Adrian Hale's Statement

I am Adrian Hale. I am writing this in the laboratory behind the house on Kirkland Street, at the bench, with the door to the house locked. Oscar Diaz is on the other side of that door and has been knocking on and off for a day and a half, and I have told him to go away, and he will not, and I am nearly out of time. There are two documents on the bench beside my elbow: one from Paul Acker, sealed, which I have not opened and will not; and this one, which I am writing in pieces, in the intervals between the fits, when I am myself enough to hold a pen. If you are reading it, Warren Pike, then I am dead, or what is left of me is dead, and either way you have a right to the whole of it. I am going to give it from the beginning. The beginning is not the night I first drank the stuff. The beginning is a boy who learned to keep two faces in one house and thought it was a virtue.

I was born to money and a good mind, and I liked the respect of serious people the way other men like drink. My worst fault was not a vice; it was an impatience, a gaiety, a wanting to be pleased, which most men carry into the open without harm and which I could not fit into the grave face I had decided to show the world. So I kept my pleasures in one room and my name in another, and by the time I was old enough to take stock of my position I had not one secret but a habit of secrecy.

I was not a hypocrite, and I want that understood, because it is the hinge of everything that follows. A hypocrite is one man telling a lie. I was two men telling the truth; both halves of me were in earnest. My appetites were ordinary. What was not ordinary was the wall I had built through the middle of my own house.

The drug did not build that wall. It found it. For years I had carried a picture in my head that I could not put down: a man cut cleanly in two, one part going his way and the other going his. If the two could be housed in two bodies, the part of me that wanted to be good could be good without dragging a prisoner behind it, and the part that wanted the other thing could have it without putting a shadow on a name. I want you to see how reasonable it sounded, in that chair, with the fire going and the clock ticking, because that reasonableness is the whole of the disease. It was a daydream before it was ever a theory.

Then, one evening, I sat up and asked myself the question that has stood at the end of my life ever since. If it could be done, how would it be done.

I came to this work honestly, which is the last thing I will be able to say for myself. I had spent twenty years in this room studying how a body takes in and holds and throws off what is put into it, and I had come to think that the body is far less solid than it looks. It is a settlement, not a wall, held together by a habit, by a balance that can be pushed. And I had begun to think that if you asked the right question of the right substance, the balance could be pushed further than anyone had pushed it, and the settlement might be persuaded to divide.

I hesitated a long time before I compounded anything. Any substance that could shake a man's identity loose from the shape of him might, by the width of a grain, either kill him or empty him and leave the shape standing. I want that in the record, because it is easy afterwards to say I was reckless. I was not reckless. I was patient, and careful, and wrong, which is not the same thing. What overcame my caution was not appetite but the beauty of the answer. A man with a theory that fits every fact he knows is a man with a light in his hand in a dark room, and he will go toward it, and he will not notice that the light is his own.

I compounded the draught in this room, over the better part of a year. The last of it was a simple-looking white salt I got from a wholesale house in the city, and I had settled on it by experiment, and I will come back to that salt at the end, because the salt is the whole story.

I compounded the elements late one night, when the house was asleep, and watched them boil and smoke in the glass, and when the boiling stopped I stood a long while with my hand on the glass and did not drink it. I was afraid, and I was also, in a way I cannot defend, happy. Then I drank it.

I do not have the words for what followed. There was a grinding in the bones, as if every joint in me were being turned on a lathe at once. There was a sickness that came up from the middle of me and filled my throat. And there was a horror of the spirit, a fear that had nothing to do with the room, the fear a man must feel at the hour of his birth or his death, and I would not wish it on a man I hated. I thought I had made a mistake and that it was going to kill me.

Then it began to let go. The pains came apart the way a knot comes apart, and I came back to myself the way a man comes back from a long illness, weak and strange and light. And in the place of all of it there came a feeling I had never had before. I felt younger. I felt lighter, as if I had put down a coat I had been wearing since I was a boy. I felt free, and the freedom was not innocent. I knew at the first breath of it that I was worse than I had been, more careless, more willing, and the knowledge did not frighten me. It came to me the way wine comes to a man; it braced me, and it delighted me.

I held out my hands to look at them, and that is when I understood that I had lost height.

There was no mirror in this room in those days; the one that stands by the bench now was brought in later, for exactly this purpose. The house was in its deepest sleep and the sky was thinking about morning, and I decided, drunk on the feeling of it, to go as far as my own bedroom, to see what I had done. I crossed the yard, and I remember looking up at the stars and thinking, with a kind of wild joy, that whatever I was now, I was the first of my kind, and that they had never looked down on anything like me. I let myself into the house, a stranger on my own stairs, and in the glass over the washstand I saw Cal Voss for the first time.

