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‘I’ll tell you what–just take it. I don’t need the money. I can see you’re in need. Take it as a gift.’
‘I need it now.’
Thomas saw a menacing look in his father’s eye that brought back old fears. He took the CD from his hand and fed it into the computer. It started up on its own, a 20-second promotional jingle that talked in a comforting voice about MyPast
. Then it gave a menu of memories. Thomas selected one. It showed his father addressing a banking summit organized by the Confederation of British Industry three or four years before. He was confident and funny and people responded loudly, applauded.
‘Is that me?’ asked Thomas’ father, incredulous. ‘Is that me?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Is that who I was?’ The speech ended to camera flashes and applause. The video faded. The boys looked on mutely.
‘Show me more. More.’
‘Really, sir, I must close the office now.’
‘Don’t give me that bullshit. Get out of my way.’
Thomas’s father seized the mouse from him and pushed him out of the seat. He stared impatiently at the screen and selected another memory.
He saw himself sipping wine with his wife in the bar at the Barbican in the interval of some concert. They were both dressed up. Thomas’s mother spoke passionately about something that could not be heard.
‘That’s my wife. How strong she used to be. How attractive. I wonder where she is now.’
‘What do you mean, Where is she now?’ asked Thomas, alarmed.
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember where she is.’
He clicked on something else. The whole family was on holiday in Florida, several years ago. Thomas was still a young child. The three boys were sunburnt and carried fishing nets. Their mother wore a wrap-around skirt and expensive sunglasses.
‘Look–there are three boys. Who’s the other one?’ He watched them playing in the sand, building mounds taller than they were.
He carried on clicking avidly. The family was wandering round the Natural History Museum–just a year or so before. Thomas was clearly visible.
‘Isn’t that you?’ asked his father looking round at Thomas. ‘Isn’t that you there–in the museum at the same time as us? What a bloody coincidence. Do we know each other?’
‘Not really know. No.’
Another scene opened up. Thomas froze with fear. It was a recording of their evening in the Oxo Tower. The lights of the Thames spread out behind them; the waiters served champagne, and Thomas’s father talked about investment to his family.
‘What the bloody hell is going on?’ he said. He turned to Thomas, his face hungry and furious. ‘Can you please explain what the hell is going on? Is this some kind of disgusting joke that you people play? You put yourselves into our memories? You sit yourself down at dinner with us, at our most intimate moments? You insert yourselves into our thoughts, our families, our past? Is that what happens? Just as I was coming to believe in my past I see you sitting there grinning out of it like some monster–and realize all of it is fake. What the hell is your game?’
The video continued quietly. Thomas saw out the corner of his eye the moment at which his father had told him to leave the house.
‘Sir, please understand. This is no falsehood. I am your son. My name is Thomas. These are my brothers. I am part of your family.’
Thomas’s father looked at him, looked deep into his pupils. He seemed to see something that he had been looking for, and the emptiness of his eyes was filled with a question. But something washed over the surface again and Thomas could peer in no more.
‘You bastard!’ His father hit him so hard around the head that he fell to the ground, dazed and astonished. ‘Think you can betray people like this and get away with it?’ He kicked him in the groin. ‘You bastard!’ He became wild, kicking him again and again in the groin and stomach.
His brothers joined in, kicking his head and face and back with all their strength. ‘You bastard!’ they chanted viciously, imitating their father. Thomas blacked out, became bloody and limp–but they did not stop beating him until they were too exhausted to continue.
Reality returned only half-way. He saw himself lying in an emergency ward. Jo had brought him there when she had discovered him lying in a kidney-shaped arc of congealed blood in the morning. He could not make things out, but his mind felt lighter. He realized that nearly all the memories had left him and soon he would be alone again.
He had the impression that he knew the person in the next bed. It was an old woman he had seen before. Gradually he remembered. She had given him a prophecy long ago. So long. She looked very sick.
‘Hello.’ His voice reached out to her, but she did not seem to be aware. ‘It’s Thomas. Do you remember me?’
She turned painfully towards him, her eyes like albumen. ‘Of course I remember you.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘It’s not easy being blind and old. I fell. Fell down the stairs. Broken my pelvis. I don’t feel well. I’m at the end.’
‘Everything happened as you said. My father became poor and I became rich. But it wasn’t how I imagined.’
‘It rarely is.’
The various sounds of the hospital seemed to become ordered and intended, like a fugue. Thomas listened for a moment.
‘As soon as she said “Memory Mine” I remembered what you said. I knew this was it! It was a good job. There was a nice woman. Her name was Jo.’ Thomas felt weightless, the memories breaking away like spores and floating back to where they came from.
‘A packhorse was needed. To get the memories through this ravine. This time. You happened to be the one. It could have been someone else. But it wasn’t. I’m sure you’ve worked that out.’
‘Yes. I think I understand things now. Things seem so much clearer.’
The old lady did not seem to be listening any more. Doctors whirled urgently around him, nurses came running, but he was content inside his mind. All that now remained was his own past; and it was good.
