The Man Who Turned Into Himself (7 page)

Anne closed the curtains of our bedroom against the afternoon light. We undressed quickly, rolled back the sheets, and made love.

***

But I'm still here.

Rick.

Yes, RICK!

Widower of Anne, father of Charlie. Poor little Charlie, where is he? I should be with him, instead of trapped inside the mind (if that's the word) of this spineless, dumb, near-doppelganger of myself who's making love to the equally near-doppelganger of my dead wife. He's inside her and I'm inside him. Boy, wouldn't that just freak the both of them if they knew!

(I'm sorry if that last remark was a little vulgar, but you're liable to get a little vulgar when you're mad — in the sense of angry, that is.)

Ever since that first hypnosis session it has been clear to me that there isn't room for the two of us in this world, unless we both want to live under lock and key indefinitely. I don't know about him, but I certainly don't.

Actually, that's not true, I do know about him, only too well. I'm getting to know more all the time. He couldn't take it again. He'd crack up totally next time. The guy's got no inner resources whatsoever: he's a real estate developer, for Chrissakes! So it's up to me to see that there isn't a next time. I must lie low, hiding in the folds of his brain — a fugitive! It's not an ideal situation. In fact it's humiliating and stultifying, but when it's a question of survival you have to do whatever's necessary. Right now I have no choice but to stay very, very hidden. Hidden from the world in general, but especially from Richard A. (for Arthur, same as me, though I never use it) fucking Hamilton — pompous self-satisfied asshole! How I loathe that man! I am ashamed that I, Rick Hamilton, could be so closely related in the great scheme of universal parallels (to coin a phrase) to such a piece of shit! And what in God's name a woman like Anne — even though this Anne is not
my
Anne, she's still close enough — is doing married to such a man is beyond me!

Incidentally, one of the few good things about hiding in this guy's brain the way I am is that at least I've got my clarity of thought back. I mean now that I know that he and I are two wholly separate entities, and especially now that he thinks I've gone away, I don't have to do battle with his thoughts the whole time. I can
read
his thoughts without any trouble. I can roam pretty much anywhere I like in his mind and find out exactly what he's thinking (which isn't a lot), and he doesn't know I'm there!

(Actually, if I may continue this digression for a moment, that's an interesting point. I can read his
thoughts,
but I have a little more trouble with his
feelings.
I can, if you like,
read
his feelings, but I'm not altogether sure if I can
feel
them. I'm in his head — more accurately, in his
mind
— but I don't have any contact with his body. I don't mean to get into the whole mind/body debate; I merely observe that the nearest I can get to his actual
feelings
— either physically based such as pleasure and pain, or abstractions such as happiness or misery — is to note from the functions of his brain that he is feeling them. But I cannot get any closer to them than that.)

Anyway, back to that first hypnotic trance. It's important that you understand what happened. I had to play my cards very carefully. I wasn't sure to begin with whether I had an ally in Emma Todd or not. Something about her convinced me that she had a deep intuitive understanding of my situation. I felt that there was, if you like, some sort of special bond between us. Maybe she didn't fully understand in every detail what was happening with me, but she was at least capable of getting it if it was explained to her — unlike that sadistic bastard Killanin and his third-rate sidekick Sherwood. Maybe it was to do with her blindness, I don't know, but right from the start there was an intensity to the way she listened. You 
knew that you had her attention. But under hypnosis . . . Wow!

However, let me take things one at a time. You will remember that Emma, when she came into my room at the clinic, addressed me as Rick. This was because I had told her to call me Rick back in the hospital where we first met. However, by the time she came to visit me in the clinic, I knew that I was living, at least outwardly, the life of this other person, Richard A. Hamilton. So all the time she was saying 'Rick', I was kind of unconsciously letting it go right past me, Rick — with the result that
he, Richard,
was the one who was actually getting hypnotised, not
me!

At least that's how I think it was working. Maybe I'm one of those people who, like she said, are immune to hypnosis, while Richard is a natural subject. I don't know about that yet. Maybe that's something I'll find out later.

