Landslide

I stared at him. ‘Susskind, you can’t say that and expect me just to leave it there.’

‘Won’t you take my word for it?’ he asked gently.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Would you if you were in my place?’

‘I guess not,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I suppose I’ll be bending a few professional ethics, but here goes. I’m going to make it short and sharp. Now, take a hold of yourself, listen to me and shut up until I’ve finished.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Your father deserted your mother soon after you were born, and no one knows if he’s alive or dead. Your mother died when you were ten and, from what I can gather, she was no great loss. She was, to put it frankly, nothing but a cheap chippy and, incidentally, she wasn’t married to your father. That left you an orphan and you went into an institution. It seems you were a young hellion and quite uncontrollable so you soon achieved the official status of delinquent. Had enough?’

‘Go on,’ I whispered.

‘You started your police record by the theft of a car, so you wound up in reform school for that episode. It seems it wasn’t a good reform school; all you learned there was how to make crime pay. You ran away and for six months you existed by petty crime until you were caught. Fortunately you weren’t sent back to the same reform school and you found a warden who knew how to handle you and you began to straighten out. On leaving reform school you were put in a hostel under the care of a probation officer and you did pretty well at high school. Your good intelligence earned you good marks so you went to college. Right then it looked as though you were all right.’

Susskind’s voice took on a savage edge. ‘But you slipped. You couldn’t seem to do anything the straight way. The cops pulled you in for smoking marijuana – another bad mark on the police blotter. Then there was an episode when a girl died in the hands of a quack abortionist – a name was named but nothing could be proved, so maybe we ought to leave that one off the tab. Want any more?’

‘There’s more?’

Susskind nodded sadly. ‘There’s more.’

‘Let me have it,’ I said flatly.

‘Okay. Again you were pulled in for drug addiction; this time you were mainlining on heroin. You just about hit the bottom there. There was some evidence that you were pushing drugs to get the dough to feed the habit, but not enough to nail you. However, now the cops were laying for you. Then came the clincher. You knew the Dean of Men was considering throwing you out of college and, God knows, he had enough reason. Your only hope was to promise to reform but you had to back it up with something – such as brilliant work. But drugs and brilliant work don’t go hand in hand so you were stupid enough to break into an office and try to doctor your examination marks.’

‘And I was caught at it,’ I said dully.

‘It would have been better if you were,’ said Susskind. ‘No, you weren’t caught red-handed but it was done in such a ham-fisted way that the Principal sent a senior student to find you. He found you all right. He found you hopped up on dope. You beat this guy half to death and lit out for places unknown. God knows where you thought you were going to take refuge – the North Pole, maybe. Anyway, a nice guy called Trinavant gave you a lift and the next thing was – Bingo! – Trinavant was dead, his wife was dead, his son was dead, and you were seven-eighths dead.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘That just about wraps it up,’ he said tiredly.

I was cold all over. ‘You think I killed this man, Trinavant, and his family?’

‘I think it was an accident, nothing more,’ said Susskind. ‘Now listen carefully, Bob; I told you the unconscious mind has its own brand of peculiar logic. I found something very peculiar going on. When you were pulled in on the heroin charge you were given a psychiatric examination, and I’ve seen the documents. One of the tests was a Bernreuter Personality Inventory and you may remember that I also gave you that test.’

‘I remember.’

Susskind leaned back in his chair. ‘I compared the two profiles and they didn’t check out at all; they could have been two different guys. And I’ll tell you something, Bob: the guy that was tested by the police psychiatrist I wouldn’t trust with a bent nickel, but I’d trust you with my life.’

‘Someone’s made a mistake,’ I said.

He shook his head vigorously. ‘No mistake. Do you remember the man I brought in here who sat in on some of your tests? He’s an authority on an uncommon condition of the human psyche – multiple personality. Did you ever read a book called The Three Faces of Eve?’

‘I saw the movie – Joanne Woodward was in it.’

‘That’s it. Then perhaps you can see what I’m getting at. Not that you have anything like she had. Tell me, what do you think of the past life of this guy called Robert Boyd Grant?’

‘It made me sick to my stomach,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe I did that.’

‘You didn’t,’ said Susskind sharply. ‘This is what happened, to the best of my professional belief. This man, Robert Boyd Grant, was a pretty crummy character, and he knew it himself. My guess is that he was tired of living with himself and he wanted to escape from himself – hence the drugs. But marijuana and heroin are only temporary forms of escape, and like everyone else he was locked in the prison of his own body. Perhaps he sickened himself but there was nothing he could do about it – a conscious and voluntary change of basic personality is practically an impossibility.

‘But as I said, the unconscious has its own logic and we, in this hospital, accidentally gave it the data it needed. You had third-degree burns over sixty per cent of your body when you were brought in here. We couldn’t put you in a bed in that condition, so you were suspended in a bath of saline solution which, to your unconscious, was a pretty good substitute for amniotic fluid. Do you know what that is?’

‘A return to the womb?’

Susskind snapped his fingers. ‘You’re with it. Now I’m speaking in impossibly untechnical terms, so don’t go quoting me, especially to other psychiatrists. I think this condition was tailor-made for your unconscious mind. Here was a chance for rebirth which was grabbed at. Whether the second personality was lying there, ready to be used, or whether it was constructed during the time you were in that bath, we shall never know – and it doesn’t matter. That there is a second personality – a better personality – is a fact, and it’s something I’d swear to in a court of law, which I might have to do yet. You’re one of the few people who can really call yourself a new man.’

