Daniel James
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none.151
I couldn’t claim to be losing time. There were no obvious gaps in my memory. It was more like driving a familiar route on autopilot. I had travelled from A to B without thinking about it; almost without experiencing it. A passenger in my own body, moving from one non-place to another, from one anonymous, global, homogenised city to the next, and everything – every airport terminal, every train station – was beginning to look the same. I was several floors below street level, navigating through a maze of endless hallways, my feet sliding across frictionless floors, my face reflected again and again in the steel and glass surfaces; the sound of my footsteps absorbed by cold, angular concrete pillars; the same garish fronts and food franchises cycling past my eyes on repeat. A kaleidoscope of late capitalism. Dazed, I joined the end of a long, snaking, line of people with suitcases that eventually brought me to a glass booth. A portly man looked back at me from behind the screen. Thankfully it wasn’t my reflection. He had a ruddy complexion and a faintly ridiculous pencil moustache. He spoke. I replied. Clearly, a transaction was taking place, but I wasn’t really listening. I wasn’t really there.
‘In what denominations?’ the cashier asked, as if he’d already had to repeat himself more than once.
I paused to give it some thought, trying to calculate how much cash I might need for the next couple of days.
‘Forgive me, sir,’ he interrupted, ‘but can I give you some advice?’
‘Okay?’ I replied, unsure where this was going.
‘No one will take you seriously in Zurich if you don’t have 100-franc bills in your wallet,’ he said, with what I felt was an unnecessary amount of smugness.
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes sir. At a minimum.’
Clearly, I was about to enter a city where appearances were important. Later, as the tram rocked back and forth gently, carrying me through the city centre, I took out one of the blue, 100-franc notes and examined it. Alberto Giacometti152 looked back at me. It felt like a sign, seeing his face on the banknote. Another artist who had tried to render reality by stripping his work of all illusions. The interior of the tram was like a vision of the future as seen through the lens of 1982, neon strip light, metallic blue and orange tubing. It made me feel like a tourist in an alternate future; a city that never was.
Later that night, I ate dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Escher Wyss district of the city. Inside, the bamboo bar, jungle foliage, and ceiling fans whirring like helicopter blades, gave the place a suitably ‘last days of Saigon’ feel. They even had a cocktail named the ‘Russian Roulette’. My dinner guest, Lina, worked as a mid-level administrative manager at The Zweites Leben Institute. I planned to find out as much as I could about her employer over dinner and drinks.
While I was at the bar ordering cocktails, my mobile began to vibrate soundlessly. I looked at the display. Private number.
‘You’re wasting your time with her.’
The same anonymous voice as before. Just like the night I took the call that changed everything. I looked over at my table. Lina smiled back at me.
‘I don’t like being followed,’ I said.
My eyes scanned the restaurant for someone watching me. A young couple looked in my direction. A waiter met my gaze for a moment, then turned away. Outside, a woman smoking glanced over her shoulder at me briefly. It could have been any of them, or no one.
‘When you get to the Institute tomorrow, ask to see a patient called Jane D.’
The line went dead.
I had asked Ariane to create a cover identity ahead of my visit to the Institute. A British businessman, with a troubled daughter, who was wealthy enough to merit a private tour. I had planned the whole thing as a reconnaissance op, information gathering only at this stage, but my anonymous client clearly had a different approach in mind. It was a risk to walk in there as myself and ask for Jane, but money talked, and my employers had spared no expense so far. The question was, could I trust them, or was I walking into a trap?
* * *
The Institute felt like a vast, dated mansion where only a handful of people lived, all dressed the same, all dead behind the eyes. I was being escorted through the cold, featureless corridors by a representative from the hospital’s professional support staff. We didn’t have to worry about disturbing any of the patients; their gaze was turned inward. They didn’t even seem to notice each other. A male patient in his thirties shuffled past us, barely able to support his own weight, a woman stared into space halfway through decorating a door, her hand sunk wrist-deep in powder blue, while outside the window a huge man with a shaven head was cutting the grass with a smile fixed on his face.
‘The director apologises that he isn’t able to escort you personally,’ my escort explained. ‘He has back-to-back meetings this morning and will be tied up until the afternoon.’
‘Not literally I hope?’
