Exchange Place

Stand and Unfold Yourself

As Kilpatrick put the ring-binder in his briefcase he noticed a suitcase on the floor of the kneehole of the desk. He took off the suit jacket and laid it on the desk and then, with some difficulty, manipulated the mannequin until he had divested it of its trousers. He folded jacket and trousers neatly and put them in the suitcase, lifted both cases, went out the door, locked it, and made his way back to Hôtel Chopin. In Room 36 he took out the ring binder, opened it at random, and read these words:

When an organism interacts with an object, be it within body boundaries (for example, pain) or outside of them (for example, a landscape), it creates a narrative. This is true whether the object be perceived in the present moment, or recalled, for the past continues to influence our behaviour. The hippocampus is a vital structure in the mapping of multiple, concurrent stimuli. It receives signals related to activity in all sensory cortices, which arrive indirectly at the end of several projection chains with multiple synapses, and reciprocates signals via backward projections along the same chains. In plain speech, it is the instrument by which we assemble ourselves. A human being is a story-telling machine, and the self is a centre of narrative gravity. Patients who have suffered severe lesions to the hippocampus lose the story of themselves: they are bereft of a past and of an anticipated future. They live in an eternal present, in which there is no elsewhere, no before, no after. Their wives, their husbands, their family and friends are constant and surprising strangers to them.

I see from your record, Mr Kilpatrick, that you are prone to bouts of amnesia: what we call transient global amnesia, specifically. It is a condition especially associated with migraine, and there can be little doubt that the electrical activity of migraine sometimes affects the hippocampus, causing temporary lapses in the processing of information. In these episodes — typically, they last for a few hours, usually less than a day — the otherwise entirely normal person is suddenly deprived of the records that have been recently added to the autobiographical memory. The immediate past, the past of the minutes just before, of the hours before, is a blank. Moreover, since our memory of the here and now also includes memories of the events we constantly anticipate — what I like to call memories of the future — it follows that the person struck by such amnesia will have no memory regarding what he intended for the minutes or the hours or days ahead. The idea of the future does not exist for him. Typically, the transient global amnesiac repeats the same questions: Where am I? What am I doing here? How did I come here? The case of K, if we might call you that for now, is especially fascinating, since it would seem that at times the narrative void caused by such attacks is bridged by K’s alternative personality, the simulacrum K created as a child. Let us call this alter ego Mr X. When K’s memory fails, X steps into the breach. Remember, X is not a simple stand-in, an ambitious understudy waiting in the wings for that moment when the leading man is laid low by some catastrophe, whether planned or accidental. Rather, it is as if Hamlet were replaced by Fortinbras, the thinker by the man of action. And Hamlet is a play about the narratives we create for ourselves, is it not? The parts we play? It concerns being or not being. That is the question. And the play starts with a question of identity. Act One, Scene One, line one: Who’s there?

Kilpatrick read on, skimming here, dwelling on some passages there, trying to make sense of it. The book consisted of three sections: X, a first-person narrative; Y, a third-person narrative concerning a Gabriel Kilpatrick; and K, alternating between first-person and third-person as the protagonists of X and Y morph into someone called K and the events detailed in section X are revisited from his point of view. The last section seemed unfinished; or if it was finished, it was inconclusive. Common to all three sections was a fascination with memory, paranormal phenomena, surveillance, questions of identity, and the bombing campaign conducted by the Provisional IRA in Belfast in the latter decades of the twentieth century. For example:

Treading the glass grit in Corporation Square, Kilpatrick was reminded that it had been the scene of a bomb two days ago. There was some dispute as to whether the intended target was the Imperial Assurance offices or the Ulster Tea Importers next door. Whatever the case, the effects, as televised on that evening’s Scene Around Six, had been spectacular. The planting of the device, in a Volkswagen estate car, had coincided with the arrival of a Hercules truck delivering a consignment of Irish Breakfast tea. The occupants of the Hercules were forced at gunpoint to abandon their vehicle. The terrorists made their getaway in a second car, a Ford Capri. The Volkswagen exploded fifteen minutes later, causing extensive collateral damage to the structure of the immediate environment, including the Hercules truck and its cargo. Kilpatrick recalled the shudder of the camera’s field of vision as it recorded car, truck and tea-chests disintegrating with a boom and whoosh, an atomic cloud of tea like starlings boiling upwards, sifting, settling on the twisted shrapnel already scattered like bits of art about the wide expanse of Corporation Square.

John Kilpatrick, reading this passage, realized that it was one of the many incidents — how many scores, how many hundreds? — he had forgotten. One lost count as one incident followed another in a series of amnesiac elisions. Yet everything was watched, overheard, recorded:

Electronic bugs — parasitic transmitters, Trojan Horse transistors, synaptic grafts or buds — were planted everywhere: in phones and door-handles and light fitments, spiked like hat-pins into the backs of hotel room curtains, masquerading as martini olives in hotel bars, lurking in the ceramic chain-pulls of hotel toilets. In smoke-filled back rooms the glint of an exposed floorboard nail was enough to invite suspicion. Cameras were concealed in smoke detectors, behind bar mirrors, and in bar optics, or were made to look like personal accoutrements: badges, buckles, brooches, bracelets, powder compacts, cigarette lighters. Taking into account that any conversation might be overheard, any covert action photographed, the players conducted conversations and actions accordingly, talking of this when they meant that, doing that instead of this.

And John Kilpatrick thought he remembered a conversation with John Bourne, who had playfully suggested that every new radio bought in Belfast was liable to be bugged: that it was both receiver and transmitter. But even if it were true, that wouldn’t apply to Bourne’s vintage EKO. So he had thought at the time. In hindsight, he wasn’t so sure. One thing was certain: there was more to everything than met the eye.