The Man Who Turned Into Himself

I lay in bed, listening to the silence of the house and trying to recall the dream that had woken me with such a start of fear. I remembered running through wide, battle-scarred streets under a flame-filled sky, but whatever demons had been pursuing me had already slipped back over the horizon into unconsciousness.

Anne was breathing softly at my side, miraculously undisturbed by the twisting and turning I must have been doing. I could tell I wasn't going to get back to sleep easily, so I slid out from under the covers, pulled on my slippers and robe, and padded downstairs.

There was still a smell of wood-smoke in the living room, but all that remained of the evening's log fire was a pile of white ash in the hearth. I pulled back a curtain and looked out. It was a clear Connecticut night with a touch of frost under a nearly full moon. In that light our rambling, half-wild garden became a place of secrets and enchantment, conjuring up memories of the cozy, old-fashioned children's stories that my grandparents used to read to me at Christmas around a roaring fire in their Devon farmhouse.

My father worked for a firm of heating engineers in London. When I was ten, he was offered a job in Philadelphia. Neither he nor my mother ever really settled there, and as soon as he retired they moved back to the south of England, which they still thought of as home. But by that time I was at Princeton, and in love.

Anne and I lived together for almost four years before we married, then waited another two years before deciding that we could afford to start a family. Charlie was just a few months old when we found this house. We had both loved it from the moment we first saw it. We wanted more children and lots of space to have them. We also wanted to live outside the city. The loan we took out was bigger than we could afford, but we gambled on being able to make the payments, and so far we had been lucky. In fact I sometimes felt that we were luckier, and happier, than we had any right to expect. Now Anne was pregnant again, just as we'd planned.

I shivered, suddenly aware of the cold, and let the curtain fall back. Had the nightmare that woke me come from the fear that good things were given only to be taken away, as though by some sadistic Manichaean principle? Did I really believe in that kind of a universe?

Maybe I did. Somewhere.

I switched on a lamp in a reflex effort to push these thoughts away, then debated whether to pour myself a whiskey or go through to the kitchen and make a hot cup of chocolate. I settled for the chocolate because I'd drunk enough with dinner and wanted a clear head for the morning.

As I stirred the pan on the stove I became aware of someone watching me. Anne was leaning against the door frame, arms folded, feet crossed. She wore a robe like mine. We had bought them together. Her short, dark hair was tousled and her eyes, normally wide with an expression between surprise and laughter, were sleepy.

'I'll have whatever you're having,' she said.

'I'm sorry I woke you.'

'You didn't. The empty bed did.' Her eyes followed me to the fridge for more milk and to the shelf for more chocolate. 'What's worrying you? Are you afraid that now you've made up your mind, they're going to change theirs?'

'It's not about tomorrow,' I responded, with a touch of impatience in my voice. She arched an eyebrow sceptically. 'Of course not,' stifling a yawn and smiling at the same time. 'It's just a coincidence that you're up at 3 am making yourself comfort drinks.'

'Everything's set for tomorrow. The meeting's only a formality.'

She came towards me, slipped her arms over my shoulders and looked into my eyes, first one then the other, the way she always did. 'All I want is to be sure you're doing it because
you
want to, not because you think you should for me, Charlie and the bump.' The 'bump' was her pregnancy that didn't even show yet. She pushed it against me, rubbing softly.

'Are you accusing me of putting my family before personal preferences?'

'It's possible.'

'You're calling me a wimp?'

'Yes.' She pressed her face to mine as my hands slid under her robe. 'Rick,' she murmured, and didn't have to say any more. I hoisted her gently up and she locked her legs around my waist. Somehow I managed to switch off the stove before I carried her out. I almost tripped on her robe as she dropped it, wobbled painfully on one of Charlie's Ninja Turtles on the stairs, and gave a muffled curse as I banged my elbow on the door at the top. 'It's never like this in the movies,' I said, lowering her, and myself with her, to the bed.

'No,' she whispered, a little breathless even though I was the one doing all the work, 'there isn't room in those narrow seats.'