He was small, a head and more shorter than I had been. He was young, no more than thirty, with a face that had nothing of my face and everything of me. And here is the thing I have to set down honestly, because you will expect it otherwise: I did not recoil. There was no horror at the sight of him, no sense of looking at a monster. There was a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself, and more myself than the face I had been shaving for thirty years, because it was single, where the other had been two men held together by force. The reason a man could not be easy near him was that every other man in the world is a mixture, and he was not. He was not a man with a bad side. He was the bad side, alone, and given a face.

I stayed in front of the glass longer than I should have. I smiled at him. Then I remembered the thing that mattered, which was that I had not yet found out whether I could get back. I went down the back stairs and across the yard with my heart going, and I compounded the draught a second time, and drank it, and went through the pain again, and came up on the other side of it as myself. I stood in the middle of this room and laughed out loud, the way a boy laughs at a trick with a coin, and I poured the rest of the night's mixture down the sink, and went to bed.

That night I stood at a fork in the road and did not know it. If I had gone into the experiment in a generous spirit, if I had risked myself in the service of something other than my own convenience, the thing that came out the other side of that glass would have been an angel. That is what the drug did. It shook the doors of the house of my disposition and let out whatever was standing nearest the door, and what was standing nearest the door, in me, at that time, was appetite. I had built the wall; I had taught myself to keep my pleasures in a locked room; and the drug simply took the lock off, and the tenant walked out.

At first I was careful with it the way a man is careful with a new tool. I would take the draught in the evening and go out as Voss and do the sort of things I will not itemize here, and come home and take it again and be Adrian Hale by morning. It did not feel like a fall. It felt like a holiday. And there was a pleasure in it that no amount of indulgence quite explains: I was nobody. I had a name and a practice, and for the first time since I was a boy I could walk down a street where nobody knew me and be, for an hour, a man with no history and nothing to lose. That is the wine I was drinking. Not the pleasures. The anonymity.

I remember one night that first winter, standing on the bridge in the cold, looking back at the lights of the city, and understanding that I could do anything at all and the blame would fall on a name that did not exist. I think that was the hour I was lost, more than the first night at the bench. The first night was curiosity. The bridge was consent.

I set him up properly, because a thorough man makes a thorough ruin. I took rooms for him near Central Square, first one room over a laundry, then two. I kept the only key, and then had a second cut for the door in the service lane, so that he could come and go unseen. I opened an account for him at a bank that asked few questions, and I practiced his signature until it was his, by sloping my own hand backward and letting the letters lean the other way down the page. The same hand, leaned the other way. That signature is the thing that caught me in the end, and I will come to it.

I drew up the papers that gave him everything. That was the will you objected to, Warren, the one that made you uneasy at your desk a year ago. I wrote it deliberately, so that if anything happened to Adrian Hale by accident, the man standing behind him would not be left with nothing. I knew exactly how it looked, and I did it anyway, and the reason is that by then I had begun to think of him not as a mask but as an heir.

And I told Oscar Diaz that a Mr. Cal Voss was to have the freedom of the house. I told him to expect the man, and let him in, and ask no questions, and Oscar, who has been with me nineteen years and does what he is told, said, "Yes, sir," and did as he was told, and is the reason you were standing in this room at two in the morning. I should have been more careful of the people who trusted me. When a man is arranging his own ruin he is careless with the small kindnesses that stand in his way.

The first real warning came in the second year, and it came because of a child. He was out one afternoon, and a little girl crossed in front of him and was slow, and he knocked her down and kept walking. He was not angry and he was not drunk; he simply did not care, and the not caring was quicker than thought. A man saw it and went after him and brought him back, and the child's father came, and then a doctor, and they had him against the wall and would not let him go. He got out of it the only way he could: he brought them to the door in the service lane and let himself in and came back with a check, and paid the family off with a check signed Adrian Hale.

The man who caught him was a relative of yours, Warren. What you do not know is what it cost me in the moment, which was a kind of joy, and I am ashamed to write it. He came in that evening and told me how he had settled it, and he laughed, and I thought: there is no danger in it, because the money never has to be his. It never occurred to me, that evening, to ask what the child had felt. It occurred to me the next morning, and by then it was a small dull ache, and the ache went away, and that is how the thing worked on me. Not with a blow. With the disappearance of the ache.

