The Map of Time (14 page)

Wells held his breath as he ventured inside the room.

He had only taken a couple of faltering steps when he heard the surgeon close the door behind him. He gulped, glancing about the place Treves had practically hurled him into once he had fulfilled his minor role in the disturbing ceremony. He found himself in a spacious suite of rooms containing various normal-looking pieces of furniture. The ordinariness of the furnishings combined with the soft afternoon light filtering in through the window to create a prosaic, unexpectedly cozy atmosphere that clashed with the image of a monster’s lair. Wells stood transfixed for a few seconds, thinking his host would appear at any moment. When this did not happen, and not knowing what was expected of him, he began wandering hesitantly through the rooms. He was immediately overcome by the unsettling feeling that Merrick was spying on him from behind one of the screens, but even so continued weaving in and out of the furniture, sensing this was another part of the ritual. But nothing he saw gave away the uniqueness of the rooms” occupant; there were no half–eaten rats strewn about, or the remains of some brave knight’s armor. In one of the rooms, however, he came across two chairs and a small table laid out for tea. He found this innocent scene still more unsettling, for he could not help comparing it to the gallows awaiting the condemned man in the town square, its joists creaking balefully in the spring breeze. Then he noticed an intriguing object on a table next to the wall, beneath one of the windows. It was a cardboard model of a church. Wells walked over to marvel at the exquisite piece of craftsmanship. Fascinated by the wealth of detail in the model, he did not at first notice the crooked shadow appearing on the wall: a stiff figure, bent over to the right crowned by an enormous head.

“It’s the church opposite. I had to make up the parts I can’t see from the window.” The voice had a labored, slurred quality to it.

“It’s beautiful,” Wells breathed, addressing the lopsided silhouette projected onto the wall.

The shadow shook its head with great difficulty, unintentionally revealing to Wells what a struggle it was for Merrick to produce even this simple gesture of playing down the importance of his work. Having completed the arduous movement, he remained silent, stooped over his cane, and Wells realized he could not go on standing there with his back to him. The moment had arrived when he must turn and look his host in the face. Treves had warned him that Merrick paid special attention to his guests” initial reaction—the one that arose automatically, almost involuntarily, and which he therefore considered more genuine, more revealing than the faces people hurriedly composed in order to dissimulate their feelings once they had recovered from the shock.

For those few brief moments, Merrick was afforded a rare glimpse into his guests” souls, and it made no difference how they pretended to act during the subsequent meeting. Their initial reaction had already condemned or redeemed them. Wells was unsure whether Merrick’s appearance would fill him with pity or disgust.

Fearing the latter, he clenched his jaw as tightly as he could, tensing his face to prevent it from registering any emotion. He did not even want to show surprise, but merely wanted to gain time before his brain was able to process what he was seeing and reach a logical conclusion about the feelings a creature as apparently horribly deformed as Merrick produced in a person like him. In the end, if he experienced repulsion, he would willingly acknowledge this and reflect on it later, after he had left. And so, Wells drew a deep breath, planted his feet firmly on the ground, which had dissolved into a soft, quaking mass, and slowly turned to face his host.

What he saw made him gasp. Just as Treves had warned, Merrick’s deformities gave him a terrifying appearance. The photographs Wells had seen of him at the university, which mercifully veiled his hideousness behind a blurry gauze, had not prepared him for this. He wore a dark gray suit and was propping himself up with a cane. Ironically, these accoutrements, which were intended to humanize him, only made him look more grotesque.

Teeth firmly clenched, Wells stood stiffly before him, struggling to suppress a physical urge to shudder. He felt as if his heart were about to burst out of his chest, and beads of cold sweat began to trickle down his back, but he could not make out whether these symptoms were caused by horror or pity. Despite the unnatural tensing of his facial muscles, he could feel his lips quivering, perhaps as they tried to form a grimace of horror, yet at the same time he noticed tears welling up in his eyes, and so did not know what to think. Their mutual scrutiny went on forever, and Wells wished he could shed at least one tear that would encapsulate his pain and prove to Merrick, and to himself, that he was a sensitive, compassionate being, but the tears pricking his eyes refused to brim over.

“Would you prefer me to wear my hood, Mr. Wells?” asked Merrick softly.

The strange voice, which gave his words a liquid quality as if they were floating in a muddy brook, struck renewed fear into Wells. Had the time limit Merrick usually put on his guests’ response expired? “No … that won’t be necessary,” he murmured.

