Talissa heard no more from Lukas Parn after she had, with a hint of regret, returned the painting. Weeks went by and the need to confide the secret of Seth’s parentage began to feel less acute. Months passed. Nothing happened. On bad days she felt like a character in a film noir who becomes implicated in a crime from whose coils she will never be free; her dreams were soured by impending discoveries of vile deeds she could not remember being part of, but for which she faced the chair.
The best salve was her correspondence with Mary. As they had predicted in Russell Square, the separation of mother and surrogate by the Atlantic was helpful, with Talissa in the role of foreign godmother. Seth, Mary said, was pleasure-seeking and impulsive, with no thought of consequences and no fall-back plans. On his first and only ski trip, he had disappeared off the back of a mountain, leaving Wilson Kalu and his younger sister alone as darkness fell; he had gone sailboarding on a reservoir in south London without a life jacket, regardless of the fact that he had never learned to swim. On the other hand, he had, to everyone’s surprise, been offered a place at an ancient university. Aged seventeen, he had shown an interest in engineering and some aptitude for it. Any shortfall in his exam grades was to be made up for by PIC points connected to his parents, his maintained school and the means by which he had been conceived. In a year’s time, he would apparently be living among ivy-covered quadrangles of old stone and scant sanitation. ‘Of course, Alaric puts it all down to that bloody train set.’
Talissa’s relationship with Mark LaSalle moved into a frictionless phase; she had even taken him to the Appalachians for a week of camping, to which she had become addicted. ‘I’m going to make you my Italian sausage and bean casserole tonight,’ she said. ‘If you play your cards right.’ He had claimed, with a straight face, to enjoy the experience.
The pleasure she took in Mark’s company was genuine, if nothing like the elation she had felt with Felix, who, according to Susan, had gone back to hospital.
‘Leon tells me he’s gone to a different place,’ she said. ‘In Vermont, I think.’
Talissa had messaged Felix regularly, but it had been a long time – almost seven years – since she had seen him. The Massachusetts state facility in which he’d been an inpatient for six months had sounded too grim to visit; then when he was back home in Queens there’d seemed no need. The Vermont place was said to be more cheerful and less dependent on stupefying drugs to keep the patients ticking over.
So one day at semester’s end, she flew to Burlington and took a cab up through the hills, in the direction of Canada. The grey road with its yellow stripe went past logging tracks and painted cowsheds as it ran through the woods. She’d made an appointment with a Dr Ramos, the resident psychiatrist, who was familiar with Felix’s case. The taxi turned down a track between conifers and deposited her outside Greenhills House. In her street clothes, she felt out of place. ‘Too bad I don’t have a milkmaid’s outfit,’ she muttered out loud as she went up some steps into a large building that had been breeze-blocked into the trees, then covered with sawn local timber to give it a more homey, log-cabin feel.
Inside it was like a faltering motel, with no one on reception. Eventually, she was shown down two corridors to an office and asked to wait. She looked out of the back window over a paddock towards some pine woods. The door from the passage swung open and a man in denim work clothes came in. He had grey hair and a round belly, but no toolbox. Talissa smiled up politely. Through his beard he muttered something she didn’t catch. There were two armchairs and a cheap coffee table, on which was a bowl with two apples and a half-finished glass of water. The man lingered, shifting his weight, and coughed. Talissa looked again and saw that it was Felix.
She stood up and gripped his forearms. Felix and not Felix. But he knew her. She could tell by the way he nodded his head. Then the years broke through her. She put her arms round him and began to sob. Christ, Christ, Christ …
He diffidently touched her head.
It took her time to compose herself. Laughing, pushing back the hair from her wet face, she sat down in one of the chairs while Felix took the other.
There was no point in asking him how he was. ‘I heard from Susan you were here,’ she said in the end. ‘Looks like a good place.’
‘I’ve been here a long time.’
‘But you go home to New York when you want.’
‘I do what I like.’
His voice was flat. She looked at the hands that had once thrilled her with their movement in the air, the hands that had held her. The fingers were stained with nicotine.
‘So … I guess your days are peaceful here.’
Felix shook his head. ‘I’ve met a man who has business interests,’ he said. ‘In Arabia. He makes a lot of money.’
‘That’s good. Saudi Arabia? I thought we’d broken off relations.’
‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The sands of Arabia.’
She tried a different tack. ‘Susan and Leon are back together. I think this time it’s for good. Which is just great. They’re so obviously made for each other.’ There was no response. ‘Leon’s such a cutie too. You still see him from time to time?’
‘Yeah.’
