The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

      He seemed more than satisfied with the results.

      ‘Shorter access times, deeper memory traces,’ he pointed out to Morley when the three men had gone off at five for the rest period. ‘Barrels of prime psychic marrow.’ He gestured at the test cards spread out across the desk in his office. ‘And you were worried about the Unconscious. Look at those Rorschachs of Lang’s. Believe me, John, I’ll soon have him reminiscing about his foetal experiences.’

      Morley nodded, his first doubts fading.

      

      Over the next two weeks either he or Neill was with the men continuously, sitting out under the floodlights in the centre of the gymnasium, assessing their assimilation of the eight extra hours, carefully watching for any symptoms of withdrawal. Neill carried everyone along, from one programme phase to the next, through the test periods, across the long hours of the interminable nights, his powerful ego injecting enthusiasm into every member of the unit.

      Privately, Morley worried about the increasing emotional overlay apparent in the relationship between Neill and the three men. He was afraid they were becoming conditioned to identify Neill with the experiment. (Ring the meal bell and the subject salivates; but suddenly stop ringing the bell after a long period of conditioning and it temporarily loses the ability to feed itself. The hiatus barely harms a dog, but it might trigger disaster in an already oversensitized psyche.)

      Neill was fully alert to this. At the end of the first two weeks, when he caught a bad head cold after sitting up all night and decided to spend the next day in bed, he called Morley into his office.

      ‘The transference is getting much too positive. It needs to be eased off a little.’

      ‘I agree,’ Morley said. ‘But how?’

      ‘Tell them I’ll be asleep for forty-eight hours,’ Neill said. He picked up a stack of reports, plates and test cards and bundled them under one arm. ‘I’ve deliberately overdosed myself with sedative to get some rest. I’m worn to a shadow, full fatigue syndrome, load-cells screaming. Lay it on.’

      ‘Couldn’t that be rather drastic?’ Morley asked. ‘They’ll hate you for it.’

      But Neill only smiled and went off to requisition an office near his bedroom.

      

      That night Morley was on duty in the gymnasium from ten p.m. to six a.m. As usual he first checked that the orderlies were ready with their emergency trollies, read through the log left by the previous supervisor, one of the senior interns, and then went over to the circle of chairs. He sat back on the sofa next to Lang and leafed through a magazine, watching the three men carefully. In the glare of the arc-lights their lean faces had a sallow, cyanosed look. The senior intern had warned him that Avery and Gorrell might overtire themselves at table-tennis, but by eleven p.m. they stopped playing and settled down in the armchairs. They read desultorily and made two trips up to the cafeteria, escorted each time by one of the orderlies. Morley told them about Neill, but surprisingly none of them made any comment.

      Midnight came slowly. Avery read, his long body hunched up in an armchair. Gorrell played chess against himself.

      Morley dozed.

      Lang felt restless. The gymnasium’s silence and absence of movement oppressed him. He switched on the gramophone and played through a Brandenburg, analysing its theme-trains. Then he ran a word-association test on himself, turning the pages of a book and using the top right-hand corner words as the control list.

      Morley leaned over. ‘Anything come up?’ he asked.

      ‘A few interesting responses.’ Lang found a note-pad and jotted something down. ‘I’ll show them to Neill in the morning – or whenever he wakes up.’ He gazed up pensively at the arc-lights. ‘I was just speculating. What do you think the next step forward will be?’

      ‘Forward where?’ Morley asked.

      Lang gestured expansively. ‘I mean up the evolutionary slope. Three hundred million years ago we became air-breathers and left the seas behind. Now we’ve taken the next logical step forward and eliminated sleep. What’s next?’

      Morley shook his head. ‘The two steps aren’t analogous. Anyway, in point of fact you haven’t left the primeval sea behind. You’re still carrying a private replica of it around as your bloodstream. All you did was encapsulate a necessary piece of the physical environment in order to escape it.’

      Lang nodded. ‘I was thinking of something else. Tell me, has it ever occurred to you how completely death-orientated the psyche is?’

      Morley smiled. ‘Now and then,’ he said, wondering where this led.

      ‘It’s curious,’ Lang went on reflectively. ‘The pleasure-pain principle, the whole survival-compulsion apparatus of sex, the Super-Ego’s obsession with tomorrow – most of the time the psyche can’t see farther than its own tombstone. Now why has it got this strange fixation? For one very obvious reason.’ He tapped the air with his forefinger. ‘Because every night it’s given a pretty convincing reminder of the fate in store for it.’

      ‘You mean the black hole,’ Morley suggested wryly. ‘Sleep?’

      ‘Exactly. It’s simply a pseudo-death. Of course, you’re not aware of it, but it must be terrifying.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t think even Neill realizes that, far from being restful, sleep is a genuinely traumatic experience.’

      So that’s it, Morley thought. The great father analyst has been caught napping on his own couch. He tried to decide which were worse – patients who knew a lot of psychiatry, or those who only knew a little.

      ‘Eliminate sleep,’ Lang was saying, ‘and you also eliminate all the fear and defence mechanisms erected round it. Then, at last, the psyche has a chance to orientate towards something more valid.’

      ‘Such as …?’ Morley asked.

      ‘I don’t know. Perhaps … Self?’

      ‘Interesting,’ Morley commented. It was three ten a.m. He decided to spend the next hour going through Lang’s latest test cards.

      He waited a discretionary five minutes, then stood up and walked over to the surgery office.

      

      Lang hooked an arm across the back of the sofa and watched the orderly room door.

      ‘What’s Morley playing at?’ he asked. ‘Have either of you seen him anywhere?’

      Avery lowered his magazine. ‘Didn’t he go off into the orderly room?’

      ‘Ten minutes ago,’ Lang said. ‘He hasn’t looked in since. There’s supposed to be someone on duty with us continuously. Where is he?’

      Gorrell, playing solitaire chess, looked up from his board. ‘Perhaps these late nights are getting him down. You’d better wake him before Neill finds out. He’s probably fallen asleep over a batch of your test cards.’

      Lang laughed and settled down on the sofa. Gorrell reached out to the gramophone, took a record out of the rack and slid it on to the turntable.

      As the gramophone began to hum Lang noticed how silent and deserted the gymnasium seemed. The Clinic was always quiet, but even at night a residual ebb and flow of sound – a chair dragging in the orderly room, a generator charging under one of the theatres – eddied through and kept it alive.

      Now the air was flat and motionless. Lang listened carefully. The whole place had the dead, echoless feel of an abandoned building.

      He stood up and strolled over to the orderly room. He knew Neill discouraged casual conversation with the control crew, but Morley’s absence puzzled him.

      He reached the door and peered through the window to see if Morley was inside.

      The room was empty.

      The light was on. Two emergency trollies stood in their usual place against