The Changeling

by Robert Silverberg

In Memoriam: PKD

Just as the startling facade of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl came into view on the far side of the small pyramid, Hilgard felt a sudden touch of vertigo and swayed for a moment, as though a little earthquake had rippled through the Teotihuacan archeological zone. He leaned against a railing until the worst of the queasiness and confusion had passed. The heat? The altitude? Last night’s fiery dinner exacting its price? Down here in Mexico a tourist learned to expect that some kind of internal upset could strike at any time.

But the discomfort vanished as quickly as it had come, and Hilgard looked up in awe, at the great stone staircase of the temple. The jutting heads of the feathered serpents burst like the snouts of dinosaurs from the massive blocks. Traces of the original frescoes, perhaps fifteen hundred years old, glinted here and there. Hilgard took eight or nine photos. But he was too hot and dusty and weary to explore the wondrous building with any real vigor, and he still felt a little shaky from that dizzy spell a moment ago. The pressure of time was on him also: he had promised to meet his driver at two o’clock at the main parking lot for the return trip to Mexico City. It was nearly two now, and the parking area was at least a mile to the north, along the searing, shadeless thoroughfare known as the Avenue of the Dead. He wished now that he had started his tour here at the awesome Quetzalcoatl Temple instead of consuming his morning’s energy scrambling around on the two huge pyramids at the other end.

Too late to do anything about that. Hilgard trudged quickly toward the parking lot, pausing only to buy a tepid beer from a vendor midway along the path. By quarter past two he was in the lot, sweaty and puffing. There was no sign of his driver and the battered black cab. Still at lunch, probably, Hilgard thought, relieved at not having to feel guilty about his own tardiness but annoyed by yet another example of Mexican punctuality. Well, now he had time to get a few more shots of the Pyramid of the Sun while he waited, and maybe—

“Señor? Señor!”

Hilgard turned. A driver—not his—had emerged from a shiny little Volkswagen cab and was waving to him.

“Your wife, señor, she will be here in two more minutes. She is taking more pictures on the top of the big pyramid, and she says to please wait, she will not be long.”

“I think you want someone else,” Hilgard said.

The driver looked baffled. “But you are her husband, señor.”

“Sorry. I am not anybody’s husband.”

“Is a joke? I am not understanding.” The driver grinned uncertainly. “A blonde woman, dark glasses. I pick you and she up in front of the Hotel Century, Zona Rosa, ten o’clock this morning, you remember? She said to me, ten minutes ago, tell my husband wait a little, I go take more pyramid pictures, just a few minutes. And—”

“I’m staying at the Hotel Presidente,” Hilgard said. “I’m not married. I drove out here this morning in a black Ford cab. The driver’s name was Chucho.”

The Mexican’s grin, earnest and ingratiating, stayed on his face, but it grew ragged, and something hostile came into his eyes, as though he was beginning to think he was being made the butt of some incomprehensible gringo prank. Slowly he said, “I know Chucho, yes. He took some American people down to Xochimilco this morning. Maybe he was your driver yesterday.”

“He met me outside the Presidente. We arranged it last night. The fare was seventeen hundred pesos.” Hilgard glanced around, wishing the man would show up before things got even more muddled. “You must be mistaking me for a different American. I’m traveling alone. I wouldn’t mind meeting an interesting blonde, I guess, but I don’t happen to be married to one, and I really am certain that you’re not the driver I was with this morning. I’m very sorry if—”

“There is your wife, señor,” said the Mexican coolly.

Hilgard turned. A trim, attractive woman in her late thirties, with short golden hair and an alert, open face, was making her way through the clutter of souvenir stands at the entrance to the parking area. “Ted!” she called. “Here I am!”

He stared blankly. He had never seen her before. As she drew closer he forced a smile and held it in a fixed and rigid way. But what was he supposed to say to her? He didn’t even know her name. Excuse me, ma’am, I’m not actually your husband. Eh? Was there a television program, he wondered, that went to elaborate lengths to stage complicated hoaxes with hapless, unsuspecting victims, and was he at the center of it? Would they shower him with home appliances and cruise tickets once they were done bewildering him? Pardon me, ma’am, but I’m not really Ted Hilgard. I’m just someone else of the same name and face. Yes? No.

She came up to him and said, “You should have climbed it with me. You know what they’ve been doing up there for the past half hour? They’re celebrating the spring equinox with some kind of Aztec rite. Incense, chanting, green boughs, two white doves in a cage that they just liberated. Fascinating stuff, and I got pictures of the whole thing. Hold this for me for a minute, will you?” she said casually, slipping her heavy camera bag from her shoulder and pushing it into his hands. “God, it’s hot today! Did you have fun at the other temple? I just didn’t feel like hiking all the way down there, but I hope I didn’t miss—”

The driver, standing to one side, now said mildly, “It is getting late, Missus. We go back to the city now?”