His host moved his gigantic head laboriously again in what Wells assumed was a nod of agreement.

“Then let us have our tea before it goes cold,” he said, shuffling over to the table in the center of the room.

Wells did not respond immediately, horrified by the way Merrick was obliged to walk. Everything was an effort for this creature, he realized, observing the complicated maneuvers he had to make to sit down. Wells had to suppress an urge to rush over and help him, afraid this gesture usually reserved for the elderly or infirm might upset Merrick. Hoping he was doing the right thing, Wells sat down as casually as possible in the chair opposite him. Again, he had to force himself to sit still as he watched his host serve the tea. Merrick mostly tried to fulfill this role using his left hand, which was unaffected by the disease, although he still employed his right hand to carry out minor tasks. Wells could not help but silently admire the extraordinary dexterity with which Merrick was able to take the lid off the sugar bowl or offer him a biscuit from a plate with a hand as big and rough as a lump of rock.

“I’m so glad you were able to come, Mr. Wells,” said his host, after he had succeeded in the arduous task of serving the tea without spilling a single drop, “because it allows me to tell you in person how much I enjoyed your story.” “You are very kind, Mr. Merrick,” replied Wells.

Once the story had been published, curious about how little impact it had made, Wells had read and reread it at least a dozen times to try to discover why it had been so completely overlooked. Imbued with a spirit of uncompromising criticism, he had weighed up the plot’s solidity, appraised its dramatic pace, considered the order, appropriateness, and even the number of words he had used, in case this turned out to be an unlucky or magical number, only to end up regarding his first and quite possibly his last work of fiction with the unforgiving, almost contemptuous eye with which the Almighty might contemplate the tiresome antics of a capuchin monkey. It was clear to him now that the story was a worthless piece of excrement: his writing a shameless imitation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s pseudo-Germanic style, and his main character, Dr. Nebogipfel, a poor, unrealistic copy of the exaggerated depictions of mad scientists already found in Gothic novels. Nevertheless, he thanked Merrick for his words of praise, smiling with false modesty and fearing they would be the only ones his writings ever received.

“A time machine …” said Merrick, delighting in that juxtaposition of words he found so evocative. “You have a prophetic imagination, Mr. Wells.” Wells thanked him again for this new and rather embarrassing compliment. How many more eulogies would he have to endure before asking him to change the subject? “If I had a time machine like Dr. Nebogipfel’s,” Merrick went on, dreamily, “I would travel back to ancient Egypt.” Wells found the remark touching. Like any other person, this creature had a favorite period in history, as he must have a favorite fruit, season, or song.

“Why is that?” he asked with a friendly smile, providing his host with the opportunity to expound on his tastes.

“Because the Egyptians worshiped gods with animals” heads,” replied Merrick, slightly shamefaced.

Wells stared at him stupidly. He was unsure what surprised him more: the naïve yearning in Merrick’s reply or the awkward bashfulness accompanying it, as though he were chiding himself for wanting such a thing, for preferring to be a god worshiped by men instead of the despised monster he was. If anyone had a right to feel hatred and bitterness towards the world, surely he did. And yet Merrick reproached himself for his sorrow, as though the sunlight through the windowpane warming his back or the clouds scudding across the sky ought to be reason enough for him to be happy. Lost for words, Wells took a biscuit from the plate and began nibbling on it with intense concentration, as though making sure his teeth still worked.

“Why do you think Dr. Nebogipfel didn’t use his machine to travel into the future as well?” Merrick then asked in that unguent voice, which sounded as if it was smeared in butter. “Wasn’t he curious?” I sometimes wonder what the world will be like in a hundred years.” “Indeed …” murmured Wells, at a loss to respond to this remark, too.

Merrick belonged to that class of reader who was able to forget with amazing ease the hand moving the characters behind the scenes of a novel. As a child he had also been able to read in that way. But one day he had decided he would be a writer, and from that moment on he found it impossible to immerse himself in stories with the same innocent abandon: he was aware that characters” thoughts and actions were not his. They answered to the dictates of a higher being, to someone who, alone in his room, moved the pieces he himself had placed on the board, more often than not with an overwhelming feeling of indifference that bore no relation to the emotions he intended to arouse in his readers.

