Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

‘This time, please pick the card that most closely represents the word Irene .’

For a moment I thought he was joking. I looked at him in vain for a clue. Time was passing. I decided to pick the little girl, but before I could raise my hand the attendants moved away and another surge of electricity compressed my gut; this one lasted twice as long as the first.

‘It’s important to me that we do this exercise properly,’ he said. ‘That means no guessing. Can you indicate that you’ve understood?’

And so it went on for the remainder of the forty-minute session: facile questions alternating with incomprehensible ones. I became stressed and jumpy each time he changed the array. I attempted every possible approach to the incomprehensible questions: answering, not answering, gazing at him blankly, shaking my head. Nothing made any difference. The shocks seemed to increase in length and intensity.

‘It’s important to me that we do this exercise properly. Can you indicate that you’ve understood?’

Finally, he called a halt to the torment. The attendant removed the bit. I took my first unobstructed breaths. ‘Thank you for your hard work today,’ he said. He flexed his mouth in a perfunctory smile. ‘See you tomorrow.’

*

That evening I watched a mosquito sink its proboscis into the unfamiliar heft of my upper arm, drink its fill, then fly away laden with this alien’s blood. I thought of Jack and I experienced a wave of grief that seemed to crash uselessly on the obdurate walls of this vessel.

The next morning I was wheeled down to a common room in a distant wing of the building. The room was dimly lit and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. Around me were half a dozen broken figures slumped in wheelchairs. Most of us were inert; one twitched restlessly; another, his eyes shut, the top of his skull ribbed horribly, like a walnut, began speaking. ‘We must attend to the difference between what men in general cannot do if they would, and what every man may do if he would,’ he said, in a shrill and grating voice. ‘Sixteen-string Jack towered above the common mark!’

I listened with an unease that shaded into horror as he repeated himself word for word with identical intonation more than a hundred times.

*

The sessions with John Smith continued each day. On alternate afternoons, I was parked in the common room with the vegetative carcasses and Sixteen-string Jack for two interminable hours.

One afternoon, I began screaming at my orderly as he wheeled me towards my appointment. It was to no avail. Then I felt something like a solid object forming in my mouth. I released it almost involuntarily. It was the word ‘book’. Panic and rage gave way to a feeling of wonder. I uttered it again and again, relishing the deliberateness of the sensation; the kick of the terminal consonant on my soft palate. It was almost magical, the sense that I had regained control over a portion of reality. The orderly turned me round and took me back to my room. Tomatoes and fresh fruit appeared beside the stodge on my tray at dinner time.

The sessions with John Smith ceased. In retrospect, it seems likely to me that his questions and the seemingly random punishments were designed to use stress and frustration to knit my consciousness into the new carcass, but that is clearly only my conjecture. The period of convalescence that followed was slower, but more comprehensible, and there were even moments of profound relief as I edged towards more finely co-ordinated use of this body and began to bring its recalcitrant tongue under my control.

A week later, I was walking unassisted and while my active vocabulary still numbered no more than half a dozen words, my comprehension was as lucid as it is now.

One afternoon, a nurse collected me from the swimming pool without a wheelchair and supported me as I walked unsteadily through the harsh light of those corridors. I was sweating from the unfamiliar exertion of navigating that big carcass and I was full of trepidation. I wondered what fresh misery had been prepared for me. A pair of heavy double doors opened ahead of me. Beyond them, I saw a small figure swigging from a plastic bottle of water. Vera Telauga. And beside her, dressed in an unfamiliar linen suit, looking at me with pity and disbelief, was me; or, me as I remembered myself.

‘You …’ I faltered. No other words would come.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

Vera took my arm with a gentleness that was as unexpected as it was welcome. ‘We’ve come to take you home.’

For the first time, I was admitted to the world outside the unit. A basketball court stood in the blazing sun. Beyond the chain-link fence around it, a plateau of desolate yellow grass stretched to the horizon in every direction. The breeze was infused with an unforgettable, slightly medicinal smell that I know now to be wormwood. I know now also that the place where I underwent the Procedure was in the Russian-administered town of Baikonur within Kazakhstan.

There was a local driver waiting in a battered Mercedes just outside the gates of the complex. By the time I reached it, the unaccustomed effort had left me soaked in sweat. The sun overhead was pitiless.

Nicholas, as I suppose I must call him, was unmistakably awkward with me, and yet I couldn’t help noticing in him, in spite of everything, a new purposefulness. Whatever he had been engaged upon with Vera had revitalised him.

We drove for hours through miles of desolate desert steppe. Vera remained beside me in the back; Nicholas sat in front with the driver, an Uzbek called Kairat, staring fixedly at the road ahead. Occasionally, he ventured a couple of words to Kairat in Russian that surprised me with its woolliness and grammatical inaccuracy.

Towards lunchtime, Kairat stopped to fill the car with diesel. The four of us ate boiled eggs and samsa — baked Uzbek pasties — at a roadside stall. A Kazakh toddler with a wide Eurasian face played in the dust with a toy train and I thought with a pang of Lucius. My son. I looked across at Nicholas. He hadn’t seen the boy; he was stealing a doubting glance at me.

‘I’m not sure how I feel about this,’ he muttered to Vera.

Later, returning unsteadily from the washroom in the back, I overheard them talking in whispers. As I approached, they heard my heavy footsteps and fell silent.

‘We’re sorting out the bill,’ Nicholas said. It was only the second time he’d addressed me directly. Of course, I knew he was lying. Hypocrite lecteur. Mon semblable. Mon frère.

Whatever human experience offers in the way of analogues for the Procedure, it always comes up short. It’s not like parenthood. Nicholas had no instinctive love for his proxy complex. I was ugly and disappointing, confirmation of his worst fears, like a particularly unflattering photograph.

In so many ways, Nicholas and I found ourselves in uncharted territory. We? He? I? One? Even the choice of pronoun is vexed. There is no word that captures the distinct but overlapping consciousness of core and proxy complexes like ours. And more and more, that word proxy I feel to be a violation of my unique subjectivity.

*

By contrast with Nicholas, Vera was almost excessively engaged with me. She talked constantly, making conscientious eye contact and pointing out features in the landscape: raptors wheeling over the plain, camels moving slowly through the heat, patches of salt showing through the parched grass.

That night, we stayed at a shabby hotel on the outskirts of a town that I believe was Shymkent. Vera helped me to wash, drying me with a gentleness that this carcass mistook for a lover’s touch. She lingered over my arousal and I found myself instantly brought to the pitch of ecstasy. She consoled me so tenderly that nothing about the episode seemed weird or demeaning. ‘You cannot be a stranger to joy,’ she whispered.