Robert Silverberg: A Sea of Faces

—But who’s the enemy?

—You’d know more about that than I would, doctor.

—Do you actually think so? I’m all the way over here. You’re right there inside your own head. You’ll know more than I ever will about you.

—You could always come inside my head if you wanted to.

—Wouldn’t that frighten you?

—It would kill me.

—I wonder, April. You’re much stronger than you think you are. You’re also very beautiful, April. I know, it’s beside the point But you are.

It’s just a small island. I can tell that by the way the shoreline curves rapidly away from me. I lie sprawled near the water’s edge, face down, exhausted, fingers digging tensely into the warm moist sand. The sun is strong; I feel waves of heat going thratala thratata on my bare back. I wear only a ragged pair of faded blue jeans, very tight, cut off choppily at the knee. My belt is waterlogged and salt-cracked, as though I had been adrift for days before making landfall. Perhaps I was. It’s hard to maintain a reliable sense of time in this place.

I should get up. I should explore.

Yes. Getting up, now. A little dizzy, eh? Yes. But I walk steadily up the gentle slope of the beach. Fifty meters inland, the sand shades into sandy soil, loose, shallow; rounded white coral boulders poke through from below. Thirsty soil. Nevertheless, how lush everything is here. A wall of tangled vines and creepers. Long glossy tropical green leaves, smooth-edged, big-veined. The corrugated trunks of the palms. The soft sound of the surf, fwissh, fwissh, underlying all other textures. How blue the sea. How green the sky. Fwissh.

Is that the image of a face in the sky?

A woman’s face, yes. Irene? April? The features are indistinct. But I definitely see it, yes, hovering a few hundred meters above the water as if projected from the sun-streaked sheet that is the skin of the ocean: a glow, a radiance, having the form of a delicate face—nostrils, lips, brows, cheeks, certainly a face, and not just one, either, for in the intensity of my stare I cause it to split and then to split again, so that a row of them hangs in the air, ten faces, a hundred, a thousand faces, faces all about me, a sea of faces. They seem quite grave. Smile! On command, the faces smile. Much better. The air itself is brighter for that smile. The faces merge, blur, sharpen, blur again, overlap in part, dance, shimmer, melt, flow. Illusions born of the heat. Daughters of the sun. Sweet mirages. I look past them, higher, into the clear reaches of the cloudless heavens.

Hawks!

Hawks here? Shouldn’t I be seeing gulls? The birds whirl and swoop, dark figures against the blinding sky, wings outspread, feathers like fingers. I see their fierce hooked beaks. They snap great beetles from the steaming air and soar away, digesting. Then there are no birds, only the faces, still smiling. I turn my back on them and slowly move off through the underbrush to see what sort of place the sea has given me.

So long as I stay near the shore, I have no difficulty in walking; cutting through the densely vegetated interior might be a different matter. I sidle off to the left, following the nibbled line of beach. Before I have walked a hundred paces I have made a new discovery: the island is adrift.

Glancing seaward, I notice that on the horizon there lies a dark shore rimmed by black triangular mountains, one or two days’ sail distant. Minutes ago I saw only open sea in that direction. Maybe the mountains have just this moment sprouted, but more likely the island, spinning slowly in the currents, has only now turned to reveal them. That must be the answer. I stand quite still for a long while and it seems to me that I behold those mountains now from one angle, now from a slightly different one. How else to explain such effects of parallax? The island freely drifts. It moves, and I move with it, upon the breast of the changeless unbounded sea.

The celebrated young American therapist Richard Bjornstrand commenced his experimental treatment of Miss April Lowry on the 3rd of August, 1987. Within fifteen days the locus of disturbance had been identified, and Dr. Bjornstrand had recommended consciousness-penetration treatment, a technique increasingly popular in the United States. Miss Lowry’s physician was initially opposed to the suggestion, but further consultations demonstrated the potential value of such an approach, and on the 19th of September the entry procedures were initiated. We expect further reports from Dr. Bjornstrand as the project develops.

Leonie said, “But what if you fall in love with her?”

“What of it?” I asked. “Therapists are always falling in love with their patients. Reich married one of his patients, and so did Fenichel, and dozens of the early analysts had affairs with their patients, and even Freud, who didn’t, was known to observe—”

“Freud lived a long time ago,” Leonie said.

I have now walked entirely around the island. The circumambulation took me four hours, I estimate, since the sun was almost directly overhead when I began it and is now more than halfway toward the horizon. In these latitudes I suppose sunset comes quite early, perhaps by half past six, even in summer.

All during my walk this afternoon the island remained on a steady course, keeping one side constantly toward the sea, the other toward that dark mountain-girt shore. Yet it has continued to drift, for there are minor oscillations in the position of the mountains relative to the island, and the shore itself appears gradually to grow closer. (Although that may be an illusion.) Faces appear and vanish and reappear in the lower reaches of the sky according to no predictable schedule of event or identity: April, Irene, April, Irene, Irene, April, April, Irene. Sometimes they smile at me. Sometimes they do not. I thought I saw one of the Irenes wink; I looked again and the face was April’s.

The island, though quite small, has several distinct geographical zones. On the side where I first came ashore there is a row of close-set palms, crown to crown, beyond which the beach slopes toward the sea. I have arbitrarily labeled that side of the island as east. The western side is low and parched, and the vegetation is a tangle of scrub. On the north side is a high coral ridge, flat-faced and involute, descending steeply into the water. White wavelets batter tirelessly against the rounded spires and domes of that pocked coral wall. The island’s southern shore has dunes, quite Saharesque, their yellowish pink crests actually shifting ever so lightly as I watch. Inland, the island rises to a peak perhaps fifty meters above sea level, and evidently there are deep pockets of retained rainwater in the porous, decayed limestone of the undersurface, for the vegetation is profuse and vigorous. At several points I made brief forays to the interior, coming upon a swampy region of noisy sucking quicksand in one place, a cool dark glade interpenetrated with the tunnels and mounds of termites in another, a copse of wide-branching little fruit-bearing trees elsewhere.

Altogether the place is beautiful. I will have enough food and drink, and there are shelters. Nevertheless I long already for an end to the voyage. The bare sharp-tipped mountains of the mainland grow ever nearer; someday I will reach the shore, and my real work will begin.

The essence of this kind of therapy is risk. The therapist must be prepared to encounter forces well beyond his own strength, and to grapple with them in the knowledge that they might readily triumph over him. The patient, for her part, must accept the knowledge that the intrusion of the therapist into her consciousness may cause extensive alterations of the personality, not all of them for the better.