The Statement: Origins

They tell me I should begin at the beginning, and I have discovered, in the weeks since the beginning stopped mattering to anyone but me, that I agree. A confession that starts in the middle is a defense. I do not intend to defend anything. Martin, you are the one man I want to read this, so I will write to you, and I will start where a chemist should have started long ago, with the elements and their sources. The police will get the short version and the arithmetic; they have their envelope, and it is enough for them. This one is the long version, and it is yours.

My father was a man who believed that a self is a thing you build, the way a mason builds a facade, stone by dressed stone, and that the building exists only as long as no one is permitted to see the scaffolding. He was not cruel in the way men in books are cruel. He was worse in one respect: he was consistent. Every morning of my boyhood he dressed according to a code he never once had to explain, because the code was in the knot of his tie and the shine of his shoes and the cane he carried, the cane with the whalebone handle and the silver head that had belonged to his own father, and the cane was not for walking. My father's health was excellent. The cane was doctrine. A gentleman, he told me once, when I was old enough to be lectured and too young to argue, is a man whose body has been furnished. The world reads the furniture and grants him credit. Woe to the man whose furnishings are cheap.

I want to be fair to him, which is the last indulgence I will permit myself in this account. He was generous to institutions. He paid his debts before they were due. He held doors and he held his tongue and he held, above all, our name, which in his country of origin had been dragged through some bankruptcy or scandal two generations back and restored by pure, grinding performance. He carried the name the way he carried the cane, as an instrument that could be leaned on and, if it came to it, used. I did not understand that last clause until much later in my life, and by then the cane had left his hand and entered mine, and I had made it into something he could not have imagined and would, I sometimes think, have understood perfectly.

My mother died when I was nine. She was the only unfinished thing in that house, the only person who ever laughed with her mouth entirely open, and she went in eleven months, from the first vague symptom to the closed coffin, and my father's grief was conducted the way he conducted everything, in good tailoring. I watched a man of immense discipline fold his wife away into a drawer of himself, and I learned from the watching that grief, like appetite, like rage, like everything else a body produces, can be put somewhere and kept. I did not cry at the funeral because I looked down the row of adults and understood that I was not permitted to be the one thing in the family that leaked.

I begin there, with the funeral, because everything else follows from it with the remorseless logic of a reaction I was too young to read. A boy who learns that the interior must be furnished over does not stop having an interior. That was the flaw in my father's doctrine, the flaw I spent forty years and one impossible molecule trying to correct. The interior does not stop. It goes septic.

I was a good boy in public and something else in private, and I will set down the private ledger now, because you of all people will not be shocked, having known me at twenty, when I still had the energy to pretend less. By fourteen I had learned that I could steal small things from the boys at school and be beloved the next day, that a lie told with my father's composure was never examined, that cruelty practiced carefully on boys weaker than me produced not guilt but a species of hunger that fed itself. At fifteen I discovered the shops on the wrong end of the commercial streets, the establishments my father's world pretended did not exist, and I went into them the way other boys went into church, with a raised heartbeat and a certainty of being seen, and I came out having been seen by no one, and the sweetness of that was the whole of it. Vice with no witness. Appetite with no ledger. For years the two lives balanced, the furnished boy and the leaking boy, and I managed the balance the way my father managed his accounts, and I even believed, in the way one believes at that age, that I was simply living more of life than other people, both halves of it, and getting away with something magnificent.

What I have not told anyone, and will tell now only because I am past the reach of pity, is that I was not getting away with anything. The two lives corroded each other on contact, invisibly, like two reagents that must never share a beaker. Every indulgence was followed not by pleasure but by a self-loathing of a purity I have never encountered since in any drug or any glass of anything. I would walk home from those streets in the dark rehearsing my father's vocabulary against myself, cheap furnishings, no credit, and the contempt I felt for myself had a taste, metallic, faintly sweet, that I can summon now on my palate as I write. I did not hate what I did. That is the precision that matters. I hated what I was, the whole apparatus, the boy who wanted and the boy who despised the wanting, and by nineteen I had concluded, with a young man's arrogance and a sick man's despair, that the problem was not moral at all. The problem was architecture. There were two of me, and the house had room for one.

That conclusion is why I chose the brain.

People at dinners, in the years when dinners still wanted me, liked to ask why a mind like mine went into neurochemistry rather than something that paid faster. I had a prepared answer about the last great map. The true answer is that I wanted, more than I wanted anything, to find the material address of shame. I wanted to isolate it, locate it in tissue, watch it in a scan, watch the self-loathing light up its little territories, because I believed, then, that anything with a material address can be treated. Can be cut out. I spent my twenties and thirties reading everything that touched the dissociatives, the anesthetics that loosen the mooring lines between a mind and itself, and I published respectable work, and I built a company, and I furnished myself so thoroughly, so publicly, that Forbes put my face on an issue once and my father, in the last year of his life, framed it. He never once said he was proud of me. He handed me the cane at my graduation, with both hands, and told me it would look right in my hand, and I understood that I had been assessed, and passed, and that the assessment was itself the inheritance. The name was solvent. The furniture was paid for.

And underneath, the other boy had never gone anywhere. He had gone into the lab with me. He was the reason my hands never shook at conferences and shook at home. He was in the mirror, which is why, somewhere in my thirties, I quietly stopped looking into mirrors, a habit that amused guests at my own table, and I told them it was vanity in reverse, and only I knew it was a man declining to be identified by the police of his own conscience.

