Wonderland (57 page)

“You … you plan on doing that kind of work?” she whispered.

Jesse shrugged his shoulders.

“The brain might be better off without a body,” Perrault said. “It wouldn’t be so distracted then by the senses. It would be pure. Whatever its function might be, it would respond more quickly.”

Helene turned to him. “But why do such a thing?”

“That’s a strange question.”

Helene smiled thinly at him. Jesse could see the strain in her face. “To preserve life at such a cost.… And what kind of life would it be? Your services go to the highest bidder, don’t they?”

“But the highest bidder would be the United States government,” Perrault said, again with that raising of his hands, as if this were all beyond his control. “A great mind doesn’t belong simply to the body it happens to have been born in. It belongs to its culture, its physical and mental environment. Therefore we can say that no man owns himself, no personality owns the brain it inhabits, any more than we can own other people. It’s taken us many centuries to understand that we can’t own other people—I mean, in private life, in private relationships. We are all unique and free. Why, then, should we own ourselves? The government may have a perfect right to demand that certain brains be preserved.”

“Preserved—why?” Helene asked.

“For the good of the nation.”

“And the brains themselves would have no choice about it …?”

“Now, when you talk about
brains
, and not about old-fashioned
personalities
, now you are speaking a language I can understand,” Perrault said politely. “Of course the brains would not have any ultimate decision concerning their own disposal. When you consider the enormous value of the brain of, let’s say, Benjamin Cady, who is worth more than all the computers that exist—his brain is absolutely priceless and could not be discarded because of any whim of his. But I would imagine brains will enthusiastically will themselves to science just as people today will their organs or their entire bodies. The brains will be honored, they will be truly resurrected, the first forms of life on this planet to be really resurrected! Maybe this is what was meant by Christ’s promise to us, or by that teasing little statement:
The Kingdom of God is within you.”

Helene brought her hand to her face. The lights of the chandelier were too bright, and her features looked stark, strained. Her distress communicated itself to Jesse, to his body. “But there isn’t any choice.…” she said.

“There never was any choice about resurrection, was there?” Perrault said with a smile. “Men were judged whether they wanted to be
judged or not. There was no possibility of escape. Why should we be any easier on men? Of course there can’t be any choice. Men live in both health and disease—they die in disease, unless they die suddenly. We could not tolerate a prodigious brain losing its health because of a sentimental attachment to its body. We cling to our bodies even when they are diseased because they are all we have known. We are terrified at the thought of losing them. It’s like the old terror of leaving one world and going to another, taking one’s chances with the next world. But, unlike that old cosmology, the new world—the new body—would always be superior to the old. Guaranteed. So resurrection would be real; you would wake up in paradise. The old body, the old earth: cast away for a true heaven. But first we must educate people out of the vicious sentimentality of loving the body, loving the personality, the personal self, the
soul
, that old illusion.… What is the old self, after all? Only the promise of disease. And disease is antisocial, mortal, private, rebellious, eccentric, unpredictable, useless, unimaginative, unprogressive, uncomely!”

Self-conscious, he let his hands fall in his lap. Jesse had never heard Dr. Perrault speak at such length.

“Disease is private.…” Helene murmured.

“Yes, certainly. And to be utterly free is to be diseased. To go one’s own private way, that is a disease,” Perrault said. “Health is something else entirely—a relaxation of the ego, the self, the name on the card, the name on the birth certificate. Health is in the public domain, it always has been a matter of medical standards and regulations. It’s in the public domain the way outer space is. Inner space and outer space can’t belong to individuals. No brain owns itself; it resides in nature like the atmosphere, it rises out of nature and subsides back into it, and only a panel of scientists is equipped to decide when a superior brain must be taken from its old body.…”

“When it
must
be taken?” Cady said.

“Yes, when it must be taken, when there is no choice about waiting any longer,” Perrault said.

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Helene said. “It’s the same as murder, what you’ve been saying. Yes, it’s the same as murder.” Mrs. Perrault had gone to Helene’s place with a large silver coffee pot, but Helene did not seem to notice her. She was shaking her head, smiling. “You’re sick, a sick man, you’re crazy, you’re a killer, and it’s because
you want to kill that you’ve thought all this out, you and men like you … you know that no one can stop you.…”

“Helene!” Cady cried.