Meanwhile, Richard ('Rick' to her) went out cold, and I, the real Rick, had the field to myself. The feeling of liberation was incredible! I got a whole new perspective on my problem. I realised immediately that the only reason I was in this mess, this immediate mess, kept prisoner in the clinic, was that he and I — that is Richard and I — had been battling for possession of the same ground: the so-called mind of Richard A. Hamilton, real estate developer.

Suddenly, looking back, I saw it all. One moment I was kneeling by my dying Anne, and the next I had flipped (again, I'll get around to how later) into this other version of myself who was also holding his wife's hand at the scene of an accident, but not the same accident and in not quite the same circumstances.

To begin with, of course, I didn't know where I was. How could I? But, equally important he, Richard, didn't know what had happened to him. I came on, as it were, so strongly that I almost knocked him right out of his own ball park for a while. At least he was so stunned that he just lay down and stayed quiet; while I, as you will remember, began to look around and ask myself what the hell was going on. 
There I was, suddenly living someone else's life; and that someone else was in many ways (though not, thank God, all ways) a clone of myself.

The problems started when
he
began to recover from the initial shock of my arrival — or, from his point of view, invasion. To me it seemed like I was beginning to remember things I didn't know I knew. What was actually going on was that he, Richard, was beginning to come to and attempt to repossess himself. It was a state of affairs that couldn't have continued, and didn't. When I look back now, it was all clearly inevitable: my 'confession' to Anne; her perfectly normal reaction (though I'm still not convinced that 'my' Anne would have done the same thing); his — Richard's — fear and panic on finding himself locked up like a lunatic; and my rage and despair at finding myself chained to this lunatic and condemned to share his fate. We couldn't function together. It was simply impossible.

So there I was in this hypnotic trance with Emma. I couldn't see her of course because he, Richard, had his eyes closed — and his eyes were all I had. But the closeness between us in that wonderful, serene atmosphere of the trance was, well, almost ecstatic.

'Rick?' she began. 'Can you hear me, Rick?'

'Oh, my God, can I hear you!' I replied. 'I can't tell you how wonderful it is to hear you. I mean, you really know I'm here, don't you? I wasn't sure that you did, but now I know you do.'

'I know you're there,' she said, her voice gentle, soothing, caressing. 'I want to talk to you. I want you to tell me about yourself.'

So I told my story yet again, but better than I'd ever told it before. I even began to approach an explanation, or at least a theory, of what had happened. I admitted that I wasn't a trained physicist, but I told her about the
Particle/Wave
magazine I published in my other — my
real
— life which gave me at least a general grasp of what was going on at the frontiers of the subject. I told her that she could verify everything I was about to say in one conversation with any university physics professor, which surely wouldn't be too much to ask.

Then, abruptly, I stopped. Something was wrong. I felt suddenly that I was going too far too fast. I sensed a warning coming from her. Being right, I realised, was not enough. It was certainly no defence against the charge of being insane!
Proving
you're right is all that counts in the blundering world of everyday commonsense reality; and I couldn't prove anything. Even Einstein, if he came back today, couldn't
prove
that space and time were curved. All he could do would be to show that nobody else had come up with a better idea that
disproved
his theory. (He would also, incidentally, have to admit that one of his notions, the EPR 'thought experiment' in 1935, had been totally invalidated by Alain Aspect's experiment in Paris in 1982. So, in the end, where are you?)

Anyway, I stopped right there (before I got on to the trickier theories about what
really
happens when an observer watches a quantum wave 'collapse' into a particle) and told Emma that I didn't want to discuss the matter any more. Respecting my decision and, I am sure, at least on some level understanding the motives behind it, she said okay and woke him — Richard — up.

He seemed quieter after that. They all noticed it. That's because
I
was quieter. As a result he was less aware of my presence. But I was thinking. I was planning what I must do. It was difficult, and he was aware of something going on and kept blurting out odd things that I had wanted to keep to myself. It was a nuisance, but I was increasingly confident that I could get around the problem in time.