The synthesis of Compound Nine took me four years, and I will not put the route on paper, ever, so do not look for it. What I will describe is what it was for, which I understood completely and stated to no one. I was not trying to cure the two-ness. Four years at the bench had taught me what my father's doctrine never knew: that the two-ness is not a defect. Man is not one. He was never one. The respectable self and the leaking self are not a disease and its symptom; they are two tenants disputing a lease that was never properly drawn, and every remedy I had ever tried, religion in my twenties, therapy in my thirties, wine all along, amounted to evicting one tenant to please the other, and the evicted tenant simply occupied me at night. C-9 was not an eviction. C-9 was a partition wall. I designed a precursor that the body would convert, in its own time, into something that could suppress, selectively and reversibly, the entire furniture of the furnished man, the trained face, the audited posture, the conscience with its ledgers, and leave the rest of the tissue running. I would put the respectable man to sleep, chemically, cleanly, and let the other one out to walk.

I remember the evening I finished the first pure batch. I was forty-four. The lab at home, the cabinet room in the back wing of the house on Broadway, held that white powder in a glass vial, and it looked like nothing, like a spilled season, like salt that had thought about becoming snow. I sat with it for two hours before I touched it. Every training I had said dilute it, test it, model it, wait. Every hour of my childhood said that if I waited I would find a reason never to open the wall at all. I dissolved a measure in a glass of wine, and I raised it, and I want the record to show that I hesitated, and that the hesitation was the last act of the unified man I had been for forty-four years.

The taste is the thing I remember with the most terrible clarity, and I have carried it through everything since, because it turns out to be the one sense that does not change hands: bitterness first, a mineral bitterness, then the salt coming up under it, faint and wrong, sea water that had been taught manners. It was foul and it was precise, and it told me, better than any instrument, that the molecule was exactly where I had put it. I set down the glass. I stood in front of the long mirror in the cabinet room, the one I had stopped consulting years before, because I had decided, that night, that whatever happened I would permit myself one witness, and I was the only candidate.

Nothing happened. For perhaps ninety seconds I stood there feeling like a fool, a middle aged chemist in his own laboratory who had drunk bad wine at his own expense. Then the wall went up. I do not have a gentler phrase. I felt a pressure behind the face, a gathering, and then a pain that I can only compare to being written over, the way one writes over a palimpsest, the older text scraped and the new text inked in its place while the page burns. I went down to one knee. I heard my own voice make a sound I will not write. The furnishing of forty years, the posture my father built, the composure, the audited face, all of it folded inward, shrinking, bowing, thinning, and the body followed the mind down, contracting, paling, and the pain was beyond anything in my catalog and yet I have already told the truth about it once and will tell it again: it was welcome. It was the exact price of the fare, and I would have paid it twice.

When it passed I was on my knees on the rug, and the man who raised his head was not the man who had knelt down. I know how that sentence reads. I knew how it would read when I chose, tonight, to write it anyway. In the mirror was a stranger, stooped, thinner than me by a size, pale as paper, with a face drawn in, gathered, a face like a fist closing, and his eyes were my eyes and they were not mine. We looked at each other for a long time, the two of us in that glass, and I felt what I can only call recognition without acquaintance, the knowledge of a face from the corner of the eye on a night street, seen once, never twice. He moved. I watched him move. He tried my voice and it came out thinner, drier, stripped of the music and keeping the diction, and what he said first, to me, in my own cabinet room, was a small dry laugh and then the word better.

It took three hours for the compound to release me, and I came back up through the pain to find myself kneeling where he had left me, in the small hours, with the wine glass unbroken on the floor. And here, Martin, is the passage you will find hardest, and I ask you to read it twice, because it is the hinge of everything that came after and everything I did to your city and to a man named Ashe whose name I am not fit to write.

I was not horrified. I stood, I steadied myself against the cabinet, I washed my face, and the feeling in my chest, while the respectable chemistry reassembled me, was the feeling of a man who has come home from his first holiday. That night I understood that I had solved, in one molecule, the problem my father had left me. His doctrine said the interior must never be seen, and his doctrine had made me a sick boy in a fine coat. My doctrine was better. The doctrine of the partition. Let the furnished man keep the daylight, the funds, the name, the cane, the credit. Let the other one have his hours, and let the hours be unwitnessed, and let neither man ever again be answerable for the other. I called those hours holidays, and for a long time, in the first sweetness of it, I believed the arrangement was not merely workable but moral, more moral than anything my father had taught me, because at last each self would be honest in his own quarter, and the lying would be confined to the wall between them.

I took my second holiday eleven days later, and my third four days after that, and I will set down in the next part of this statement what the holidays became. But that first night, before I slept, I stood once more in front of the mirror, at the edge of the glass, not quite in it, and I gave the stranger, out loud, the name he had already chosen for himself somewhere in the years he had waited inside me. Silas Crow. A good name for the back of the coat — and, if you must know, Martin, a dictionary word: to crow, to triumph over a discomfiture of one's own making. I found it while looking up another word entirely, and it was the first thing in years I had not had to teach myself to want. I said it to the glass, and the glass agreed, and I went to bed, and for the first time since I was nine years old and standing at my mother's grave with my hands folded and dry, I slept without a single dream.