THIRTEEN

When I first won the lottery, and realized that athanasia was mine for the taking, I had tried to imagine what the clinic on Collago would be like. I visualized a gleaming glass-and-steel sky scraper, filled with modern medical equipment, and doctors and nurses moving about the shining corridors and wards with purpose and expertise. Relaxing in the landscaped gardens would be the new immortals, perhaps reclining in bath chairs with blankets over their legs and cushions behind their heads, while orderlies wheeled them to admire the profusion of flowerbeds. Somewhere there would be a gymnasium, where rejuvenated muscles would be exercised; perhaps there would even be a university, where newly acquired wisdom could be disseminated.

The photographs I saw in the office in Muriseay made literal whatever imaginings I might have had. These I had reacted against: the smiling faces, the saturated colours, the blatant attempt to sell me something I had already unwittingly purchased. The clinic, as depicted in the brochure, looked as if it would be somewhere between a health farm and a ski-resort, with physical well-being, exercise and social intercourse predominating.

The ways of the Archipelago were always surprising me, though, for I found none of this. The brochure was a lie, but only in the way all brochures are lies. Everything in the pictures was there to be seen, although the faces were different and now there was no photographer to be smiling for, but when I saw the place for myself everything seemed subtly different. Brochures, by omission, encourage you to bring your own wishes to what you do not see. I had assumed, for instance, that the clinic was in open countryside, but this was the product of careful choice of photographic angle, because it was on the very edge of Collago Town itself. Then I had thought that the gardens and chalets and antiseptic corridors were all there was of the place, but the pictures had not shown the central administrative building. This, an incongruous, dark-brick mansion, loomed over the tastefully spaced wooden chalets. That the interior of the place had been gutted, modernized and equipped with advanced medical facilities I discovered later, but the first sight of the old house gave one an oddly sinister feeling; it had the quality of moor and wind to it, as if it had been transplanted from some romantic melodrama of the past.

We had been met from the ship by a modern minibus operated by the clinic. A driver had stacked our baggage in the back of the vehicle, while a young woman, wearing the Lotterie uniform, took a note of our names. As I guessed, my five fellow passengers had not realized I was one of them. While we drove up the hilly streets of Collago Town, there was an almost palpable sense that Seri and I were interlopers in a private party.

Then we came to the clinic grounds, and our first sight of the place. The incongruities registered themselves, but what I noticed most was how small it was.

“Is this all there is?”‘ I said quietly to Seri.

“What do you want, a whole town?”

“But it seems so small. No wonder they can only treat a few people at a time.”

“The capacity’s nothing to do with size. It’s the manufacture of the drugs which is the problem.°’

“Even so, where’s the computer, where do they keep all the files?”

“It’s all done here, as far as I know.”

“But the clerical work alone…”

It was a minor distraction, but my weeks of self-questioning had given me the habit of doubt. Unless there were more premises elsewhere, the Lotterie-Collago could not operate on its pan-national scale from this place. And the tickets would have to be printed somewhere; the Lotterie would hardly subcontract the work, with all the risk of fraud.

I wanted to ask Seri, but I suddenly felt I should be careful what I said. The bus we were in was tiny, the seats crammed close together. The uniformed young woman, standing at the front beside the driver, was not showing much interest in us but she would be in easy hearing of me if I spoke in normal tones.

The bus drove around to the far side of the house; on this side there were apparently no more outbuildings. The gardens stretched away for some distance, blending imperceptibly with wild ground beyond.

We alighted with the other people and went in through a doorway. We passed through a bare hall and went into a large reception area at the side. Unlike the other people I was carrying my luggage: the holdall, which I slung over my shoulder. My five fellow passengers were now subdued, for the first time since I had noticed them, apparently overawed by the fact that they had finally entered the very building where they would be made to live forever. Seri and I hung back from the rest, near the door. The young woman who had met us at the harbour went behind a desk placed to one side.

“I need to verify your identities,” she said. “Your local Lotterie office has given you a coded admission form, and if you would now give this to me I will assign you your chalets. Your personal counsellor will meet you there.”

A minor upheaval followed, as the other passengers had left their forms in their baggage, and had to retrieve them. I wondered why the girl had not said anything on the bus; and I noticed the bored, sour expression she wore.

I took the opportunity to go forward first and identify myself. My admission form was in one of the pouches on the side of my bag, and I laid it on the desk in front of her.