My attempt at humour met with an icy look from the orderly, who kept walking. We saw so few people that it seemed to distort the interior of the hospital even further, making the rooms feel cavernous, and the corridors telescopic. Everything felt unreal. It wasn’t just the emptiness. It was a feeling in the air. The decor looked wrong, like a television set from the 1980s, all pastel plastics and cheap wood panelling. We stopped at an elevator and stepped inside when the doors parted. Jane D’s room was on the third floor. The lift juddered upwards and stopped abruptly, the light inside the compartment flickering off and on. An alarm sounded. My escort’s face drained of colour.
‘Problems?’ I asked.
He tapped the button for the third floor repeatedly.
‘You’re not claustrophobic, are you?’ I added.
‘It’s not that,’ he replied, clearly agitated, as the lift began to move again. ‘The alarm isn’t for the lift. It’s for the secure unit upstairs.’
The doors opened to chaos. There was a crowd of people, patients and staff, pushing and shoving in the corridor, blocking our view of whatever was going on at the other end.
‘Wait here’, the orderly said, but I ignored him and followed instead, letting him clear a path through the bodies.
People were screaming. An orderly came out of one of the rooms, turned away from us, and threw up violently. Two nurses stood in the doorway, their clothes smeared with blood. There were voices coming from inside. I strained to see past them into the room, but I couldn’t. The alarm continued to wail.
‘There’s blood everywhere…’ I heard someone say.
‘How did this happen?’
‘The room was locked.’
‘It looks like an animal got in there…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Is that Jane’s room?’ I asked.
‘How did she do it?’
‘Keep him away,’ an angry voice said.
‘Who?’ someone replied.
‘The journalist,’ the voice snapped. ‘Get him the fuck out of here.’
A male orderly appeared through the crowd and herded me back into the elevator. As the doors closed, I could see blood seeping out from the cell and into the hall. They kept me waiting in an empty office for an hour-and-a-half, while the authorities arrived, and the body was removed. When the director finally came to see me, there was a spot of blood on his shirt collar.
‘Everything I’m about to say to you is off-the-record…’ he began. ‘Officially, we’re not having this conversation.’
‘Jane is dead,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he replied, adjusting his glasses.
‘How?’
‘We don’t know yet, but we’re treating it as suicide.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ve checked the CCTV footage. Jane was alive when she returned to her room after her morning session. No one has been in or out since. Not until a routine check just after 11am. That’s when the alarm was sounded.’
‘You don’t think it’s strange that she ends up dead before I could talk to her?’ I said.
‘Let’s not jump to conclusions, Mr James. If you want an official statement, you’ll have to contact the Institute’s corporate communications office in Geneva. As I said earlier, this conversation isn’t really happening.’
‘I don’t want a statement, I want the truth.’
I took my hand out of my pocket and held up my phone to show him I was recording our conversation. His face drained of the little colour it had left.
‘Please…’ he stammered.
‘If you want me to keep my mouth shut you’re going to have to give me something. I want in that room.’
STATEMENT / PATIENT 1263 / JANE D153 7/10/11 09;43
There is a name I know as well as my own. A name that has always been there on the edge of my consciousness, like a figure stood forever on my periphery, but who vanishes when I turn to look. It is the name of the man who ruined my life.
I’m four years old. A salesman type with the kind of moustache you only saw in the 1980s comes to our front door. He wears a brown suit, beige shirt, maroon tie, and carries a leather suitcase. We all sit at the dining table. I climb onto my mother’s knee and put my arms around her neck. The suitcase has a gold combination lock. I watch as the man fumbles with it impatiently. He tries one combination, then another and another, becoming more frustrated with each failed attempt. In my mind, the numbers dance. The man looks up and smiles. He turns the suitcase around and slides it across the table to me. I release my grip on my mother’s neck and with my little fingers and thumbs open the lock at the first attempt.
‘How did–?’ my mother asks.
The man smiles at her as if she’s just observed that the sky is blue for the first time.
‘Your daughter has a way with numbers,’ he says.
He was right, for all the good it did me. I’m twenty-two years old and I’m spending my birthday under twenty-four-hour watch. It’s reassuring in a way, knowing that someone is always there watching you, even when you’re asleep. I didn’t know it at first, but people were watching me my whole life. This room with its two-way mirror and its CCTV is my life in miniature; a microcosm. It’s nothing new. Jane Doe at the mercy of the all-seeing eye. Only I’m never safe, because what the orderlies don’t know is this: they can get me anywhere. Concrete walls and locked doors can’t stop them. Nothing can.
