far too boring to sit down and give me a coherent account. Her life had been as
unremarkable as mine: she'd grown up in a suburban, middle-class family, studied
her profession, found a job. Like almost everyone, she'd switched at eighteen.
She had no strong political convictions. She was good at her work, but put ten
times more energy into her social life. She was intelligent, but hated anything
overtly intellectual. She was impatient, aggressive, roughly affectionate.
And I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside her head.
For a start, I rarely had any idea what she was thinking - in the sense of
knowing how she would have replied if asked, out of the blue, to describe her
thoughts at the moment before they were interrupted by the question. On a longer
time scale, I had no feeling for her motivation, her image of herself, her
concept of who she was and what she did and why. Even in the laughably crude
sense that a novelist pretends to "explain" a character, I could not have
explained Sian.
And if she'd provided me with a running commentary on her mental state, and a
weekly assessment of the reasons for her actions in the latest psychodynamic
jargon, it would all have come to nothing but a heap of useless words. If I
could have pictured myself in her circumstances, imagined myself with her
beliefs and obsessions, empathised until I could anticipate her every word, her
every decision, then I still would not have understood so much as a single
moment when she closed her eyes, forgot her past, wanted nothing, and simply
was.
Of course, most of the time, nothing could have mattered less. We were happy
enough together, whether or not we were strangers - and whether or not my
"happiness" and Sian's "happiness" were in any real sense the same.
Over the years, she became less self-contained, more open. She had no great
dark secrets to share, no traumatic childhood ordeals to recount, but she let me
in on her petty fears and her mundane neuroses. I did the same, and even,
clumsily, explained my peculiar obsession. She wasn't at all offended. Just
puzzled.
"What could it actually mean, though? To know what it's like to be someone
else? You'd have to have their memories, their personality, their body -
everything. And then you'd just be them, not yourself, and you wouldn't know
anything. It's nonsense."
I shrugged. "Not necessarily. Of course, perfect knowledge would be impossible,
but you can always get closer. Don't you think that the more things we do
together, the more experiences we share, the closer we become?"
She scowled. "Yes, but that's not what you were talking about five seconds ago.
Two years, or two thousand years, of 'shared experiences' seen through different
eyes means nothing. However much time two people spent together, how could you
know that there was even the briefest instant when they both experienced what
they were going through 'together' in the same way?"
"I know, but . . ."
"If you admit that what you want is impossible, maybe you'll stop fretting
about it."
I laughed. "Whatever makes you think I'm as rational as that?"
When the technology became available it was Sian's idea, not mine, for us to try
out all the fashionable somatic permutations. Sian was always impatient to
experience something new. "If we really are going to live forever," she said,
"we'd better stay curious if we want to stay sane."