“Yes. Of course.” She tucked a stray shirttail back into her slacks, took the camera bag from Hilgard and followed the driver toward the Volkswagen cab. Hilgard, mystified, stayed where he was, scanning the parking lot hopelessly for Chucho and the old black Ford and trying to construct some plausible course of action. After a moment the blonde woman looked back, frowning, and said, “Ted? What’s the matter?”

He made an inarticulate sound and fluttered his hands in confusion. Possibly, he told himself, he was having some sort of psychotic episode of fugue. Or perhaps that moment of dizziness at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl had in fact been a light stroke that had scrambled his memory. Could she really be his wife? He felt quite certain that he had been single all his life, except for those eight months a dozen years ago with Beverly. He could clearly envision his bachelor flat on Third Avenue, the three neat rooms, the paintings, the little cabinet of pre-Columbian statuettes. He saw himself at his favorite restaurants with his several lovers, Judith or Janet or Denise. This brisk, jaunty blonde woman fit nowhere into those images. But yet—yet—

He had no idea what to do. His fingers began to tremble and his feet felt like blocks of frozen mud, and he started to walk in a numbed, dazed way toward the Volkswagen. The driver, holding the door open for him, gave him the sort of venomous look of contempt that Hilgard imagined was generally given to gringos who were so drunk at midday that they were unable to remember they were married. But Hilgard was not drunk.

The woman chattered pleasantly as they zipped back toward Mexico City. Evidently they were planning to visit the Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park that afternoon, and tomorrow morning they would move on either to Cuernavaca or Guadalajara, depending on which one of them won a low-keyed disagreement that had evidently been going on for several days. Hilgard faked his way through the conversation answering vaguely and remotely and eventually withdrawing from it altogether by pleading fatigue, a touch of the sun. Before long, gray tendrils of smog were drifting toward them: they were at the outskirts of Mexico City. In the relatively light Sunday traffic, the driver roared flamboyantly down the broad Paseo de la Reforma and cut sharply into the Zona Rosa district to deposit there in front of the slender black-and-white tower of the Hotel Century. “Give him a nice tip, darling,” the woman said to Hilgard. “We’ve kept him out longer than we were supposed to.”

Hilgard offered the glowering driver a pair of thousand-peso notes, waved away the change, and they went into the hotel. In the small lobby she said, “Get the key, will you? I’ll ring for the elevator.” Hilgard approached the desk and looked imploringly at the clerk, who said in fluent English, “Good afternoon, Mr. Hilgard. Did you find the pyramids interesting?” and handed him, without being asked, the key to room 177.

This is not happening. Hilgard told himself, thinking of his comfortable room on the seventh floor of the glossy Hotel Presidente. This is a dream. This is a hallucination. He joined the blonde woman in the elevator; she pressed 17 and it began to ascend slowly, pausing dismayingly for a fraction of a second between the tenth and eleventh floors as the power sagged. Room 177 was compact, efficient, with a semicircular double bed and a little bar unit stocked with miniature bottles of liquor, mixers, and such. The woman took a brandy from it and said to him, “Shall I get you a rum, Ted?”

“No. Thank you.” He wandered the room. Feminine things all over the bathroom sink, makeup and lotions and whatnot. Matching his-and-hers luggage in the closet. A man’s jacket and shirts hanging neatly—not his, but the sort of things he might have owned—a book on the night-table, the new Updike novel. He had read it a few months ago, but in some other edition, apparently, for this had a red jacket and he remembered it as blue.

“I’m going to grab a shower,” she said. “Then we go out to get lunch and head over to the museum, okay?”

He looked up. She padded past him to the bathroom, naked; he had a sudden surprising glimpse of small round breasts and dimpled buttocks, and then the door closed. Hilgard waited until he heard the water running, and took her wallet from her open purse. In it he saw the usual credit cards, some travelers’ checks, a thick wad of well-worn Mexican banknotes. And a driver’s license: Celia Hilgard, thirty-six years old, five feet five, blond hair, blue eyes, 124 pounds, married. Married. An address on East 85th Street. A card in the front of the wallet declared that in case of emergency Theodore Hilgard was to be notified, either at the East 85th Street address or at the offices of Hilgard & Hilgard on West 57th Street. Hilgard studied the card as though it were written in Sanskrit. His apartment was on East 62nd Street, his gallery two blocks south of it. He was sure of that. He could see himself quite sharply as he walked down Third every morning, glancing toward Bloomingdale’s, turning east on 60th—

Two Ted Hilgards? With the same face?

“What are you looking for?” Celia asked, stepping from the bathroom and toweling herself dry.

Hilgard’s cheeks reddened. Guiltily he tucked her wallet back in her purse. “Ah—just checking to see how many pesos you have left. I thought we might want to cash some travelers’ checks when the banks open tomorrow.”

“I cashed some on Friday. Don’t you remember?”

“Slipped my mind, I guess.”

“Do you want some of my pesos?”

“I’ve got enough for now,” he said.

