Adrian Kessler's Statement

There is a mirror on a stand at my left hand, angled so that I can see myself while I write, and I have looked into it twice since I began this sentence. I put it there on purpose. I need to know, at every moment, which of us is sitting in this room.

I was born to a great deal of money and a good mind, and everyone who knew me as a boy would have told you I was safe for a distinguished and honorable life. My worst fault, then, was an impatience of pleasure — an appetite for the loud, the easy and the low, which I was born with, and which I found entirely incompatible with the desire I had, even at twenty, to be seen as a serious man.

So I hid it. And I hid it so thoroughly, over so many years, that by the time I was old enough to take stock of my position in the world I discovered that I had become two people, and had been two people for a long time, and that the two of them had almost nothing to say to each other.

I was never a hypocrite. Both of me were entirely in earnest. There was the man of the hospital, the research, the board, the money given away, the forty years of useful work; and there was the other thing, which went out at night and wanted what it wanted. And I began — first as a joke, then as a habit, and finally as a matter of daily and desperate reflection — to think about the fact that a human being is not one thing, but at least two, bound together in the same body and obliged to share a single reputation.

If the two could ever be separated, I told myself, a man would be released from the most unbearable thing about being alive. The unjust one could go his way, freed of the conscience of his better brother. The just one could walk steadily upward, doing good, and never again be dragged down for the crimes of the tramp chained to his ankle.

That was the daydream. I was a pharmacologist, and I was a good one, and in the middle of it I found something real.

I am not going to describe the chemistry. You could not reproduce it and it would be criminal to try. It is enough to say that I found the salt — that particular salt, bought in bulk in 2016 from a supplier who has since changed hands — and that with it I could loosen the grip of the thing and put a different face on what was underneath.

I sat with the vial in front of me for a month before I drank it.

The first time, the pain was worse than anything I have ever experienced, and I have passed a kidney stone: a grinding in the bones, a nausea that took my mind apart, and something in the spirit that I will not try to put into English. And then it passed, and I came out the other side of it as though out of a long illness, and I felt — I can only say I felt better. Lighter. Younger. I was aware of a current of appetite and recklessness running through me like water through a mill. And it was sweet. It was sweet in a way that no honest thing has ever been sweet to me.

I crossed the yard and went up to my bedroom, and looked at myself in the mirror for the first time, and saw what I had always kept in the basement.

He was smaller than I was, and younger, and there was nothing anyone could point to that was wrong with him, and the whole of him was wrong. I understood the arithmetic of it immediately. I had spent nine-tenths of my life in effort, work, self-control; the other part of me had never been exercised at all. And so the thing that came out was stunted, and slight, and pure. In all the ranks of men there is not one who is not mixed out of good and evil. I had made the first unmixed one, and he was pure evil, and the only feeling I had, looking at him, was a leap of recognition.

I went back to the cabinet and drank the same glass again, and came back with the face and the height of Adrian Kessler.

That was the crossroads — not the night I first drank the drug, but the night I decided I liked it. Understand that the compound has no moral direction at all. It is nothing but a door, and what comes through the door is only what was standing behind it. Had I gone into that experiment as a saint, I would have come out an angel. But my virtue was asleep in those years and my vanity was wide awake, and what came through the door was Voss.

I gave him a house. I rented two rooms on Fenwick Street through a woman who asked nothing and told nobody. I told Manny Reyes that a Mr. Voss, whom I described, was to have the freedom of the house. I wrote a will in which he was my heir, so that if anything happened to me as Kessler I could live on as Voss without losing anything. And after that, I had what no other man in the world has ever had.

As for the key you found lying by that door, broken, with the break gone rusty: I broke it with my own heel, years ago, on the night I understood that the two of us were never again going to use the same entrance. I never had another one cut, and I never had the lock mended. After that the alley door was a door that any key would open — a screwdriver would have done it, and so would the key to a laboratory, turned by a man in a hurry on a dark street. Ray Sandoval told you the truth. He told you the truth about a lock that had stopped being a lock.

Other men have hired people to do their crimes, and sat at home, respectable. I was the first man who ever hired himself. I could stand in the light as Adrian Kessler, put out my hand, and be trusted; and then I could walk down the alley, mix the drink I always kept ready, and in ten seconds whatever Voss had done would pass off the world like the mark of breath on glass; and the man standing in his place would be Adrian Kessler, with a fire on and a kettle on and no memory of interest either.

For a while that was the whole of it, and it was funny, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Then Voss began to be tired of being a thing. And his pleasures — I will not detail them, but I will say this, that a man who is only a quarter of a man has to be especially cruel to convince himself he is real — his pleasures got away from me. I would come back from those nights and stand inside my own study, looking at the fire and my own books and my own life, and be genuinely astonished at what somebody with my taste had been doing all evening. And I paid for it by the simple device that all men use: I told myself it was somebody else. Voss did it. Voss alone.