“I’m Peter Sinclair,” I said.

She said nothing, but ticked my name off the list she had com piled on the bus, then punched the code number .on my form into a keyboard in front of her. Silently, and invisibly to me, a readout must have appeared on the screen facing her. There were some thin metal bracelets on the desk, and she passed one of them through a recessed channel in the surface of the desk, presumably encoding it magnetically, then held it towards me.

“Attach this to your right wrist, Mr Sinclair. You will be in Chalet 24, and one of the attendants will show you how to find it. Your treatment will commence tomorrow morning.”

I said: “I haven’t finally decided yet. Whether or not to take the treatment, I mean.”

She glanced up at me then, but her expression remained cold.

“Have you read the information in our brochure?”

“Yes, but I’m still not sure. I’d like to find out more about it.”

“Your counsellor will visit you. It’s quite usual for people to be nervous.

“It’s not that I’m—” I was aware of Seri standing close behind me, listening to this. “I just want to ask a few questions.”

“Your counsellor will tell you anything you wish to know.”

I took the bracelet, feeling my antipathy harden. I could feel the momentum of my win, my travels, my arrival and induction here, taking me ineluctably on towards the treatment, my reservations cast aside. I still lacked the strength to back out, to reject this chance of living. I had an irrational fear of this counsellor, visiting me in the morning, uttering soothing platitudes and propelling me on towards the operating table and the knife, saving my life against my will.

Some of the other people were now returning, their admission forms clasped like passports.

“But if I decide against it,” I said. “If I change my mind… is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“You are committed to nothing, Mr Sinclair. Your being here does not imply consent. Until you sign the release form, you may leave at any time.”

“All right,” I said, conscious of the small group of elderly optimists assembling behind me. “But there’s something else. I’ve got my girlfriend with me, I want her to stay with me in the chalet.”

Her eyes turned briefly towards Seri. “Does she understand that the treatment is for you alone?”

Seri exhaled breath sharply. I said; “She’s not a child.”

“I’ll wait outside, Peter,” Seri said, and went out into the sunlight.

“We can’t allow misunderstandings,” the girl said. “She can stay tonight, but tomorrow she will have to find accommodation in the town. You will only be in the chalet for one or two nights.”

“That suits me fine,” I said, wondering if there was still a chance Mulligayn was in the harbour. I turned my back on her and went outside to find Seri.

An hour later Seri had calmed me down, and we were installed in Chalet 24. That evening, before going to bed, Seri and I walked in the darkness through the gardens. Lights were on in the main building, but most of the chalets were dark. We walked as far as the main gate, where we found that two men with dogs were on guard.

As we walked back, I said: “It’s like a prison camp. They’ve overlooked the barbed wire and watchtowers. Perhaps someone should remind them.”

“l had no idea it was like this,” Seri said.

“I had to go into hospital when I was a child. What I didn’t like about that, even then, was the way they treated me. It was as if I didn’t exist, except as a body with symptoms. And this place is the same. I really resent that bracelet.”

“Are you wearing it?”

“Not at the moment.” We were following a path through the flowerbeds, but the further we moved from the lights of the main building the more difficult it was to see. A patch of open ground was on our right, so we sat down, discovering that it was a lawn. “I’m going to leave. First thing in the morning. Will you understand if do?”

Seri was silent for a while, then said; “I still think you should go through with it.”

“In spite of all this?”

“It’s just a sort of hospital. They’ve got the institutionalized mind, that’s all.”

“It’s most of what’s putting me oil at the moment. I just feel I’m here for something I don’t need. As if I volunteered for open-heart surgery or something. I need someone to give me a good reason to go on with it.”

Seri said nothing.

“Well, if it was you, would you take the treatment?”

“It doesn’t apply. I haven’t won the lottery.”

“You’re avoiding the question,” I said. “I wish I’d never bought that damned ticket. Everything about this place is wrong. I can feel it, but I can’t say why.”

“I just think you’ve been given a chance to have something that very few people have, and that a lot would like. You shouldn’t turn your back on it until you’re sure. It will stop you dying, Peter. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“We all have to die in the end,” I said defensively. “Even with the treatment. All it does is delay it a bit.”

“No one’s died yet.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“I can’t be completely, of course. But in the office we got annual reports on all the people who have been treated. The records go back to the beginning, and the list always got longer. There were people on Muriseay. When they came in for their check-ups, they always said how well they felt.”

