Doppelgangers (4 page)

That, then, became his nightmare life for weeks, perhaps months. The days of dawdling, wrapped in bandages that pulled and ached. Then another swamping injection, and out one went, to wander in a limbo of confused memories, vivid and bright but incoherent, and then back again to this world far more dark, insane, incomprehensible, but having one terrible stigma of reality, that it was always the same. There was one small serial change: first he could feed normally, but, as it went on, he fed through a tube, sucking his substance as his jaws were bandaged up. I'm sinking back to a suckling state, he thought.

If only he could have stayed asleep or been put under for good. But now he was in their hands and that was the last thing they wanted. He would mutter in his mind—he could hardly use any part of his face—“Living clay, living clay.” Yes, it was apt.

One day, however, they told him he must see, for they wanted to watch him move at instruction—wanted to be sure they had left the controls in good condition. He was sat up. The light came clearer until one could see the whole room. It was not much to see. His touch that first night had told him really all there was. He was inside that smooth plastic cell which had just room for the bed and space for a person to stand on each side of it. They were evidently doing so, for he could feel their arms holding him and then their hands manipulating his bandages.

The one thing that must have been added to the room was across the middle of the bed—a wide mirror with a lamp above it. He looked and saw his still-bandaged head. Then, like an exhumation, these grave-clothes began to be unswathed. He saw his hair and forehead appear as the unwrapping reached where the two small eyeholes had been left. But after that, recognition tried in vain. There wasn't a face there. Loops and curls and volutes of skin and flesh he could see.

“This is just preliminary,” said a voice at his left. “Will you pull your mouth to the right?”

He did so, and through the stiff skin and stretched flesh he felt something moving.

“Very good, quite satisfactory! We just wanted to see if the muscle co-ordination was quite in place. No need for surprise. You've probably understood, these are merely grafts getting ready. When they have made their new attachments and the circulation has started through the new rooting, then we can cut them free from their original base. Everything is going well. Now wrinkle your nose. Now contract your left cheek. Good, good!”

Yes, he could make this tasseled and looped mask move a little. He wondered why he obeyed. He concluded that it was less trouble. The dressings were replaced and the bandages readjusted. Once or twice he nearly roused himself to pull the whole thing off. He thought, though, with a dull clarity, that it would only hurt and he was tired. They couldn't be meaning to leave him as he was.

He was in no pain, only ached and was tired and muddled. Into his mind there floated a story he'd read as a boy about a mad doctor on an island who tried by surgery to make animals into men. Of course it was nonsense, but this was the living nightmare. He simply sighed.

But it was only a beginning. The grafts took. Then they showed him the face they were shaping again. Again he could see only a clumsy sketch of a man. So many scars ran across it that every feature that made it human was camouflaged by a cut, furrow, boss, or line which made any clear recognition impossible.

“Of course, the secondary, scar-removal operations will remove all that,” said the voice that supervised these inspections.

He only sighed. Perhaps now, like the man who in the terror tale went down the maelstrom, he had touched bottom, and, having expunged him, they would start drawing on the
tabula rasa
what they wanted to reconstruct in the place of what he'd been. But no, there was further to go. They took careful measurements for a long while one day—if day it was—it was a couple of hours, he judged, after his first taking suck after a sleep. Then he was hoisted up and wrapped and injected on the face and the big work began. But it, too, was slow and was done in two divisions. First there was the extraction program. Upper and lower teeth went. More than ever like a creature reduced to a foetal state, he sucked his food day by day over the sore, aching gums. But they healed, too. Nature never seemed to take resentment, to curse life and die; no, the life in him hung on. Provided it was given the chance to repair, given the dressings that permitted it not to be too discouraged in its resolve to live whether he liked it or no, whether he was still recognizably human, it would patch and fuse as though it were glass being bent and twisted in a flame and blown into any fantastic shape. The life in him didn't seem to care whether he suffered or not; not even his physical pain—for now that came in shoots and dull, stretched spans—seemed to affect it at all, still less his shame.

