Wonderland (56 page)

Mrs. Perrault was asking Helene about something, in a rough, hearty singsong voice. Jesse overheard her saying something about
forty years
again.

“Helene—your name is Helene—a very pretty name—Helene, you see what your life will be like, their minds are half with you and half
there
, and when they fall asleep at night—who can tell what they’re doing? Better to let them do it in their sleep!”

This awkward period had lasted about half an hour.

Then Mrs. Perrault served dinner. She interrupted a conversation between her husband and Cady, telling them that the food was ready, it would be getting cold. They rose and went a few yards into the dining room, which opened onto the living room. The table was already set. “Anywhere, please sit anywhere,” she said. Her pleasant, plain face gleamed with enthusiasm. Jesse ended up sitting next to her and was called upon to help her dish out food, plate after plate, loaded with beef and potatoes and string beans and creamed onions. He didn’t
know whether to be irritated by this or grateful for something to do. What about his wife? How was his wife? Sometimes the odor of food nauseated her. But she seemed all right. Dr. Cady ate everything that was given to him with a show of pleasure, though this food must have disappointed him. Dr. Perrault, at one end of the table, spent much of the meal staring down at his plate with a small, fuzzy smile, as if wondering why he had invited these people. Maybe he had had some reason and now he had forgotten it …?

Jesse glanced at his watch.

Overhead, an old-fashioned chandelier burned too brightly. The light bulbs were imitation flames that stuck out of dusty cardboard cylinders meant to represent candles. Yes, the lights were far too bright. The ordeal reminded Jesse of an operation; but the room was too warm.… To get through it, he thought of Reva. Reva’s face. That perfect, flawless face.… The mouth with its perfect smile.…

Though he had not seen her for many months, he had fallen in love with her. He could remember only fragments of their dissatisfying conversation.
Did you get out of this what you wanted?
she had asked.

What had he wanted?

He had wanted her, but then what? What would come next?

But his imagination went blank when he thought of what might have come next. It was not possible to think of anything coming next. Reva’s face, Reva’s body, and then.… Jesse picked at his food, lovesick for Reva. He felt at such times an almost physical distress, a cramping of the belly. But he had to eat because he was a guest at Dr. Perrault’s home, an enviable guest. After a ten-day period of enduring more insults than usual from the old man he had been invited over for dinner, so he had to eat, had to keep passing dishes of food around the table in a cheerful never-ending circle. It was like belonging to a family … like belonging to a family … and yet he kept thinking of Reva, who was so solitary and inaccessible to him. He could not imagine her captured and subdued like Helene, weighed down by pregnancy, sitting beside her father and across the table from her husband.

Still, he loved Helene. He would have died for her.

Thick slabs of roast beef, oozing watery blood. They ate. Perrault would not touch his wine, though his wife teased him; he snapped at her, he smiled an angry apology, something about wanting to remain
clear-headed in case anything happened at the hospital.… Mrs. Perrault glanced meaningfully over at Helene.
Forty years of this!
her mild self-pitying glance said.

Now the talk drifted onto Dr. Cady’s experimentation at Harvard—work in the histochemistry of motor neurons and interneurons in cat spinal cords; just the sound of it made Mrs. Perrault shake her head. She abandoned them to their subject, going out to the kitchen for more food. Jesse could not decide if he liked the woman or if she made him uneasy. He felt relieved when she left his side. Through the archway of the old-fashioned dining room he could see a row of photographs arranged above Dr. Perrault’s harpsichord, graduation pictures of two boys and a girl, the Perrault children. Jesse gathered that the boys had gone to Harvard Medical School like their father, and were now somewhere in the East. Maybe he spent his money on them, setting them up in practices …? Still, he would have a lot of money left over. Perrault’s staff physicians liked to speculate about the old man’s fortune. It was hard to think of him as a father who would lavish money upon his children, and Jesse felt a pang of envy for those young men.…

Mrs. Perrault came back with some food. She walked firmly, like a peasant, coming straight to him.
Eat, Eat. Don’t listen to them talking, just eat
. There was hardly room on the table for another bowl. A big red ceramic bowl of mashed potatoes. Jesse saw that Helene was smiling vaguely at Mrs. Perrault, and he wondered at her look of happiness. In their own apartment she was rarely happy. Her smiles were thin and forced. Even when she fussed over Jeanne, when she dressed Jeanne or played with her, Helene’s smile was strained and unconvincing. Tonight, the deep pink material of her dress cast up a frail, rose light onto her face.