They had lunch at the hotel. For Hilgard it was like sitting across the table from a keg of dynamite. He was not yet ready to admit that he had gone insane, but very little that he could say to her was likely to make any sense, and eventually she was bound to challenge him. He felt like someone who had come into a movie in the middle and was trying to figure out what was going on, but this was worse, much worse, because he was not merely watching the movie, he was starring in it. And found himself lunching with a total stranger to whom he had been married, it seemed, for years. But people who have been married for years have little new to say to one another at lunch, usually. He was grateful for the long silences. When she did speak, he answered cautiously and briefly. Once he allowed himself the luxury of calling her by name, just to show that he knew her name; but his “Celia” provoked a quick frown in her that puzzled him. Was he supposed to have used some pet name instead? Or was there a name other than Celia by which everybody called her—Cee, perhaps, or Cele, or Charley? He was altogether lost. Lingering over his coffee, he thought again of that dizzying moment at the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, when everything had swayed and swirled in his head. Was there such a thing as a stroke that affected one’s memory without causing any sort of paralysis of the body? Well, maybe. But he wasn’t suffering merely from amnesia; he had a complete and unblurred set of memories of a life without Celia, as a contented single man running a successful art gallery, living a fulfilling existence, friends, lovers, travel. Arriving in Mexico City three days ago, looking forward to a week of cheerful solitude, warm weather, spicy food, perhaps some interesting new pieces for his collection. How could a stroke build all that into his mind? With such detail, too: the black Ford cab, Chucho the amiable driver, the seventh-floor room at the Hotel Presidente—

“I’ve left something upstairs,” he told Celia. “I’ll just run up for it, and then we can go.”

From the room he dialed the Presidente. “Mr. Hilgard, please.”

“One moment.” A long pause. Then: “Please repeat the name.”

“Hilgard. Theodore Hilgard. I think he’s in room 770.” A longer pause.

“I’m sorry, sir. We have no one by that name.”

“I see,” Hilgard said, not seeing at all, and put the phone down. He stared at himself in the mirror, searching for signs of a stroke, the drooping eyelid, the sagging cheek. Nothing. Nothing. But his face was gray. He looked a thousand years old.

They hailed a cab outside the hotel and went to the Museum of Anthropology. He had been there several times, most recently yesterday afternoon. But from what Celia said it was apparent she had never seen it, which was a new awkwardness for him: he had to pretend he had no familiarity with that very familiar place. As they wandered through it he did his best to feign fresh responses to objects he had known for years, the great Olmec stone heads, the terrifying statue of the goddess Coatlicue, the jade-encrusted masks. Sometimes it was not necessary to feign it. In the Aztec room there was an immense marble stela just to the left of the calendar stone that he could not recall from yesterday’s visit, and there was a case of amazing little Olmec figurines of polished jade absolutely new to him, and the Mayan room seemed arranged in an entirely different way. Hilgard found all that impossible to comprehend. Even the huge umbrella-shaped fountain in the museum courtyard was subtly different, with golden spokes now sprouting from it. The cumulative effect of the day’s little strangenesses was making him feel giddy, almost feverish: Celia several times asked if he was getting ill.

They had dinner that night at an outdoor café a few blocks from their hotel, and strolled for a long time afterward, returning to their room a little before midnight. As they undressed Hilgard felt new dismay. Was she expecting him to make love? The thought horrified him. Not that she was unattractive, far from it. But he had never been able to go to bed with strangers. A prolonged courtship, a feeling of ease with the other person, of closeness, of real love—that was what he preferred, indeed what he required. Aside from all that, how could he pretend with any success to be this woman’s husband? No two men make love quite the same way; in two minutes she’d realize that he was an impostor, or else she’d wonder what he thought he was up to. All the little sexual rituals and adjustments that a couple evolves and permanently establishes were unknown to him. She would be confused or annoyed or possibly frightened if he betrayed complete ignorance of her body’s mechanisms.

And until he understood what had happened to him, he was terrified of revealing his sense of displacement from what he still regarded as his real life. Luckily she seemed not to be in an amorous mood. She gave him a quick kiss, a light friendly embrace, and rolled over, pressing her rump against him. He lay awake a long time, listening to her soft breathing and feeling weirdly adulterous in this bed with another man’s wife. Even though she was Mrs. Ted Hilgard, all the same—all the same—

He ruled out the stroke theory. It left too much unexplained. Sudden insanity? But he didn’t feel crazy. The events around him were crazy; but inside his skull he still seemed calm, orderly, precise. Surely true madness was something wilder and more chaotic. If he had not suffered any disruption of his brain or some all-engulfing delusional upheaval, though, what was going on? It was as though some gateway between worlds had opened for him at Teotihuacan, he thought, and in that instant of dizziness he had stepped through into the other Ted Hilgard’s universe, and that other Hilgard had stumbled past him into his own world. That sounded preposterous. But what he was experiencing was preposterous, too.

In the morning Celia said, “I’ve got a solution to the argument over Cuernavaca versus Guadalajara. Let’s go to Oaxaca instead.”