I’m nine years old. The man with the moustache returns. He’s older. His hair flecked with grey. The last time he was here, he took out a painting from his suitcase and asked me to tell him what I saw. He talked for a long time with my parents, but I only remember two words from their conversation – ‘Ezra Maas’. There was something unusual about the artwork. It was like looking at a still image from a dream. The colours were out of sync, contrary to what my mind was expecting to see somehow, almost shifting before my eyes in a way that suggested a strange kind of repeating pattern. There were numbers dancing in my mind as I looked at the colours, but I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. I said nothing, and the man left, disappointed.
In the five years since that day I had struggled with everyday things, from making friends and talking to people, to brushing my teeth without the sound causing me to have a panic attack, or becoming enraged unless all the labels were cut from my clothes. My parents thought I was being difficult, that I was trouble, but I couldn’t control it. I hated myself for disappointing them. They took me to a child psychologist who asked me the same questions over and over, but I didn’t understand how to respond, or what he wanted to know. It all seemed to start when I was four, looking at that painting. Now the man was back.
He talks to my parents, as if I’m not there, telling them about a place for special children where they can be cared for by trained professionals, and where children with unique gifts can be nurtured in a safe, inclusive, environment. My parents tell me they are very proud of me as they pack my suitcase and pocket the cheque the man gives them. As we walk to the car, the man introduces himself.
‘You don’t have to be scared, Jane. Not anymore. Not ever. You’re one of us now.’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘Good. My name is Malcolm and we’re going to a special place.’
We drive for hours, first along motorways then onto dark country roads, which twist and turn, where no signs can be seen, and the car headlights illuminate only a few feet in front of us. I hear the crunch of gravel beneath the tyres as we slow to a stop. Through the window I spy a series of concrete buildings, surrounded by open fields and acres of woodland.
‘This doesn’t look like a hospital.’
I watch Malcolm’s eyes in the rear-view mirror.
‘You don’t need a hospital, Jane. Your parents think you’re sick,’ he says. ‘But you’re not.’
‘Then what am I?’
‘That’s what we’re here to find out.’
We get out of the car and walk across the gravel towards one of the buildings. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The sky on the horizon is pale blue and streaked with burning embers. There are children of different ages working on the estate, performing a variety of menial jobs. They all wear the same grey sweatshirts and jogging bottoms, with plain white trainers. They avert their eyes from us as if they’re scared of making eye contact and getting into trouble.
‘What is this place?’ I ask.
‘You’ll see.’
What Malcolm describes as ‘orientation’ lasts more than six hours. All of my personal belongings are taken from me, including my clothes. I’m given the same grey marl outfit as everyone else and am interviewed by four different members of staff. Every time they begin with the same question.
‘What is the worst thing you have ever done in your life?’
They call it the Foundation. That’s where we are. There are no clocks here. No televisions. No phones. No newspapers. It’s hard to keep track of time. I make tiny scratches on the steel leg of my bed in the shared dormitory to mark the days. Each day we’re assigned a daily timetable of tasks from 6am onwards. Scrubbing toilets, painting walls and fences, cleaning floors, the list of tedious chores and tasks goes on and on. We work until midnight unless we’re on the night shift. They watch you constantly and all the children are terrified to do anything else but obey. One day I decide to stop. I let the mop fall to the floor and make no effort to pick it up. A female supervisor walks over to me aggressively.
‘What’s the problem here?’
‘I was just wondering, if we’re so special, why are we doing such menial work?’
‘Do you think you’re too good for this?’
‘I know I am.’
The woman’s eyes widen then fill with rage, but I’m not afraid. Malcolm appears and steps between us before it can escalate. It’s just as well. My fists are clenched tightly and I’m ready to fight.
‘Come with me,’ he says.
We walk through the corridors of the Foundation together.
‘Manual work is a form of meditation,’ he says. ‘It clears the mind and leaves space for ideas to manifest.’
‘You didn’t come to my house to test whether I could mop floors.’
