Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

Nicholas was right to be disgusted: there was nothing egalitarian about this version of the Common Task. It was of a piece with the primal unfairness that has seen favoured consciousnesses hogging power, food and opportunities for reproduction since our ancestors crept out of the ocean. I share his moral outrage.

The gap he was talking about had begun for me in the hotel room in Moscow. That was the moment our experience bifurcated. Our consciousness had split in two like a cell undergoing mitosis. From a storm of almost ineffable images, I had emerged into the hospital bed in Baikonur.

For Nicholas there was no comparable break. He said there had been direct threats to him in Moscow. Two men had tried to abduct him from outside his hotel in broad daylight. He had come to the realisation that Vera was telling the truth and had concluded that they had to act. I was his idea: a double who would be tangible evidence of the Common Task.

Vera, he said, had been initially reluctant. She worried that it would compound the ethical lapse of getting involved with the Procedure in the first place. But what else would provide definitive proof? Vera had said it herself: it couldn’t be grasped intellectually. Words were not enough. Like the Apostle Thomas, the human mind needs the touch of flesh to assuage its doubts.

Nicholas had supplied her with his journals, his writings, all the supplementary data she needed. She’d generated a code. It was handcarried in a diplomatic bag to Baikonur and slipped into the most recent batch of resuscitations. They’d had to rush. At the time of my release from the facility I was still some way away from full rehabilitation. Judged purely as a medical matter, my discharge was clearly premature, but Vera sanctioned it while she still had the authority to do so. She needed to do it before her subversion came to light.

We lay parallel in our narrow berths. The carriage rocked in the darkness. ‘We’re going to have to move quickly when we get back,’ he said. ‘They’ll be after us. As soon as you’re ready, we’ll go to the authorities. If the police won’t act, we’ll go public. Vera’s drawn up a list of the great and the good: scientists, human rights lawyers. The world’s got to know what’s being done. Can you imagine what Johnson would have made of this, an unholy combination of slavery and forgery?’

There was excitement in his voice, a bracing sense of the importance of his task. I almost didn’t recognise him. Nicholas had never done an impetuous thing in his life. Now, he suddenly had a taste of life as a combatant in an honourable cause. There was an elation about him: the same energising change that comes over Hamlet when he returns to Denmark from England towards the end of the play, transformed from worrier to warrior.

It had grown colder in the compartment as we made our way across the steppe. Nicholas finally fell silent. I assumed he’d gone to sleep. He must have been exhausted. A few moments later, I was aware of someone standing on the end of my bunk and reaching up into the cubby-hole above the compartment. I closed my eyes and wondered what he was doing. Something dropped on me. He had covered me up with a blanket.

Vera had provided in her plan for multiple delays in crossing borders, but we made such good time that we reached Simferopol a day ahead of schedule. A procession of worn-out people passed through the train station with wrinkled Asiatic faces and those third-world suitcases: big fake-tartan laundry bags, full of cheap Chinese goods for sale. A sign over the station toilet said ‘Washing footwear is prohibited’. Just outside it, an old woman was sitting in the dust selling a single sinister-looking fish. ‘Fresh flounder!’ she croaked.

It seemed unwise to linger in a town of any size so we took a taxi to Chufut Kale, an abandoned cave village, where the only other visitors were a man called Dimitrii Muranov and his family. Muranov told us he was a poet, and at the slightest hint of incredulity from Nicholas, he went to his car to fetch two volumes of verse from a cardboard box in the boot. One was a book of love poems to his first wife; the other a book of love poems to his second wife, a blonde girl he called his Lolita who looked barely older than her fifteen-year-old stepdaughter. Nicholas thanked him for the books. Muranov inscribed them, explaining as he did so that he was also in real estate. He offered us a ride in his cramped car, but we had the taxi driver waiting for us at the foot of the hill. We crept off without saying goodbye. Nicholas flipped through the books as we drove back to Simferopol.

‘She’s still with Caspar,’ he said, though neither of us had mentioned Leonora’s name. ‘They’ve moved into a big house on Chepstow Road. Last time we spoke, Leonora was about to have lunch with Candy Go. Can you imagine? They have the same Pilates teacher.’

In the days we had been travelling, my speech had begun to show marked improvement, and though I was still unable to form whole sentences, our singular connection meant that Nicholas was often able to guess my thoughts after one or two words, and in this case none at all. Muranov’s wives, the poetry, the young children in the limestone caves: by some strange alchemy, these things had made both of us think of Leonora.

It meant there was something exhausting about being together. We were open books to one another. We couldn’t outrun each other’s consciousness. Wherever one of us went to hide, the other was there before him.

*

Rain was pouring down in Yalta when we finally arrived after the two-and-a-half-hour trolley-bus ride; the mountains obscured by mist and the sea a queasy mass of grey.

Nicholas and I sat in the half-light of a basement bar called the Black Muscatel and drank sticky Crimean wines.

I’ve lost my liking for alcohol. It just makes me nauseous and more uncoordinated. But Nicholas knocked the tumblers back in the Russian style and it loosened him up. He helped himself to more wine and then offered the bottle to me. I reached out to cover my glass with my hand and sent it crashing to the floor. I felt his disappointment at my clumsiness, his anxiety that no one would believe what I’d gone through, that he would fail and let down Vera.

At 10 p.m., we boarded the ship, queuing in the darkness with the other passengers on the clanking gangway. That night I had my first post-Procedure dream: I saw Vera in the blinding sunshine at the Yassawi mausoleum, but the dome above it was gilded like the Temple of the Rock and Vera was dressed all in white. She beckoned to me and as I leaned over she whispered in my ear: ‘The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.’ At that instant, I awoke and saw Nicholas in the bed next to mine. Our eyes met and I knew he had woken from the same vision.

*

The Dimitrii Shostakovich was a cruise ship and her route across the Black Sea had a consequent lack of urgency. She put in at Odessa for one night before doubling back on a south-easterly course to Trabzon. A good half of the tour party — many of them Finns and Belgians — disembarked in Odessa to go sightseeing and visit the opera. Nicholas and I remained on board. We played ping-pong in a windowless steel exercise room; sportingly, Nicholas played left-handed to compensate for my disability.

At mealtimes, he ordered dishes from the menu that I knew he didn’t like. He ate honeydew melons and pork cutlets with manufactured enthusiasm. His intention was obvious: he wanted to stress our differences.

To say that Nicholas and I had complicated feelings about each other would be an understatement. But I know that in some way my existence was a liberation for him. He didn’t know what the future held — who does? — but he was facing it with a new lightness. At times he missed his old life terribly, Leonora and the children; at others he was beginning to glimpse the possibilities that lay ahead. I think he saw that he had come to the end of something. He had burned out a self. Someone else could be Nicholas Slopen. He would start afresh.