I said: “What check-ups?”

In the darkness I could see Seri was facing me, but I could not make out her expression.

“There’s an option. You can monitor your health afterwards.”

“So they’re not even sure the treatment works!”

“The Lotterie is, but sometimes the patients aren’t sure. I suppose it’s a form of psychological reassurance, that the Lotterie does not abandon them once they leave here.”

“They cure everything except hypochondria,” I said, remembering a friend of mine who had become a doctor. She used to say that at least half her patients came to the surgery for the company. Illness was a habit.

Seri had taken my hand. “It’s got to be your decision, Peter. If I was in your position, perhaps I’d feel the same. But I wouldn’t want to regret turning down the chance.”

“It just doesn’t feel real,” I said. “I’ve never worried about death because I’ve never had to face it. Do other people feel that?”

“I don’t know.” Seri was looking away now, staring at the dark trees.

“Seri, I realize I’m going to die one day… but I don’t believe that, except cerebrally. Because I’m alive now I feel I always will be. It’s as if there’s a sort of life force in me, something strong enough to fend off death.”

“The classic illusion.”

“I know it’s not logical,” I said. “But it means something.”

“Are your parents still alive?”

“My father is. My mother died several years ago. Why?”

“It’s not important. Go on.”

I said: “A couple of years ago I wrote my autobiography. I didn’t really know why I was doing it at the time. I was going through something, a kind of identity crisis. Once I started writing I began to discover things about myself, and one of them was the fact that memory has continuity. It became one of the main reasons for writing. As long as I could remember myself, then I existed. When I woke up in the mornings the first thing I’d do would be to think back to what I’d done just before going to bed. If the continuity was there, I still existed. And I think it works the other way… there’s a space ahead that I can anticipate. It’s like a balance. I discovered that memory was like a psychic force behind me, and therefore there must be some kind of life force spreading out in front. The human mind, consciousness, exists at the centre. I know that so long as there is one there will always be the other. While I can remember, I am defined.”

Seri said: “But when you die in the end, because you will… when that happens your identity will cease. When you die you lose your memory with everything else.”

“But that’s unconsciousness. I’m not scared of that because I won’t experience it.”

“You assume you have no soul.”

“I’m not trying to argue a theory. I’m trying to explain what I feel. I know that one day I will die, but that’s different from actually believing it. The athanasia treatment exists to cure me of something I don’t believe I have. Mortality.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you suffered from cancer.”

“So far as I know, I don’t. I know it’s possible I might contract it, but I don’t really believe, deep down, that I will. It doesn’t scare me.”

“It does me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m scared of death. I don’t want to die.”

Her voice had gone very quiet, and her head was bent.

“Is that why you’re here with me? Because of that?”

“I just want to know if it’s possible. I want to be with you when it happens, I want to see you live forever. I can’t help that. You asked me what I would do if I won the prize… well, I’d take the treatment and not ask why. You say you have never faced death, but I know all about it.”

“What happened?” I said.

“It was a long time ago.” She leaned towards me and I put my arm around her shoulders. “l suppose it shouldn’t matter anymore. It was when I was a child. My mother was an invalid and she was dying slowly for ten years. They said there was no cure for her, but she knew, and we all knew, that if the Lotterie had admitted her she would be alive now.”

I remembered our walk in the village by the petrifying pool, when Seri had argued the Lotterie’s case for turning away the sick. I had had no idea of the degree of her contradictions.

“I took the job because I’d heard a rumour that after some years the staff qualify for free treatment. It wasn’t true, but I had to stay on. These people who win, who turn up at the office… I loathe them but I have to be near them. It’s a kind of rapture, knowing that they will not die, that they can never be ill. Do you know what it is to be in real pain? I had to watch my mother die, knowing there was something that could save her! Every month my father went out and bought lottery tickets. Hundreds of them, whatever cash he had spare. And all that money came to this place, and the treatment that could have saved her is given to people like you and people like Mankinova, and all the other people who don’t really need it.”

I drew away from her, and picked stupidly at the grass with my fingers. I had never known pain, beyond the transient agony of a neglected tooth, of a broken arm in childhood, a twisted ankle, a septic finger. I had never considered it before, never thought about death in any way except the abstract.

I failed to measure the value of the clinic’s treatment, but this was only because I did not understand the alternative.

