A week later, I was walking unassisted and while my active vocabulary still numbered no more than half a dozen words, my comprehension was as lucid as it is now.

One afternoon, a nurse collected me from the swimming pool without a wheelchair and supported me as I walked unsteadily through the harsh light of those corridors. I was sweating from the unfamiliar exertion of navigating that big carcass and I was full of trepidation. I wondered what fresh misery had been prepared for me. A pair of heavy double doors opened ahead of me. Beyond them, I saw a small figure swigging from a plastic bottle of water. Vera Telauga. And beside her, dressed in an unfamiliar linen suit, looking at me with pity and disbelief, was me; or, me as I remembered myself.

‘You …’ I faltered. No other words would come.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

Vera took my arm with a gentleness that was as unexpected as it was welcome. ‘We’ve come to take you home.’

28

For the first time, I was admitted to the world outside the unit. A basketball court stood in the blazing sun. Beyond the chain-link fence around it, a plateau of desolate yellow grass stretched to the horizon in every direction. The breeze was infused with an unforgettable, slightly medicinal smell that I know now to be wormwood. I know now also that the place where I underwent the Procedure was in the Russian-administered town of Baikonur within Kazakhstan.

There was a local driver waiting in a battered Mercedes just outside the gates of the complex. By the time I reached it, the unaccustomed effort had left me soaked in sweat. The sun overhead was pitiless.

Nicholas, as I suppose I must call him, was unmistakably awkward with me, and yet I couldn’t help noticing in him, in spite of everything, a new purposefulness. Whatever he had been engaged upon with Vera had revitalised him.

We drove for hours through miles of desolate desert steppe. Vera remained beside me in the back; Nicholas sat in front with the driver, an Uzbek called Kairat, staring fixedly at the road ahead. Occasionally, he ventured a couple of words to Kairat in Russian that surprised me with its woolliness and grammatical inaccuracy.

Towards lunchtime, Kairat stopped to fill the car with diesel. The four of us ate boiled eggs and samsa – baked Uzbek pasties – at a roadside stall. A Kazakh toddler with a wide Eurasian face played in the dust with a toy train and I thought with a pang of Lucius. My son. I looked across at Nicholas. He hadn’t seen the boy; he was stealing a doubting glance at me.

‘I’m not sure how I feel about this,’ he muttered to Vera.

Later, returning unsteadily from the washroom in the back, I overheard them talking in whispers. As I approached, they heard my heavy footsteps and fell silent.

‘We’re sorting out the bill,’ Nicholas said. It was only the second time he’d addressed me directly. Of course, I knew he was lying. Hypocrite lecteur. Mon semblable. Mon frère.

Whatever human experience offers in the way of analogues for the Procedure, it always comes up short. It’s not like parenthood. Nicholas had no instinctive love for his proxy complex. I was ugly and disappointing, confirmation of his worst fears, like a particularly unflattering photograph.

In so many ways, Nicholas and I found ourselves in uncharted territory. We? He? I? One? Even the choice of pronoun is vexed. There is no word that captures the distinct but overlapping consciousness of core and proxy complexes like ours. And more and more, that word proxy I feel to be a violation of my unique subjectivity.

*

By contrast with Nicholas, Vera was almost excessively engaged with me. She talked constantly, making conscientious eye contact and pointing out features in the landscape: raptors wheeling over the plain, camels moving slowly through the heat, patches of salt showing through the parched grass.

That night, we stayed at a shabby hotel on the outskirts of a town that I believe was Shymkent. Vera helped me to wash, drying me with a gentleness that this carcass mistook for a lover’s touch. She lingered over my arousal and I found myself instantly brought to the pitch of ecstasy. She consoled me so tenderly that nothing about the episode seemed weird or demeaning. ‘You cannot be a stranger to joy,’ she whispered.

She asked me if I was too tired to eat with them. I felt frail and bewildered but I craved human contact. Vera changed her clothes and put on make-up for our dinner. We ate fatty shashlik and raw onion in a private booth in the outside courtyard of a chaikana. Nicholas drank several beers and ignored us.

Halfway through the meal, Vera’s patience snapped. ‘You have to engage with him,’ she said to Nicholas. ‘For both your sakes.’

He turned slowly and theatrically to meet her angry stare. ‘If you can’t persuade me,’ he said, ‘how are you going to persuade anyone else?’

A waitress in plastic sandals entered our booth to put a basket of freshly cooked flatbread on the table. As she left, Vera said to Nicholas: ‘I told you what to expect.’

Nicholas pulled off a tiny piece of bread and examined it without answering her. I felt his bitterness and disappointment. He was punishing her with his contemptuous silence. I think that I grasped even at the time not only the substance of their disagreement but Vera’s profound fear of being disbelieved. She was compelled to try to appease him. ‘He may be months away from full rehabilitation,’ she said.

‘And what if this is as good as it gets?’

She gave him a volcanic stare which he met without speaking. I felt wounded by his contempt. I wanted to tell them that I understood everything; that I grasped, however dimly, the mystery of our overlapping consciousnesses.

I opened my mouth to speak and they both looked at me with a sudden surge of interest. I could feel my eyes rolling back in my head with the effort. ‘Book,’ I said. ‘Book.’

Nicholas shook his head and looked away disgustedly. Vera patted my hand.

*

The next morning, we set off before dawn and drove for several hours. The flat land had an oceanic scale; shoals of tiny livestock moved slowly in the distance. When the wind blew over the grass, the blades rippled like the surface of an enormous green lake. Gradually, sand and scrub came to dominate the landscape. I saw from a road sign that we were approaching the town of Turkestan. Just beyond it lay our destination: the mausoleum of Akhmet Yassawi, an eleventh-century poet and Sufi mystic.

The building, erected on the command of Timur the Great – Marlowe’s Tamburlaine – is one of the treasures of Central Asia. Its huge central dome rises forty metres from the desert floor.

Kairat pulled up in an empty car park on the outskirts of the complex. The structure was dun-coloured in the blazing sunlight.

‘This is an odd moment to go sightseeing,’ Nicholas said. I looked at him in surprise: the same thought expressed in an identical form had crossed my mind only fractionally before he uttered it. It was my first instance of a phenomenon that soon grew too commonplace to be noteworthy: the weird echoes between our incestuous subjectivities.

Kairat said he would wait for us, but Vera saw him off with a hefty tip and told him we would make our own way back later. When he had left, she explained that she wanted to change vehicles. The chances of our being recognised increased every day we spent with Kairat; she had therefore asked him to take us to the Yassawi mausoleum on the pretext of sightseeing, but in fact so that we could engage the services of a new driver.

‘Since we’re here anyway, does anyone object if I have a look round?’ said Nicholas. I found the constant note of irony in his voice irritating in the extreme. I remembered Leonora’s frequent bouts of hostility towards me, which at the time had seemed so inexplicable. Now I wondered how she had put up with him so long.