Grey Area (20 page)

He wanted to get back to the chess game, but felt that he really ought to undertake some sort of comparative study of the fire-resistant tiles in the Facility. He had visited the other buildings and spent some time studying their fire-resistant tiles, and then begun to work his way back towards my rooms. When I found him he was nearly finished. However, it’s an indication of just how benign and localised the effects of Inclusion are that when I suggested he cut this exercise short, he happily acceded.

30th January

Bohm has come up with the names of twenty of his patients who he anticipates having to prescribe anti-depressants to within the next month. In place of the tricyclics or SSRIs he will, of course, prescribe Inclusion. Another group of twenty patients who are currently on tricyclics or SSRIs will be put on to Inclusion; and a third group of ‘new depressives’ will be given a placebo.

I will give the batches of prepared Inclusion to MacLachlan, the pharmacist. He will then make up the prescriptions in conformity with this schema. Bohm will, of course, have no idea which of his patients will be in receipt of Inclusion. His task is merely to record data as and when they present themselves to him. This is as reasonable a conformity to the principles of the double blind as we can manage under the circumstances.

I did suggest to Gainsford that I introduce another level of blind to the trial, as Ford and I did for our now infamous double-double blind trial at my Concept House in the seventies. But Gainsford is too much of a plodder to recognise its brilliance and knocked me back.

Gainsford is, needless to say, absolutely delighted with my progress on the trial. And he relayed a special message to me from the Cryborg Main Board, which said: ‘We are absolutely delighted.’ Gainsford hadn’t thought I would get to this stage for at least six months. In part this is fortuitous. If Bohm was an enthusiastic convert to the potential of Inclusion, MacLachlan is positively messianic about the stuff.

He himself has been treated for depression on and off for a number of years. Although it’s a far from empirically sound assessment of the drug’s potential, its effect on MacLachlan was heartwarming. He came out to Worminghall with Bohm one night for a few hands of bridge. MacLachlan’s play was so diffident and unresponsive that he was hardly more proactive than the dummy.

Bohm and I persuaded him to come out for two more sessions; and on the third we broached the issue of Inclusion. Initially, MacLachlan was sceptical – not suspicous, just sceptical. However, when Bohm and I reported our own experiences of the drug to him, he was eager to try it.

When we resumed play an hour after MacLachlan had ingested some Inclusion, he was a different man. Witty, engaged, eloquent, both on the game in hand and the whole history and practice of bridge; there was little Bohm and I could do to contain him. His countenance – which is mousey in the extreme, hidden behind a water-rat beard of terrible lankness – brightened and brightened. His impressions of Omar Sharif became hard to deal with, but overall I can say that MacLachlan’s Inclusion-based rehabilitation was one of the most humane things I have witnessed in almost thirty years as a medical practitioner.

Bohm and I have restricted MacLachlan to a nugatory dosage of Inclusion. He himself admits that if he takes too much he becomes overly absorbed in the little pictures that adorn the labels of the shampoo he sells at the pharmacy, or some such irrelevance. However, on a mild dose he just feels that loose sense of positive engagement that we are looking for.

9th February

The trial has been underway for a week now and everything is going smoothly. There is actually remarkably little for me to do now, except wait for Bohm to begin relaying the data.

I have been in the habit of commuting to Worminghall on a weekly basis. Really it is a tedious place. On a good day there is something affecting about the view from the Chiltern escarpment where the Facility is, down on to the rolling country of Oxfordshire. Walking along the Ridgeway path, where it dives under the M40, I am often reminded of early Renaissance paintings depicting enclosed landscapes like this; and can half imagine that the cooling towers of Didcot Power Station are some Tuscan fortification.

On a good day, that is. On a bad day it’s dreary beyond belief. Often thick fogs roll in from the north, and the whole countryside is rendered both tatty and claustrophobic. On my walks I pass chicken-wired pheasant runs and abandoned piggeries. They give a disagreeable impression of
urb in rus.
The fog distorts my sense of scale, and I toy with the notion that I am wandering over a giant, derelict tennis court, or a still vaster cat’s litter tray that no one has bothered to empty for a while.

