Yes, and I intend to go on being him. Doing marketing research and living with Celia and signing my name to checks. You’ll help me adapt, yes. You’ll have a couple of sessions of therapy with me every week, and you’ll tell me where I went to college and what the names of my friends are and who the presidents have been in this world, if they have presidents here. So far as everyone else will know, you’re helping me recover from a mysterious mental fog. You won’t tell a soul that I don’t belong here. And sooner or later I will belong here. All right, Judith? You see, I’ve got no choice. There’s no way for me to get back across the barrier. I’ve managed to prove to one other human being that I’m not crazy, and now I’ve got to put that behind me and start living the life I’ve been handed. Will you help me?”

“One condition,” she said.

“Which is?”

“You’re in love with me. I see that, and I don’t blame you because I know you can’t help thinking I’m your Judith. I’m not. I’m Ron’s. Go on flirting with me, go on having fantasies about me, but don’t give me any moves, ever. All right? Because you might open up in me something that I don’t want opened, do you understand? We remain friends. Co-conspirators, even. That’s all. Is that agreed?”

Hilgard looked at her unhappily. It was a long while before he could bring himself to say it.

“Agreed,” he told her at last.

Celia said, “Judith phoned while you were on the way back. She talked to me for twenty minutes. Oh, Ted—my poor Ted—”

“I’m going to be okay. It’ll take time.”

“She says these amnesias, these detailed delusions, are extraordinarily rare. You’re going to be a textbook case.”

“Wonderful. I’m going to need a lot of help from you, Celia.”

“Whatever I can do.”

“I’m a blank. I don’t know who our friends are, I don’t know how to practice my profession, I don’t even know who you are. Everything’s wiped out. I’ll have to rebuild it all. Judith will do as much as she can, but the real burden, day by day, hour by hour, is going to fall on you.”

“I’m prepared for that.”

“Then we’ll start all over—from scratch. We’ll make a go of it. Tonight we’ll eat at one of our special restaurants—you’ll have to tell me which our special restaurants are—and we’ll have the best wine in the house, or maybe a bottle or two of champagne, and then we’ll come back here—we’ll be like newlyweds, Celia, it’ll be like a wedding night. All right?”

“Of course,” she said softly.

“And then tomorrow the hard work begins. Fitting me back into the real world.”

“Everything will come back, Ted. Don’t worry. And I’ll give you all the help you need. I love you, Ted. No matter what’s happened to you, that hasn’t changed. I love you.”

He nodded. He took her hands in his. Falteringly, guiltily, with a thick tongue and a numbed heart, he forced himself to get the words out, the words that were his only salvation now, the words that gave him his one foothold on the shores of an unknown continent. “And I love you, Celia,” he told the absolute stranger who was his wife.