Grey Area (18 page)

R.P.H.

First Extract from Dr Zack Busner’s Log

5th October

Anthony Valuam waylaid me in the corridor this morning and suggested that I lunch with him and one of the research directors of Cryborg Pharmaceuticals next week. I surprised myself by agreeing. On balance I think that, whatever they propose, it can hardly be less ethical than the work I am currently doing at Heath Hospital.

12th October

Lunch was far better than I expected. Gainsford, the research director, took us to Grindley’s Upstairs. I enjoyed my rack of lamb, but perhaps disgraced myself by setting fire to rolled-up Amaretti papers and watching them float up to the ceiling.

Gainsford wants me to resign my consultancy and come and work for him at Cryborg. He was rather coy about the project he has in mind. He made a big pitch, saying Cryborg would pay me four times what I’m currently earning. If this is really the case I will be making far more than I ever have – even during my heyday as a TV pundit in the early seventies.

I told Gainsford that nothing could be more antithetical – even now – to my concept of mental health treatment, than working for a multinational drug company. He simply laughed. He’s a little man, his round face decorated with one of those mini goatee-and-moustache combinations. While he spoke it twitched, registering his circumspection.

22nd October

Through Valuam I have intimated to Gainsford that I might be interested in leaving Heath Hospital to work for Cryborg. Gainsford phoned me today and told me that he could only fill me in on the project if I was prepared to sign some sort of corporate secrets waiver. I agreed to this readily enough – I love secrets. We arranged to meet at the Cryborg head office in Victoria next Thursday.

30th October

It’s a drug trial, how droll. But what a drug. I understand now why Gainsford was so insistent on secrecy. The range of applications and the potential market for the drug is absolutely staggering. From the evidence Gainsford presented to me it is clear that Cryborg are on the verge of a really major advance in neuro-pharmacology.

The drug has been tentatively given the name ‘Inclusion’. It is relatively easy to produce, being derived entirely from the cadaverous and faecal matter of an obscure insect parasite. Once the psychoactive ingredient is isolated it can be stabilised using a specially devised cyclotron. Gainsford demonstrated the whole procedure for me in a laboratory adjoining the main Cryborg boardroom.

Gainsford wants me to test the drug for him. The catch is that the trial has to be conducted in secret – and on the general population. This is obviously why Cryborg approached me. Even though my conduct as a professional has been impeccable over the past fifteen years I am still known as an unorthodox practitioner; a whacko shrink who is prepared to undertake courses of research well outside the mainstream.

Nevertheless, were money the sole consideration I would have given Gainsford short shrift. However, my curiosity had been awakened – and once that’s happened there is little that can stop me. The evidence that Gainsford presented on Inclusion was remarkable. This clearly showed that astonishing results had already been achieved using Inclusion for the following broad range of reactive depressive symptoms: anxiety, insomnia, stress, impotence etc. There is no known toxic dose for the drug either.

Could this be the panacea we have been searching for for so long? I no longer have any faith in the talking cures, nor do I find it easy to prescribe drugs like the tricyclics, which I know will only help a very small number of the patients who are referred to me. That the refined crap of a bee mite might prove to be the salvation of our growing legions of misery is fantastic enough and ironic enough to be believable!

5th November

A sad day for me. I handed in my notice to Archer, the senior administrator at the Health Authority. He insisted on having a long chat with me about my future – I was evasive. Under instructions from Gainsford I have not admitted to anyone – even my family – what the precise nature of my employment at Cryborg will be. Archer wouldn’t let it lie. He kept on bleating about what a loss it was, how he’d thought I would stay at Heath until my retirement, how they needed me to fight the depredations of the Government. Whenever the conversation flagged, he would crank it up again like some Klaxon, until he was wailing away again, saying we should keep in touch, how he thought of me as family etc. He’s the sort of person who gives gregariousness a bad name.

13th November

I’m winding down my work on the wards. My replacement is yet to be decided on, in the meantime Jane Bowen will cover Ward 8 and Anthony Valuam Ward 9. I feel far more emotional about leaving Heath Hospital than I thought I would. Particularly as Misha Gurney – one of my patients and the son of my old friend Simon Gurney, the sculptor – committed suicide last night. They found him early this morning in one of the abandoned radiography suites in the hospital basement. He had hung himself. Poor, sad boy. Perhaps Inclusion might have helped him. Now we’ll never know.

24th November

Gainsford drove me up to Worminghall in the Chilterns today, and we toured the new Research Facility. He had been given a very large Toyota saloon by the Cryborg car pool, which was unfortunate as he is almost too small to reach the pedals. Driving out of London we had a number of near misses, but once we got on to the M40 Gainsford put on the cruise control and knelt on the driving seat. We both relaxed and he began telling me about Inclusion in far greater detail.

Apparently Cryborg have for a number of years employed a young research chemist called Sumner, to explore the Amazonian rainforest. Sumner’s job is to get as close as possible to the various Amerindian tribes and discover the secrets of their medicinal plants. Naturally Cryborg are not alone in this – the drug rush has been going on for at least a decade now. Apparently, in some remote parts of South America, the research chemists outnumber the tribespeople.

Of course, most pharmacologists have treated the toughened roots, waxy leaves and gungy pastes brought back from these expeditions with the utmost scepticism. And really, most of the ‘discoveries’ have proved to be nothing but the chemical equivalent of the raffia tat and facial mud sold by pseudo-ecological shops.

But Sumner had more luck. He was far more adventurous and determined than his rivals, and journeyed long into the rainforest on trips that lasted for months. Trips during which he moved entirely within the ambit of tribal groups of hunter-gatherers that had never seen a European before.