The chance to perfect my strategy came in, and only in, those hypnosis sessions with Emma. I'd figured out what she was doing and I made the most of the opportunity she was offering me. She was giving me the time, the privacy, the freedom from
him,
to think. Those sessions with her, with him under hypnosis and sleeping like a fat, overfed dog in 
front of the fire, gave me time to get my thoughts together.

I realised, because she had told me, that our sessions were being recorded. And anyway I knew that the television up on the wall was watching and listening the whole time. So it was obvious to me that the last thing I should do was insist on the differences between myself and Richard. That would in itself be taken as sufficient evidence for keeping me — both of us — locked up here indefinitely. And Richard, being too dumb and scared to handle it, would just freak out like before and I wouldn't be able to control him. Clearly, it was up to me to take the initiative. And this, I realised, was what Emma was giving me the opportunity of doing.

And so, by the end of our fourth session of hypnosis, I did what the camera on the wall and the listening microphones wanted me to do: I played 'cured'. I, Rick, instead of repeatedly explaining who I was and how I came to be there, gradually allowed myself to fade, or appear to fade, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, into nothingness. Until suddenly I was no longer there at all.

My last card of the game, its playing, even if I say so myself, impeccably timed, was to say to Emma towards the end of that fourth session: 'Emma, why do you keep calling me Rick? My name's Richard. Everybody calls me Richard. It's not that I'm particularly fussy, but it just feels strange to be called Rick.'

There was a pause. I could feel her pleasure and, indeed, pride. She knew I had taken full advantage of the opportunity which she had given me. I knew then that I was home and dry. It was over. At least this part of it.

'All right, Richard,' I heard her say, 'now I'm going to wake you up. When I count to three you will wake up feeling relaxed, refreshed, and full of confidence. And "Rick" will have gone away completely. Now: one, two, three . . . '

And the slumbering moron woke up, and felt great. And I settled back, very quiet, knowing now that patience, secrecy and singleness of purpose were my best allies.

I
can handle the situation, at least for the time being. 
Long enough, I hope, to find the way out that I know is there somewhere. One thing I have to do is get control of
him
without his knowing it. Or if I can't do that, at least reach some kind of understanding whereby he won't obstruct me, and might even help me.

Because I can't do anything without him, I'm incorporeal. Without at least temporary use of his physical being I'll never get out of here.

And if I don't, if I finally do begin to feel that I am trapped indefinitely and fall into despair . . . then I really might become insane.

And I wouldn't like to be him if that happened.

With every minute spent in this man's company I despise him more. When he looks in a mirror I look away — not literally, of course, because I don't have eyes to look away with. But what I do is avoid contact with those parts of his brain that register, through his eyes, his reflection. And I especially avoid those areas of his brain that give a little tremor of self-satisfaction at what they see.

Oh, the pleasure I could have with this fool if I dared to turn the search-light of my scorn full blast on to his furtive inner self: the shabby secrets, shoddy thoughts, the narrow and self-serving aspirations that he passes off as honest ambition. My God, is this what we're all like inside? Are we really taken in by the external charades we put on for each other? Or do we just pretend to believe each other's lies? And if so, why? Do we need companionship that badly?

I can't
— won't
— believe that that's all there is to this thing we call 'society'. There's got to be some hope, surely. Even the fact that I
want
there to be hope is itself a kind of hope. But my God, it's a pretty thin basis for optimism about the future of humanity.

I said it again: 'My God'. Am I becoming religious?

Are You there? Is anybody there?

Silence. What did I expect?

I expected silence.

No, I'm not becoming religious. I'm no more (and no less) religious than anybody else when faced with the gross, apparent meaninglessness of existence. Why, we ask ourselves, do we search for meaning if there is none? Where does the idea come from? The fact that we think of it means it must exist somewhere — bingo, God!

On the other hand, perhaps meaning isn't 'out there' to be found, but is something we create for ourselves. In that case does it have any meaning outside our need for it? Does our need give it meaning?