She got to her feet, pushing back her chair. She pressed her hands against her face and pulled at the skin beneath her eyes, a curious, private gesture of utter weariness. Jesse hurried over to her. She turned from him as if she did not know who he was and walked away—toward the rear of the house, staggering. Jesse followed her. “Are you going to be sick?” he whispered. He put his arm around her shoulders and walked with her back to the Perraults’ bathroom—a tiny room with peeling walls and a dull, scuffed linoleum floor. “It’s all right, Helene. We can go home. As soon as you feel better we’ll go home.” His heart was pounding. Helene turned from him, gagging. She swayed. Her swollen stomach looked ripe and fragile to Jesse; he was afraid something terrible would happen to her. “Helene …?” he said. She would not look at him. He wondered if he hated her for what she had said to Perrault and what she was doing to herself and to him—

“Leave me alone. Please,” she said.

“But Helene—”

“Leave me alone!”

He left her. Back in the dining room everyone was standing—these old, aging people with their worried faces. Jesse stared angrily at them. Perrault’s face was reddened. “I’m sorry—” he began.

Jesse nodded abruptly.

He went to the front closet to get Helene’s coat. Perrault followed.

“You’re upset,” he said flatly.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, you’re upset, your wife is very nervous. It’s her condition, isn’t it? This pregnancy?”

“I suppose so.”

“Look at me, please. Look straight at me,” Perrault said.

Jesse looked at him. He was such a short man, frail and meek in his body—Jesse could not think why he feared him so much.

“Do you agree with her?” Perrault said.

Jesse said nothing.

“Your wife’s words, her accusation—do you agree?”

Jesse stared at him and did not reply.

“Then don’t answer. All right. I had invited you tonight for a certain
reason … for a private, personal reason,” Perrault said quickly. His face was very red. “But now … now I … we … We can talk about it some other time.…”

Jesse nodded slowly. His mind was a blank, even his anger and alarm had run down: he felt the terrible, open purity of his brain, which belonged to no one at all.

A week before Jesse’s thirty-first birthday, in October of 1956, his receptionist came back to his office and said, “There’s a young woman who wants to see you. Her name is Rita Smith.”

“Who?”

“Rita Smith. She says it’s very important that she talk with you. She doesn’t have an appointment.”

“No referral?”

“No. She says it’s very important.… I told her you were very busy, but she says she’ll wait, she says you know her.”

Jesse tried to think: did he know anyone named Rita Smith? The name meant nothing to him. Some nervousness, some very slight resentment in the receptionist’s manner made Jesse wonder about this young woman.… Well, he couldn’t resist. He would have to see her.

“Please show her in,” he said politely.

The receptionist brought back Reva Denk.

She came right up to him, leaned over his desk, and shook hands happily. “Dr. Vogel! It’s so nice of you to remember me!” she laughed. She laughed at his surprise, leaning across his large desk with a childlike pleasure at giving surprise. In the sharp sunlight of noon her beauty glared at him.

“You—you came back—You’re here—” Jesse stammered.

“And you remember me,” she said triumphantly.

She stood back as if to give him time to look at her, to assess her. Lowering her gaze, she seemed to be assessing herself. Shorter than he remembered her appearing. More contained, petite. She was wearing high-heeled shoes and a dress of smooth, silky wool, a very light blue. Her hair was tied back from her face in two thick, loose clumps, tied
with ordinary yarn, and it was parted in the middle in a long wavering line. Her face was clean of make-up and looked very young, younger than Jesse recalled. Her skin was smooth and a little shiny, accentuated by the sunlight of noon.

That this woman should come to him at noon!

“But what—how—How did you find me?” Jesse asked.

“I looked you up in the directory. I’ve never forgotten you.”

His heart had begun to pound heavily. He got to his feet, behind the desk—on which were arranged neat piles of letters, files, papers, an entire life, a maze of a life—as if fearful of coming out from behind it, of facing this woman directly. He stared at her face, her mouth. Her smiling mouth. It was artless, pleased, happy. The flash of her gums startled him; he might have glanced at something forbidden.

