William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

I soon got the full story of Kramer’s constant bastardy, of course: a tearful finger-knotting account, leaden with self-pity, that went on well into the night. Other women apparently, from the word go. Things had become dramatically worse because now, it seemed, there was one in particular: one Erica — said with much venom — an old flame. As Erica’s description emerged, I realised to my surprise that I knew her. She had figured in two of Kramer’s visits before his marriage to Joan. Erica was a tall, intelligent redhead, strong-shouldered and of arresting appearance and with a calm and confident personality. I had liked her a lot. Naturally I didn’t tell any of this to Joan, whom — as Kramer predictably rang from London announcing successive delays — I was beginning to find increasingly tiresome; she was getting on my nerves.

Take her reaction to my own particular case, for example. When I explained my unique problems caused by the side effects of my operation, she didn’t believe me. She laughed, said I must be joking, claimed that such things could never happen. I admitted such cases were exceptionally rare but affirmed it as documented medical fact.

I now know, thanks to this book I’m reading, the correct academic term for my “ailment.” I am a “bizarre situation.” Reading on, I find this conclusion: “Our language is not sufficiently articulated to cope with such rare and unusual circumstances. Many philosophers and logicians are deeply unhappy about ‘bizarre situations.’ ” So, even the philosophers have to admit it. In my case there is no hope of ever reaching the truth. I find the concession reassuring somehow — but I still feel that I have to see Kramer again.

Indeed, my condition is truly bizarre. Since the link between my cerebral hemispheres was severed, my brain now functions as two discrete halves. The only bodily function that this effects is perception, and the essence of the problem is this. If I see, for example, a cat in my left- side area of vision and I am asked to write down what I have seen with my right hand — I am right-handed — I cannot. I cannot write down what I have seen because the right half of my brain no longer registers what occurred in my left-hand area of vision. This is because the hemispherical division in your brain extends, so to speak, the length of your body. Right hemisphere controls right side; left hemisphere, left side. Normally the information from both sides has free passage from one hemisphere to the other — linking the two halves into one unified whole. But now that this route — the corpus callosum —has gone, only half my brain has seen the cat. The right hemisphere knows nothing about it, so it can hardly tell my right hand what to note down.

This is what the surgeon meant by “metaphysical” side effects, and he was right to say my day-to-day existence would be untroubled by them, but consider the radical consequences of this on my phenomenological world. It is now nothing but a sequence of half-truths. What, for me, is really true? How can I be sure if something that happens in my left-side area of vision really took place, if in one half of my body there is absolutely no record of it ever having occurred?

I spend befuddled hours wrestling with these arcane epistemological riddles. Doubt is underwritten; it comes to occupy a superior position to truth and falsehood. I am a genuine, physiologically real sceptic — medically consigned to this fate by the surgeon’s knife. Uncertainty is the only thing I can really be sure of.

You see what this means, of course. In my world, truth is exactly what I want to believe.

I came to this book hoping for some sort of guidance, but it can only bumble on about the “insufficient articulation of our language,” which is absolutely no help at all, however accurate it may be. For example, the door of this café I’m sitting in is on my left-hand side. I clearly see in my left field of vision a tall woman in black come through it and advance towards the bar. I take a pen from my pocket and intend to write down what I saw in the margin of my book. I say to myself: “Write down what you saw coming through the door.” I cannot do it, of course. As far as the right-hand side of my body is concerned, the lady in black does not exist. So which hemisphere of my brain do I trust, then? Which version of the truth do I accept: lady or no lady?

They are both true as far as I am concerned, and whatever I decide, one half of my body will back my judgement to the death.

Of course there is a simple way out: I can turn round, bring her into my right field of vision, firmly establish her existence. But that’s entirely up to me. Oh, yes. Unlike the rest of you, verification is a gift I can bestow or withdraw at will.

I turn. I see her. She is tall, with curly reddish auburn hair. Our eyes meet, part, meet again. Recognition flares. It is Erica.

It was I who discovered Joan’s body on the floor of the guest bedroom. (One shot: my father’s old Smith & Wesson pressed against her soft palate. I use the revolver — fully licensed of course — to blast at the rooks that sometimes wheel and caw round the house. Indeed, Joan and I spent a tipsy afternoon engaged in this sport. I couldn’t have known.…)

Kramer was still in London. I had gone out to a dinner party, leaving Joan curled up with a whisky bottle — she had muttered something about a migraine. Naturally, I phoned the police at once.

Kramer arrived on the first train from London the next morning, numbed and shattered by the news.

At the inquest — a formality — it came out that Joan had attempted suicide a few months earlier and Kramer admitted to the rockiness of their marriage. He stayed with me until it was all over. They were stressful, edgy days. Kramer was taciturn and preoccupied, which under the circumstances wasn’t surprising. He did tell me, though, that he hadn’t been continually in London but in fact had spent some days in Paris with Erica where some sort of emotional crisis had ensued. He had only been back thirty-six hours when the police phoned his London hotel with the news of Joan’s death.

And now Erica herself sits opposite me. Her face has very little make-up on and she looks tense and worried. After the initial pleasantries we both blurt out, “What are you doing here?” and both realise simultaneously that we are here for the same reason. Looking for Kramer.

When Kramer left after the inquest he told me he was going to Paris to re-join Erica and make a film on De Chirico for French TV. Apparently unperturbed he had continued to sleep in the guest bedroom, but it was several days before I could bring myself to go in and clean it out. In the waste-paper basket I found several magazines, a map of Paris, a crumpled napkin from the Bar Cercle with the message, “Monday, Rue Christine” scrawled on it and, to my alarm and intense consternation, a semi-transparent credit card receipt slip from a filling station on the M4 at a place no more than an hour’s drive from the house. This unsettled me. As far as I knew, Kramer had no car. And, what was more disturbing, the date on the receipt slip was the same as the night Joan died.

***

Erica is distinctly on edge. She says she has arranged to meet Kramer here tonight, as she has something to tell him. She picks at her lower lip distractedly.

“But anyway,” she says with vague annoyance, “what do you want him for?”

I shrug my shoulders. “I have to see him as well,” I say. “There’s something I have to clear up.”

“What is it?”

I almost tell her. I almost say, I want the truth. I want to know if he killed his wife. If he hired a car, drove to the house, found her alone and insensibly drunk, typed the note, put the pistol in her lolling mouth and blew the top of her head off.