Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [138]
He could go to the doctor’s. He could visit the Quiblers, or the Khembalis. He could go to his tree house. He could go back up to work. He could go out to dinner. He could sleep right there in the NSF basement, in the back of his van.
The sense of indecision hadn’t been like this for a while. He was pretty sure of that. Recalling the past week, it seemed to him it had been getting better. Now worse. The stab of elevated heart rate galvanized him again. Maybe this was what they meant by the word terror.
He felt chilled. And in fact it was freezing in his van. Should he put on his down jacket, or—but stop. He grabbed the down jacket and wrestled his way into it, muttering “Do the obvious things, Vanderwal, just do the first fucking thing that pops into your head. Worry about it later. Leap before you look.”
Indecision. Before his accident he had been much more decisive. Wait, was that right? No. That could not be quite true. Maybe it was before he came to Washington that he had been sure of himself. But had he been? Had he ever been?
For a second he wasn’t sure of anything. He thought back over the years, reviewing his actions, and wondered suddenly if he had ever been quite sane. He had made any number of bad decisions, especially in the past few years, but also long before that. All his life, but getting worse, as in a progressive disease. Why would he have risked Marta’s part of their equity without asking her? Why would he ever have gotten involved with Marta in the first place? How could he have thought it was okay to sabotage Pierzinski’s grant proposal? What had he been thinking, how had he justified it?
He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought about it; one might even say that he had managed to avoid thinking about it. It was a kind of mental skill, a negative capability. Agile in avoiding the basic questions. He had considered himself a rational, and, yes, a good person, and ignored all signs to the contrary. He had made up internal excuses, apparently. All at the unconscious level; in a world of internal divisions. A parcellated mind indeed. But brain functions were parcellated, and often unconscious. Then they got correlated at higher levels—that was consciousness, that was choice. Maybe that higher system could be damaged even when most of the parts were okay.
He twisted the rearview mirror around, stared at himself in it. For a while there in his youth he would stare into his eyes in a mirror and feel that he was meeting some Other. After returning from a climb where a falling rock had missed him by a foot—those kinds of moments.
But after Marta left he had stopped looking at himself in the mirror.
Now he saw a frightened person. Well, he had seen that before. It was not so very unfamiliar. He had never been so sure of himself when he was young. When had certainty arrived? Was it not a kind of hardening of the imagination, a dulling? Had he fallen asleep as the years passed?
Nothing was clear. A worried stranger looked at him, the kind of face you saw glancing up at the clock in a train station. What had he been feeling these last several months before his accident? Hadn’t he been better in that time? Had he not, from the moment Rudra Cakrin spoke to him, tried to change his life?
Surely he had. He had made decisions. He had wanted his tree house. And he had wanted Caroline. These sprang to mind. He had his desires. They might not be entirely conventional, but they were strong.
Maybe it was a little convoluted to be relieved by the notion that having been a fuck-up all his life, there did not have to be a theory of brain trauma to explain his current problems. To think that he was uninjured and merely congenitally deformed, so that was okay. Maybe it would be better to be injured.
He fell asleep at the wheel, thinking I’ll go back to the tree house. Or out to San Diego. Or out to Great Falls. Or call the Khembalis. . . .
The next morning he did not have to decide what to do, as the conference room next to Diane’s office filled with European insurance executives,