From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Monday, May 14, 2001 4:21 PM Twenty-sixth post Metamorphosis: Quarternary (part 3 of 3) So Orr has traveled along the railroad tracks all the way around the world and returned to where he started. (He once thought the bridge might go all the way around the world; it doesn't, but the rails do.) Now that he's returned to where he started, I now know why it was never indicated whether Orr left The Bridge in the Cityward or Kingdomward direction. The truth is that he hasn't really left it, so the direction that he set out in was immaterial. Orr passes out and wakes up in a hospital bed, hooked up to a catheter and so on. But he's not in the real world. He realizes that he's inside The Bridge, inside its metal bones. Dr Joyce is there, as his doctor, he's seen Arrol there, dressed as a nurse, later there is a mention of a sallow-faced lad who might be the narrator as a child. They've taken away the card he was given, "and the scarf...I mean the handkerchief" if we needed any more confirmation that the scarf that Andrea gives him and the handkerchief he gives Arrol are one and the same. (Though, come to think of it, part of his dream fantasy may have been the role reversal of him giving her the handkerchief instead of the other way around. If so, it didn't hold, Arrol was still the one to monogram it with his initials, not he with hers.) Dr. Joyce says that they have a new treatment that might make him better. This time Orr eagerly agrees to it. The treatment turns out to be that Orr has to tell everything he remembers to a machine. It takes a while. All the people have gone, there's only Orr and the machine left. Again, no one has used the name Orr in quite a while, so it might be just as good to say that there is only the narrator and the machine left. The machine tells him that his dreams were right in the end, that his last ones after he left The Bridge were of his real self. The machine says that he will believe it because he trusts machines, he understands them and they don't frighten him, while he feels differently about people. In other words, the narrator has constructed an entity within his dreams to present himself with what he remembers, and he's made that entity in the form of something he trusts. The technical term for this kind of entity is "spirit guide", and at this point one should realize that the narrator has been undergoing a varient of the type of experience known as a shamanic journey, or a spirit quest. This kind of thing is why I find it funny when people, or even Banks himself, say that he doesn't have religion in his books. The drones and Minds of the Culture are Hindu style gods, guardian angels, and other mythic entities dressed up in a bit of pseudoscience. They are these entities not because of their powers, although their powers are certainly worthy enough, but because they function mythically and symbolically in the exact same fashion. I've always felt that, extraordinary mental constraints aside, an intelligent machine would probably get just as tired of looking after people as other people do. One can certaily postulate that they wouldn't, but absent evidence, it seems more correct to say that they don't because of their mythic function within the story. The machine tells him that his real body is in the Neurosurgical Unit at Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, he was moved from the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh some time ago. He asks why the machine doesn't know exactly when he was moved, and the machine replies that *he* doesn't know -- in other words, the machine only knows what the narrator does. The machine tells him that he doesn't know when it was because they have been trying treatments and drugs on him that have scrambled his sense of time. The machine tells him that he's been under for seven months, because last time Andrea was there she said it would be "her birthday in a week and if [he] were to wake up it would be the best --" time, presumably. So we know that some part of the narrator can hear what his visitors say. The machine tells him that his choice is to stay under or surface, and asks if he's going to wake up. The man asks how he'd do that, and says that he tried before, before he reached the desert. The machine says it doesn't know how, but it knows that he can do it if he wants to. But neither of them know if he wants to. This is perhaps the explanation of the otherwise mysterious earlier narration: "Let's get one thing absolutely straight: it's all a dream. Either way, whatever. We both know that. I have a choice, however." The "I have a choice" bit refers to the narrator's choice of whether to wake up or not, and the "both" could be him and the machine -- but it could also be Orr and the narrator. The narrator/Orr wakes up again in an armchair in a small room with one door and a screen. His body image has changed to one more closely matching reality: no beard (they've shaved it), a bald patch, and he's thinner. The door leads to another similar room with just a hospital bed in it; the bed has a "blanket pulled back at one corner, as though in invitation." He half expect to find an old guy who looks just like him, like Keir Dullea does in _2001: A Space Odyssey_. But he doesn't, the screen turns on, this time in color (previous times with the TV have all been in black and white). He's sees the man in the hospital bed again, this time he's on his stomach. There a plastic hospital bracelet on the man's wrist, just as Orr had on The Bridge. Two nurses turn the man over but the narrator can't hear what they are saying. Visitors start appearing for other people in the ward, but "Nobody for my man yet. Doesn't look as though he cares." But of course he does care! Banks is great at these narrative self-deception statements... Andrea shows up. She's pretty. She kisses the man in the bed and takes his hand. The narrator thinks "Why is she here? Why isn't she is Paris?" Then she lowers her head to the sheets, and her shoulders shake a couple of times; it's unstated, but she's crying. The screen goes dark. The narrator suspects his subconcious is trying to tell him something. The narrator undresses and goes to sleep in the hospital bed in the next room. Note the sequence of settings in this part. He returns to The Bridge, it's wrecked. The fact that he returned there, even though he was travelling away from it, indicates that there is no where else in his dream world for him to go; it's really all the same place. From then on, his settings become more and more constricted, all the people gone except his machine, until all he has left is two small rooms, then only one, really (since the screen in the other is dark) with a hospital bed in it. He's systematically closing off the idea that he has anywhere that he could go to escape waking up. As for the actual waking up itself, the final impetus is given by his proof that Andrea actually cares for him, when she cries. Of course this is all a little bit vicious and childish too: he has to see that he's hurt her, to get revenge for her hurting him, before he'll wake up. If the sequence with the Field Marshal was supposed to be justified as him confronting and destroying the power-seeking, sadistic side of himself, it didn't completely work. There is one short chapter left -- plus I plan a conclusion or two after that.