The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (8 page)

‘There’s no point in going on asking what my fee is. My fee doesn’t exist, because I won’t perform the operation.’

‘Your fee exists all right. The doubt is whether it’s worth my while to pay it. Your fee is the sum that would persuade you to perform the operation.’

‘Nothing will persuade me.’

‘You mean you’ll do it for nothing?

‘I mean no such – Sorry,’ the surgeon said. ‘I’m not used to millionaires’ humour. I see it’s as specialised as medical humour. However, the answer is that I won’t do the job. So I’ll be getting back to the hospital.’

‘Sit down. You’ve established good personal relations with me. You’ve made me laugh. This is obviously the most
advantageous
moment for you to start to negotiate.’

‘I don’t
want
to negotiate. There’s nothing
to
negotiate.’

‘No, of course there isn’t: yet. I haven’t made you an offer yet.’

‘Look, I realise you can offer me – by my standards – the earth. But you must realise in your turn that I already make – again by my own standards – a very adequate living. I have few extravagant tastes. Those I have I can afford. I’m not pathologically greedy. So if you offer me the earth, my answer is, quite frankly, “Thanks, but I don’t
need
the earth.”’

‘Splendid. It looks as if I shan’t have to pay as much as I feared.’

‘Listen,’ the surgeon said, rearranging his posture in the chair as though thereby to rearrange his posture in the
argument
. ‘Can’t you just accept the fact that you’ve come up against medical ethics?’

‘I’m not asking you to perform an abortion. Or euthanasia.’

‘What a conventional view you take of medical ethics. There’s more to it than that.’

‘What more?’

‘Put it like this. My life’s work – my vocation, if you prefer – consists of removing damaged or unhealthy tissue, to the benefit of the patient’s general health. To remove
un
damaged
, perfectly healthy tissue –’

‘Suppose I asked you to remove an inch of undamaged, perfectly healthy nose and thereby give me a handsomer face?’

‘I don’t do cosmetic surgery.’

‘That’s mere personal chit-chat. Do you in principle
condemn
those of your colleagues who
do
do cosmetic surgery?’

‘No. But they’re taking into consideration the patient’s general health, including his state of mind. If an ugly nose is rendering a patient liable to depression—’

‘And what about
my
state of mind? What about the
depression
I
feel at the sheer waste involved in maintaining a long, heavy left arm that does nothing to earn its keep?’

‘Listen,’ the surgeon said patiently. ‘Listen.’ He rose and walked to the window, which was covered by a Venetian blind. He peered between two of the slats and managed to see a little light. ‘I don’t understand what you hope to gain. Do you imagine you could save on your food bills if you had one limb fewer to support? Have you some naïve idea that food intake is directly related to body weight? Is that it? Well, you’re wrong. What one eats is largely a matter of habit. And even if you managed to re-train your appetite, how much would you save? Ten pence a day? 20 pence a day? You don’t
need
to save 20 pence a day.’

‘And
you
said
I
was naïve,’ the businessman said. ‘You think of finance as just getting and spending. Perhaps it’s the fault of your medical training. You see it in terms of the alimentary tract.’

‘All right. If I’m naïve, explain to me. What is this idea all about?’

‘Well, primarily, it’s a matter of principle.’

‘Principle?’ said the surgeon, shocked into turning round.

‘Yes. Did you think only you had them? Waste consists of letting someone’s work – someone’s energy – dribble away into an unproductive dead end. Waste is death. Like you, I’m
engaged
in a war against death. So: my first principle is that anything that doesn’t contribute to life – to efficiency, to
production
– must be cut out. My left arm contributes nothing.
I’m not merely right-handed; I’m extremely right-handed. With my left hand I can’t so much as turn a doorknob or unzip my trousers. I have to maintain – foodwise, energywise,
washing-wise
, warmthwise, clothingwise – all this muscle power in my left arm but I can’t apply it.’

‘You use your left arm in ways you’re not aware of. To maintain balance, and so on.’

