Kyriakides: Is that difficult to understand?
John: You think he can help you?
Kyriakides: Susan says he’s been helpful.
John: Cooperating in his own annihilation?
Kyriakides: If that’s what it means. It may not. Do you despise him so much? You created him, after all. He’s a part of you.
John: I don’t think even Shakespeare would enjoy having Hamlet compete for the control of his body—do you, Max?
Kyriakides: Hamlet was imaginary—
John: So was Benjamin.
Kyriakides: But he isn’t any longer. Surely that’s the point? You’ve created a living human being. You have to live with the consequences.
John: I yield to your experience in the matter.
From the notebooks of Maxim Kyriakides:
We live together in mutual isolation. The house is big enough that we are not forced into interaction; therefore that interaction has not yet begun. Susan and Amelie are nervous with each other—rivals, in a sense, though I don’t think either of them quite realize that I wonder about the wisdom of taking in Amelie, but Susan was insistent; and she may be useful in dealing with Benjamin … when Benjamin finally appears.
He is the ghost that hovers over this house. I do not know him. I do not know what role he has to play, or whether he will be willing to play it Tomorrow John enters the hospital for tests; perhaps after that we will have some useful approach to the problem—certainly we will all feel less aimless.
In the meantime I am chafing under John’s hostility. It is understandable and perhaps even therapeutic for him. Nevertheless it hurts. I am in every important sense his father. He must know I feel that way—it was always impossible to hide intense emotion from him. But he resents it, or uses it against me.
And I cannot blame him.
My God, that is the worst of it.
He believes I abandoned him.
He’s right.
15
Susan drove everyone into the city in her Honda—she thought of it as hers, though it was Dr. Kyriakides who had taken out the lease. Dr. Kyriakides didn’t drive; the task had fallen to Susan by default; therefore, it was her car.
It was a cold, clear January day, the sun bright but barely strong enough to warm the tarmac. Snowplows had left huge hills of snow on each side of the highway. It had been a snowy winter and the indications were that it would get worse. No snow today but lots of icy runoff; Susan was cautious on turns; downtown, she parked in an underground lot.
Today was the day John was scheduled for tests at Toronto General. TGH was the city’s central hospital, and as she passed through the lobby Susan was reminded of every other hospital she had ever seen. The corridors were pastel green and blue, the paint abraded where gurney carts had bumped against the walls; mysterious doors opened into mysterious rooms; doctors and interns bustled past with fixed, distant expressions. Dr. Kyriakides introduced John to another doctor, a man named Collingwood, while Susan and Amelie staked out chairs in a waiting room. Collingwood was grey-haired, bearded, stout. He spoke in a subdued tone, then led John away down the corridor. Dr. Kyriakides sighed, and rooted out a copy of Newsweek from the sidetable. Amelie had found People. Susan could not concentrate on reading; she kept her eyes on the corridor beyond the waiting-room door.
She glimpsed John when he passed a second time, without stopping, as he followed Dr. Collingwood down the hall. He had changed into a green hospital gown and paper slippers, and the effect, Susan thought, was of an immense indignity.
When Susan was fourteen years old she had decided to become a doctor. It was a serious ambition, but in the end she realized she didn’t have the stomach for it. Undergraduate biology courses offered confirming evidence that her squeamishness was fundamental, inarguable, and permanent. That was when she detoured into cellular biology. She could deal with living systems as whole entities or as specimens on a slide; it was only that queasy middle ground, the surgeon’s world of pumping blood and palpitating organs, that repelled her. That was the world where her father’s cancer had lived. Of all the ugly facets of his death she resented this perhaps most of all, that he had become an ecology for a virulent and alien growth. It struck her now that what she missed most was the illusion of his sturdiness. Fathers should be solid, front to back, Susan thought. Otherwise nothing was certain. Anything could happen.
Maybe that was how John felt about Dr. Kyriakides.
But, disappointingly, she hadn’t been able to talk to John much in the few days he had been back from Vancouver. He was moody; he had isolated himself in his room. Susan had passed his door and seen him pecking at a computer terminal, curious (but vaguely familiar) symbols flowing across the monitor. She wanted to go in, talk to him, say something that would make him happy. But it was not a privilege she had earned. No real intimacy had passed between them and Susan felt ashamed of her feelings, the schoolgirl crush she had obviously developed. John was, as Dr. Kyriakides continued to insist, in some sense not even truly human.
But Susan knew what it was like to feel set apart, to feel different. Growing up in a California suburb, bookish and shy, citizen of an invisible country somewhere between Fantasyland and Pasadena, she would have welcomed the idea of a gentle superhuman sweeping her off her feet.
Except that he did not sweep. And “superhuman” didn’t mean what it should. And he was not even especially gentle.
And worse—unless Dr. Kyriakides could do something about it—he might be dying, or at the very least losing himself …leaving me, Susan thought childishly; voyaging off, like her father, wherever people go when they leave their sullen, grieving families abandoned by the graveside.
But these were hospital thoughts. Susan walked down the corridor to a vending-machine cafeteria and bought herself a cup of coffee, hoping to shake the mood. Machine coffee in a styrofoam cup, cloyingly sweet and hot enough to raise blisters. She liked it.
When she got back to the waiting room Dr. Collingwood was there. He was a bear-shaped man, but not really large; he was only just as tall as Susan and the effect, as he turned to face her, was of some stern but basically amiable big animal. “This is Susan?” he asked.
Dr. Kyriakides nodded.
Collingwood said, “We have John in a room upstairs while we wait for time on the scanner. He asked for you to come up.”
Susan was a little flattered, a little frightened. She followed Collingwood to the elevators and up two floors, then down an identical corridor to a small room in which John was sitting in his hospital gown.
Collingwood closed the door and left them alone.
John motioned to a chair. Susan sat with her hands primly in her lap.
He said, “You look more nervous than I am.”
“Are you nervous?”
“Not about the PET scan. Apprehensive about the results, obviously. Hospitals frighten you?”
“Yes.” She didn’t explain why.
He said, “I brought this.”
He reached into a day bag beside his chair and lifted out a portable chess set in a folding wooden box. “We have some time to kill while they warm up the machinery. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d like a game.”
She smiled. “You’ll win.”
“But that’s not why I play.” He sounded almost sheepish. “I like the patterns. It’s like a dance. I like to watch it unfold. Is it all right?”