It’s mordant fantasising such as this that has driven me to what might be termed ‘recreational’ use of Inclusion. I am very rigorous about this, though, I have no desire to experience an Inclusion dependency – if such a thing turns out to be possible. So I only take Inclusion when playing ping-pong with one or other of the auxiliary staff. I can’t say that the Inclusion makes my game any better, but it does make me considerably more interested. I now really appreciate ping-pong and am extremely glad that I’ve decided to make it a part of my life.

4th March

The trial has now been going for over a month and the results are very encouraging. Bohm’s reports clearly demonstrate that the depressive patients treated with Inclusion are responding far better than those on tricyclics or SSRIs, and far, far better than the control group. If things carry on this way for another month I shall have to recommend that Cryborg find a way of legitimating the discovery and the trial findings. To allow things to go much further, would, I feel, cast into doubt the ethics of what we have been doing. I shall relay this conviction of mine to Gainsford in my next report.

11th March

I had a worrying phone call from Bohm this afternoon. What he had to tell me has unsettled me and cast into doubt some of my faith in Inclusion. One of Bohm’s patients, a painter called Simon Dykes who lives on the Tiddington side of Thame, has been saying some very strange things to him.

I am fairly certain that Dykes must be on Inclusion. There is no other explanation for his behaviour, if Bohm’s report of it is to be believed.

Bohm has been prescribing ‘anti-depressants’ to Dykes for almost six weeks now. Dykes came to see him complaining of a sense of futility, emotional alienation, impotence etc., etc. He made light of his depression, but his wife – who attended with him – told Bohm, in confidence, that he had been a nightmare since last year and had to be hospitalised, briefly, over Christmas.

Initially the Inclusion seemed to be having a beneficial effect on Dykes. He reported to Bohm just the sense of positive engagement that we look for from the drug. Dykes said that he was sorting out his problems with his wife, he was enjoying the company of his children and had begun to paint again after a block lasting some six months.

However, last week when Dykes went to see Bohm for his check-up, he told him that he was having doubts about his sanity again. He now felt that he was ‘going the other way’. When Bohm asked Dykes to elaborate, the painter said that he was having difficulty in controlling his capacity for being involved with things. That when he turned his attention to something – whether it be a person, an object, a whole area of knowledge, or merely some abstract notion – he couldn’t prevent himself from being sucked deep into its contemplation. Furthermore, the painter claimed that he began to feel as if he knew more about whatever it was than he possibly could.

Bohm asked him for an example and Dykes came up with the Boxer Rising. He said he was looking through an old edition of the
Britannica
when he came across the entry on the Boxer Rising. Accompanying it was a picture of the Chinese Boxers attacking the British Embassy. Dykes swears he didn’t read the entry at first. Instead he merely stared at the old engraving (apparently he leafs through such old books looking for graphic material for his work), and found himself being ‘sucked into it’. While in this reverie he became acquainted with a vast amount of information on the Boxer Rising, including the names of the ring-leaders, and even elements of their motivation.

When he was sufficiently recovered, he read the accompanying entry. All of the facts that had come to him in the reverie turned out to be true! He even knew some things that weren’t in the entry, but when he did some further research at the Bodleian in Oxford, they panned out as well!

If all of this wasn’t bad enough, the horrific clincher came this week. Dykes arrived for his appointment as usual, at about eleven. Bohm said that the painter was haggard and unkempt. His eyes darted this way and that around Bohm’s consulting room, lighting on object after object, as if he were seeing not the things themselves, but looking deep into their anatomy.

Bohm asked him how he was feeling and Dykes said that he knew he wasn’t taking an anti-depressant, but some experimental drug. When Bohm challenged him and asked how could he be so sure, Dykes replied that he knew the man who was behind it. His name was Busner and he was operating out of a compound in the Chilterns near Worminghall.