Search me.

Somebody once said that no man is a hero to his valet. I've never had, or been, a valet; but I can tell you with some authority that no man is a hero to anyone who knows what he's thinking.

Enough! What right do I have to this superior moral tone?

Just because I have this bird's (or worm's — birm's?) eye view of Richard A. Hamilton doesn't make me any better. I'm looking out of myself at the inside of him. How do I know there isn't somebody doing the same inside me, and feeling just as repelled? After all, Richard A. Hamilton
is
me, or a near enough facsimile to be embarrassing. Count your blessings, Rick: list the differences.

I've already mentioned one — he takes no exercise. I find that very hard to understand. How can anyone who's almost me be so unphysical? I'm not trying to imply I'm Mr Universe or anything, or that he's a slob with a gut hanging over his belt. He dresses carefully and, knowing he has a tendency to run to fat, he watches his weight more closely than I do. He actually lunches quite often in one of those restaurants where they give you a calorie count of your meal with your bill. I couldn't help letting out such a snort of derision the first time we went there that he almost heard me.

Secondly, he has no children and shows no interest in having any. All right, I can understand that people on the whole don't miss what they've never had. Nobody has an obligation to breed, in fact they're probably doing the world a favour by avoiding it. All the same it drives a wedge between us: I with the joy I found in parenthood, and he with the dull satisfaction he finds in playing the market and getting asked to the right parties.

Thirdly he has — are you ready for this? — political ambitions! Now listen, I won't deny I've thought about it. Be honest — who hasn't? At the very least you tell yourself you could do better than those fools on the Hill, in the Oval Office, the Governor's Mansion, wherever. And you probably could — if you went in there right now, today, as you are. But of course you can't. To get even a shot at the job you have to go through years of compromise and concession that leave you virtually undistinguishable by the time you get there from the people you're replacing.

This guy knows that, and it doesn't bother him. He accepts it. He actually has a game plan. You could call it half-baked or opportunistic, depending on how seriously you took him. It involves him making a lot of the right moves over the next few years and winding up as Governor. If it weren't for the fact that he was born outside of the United States, he'd be looking toward the Presidency. I can't believe this guy.

Actually I am the one fly in his ointment so far. The other day I listened in on a conversation between him and Harold that I was frankly hard pressed to believe. Harold is the one person in the world to whom he has confided these ambitions — apart from Anne, but he talks of them to her only in vague and general terms. But he and Harold are co-conspirators. Clearly Harold would be in line for a very senior post if things worked out.

The other day he sat down with Harold over lunch (at the calorie-counting place) and asked if in Harold's opinion his recent spell in the psychiatric clinic may have harmed his political prospects in the long term. Harold had obviously given the matter some thought already. His considered judgment was that probably no harm had been done. It wasn't as though Richard had been admitted for any actual illness. He hadn't suffered a breakdown or fallen prey to a depression that might raise questions about his fitness for high office. All that had happened was that he'd been in a car accident and suffered post-shock trauma brought on by a blow to the head. It wasn't exactly a plus factor, but the damage was controllable — especially if they managed to suppress the story of how he was found one night prowling around some strange house peering in the windows. If he were to become dubbed 'The Prowler' or, even worse, 'Peeping Tom' by his enemies, then the game would be up. But Harold was sure they could get over that problem by spreading a little money in the right places and getting a few signed undertakings from key witnesses.

Sometimes I worry about Harold — this Harold. I cannot believe that 'my' Harold would have taken such a cynically pragmatic view. Maybe lawyers just mirror the values of their clients.

But is that what friends do? I thought friends were supposed to tell you when you were talking bullshit, not just sit there nodding sagely and counting up their calorie intake. I thought Harold had standards.

And then there's Anne. What to say about Anne? Where to start? I've already mentioned the most obvious differences: the hair, the clothes. But there's also the body. It's the same body, it weighs the same, it goes in and out in the same places, but it's in better shape. Not that my Anne was in bad shape by any means. On the contrary! But my Anne didn't jog, didn't have an exercise bike in the bathroom, didn't go to the gym and work out with weights at seven in the morning. This one is, if I may put it so, more like me than I am.