‘I’ve come down from the trees. Mobility, for me, is pressing the buttons on the intercom. That’s how I got you to come here.
You
have to be mobile.
I
just have to get you to come. And I push the buttons with the fingers of my right hand.’

‘The whole idea is monstrous,’ the surgeon said.

‘You mean logical.’

‘Yes, all right, logical – but totally unreasonable. Such a drastic remedy – merely to save ten pence a day.’

‘You have the characteristic mentality of the professional classes’, the businessman said affably. ‘You professional men know about
making
money. You enjoy making it. You yourself have probably
made
, in one sense of the word, as much as I have. But when you’ve made it, you can’t think of anything to do with it except spend it. That’s why you’re merely
comfortably
off, whereas I’m what you call a millionaire.’

‘Why do you say what I
call
a millionaire?
Aren’t
you a millionaire?’

‘Frightened my offer won’t be as much as you’d hoped?’

‘I tell you there’s no question—’

‘Just my little millionaire’s joke’, the businessman said
calmingly
. ‘No, when you talk about a millionaire, I feel as you medical practitioners must when a patient says “Doctor, my blood’s over-heated” or “Doctor, I’m having trouble with my nerves”. I can tell that you don’t know what you mean yourself. You’ve no clear picture in your own head whether your
millionaire
is someone who could raise a million or someone who could realise a million or just someone whose holdings are worth a million on paper so long as he doesn’t try to realise them. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you visualise a millionaire as someone who keeps a million in cash in cardboard boxes under the bed.’

‘I don’t profess to be a financier.’

‘Yet you think you know you can afford to refuse my offer
before you’ve even heard it.’

‘I know I can live comfortably without your offer.’

‘By “comfortably”, you mean having plenty of cash to spend. If I offered you a million – and don’t get excited; I shan’t – you’d ask for it to be delivered in cardboard boxes.’

‘Well, if it was tied in some investment and I couldn’t get it out without destroying its value, I wouldn’t get much fun out of it.’

‘A millionaire who keeps his million under the bed will never be a multi-millionaire.’

‘I don’t
want
to be a multi-millionaire.’

‘You don’t
want
! It all turns on what you personally
want
. You professional classes are so selfish. You think of me as a greedy capitalist. You imagine you’re well to the liberal side of me. And all
you
want is cash to spend, regardless of what you do to the economy. Just because you work hard at a skilled, socially useful job, you think you’re entitled to a high income – and you believe that income to be your
reward.
You feel entitled to get
fun
out of it: by spending it. You take the money out of the economy and drop it through a hole in your pocket and then you righteously say you’re not pathologically greedy. What you do is convert capital into waste matter. When you divert money from its productive function of making money, you kill it. I look on you as a deadly amateur, just as a brewer or a baker would if you told him you collected yeast not in order to brew or bake with it but just to get fun out of it.’

‘All this rhetoric is quite pointless,’ the surgeon said. ‘It’s high time I got back to my selfish if socially useful job.’

‘I’m offering you the chance to do something
extra
socially useful by helping me plug the holes through which my efficiency goes to waste. And you arrogantly reply that I don’t
need
to save ten pence a day, so the job’s beneath you. Suppose I
did
need to? Suppose I was a pauper? Would the operation
suddenly
become ethical?’

‘A pauper has never made me such a monstrous proposition.’

‘It wouldn’t be worth his while. He’d never save enough by it to cover his expenditure on your fee. His saving would be in proportion to his tiny outgoings. My outgoings, on the other hand, are enormous. Look at the gadgetry and hardware in this office. It’s all worth it, because it multiplies my efficiency.’

‘I advise you to have one gadget fewer and keep your arm.’