***

Charlie woke us ten minutes before the alarm went off to say that he could hear Gummo, our Siamese cat, stuck on the roof again. I pulled on an old tracksuit and climbed into the chilly loft to let him in through a skylight. Charlie waited anxiously where I'd told him to on the landing, circled by Harpo, his mongrel terrier, who pierced the air with a repeated nervous yelp.

The cat was really freaked by something. I tried everything 
I knew to get him in, including coaxing, cajoling, and even having Charlie run down to get his food bowl filled with his favourite breakfast. It was no good; the wretched animal just prowled up and down the tiles, making plaintive meowing noises and staying carefully beyond my reach. I realised I was going to have to go out and get him. I hauled myself up through the skylight, inwardly reflecting that domestic bliss, like most kinds of happiness, had its shortcomings.

Climbing out on to a sloping roof of very old tiles before the overnight frost had completely thawed was not the cleverest thing I've ever done. The cat seemed to sense the danger and ran for his life, terrified that I might pick him up and then fall, still clutching him.

I don't think I would have fallen at all if the cat hadn't turned and lashed out at me, lips drawn back in a snarl and claws extended, when I went after him. I'm pretty agile and I was moving with care, but I just wasn't ready for this reaction from a cat who, I swear, spends half his life sleeping on my desk, and the other half curled up on my lap whenever I sit down to read. I cursed him, and suddenly I heard a scream. Not my voice. Anne's.

As the world began to spin, I saw her terrified face in the skylight I'd just climbed out of. Only then did I realise that the world was spinning because I was falling.

It was one of those moments where reality hangs suspended. It's not even that things happen in slow motion. They're both happening and not happening at the same time. Events are kept at arm's length by a protective barrier of shock and denial. You think thoughts you don't have time to think. You realise in a detached, purely intellectual way that something awful is happening, but without really touching you.

Then your imagination goes to work. You have a flash of yourself in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. Even worse, on your back, a quadriplegic in an orthopaedic bed.

Suddenly . . . I'm not absolutely sure about this, but I think I heard myself laughing. It was all too absurd to be taken seriously. It couldn't be true!

Anne's scream continued to ring in my ears as I pitched off the roof, turning in space. I could hear Charlie's cry and the dog's panicky barking in the loft behind her. But they were wrong, surely, to be alarmed. It couldn't happen. It couldn't!

I didn't know much for a while after I landed. I didn't black out, but time stopped.

Then I felt the life begin to flow back into all the parts of my body. Mentally I checked them off, one by one. Things moved. I was whole.

By the time Anne reached me I was on my feet, picking chunks of the evil-smelling compost into which I'd fallen off my tracksuit.

***

I inspected myself in the long bathroom mirror as I stepped out of the shower. I'd have a bruise or two, but nothing worse. The fact that I was in good shape, thanks to a vigorous workout several times a week, had probably helped. At least I'd landed with a certain degree of physical coordination.

How remote it seemed already, that appalling knowledge that everything hung in the balance. Suppose I'd cracked my head open? Another couple of feet either way and it would have been like a coconut against concrete. I peered into the eyes between the dark mop of hair and the white foam as I began to shave. How must brain damage feel, from the inside? You must know there's something terribly wrong, but you're not sure what. Maybe every so often you get a kind of oblique flash of the appalling truth:
you're
what's wrong. You're a freak, not quite human. People pity you, but above all they fear you, because you have become their nightmare.

I closed my eyes and forced myself to think of something else. Moments later I was heading downstairs for breakfast. As I entered the warm kitchen that smelled of coffee, eggs and toast, Charlie took up the refrain he had been chanting non-stop and with much hilarity ever since it happened.

'Daddy fell in the doo-doos, daddy fell in the doo-doos . . . !'

***

I drove down tree-lined lanes, working through the intricate network of back roads that joined the highway at the last possible point before entering the city. The radio was on, but I couldn't have told you two minutes afterwards what the headlines on the news had been. The day, which had already started out dramatically, would, if all went well, be an important one for me.