All that is minor, however, by comparison with the differences I am now becoming daily more aware of. For one thing I see less of her than I used to. That is to say that she and Richard spend less time together than Anne and I did. She has a full calendar. When she's not organising a fundraiser for the opera house she's doing it for the symphony orchestra, the art museum, or some hospital or university trust. Anne is into fashionable charities in a big way. I think, although I know she would hotly deny it, that she calculates the amount of effort she puts into a cause by the amount of cachet she expects to get out of it. I know it doesn't make her any different from most of the other women she sits on these committees with, but it's a terrible thing to say about someone you love.

Oh, yes, I still love her. I've tried not to. It would be easier if I didn't. I tell myself that she's a social-climbing phony married to an ambitious creep — and that's where my righteous indignation falls apart. Because it's all clearly his fault, and — I have to be honest about this — as there's something of me in him and something of him in me, I must accept my share of the responsibility for what he's made of her.

You may ask why, if Anne is still essentially and inwardly the woman I think she is, she doesn't simply rebel and refuse to play the role of rising social matron that he wants of her? Frankly, I don't know the answer to that, and it troubles me. Is this really the direction she wants her life to take? Could I, if I were Richard, have done this to
my
Anne? I find it hard to believe. My Anne has — had — more strength than that. My Anne would not have married this man. She would have laughed at his pretensions and gone her own way. Is it possible that the two Annes are as different as Rick and Richard?

How far I am from home.

I must hold on. I must not despair.

Their lovemaking is the hardest thing to live through. They're not as good together as we were, and that makes it worse. They have their routines. He knows what she likes, she knows what he likes. They don't talk about it, they don't ask each other questions the way we sometimes would. It's good sex, but ours was great. It's frequent, four, five times a week, but ours was more frequent. We never counted, it was just part of being together. Sometimes — this is the worst thing — he fantasises. He isn't making love to her at all but to some pornographic image in his mind. When we — my Anne and I — had fantasies we'd talk about them, play them out, enjoy them. His are sordid secret things. Sometimes he thinks about a woman that he's met or just glimpsed somewhere and her image takes the place of Anne. Other times he invents them. Does Anne do the same? I wonder.

One thing I know for certain: he doesn't chase after other women. I might respect him more if his reasons weren't so cowardly. Fundamentally he's too lazy. Also he's afraid of scandal. And disease. And there's a pragmatic streak in him which knows he'd be damn lucky to wind up with anyone better than Anne.

It's not good enough. It's unbearable. Here I am stuck in the recesses of his consciousness while he paws and grunts and sweats all over her. I feel like a voyeur, a sick pervert. When he has an orgasm, I don't. It happens in
his
body and
his
brain, not in
me
— whatever I am. All I'm aware of is the synaptic convulsion of his climax. It could as well be a sneeze as an orgasm for all it means to me. How I long to feel what his hands feel, to experience what his body is capable of offering, to mould and guide his movements to awaken in her the raw, real passion that I know is there —
must
be there. She isn't
my
Anne, but she's close enough. I love her and I want her. I could change her. I could make her mine.

But I can't.

Enough. Change the subject. Anything.

I must be clear and firm of purpose. My only hope is to find some way of communicating with him that will not set off the kind of panic that happened before. I could destroy him, and it would give me some satisfaction. But that would mean destroying myself too. It's a horrible dilemma. I must hold on.

What can I do?

***

Something awful has happened. It left me stunned, numb with shock, for half the day. But gradually I came to realise what I must do. It is my only chance.

