He paused to let his words sink in.
‘But in point of fact the substance is practically interchangeable. It’s not the substance of your thoughts that makes them frightening. Fear is a physical phenomenon. It’s the fear that creates the substance. Your heartbeat speeds up, your chest tightens, you tense up, stiffen, you become rigid. Your inward horizons shrink down and now you feel helpless and no longer free. You rage against it, like an animal in a cage. All these physical symptoms taken together make you give your thoughts such weight, Lynn, that’s why they have such horrible power over you. It’s important that you learn to see through the mechanism. It’s nothing more than that, you see. As soon as you manage to relax you’ll be able to break the spiral. The more intensely you feel yourself, the less power your thoughts have to torture you. That’s why any sort of therapy will have to begin with physical exercise. Sport, lots of sport. Exercise, feel the burn, make your muscles ache. Sharpen up your senses. Hearing, sight, taste, smell, touch. Leave all these projections behind and get out into the real world. Breathe deeply, feel your body. Do you have any questions?’
‘No. Actually, yes.’ Lynn wrung her hands. ‘I understand what you mean, but – but – it’s just that these really are very specific fears. I mean, I’m not just making this up! What I’ve done here, what I’ve let myself in for. My thoughts only ever have to do with – destruction, disaster – death. Other people, dying. Killing, torturing them, destroying them! – I am so horribly afraid of turning into something, suddenly slipping my leash, that I’ll leap on the others, tear them to shreds, people I love! Something eating away at me from inside, until there’s nothing left of me but a shell, and inside that shell something awful, something strange, and – I don’t know who I am any longer. I don’t know how much longer I can take all the pressure—’
Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, drops of sheer despair. Her chin trembled. There seemed to be fluids spouting from everywhere, from her nose, the corners of her mouth, spilling over her lower lip. The man leaned backwards and looked at her from under lowered eyelids, maybe expecting that she would add something, but she couldn’t say any more, she could only gasp for air. She wished she could vanish from this world, back to the womb, not to Crystal’s though – the woman had never been able to offer her safety or warmth, all she had done was pass on her melancholy poison, the bad code written in her genes. She wished she had a father who would tell her that it had just been a bad dream, but not Julian – he would take her in his arms and comfort her, yes, but he wouldn’t have the least idea of what her problem was, any more than he had been able to understand Crystal’s depression and her later mental illness. That didn’t mean though that Julian despised weakness, he just couldn’t understand it! Lynn wanted to be back in the loving arms of parents who had never existed.
‘I have very high expectations of myself,’ she said, straining to sound businesslike. ‘And then – I feel sure that they’re too high, and I hate myself for falling short – for failing.’
She felt herself become transparent, and clutched her arms tightly around herself though it did nothing to make the feeling go away. She was talking to a computer, but she had rarely felt so exposed.
‘I’ll just suggest another way you could look at it,’ ISLAND-II said after a while. ‘These aren’t your expectations. They are other people’s expectations, but you’ve bought into them so completely that you think that they are yours. So you try to bring your actions into line with these expectations. You don’t place any value on who you truly are, but rather on how other people would like you to be. But you can’t deny your real self for ever, you can’t spend for ever running yourself down. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I think I do.’
The man looked at her for a while, friendly, analytical.
‘How do you feel right now?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘The person you really are knows. Try to feel that feeling.’
‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘I can’t do something like that. I can’t get – close to myself.’
‘You don’t have to conceal anything here, Lynn.’ The man smiled. ‘Not from me. Don’t forget, I’m just a program. Albeit a very intelligent one.’
Conceal? Oh yes, she was the queen of concealment, had been since her childhood, when she had spent hours in front of the mirror, herself and her reflection practising concealment together, until she was able to project any possible expression onto her pretty face: confidence, when she was about to fall to pieces, easygoing calm when the winds of stress were screaming all around her, bluffing with an empty hand. And how quickly she had learned what such tactics could achieve, when the man she most wanted to please disapproved of the very idea of such concealment. But he couldn’t see through her mimicry, and in the end even she couldn’t see through it. In the hectic attempt to keep up with the pace he set, she developed a deep-seated aversion to finer feelings, her own included. She began to despise her fellow man’s maudlin moods and public passions. Souls stripped bare, suffering on display, the clingy confidentialities of unearned intimacy. Letting the whole world know what side of bed you’d got out that morning, letting them all peer in at the bubbling chemistry of your mind – all this was repulsive. How much she preferred her own clean, hygienic concealment. Until that day five years ago when everything changed—
‘What you’re feeling is rage,’ ISLAND-II said calmly.
‘Rage?’
‘Yes. Unfettered rage. There’s a Lynn Orley trapped inside who wants to break out at last, and be loved, wants herself to love her. This Lynn has to tear down a great many walls, she has to free herself of a great many expectations. Are you surprised that she wants to maim and kill?’
‘But I don’t want to maim and kill,’ she sobbed. ‘But I can’t – can’t do anything to stop—’
‘Of course you don’t want to. Not physically. You don’t want to do anything to anyone, Lynn, have no fear on that front. You’re only torturing one person, yourself. There’s no monster inside you.’
‘But these thoughts just won’t leave me alone!’
‘It’s the other way around, Lynn. You won’t leave them alone.’
‘But I’m trying. I’m trying everything I can!’
‘They’ll become weaker the stronger the real Lynn grows. What you think is some monstrous transformation is really just a new birth, a beginning. We also call it liberation. You kick and bite, you want to get out. And of course as you do that, something else dies, your old self, the identity that was forced upon you. Do you know what the three childhood neuroses are?’
Lynn shook her head.
‘They’re as follows: I have to. I mustn’t. I ought to. Please repeat.’
‘I – have to, mustn’t – ought to—’
‘How does it sound?’
‘All fucked up.’
‘From today, they don’t count for you any longer. You aren’t that child any longer. From now on, all that counts is: I am.’
‘I am what I am—’ Lynn sang in a wavering voice. ‘And who am I?’
‘You’re the one who knows what you think and what you’re doing. You are what’s left when you have shucked away all those people you think are you, until all that’s left is pure awareness. Have you ever had the feeling of watching yourself think? That you can see the thoughts rising up and then vanishing again?’