“Wonderful!” Hilgard cried. “I love Oaxaca. We ought to phone the Presidente Convento to see if they’ve got a room—that’s such a splendid hotel, with those old courtyards and—”

She was staring strangely at him. “When were you in Oaxaca, Ted?”

Hesitantly he said, “Why—I suppose—long ago, before we were married—”

“I thought this was the first time you’d ever been in Mexico.”

“Did I say that?” His cheeks were reddening. “I don’t know what I could have been thinking of. I must have meant this was our first trip to Mexico. I mean, I barely remember the Oaxaca trip, years and years and years ago, but I did go there, just for a weekend once—”

It sounded terribly lame. A trip that was only a vague memory, though the mere mention of Oaxaca had made him glow with recollections of a lovely hotel? Celia had registered the inconsistency, but she chose not to probe it. He was grateful for that. But he knew she must be adding up all the little contradictions and false notes in the things he was saying, and sooner or later she was apt to demand an explanation.

Within an hour they had everything arranged, and that afternoon they flew down to Oaxaca. As they checked in at the hotel, Hilgard had a sudden horrified fear that the clerk, remembering him from two years ago, would greet him by name, but that did not happen. Sitting by poolside before dinner, Hilgard and Celia leafed through their guidebooks, planning their Oaxaca excursions—a drive to the ruins at Monte Albán, a trip out to the Mitla site, a visit to the famous Saturday morning market—and once again he found it necessary to pretend little knowledge of a place he knew quite well. He wondered how convincing he was. They had dinner that night at a splendid Basque restaurant on a balcony overlooking the main plaza, and afterward they strolled back slowly to their hotel. The night air was soft and fragrant, and music floated toward them from the plaza bandstand. When they were halfway back, Celia reached for his hand. He forced himself not to pull away, though even that innocent little contact between them made him feel monstrously fraudulent. At the hotel he suggested stopping in the bar for a nightcap, but she shook her head and smiled. “It’s late,” she said softly. “Let’s just go upstairs.” At dinner they had had a carafe of sangria and then a bottle of red Mexican wine, and he felt loose-jointed and tranquil, but not so tranquil that he did not fear the confrontation that lay just ahead. He halted a moment on the landing, looking toward the glittering pool. By moonlight the heavy purple clusters of bougainvillea climbing the ancient stone walls of the courtyard seemed almost black. Huge hibiscus blossoms were strewn everywhere on the lawn and strange spiky flowers rose from a border of large bizarre succulents. Celia touched his elbow. “Come,” she said. He nodded. They went into their room. She turned on a lamp and began to undress. Hilgard’s eyes met hers and he saw a host of expressions cross her face in an instant—affection, desire, apprehension, perplexity. She knew something was wrong. Give it a try, Hilgard told himself fiercely. Fake it. Fake it. He ran his hand timidly along her hips, her thighs. No.

“Ted?” she said. “Ted, what’s going on?”

“I can’t explain. I think I’m losing my mind.”

“You’ve been so strange. Since yesterday.”

He took a deep breath. “Yesterday is the first time I ever laid eyes on you in my life.”

“Ted?”

“It’s true. I’m not married. I run a gallery at 60th near Second. I came to Mexico alone last Thursday and I was staying at the Presidente.”

“What are you saying, Ted?”

“Yesterday at Teotihuacan I started to walk past the Temple of Quetzalcoatl and I felt a peculiar sensation in my forehead and since then I seem to be somebody else of the same name. I’m sorry, Celia. Do I sound incoherent? I don’t think I do. But I know I’m not making any real sense.”

“We’ve been married nine years. We’re partners in a marketing research firm, Hilgard & Hilgard, on 57th and Sixth.”

“Marketing research. How strange. Do we have children?”

“No. We live in a co-op on 85th, and in the summers we—oh, Ted! Ted?”

“I’m so sorry, Celia.”

Her eyes in the moonlit darkness were fixed, bright, terrified. There was the acrid smell of fear-sweat in the room, hers, his. She said huskily, “You don’t remember any of our life together? Not a thing? In January we went to San Francisco. We stayed at the Stanford Court and it rained all the time and you bought three ivory carvings at a little place across the street from Ghirardelli Square. Last month we got the contract for the Bryce account and you said, ‘Fine, let’s celebrate by going to Mexico. We’ve always wanted to go to Mexico and there’s no better time than this.’ In April we have a big presentation to do in Atlanta, and in May—Ted? Nothing. Ted?”

“Nothing. It’s all a blank.”

“How scary that is. Hold me, Ted.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t remember us in bed either?”

“The first time I saw you was two o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

“We’ll have to fly home tomorrow. There’s got to be some kind of therapy—a drug treatment, or maybe even shock—we’ll talk to Judith Rose first thing—”

Hilgard felt a shiver of surprise. “Who?”

“You don’t remember her either?”