The second part, when the gums had healed, was preluded by fresh careful measurements. They were fitting him, gauging him against some most detailed set of readings. They checked and rechecked. At last they were ready for what he heard one call the big step.

“There, there's no ground for alarm, and that's why we're ready to tell you everything, we're going to explain,” said the voice one day as they raised him up.

He could faintly see the masked surgeon-figures round him. Indeed, now he was allowed to get up, as his bed slid away and the operating table took its place—Oh, yes, he was now quite the big boy who could be trusted to co-operate and take a part in the common building up.

“This technique, you'll be amused to hear, was invented by the beauticians. People with receding jaws suffer so much from a sense of inferiority, that it's become quite standard practice to lengthen the jaw. Yours will need, for the full effect, to be brought forward a bit. It's quite a standard piece of surgery, though still a little slow if it is to be done comfortably. We just cut through both sides of the lower jaw and bring it forward.”

He was glad, before they were finished with this part of him, that they had been slow. Certainly anything faster must have been agony. But the long days of close bandaging were a prodigious weariness. He often wondered whether one could die from sheer frustration. His body answered for him. He might be weary of life. It wasn't, and it held the reins. They had picked a good body, as they said, and it was theirs, and loyal to them now, no longer to him. When the jaw was finished he could eat smooth things, and that was a relief. He noticed bitterly how the will to live seized on any little comfort as helping to make its case for just going on.

But
they
were still going on. They, now, having reached the foot of his face, began at the top. It was time now for his eyes; getting back the use of his mouth, he had to give up the use of vision. His whole forehead was bandaged. They were working round the eye sockets. But at last that too was over. Now he would have rest, surely; surely now they would get to work at removing the scar lines and puckers and he would know the end of all this ghastly carnival—true carnival at last, true farewell to the flesh, true and actual pruning down to the stock the tree of life.

But no, though the face was finished and through stiff eyelids he once again saw his cursed featureless cell, they were ready to start another campaign and another sense was to be taken for a term of imprisonment from him. They opened his throat. They kindly explained what they were up to when they had done a certain amount of work which had made even swallowing a problem and made all speech impossible. They needed his co-operation—“and shall increasingly,” said that soothing voice. He heard a recording machine start up, and they asked him to speak. He heard a strange tone come from his throat. They played from somewhere a few notes and he was told to sing them. This rehearsal lasted about twenty minutes. His throat felt strangely odd and he could not clearly recognize his voice.

“Pretty good; pretty good.”

Then the gramophone shouted out some words in a hoarse, powerful voice.

“Try and get that,” the teaching controller of the performance suggested. He tried. “Fairly close, fairly close. We should get it next time.”

Next time was after a number of further small operations and rests. At last it was over. They made a jagged chart appear on an illuminated strip that ran on a small screen in front of them. Then he was told to speak, certain words over and over. On the bright field alongside the jagged chart that kept on making its queer saw-edge pattern appeared another pattern almost identical.

“That's the best test. Far closer than the ear. For the magnification is so much greater so that the sound impulses show up. We'll measure these angle impulses. All the rest is really training. We've now given you an instrument that's undetachable and undetectable: you have armor that no one can pierce.”

This kind of rhetoric was unlike them, he reflected in a dull reactive way.

“What do you mean?” he asked, wondering faintly whether they might possibly mean that his hell was about to alter, if not to end.

The answer, though not reassuring, was in the same tone of suppressed cheerfulness: “You wait and you won't have to wait long. Yes, we've succeeded. You were a good pick, for there wasn't really much basic work to be done, really only a few superficial redrawings; and the flesh was even more responsive than we'd hoped. Living clay!”