“You’ll have some more, won’t you, Helene? Just a little more?” Mrs. Perrault said. She was gently bullying.

Helene acquiesced. She glanced at Jesse, smiling. He tried to smile back. But he distrusted her, he was puzzled by her … what was there about this crowded table with its ornate, chipped china and its mismatched wine glasses and water goblets and its old-fashioned, heavy, slightly tarnished silverware that pleased her?

“Good. Good. You need to nourish yourself,” Mrs. Perrault muttered.

Dr. Cady was talking about his work. “… yes, but it isn’t satisfying,
working with animals. Yes, it’s pure and open-ended, but there are no personalities involved.”

Helene turned to him, surprised. “Personalities …?”

“You would want personalities?” Perrault asked carefully.

“I think so, yes.”

“No, really, that element is distressing,” Perrault said. He crossed his knife and fork neatly on his plate to indicate that he was finished with this meal. He cleared his throat as if trying to clear his hoarseness. “Because the personality is not permanent. It’s absolutely unstable. Therefore you find yourself working with—you might say experimenting with—a substance you naively believe to be stable, when in reality it is ephemeral. An animal has as much personality as a man.”

Mrs. Perrault laughed quietly.

“Listen to that! I don’t believe that,” she said.

Perrault ignored her. He addressed the others as if they had questioned him. “What is a personality?” he said politely. “I will tell you, it is a conscious system of language. And when the language deteriorates, as it must, the personality vanishes and we have only the brute matter left—the brain and its electric impulses. Benjamin, do you agree?”

“But still there’s an unconscious layer of personality. The mind is in the brain, though it’s invisible,” Cady said at once. “And up to a certain point it can communicate with you; it can tell you about the process of its own deterioration.”

“It isn’t reliable,” Perrault said.

“But of course it’s reliable, as reliable as anything else. When a person tells you that he has felt a small explosion in his head, and he dies an hour later, you can assume before an examination that he has suffered a hemorrhage, that something blew out—”

Perrault glanced at Jesse as if urging him to speak. Jesse said, wondering at this odd conversation, “They don’t need to tell you that.…”

Perrault interrupted impatiently. “No, of course, they don’t need to tell us anything. We tell them. Or we don’t bother telling them at all, we simply make a record of it for our own information. No, the personality is an illusion, and there is no one of us sitting around this table who truly possesses any personality, any permanent system of conscious or unconscious language. It is just a tradition. Personality is just a tradition that dies hard.”

“A tradition …?” Helene said. “I don’t understand.”

Dr. Perrault smiled his myopic, blurry smile, as if seeking out Helene in a dimension that was not real to him, a kind of dream. “I mean that belief in it is a tradition. It is a belief that dies hard.”

A few moments of silence. Perrault continued to smile toward Helene. Jesse realized slowly that the old man did not believe in women, in their existence. They did not matter. They could not understand, it was hopeless to talk to them; and yet one had to talk to them out of politeness. That, too, was a tradition. And perhaps Jesse himself did not believe in women the way he believed in men.… Perrault was saying argumentatively, “What is the personality, then, that we encounter in those we think we love? I will tell you this also: It is a pattern of attitudes that are expressed in certain language patterns we recognize because we are accustomed to them, you might say
conditioned
to them, to be technical, the attitudes being a barrier to protect these people and ourselves against the infinite. The original chaos. Who can deny this? I am not contradicting you, Benjamin, but simply expanding upon what you obviously believe. There’s no surprise in this. We each have a hidden obsession, I suppose, a kind of monster that has made our facial structures what they are on the surface, the facial mask that is our own, uniquely in the universe, and we try to keep this monster secret, except perhaps to ourselves. And some of us never see the monsters in ourselves.… This is the personality people defend. But it is only ephemeral. With a tiny pin in my fingers,” he said, raising his hand and touching his forefinger to his thumb, “I can destroy any personality in about thirty seconds, sixty seconds at the most.”