Then he was careless, and I paid for him, and part of the paying was a bank account opened under his name and the hours I sat up afterwards practicing a backward-sloping signature to draw on it until it passed. I got very good at that signature. You have seen it. Everyone in this city has seen it.

And then a morning came when I woke up in my own bed and my own room, and looked at my own hand on the blanket, and it was not mine. It was small, hairier, coarser. I had gone to bed as myself and woken up as Voss, without the drug, without intending it, without consent.

I can tell you the exact shape of the fear. It was not the fear of the discovery of a crime. It was the fear of the disappearance of a man, and the man was me, and there was nobody I could ask for help.

I gave it up that day. I did. For two months I lived harder at being good than I have ever lived at anything. And then one January afternoon I sat on a bench in the sun, and the animal inside me began licking at old memories, and I thought — I remember the exact thought — after all, I am no worse than my neighbors. And in the middle of that conceit I felt the nausea come up, and the wrenching in the bones, and I looked down at my hands and they were Voss's hands.

I was in a city park in the middle of the day, and I was the most wanted man in Massachusetts, and my drugs were locked in a room in a house I could not walk into, because my own people would have handed me to a police officer and been right to do it. I wrote two letters in a hotel room that afternoon, in a hand that had become large and shapeless — one to Nora, and one to Manny Reyes, telling him to expect a stranger at the laboratory door at midnight and to have a locksmith standing by and to ask no questions — and I sent them out registered so that I could prove to myself they had gone, and then I sat and drank in the corner of a taxicab for four hours until midnight.

There was a third letter that day, and I did not register it, and I have not been able to think about it since without putting down the pen. Four lines to Merritt Ashby, asking him to put a small question about the Fenwick Street right-of-way to Howard Vane in person, and to bring me back what Vane said about it. I wanted to know how closely you were watching. That is why Merritt Ashby was carrying an envelope with your name on it in his own pocket on the last evening of his life, and it is why he stopped in a lane and bowed to a small man he did not know, and was polite to him. He was doing me a kindness. I killed him for being polite to me.

I went to the one person alive I could stand to have look at me, and she looked at me, and then she gave me what I asked for, and she watched me turn back into myself, and that was the last hour of the friendship of my life.

From that day the drug stopped working reliably, and then it stopped working at all, and I know the reason, and the reason is the most ordinary and stupid thing in this confession. I have it in front of me as I write: a saucer of white salt, weighed out this morning. It came from a supplier who swore it was the same lot and shipped forty pounds of it out of a warehouse in New Jersey, and I brought it home, and I measured it on the desk in front of Manny, and I drank it, and nothing happened. The second time I did it, Manny went out of the room and stood on the stairs until it was over. My first batch must have carried an impurity that was the drug. Every lot I have found since has none of it. I have spent a month ransacking three states for a molecule that no longer exists anywhere.

So for a week I have been sitting in the cabinet with the last of the old powder, in an armchair pulled up to the fire, with a tea set and a mirror and no future whatever. It takes a triple dose now to get six hours of being myself. I sleep in snatches in the chair, and when I wake up I am always Voss, and once — once, this week, in the afternoon, when I was by the window and I saw the only two friends I have left standing in the alley below me, and the one of them was about to say something kind — the change came up over me in the middle of it, in front of them, in daylight, and I got the window shut before they saw more than a face. You may be the man who saw it, Howard. I am sorry. It was the first time I understood what I had done to something that was never mine to keep.

I do not know what will happen in half an hour. I do not know whether he will take the powder yet or wait, or whether the change will come first and he will take this paper and tear it up without reading it. That is why I am writing this morning, and why I am writing fast.

There is a saucer on this desk with the last of it on it, and a glass of water, and I have been writing around them for an hour the way a man walks around a hole in a floor. Very well. I am doing it now, while I can still hold the pen. The powder goes into the glass; the crystals go under; the water clouds, and clears, and then goes that thin green I have watched a thousand times. Six hours, and no more. I will seal this and leave it with the other, and whether the man who opens the cabinet finds him or me, I do not know and I am not able to care.

I have looked at the last of the powder on the saucer this morning for a long time. There is not enough for another week. I think when it is gone he will come for me and there will be nobody to write to, and I would rather this ended with a certain amount of dignity, and in my own room, than in a police station in front of people who would have to be told my name.

There is one more thing, and then I am done, and then it will be time to mix the drink.

Nora Aldiss told me once — many years ago, in her kitchen, when we still spoke — that the human body is not a mystery, that it is a machine with parts, and that anyone who goes looking for a soul in a laboratory is a man who wants an excuse to be something other than an animal.

She was right, as it turns out, in the only way that matters. There was no soul in the laboratory. There was only a door. And behind the door, all along, was nothing but me. Every man is two men; the only thing I ever did that anybody else has not also done was to give the second one a name and a bank account and let him out into the street.

Adrian Kessler

P.S. I have written this in the cabinet, and it has taken me six hours, and I have not once been interrupted, which frightens me more than anything else in it. — A. K.