‘They have this real nice apartment not far from where I live now. Leon’s mysterious job must be going well. Did you ever understand what he does?’
Felix looked down.
‘Did you know I have a dog? Pelham. He’s a great little guy. He talks to me. Then if I’m staying home and I’ve finished work, we’ll watch a movie together. On the couch.’
‘Right.’
‘He only likes animations, to be honest. He falls asleep in the other stuff.’ She paused. ‘Felix?’
His eyes moved to meet hers.
‘What do you do all day?’
‘My aunt comes to visit. She doesn’t like it if I’m not here. The guy upstairs is a pain in the ass.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s up all night trying to see what’s going on. He has a telescope. He says it’s for looking at the stars.’
Talissa glanced down at the table, the shiny supermarket apples. She could guess how they tasted. She inhaled through the tightness in her chest. Fearless, wasn’t she? Or meant to be. Go on, then.
‘Do you know who I am, Felix?’
‘I’ve told my aunt about him.’
‘You don’t have an aunt, my love. Do you know who I am?’
‘She won’t let me.’
‘Tell me who I am.’
Felix’s face was expressionless as he looked out of the window. ‘I know you.’
Talissa bit her lip. ‘And do you remember … what we were? How we knew each other?’
Seven years, she thought, is not long in the history of love.
He looked back into the room, his eyes on her face for a long minute. But there was no focus in them and he said nothing, until suddenly: ‘I went to Canada once. Drove up from here. We went to a Dippy’s Donuts.’
‘And?’
‘They’d run out of donuts.’
‘That’s Canada for you.’
He said nothing.
After a minute, the silence began to upset her and she felt the tears beginning to rise again. She started to speak, hanging out ideas in the hope that one of them would make him rise.
‘… in the department. Can’t keep going on in the same place. Sometimes I think I might go back to Boston. Ask the Helen Lingard if they’ll take me back. Do you remember coming to see me there?’
‘In Boston?’
‘Yes! We had dinner in the apartment. Shrimp and … something. Salad, I think. It was …’
She looked for an answering light, but he had vanished again into a labyrinth behind the eyes. For him, there was something more urgent than her attempts at conversation.
‘I guess it was a while ago,’ she said softly.
For another five minutes or so, she tried. But the effort was making them both tired and the urge to give in – to let reality take whatever shape it was insisting on – was too great. She hugged him one more time and made her way to the front desk, keeping her eyes fixed on the long, sterile corridor ahead of her.
When she told Susan about the visit, she tried to make it sound positive. She stressed the rural setting and the fresh fruit.
‘Yeah, Leon told me it was the best place on the East Coast,’ said Susan. ‘Not that that’s saying a whole lot, I guess.’
‘He’s lucky to be there. I don’t know who pays for it.’
‘It’s some partnership with a drug company. Felix got onto it through a ballot at the public end. At the big place where he was before.’
‘Has Leon been to see him?’
‘A coupla times. Felix only goes there for a rest. I think it’s a three-month stay. Then he’s meant to manage on his own, back in New York.’
They were eating Chinese food in Talissa’s apartment.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Talissa. ‘I can’t help him. I don’t want to interfere with his life. I’d prefer to let it all fade into history. To keep my memories intact. But I feel sorry for him.’
‘Did he seem sad?’
‘He seemed … flat. It’s hard to say if he feels pain like you and me. You just can’t tell. The shrink said they try not to use strong meds. But occasionally it’s necessary, to flatten out the worst.’
‘And what’s the worst?’ said Susan.
‘Voices. Ideas of persecution. Just, I don’t know, living in another world. A different reality. It seems like a kind of tundra. But with electrical storms.’
They looked at one another over the cardboard cartons on the table. ‘I often think back to what he was like when you first met,’ said Susan, sticking in her chopsticks. ‘He was a bit grandiose even then.’
‘Yeah, but he was in the room. And everyone should be ambitious. I liked that about him.’
‘Plus, he was super-hot,’ said Susan.
‘He was beautiful.’
Talissa thought of his belly and his matted hair.
‘What did the shrink say?’ said Susan. ‘Does he think he might get better?’
‘No, not really. He said it’s like he’s switched onto a different operating system. For good.’
‘Is that all he said?’
‘No. He explained the whole thing, as far as they understand it.’
‘And?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Listen! It’s me you’re talking to!’
Talissa laughed. ‘OK. But this is the bit where I usually tell the kids they can look out the window for a while.’
Dr Ramos had a small office on the first floor. To judge from the view over the woods, it was almost directly above the room where she’d just been with Felix.