Richard sleeps, I don't. Whatever it is that makes corporeal brains and bodies need those daily hours of oblivion doesn't affect me. While he sleeps I spend my time probing those regions of his mind that I'm afraid to enter while he's awake for fear of arousing his suspicions. Sometimes my movements trigger dreams in him, but dreams are acceptable. He knows about dreams. We all think we know about dreams. We take them for granted, however extraordinary, and push them aside when we wake. I've even tried talking to him in his dreams, hoping that maybe I could establish some kind of bridgehead between us. It didn't work. Part of him realised what was happening and the panic started up again. I had to stir up a quick smokescreen of all kinds of irrelevancies so that he passed the incident off as a standard nightmare.

I've combed back and back through his memory banks, comparing them with my own, noting where he made one decision where I had made another, or where things had happened to him slightly differently from the way they happened to me. The similarities between our lives are overwhelming, which makes the differences between us all the more extraordinary. I was just beginning to think that if the same was true of my Anne and this Anne, then there was hope yet that I might in time elbow this lumbering hulk of Richard aside and find a way to rebuild between us, her and me, the relationship we had enjoyed in that other world. We might even — I don't know how these things work exactly, but our genes must be pretty much identical to what they were in that other world — we might even be able to have Charlie, or at least a child almost identical to him.

Then it happened, this terrible thing. It involved Anne.

Richard was due to fly to Chicago and stay overnight for a business meeting. His plane was in the early evening, but by mid-afternoon it was obvious that he was coming down with flu. He thought about calling Harold to have him go in his place, then remembered that Harold was in Phoenix working on an acquisition for another client. 
So he cancelled his meeting, cancelled his flight, and went home.

Anne was out — probably, he thought, at one of her committees. He left a note for her just inside the door, swallowed some aspirin and vitamin C, and put himself to bed.

By the time she got back he was already half-asleep. I heard her come in, but he didn't. I heard her say something under her breath when she read his note and put her head into the bedroom. It sounded like she said 'Oh, no!', but very softly, barely a whisper.

She came closer and must have been standing over him for several moments before he sensed her presence and opened his eyes. She kissed and fussed over him and asked if she should call the doctor. He said absolutely not (he was a coward about doctors — more so than ever after having been shut up in that clinic). All he wanted, he said, was to sleep it off, maybe spend tomorrow in bed, then he would be fine. It was a twenty-four-hour thing that half the people in the office had already had. He apologised that probably she would catch it now and she told him not to worry about that, just get well. She said she'd let him sleep and look in later to see if there was anything he needed.

I've no idea how much later 'later' was. He was in a deep sleep by then and I was going over his memory of an important conversation that he'd had with his father when he was fourteen. I'd had the same conversation with my father — ostensibly about career possibilities, but really about what a man searches for in life — except for certain tiny details. I was trying to figure out if these details had ultimately led to some of the major differences between Richard and myself, when I heard the door open and Anne's footsteps come softly across the carpet.

His eyes were closed, so I couldn't see anything, but I could hear her breathing as she leant close. I supposed she just wanted to make sure that he was sleeping peacefully before going back to whatever she was doing. But just as she turned to leave the telephone rang.

To say it rang is an exaggeration. It had a soft tone which at the best of times would take some moments to penetrate even a light sleep. This was because Richard preferred to be coaxed awake rather than startled. On this occasion it barely even hinted at a first ring before — she was standing right by it — she picked it up.

She answered softly so as not to wake him, but as soon as she heard who it was she became flustered and afraid to talk. She needn't have worried. There wasn't even a flicker of response in Richard's brain. He was sleeping so heavily that a fire alarm wouldn't have roused him. Even I, fully awake, couldn't hear much — except that it was a man's voice at the other end.

'I can't talk,' she said in a muffled, urgent whisper as though her hand was shielding her mouth. 'He's here. I've been trying to call you. No, he didn't go, he's sick. I'm in the bedroom — wait.'

Very quietly she put down the phone, tiptoed out, closing the door with barely a sound, and presumably continued the conversation on a safe extension.

Richard slept on. But I . . . you can imagine how I felt. You can imagine how much I would have given for the use of his hands to pick up that phone and find out what was going on.

But I knew what was going on. There was no mistaking that tone of voice, that intimate conspiratorial guilt.