According to Gainsford, on one such trip Sumner encountered the most bizarre group of indigenes imaginable. These people – who called themselves the Maeterlincki – had a life-cycle (metaphysic, socio-cultural form, collective psychopathology) entirely bound up with the harvesting of honey. Honey produced by terrifying swarms of cliff-dwelling bees.

The Maeterlincki’s knowledge of these valuable domestic animals is comprehensive, pragmatic and highly sophisticated. Despite the fact that they maintain a view of the cosmos that is entirely apiacentric. For, according to the Maeterlincki, each of their individual consciousnesses is merely the slumbering reverie of a single bee. A death in the tribe coincides with a bee awakening.

Needless to say, this rather baroque belief system gave rise to incredibly complicated explanations by the tribal elders, when they were asked by Sumner how it was that they presided over the establishment and then decay of entire bee colonies, whilst their own life-spans were no longer than a few hours.

Sumner became intrigued by the Maeterlincki’s skill as apiarists and went with them to witness the honey harvest. He watched, while they climbed up the granite outcrops where the bees built their hives, and extracted the vast, dripping golden combs. The comb-extraction teams were made up of three tribesmen. (The actual harvesting of the honey is taboo for women.) One of the men would perform a mime of a bee – intended to distract the swarm; the second would remove the combs from the hive; the third would stand by as a decoy and allow himself to be stung – usually to death. Sumner said he had never witnessed such indifference to pain as that displayed by the sacrificial member of the team.

Sumner stayed with the Maeterlincki for six months. Long enough for him to gain their trust, and for the tribal elders to allow him to become an initiate. The initiation involved the ingestion – in its raw form – of the substance that Gainsford has since named ‘Inclusion’.

I am able to include here some of Sumner’s own description of the initiation rite. When we reached Beaconsfield (Junction 2), Gainsford suddenly announced that he had a friend he wanted to visit who lives in the precincts of the Bekonscot Model Village. He left me in the Toyota, together with a copy of Sumner’s field report to Cryborg. I popped out of the car a few minutes later and ran across the road to Pronta-Print, where I photocopied the following:

Extract from Dr
Clive Sumner’s Field Report to the Cryborg Research Division

On the morning appointed for my initiation I went, together with Colin and Paul, the other two members of my cell (marginal note: Remember, the Maeterlincki’s social organisation is entirely apian. Z.B.), to the base of the granite outcrop.

Colin cut and trimmed a long, hollow bamboo tube, whilst Paul prepared the sacred dust for ingestion. He broke open one of the desiccated hives, which had been abandoned by its colony.

The hive was a great, tattered bundle of dried and flaking material with the texture of papyrus. It was roughly ovoid, but with a flat back, where the bees’ mucilage had cemented it to the rock. Paul split it open and invited me to examine the hive’s internal structure. This was unusual – to say the least – and it was at this point that I began to suspect that I was on the verge of an exciting and unusual discovery.

The interior of the hive had the familiar structure of serried ranks of hexiform chambers, connected by minute passageways radiating from the central chamber of the hive, where the queen once resided. But within the hive a secondary structure had been constructed: a hive inside a hive.

This subsidiary hive had the same hexiform chambers and minute passageways, but they were far smaller. These chambers were delicately positioned in the very interstices of the apian chambers. I asked Paul what had caused this. He directed me to look closely at one of these small chambers, which was no bigger than a quarter of a pinhead. Entombed within it was the perfectly preserved cadaver of a mite.

Wringing the explanation for this phenomenon out of Paul and Colin was a tiresome business. As I have written above, the Maeterlincki lack much of the conceptual equipment that we take for granted and their language is devoid of certain key terms necessary for the description of social forms. But here is a paraphrase of my cell-fellows’ ‘Song of the Bee Mite’:

These parasitic mites are quite unlike ordinary bee mites. Rather than infesting the actual body of the bee, they attack the structure of the hive, creating, as I had observed, a secondary hive. The Maeterlincki explained that this invasion was accompanied by a gradual shift in the hive’s social organisation. The normal and successful ratio between workers (sexually undeveloped females) and drones (sexually productive males) was reversed, so as to favour the development of more drones and fewer workers.

Very gradually the hive began to succumb to parasitically induced decadence. Unless the queen and her remaining workers managed to summon the energy to abandon the hive and swarm, the hive’s economy became moribund. Eventually, all that was left was a dying queen surrounded by starving drones. It was as if the collective consciousness of the hive – if such an entity can be posited – had given in to a form of apian anomie.

The Maeterlincki regard this process as a necessary part of their relationship with the bees. They couldn’t tell me for how long they had been harvesting the defunct hives, nor how they discovered the psychoactive properties of the dust made from the mites’ crushed corpses and sub-hives. Legend had it that in some previous dark age, the Maeterlincki had been beset by an abiding and terrible collective depression, a truly pathological boredom and lack of interest. Remnants of this pre-bee mite era remained embedded in their language (they have, for example, over twenty different words to express the concept of eyes ‘glazing over’).

My cell-mates then made much of my own frequent bouts of apathy and tedium vitae. They urged me to cast aside my reservations and embrace the great spirit of the beehive.

The bamboo tube was primed with the dust. One end was rammed into my nostril and Colin blew hard from the other. My other nostril received the same treatment, with Paul as the blower this time. We then did the same for Colin and Paul, rotating roles and nostrils. When we were done we returned to the Maeterlincki’s longhouse and life went on as before. Thereafter, for the duration of my stay, I was expected to ingest more of the mite powder on a daily basis.

And what was the effect of this peculiar dust ? To begin with I noticed nothing at all. Perhaps this was because I had been expecting something really radical, like the psychotropic drugs used by other Amerindian tribes: ayahuasca, yopo, yage and datura. But the bee-mite powder wasn’t painful as it was absorbed into the mucous membranes, nor did it produce nausea. There were no hallucinations, no sensations of a paradigm shift in either body, or ego-awareness.