Life seemed long and untroubled because it had been so far. But good health was a deception, a variant from the norm. I remembered the hundreds of prosaic conversations I had heard throughout my life, snatches of dialogue in public transport and restaurants and shops: most of them seemed to be about illness or worries, their own or those of close ones. There had been a little shop near my apartment in Jethra where for a time I bought fruit. After a few weeks I had found somewhere else, because for some reason the shopkeeper encouraged his customers to talk about themselves, and waiting to buy fruit was always attended by nightmare glimpses into other people’s lives. An operation, a seizure, an unexpected death.

I had shrunk away from that, as if by contagion I would suffer too.

“Then what do you think I should do?” I said at last.

“I still think you should go ahead. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Frankly, no. You just contradict yourself. Everything you say makes it worse for me.”

Seri sat in silence, staring at the ground. I realized that she and I were moving away from each other. We had never been close, except for affection and the temporary proximities of sex. I had always had some difficulty in relating to her, sensing that we had landed accidentally in each other’s lives. For a time our lives were running parallel, but inevitably they would diverge. Once I had thought it would be the athanasia that would divide us, but perhaps it would take less than that to split us up. She would move on, I would move on.

“Peter, I’m getting cold.” There was a wind from the sea, and the latitude was temperate. Here it was just the beginning of summer, as in Jethra it had been the first weeks of autumn.

“You haven’t explained yourself,” I said.

“Do I have to?”

“It would help me if you could. That’s all.”

We walked back to our chalet, and Seri linked her hand in my arm. Nothing had been resolved, the decision would have to be mine. Because I looked to Seri for an answer I dodged the uncertainty in my own mind.

Like that house in the village, the chalet felt warm after the relative cool outside. Seri sprawled on one of the two narrow beds and began reading one of the magazines we had found. I went to the other end, where an area was furnished as a writing space. There was a desk and a chair, both well made and modern, a wastepaper basket, a typewriter, a stack of clean paper and a number of different pens and pencils. I had always had an enjoyable appreciation for clean stationery, and I sat at the desk for a few minutes, fingering the keys of the typewriter. It was much more efficiently designed and solidly built than the little portable I had used for my manuscript, and as you sometimes feel when you sit at the controls of an unfamiliar car that you could drive it fast and safely, so I got the impression that were I to work at this desk I could write fluently and well.

“Do you know why they’ve put all this stuff here?” I said to Seri.

“It’s in the brochure,” she said in an irritated voice, not looking up from her magazine.

“I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

“Would you just shut up for a while? I want a rest from you.”

l took down my holdall and found the brochure. I flipped through it, glancing again at the photographs. One was of the interior of one of the chalets, brightly lit and unoccupied. There were no sandals scattered on the matting on the floor, no clothes thrown untidily on the ends of the beds, no empty beer cans lined up on the shelf, no shadows on the brilliant white walls.

In the caption to this photograph it said: “…each of our chalets includes modern facilities for the writing of your private account, which is a crucial part of our exclusive treatment”.

This must mean the questionnaire Seri had told me about. So I was to write of myself, to tell the story of my life, so that afterwards I could be made into the words I had written. No one here at the clinic could have known that this was something I had already done.

I mused for a while, thinking of the sort of people who had been on the ship with us, each tonight sitting at a desk like this one, contemplating their own lives. I wondered what they would find to say.

It was a return to the hubris I felt whenever I thought of the others. What, indeed, had I found worth saying? While writing, I had been humbled by the discovery that very little of interest had happened to me.

Was this perhaps the real reason I had invented so much? Was it not, after all, that truth was best found through metaphor, but that self-deceit and self-embellishment were the principal motives? I looked along the cabin at the top of Seri’s head, bent over the magazine while she read. Her pale blonde hair fell forward, concealing her face. She was bored with me, wanted a break. I had become self-obsessed, introspective, endlessly questioning. My inner life was constantly externalizing itself, and Seri had always been there to bear the brunt of it. I had spent too much time in my inner world; I too was tiring of it, wanted an end to it all.

Seri ignored me as I undressed and climbed into the other bed. Some time later she turned off the lights and crawled into her own bed. I listened to the sound of her breathing until I drifted off into sleep.

In the middle of the night, Seri came to lie with me. She held me tightly, kissed my face and neck and ear until I wakened, and then we made love.