Dykes had seen me – he claimed – in the Three Pigeons Inn by Junction 7 of the M40. He hadn’t paid any particular attention to me when he went into the pub, but after he grew tired of contemplating the history and evolution of the towelling bar mat, he turned his attention to the ‘froggy-looking man in the corner wearing the mohair tie’. He said that I wasn’t as easy to read as the bar mat, or the engraving of the Boxer Rising, but that merely by looking at me he could include elements of my mental terrain into his own. So it was that he discovered that I was doing some sort of drug trial, and that it involved anti-depressant medication.

The bugger is that I do have a drink in the Three Pigeons from time to time, and there’s every possibility that Dykes has seen me in there. Although I cannot recall noticing anyone paying undue attention to me. On the contrary, it’s often extremely difficult to get served in there, despite a bar staff to drinker ratio of about 1:1.

After this encounter Dykes formed the conviction that his current predicament had something to do with me. He then challenged Bohm with this information. Bohm told me that he was as circumspect as possible. He advised Dykes to stop taking the Inclusion immediately and switch to a tranquilliser. Dykes refused, and as he already has a repeat prescription for Inclusion, Bohm realised that he would be unable to force the issue. Especially as Dykes then said he wanted Bohm to arrange a meeting with me, and that if he didn’t, or if I refused to see him, he would get in touch with the press.

Bohm displayed as much sang-froid as he could under the circumstances. He told Dykes to go home and try to relax, and that he would ‘see what he could do’. As soon as Dykes left the health centre he called me.

I have been put into such a state by this news that I’ve been unable to come up with a definitive analysis of the situation. Can it be that this is some kind of Inclusion-induced psychosis? And if so, will it occur in all of the patients who have been prescribed the drug? I shudder to think. An alternative possibility is that Dykes is going into a psychotic or schizoid interlude despite, rather than because of, the Inclusion, and that the facts he has adduced about the Inclusion trial and myself are lurid supposition, hit upon by chance.

Whatever the case, I cannot at this stage bear to inform Gainsford. I know that he would overreact and jeopardise what we have achieved so far. If we can contain the situation with Dykes then there is no reason to abort the trial. So, I told Bohm that he was to bring Dykes up to Worminghall as soon as possible. He called back an hour or so later and said that they would be coming up tomorrow night. Until then I will see if I can’t discover some more about the drug’s effects. Obviously, the best way to do this is for me to take an extra-large dose of Inclusion myself.

This may appear foolhardy, but the whole thing intrigues me so much that I am determined to get to the bottom of it. I am passionately interested in Inclusion, and wish it at all costs to remain a large part of my life.

And that’s it. That’s the last entry in Busner’s journal. Or at any rate the last that you’re able to read. There are a few pages after this entry that have obviously been torn out by someone – just a ragged fringe of paper remains, close to the binding; the rest of the notebook is empty.

That doesn’t immediately concern you. What’s far more intriguing is the other notebook, the one you know already is Simon Dykes’s own diary. How did it come to be at the Worminghall Facility? Did Dykes take it up there himself on the climactic night of the 12th of March? And is the fact that it’s exactly the same kind of notebook as Busner’s purely coincidental? Or is it yet another ramification of the Inclusion trial?

You don’t hesitate. You pick it up and give it a heft. Well, that won’t tell you anything. Open it up and have a read:

12th October

Why fucking bother? Why fucking bother at all? Why fuck and why bother? I would be angry – if I had the energy. I would hate myself more, if I didn’t feel dead already. I hate doing this. I hate writing these things. Write down your feelings. It’s the sort of shit that that dickhead psychotherapist at the Warneford told me to do, when I made the profound mistake of going to see him on Tony Bohm’s recommendation.

If I find myself writing this stuff down, it’s only because I have to make something external, something that’s tangible, just to keep alive in me the idea that I’m alive at all.