“That’s just it. I do. I know a Judith Rose. Tall handsome olive-skinned woman with curly black hair, professor of neurobiology at Rockefeller University—”

“At New York Medical,” Celia said. “All the rest is right. You see? You haven’t forgotten everything! You still remember Judith!”

“She’s at Rockefeller,” said Hilgard. “I’ve known her four or five years. She and I were supposed to take this trip to Mexico together, but at the last moment she had to cancel because she got tied up on a grant proposal, and it looked like she’d be busy with that for weeks and weeks, so we decided that I would come down here by myself, and—”

“What are you saying?” Celia asked, amazed.

“Why, Judith and I are lovers, Celia.”

She began to laugh. “Oh, no! No, that’s too much. You and Judith—”

“We both see other people. But Judith has the priority. Neither one of us is the marrying sort, but we have an excellent relationship of its kind, and—”

“Stop it, Ted.”

“I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m just telling you how it is between me and Judith.”

“If you want to tell me you’ve had affairs, I can handle it. I wouldn’t even be immensely surprised. But not with Judith. That’s too absurd. Nothing’s ever certain in this world, but one thing I’m positive of is that Judith doesn’t have any lovers. She and Ron are still like honeymooners. She must be the most faithful woman in the world.”

“Ron?”

“Ron Wolff,” Celia said. “Judith’s husband.”

He turned away and stared through the window. Hollowly he said, “In the world I live in, Judith is single and so am I, and she’s at Rockefeller University, and I don’t know any Ron Wolffs. Or any Celias. And I don’t do marketing research. I don’t know anything about marketing research. I’m forty-two years old and I went to Harvard and I majored in art history, and I was married to someone named Beverly once for a little while and it was a very bad mistake that I didn’t intend to make twice, and I feel sorry as hell for spoiling your vacation and screwing up your life but I simply don’t know who you are or where you came from. Do you believe any of that?”

“I believe that you need a great deal of help. And I’ll do whatever I have to do to see that you get it, Ted. Whatever has happened to you can be cured, I’m sure, with love and patience and time and money.”

“I don’t think I’m crazy, Celia.”

“I didn’t use that word. You’re the one who talked of losing your mind. You’ve had some kind of grotesque mental accident, you’ve undergone a disturbance of—”

“No,” Hilgard said. “I don’t think it’s anything mental at all. I have another theory now. Suppose that in front of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl there’s a mystery place, a—a whirlpool in the structure of the universe, let’s say—a gateway, a vortex, whatever you want to call it. Thousands of people walk through at and nothing ever happens to them. But I was the victim of a one-in-a-trillion shot. I went to Mexico in my world and the Ted Hilgard of your world went there at the same time, and we were both at Teotihuacan at the same time, and some immense coincidence brought us both to the whirlpool place simultaneously, and we both went through the gateway and changed places. It could only have happened because our two worlds were touching and he and I were identical enough to be interchangeable.”

“That does sound crazy, Ted.”

“Does it? Not as crazy as any other theory: Things are different in this world. You, Judith, Ron. The Updike book has a red jacket here. I’m in marketing research instead of art. The museum has a different kind of fountain. Maybe it costs twenty cents to mail a letter instead of eighteen. Everything’s almost the same, but not quite, and the longer I look, the more differences I see. I have a complete and vivid picture in my mind of the world on the other side of the gateway, down to the littlest details. That can’t be just a mental aberration. No aberration is that detailed. How much does it cost to mail a letter?”

“Twenty cents.”

“In my world it’s eighteen. You see? You see?”

“I don’t see anything,” Celia said tiredly. “If you can delude yourself into thinking you’re entirely different from who you are, you can also very sincerely believe that the postage rate is eighteen cents. They keep changing it all the time anyway. What does that prove? Listen, Ted, we’ll go back to New York. We’ll try to get you help for this. I want to repair you. I love you. I want you back, Ted. Do you understand that? We’ve had a wonderful marriage. I don’t want it vanishing like a dream.”

“I’m so damn sorry, Celia.”

“We’ll work something out.”

“Maybe. Maybe.”

“Let’s get some sleep now. We’re both exhausted.”

“That’s a fine idea,” he said. He touched his hand lightly to her forearm and she stiffened, as though anticipating his caress to be an initiation of lovemaking. But all he was doing was clutching at her as at a rescue line at sea. He squeezed her arm briefly, let go, rolled to the far side of the bed. Tired as he was, he found it hard to fall asleep, and he lay alert a long time. Once he heard her quietly sobbing. When sleep came to him, it was deep and nearly dreamless.

Hilgard would have liked to roam Oaxaca for a few days, enjoying its clear air, lovely old streets, and easy, unhurried pace, but Celia was insistent that they start at once on the task of restoring his memory. They flew back to Mexico City on the 11:00 A.M. flight. At the airport Celia learned that there was a flight to New York in mid-afternoon, but Hilgard shook his head. “We’ll stay over in Mexico City tonight and take the first plane out in the morning,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to go back to Teotihuacan.”

She gasped. “For Christ’s sake, Ted!”

“Humor me. I won’t leave Mexico without making certain.”

