Smoke and Mirrors

Benham chuckled, too, and since he was sitting next to a psychiatrist, he spent the rest of the evening trying to act normally.

He drank too much wine with his dinner.

After the coffee, when he couldn’t think of anything else to say, he told the psychiatrist (whose name was Marshall, although he told Benham to call him Mike) what he could recall of Simon Powers’s delusions.

Mike laughed. “Sounds fun. Maybe a tiny bit spooky. But nothing to worry about. Probably just a hallucination caused by a reaction to the antibiotics. Sounds a little like Capgras’s Syndrome. You heard about that over here?”

Benham nodded, then thought, then said, “No.” He poured himself another glass of wine, ignoring his wife’s pursed lips and almost imperceptibly shaken head.

“Well, Capgras’s Syndrome,” said Mike, “is this funky delusion. Whole piece on it in The Journal of American Psychiatry about five years back. Basically, it’s where a person believes that the important people in his or her life—family members, workmates, parents, loved ones, whatever—have been replaced by—get this!—exact doubles.

“Doesn’t apply to everyone they know. Just selected people. Often just one person in their life. No accompanying delusions, either. Just that one thing. Acutely emotionally disturbed people with paranoid tendencies.”

The psychiatrist picked his nose with his thumbnail. “I ran into a case myself, couple, two, three years back.”

“Did you cure him?”

The psychiatrist gave Benham a sideways look and grinned, showing all his teeth. “In psychiatry, Doctor—unlike, perhaps, the world of sexually transmitted disease clinics—there is no such thing as a cure. There is only adjustment.”

Benham sipped the red wine. Later it occurred to him that he would never have said what he said next if it wasn’t for the wine. Not aloud, anyway.“I don’t suppose . . .” He paused, remembering a film he had seen as a teenager. (Something about bodysnatchers?) “I don’t suppose that anyone ever checked to see if those people had been removed and replaced by exact doubles . . . ?”

Mike—Marshall—whatever—gave Benham a very funny look indeed and turned around in his chair to talk to his neighbor on the other side.

Benham, for his part, carried on trying to act normally (whatever that was) and failed miserably. He got very drunk indeed, started muttering about “fucking colonials,” and had a blazing row with his wife after the party was over, none of which were particularly normal occurrences.

Benham’s wife locked him out of their bedroom after the argument.

He lay on the sofa downstairs, covered by a crumpled blanket, and masturbated into his underpants, his hot seed spurting across his stomach.

In the small hours he was woken by a cold sensation around his loins.

He wiped himself off with his dress shirt and returned to sleep.

Simon was unable to masturbate.

He wanted to, but his hand wouldn’t move. It lay beside him, healthy, fine; but it was as if he had forgotten how to make it respond. Which was silly, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

He began to sweat. It dripped from his face and forehead onto the white cotton sheets, but the rest of his body was dry.

Cell by cell, something was reaching up inside him. It brushed his face tenderly, like the kiss of a lover; it was licking his throat, breathing on his cheek. Touching him.

He had to get out of the bed. He couldn’t get out of the bed.

He tried to scream, but his mouth wouldn’t open. His larynx refused to vibrate.

Simon could still see the ceiling, lit by the lights of passing cars. The ceiling blurred: His eyes were still his own, and tears were oozing out of them, down his face, soaking the pillow.

They don’t know what I’ve got, he thought. They said I had what everyone else gets. But I didn’t catch that. I’ve caught something different.

Or maybe, he thought, as his vision clouded over and the darkness swallowed the last of Simon Powers, it caught me.

Soon after that, Simon got up, and washed, and inspected himself carefully in front of the bathroom mirror. Then he smiled, as if he liked what he saw.

Benham smiled. “I’m pleased to tell you,” he said, “that I can give you a clean bill of health.”

Simon Powers stretched in his seat, lazily, and nodded. “I feel terrific,” he said.

He did look well, Benham thought. Glowing with health. He seemed taller as well. A very attractive young man, decided the doctor. “So, uh, no more of those feelings?”

“Feelings?”

“Those feelings you were telling me about. That your body didn’t belong to you anymore.”

Simon waved a hand, gently, fanning his face. The cold weather had broken, and London was stewing in a sudden heat-wave; it didn’t feel like England anymore.

Simon seemed amused.

“All of this body belongs to me, Doctor. I’m certain of that.”

Simon Powers (90/00666.L SINGLE. MALE.) grinned like the world belonged to him as well.

The doctor watched him as he walked out of the surgery. He looked stronger now, less fragile.

The next patient on Jeremy Benham’s appointment card was a twenty-two-year-old boy. Benham was going to have to tell him he was HIV positive. I hate this job, he thought. I need a holiday.

He walked down the corridor to call the boy in and pushed past Simon Powers, talking animatedly to a pretty young Australian nurse. “It must be a lovely place,” he was telling her. “I want to see it. I want to go everywhere. I want to meet everyone.” He was resting a hand on her arm, and she was making no move to free herself from it.

Dr. Benham stopped beside them. He touched Simon on the shoulder. “Young man,” he said. “Don’t let me see you back here.”

Simon Powers grinned. “You won’t see me here again, Doctor,” he said. “Not as such, anyway. I’ve packed in my job. I’m going around the world.” They shook hands. Powers’s hand was warm and comfortable and dry.

Benham walked away, but could not avoid hearing Simon Powers, still talking to the nurse.

“It’s going to be so great,” he was saying to her. Benham wondered if he was talking about sex or world travel, or possibly, in some way, both.

“I’m going to have such fun,” said Simon. “I’m loving it already.”

VAMPIRE SESTINA

I wait here at the boundaries of dream,

all shadow-wrapped. The dark air tastes of night,

so cold and crisp, and I wait for my love.