‘Your advice is uneconomic. I would gain the cost of the gadget but lose the efficiency it gives me, which multiplies in geometric progression. You constantly overlook the factor of progression. You estimate I might save ten pence a day on food. Now if
you
saved ten pence a day, your ten pences would merely mount up in an old jam jar on a shelf in your kitchen. If
I
save ten pence a day, each ten pence will be put to work to make more pence. If you and I each save ten pence a day, I will end up with a great deal more money than you will. My saving will be in terms of compound interest. You think of coins and notes as things. I know they are processes. You think of my office equipment as a collection of things. I know they are processes – and, what’s more, I know they are processes of two opposite kinds, going in opposite directions. They’re processes that
multiply
my efficiency. But at the same time they represent an
investment
of my capital, and as such they are processes of
deterioration
. Now food intake, you pointed out, is not directly related to body weight. But wear and tear on, for instance, this fitted carpet and these office chairs
is.
If I reduce wear and tear on them, I postpone the moment when I shall have to invest a capital sum in their replacement. If I postpone it by, let us say, a year, I gain a year’s usufruct of the capital sum involved. Do you begin to see? With your professional-class habit of
thinking
of money in static terms, you underestimated both the extent of the saving I shall make and the value of making the saving.’

‘You’re very plausible,’ the surgeon said. ‘But I’m not going to be talked into anything.’

‘I’ve given you enough to think about. To say any more now would be a waste of my energy. There comes a point in all negotiations where the person who is going to yield closes his ears: in order to concentrate on how, and how far, he’s going to yield. My assistant will phone you tomorrow about the fee.’

‘It’s not too late to change your mind.’

‘If you make it up in accordance with clear principles in the first place,’ the businessman replied from the operating trolley,
‘you don’t need to waste energy changing it.’

‘I still think it’s one of the morbidest, unnaturallest ideas I’ve ever heard.’

‘“Unnatural,”’ the businessman mocked. ‘All your medical expertise rests on the biology of myth. What’s “natural” for human beings?
You’re
not natural. Natural human beings don’t perform skilled surgery.’

‘Yours is an idea that could only occur to an abnormal
mentality
.’

‘If I had a normal mentality I’d have a normal income. And if I had a normal income, you wouldn’t be getting the fee you are.’

The surgeon had arranged the matter furtively, concealing from his assistants and the nursing staff the circumstances of the operation. He was sure that what he was doing was
professionally
disreputable. He was not even confident of its legality. He had made the businessman sign a paper which he hoped (he didn’t like to consult a lawyer) would protect him against a later accusation of unprofessional conduct or a suit for damages. In return, the businessman made the surgeon sign a contract
stipulating
the fee in advance.

Soon after the operation, the surgeon transferred his patient to an expensive nursing home in the country, where he visited him only once.

‘I feel fine,’ said the businessman, who was sitting up in a chair, the left sleeve of his dressing-gown pinned across his chest. ‘I’ve experienced none of the difficulties you predicted in keeping my balance. Did you have any success in selling my arm to the medical school?’

‘No. They’re not short of material to dissect. I had the arm incinerated.’

‘Wasteful.’

‘Or actually, if you want to know, I didn’t
try
to sell it.’

‘Wantonly wasteful.’

‘On the contrary. I have a reputation to consider. I didn’t want to have to explain how I came by an arm which any
medical
student could tell was perfectly healthy and undamaged.’

‘You’d better deduct the value of the arm from your bill.’

‘You’re the meanest man I ever met.’

‘On the contrary. I explained this point to you earlier. It’s
waste which is mean. Now: how quickly can I get out of this exorbitant nursing home?’

‘Tomorrow, I should think. You seem to be making an
excellent
recovery.’

‘I’ve every incentive to. The transaction won’t justify itself until my saving by it has covered what they’re charging me here plus your fee. I haven’t had your bill yet.’

‘It’ll be coming. It may give you a shock.’

‘You can’t charge more than the sum we agreed.’

‘No,’ said the surgeon wearily. ‘But I can charge less. I’m still free to do that.’

(He had in fact charged £5.)

‘It seems a wasteful way to demonstrate your freedom. Not that I’m quarrelling with it. I shall shew a profit sooner than I’d reckoned. I suppose you took something off for the fact there were no complications.’

‘Or for the complications of my conscience.’

‘That’s your affair. But there were no complications about the operation, were there?’