Robert Wilson - The Divide

“Do I know you?”

“I’m a friend of John’s.”

Benjamin doubted it. Sometimes, scraps of memory would cross the barrier between Benjamin and John—more often now than ever before. That was how he had recognized the woman in the first place. But the recognition did not signal “friend”; instead it evoked a more complex reaction, fear and hunger and hope and an old, vast disappointment almost too big to contain.

“I only have an hour for lunch,” he said.

She sipped her Pepsi. “You work here?”

“In the mail room. I sort and deliver.”

“Interesting work?”

“I like it.” He unwrapped his sandwich but left it alone. He wasn’t hungry anymore. “This is about John,” he said. “Something’s happening to John.”

John my real father, he thought, John who invented me, John who created me. No, not quite that; but there was no obvious word for what John had done or Benjamin had become; no word that Benjamin knew.

He knew about John. It was a shadow knowledge, ghostly, and for a long time Benjamin had tried to ignore it. But the knowledge wouldn’t go away. Useless to pretend, for instance, that he had had a childhood. For a long time he had remembered growing up with the Woodwards, but most of that was false memory, no more substantial than the picture on a TV screen. His “real” childhood was John’s childhood, a confusion of threatening images (a woman named Marga, a man named Kyriakides); in fact his childhood was no childhood at all, because “Benjamin” had never been a child. Benjamin was born a teenager and only gradually acquired a substantial existence, imitation deepening into reflex— the mask growing roots into the skull, he thought, startled: because it was a John thought more than a Benjamin thought. Maybe John was coming back again.

So soon. Too soon.

“I was sent here by Dr. Kyriakides,” Susan said, and the name sent a shockwave up his spine. “Dr. Kyriakides thinks John might be sick. Might be dying.”

This was not the kind of information he could assimilate all at once. His stomach was churning. He looked at his watch. “I have to go back to work.”

“I can wait,” Susan said. “I have my car—I can drive you home.”

Trouble! But there was no avoiding it now.

He stood. “I get off at four.”

“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Susan Christopher said.

Rain all day, grey down the big office windows as he wheeled his cart around; rain when he followed Susan Christopher out to her car, red-blinking rain all up and down the dark rush-hour streets. Benjamin sank into the front passenger seat as Susan pulled out into the traffic. She said, “Do you know about John, about what he is?”

“A little,” Benjamin said. “I know more about him than I used to. His brain, right? His brain is different.” My brain, too, he thought: it’s where we live. Briefly, he imagined the kind of house called a “semi-detached,” two separate homes butted up against a common wall. Noisy neighbors, Benjamin thought. Used to be the wall was thicker; nothing came through. Now, when John was in control, Benjamin retained some sense of his own existence, as if he had retreated to an upstairs room where he could watch from the window, or just float and dream, while his raucous neighbor shouted and raved.

“His brain is unique,” Susan was saying. “He was made that way. There were hormones—drugs—that changed the way he grew.”

“Dr. Kyriakides.”

Susan nodded.

“And now that’s changing,” Benjamin guessed.

She gave him a second look, maybe surprised that he had guessed. She nodded. “The tissue in the brain is more fragile than anyone expected. It deteriorates—it may be doing that already.”

“A mental breakdown,” Benjamin said.

“Maybe. Maybe even worse than that. Not just for John—for you.

But he could not dispel the image of his brain (John’s brain) as a house, a cavernous mansion, strange and multichambered—now grown brittle, dry, drafty, and susceptible to flash fires. “You don’t really know what might happen.”

“No, not really.”

But something was happening; Benjamin knew it; and he guessed she was right, you couldn’t burn down half a house and leave the other half intact—what happened to John would surely happen to Benjamin, too. For years Benjamin had been John’s shadow, his half-self, a marionette. But in the last few months he had emerged into a real existence—a life; and when he said the word “I” it meant something; he had moved in with Amelie, who looked at him and saw Benjamin. “Benjamin,” she would say. Maybe he had let himself believe that this would go on forever … that John would fade; that John would become the shadow, reduced at last to “John,” a memory. But now maybe we both lose. Maybe we’re both memory.

Susan drove into the core of St. Jamestown, where the peeling apartment towers stood like sentinels. She pulled up at the curb opposite the rooming house, but neither of them moved to get out. Susan turned the heater up.

Benjamin looked thoughtfully at her. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to help.”

“Help how?”

“I want you to see Dr. Kyriakides. I want you to let him treat you.”

“Can he change what’s happening?”

“We’re not sure. We’d like to find out.”

But the idea was disturbing. He felt a spasm of unease that was clearly John’s: as if John had rolled over inside him. “John doesn’t want me to do that.”

“He’s reluctant,” Susan admitted. “I’ve spoken to him.”

Benjamin gazed at the rain. “I don’t control him.”

“You control yourself.”

“I’m not sure—I don’t know if I could do something he didn’t really want. I mean, it’s never come to that.”

“I just want you to think about it,” Susan Christopher said. “That’s enough for now.”

“Oh, I’ll think about it.” Benjamin unlatched the door. “You can count on that.”

He crossed the rainy street to the boardinghouse, where the front door opened and Amelie stepped out, hugging herself, glancing a little nervously from Benjamin to the rental car and back. Benjamin was suddenly in love with the look of her under the wet porch awning in her tight jeans and a raggedy sweater and her breath steaming into the cold, wet air. Not for John, he thought: what Susan Christopher had asked for, his “help,” he might give, even if it meant an end to everything he had assembled here, his real life (which might be ending anyway); but not for John or even for himself. For her, he thought, for Amelie on the porch in her old clothes, Amelie who had drawn him out of the vacuum of himself with a word and a touch … because there was a chance, at least, that he might survive where John did not, and he owed her that chance; owed her the possibility of a happy ending; or—if that failed—if everything failed—at least the evidence of his courage.

Susan watched from the Volvo as Benjamin entered the rooming house.

Scary, she thought, how easy it was to accept him as Benjamin. “Multiple personality”—she had seen the movies, the PBS documentaries. But those people had always seemed just slightly untrustworthy, as if the whole thing might be—on some level—a sort of confidence trick, the nervous system’s way of committing a sin without taking the blame.

This was different. Benjamin was not the product of a normal mind pushed beyond its limits. He was an invention—a work of art, a wholly synthetic creation. A “normal” mind, Susan thought, can’t do that. It was a feat unique to John Shaw, as unpredictable and utterly new as the fiercely coiled cortical matter under his skull.