It was a lot to take in at once – too much. I said, ‘God! You’ve handed me something to think about.’

‘I had to do it,’ said Susskind. ‘I had to explain why you mustn’t probe into the past. When I told you what a man called Robert Grant had done it was like listening to an account of the actions of someone else, wasn’t it? Let me give you an analogy: when you go to the movies and see a lion jumping at you, well – that’s just the movies and there’s no harm done; but if you go to Africa and a lion jumps at you, that’s hard reality and you’re dead. If you insist on digging into the past and succeed in remembering as personal memories the experiences of this other guy, then you’ll split yourself down the middle. So leave it alone. You’re someone with no past and a great future.’

I said, ‘What chance is there that this other – bad – personality might take over again spontaneously?’

‘I’d say there’s very little chance of that,’ said Susskind slowly. ‘You rate as a strong-willed individual; the other guy had a weak will – strong-willed people generally don’t go for drugs, you know. We all of us have a devil lurking inside us; we all have to suppress the old Adam. You’re no different from anyone else.’

I picked up the mirror and studied the reflected caricature. ‘What did I … what did he look like?’

Susskind took out his wallet and extracted a photograph. ‘I don’t see the point in showing you this, but if you want to see it, here it is.’

Robert Boyd Grant was a fresh-faced youngster with a smooth, unlined face. There was no trace of dissipation such as one might have expected – he could have been any college student attending any college on the North American continent. He wasn’t bad-looking, either, in an immature way, and I doubted if he’d had any trouble finding a girl-friend to put in the family way.

‘I’d forget about that face,’ advised Susskind. ‘Don’t go back into the past. Roberts, the plastic surgeon, is a sculptor in flesh; he’ll fix you up with a face good enough to play romantic lead with Elizabeth Taylor.’

I said, ‘I’ll miss you, Susskind.’

He chuckled fatly. ‘Miss me? You’re not going to miss me, bud; I’m not going to let you get away – I’m going to write the book on you, remember.’ He blew out a plume of smoke. ‘I’m getting out of hospital work and going into private practice. I’ve been offered a partnership – guess where? Right – Montreal!’

Suddenly I felt much better now I knew Susskind was still going to be around. I looked at the photograph again and said, ‘Perhaps I’d better go the whole way. New man … new face … why not new name?’

‘A sound idea,’ agreed Susskind. ‘Any ideas on that?’

I gave him the photograph. ‘That’s Robert Grant,’ I said. ‘I’m Bob Boyd. It’s not too bad a name.’

III

I had three operations in Montreal covering the space of a year. I spent many weeks with my left arm strapped up against my right cheek in a skin grafting operation and, no sooner was that done, than my right arm was up against my left cheek.

Roberts was a genius. He measured my head meticulously and then made a plaster model which he brought to my room. ‘What kind of a face would you like, Bob?’ he asked.

It took a lot of figuring out because this was playing for keeps – I’d be stuck with this face for the rest of my life. We took a long time working on it with Roberts shaping modelling clay on to the plaster base. There were limitations, of course; some of my suggestions were impossible. ‘We have only a limited amount of flesh to work with,’ said Roberts. ‘Most plastic surgery deals mainly with the removal of flesh; nose-bobbing, for instance. This is a more ticklish job and all we can do is a limited amount of redistribution.’

I guess it was fun in a macabre sort of way. It isn’t everyone who gets the chance to choose his own face even if the options are limited. The operations weren’t so funny but I sweated it out, and what gradually emerged was a somewhat tough and battered face, the face of a man much older than twenty-four. It was lined and seamed as though by much experience, and it was a face that looked much wiser than I really was.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Roberts. ‘It’s a face you’ll grow into. No matter how carefully one does this there are the inevitable scars, so I’ve hidden those in folds of flesh, folds which usually come only with age.’ He smiled. ‘With a face like this I don’t think you’ll have much competition from people your own age; they’ll walk stiff-legged around you without even knowing why. You’d better take some advice from Susskind on how to handle situations like that.’

Matthews had handed over to Susskind the administration of the thousand dollars a month from my unknown benefactor. Susskind interpreted FOR THE CARE OF ROBERT BOYD GRANT in a wide sense; he kept me hard at my studies and, since I could not go to college, he brought in private tutors. ‘You haven’t much time,’ he warned. ‘You were born not a year ago and if you flub your education now you’ll wind up washing dishes for the rest of your life.’

I worked hard – it kept my mind off my troubles. I found I liked geology and, since I had a skull apparently stuffed full of geological facts it wasn’t too difficult to carry on. Susskind made arrangements with a college and I wrote my examinations between the second and third operations with my head and arm still in bandages. I don’t know what I would have done without him.

After the examinations I took the opportunity of visiting a public library and, in spite of what Susskind had said, I dug out the newspaper reports of the auto smash. There wasn’t much to read apart from the fact that Trinavant was a big wheel in some jerkwater town in British Columbia. It was just another auto accident that didn’t make much of a splash. Just after that I started to have bad dreams and that scared me, so I didn’t do any more investigations.

Then suddenly it was over. The last operation had been done and the bandages were off. In the same week the examination results came out and I found myself a B.Sc. and a newly fledged geologist with no job. Susskind invited me to his apartment to celebrate. We settled down with some beer, and he asked, ‘What are you going to do now? Go for your doctorate – ’