Novels were not slices of life, but more or less controlled creations reproducing slices of imaginary, polished lives, where boredom and the futile, useless acts that make up any existence were replaced with exciting, meaningful episodes. At times, Wells longed to be able to read in that carefree, childlike way again, but having glimpsed behind the scenes, he could only do this with an enormous leap of his imagination. Once you had written your first story, there was no turning back. You were a deceiver, and you could not help treating other deceivers with suspicion. It occurred to Wells briefly to suggest that Merrick ask Nebogipfel himself, but he changed his mind, unsure whether his host would take his riposte at the gentle mockery he intended. What if Merrick really was too naïve to be able to tell the difference between reality and a simple work of fiction? What if this sad inability and not his sensitivity allowed him to experience the stories he read so intensely? If so, Well’s rejoinder would sound like a cruel jibe aimed at wounding his ingenuousness. Fortunately, Merrick fired another question at him, which was easier to answer: “Do you think somebody will one day invent a time machine?” “I doubt such a thing could exist,” replied Wells bluntly.

“And yet you’ve written about it!” his host exclaimed, horrified.

“That’s precisely why, Mr. Merrick,” he explained, trying to think of a simple way of bringing together the various ideas underlying his conception of literature. “I assure you that if it were possible to build a time machine, I would never have written about it. I am only interested in writing about what is impossible.” At this, he recalled a quote from Luciano de Samósata’s True Tales, which he could not help memorizing because it perfectly summed up his thoughts on literature: “I write about things I have neither seen nor verified nor heard about from others, and in addition, about things that have never existed and could have no possible basis for existing.” Yes, as he had told his host, he was only interested in writing about things that were impossible.

Dickens was there to take care of the rest, he thought of adding, but did not. Treves had told him Merrick was an avid reader. He did not want to risk offending him if Dickens happened to be one of his favorite authors.

“Then I’m sorry that because of me you’ll never be able to write about a man who is half-human, half-elephant,” murmured Merrick.

Once more, Wells was disarmed by his host’s remark. After Merrick had spoken, his gaze wandered over to the window. Wells was unsure whether the gesture was meant to express regret or to give him the opportunity to study Merrick’s appearance as freely as he wished. In any case, Wells’s eyes were unconsciously, irresistibly, almost hypnotically drawn to him, confirming what he already knew full well. Merrick was right: if he had not seen him with his own eyes, he would never have believed such a creature could exist. Except perhaps in the fictional world of books.

“You will be a great writer, Mr. Wells,” his host declared, continuing to stare out of the window.

“I wish I could agree,” replied Wells, who, following his first failed attempt, was beginning to have serious doubts about his abilities.

Merrick turned to face him.

“Look at my hands, Mr. Wells,” he said holding them out for Wells to see. “Would you believe that these hands could make a church out of cardboard?” Wells gazed benevolently at his host’s mismatched hands. The right one was enormous and grotesque while the left one looked like that of a ten-year-old girl.

“I suppose not,” he admitted.

Merrick nodded slowly.

“It is a question of will, Mr. Wells,” he said, striving to imbue his slurred voice with a tone of authority. “That’s all.” Coming from anyone else’s mouth these words might have struck Wells as trite, but uttered by the man in front of him they became an irrefutable truth. This creature was living proof that man’s will could move mountains and part seas. In that hospital wing, that refuge from the world, the distance between the attainable and the unattainable was more than ever a question of will. If Merrick had built that cardboard church with his deformed hands, what might not he, Wells, be capable of—he who was only prevented from doing whatever he wanted by his own lack of self-belief? He could not help agreeing, which seemed to please Merrick, judging from the way he fidgeted in his seat. In an embarrassed voice that sounded even more like that of a dying child, Merrick went on to confess that the model was to be a gift for a stage actress with whom he had been corresponding for several months. He referred to her as Mrs. Kendal, and from what Wells could gather she was one of his most generous benefactors. He had no difficulty picturing her as a woman of good social standing, sympathetic to the various types of suffering in the world, so long as they were not on her doorstep, who had discovered in the Elephant Man a novel way of spending the money she usually donated to charity. When Merrick explained that he was looking forward to meeting her in person when she returned from her tour in America, Wells could not help smiling, touched by the amorous tone which, consciously or not, slipped in his voice. But at the same time he felt a pang of sorrow, and hoped Mrs. Kendal’s work would delay her in America so that Merrick could go on believing in the illusion of her letters and not be faced with the sudden discovery that impossible love was only possible in books.