‘You’re more perceptive than you know, but your rebellious nature could limit your opportunities here. If you can control that side of you, there is greater work to be done.’
We walk past a series of rooms. There are people kneeling and praying in front of a flickering TV screen. In other rooms, children are kept in isolation, in total and complete darkness or in stark, permanent light, unable to sleep; in others they are subjected to the same song, played on a loop twenty-four hours a day.
‘Each of us enters the Foundation blind,’ Malcolm says. ‘We see only what they want us to see. The lies must be burned away. Do you understand?’
We keep walking until we reach a huge hall filled with children working at computer terminals. There is a large screen on the wall that appears to show mathematical equations. The numbers are changing constantly as if they are responding in real-time to the key strokes of the children at the terminals. I recognise some of the equations – Euler’s Identity154 expressed as eiπ + 1 = 0.
‘This isn’t a school is it?’
‘No, it’s not,’ Malcolm smiles.
I look up at the equations, shapes and colours flashing before my eyes. I can see Boolean algebra, Euler–Lagrange equations, Noether’s theorem, and more.
‘What problem are you trying to solve?’ I ask.
‘The problem of life,’ he replies.
I’m eighteen years old. My first year at Oxford. Everyone asks me if it’s a dream come true to be here, but it’s not. I escaped two years ago and started a new identity, using my talent for computers to erase myself and start again, but I can’t stop looking over my shoulder. I’m haunted by the feeling that they’re still controlling me; that they had allowed me to leave and the life I’m living now is all part of their plan for me.
I’m back at the Foundation, aged fifteen. My first kiss is with a girl called Heather. She’s a few years older than me and has been here since she was six. She sometimes supervises the room where I work on the equations, but there is something different about her, a fire in her eyes. I enjoy the way she looks at me and how I feel whenever she enters the room. She takes my hands in hers one day when no one is looking. Touching is strictly forbidden. It was a signal, her way of letting me know I wasn’t imagining this feeling. I can’t sleep that night for excitement.
We talk in stolen moments, in secret places, often huddled together, whispering in the dark. She tells me things about the Foundation from before I arrived, and asks me questions about my work. Her talent is her understanding of words rather than numbers, so she doesn’t get to see the equations. Heather says the Foundation believes language to be dangerous, a tool for lies and deceit. They plan to create a new language that will reveal the names beneath the names of things. I asked her if she’s ever heard the words ‘Ezra Maas’. For the first time Heather looks frightened.
‘We’re not supposed to talk about him,’ she says.
I was older than most of the new inductees when I first came to live at the Foundation. They had made an exception for me in this regard, and I was expected to be grateful. There were teenagers here who had first arrived as babies with their parents. They couldn’t remember anything before this place. It was their whole world. They had no knowledge other than what they had been taught by the Foundation, nothing except what they were allowed to know. And while the education appeared to be of a high standard, only authorised and heavily sanitised books and media were allowed into the Foundation. There were computers, but no internet access. The Foundation had its own software and it was on a closed network, much like the compound itself. Adults like Malcolm were able to come and go at will, it seemed, and some of the older, most trusted teenage members of the Foundation were able to leave for a few hours to carry out specific tasks. Heather was one of those allowed to leave.
‘There are special rules for those of us who are able to go outside of the compound,’ she tells me in a terrified whisper. ‘No cinemas, newspapers, television, no socialising with outsiders, no restaurants, no sports, no talking about the Foundation. If you don’t comply you’re excommunicated, and then you’ll never see your family again.’ Heather told me there had been suicides at the Foundation before, mental breakdowns and worse. She said a whole family had been murdered once because the father wanted to save them from the horrors of the world. Heather warned me of an initiation ritual for senior members inducted into the inner circle. It involved the screening of a special orientation film, reportedly created by Maas himself. She said that the people who saw it were never the same afterwards.
I’m twenty-two years old and back in my padded cell. After an incident on campus the University is forced to let me go. I find myself sectioned after throwing a brick through the window of an art gallery, and threatening staff with a steel bar. The doctor talks about me as if I’m not there, recounting my sad story to a trio of young medical students who stare at me through the glass. Their curious eyes studying my paralysed features like I’m a museum exhibit. This summer’s newest attraction, the taxidermied girl. The joy of Clozapine.