THE BILLIONAIRE’S SLEEP The Third Story (#ulink_dd830e08-6f96-58aa-bf2e-f8c82a1efb05)
IN THE CITY of Delhi there once lived a man who had never been able to sleep.
In appearance he had everything he wanted–more, in fact, than one person could ever want, for he was the owner of a vast industrial group and one of India’s richest men. Rajiv Malhotra lived in an elegant colonial mansion on Prithviraj Road with a garden full of gulmohar trees and parakeets; he was attended by servants and cooks and chauffeurs; he ran households in Jakarta, New York, and London; and he was married to a beautiful former film star. But it was as if fate, in bestowing so many blessings, had sought to ensure he would not be ignorant of suffering, and sleep was something he could not achieve.
‘To sleep is as to breathe!’ he would think to himself as he sat alone in the back of his tinted Mercedes on his way to work every morning. ‘Just look at all the people who have nothing, but to whom sleep’s treasures come every day, like a lifelong, unbidden friend. People sleep on the highways and in the train station, they sleep as people step over them and dogs bark around them–young boys, old women–all are able to sleep. But I, who have so much, have not this thing that the poorest beggar is able to enjoy.’
He led a double life. By day he would lead the life of people: working, eating, attending social functions, chatting to family and friends. Of course fatigue gnawed at him like a cancer: his organs felt as if they were of lead and ready to drag him down into a void, his eyes were like boulders in his head. But there was light and there were people, and he felt a part of the world. He worked endlessly, slowly transforming his father’s steel company into a global industrial empire that made him feel involved, significant.
But his nights were another life altogether. A life of black solitude when everyone around him demonstrated a loyalty more primal–happily, eagerly, gratefully, and so simply!–leaving him behind for the arms of sleep, abandoning him to wish away the hours of night, to experience time as something he had somehow to get through, and thus to become submerged in pointlessness.
While his wife slept upstairs he would wander through their many rooms, like a ghost condemned to revisit a castle every night for eternity, slinking tediously through the same corridors centuries after the life he once knew has given way to silence and dereliction. He would rifle the house aimlessly for new soporifics–books to draw him out of his boredom and panic enough that sleep might steal up on him unnoticed; videos or TV shows for him to surrender his mind to for a while. He wandered in the deep shadows of the garden smoking unaccustomed cigarettes, read the day’s news again, finished off bowls of peanuts that had been put out hours ago for evening guests; finally, he went drowsily to bed to lie next to his wife only to find in his horizontality some kind of strange excitant that would send his exhausted mind scampering aimlessly around labyrinths of irrelevant problems to which he needed no solution. At length, the windows would lighten, the azan would sound from distant mosques, and he would start to change from yesterday’s clothes into today’s, simultaneously relieved to be no longer alone and tortured that his strange impotence had been confirmed once more.
Of course he had consulted doctors. He had tried sleeping pills, relaxants, anti-anxiety drugs, meditation and hypnosis. He had diligently read the publications of the Sleep Disorder Society of America and the scientific publications of all the leading somnologists. He had tried every kind of therapeutic bed, pillow, earplug, and eyemask. He had followed the suggestions of friends to play Mozart or classical ragas very softly in his room, had even given a chance to the Sounds of Nature CD collection someone had sent him, lying in bed to the surround sound of cicadas in the rainforest or underwater whale recitatives, and trying to detect signs of somnolence inside himself. None appeared. No therapy, from folk to pharmacological, had managed to prise open for him the gates of the kingdom of slumber, and after some years he stopped looking for help. He did not sleep, and that was that.
It was doctors who confirmed to him, however, what he had himself long suspected: that a lifetime without sleep was almost certainly responsible for the fact that, after ten years of marriage, he and his wife had never conceived a child.
When Rajiv Malhotra had married the Bollywood superstar Mira Sardari, the newspapers had been apoplectic with idolizing, goggling glee. The romance had every element of legend: the society man of the 70s who was jilted by the beautiful–and older–mother and waited twenty years to marry the daughter; the helicopter accident that orphaned the teenage Mira and made her the child of India herself, with doting parents in all the leading families; the secret wedding in a Himalayan resort while Mira was at the height of her fame and in the middle of her classic Exile (no one was there, but everyone was an eyewitness); the ending of her film career ‘so I can devote myself to helping those less fortunate than myself’; his sophistication and massive commerical power. But children, which they both saw as the fulfilment of their lives, did not come. Doctors advised the couple that Rajiv’s sleepless body, incapable of rejuvenating itself, would never produce seed. His private thoughts, that had dwelt single-mindedly on iron and tin for so long, became more and more obsessed by flesh and blood. There was a quietness between him and his wife. And after a while, the editors of newspapers, obsessed with dynasties even more than with money, themselves turned quiet.
One night Rajiv decided to go to one of his factories to inspect how business was being conducted. He was that kind of businessman: he liked to see every detail for himself.
As he arrived it was already nearly midnight, and the discreet lighting along the pathway to the main entrance left most of the vast building floating unseen in the darkness. This was the site of one of his newest ventures: a telecom centre where honey-toned Indian operators with swiftly acquired American accents gave free 1–800 telephone succour to the throngs of needy consumers of the United States.