My company, Hamilton Publications Inc., had set up in business nearly six years earlier, with just myself, my assistant Marcie, and two others. Our specialist publications ranged from a literary review to a newsletter for professional caterers. One of our earliest efforts had become a must with every wine grower on the west coast. There was a bi-monthly that no gallery owner could afford to be without. High school science departments subscribed in their thousands to
Particle/Wave,
a digest and update of progress in the new physics, too simple for genuine researchers but too technical for the layman.

I or one of the team would spot what looked like a gap in the market and then check it out demographically. Nine times out of ten we came up with compelling reasons to drop the idea; but that one time out of ten would add another title to our list.

After a while total strangers started calling up or writing in with ideas. Three of them had, within weeks, found themselves allocated office space and running their own brain-child. We devised a profit share scheme so that they felt they were working as much for themselves as for the firm.

About a year ago we'd started to attract attention from the big boys. A couple of conglomerates had come sniffing around with buy-out offers, but I wasn't keen on going to work for somebody else. Essentially I'm a dabbler, an ideas man. I love nothing better than to spend days and sometimes weeks reading up on some topic that has caught my imagination. It can be nuclear physics or traffic control. I'm a kind of specialist in the eclectic; or 'totally lacking in intellectual focus' as they put it in college, where I did not distinguish myself.

Anyway, the business, at the point or the plateau it had reached, was a kind of natural extension of me, one that I didn't want to give up just yet, not even in return for a lot of money.

At the same time, it might have been nice to branch out in one or two other directions. For instance, I'll tell you something that may not have occurred to you. Do you want to know how people
really
are? How they're feeling, what they're saying, what they really mean? If you want to know what is truly going on in the world around you, don't read anything by journalists or sociologists or any kind of analyst. Don't even talk to cab drivers.

Read the trade papers. There's one for every trade and everything that likes to call itself a profession. The boasts ring so hollow and the anxieties stare so searingly through that the truth, unspoken, hits you like a sledgehammer. The trades are the code books to what's happening and where we're going. I wanted to start my own string of them. And try something, I don't know . . . new.

My lawyer, Harold, had begun making inquiries about possible sources of finance, hence the meeting at the bank. Anne had made me promise to call her and report as soon as we were through. She was taking Charlie into town some time late morning for a friend's birthday party that was to begin with a movie outing. After that she would be working at home all afternoon. She organised a charity that ran shelters for the homeless. It was unpaid work and she was fully aware that the help they offered was a drop in the ocean. She used to joke that it was a perfect job for a knee-jerk liberal: well-meaning, pious, and ultimately ineffectual. She'd been a journalist before having Charlie, a good one with a promising future. She could have gone back to it but chose not to. I think she was prouder of what she was doing than . . .

The sound of the horn reached me from a long, long way away. I don't know where my mind had been. Not consciously going over all the things I have just been setting down. All I know is that I suddenly seemed to come out of a daydream to find a huge truck bearing down on me, horn blaring and lights flashing.

I swung the wheel to the right, and still don't know how I managed to miss him. The car skidded and stalled and came to a halt half on and half off the road. For a while I couldn't do anything except sit there shaking and feeling a clammy, cold perspiration all over me. Eventually I pulled myself together and drove off, hunched over the wheel in fierce concentration, heart still pounding.

Even by the time I'd parked in my numbered space in the lot behind our building, I was still shaky. To miss death twice in one morning was too close for me. I had this jolt of superstition about things coming in threes. It was a few minutes before I got out of the car and headed into the building — big, square, turn-of-the-century. It closed itself around me that morning like an old friend, familiar and reassuring.

I took the elevator to the sixth floor, where we occupied half the available space. I pushed open the door with its modest logo: 'Hamilton Publications Inc.' Jigger, the receptionist, smiled up from her desk and the day's first cup of coffee and said good morning. I walked through to my corner office, greeting on the way the four men and two women who were in before me because they had deadlines to meet by the end of the day. The others would be in soon if they weren't tied up seeing contributors or working at home. Marcie always knew where everybody was if I needed to talk to them.

'Harold called to ask can you pick him up at his office so you can talk on the way over.' Marcie was checking off my messages with her customary efficiency.