With his moustache and his short-sleeved white shirt showing hairy arms, Ramos looked like the professional tennis players she had watched on TV with Felix, one of those guys who hustled in the early rounds but seldom made it to the second week.
‘So, Ms Adam. What did you make of him?’
‘Well … He’s not the man I knew.’
‘I understand,’ said Ramos. ‘And who is he now?’
‘He’s someone else.’
‘It’s what happens. Felix suffers from what in the old days they called schizophrenia.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I can’t tell you about Felix in particular because you’re not his next of kin.’
‘But in general?’
‘Our brains carry the potential to switch programs. Like a computer that decides of its own accord to suddenly change and run on a different operating system.’
‘Why does it do that?’
Ramos laughed. ‘We don’t know.’
‘Even roughly?’ said Talissa.
‘Ripple dissolve …’ said Ramos, making a wave motion with his fingers. ‘Let’s go back two hundred years. All sorts of people they call “lunatics” are first gathered in these huge asylums. Each state has one. Among these thousands, the doctors can make out an interesting group. What in Latin they call—’
‘I don’t speak Latin.’
‘OK, what they call “young madness”. Hits you around twenty or twenty-one years old.’
‘Felix was older than that.’
‘I know. Unusual, but not unheard of. Anyway. You hear loud voices, but there’s no one in the room. You become convinced that there are powerful but secret systems running the world. You’re their plaything. They read your thoughts and broadcast them to the world. That kind of thing. You’re persecuted. Often you’re driven to kill yourself.’
‘Right.’
‘Then in about 1910 some Swiss guy stops calling it young madness and christens it schizophrenia.’
‘Does it really matter what it’s called? It’s a thing, right?’
‘Sure it matters. That word implies your mind is split in two. But it’s the exact opposite. Felix’s thoughts and beliefs are far more unified than ours. We can see both sides and change our mind. He never can. So the wrong name leads to a century of misunderstanding.’
‘But what causes it in the first place?’
‘Fast-forward now.’
‘We’re through with the ripple dissolve?’
‘Yup. Fast-forward to about 1960. We have a primitive grasp of genetics. Looks like this thing runs in families. At least, if a parent or aunt has it, you’re much more likely to get it. So off go the lab guys to try to finger the guilty gene, or combination of genes. They draw a blank over decades. Genetics is still rough and ready. Anyway, there’s a hitch. In identical twins, one may get it and one doesn’t. So it’s not just genetic. There must be a secondary cause.’
‘Like what?’
‘Life. Experience. Stuff that happens to you. Especially what junk you throw into your system. Drink, drugs and so on. Seems they can flip the switch and make your brain change program. Provided you already have that predisposition.’
‘Complicated,’ said Talissa.
‘Fast-forward again. With better genetics they discover a lot of the so-called identical twins were not actually identical, but fraternal. Just looked alike.’
‘So it is genetic after all?’
‘No. The Nazis murdered all the Germans who had it. That should have eradicated it. But by thirty years after the war, it was back to pre-Nazi levels. Higher, in fact.’
‘So then what?’
‘Well, there’s a long, long civil war between the biological guys who still say it’s basically a thing like multiple sclerosis, like a little blister forming in the brain. But instead of sitting on the brain cells that regulate the movement of your legs and arms, it forms on the cells that control your thoughts. I’m putting this quite crudely, but—’
‘Crude’s good.’
‘Meanwhile, the other camp say: No, it’s all to do with life experience and we need to listen to what these patients say. Their stories, the things they tell you, they’re not just neural exhaust, or nonsense: they’re an attempt to explain their world. Then it becomes political. Democrats go with the life-experience theory – bad housing, street drugs, immigration – Republicans with the genetic, God’s curse, tough luck and so on. Roughly.’
‘Politicians are not scientists. Can we fast-forward again?’
‘OK. Let’s go to 2025. The human genome’s fully mapped. Now genome-wide surveys begin to identify a few of the genes common to the sufferers. But there are hundreds of them! And maybe many more to come. This coincides with a complete loss of faith in diagnostic categories.’
‘How come?’
‘The professional bodies in charge of psychiatry give out this handbook to us doctors. There’s a ten-point test for this disease. To receive the diagnosis, a patient needs to have exhibited a minimum of five of the symptoms acutely in the last six months. So two people can be diagnosed with the same illness without sharing a single symptom.’