He was seen, though, and a check signed by a respectable man draws eyes. So I opened a second account in Voss's own name, and after that I thought I was safe. Notice the shape of my thinking, because it is the shape of everybody's thinking when they begin to go down. Each time the thing touched the world I did not pull it back; I built a wall around it. A check could be traced, so I gave him an account of his own. A servant might see him leaving this room, so I gave him a door on the lane. Each wall was sensible. Each wall was a brick in the prison, and the prisoner was me.

For a long time I told myself I was the one holding the key. That is the lie every man in my position tells himself, and I believed it. At first the draught did what I asked of it: it took me down and brought me back, and the bringing back cost a dose and an hour of pain I had learned to expect. Then the dose began to need help, and the help was an effort of the will, like a man lifting a weight he knows is at the edge of what he can lift. And then, one morning, it happened without the drug at all.

I woke in my own bed with the light in the room and a feeling I could not place, the feeling of having slept in a place that was not mine. I knew every piece of the furniture and something kept saying I was not where I was. Then my eye fell on my hand, on the coverlet, half shut.

My hand is a large hand, white and square and professional; you have shaken it a thousand times. The hand on the coverlet was lean and corded and brown, with hair across the back of it. It was the hand of Cal Voss.

I stared at it the way you stare at a word you have written until it stops being a word. Then the terror came up in me all at once, the way a crash of metal comes, and I threw myself out of the bed and went to the glass, and the glass told me what I already knew. I had gone to sleep as Adrian Hale. I had woken as him. There had been no glass, no salt, no draught. He had simply been there in the morning, wearing my bed and my room, and my first clear thought, and it was not a noble one, was not what have I done; it was how do I get back before the servants are up.

I dressed as well as I could in my own clothes, which hung on me, and I went through the house, and Diaz saw me, and he looked at me and looked away, because he had been told to expect the small man and had learned not to ask. Ten minutes later I was in this room with the glass at my lips, going through the pain again, and then I was myself, and I sat down to breakfast with a face like a closed door and did not eat a thing.

That was the day I understood the arithmetic had turned around. In the beginning it had been hard to throw off Hale and become Voss. Now it was hard to throw off Voss and stay Hale, and each time it was a little harder, and I had begun to suspect, and I record that I suspected it and did nothing, that the balance was slowly moving and that the settled end of the movement was not going to be me.

So I did the only decent thing I ever did in that year, and I did it too late and for the wrong reason, but I did it. I shut the door of this room and put the key in my pocket and stopped. I told myself I would be the doctor and nothing else, and I locked the second door, the one on the lane, and I did not go up Central Square, and I did not take the draught, and for two months I held to it. I want to describe those two months honestly, because they were not misery, and that is the trap. I worked. I saw patients. I gave away money where it would do some good, and I slept at night and woke as myself, and the ordinary life began to feel like a life again. But I did not destroy the key. I did not give up the rooms, or the account, or the clothes in the wardrobe of that apartment. I was keeping a reservation, and a man keeps a reservation because some part of him intends to use it.

It was a dinner that undid me. That is all it was, and I am sorry it was nothing grander, because it would be easier to bear if it had been something worth the price. There was a dinner for me, in the autumn, at a house on Brattle Street, where men I respected stood up and said good things about my work, and I sat there and drank their wine and felt the warmth of it go through me, and I began to compare myself with the men at the table. It was not pleasure. It was vanity, the ordinary vanity of a man who has done good and knows it and begins to think that the good is his to spend. I went home full of that warmth, and I stood in my study, and I told myself that I was not like the others, that I had a strength in me they did not have, that I could open the door and shut it as I pleased because I was the one who had built the door. And I mixed the draught, and I drank it.

I do not clearly remember the night that followed. That is the honest account and I am not going to embroider it. My memory of it is not the memory of a man who watched; it is the memory of two men, one of whom was doing the thing and one of whom was locked behind a glass watching it happen, and the two memories do not fit together, and they never have. What I know is the shape of it, because the papers told me and because he told me in his own way, and because I could not stop the pictures that came with it.

He had the stick. You gave me that stick, Warren, the black one with the leather loop, after my knee was opened, and he took it out that night, that same stick, into the quiet part of Mount Vernon Street. Ward Ellis was walking home. A woman across the street, three floors up, waiting up for her family, saw it all: how the small man spoke to the older man, and then began to strike him with the stick, without anger, the way a child breaks a thing in a room he thinks is empty, and did not stop when the man was down, and laughed. Then a cab, and away. She gave the police the stick, and the stick had my initials on it, and it had been a gift from my closest friend.