“The subject is mortally afraid of her own mental state, which is like being afraid of your own shadow. There is no escape. She has invented a complex fantasy world where all of her problems have been caused by a fictitious organisation which abducted her from her parents as a child.”
They’ll know the truth soon enough. The Foundation will come for me. I’ve too much knowledge in my head, too many secrets. They need the numbers for his plan, but I won’t tell them. They’ll have to kill me first.
I’m sixteen years old and I’m in love. Heather can’t bring anything back from the outside, not physically at least, so she brings me stories. And not just about the world, but from books. Heather goes to the library and memorises line after line, page after page, of the most beautiful words. She fell in love with literature, and I fell in love with her. There were times when I could barely see her in the dark, but her disembodied voice, sensual, calm, and clear, could find me anywhere. It was Heather who got me out. I still remember the feeling as we ran through the woods, faster and faster, our feet moving so quickly, so lightly, we barely made a sound, the dawn light flickering between the trees like we were figures inside a Zoetrope. But when I turned to look for Heather, she wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t understand. I stood there for a long time, in the cold morning air, listening to my own breathing, waiting for a sign that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t crazy, but the woods were empty and silent.
I tried to start a new life, but I wasn’t sure why. Everything happened in a jumble after that, time skipping back and forth. My life flashing before my eyes, just as Heather and I had run through the trees. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. All I knew were numbers. In the end, that knowledge saved me. I hacked the system. Somehow within two years I had a new name, a part-time job, and I had been accepted to University to study mathematics. It didn’t last. It couldn’t. That life was a lie.
I’m twenty-two years old and they’re handing me a paper cup full of pills. I’m eleven and I’m devising a new kind of mathematical equation for the Foundation. I’m sixteen years old and Heather’s fingertips are touching my cheek in the dark. She catches a tear and doesn’t let it fall. We’re in the forest together once more, running for our lives, she presses something into my hand, a memory stick, just before she disappears.
I’m three years old and I’m playing in the garden. It is a whole twelve months before I will hear the name Ezra Maas; before my life will be ruined forever. I know my parents love me as surely as I know the warmth of the sun. I’ve no reason to doubt one day it will all change. Sometimes I think this was the happiest day of my life, but it’s not. The happiest days were in the darkness with Heather, listening to the sound of her voice. I realise now how to escape. I know a place where even they can never find me. The doctors and the students go away. The surveillance cameras freeze. This is when they will come for me, in the moment between moments. I hear footsteps. The Foundation is here. I know they are. The shadows in my room grow darker. A deep and endless black, filled with ugly spirits, and when it has me, I will be lost in space, falling forever and ever. There is no escaping your own shadow, but I won’t let them have my soul, no matter what happens to my body. I’m taking my secrets with me, down into the dark, and I’m not afraid – because wherever I go her voice is with me.
END155
Notes
151. The Book of Ecclesiastes 1.16.
152. The surrealist sculptor and artist’s face adorns the Eighth design of the 100-franc note in Switzerland, first issued in 1998 and still in circulation today.
153. Note to reader: The following statement is based on a handwritten testimony recovered by Daniel from the room of Jane D, a patient at the Zweites Leben Institute in Zurich. According to his notes, he found it hidden between the mattress and metal bed frame in Jane’s room. While transcribing her handwritten note, Daniel has clearly taken the testimony and adapted it into a narrative, with dialogue and descriptive passages. Whether these elements were part of Jane’s original note, or not, is unknown – Anonymous.
154. Euler’s Identity has been described as the most beautiful equation in Mathematics. It stems naturally from interactions of complex numbers which are numbers composed of two pieces: a real number and an imaginary number.
155. Note to reader: Jane told a compelling story, but was that all it was? A story? She was being treated for suspected schizophrenia and her file gave a very different account of her life and background, describing a happy childhood before the onset of psychotic episodes in her teens, culminating in a nervous breakdown while she was in her first year of mathematics at Oxford. Her file said she had reported hearing voices at a young age and she had told doctors she could communicate with numbers. She appeared to have developed an obsession with Maas after seeing one of his artworks as a child, and came to believe there were hidden messages in his paintings. Daniel appears to have thought Jane’s testimony was important enough to include in his final version of the manuscript. Whether he believed her or not is another matter, and a question we will never know the answer to – Anonymous.