Stealing Faces

“But you will. Oh, not right away. You’re too badly cowed at the moment, too humiliated even to emerge from your room for more than one meal a day. But eventually your shame will ebb. You’ll be back to your old self again, won’t you? But not quite your old self. You’ll be different. You’ll have changed.”

“I… I haven’t… I didn’t…”

“Oh, yes. You’ve changed, whether you know it or not. You’ve acquired a taste of independence. You know how it feels to act on your own initiative. After all these years of doing what you’re told, running errands on command, eating at assigned times — after all that, you’ve finally discovered your glorious ego.”

“I have?”

“It’s remarkable, really. On your own, you’ve retraced the course of human evolution over the past several thousand years. Have you read the Iliad, Walter? Oh, of course you haven’t. It hasn’t got Curious George in it, so how could you? But if you had read it, you’d know that the Greeks of that period possessed no concept of an integrated person. Limbs and breath and blood, yes — but not a person, a totality, moved by a single will. The arm tensed, or the breath came fast and shallow, or the blood pulsed quicker in the veins, but where was the unique, conscious personality, the mind and self that were the unifying principle of it all? There was no person, not in the modern sense. Imagine living with no notion of a self. But you don’t have to imagine it, do you?”

Walter blinked, plain bewilderment showing on his face.

“Then later,” Cray went on as if he’d heard an answer, “came the more sophisticated Greeks — Sappho the poetess, Archilochus the warrior. They discerned a will in themselves, a will to love or fight. What a find this was! They glorified their newfound will, and subsequent Greeks built avidly on this discovery, until you hear of an inscription on the Delphic oracle’s temple that read simply, Know thyself. A platitude now, but originally a new and dizzying insight. Ever since that day, poor humanity has been striving to know itself, to analyze and organize and prioritize its endlessly fascinating inner life. Today we have built a great, towering edifice of self, a skyscraper of Babel, and we worship at its cornerstones, while neglecting and forgetting and denying what animals we really are. Denying the primal truth for the sake of an ever more elaborate illusion, a game of words, abstractions, superficialities. We’ve cut ourselves off from our true nature, from the instincts that really move us. We deny the earth that made us, while striving after a divinity that doesn’t exist.”

Cray allowed himself a smile, a kindly smile directed at the man who had been, in some way, his friend.

“Now you’ve become one of us, Walter. You’ve become a person with a will and a mind and all the tormented conflict and narrow self-absorption attendant on such things. You’ve arrived, Walter. You’re a man of the modern world at last. Congratulations.”

Walter, dazed under this onslaught, comprehending none of it, merely nodded in stupid gratitude. “Thank you, Dr. Cray.”

Cray laughed. Poor Walter.

“The point is,” Cray said softly, “you’re not what you once were. You’ve become unreliable, a random variable, capable of disrupting all the careful equations of my life.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Walter said with the perfect genuineness of a child.

Cray sat on the couch, comfortingly close to the huge, stoop-shouldered man. “Will you take your medicine?”

Walter blinked. “I always do.”

“No, this is new medicine. It’s used only in very special cases, like yours.”

“I’ll take it, Dr. Cray.”

“You haven’t even asked me what it is.”

“I trust you.”

“Yes, of course you do.”

“I trust you,” Walter said again, more softly. “I think… I think you’re the greatest man in the world. I think you’re like…” He turned away, bashful in this moment of absolute sincerity. When he finished his thought, he was blushing. “I think you’re like God.”

Cray uncapped a vial and spilled a few small dark pills into his hand.

“I always wanted to tell you,” Walter went on, his voice hushed with embarrassed reverence. “But I was afraid you’d say I was crazy. I mean… more crazy than usual.”

“We’re all crazy, Walter,” Cray said without emotion. “The mind itself is our disease. We seek a cure. Now take your medicine.”

Humbly: “Yes, Dr. Cray.”

With the practiced skill of a lifelong patient, Walter dry-swallowed the pills.

“You’ll be feeling tired soon,” Cray said. “I’ll let you rest.”

“Don’t go, Dr. Cray.”

“No? Well, I suppose I can stay a little while.”

As things turned out, Cray lingered in the room for hours, holding Walter’s hand and speaking soft, comforting, meaningless words, while Walter first blinked at his blurring vision, then clutched his belly in a spasm of pain. Finally Walter closed his eyes and slept.

Even then Cray maintained his vigil. He monitored his patient’s pulse, observing the onset of bradycardia, the most common symptom of a digitalis overdose.

Walter’s heart rate dropped below sixty beats per minute, then below forty, then became irregular.

At dawn his heart stopped. Supine on the sofa, his mouth open, head lolling, the big man shivered all over like a wet dog and lay still.

Watching him, Cray reflected that he was indeed like God, in at least one way.

He could take a life.

He remembered that stray thought now, as he crossed the grounds of the institute under the clean blue sky and the crisp peaks of the Pinaleno range.

He felt whole. He felt strong. He felt—

“Dr. Cray!”

Cray stopped.

He knew that voice.

Damn.

He looked down the long driveway toward the front gate, where a guard had detained a burly, bearded man of seventy.

“Dr. Cray, I demand to speak with you!”

The man’s voice carried easily. Several patients were staring in his direction. An orderly pushing a woman in a wheelchair had stopped on the greensward, his gaze swinging between the unwelcome visitor and Cray himself.

“I know you can hear me!”

“Oh, hell,” Cray muttered.

He would have to acknowledge this man, much as he hated to. Straightening his shoulders, he marched along the driveway toward the gate, where Anson McMillan, Kaylie’s father-in-law, waited by his pickup truck, glaring at Cray through the wrought-iron bars.

McMillan had gray hair and a gray beard. He was all squares and rectangles — hard, blocky face, squat frame, wide shoulders. In his denim shirt and corduroy pants he looked like an aging cowhand, lacking only a lasso and a wide-brimmed hat.

Cray had expected him to return eventually, but not so soon. McMillan had visited the hospital only last week, immediately after Kaylie’s arrest.

“Dr. Cray,” McMillan said again, with dangerous courtesy, as Cray drew close.

“Good afternoon, Mr. McMillan.” Cray kept his voice even. “What seems to be the problem?”

“The problem is that this glorified night watchman”—McMillan threw a contemptuous glance at the guard, who stiffened under the insult—“won’t let me pass.”

“Don’t denigrate my employees, please,” Cray said, reaching the gate at last and coming face to face with McMillan across the iron barricade. “Officer Jansen here is doing his job.”