When I came to myself that morning I was in the apartment over by the water, and there was blood on my shirt, and I sat on the floor a long while and went through everything I knew, and then I did what a frightened man does: I burned my papers, took the first cab home, shaved, and sat down to breakfast, and it was only at breakfast, with the paper folded beside the plate, that I understood what had been done, and by whom, and that the by whom was me.

After that I repented and worked and gave myself to the practice with my whole strength, and I did a great deal of good in those months, and I am not going to list it, because a man who lists his good works has already spent them. It did not matter. The stone does not come out.

I wrote to you in that time, Warren, and I lied to you in my own hand. I told you the small man had gone for good, and I gave you a note as proof, a farewell in his hand; you had it examined, and the examination found what you did not want to find, because there was only ever one hand. I can lean my own writing the other way down the page, and that is the whole of Cal Voss on paper.

The afternoon you and Boone stood in the street below this window, I leaned out and was glad to see you, and mid-sentence the shudder came on me, and I knew what my face was doing, and I closed the window in your faces and stood at the bench until it passed. You were the first to see it. I have thought since about the two of you on the pavement, looking up.

From that autumn he came and went as he pleased. The draught was for holding myself together, and even that stopped working; a dose became two, and two became a dose I was afraid to take, and still I would be taken in the middle of a sentence and come to myself somewhere else with my hands dirty and no memory worth the name. I slept in a chair when I slept at all. And when I was not myself he did the small things that told me what he thought of me: he scrawled filth in my own hand in the margins of my books, he burned the letters I had kept from people who are dead, and one morning I found he had torn up the photograph I keep of my father. There were two of us in one house and only one of us could be awake.

Then the salt ran out. I had been drawing on the last of it, and I sent Diaz out to buy the like from every house in the city that would sell to me, and it came, and I compounded it, and it was dead. Red, and then the orange, and then nothing. No plum. No green. A doctor does not need to be told what that means. Whatever made that preparation work was in what should not have been there, and I had used it up.

When there was nothing left that I could make, I did the thing that finished Paul Acker. I wrote to him in my own writing, because the one part of the old character that stayed with me was the hand, and I sent the small one to his door with the letter, and Acker did what I asked: he went to his own laboratory and brought back the tin and the vial I had left with him years before, the last of the first salt and the last of the red liquor, and he stood in his own front room and watched the small man drink and turn into me. He did not deserve it. He was a careful, proud man who had once been my friend, and I used him to keep myself alive, and it killed him, and I did it anyway.

That was in November. I had perhaps a thimbleful left. I used it when I had to, and I counted the days, and one night, in one of the clear hours, I took what remained and poured it away in this room and watched it go, and set the empty vial on the bench where you found it, and left the last crushed bottle in his hand, because I wanted you to know that both of us were done. I did it because I had seen what he would do with it if it stayed, and because I could not be trusted with it either, and because I had decided that whatever was coming was coming without that last door standing open. It was the only thing I had left that was mine to give away.

And here is the end, which is not even a story. I had a chemist look at both salts while I could still write a check and be believed. The first lot, the one that worked, came from one house, one lot, made in a certain way in a certain year, and it carried a trace of something that was never supposed to be in it, a fraction of a percent of a thing the later lots do not carry, because by then they had cleaned it up. There is no more of it. The house has changed hands, the old process is gone, and there is not a gram of that lot left anywhere in the world. I have asked, and I would have paid anything, and it does not exist. The one thing that could turn a man into two men was a mistake in a factory, and the mistake has been corrected.

So there is nothing left but to wait, and I know what I am waiting for. I am waiting to be swallowed. I am writing this in a body that will not be mine much longer, and when it goes I will not be here to be sorry about it, which is a mercy, and he will be, which is my problem only until it is not.

I have set it all down in the order it happened and left nothing out to make myself look better, and I am going to stop now, because there is only one admission left in me.

I am not writing about a man who made a devil and is sorry for it. I am writing about a man who found out what he was. Every morning of my life I was the respectable doctor, and I called the other thing a sickness, a thing that came to me from outside; and it did not come to me from outside, it was me, and I built its house and gave it a name and a key and an account and a door, and I did it because some part of me liked it better than I liked the man I had decided to be. To admit who I am becoming and to admit who I am is one admission. I have made it, and I am finished.