He swiped a security card at the entrance and day struck; the lights inside burned in the night like a sunny afternoon. Rajiv scanned the rows of cubicles critically, saw a Coke can on the floor that immediately irritated him, watched for any malfunctions in the efficiency of the place. Every worker had to average thirty calls an hour. Nine-hour shifts, one 45-minute break, two 15-minute breaks. Efficiency was everything.
He walked down the length of the hall unseen by the headphoned workers at their screens, and climbed the staircase to the mezzanine where the floor manager sat in a glass booth.
The manager jumped as if he had seen a television image come to life.
‘We are honoured, sir–extremely honoured–sir–’
‘How is everything?’
‘Extremely well. Thank you. Thank you very much.’
‘I’ve come to spend a bit of time listening to the calls. Want to see how everything is working.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The manager took off his headphones and switched the output to the speaker.
From above, the cubicles looked like a magnified insect battery, a nest uncovered by mistake, a glimpse of geometrically precise rows of pods, lines of tiny vespine heads, shining with black Sony ovals, trembling with larval energy on T-shirted thoraces.
‘Is this the number for customer complaints?’ A crystalline American accent asserted itself over the speaker.
‘Yes it is, madam. What can I do for you this morning?’
At that inconvenient moment, Rajiv’s mobile phone rang.
‘Hello?’ he said, in one quick syllable.
‘Hi, it’s me.’
‘Hello, Mira. I’m at work. What are you doing? It’s late.’
‘Last week I was on one of your flights from San José to Boston. There was a stop-over in St Louis. The flight out of San José was delayed by one and a half hours and I missed the Boston connection.’
‘I’m having a massage. At home. There’s something important I want to discuss with you.’
‘Not now.’
‘When then? Do I have to make an appointment? You never have time. There’s something very important to both of us that I want to tell you about and at ten past midnight on a Tuesday night I feel I have a right to expect that you’ll be available. And since you’re not actually in the house–’
‘You people didn’t have another flight to Boston till the next morning. So I had to buy another ticket on American to get there on time.’
‘OK quickly. I don’t have much time. What is it?’
‘I’ve just read this article–today’s paper–it’s about a new technique. Listen to this.’
‘Mira–please, not now! I can’t concentrate.’
‘You guys couldn’t get me there and I had to attend a dinner with people who were only in the country for one day. I need a refund.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that?’
‘I mean they’d managed to make it all the way from Paris and I was going to say sorry I’m stuck in Missouri?’
‘Is loitering around your damned factory at midnight so important? Just tell them to wait. Listen to me for one minute. You’ll be as excited as I am.’
‘OK, I’m listening–Why is this guy letting her talk on like that? Who cares about her damned dinner? Just give her what she wants and let’s move on–Go on Mira.’
‘SCIENTISTS PRODUCE VIABLE GORILLA CLONE: Claim Human Cloning now Possible.’
‘Madam, can we start from the beginning? Name and the date of travel?’
‘It’s datelined Cambridge, England. I’ll start from the beginning. A group of scientists at Bios Laboratories Ltd today announced they had produced an eight-cell gorilla foetus that would, had it been implanted in a mother gorilla, have given rise to a normal pregnancy and infant. The scientists destroyed the foetus, saying that their objectives were simply to confirm a number of theoretical and technical hypotheses, not to create quote public curiosities–blah blah blah…’
‘Last Thursday. Flight 162. Name is Laurie Kurt.’
‘OK, this is the bit: Dr Stephen Hall, the Technical Director at Bios Laboratories, said that the experiment showed how far the science had come.’
‘Let me just find that on the system for you. Hope you made it to the dinner in the end, after they’d come so far?’
‘In the end. Thank God. They were venture capitalists from France who were looking to put money into my company. It was the only time in four months we all had spare diary time. Can you believe that?’
‘I’m going crazy listening to this small talk. If this guy wants to chat he can do it in his spare time. He’s supposed to do one call every two minutes. What’s his average? Check it.’
Somewhere in California a police siren swelled, Dopplered, and faded.
‘Rajiv? Are you listening? “A few years ago these eight cells would have been on the cover of Time magazine and people would have been saying that this has turned our idea of nature on its head.”’
‘We’ve got this amazing technology, it’s going to turn the lives of three hundred million Americans literally upside-down–and I’m sitting stuck in St Louis–of all places!–missing the only time I could get with these VCs in four months.’
‘“Now we have well-established techniques for doing this kind of thing, and can achieve our objectives with a high degree of predictability–and no one is really surprised anymore.”’
‘He’s making eighteen calls an hour, sir.’
‘Then why is he still here?–Mira, hang on a minute–That’s not how you were briefed. If he’s not doing his job, fire him. That’s what you’re here for!’
‘You can imagine how I felt–’
‘Otherwise I’ll fire you.’
‘When asked what this meant for the future of human cloning, Hall was unequivocal. “It’s going to happen. We could do it now. And someone will do it. One thing that history has taught us is that human curiosity never sleeps, no matter what obstacles the doomsayers try to put in its way.”’
‘Mira, please!’
‘–this was possibly the most important moment of my life–’