“You think you’re just going to walk back into another world?”

“I don’t know what I think. I just want to check it out.”

“And you expect the other Ted Hilgard to come strolling out from behind a pyramid as you vanish?”

She was starting to sound distraught. Calmly he said, “I don’t expect anything. It’s just an investigation.”

“What if you do? What if you vanish into that whirlpool of yours, and he doesn’t come out, and I’m left without either of you? Answer me that, Ted.”

“I think you’re beginning to believe my theory—”

“Oh, no, Ted, no. But—”

“Look,” he said, “if the theory’s crazy, then nothing will happen. If it isn’t, maybe I’ll go back where I belong and the right me will return to this world. Nobody knows. But I can’t go to New York until I’ve checked. Grant me that much. I want you to humor me, Celia. Will you do that?”

In the end she had to yield, of course, and they checked their baggage at the airport and booked a hotel room for the night and a flight for the morning, and then they hired a cab to take them to Teotihuacan. The driver spoke little English and it was hard to make him understand that they did not intend to spend all afternoon at the pyramids, but only half an hour or less. That seemed unthinkable to him: why would anyone, even two rich gringos, bother driving an hour and a half each way for a half-hour visit? But finally he accepted the idea. He parked at the southernmost parking lot, near the museum, and Celia and Hilgard waked quickly across the road to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. His throat was dry and his heart was pounding, and she looked equally tense and drawn. He tried to retrace his steps exactly. “I came through this way,” he said, “and just around this corner, as I got my first glimpse of the facade—”

“Ted, please don’t. Please.”

“Do you want to try? Maybe you’ll go through it after him.”

“Please. Let’s not.”

“I have to,” he said. Frowning, he made his way along the paved walkway, paused as the facade and its fierce serpent-snouts emerged in sight, caught his breath, plunged onward, waiting for the moment of vertigo, that sensation as of a highly localized earthquake. Nothing. He looked back. Celia, pale, grim, arms folded, was staring at him. Hilgard returned and tried it again. “Maybe I was just six inches off that time. A little to the left—” Nothing. Nothing the third time, or the fourth. A few other tourists passed by, staring oddly at him. Back and forth he went, covering every inch. The pathway was narrow; there were only a few possible routes. He felt no vertigo. No gateway in space opened for him. He did not tumble trough into his rightful world.

“Please, Ted. Enough.”

“Once more.”

“This is embarrassing. You look so damned obsessive.”

“I want to go where I belong,” Hilgard said.

Back and forth. Back and forth. He was beginning to feel embarrassed too. Perhaps she was right: this was mere madness that had possessed his soul. There are no gateways. He could not walk back and forth in front of those horrendous stone faces all afternoon. “Once more,” he said, and nothing happened and he turned away. “It doesn’t work,” he told her. “Or else it works only when one’s counterpart is passing through it at the same instant. And that would be impossible to arrange. If I could send him a message—tie it to a rock, toss it through the gateway, tell him to be here tomorrow at nine sharp—”

“Let’s go,” Celia said.

“All right. Yes.” Defeated, dejected, he let her lead him across the dry hot temple courtyard to the waiting taxi. They returned to Mexico City in the full madness of the evening rush hour, saying little to each other. Their hotel room turned out to have two single beds instead of a double. Just as well, Hilgard thought. He felt an immense airless distance between himself and this woman who believed she was his wife. They had a bleak dinner at a Zona Rosa restaurant and went to sleep early, and before daybreak they were up and out and on their way to the airport.

“Maybe when you’re in your own home,” she said, “you’ll begin to get pieces of your memory back.”

“Maybe,” he said.

But the co-op on East 85th meant nothing to him. It was a handsome apartment, thirty stories up, obviously worth a fortune, and it was furnished beautifully, but it was someone else’s house, with someone else’s books and clothes and treasures in it. The books included a good many that he also owned, and the clothes fit him, and some of the paintings and primitive artifacts were quite in accordance with his own taste. It was like being in one’s twin brother’s home, perhaps. But he wandered helplessly and in growing panic from room to room, wondering where his files were, his little hoard of boyhood things, his first editions, his Peruvian pottery collection. Delusions? Phantom memories of a nonexistent life? He was cut off from everything that he thought to be real, and it terrified him. The Manhattan phone book listed no Theodore Hilgard on Third Avenue, and no Hilgard Galleries, either. The universe had swallowed that Ted Hilgard.

“I phoned Judith,” Celia said, “and told her something of what happened. She wants to see you first thing tomorrow.”

He had been to Judith’s Rockefeller University office often enough, just a few blocks east of his gallery. But this was a different Judith and her office was at New York Medical, uptown at the edge of Spanish Harlem. Hilgard walked over to Fifth and caught a bus, wondering if he had to pay his fare with some sort of token in this world, wondering if the Metropolitan Museum was where he remembered it, wondering about Judith. He negotiated the bus problem without difficulty. The gray bulk of the museum still crouched on the flank of Central Park. Upper Fifth Avenue looked more or less untransformed, the Frick Collection building just as dignified as ever, the Guggenheim spiral as peculiar as ever. And Judith was untransformed also: elegant, beautiful, warm, with the light of that wonderful intelligence gleaming in her eyes. The only thing missing was that certain mischievous sparkle, that subliminal aura of shared intimacies, that acknowledged that they had long been lovers. She greeted him as a friend and nothing more than a friend.

