Michael Frayn - Skios

Never mind. The important thing was that he had clean clothes to change into. His evening lecturing trousers. Yes, crumpled, but still with creases in them. His clean soft silk underpants. He rubbed them between finger and thumb, and sniffed their cleanness. He pressed them affectionately against his cheek to feel their softness. The silk snagged against the unshaven whiskers on his cheek. Yes — first, a shave.

Where was his razor, though? And his toothbrush, for that matter, and all the rest of the stuff in his toilet bag? Where was the toilet bag?

He pushed open the bathroom door. And there it all was, scattered around the basin. There was a chef’s toque of lather on the shaving brush. Someone had been using his shaving things! The cap was off the toothpaste. They had even used his toothbrush!

That young man with the obsequious stomach. He hadn’t been stealing Dr. Wilfred’s things — he had been using them. He had been living in the room!

Dr. Wilfred felt the lather on the shaving brush. It was dry. The toothpaste spilling from the open tube was caked hard. The young man had been here all day. He looked at the bed. The man had slept here. He must have arrived the night before. In fact he must have been on the same plane as Dr. Wilfred, since he had stolen his bag from the carousel. And then been met by whoever was meeting Dr. Wilfred. And persuaded them he was Dr. Wilfred!

Everything was at last becoming clear.

And if the man had been shown to Dr. Wilfred’s room … if he had been allowed to remain in it all day … he must have continued to pass himself off as Dr. Wilfred … Was presumably still doing so.

He had taken over Dr. Wilfred’s identity. He had stolen his life.

And where was he now? He was out there somewhere having predinner drinks, being introduced to scholars and millionaires. As Dr. Norman Wilfred. Some young delinquent in skateboarding trousers!

It suddenly came into Dr. Wilfred’s head what the impostor was intending to do. He was going to give the Fred Toppler Lecture.

No — not possible! Dr. Wilfred had the lecture here, on the desk in front of him. He picked it up and glanced through it. “… the challenges facing us today … the hopes and fears of mankind…” He put his arms round it and pressed it against his chest. How right he had been never to let it out of his sight!

But perhaps the fake lecturer had a fake lecture? Perhaps he was planning to deliver a text of his own invention? Some thesis that blithely ignored the challenges, that mocked and derided the hopes and fears?

No, it was ridiculous. He was simply having one of those moments of panic that you laugh at afterward. In any case, the imposture was now over, since he himself, the real Dr. Wilfred, had arrived.

Perhaps he should quickly shave and change, then get out there and make absolutely sure that everyone understood that it was he who was he. No, not even shave and change. He could do that later. Even unshaven and unchanged he was who he was.

* * *

“Oliver Fox,” said Eric Felt for the tenth time, as if repetition might somehow tease a little more meaning out of the name. “And he told everyone! That’s the ridiculous thing! I was there! I heard him! ‘I’m Oliver Fox,’ he said. But he said it in a kind of funny way, so everyone thought it was a joke. I knew it wasn’t. That’s why I went and searched his room.”

He and Christian were sitting in the shuttered darkness of Empedocles, with the passport that Eric had found in Dr. Norman Wilfred’s room lying on the low table between them. Christian was bent over it, trying to catch what little light there was from the tiny sanctuary lamps, almost concealing it behind his drizzle of lank gray hair. Dr. Norman Wilfred gazed back at him from under his own blond mop. But the face was not the property of Dr. Norman Wilfred. It belonged to someone called Oliver Fox.

“So poor Nikki’s made a complete laughingstock of herself,” said Eric. “This is the speaker she landed Mrs. Toppler with, and it turns out to be someone who’s just walked in off the street! She’s been leading Mrs. Toppler round on a piece of string! Nikki thought she was going to get her to push you out and make her director!

“And now this. They’ve put a knife in our hands, Christian! The time has come to use it.”

Dr. Norman Wilfred couldn’t even get into the Temple of Athena, because the guests were already spilling out on their way to dinner. They all had their backs to him, concealing something or someone they were surrounding like swarming bees. It was difficult to think how to make people know that their lecturer had at last arrived.

“Hello!” he said. “Excuse me.”

No one turned. The bees seemed to have been deafened by the sound of their own excited buzzing.

There was one woman standing a little apart from the others, as absorbed in whatever it was as everyone else, but holding a clipboard, which suggested some kind of official standing.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. He waved his hand about in front of her. “Hello … Excuse me…”

Her eyes flicked briefly towards him, up to the fringe of unwashed and uncombed hair around his sunburnt pate, then down over the gray stubble on his chin to the daytime traveling trousers dried awkwardly around the contours of his legs.

“Dr. Norman Wilfred,” he said, holding out the hand he had been waving in her face.

She ignored his hand, and nodded at the backs of the people in front of her.

“There,” she said. “If you can see him through all his worshippers.” She turned on her heel and walked away.

Dr. Wilfred felt the sensation of sand being sucked away from beneath his feet by the receding tide. Perhaps his ridiculous moment of panic earlier was not so entirely ridiculous after all. What people were saying so excitedly, he realized, at various pitches and with various intonations, was his name. “Dr. Wilfred! Dr. Wilfred? Dr. Wilfred, may I ask you…? Dr. Wilfred, what is your view…?” They were saying it not to him, though, but to someone he couldn’t even see in the press of people around him. “Dr. Wilfred, this is the bishop of the Hesperides Archipelago … Mr. and Mrs. Oleg Skorbatov … His Excellency Sheikh Abdul hilal bin-Taimour bin-Hamud bin-Ali al-Said…”

For a moment Dr. Wilfred believed that he was having the kind of out-of-body experience he had read about in which someone looks down upon himself dying. Concealed by all these people, like the discarded body on the operating table concealed by the doctors and nurses so desperately bending over it, was himself. Not himself as he actually was, but as he might have been in some other life. Younger, potbellied, in skateboarding trousers. And not dying — living. Living the life that belonged to this Dr. Wilfred.

Yes, that was what was so wrong — precisely that the himself in there wasn’t himself. It was someone else. The author of all his misfortunes and the thief of all his labors.

Another of his black bolts of rage went through him. He ran after the crowd of duped sycophants as they began to move up the roadway, hardly able to wait for the moment when he publicly exposed and humiliated the trickster, when he reclaimed the kingdom that had been stolen from him.

“Hey!” he said. “Wait! Stop!”

No one waited, though. No one stopped. No one even noticed.

“Not him!” he screamed. “Me!”

A man at the back of the crowd turned round to look.

“Me, me, me!” said Dr. Wilfred, but found it difficult in his fury to find any form of words that articulated comprehensibly the monstrous injustice he had been subjected to. “Dr. Norman Wilfred! Me! I am!”