Helene was staring at him. Jesse felt a strange thrill of certainty in what Perrault had said.

“I don’t understand that,” Helene said. “Do you mean … what do you mean …?”

“My daughter is very sentimental,” Cady teased. He patted Helene’s arm. But Jesse could see that he himself was doubtful.

“What you’re saying is terrible,” Helene said.

“The truth can’t be terrible,” said Jesse.

Perrault looked at him, pleased. Triumphant.

“Ah, Jesse! Yes, Jesse, absolutely yes, yes—the truth can’t be terrible—that’s the first law of science! What is terrible can be true or not
true, but what is true cannot be terrible. You’re reading my mind, Jesse.”

Jesse felt his face grow warm.

Helene was watching him with a still, small smile. He felt the hysteria rising in her.

“What did you say, Jesse?” she asked.

Dr. Cady, trying to make a joke of this, turned to Helene. “I think my little girl is nervous tonight. She isn’t herself tonight. Maybe you’re worried about Jeannie …?”

“Jeannie? No.”

“Maybe you should call the baby-sitter and check with her …?”

“Why? I’m not worried. Jesse is the one who worries about our daughter, not I,” Helene said evenly. “I don’t worry. No, I’m thinking about what Dr. Perrault said just now, about the pin … the pin and the personality that can be destroyed with the pin.…”

“Your wife is a very serious young woman,” Perrault said to Jesse, with that special look he shot Jesse whenever one of the less able assistants blundered during an operation. “She should consider the fate of the personality when the brain is lifted out of its encasement and placed in another substance, when it is hooked up to another system. What then? Without its senses, is the brain any longer a personality?”

“Yes,” said Helene.

“What do you mean, yes?”

“Yes. It is a personality.”

Perrault laughed. He lifted his hands as if to show that he could not argue, he had no interest in arguing.

Cady said at once, “You mean the transplanting of brains. Yes, that’s good. A good point. It seems to me that the brain would still be a personality because it would have a memory; a personality is largely memory, conscious or unconscious. An unfathomable number of memory units. So it would hold in these units its shattered ‘personality,’ unless that personality could be wiped out.”

“Hooked up to another body, let’s say,” Perrault said, “and with the demands of the new body’s senses, what then? The same personality, a new one belonging to the body, or a synthesis of the two?”

“It depends upon the memory.…”

“We will allow the memory.”

Helene said sharply, “But this can’t be done.”

“Certainly it can be done, Helene,” said Cady. “It will be done in the next decade.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Kidneys will be transplanted, hearts will be transplanted, everything,” Cady said. “The body is a jumble of mechanical parts, some of which work well and some of which rattle. The parts can be detached and exchanged for new ones. Is this evil? Helene, you know all this, you’re just pretending to be shocked. I think it’s that baby you’re going to have … you’re rehearsing innocence for it, the innocence of a young mother.…”

“Don’t upset the young lady. What good does it do to talk about these things? Just go and do them according to your plans, complete them and write your reports and collect your prizes,” Mrs. Perrault said lightly. She might have been talking to children. She got to her feet and asked if anyone wanted coffee.

Perrault ignored her. He turned peevishly to Jesse. “I’ll put it to Dr. Vogel. Are you going to be transplanting brains in your lifetime, Dr. Vogel?”

“I suppose so,” Jesse said.

“Will it be so terrible?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because nothing is terrible any longer
. “Because … because it will have to be done … someone will have to do it,” Jesse said.

“Yes, and if not Dr. Vogel, then who?” Perrault said triumphantly. “Who else? I admire your son-in-law, Benjamin, beyond any other man I know. This isn’t flattery. It’s a fact. He has part of my brain right now, memorized in his fingertips. That, too, is a tradition, the old tradition of training, of ritual. It will do for another generation or two. But then—the future—well, the future is going to be very interesting.”

“The future.…” Cady said slowly.

“Yes, we’re making the future very interesting,” Perrault laughed.

Helene was staring across the table at Jesse.