What was she saying?

Looking around his office. Smiling happily. “This is so high in the air, it’s like being in a tower—up in a castle—up in the air,” she said. “And what are all these things? Diplomas? Do they belong to you, all of them to one person? You? I can’t read that—is that Latin? I don’t know any foreign languages. Ah, what a wonderful place this is, so high up!—do you spend a lot of time standing at the window here, looking at the lake? I’d stand here all the time. I’d let my mind sail out the window and into the lake.…”

He could not follow her words. He was so struck by her—the sudden intimacy of her presence, her being. That slender, lively body, those girlish legs, that head of blond hair now tied into two loose, swishing strands, the gleam of a gold bracelet on one arm, the constant movement of her eyes and lashes.… She was rhythmic, slowly moving, a slow delicate whirl of various shades and shallows of light, the gleam of her eyes, her moist lips, her very white teeth, the whorls of her ears, the pale, almost waxy whorls of her ears, the very tip of her fragile nose confused with the rhythmic whirl and dip of her words. Rises, hollows. The intense glare of the sunlight that seemed to make her skin opaque, poreless, smooth as flesh painted on a canvas. She was turning to him, teasing him, calling him to her. Didn’t he hear her voice beneath that chattering voice calling
Jesse? Jesse?

Or did he imagine her?

He had been imagining her for many months, he had been dreaming and exaggerating her. Along with Helene he had dreamed of Reva:
he had made love to Reva in the form of a husband of Helene’s. Two bodies had come together in love, a pantomime of love, and Jesse had manipulated them from a small sacred hollow somewhere in his own head, chaste and untouched, sending out the nerve impulses of love, wishing that love be made flesh. But the love was in honor of Reva and Jesse.

Now she was here, with him. Unexaggerated. She put out one exploratory hand, not toward Jesse but toward the window, as if drawn by it. Something about the sunlight, the height, the vaporous horizon of the lake and the sky seemed to draw her. She was wearing a gold bracelet that looked primitive, barbaric, a huntress’s armband four or five inches wide. It must have been very heavy on her slight wrist. It was oddly out of proportion to her size.

“That’s very beautiful,” Jesse said quickly. He had to use the word
beautiful
. He had to utter it. “Are you—are you back in Chicago permanently? I tried to call you at that number several times but—”

“Oh, that’s over, you mean that place on the North Side? That’s over. I came back in the winter by myself and lived for a while in New York, and now I’m here for a while—in Chicago—and then I think I’ll be going up to northern Wisconsin.”

“Northern Wisconsin? When?”

“Oh, in a week,” she said lightly.

Jesse stared at her. She was so bright a presence—the color of her dress so brilliant, so supernaturally intense—that he could not concentrate on what was being said. He did not know how important these words were. There were words he had rehearsed in silence:
I am in love with you
. But perhaps she already knew these words.
I want nothing from you
. But now that she was with him, in this room with him, the air between them was agitated and unserious, as if stirred by winds from outside the building, from the autumn sky, and he felt himself smiling slowly, unresisting, giving in, the way Reva was smiling at him.

The intimacy of that smile: they had known each other long ago, perhaps. They were lovers who did not have to hurry about touching each other. They were brother and sister.

“Take me out to lunch,” Reva said suddenly. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Jesse had no time. He could not leave the office, really. But he said at once, “Yes, of course.…”

“I want to walk around and talk to you. I’ve thought of you so
much,” Reva said. “I feel like a sister to you. I feel that we’re in a plot together, you know, a story, after that strange way you looked me up—did you hire a detective to check on me? Did you? Oh, don’t look so worried! It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter how we got to know each other; that belongs in the past. My life at that time belongs in the past, it’s better forgotten—that big, crazy car I took you for a ride in, remember, as if we were in a movie together and had to ride together for five or ten minutes, on film, using up film!—oh, it’s better forgotten, forget it all! I feel so warm toward you, Jesse, and I’m very happy about your success here—because I think you’re doing well in your life, aren’t you?”