Smoke and Mirrors

On Saturday night Dr. Jeremy Benham and his wife, Celia, attended a dinner party held by a professional colleague. Benham sat next to a foreign psychiatrist.

They began to talk, over the hors d’oeuvres.

“The trouble with telling folks you’re a psychiatrist,” said the psychiatrist, who was American, and huge, and bullet-headed, and looked like a merchant marine, “is you get to watch them trying to act normal for the rest of the evening.” He chuckled, low and dirty.

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believes that the important people in his or her life—family members, workmates, parents, loved ones, whatever—have been replaced by—get this!—exact doubles.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.