That horrible phrase, how long ago it was that he had first recoiled from it? There was hardly any spring left in his spirit now to recoil, but he felt with a huge weariness of recollection how much more horrible the whole set of ordeals had been than his worst fear had imagined. There was all the suffering, of course; but that, one might hope to put behind one; the mind heals as does the flesh. But this more than mutilation, this obliteration, this just smoothing out the person, and, then, on the blank, modeling another—that was a smearing blow that left life a blank. And yet the damned body that had co-operated with these carvers was now as ready to live as ever, it was longing for life at any price.

“It's the straightaway for you now. There's no one in the whole underground that won't envy you.”

He thought of saying there was no need to sneer, but it just wasn't worth while. He lay in a sunken silence. A meal came and he swallowed the usual mush.

“Can't I even have a dotard's comfort and be fitted with false teeth?” he called out into the silence as the strength at least of protest came with the intake of the food. But his voice wasn't his own. It was half a dotard's mumble and half a bellow.

A voice answered out of the wall, “Certainly, but all in good time. The jaw has to settle down a bit; it will make all the more for your comfort.”

He knew that must be a lie and gave up.

Some days passed. Then a voice remarked, “We shan't trouble you with any more drills beyond this one. We just want one more movement check-up, to be sure you're completely mobile and at home with your new instrument.” The lit mirror flashed on in front of him and he was aware of two figures standing at each side of him. “Turn head right: left: up: down: smile: yawn: purse lips: wink one eye: wink both.”

Like a loosely made rubber ventriloquist's doll, he writhed these roughly modeled features, grimaced, went through the command performance. It seemed to him simply a tangle of grotesque leers.

But at the end they said, “Fine! And now pull it into a repose. Yes”—and it was clear they were speaking to each other, not to him—“yes, that will do. When it's got proper backing that will be a very convincing piece of assembly. No visible tremors, strains, or tension, though of course one can see that there are a few stiffnesses and resistance reflexes hanging on under the surface.” Then to him, “But we'll deal with all that quite soon.”

The horrible mirror flashed off and he heard it sliding away. He lay quiet in the dark. He wasn't quite sure—hadn't been able in the first flash of the light to see with any exactness. They didn't care whether he saw as long as they could see him doing what they said. But it must be pretty bad. He could stand that voice now embedded in his throat and which made coarse guttural growls, the sound of an old rasped organ. The blow was in what he thought he'd glimpsed of the face.

He'd tried to start at the top—the rest was writhing under the orders too much for him to be sure he made out anything clearly. He was sure the forehead and eyes had aged fifteen years fully from that time perhaps not fifteen weeks ago when he had stood unconsciously fully satisfied with the appearance through which he looked out at the world. Something wonderful, diabolically wonderful, had been done—a black magician's marvel of grafting and blends. From that upper piece, on which he had fixed his attention as soon as he could focus, it was clear that not only had they forged new features, new profile, new oval—they had made a new, or rather an old, texture, an old skin out of a new, fresh, healthy one. Large pores, coarsened texture, the first faint blotchy discolorations of oncoming old age—yes, he'd seen enough to see they must all be there to give that effect of tiredness and general loss of tone. It was just as when out of fresh, innocent wood a faker of antiques turns a good, simple piece of furniture of the right build and size into a weather-beaten, time-eroded period-piece, a museum curiosity.

He threw himself back on his bed. Coldly, comfortlessly through his mind as he lay in the silence ran the thought, “So we do care so much for ourselves, for what we feel we look like!”

The first time he again paid any attention or tried to understand was when some time after a voice said, “You will now have something enjoyable.” But his shudder of anticipation was cut short by, “Your muscle tone can be put back quickly by massage and you will have a good spell every day. You'll feel wonderfully better.”

True enough, two masked masseurs came a few minutes later and with the first manipulations he discovered to his surprised relief that he was in the hands of men who wished to give him comfort and knew how. It was the first real rest and relaxation that he'd had. It was hard to keep up those submuscle tensions, that qui vive of the deep sinews, when these strong reassurances, so much more massive and deep than any words, came to him from the deepest sense, touch. He could not doubt the friendliness of the hands that dealt with him, if he still knew nothing of the eyes that were looking him over from behind their masks.