For hours, days, years perhaps, I was a trapped in a dream, slowly suffocating. Sensations, when they came, were muted, distant, less as if I was experiencing them and more as if someone else experiencing them was describing them to me. I could feel my mouth and sometimes the lids of my eyes, but when I moved my hands and fingers, it was as if I were moving them through a liquid just as resistant as they were and feeling nothing at all.
Something in my head still nags me, and I will not look too closely at it. Now that I can see things, can feel things again around and outside me, why would I turn my gaze inward?
I have all the usual appendages. I am doubly legged and doubly armed, just as I remembered. My face does not look exactly as I remember it looking, and this perhaps is due to my having dreamt too long. I am not certain what has been done to me. I do not remember this body as my body, and my movements within it are clumsy and ill-remembered. But it is the only body I have.
My last memories, the last clear ones anyway, were of something else, another body, another place. Or not another body exactly since it was so close to this one, a near-copy of it. I was being led to the tablature by my twin, or I was leading my twin to the tablature—something is unclear on that score. I was taking Unnr—unless it was Uttr I was taking and I was Unnr and then . . .
That’s odd. Surely I know who I am? And yet both names sound familiar to me, as if I could wear either or both at once.
Something is quite wrong.
“Monitor,” I said, “am I Unnr or am I Uttr?”
Move closer to the aperture and raise your head, said the monitor.
I did so, and held still. It observed me for a long time.
The question cannot be answered in these terms, it said. Please rephrase.
I thought for a moment. “Am I Unnr?” I asked. “Yes or no.”
No, it said without hesitation.
“I am Uttr, then,” I said.
No.
No? Something was wrong with the monitor. It was malfunctioning, unable to apprehend the information coming through its aperture. The aperture, I saw, regarding it more closely, had become scratched somehow.
I could feel a pressure in my head. I ignored it.
“Where is Unnr?” I asked.
Dead, it said.
“And Uttr?”
Dead.
“Then,” I said, wondering even as I asked if it was in fact a question it was wise to ask, “who am I?”
You do not have a name, it said. You have only a letter, the next letter in the sequence. The one who came before you could think of no name to give you, and he saw no point in the end to giving you a name at all. He failed in his purpose, insofar as that purpose was to give you a name.
“What is my letter?”
X.
And yet I have no knowledge of X, none at all. I remember myself as Uttr, or Unnr, or, sometimes, a strange combination of the two, as if somehow the personality of one of us has become mixed or confused or partially overwritten with the personality of the other. I have no memory of the pair starting with V that must have followed me, followed Uttr, or Unnr. Or of the pair starting with W that must have followed them. Or of the other X that must have come along with me, with this body, for we always come in pairs.
“And Tore?” I asked the monitor. “And Ture?”
Dead, it said.
“Recently?” I asked.
No, it said.
Perhaps I am neither Unnr nor Uttr but am someone else after all, someone later, as the monitor suggests. Or perhaps the monitor is broken. I can see on the floor around it small pieces of plastic that have been chipped from its casing, and a large scratch is on the screen. If it shows signs of wear on the outside, would not its inner systems show wear as well? Which is more likely, that my memories are faulty or that something is wrong with the monitor?
No, I cannot think myself as other than a U. It does not matter what the truth is. What matters is how it feels.