“What in God’s name has been going on with you?” she asked at once.

He smiled ruefully. “Between one moment and the next I seem to have had a total identity transplant. I used to be a bachelor with an art gallery down the block from Bloomingdale’s. Now I’m a married man with a marketing research company on 57th Street. And so on. A burst of dizziness at the ruins of Teotihuacan and everything in my life got switched around.”

“You don’t remember Celia?”

“It isn’t just amnesia, if that’s where you’re heading. I don’t remember Celia or anything else having to do with my life here. But I do remember a million other things that don’t seem to exist any more, a complete reality substructure: phone numbers, addresses, biographical details. You, for instance. The Judith I know is with Rockefeller University. She’s single and lives at 382 East 61st Street and her phone number is—you see what I mean? As a matter of fact, you may be the only link between my old life and this one. Somehow I got to know you in both identities. Figure the odds against that.”

Judith looked at him with intense, somber concern. “We’ll arrange a full battery of neurological tests right away. This sounds like the damnedest mental short circuit I’ve ever heard of, though I suspect I’ll turn up some similar cases in the literature. People who experienced sudden drastic dissociative reactions leading to complete disruption of personality patterns.”

“Some sort of schizoid break, is that what you’re saying?”

“We don’t use terms like schizophrenia or paranoia much any more, Ted. They’ve been corrupted by popular misconceptions, and they’re too imprecise anyway. We know now that the brain is an enormously complex instrument that has capabilities far beyond our rational understanding—I mean freakish stuff like being able to multiply ten-digit numbers in your head—and it’s entirely possible that given the right stimulus it can manufacture a perfectly consistent surrogate identity, which—”

“In layman’s terms, I’m crazy.”

“If you want to use layman’s terms,” Judith said, “you’re suffering from delusions of an extraordinarily vivid kind.”

Hilgard nodded. “Among those delusions, you should know, is that you and I were lovers for the past four years.”

She smiled. “I’m not at all surprised. You’ve been carrying on a lovely little flirtation with me from the moment we met.”

“Have we ever been to bed together?”

“Of course not, Ted.”

“Have I ever seen you naked?”

“Not unless you’ve been spying on me.”

He wondered how much this Judith differed from his. Risking it, he said, “Then how do I know you have a small surgical scar on your left breast?”

Shrugging, she said, “I had a little benign tumor removed years ago. Celia might have mentioned that to you.”

“And I’d know which breast?”

“You might.”

“I can tell you six or seven other things about your body that only somebody who’s plenty familiar with it would know. I can tell you what your favorite lovemaking position is, and why. I can imitate the sound you make at your climax.”

“Oh? Can you?”

“Listen,” he said, and did his best to duplicate that strange whining passionate cry he had heard so many times. Judith’s playful, challenging smile disappeared. Her lips grew taut and her eyes narrowed and splotches of color came to her cheeks. She glanced away from him.

Hilgard said, “I didn’t have a tape recorder under your bed. I haven’t been discussing your sexual idiosyncrasies with Ron. I wouldn’t even know Ron if I tripped over him in the street. And I’m not reading your mind. How do I know all these things, then?”

She was silent. She moved papers about randomly on her desk. Her hands appeared to be shaking.

“Maybe you’re the one with dissociative reactions,” he said. “You’ve forgotten all about our affair.”

“You know that’s nonsense.”

“You’re right. Because the Judith Rose I’ve been to bed with is at Rockefeller University. But I’ve been to bed with a Judith Rose who’s very much like you. Do you doubt that now?”

She made no reply. She was staring at him in an astounded way, and there seemed to be something else in her look, a volatility, an excitement, that led him to think he had somehow reached across the barrier of his lost world to touch her, this Judith, to arouse her and kindle in her some simulacrum of the love and passion that he knew they had had in another existence. A sudden wild fantasy erupted in him—getting free of Celia, getting Judith free of Ron, and reconstructing in this unfamiliar world the relationship that had been taken from him. But the idea faded as quickly as it had come. It was foolishness; it was nonsense; it was an impossibility.

She said finally, “Describe what you think happened to you?”

He told her in all the detail he could muster—the vertigo, the feeling of passing through a gateway, the gradual discovery of the wrongness of everything. “I want to believe this is all just a mental illness and that six lithium pills will make everything be right again. But I don’t think that’s how it is. I think what happened to me may be a lot wilder than a mere schizoid break. But I don’t want to believe that. I want to think it’s just a dissociative reaction.”

“Yes. I’m sure you do.”

“What do you think it is, Judith?”

