Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [97]
“I won’t do it again, Dr. Cray.”
“Won’t do what again? Try to kill Kaylie? Follow me when I go out for a drive? Say too much to the wrong people, as you almost did on Tuesday night?”
Walter was confused by the fusillade of questions. “I—I won’t do any of it anymore.”
“But you will. Oh, not right away. You’re too badly cowed at the moment, too humiliated even to emerge from your room for more than one meal a day. But eventually your shame will ebb. You’ll be back to your old self again, won’t you? But not quite your old self. You’ll be different. You’ll have changed.”
“I ... I haven’t ... I didn’t...”
“Oh, yes. You’ve changed, whether you know it or not. You’ve acquired a taste of independence. You know how it feels to act on your own initiative. After all these years of doing what you’re told, running errands on command, eating at assigned times—after all that, you’ve finally discovered your glorious ego.”
“I have?”
“It’s remarkable, really. On your own, you’ve retraced the course of human evolution over the past several thousand years. Have you read the Iliad, Walter? Oh, of course you haven’t. It hasn’t got Curious George in it, so how could you? But if you had read it, you’d know that the Greeks of that period possessed no concept of an integrated person. Limbs and breath and blood, yes—but not a person, a totality, moved by a single will. The arm tensed, or the breath came fast and shallow, or the blood pulsed quicker in the veins, but where was the unique, conscious personality, the mind and self that were the unifying principle of it all? There was no person, not in the modern sense. Imagine living with no notion of a self. But you don’t have to imagine it, do you?”
Walter blinked, plain bewilderment showing on his face.
“Then later,” Cray went on as if he’d heard an answer, “came the more sophisticated Greeks—Sappho the poetess, Archilochus the warrior. They discerned a will in themselves, a will to love or fight. What a find this was! They glorified their newfound will, and subsequent Greeks built avidly on this discovery, until you hear of an inscription on the Delphic oracle’s temple that read simply, Know thyself. A platitude now, but originally a new and dizzying insight. Ever since that day, poor humanity has been striving to know itself, to analyze and organize and prioritize its endlessly fascinating inner life. Today we have built a great, towering edifice of self, a skyscraper of Babel, and we worship at its cornerstones, while neglecting and forgetting and denying what animals we really are. Denying the primal truth for the sake of an ever more elaborate illusion, a game of words, abstractions, superficialities. We’ve cut ourselves off from our true nature, from the instincts that really move us. We deny the earth that made us, while striving after a divinity that doesn’t exist.”
Cray allowed himself a smile, a kindly smile directed at the man who had been, in some way, his friend.
“Now you’ve become one of us, Walter. You’ve become a person with a will and a mind and all the tormented conflict and narrow self-absorption attendant on such things. You’ve arrived, Walter. You’re a man of the modern world at last. Congratulations.”
Walter, dazed under this onslaught, comprehending none of it, merely nodded in stupid gratitude. “Thank you, Dr. Cray.”
Cray laughed. Poor Walter.
“The point is,” Cray said softly, “you’re not what you once were. You’ve become unreliable, a random variable, capable of disrupting all the careful equations of my life.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Walter said with the perfect genuineness of a child.
Cray sat on the couch, comfortingly close to the huge, stoop-shouldered man. “Will you take your medicine?”
Walter blinked. “I always do.”
“No, this is new medicine. It’s used only in very special cases, like yours.”
“I’ll take it, Dr. Cray.”
“You haven’t even asked me what it is.”
“I trust you.”
“Yes, of course you do.”
“I trust you,” Walter said again, more softly. “I think ... I think you’re the greatest man in the world. I think you’re like ...” He turned away, bashful