Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

At the same time, our sameness, our redundancy and the potential for future conflict gave rise to terrible thoughts. I took heart from the fact that the torment of the Procedure itself, which is one of the constituent experiences of my identity, was to him a blank. The memory of the suffering I had undergone reassured me of my singularity.

Nicholas consoled himself with a different rationalisation. At root, there was always something patronising in his attitude towards me. Being conditioned to the idea of his uniqueness, he had the notion that he was the original, I the copy. He had no understanding of how profoundly I feel that, far from being a copy, I am an enhancement. I am the best of him. Nor could he imagine how powerfully I am attached to Lucius and Sarah. My love for them wasn’t, isn’t, a simulacrum of his. It’s primary, non-negotiable, agonising. Each night, we lay in our cabin in silence as the ship cut slowly across the Black Sea. The darkness was full of unanswerable questions. I thought of my children.

I had my second session with Dr White today and my overriding sense was of how much I miss Dr Webster. White is about fifty, a second-row forward run to seed, but still with all the hearty’s machismo and swagger. It makes me wonder once again about the motivation of someone who voluntarily spends their time in the company of lunatics. Who is really suffering from messianic grandiosity?

White bristled with hostility towards me from our first session. Today, he started with almost the same words, warning me that he was no pushover. He accused me of being up to the same tricks that I was with Dr Webster and said I’d find him a tougher customer. ‘I’m not going to swallow any of your bullshit,’ he threatened.

I asked him what a strict Freudian would make of that declaration. He looked at me sourly.

We spent most of the session in silence. At the end, he suggested that he’d withdraw my computer privileges if I didn’t show more sign of complying. He could see this panicked me. ‘I want you to think long and hard, my friend,’ he said, in a tone that was anything but friendly.

*

Nicholas and I got back to England on September 25th 2009. We travelled from Southampton to Victoria by train and took a black cab to Colliers Wood. Nicholas and Leonora were in the process of selling the house and Nicholas had rented a tiny one-bedroom flat on the high street. I followed him to the top floor, using the bannister to lever myself up the stairs. Misha Bykov was waiting for us inside. His body seemed to fill the living room. The curtains were drawn.

He and Nicholas exchanged muted greetings in Russian.

‘It’s not exactly what we hoped for,’ Nicholas said. He put his bag in the bedroom and hung our coats in the hall cupboard.

‘No?’

A pair of sofas faced each other around a glass coffee table. Misha sat down on one of them. It groaned a little under his weight.

Nicholas shook his head. ‘It might be months.’ He went to the galley kitchen and poured us both glasses of water.

I felt Misha’s eyes on me as I drank carefully. ‘We don’t have months,’ he said. He asked Nicholas to sit down.

Nicholas sat down beside me on the sofa. Misha looked at each of us in turn, appraising us. ‘We need our proof,’ he said.

Proof. Dokazatel’stvo. That was me.

‘We’re very short of time,’ he went on. ‘They know what we’re up to now. And if Vera’s talking …’

Nicholas shot me a glance. ‘Vera’s alive?’

‘Of course. They have to take care of her. They need what’s up here.’ He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. ‘But us …’ He widened his eyes to emphasise the size of the threat we were under. His irises stood out alarmingly, like the bullseye on an archer’s target. ‘We’re just small change.’

Nicholas finished his glass and put it on the table. ‘How long do we have?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t ask them. Sooner or later, they’re going to figure out that I’m part of this too. But not weeks. Definitely not weeks. Three days, five maybe.’

‘I need at least a week,’ said Nicholas.

‘Why? What’s to stop us doing this now? We need to …’ Misha chopped the side of his hand against his palm. The sound it made evoked abrupt severance.

Nicholas hesitated. ‘If we go too soon, no one will believe us. They’ll think we’re mad. And once we break cover, we’re all running for our lives. We need to give ourselves a fighting chance. We need his testimony.’

This answer didn’t please Misha, but I could see him considering it. He stared at the floor for a while as though he was recalculating a difficult sum. Finally, he nodded. ‘Okay. A week.’ He got to his feet.

The focal point of the tiny room was a cast-iron fireplace with giant pine cones in the grate. Misha reached up inside the chimney breast and pulled out a plastic bag. It emerged with a patter of broken plaster and dust which he recoiled from with a surprising fastidiousness. He wiped the bag with his handkerchief and took out a dossier of documents and photographs — a paper trail to the Common Task. Nicholas added the Swiss passports on which we’d travelled from Almaty to the dossier and Misha showed him how to secrete it back inside the chimney breast.

‘Okay,’ Misha said, in English. And in Russian: ‘Good luck.’ He nodded at me. I heard the unfamiliar clunk of the front door as he left.

Nicholas saw the query in my face.

‘Yes, he can take care of himself. He was a maroon beret. Vera said he was one of the last Spetsnaz soldiers to leave Kabul in ’89.’

*

A degree of irrational optimism is necessary for us even to attempt difficult tasks. There are things like war and marriage that we’d just never undertake if we didn’t somehow blind ourselves to the real odds against us. But Vera must have always known that our chances of success were remote.

They needed irrefutable evidence: proof that the Common Task was a going concern, proof that the Malevin Procedure was workable, proof of the criminal conspiracy surrounding it, proof that Hunter Gould and Sinan Malevin were among its organisers and beneficiaries.

I was their Exhibit A.

Vera and Nicholas needed to reveal what was going on in Baikonur before the lieutenants of the Common Task learned that Vera was attempting to betray them. They were under pressure to move quickly. This had forced them to collect me well before my rehabilitation was complete. It had been a psychological blow to Nicky. And yet, events at Almaty showed that they had waited too long. Somewhere along the chain, they had been exposed.

For the next thirty-six hours, Nicholas worked to make up lost ground. He pumped me for information about what I’d undergone. He went through Vera’s list of contacts, adding names, excising others. He agonised about when to go to the police, about whether to contact people individually or to hold a press conference. He settled on the latter, and booked a room under an assumed name at Conway Hall, the headquarters of the South Place Ethical Society. And he worried about the impact of all this on Vera.

Misha had said Vera’s grasp of the Procedure made her indispensable. But was that true?

Malevin’s methods always generate a code for the proxy complex, but its reliability and accuracy depend on the subjective judgements of the coder. Malevin identified 167 key markers which can be recombined in a virtually infinite array. So the coding process requires a subjective sense of nuance. It demands both tough-mindedness and compassion from the coder. It is hard to imagine anyone more rich in both than Vera. In the most delicate and profound way, her extraordinary work exposes the false dichotomy between art and science. She is the reason I am here.