“My opinion doesn’t matter, does it? What matters is proof.”

“Proof?”

She said, “What were you carrying on you when you experienced your moment of vertigo?”

“My camera.” He thought. “And my wallet.”

“Which had credit cards, driver’s license, all that stuff?”

“Yes,” he said, beginning to understand. He felt a stab of fear, cold, intense. Pulling his wallet out, he said, “Here—here—” He drew forth his driver’s license. It had the Third Avenue address. He took out his Diner’s Club card. Judith laid her own next to it. The cards were of different designs. He produced a twenty-dollar bill. She peered at the signatures on it and shook her head. Hilgard closed his eyes an instant and had a flashing vision of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the great heavy snouts of the serpents, the massive stone steps. Judith’s face was dark and grim, and Hilgard knew she had forced him to confront the final proof, and he had a sense of a mighty gate swinging shut forever behind him. He was not the victim of any psychosis. He had actually made the crossing, and it was irrevocable. His other life was gone—it was dead. Bitterly he said, “I forged all this stuff, right? While I was down in Mexico City I had it all printed up, counterfeit money, a fake driver’s license, to make the hoax look really convincing. Right? Right?” He remembered something else and went burrowing for it in his wallet and found it after a frantic search—Judith’s own business card, with Department of Neurobiology, Rockefeller University on it in shining engraved letters. The card was old and worn and creased. She looked at it as though he had put a basilisk in her hand. When she stared at him again, it was with a sad and tender look of pity.

At length she said, “Ted, I’ll give you all the help I can.”

“What kind of help?”

“Making the adaptation. Learning your role here. Celia and I, between us, ought to be able to fill you in on who you’re supposed to be. It’s the only thing I can imagine doing now. You’re right that lithium won’t fix anything.”

“No,” Hilgard said. “Don’t involve Celia.”

“We have to.”

“No,” he said. “She thinks I’m her husband and that I’m suffering from an unfortunate dissociative reaction, or whatever you call it. If she comes to realize I’m the complete stranger I’ve been insisting I am, I’m lost. She’ll throw me out and try to find ways of getting him back. And I have no way to function in this world except in the identity of Theodore Hilgard.”

“You are Theodore Hilgard.”

“Yes, and I intend to go on being him. Doing marketing research and living with Celia and signing my name to checks. You’ll help me adapt, yes. You’ll have a couple of sessions of therapy with me every week, and you’ll tell me where I went to college and what the names of my friends are and who the presidents have been in this world, if they have presidents here. So far as everyone else will know, you’re helping me recover from a mysterious mental fog. You won’t tell a soul that I don’t belong here. And sooner or later I will belong here. All right, Judith? You see, I’ve got no choice. There’s no way for me to get back across the barrier. I’ve managed to prove to one other human being that I’m not crazy, and now I’ve got to put that behind me and start living the life I’ve been handed. Will you help me?”

“One condition,” she said.

“Which is?”

“You’re in love with me. I see that, and I don’t blame you because I know you can’t help thinking I’m your Judith. I’m not. I’m Ron’s. Go on flirting with me, go on having fantasies about me, but don’t give me any moves, ever. All right? Because you might open up in me something that I don’t want opened, do you understand? We remain friends. Co-conspirators, even. That’s all. Is that agreed?”

Hilgard looked at her unhappily. It was a long while before he could bring himself to say it.

“Agreed,” he told her at last.

Celia said, “Judith phoned while you were on the way back. She talked to me for twenty minutes. Oh, Ted—my poor Ted—”

“I’m going to be okay. It’ll take time.”

“She says these amnesias, these detailed delusions, are extraordinarily rare. You’re going to be a textbook case.”

“Wonderful. I’m going to need a lot of help from you, Celia.”

“Whatever I can do.”

“I’m a blank. I don’t know who our friends are, I don’t know how to practice my profession, I don’t even know who you are. Everything’s wiped out. I’ll have to rebuild it all. Judith will do as much as she can, but the real burden, day by day, hour by hour, is going to fall on you.”

“I’m prepared for that.”

“Then we’ll start all over—from scratch. We’ll make a go of it. Tonight we’ll eat at one of our special restaurants—you’ll have to tell me which our special restaurants are—and we’ll have the best wine in the house, or maybe a bottle or two of champagne, and then we’ll come back here—we’ll be like newlyweds, Celia, it’ll be like a wedding night. All right?”

“Of course,” she said softly.

“And then tomorrow the hard work begins. Fitting me back into the real world.”

“Everything will come back, Ted. Don’t worry. And I’ll give you all the help you need. I love you, Ted. No matter what’s happened to you, that hasn’t changed. I love you.”

He nodded. He took her hands in his. Falteringly, guiltily, with a thick tongue and a numbed heart, he forced himself to get the words out, the words that were his only salvation now, the words that gave him his one foothold on the shores of an unknown continent. “And I love you, Celia,” he told the absolute stranger who was his wife.

Content

The Changeling
by Robert Silverberg