Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions - By Neil Gaiman Page 0,88

following week. Tests showed he still had the disease.

Benham shrugged.

“It’s not unusual for it to hang on for this long. You say you feel no discomfort?”

“No. None at all. And I haven’t seen any discharge, either.”

Benham was tired, and a dull pain throbbed behind his left eye. He glanced down at the tests in the folder. “You’ve still got it, I’m afraid.”

Simon Powers shifted his seat. He had large watery blue eyes and a pale unhappy face. “What about the other thing, Doctor?”

The doctor shook his head. “What other thing?”

“I told you,” said Simon. “Last week. I told you. The feeling that my, um, my penis wasn’t, isn’t my penis anymore.”

Of course, thought Benham. It’s that patient. There was never any way he could remember the procession of names and faces and penises, with their awkwardness, and their braggadocio, and their sweaty nervous smells, and their sad little diseases.

“Mm. What about it?”

“It’s spreading, Doctor. The whole lower half of my body feels like it’s someone else’s. My legs and everything. I can feel them, all right, and they go where I want them to go, but sometimes I get the feeling that if they wanted to go somewhere else—if they wanted to go walking off into the world—they could, and they’d take me with them.

“I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it.”

Benham shook his head. He hadn’t really been listening. “We’ll change your antibiotics. If the others haven’t knocked this disease out by now, I’m sure these will. They’ll probably get rid of this other feeling as well—it’s probably just a side effect of the antibiotics.”

The young man just stared at him.

Benham felt he should say something else. “Perhaps you should try to get out more,” he said.

The young man stood up.

“Same time next week. No sex, no booze, no milk after the pills.” The doctor recited his litany.

The young man walked away. Benham watched him carefully, but could see nothing strange about the way he walked.

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