Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

At first, it seemed as though Vera would breeze through. Her luggage was accepted without a hitch; her seat assigned; then the attendant called her back. It seemed to be a routine query, but as the minutes stretched out, it became clear that something out of the ordinary was taking place. When I finally turned to look, Vera was standing to one side of the desk, where she was tapping her boarding card on her hand in a show of impatience as the attendant checked in some other passengers. There was a ruffle of energy at the distant edge of the hall and the crowd parted for a phalanx of security men headed by a man in a grey suit. Vera threw her passport and boarding pass to the ground in what seemed like a gesture of frustration but was in fact a pre-arranged signal for us to abort the plan.

Nicholas stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go.’

In my haste, I left behind my brand new suitcase, bought in the market that morning, not to hold my possessions — I had none — but to give me more plausibly the appearance of a business traveller.

Nicholas marched grimly towards the main entrance while I stumbled along a few steps behind him. Vera was standing at the check-in desk protesting as the man in the suit, who was holding a walkie-talkie, plucked at her elbow. As I watched, the uniformed security men swarmed around her and ushered her noiselessly away from the other travellers. An American oilman in chinos kicked his bag to the next spot in the line. His daughter swooped across the floor on the roller in the heel of her trainers. The attendant turned her look of infinite exasperation to the next customer. Vera’s face became visible again from the far side of the hall as she turned back to remonstrate with one of her handlers; pale and frantic, she looked almost ghostly against the dark suits that surrounded her. I was trying to read the nuances of her expression — beneath the defiance and the fear, was there a hint of resignation? — when the blade of the revolving door severed us completely.

With gruff tenderness, Nicholas took my arm and urged me to hurry. We walked quickly past the old terminal building, with its crumbly and baroque late Stalin-period plasterwork, towards the importuning taxi drivers at the far end of the car park.

*

Both of us were numb from the loss of Vera. It was an amputation, an incalculable disaster. But the urgency of our predicament prevented our dwelling on it then. In her thoroughness, Vera had prepared a contingency plan for precisely this eventuality. We had a pair of Swiss passports and train tickets for Simferopol, from where the tram service would connect us to Yalta, and a cruise ship called the Dimitrii Shostakovich which would drop us in the relatively free air of Trabzon on the Turkish coast.

Nicholas was silent as we made our way nervously through the gloomy marble ticket hall of the main station.

We had second-class tickets for the train but Nicholas bribed the conductor for an upgrade and we found ourselves alone in a first-class compartment with maroon vinyl seats and café au lait drapery. Pedlars moved along the corridor selling buckets of apples and foil bags of grilled chicken.

As soon as the train had lurched out of the station, Nicholas left the compartment. Outside the dirty window, the suburbs of Almaty slid by in the afternoon light; beyond them rose the jagged yellow peaks of the Tian Shan mountains.

Nicholas returned an hour later and sprawled untidily on the opposite banquette. ‘We’d better talk,’ he said. ‘I’d better talk. You understand this thing we’re in?’

He leaned towards me and looked in my eyes. I could smell alcohol on his breath. I had the awful sensation of being disgusted by the sight of my own face.

‘It wasn’t an easy decision to make,’ he said.

He wasn’t being truthful: the decision was easy; what he was finding difficult were the consequences.

‘Vera and I spoke about this,’ he went on. ‘Something happening to her. She was going to write you a letter, but it would have been compromising. I’m supposed to tell you that there will be a gap.’

From the volume of his voice and his awkwardness with me, I got the feeling he thought I was all gap.

‘The way the Procedure works, there’s a hiatus — it’s called an entelechic or mnemonic hiatus. It’s scientific periphrasis. They’re just nervous about calling it amnesia.’ He closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. It was a gesture of despair. I could hear his drunken breath whistling in his nostrils. ‘Just tell me: do you have any idea who I am? Do you remember anything at all?’

I looked at him for a moment, then I shut my eyes and visualised the mouthparts of the anatomical head. I forced my tongue into the gap between my parted teeth and breathed out. I could feel the muscles in my throat tighten. The sound originated somewhere in my abdomen. ‘Th-this,’ I said. The word faded away into silence like a hiss of steam.

‘Well, that’s a start,’ he said. I opened my eyes and he was looking at me with a new alertness.

Seconds passed. I manoeuvred my lips to make the tiniest possible aperture. After a tentative start, the sound emerged with surprising clarity: ‘World.’ Now I threw my head back and felt my face contort. My left foot rose on tiptoe from the strain. ‘Of.’ As I struggled to maintain the muscle tone in my jaw, my hands spontaneously formed fists. I spat all my rage and contempt into the next word: ‘Dew.’

The blood was draining from his face as he looked at me in horror, but I was determined to give him the full proof of life. I went on, my articulation decreasing in clarity with every syllable. ‘Isaworld. Of. Dew. Andyet. And yet.’ The tension finally left me. I flopped against the seat back. It was no longer hot in the carriage, but I had broken out in a sweat from the effort.

With every fibre of my new body, I understood the associations those words evoked for him. It was his favourite poem: Issa’s perfect haiku, compressing a glimpse of infinity into a handful of syllables, lamenting the intrusion of death and change into every life, awakening Nicholas’s sense of grief for his father, his mother, his sister. He looked as though he had been slapped. He fell back against the banquette and stared at me, open-mouthed, in shock.

What must he have been thinking? To acknowledge intellectually the possibility of the Procedure was one thing, but to be confronted by your double, your fetch. We’d both read enough to understand that, in myth at least, such a thing never ends well.

Suddenly, we were interrupted by a noise at the door of our coupé. Outside, someone was wrestling with the handle. Nicholas stiffened for an instant then grabbed the door and held it shut. ‘ Zanyat! ’ he shouted. ‘It’s occupied. Occupé! Besetzt! ’ The noise stopped. There were footsteps. Nicholas slid open the door a crack. I could see a puzzled Kazakh retreating down the corridor apologetically.

‘My nerves are shot,’ Nicholas said. And then: ‘You must be starving.’

Vera had packed some food — hardboiled eggs, a wheel of Uzbek bread — and at the next stop, Nicholas bought two polystyrene pots of instant noodles on the platform and rehydrated them with water from the guard’s samovar. Textured soya chunks floated in the broth. He fed me with a plastic fork as the locomotive tugged us across the steppe with a distinctive uneven rhythm. In the dying light, cows or sheep were just visible on the vast pastures outside the window as tiny, ant-shaped dots.

‘It’s got to be stopped,’ he said. ‘Vera and I agreed on that. It’s an abomination. Fedorov wanted to help the whole of humanity. But this is just like every other utopian scheme. Something that’s supposed to be a gift for humanity in general diminishes the worth of individual humans to zero. You can see what happens next: life itself will become another good that the rich get more of. Vera said they’re already talking about having two classes of proxy complex: zachots and pyaterki. Only the pyaterki will have full consciousness. It’s unspeakable. They’ve been stepping up the numbers. The survival rate is abysmal. But each resuscitation makes subsequent ones easier.’