Stanislaw Lem: Peace on Earth

I don’t know what to do. If I could say “I’m miserable,” it wouldn’t be so bad. I can’t say “We’re miserable” either because I can only partly speak for myself even though I’m still Ijon Tichy. I used to talk to myself while I shaved but I had to stop because of my left eye’s lewd winking. Coming back in the LEM, I didn’t realize what happened to me just before lift-off. The LEM, by the way, doesn’t have anything to do with the American NASA module manned by Armstrong and Aldrin to collect a couple of moon rocks. It was given the same name to disguise my secret mission. Damn that mission. When I returned from the Calf constellation, I intended to stay put for at least a year. But I agreed to go for the sake of mankind. I knew I might not come back. Doctor Lopez said my chance of survival was one in twenty point eight. That didn’t stop me: I’m a gambler. You only die once. Either I come back or I don’t, I said to myself. It never occurred to me that I might come back but not come back because we would come back. To explain I’ll have to release some highly classified information but I don’t care. That is, partly. I’m writing this too only partly and with great difficulty, typing with the right hand. The left I had to tie to the arm of the chair because it kept tearing the paper out of the machine. It wouldn’t listen to reason, and while I was immobilizing it, it punched me in the eye. It’s because of the doubling. Our brains all have two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum or great commissure. Two hundred million white nerve fibers connect the brain so it can put its thoughts together but not in my case. It happened on that range where the moon robots tested their new weapons. I stumbled in there by mistake. I’d accomplished my mission, had outsmarted those unliving creatures, and was on my way back to the LEM when I had to urinate. There are no urinals on the moon. They wouldn’t work anyway in a vacuum. You have a little container in your suit, just like Armstrong and Aldrin, so you can relieve yourself anytime, anywhere, but somehow I couldn’t, not there in the full sun in the middle of the Sea of Serenity. Not far from me was a solitary boulder. I went over to its shadow. How was I to know there was an ultrasound-inducing field there? While I’m urinating, I feel this little snap. Like a crack in the neck, only higher, in the middle of the skull. It was a remote callotomy. It didn’t hurt. I felt funny but the feeling passed and I continued on my way. The strangeness I attributed to an understandable excitement, considering all I had been through. The right hand is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. That’s why I said I was writing only partly. My right hemisphere obviously doesn’t approve of what I’m writing. And I can’t say “I’m writing” — it’s my left hemisphere that’s writing. I’ll have to reach some compromise with the opposition because I can’t sit forever with my hand tied. I’ve tried to appease it but nothing works. It’s arrogant, aggressive, vulgar. Fortunately it can read only certain parts of speech, nouns mainly. I know this because I’ve been reading up on the subject. It doesn’t understand verbs or adjectives, so while it’s watching I have to express myself carefully. Will this work? I don’t know. And why is it that all the civilized behavior is in the left hemisphere?

On the moon too I was supposed to land only partly, but in an entirely different sense, because it was before the accident, before I was doubled. I was supposed to circle the moon in stationary orbit, the reconnaissance to be accomplished by my remote, which even looked like me except it was plastic with antennas. I sit in LEM 1 and LEM 2 lands with the remote. Those war robots hate people. They will kill at the drop of a hat. At least that’s what I was told. But LEM 2 malfunctioned and I decided to land to see what was going on because I was still in contact with it. Sitting in LEM 1, I suddenly had severe stomach pains, not in the flesh, that is, but by radio because, as I learned after landing, they broke LEM 2’s hatch cover, grabbed the remote, and pulled out its insides. I couldn’t disconnect because if I did, my stomach might stop hurting but I’d lose all contact with my remote and wouldn’t be able to locate it. The Sea of Serenity, where the attack took place, is like the Sahara. Also, I got the wires mixed because even though each wire is a different color there are too many of them and I couldn’t find the emergency instructions. Trying to find them with a stomachache made me so mad that instead of calling Earth I decided to land, even though I’d been warned I shouldn’t do that under any circumstances. But retreat just isn’t in my nature. Besides, the remote may have been only a machine stuffed with circuitry but I couldn’t leave it in the clutches of those robots.

I see that the more I explain, the less clear it gets. I should probably begin at the beginning. Except I don’t know what the beginning was because most of it is remembered in the right hemisphere, which I can’t get to now. There’s a lot I don’t remember, and in order to obtain even a little of that information I have to speak to my left hand with my right in sign language but it doesn’t always answer. The left hand gives me the finger for example, and that’s one of its more polite indications of a difference of opinion.

I’d like to give it a good smack but the problem is, while the right hand is stronger than the left, the legs are equal, and what’s worse, I have a corn on the little toe of my right foot and the left foot knows about it. When that trouble started on the bus and I shoved my left hand forcibly into my pocket, its foot took revenge by stomping on the corn so hard, I saw stars. I don’t know if it’s a loss of intelligence caused by the doubling but I can see I’m writing nonsense. The foot of my left hand is, of course, my left foot. There are times my unfortunate body falls into two enemy camps.

I interrupted my writing to kick myself. That is, my left foot kicked my right so it wasn’t I, or it was only partly I, but grammar simply can’t describe this situation. I started taking off my shoes but stopped. A person, even in such straits, shouldn’t make a fool of himself. Was I supposed to twist my own arm to learn what the problem was with the wires and the emergency instructions? True, I had beaten myself in the past but the circumstances were different. Once in that time loop, when the today me was against the yesterday me, and once to counteract the poison of the benignimizers in that hotel in Costa Rica. I had beaten myself black and blue, but remained myself, indivisible. It wasn’t so unusual. Didn’t people in the Middle Ages flog themselves? But no one now can put himself in my shoes. It’s impossible. I can’t even say that there are two of me because there aren’t. Or there are but only partly. If you want to know what happened to me, you’ll have to read this whole story, word by word, even when it doesn’t make sense. The sense will come, though probably not completely because you can get to the bottom of it only by callotomy, just as you can’t know what it’s like to be an otter, say, or a turtle without being turned into an otter or a turtle, and then you can’t communicate it because animals don’t talk or write. Normal people, of which I was one most of my life, don’t understand how a split-brain person can be himself and look like himself and speak about himself in the first person singular and walk normally and talk coherently while his right hemisphere doesn’t know what his left hemisphere is doing (except for mushroom barley soup in my case). Some say that callotomy must have existed in Biblical times because it is written that the left hand needn’t know what the right hand is doing, but I always thought that was a figure of speech.