‘Sounds a bit of a—’
‘Clusterfuck? By 2030, they’ve ditched almost all the labels. There is simply a long spectrum of madness, from Mrs Happy, at one end, to Mr Life-in-a-Back-Ward at the other. But the difference is only quantitative. Think of a one-to-a-hundred scale. I’m about an eight. I have some low moods that are unrelated to my life circumstances. A couple of irrational phobias. I’d guess you’re about a five. Felix is a ninety.’
‘But what about all the advances in brain scanning and so on? Surely they must have helped?’
‘Not much,’ said Ramos. ‘As long ago as 2035 we could map the whole brain and its hundred billion neurons. But mapping’s one thing. Understanding what the hell’s going on there will take another maybe fifty years. Minimum.’
‘And meanwhile we’re all crazy.’
‘Pretty much. You buy a car off the lot. The chassis is fine. The wheels don’t fall off. But the new stuff, the stuff that hasn’t had time to bed in … Oh boy. Sure as hell the fancy electronic warning systems will go wrong, it’s just a question of when. Young madness or old madness. Youthful dementia, like your Felix, or senile dementia, like half the population.’
‘And why are we like this?’
‘It’s who we are. It’s our special frailty. In the genes. No other primate has it. Mind you, no other primate walked on the moon. So maybe it’s our special power too.’
When the cab eventually came to collect her from Greenhills, Talissa had an urge to ask the driver to go the other way – not to the modern airport with its sweating departure gates, but north into the woods.
At work, she’d battled against the temptations of a certain way of thinking, in which impulses and thoughts were allowed to go where they wanted, regardless of logic. Her occasional recourse to this mindful but unstructured state was one reason why she’d given up trying to rationalise what she’d seen twenty years ago in a closed room of a derelict chateau in Brittany. A man, a kind of man: of her species, or possibly of another. Or an illusion. Perhaps even a delusion, of the kind Felix suffered. She found it impossible to know. And she was aware that each revisit altered the memory a little. The more she scratched at it, the more she reshaped the outline.
It was ceasing to matter to her, because she was content to embrace uncertainties without always reaching after reason and fact. This response was ‘unscientific’, said her professional conscience. But according to most philosophers she knew, or had heard of, to be contentedly unsure was the mark of a mature mind – because only small intellects are frightened of the unresolved.
As Talissa leant back against the car upholstery, she closed her eyes and let her mind wander.
She saw the scene that Lukas Parn had briefly invoked. A Neanderthal settlement somewhere on the Asian steppe. Fifty thousand years ago. To this, she began to add detail from her own knowledge …
A dignified and hardy people, hunters with a sense of family and group. A dozen or so in this one. Ready to move over the landscape, to follow food or shelter, but fixed in ritual: people who care for their young and bury their dead among flowers. A form of speech, uttered loudly, sometimes in a high voice at odds with the deep chest from which it comes. A palisade, some shelters made from dried hides stretched over sharpened wooden poles. Dead animals butchered by honed flints and roasted on fires, then passed around. Marrow scraped from the cracked bones. A way of life that hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years: a people resilient through earth-altering changes of climate and landscape. A hardy human species persevering in a just habitable niche.
Then a shout from the edge of the palisade. A small group is seen approaching in the dusk. What are these creatures, these people who seem new yet familiar?
They come closer in the dying light, three female, four male, in animal furs. Their hands are bare and open, with no weapons. They are all smiling. Why? As they come closer, it’s clear they are humans, nothing to be frightened of – though they are a little taller, narrower, with darker skin on their limbs and faces. They seem tired from travelling. To take in more air, they use their mouths because their nose openings are so small.
It’s not their size or their strength that makes them daunting. The local men could fight and kill them easily. It’s something else they have. They will never not take what they want. If it needs a day or a month or a lifetime. They’re driven by a force the older people cannot match. It’s pointless to deny them.
At this moment, as the winds begin to howl, it seems that lust is destiny. The strangers enter the corral and take the offered food, the women with their breasts hanging free of their coverings, the agile, smiling men tearing flesh from a bone with their teeth … In all the local females there is the clamour of desire.
Eventually one of the new men comes, sated with food, still smiling. In a dark corner, by a tree, he chooses a mate, puts his hands on her breast, then pushes the fur he is wearing to one side so she can see it, holding itself up, away from him, like a craning creature of its own desire. She kneels and spits on it, moves the saliva up and down with her mouth, her fingers, to prepare it. He spreads the cleft of her apart, kneels and laps it like an ox before he pushes in. Soon there’s so much pressure on the part of her that wants it most that she’s reduced to nothing but a point of fire.
She’ll move onward with them, when the sun comes up, and leave what she’s known behind. Tomorrow and the next day, these nights of giving in, the fall.