Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘We’ll get out of your hair,’ Frazer Melville says. ‘Just call if you need us.’

‘And you’re the one responsible for the patient?’ asks the anaesthetist. I nod. ‘Then I’ll need you there with me. As soon as we’re done with the procedure I’ll want to get going. And — no offence, but I want to forget I ever came here.’

‘Is this guy safe?’ I ask Ned when Kristin Jons dottir has melted discreetly upstairs, and Frazer Melville has led the medic to the parlour.

‘Yes. But he doesn’t have to like the situation.’

‘So how did you persuade him in the first place?’

Ned looks evasive. ‘We’re living by new priorities. Not all the choices we make are going to be of the finest moral quality.’

‘I can tell you’ve hung around with politicians. Are you going to add that the end will justify the means?’ He doesn’t answer. I sigh. ‘I’ll need the pictures of all four rigs ready so we can look at them immediately afterwards. I’m hoping she’ll spot a detail that clinches it. We’ll need good definition. Some new angles, if you can get them.’

‘Right. I’ll go summon the princess.’

When Bethany comes downstairs, barefoot, rebandaged and unkempt, she’s hungry for action. Grabbing the handles of my chair despite my protests, she pushes me at high speed down the corridor and into the parlour, where she greets the medic with a ‘Yo, doc’ and a blazing orthodontic grin. He returns it with a baleful look, and eyes her as she settles herself on the low sofa, humming tunelessly and picking at the scabs on the exposed parts of her arms.

I have often wondered what draws anaesthetists to a profession which requires one to so finely judge the line between the conscious and the unconscious self, the living state and the dead. Their high suicide rate is ascribed to the ready availability of the means, but something about the way this young man carries himself makes me speculate there’s more to it than that. As for Bethany, a stranger is about to blast her brain with electricity in a medical procedure whose effectiveness has never been understood — and she is ready and willing. The trust involved, the inevitability of a massive power imbalance, and the paradoxical absence of intimacy between Bethany and the anonymous doctor, makes for an emotionally lurid contract, I reflect, watching him adjust the position of the small machine on the coffee table. He inserts a rubber wedge in her mouth: she opens wide to accept it with uncharacteristic docility. Her bare feet are smudged with what looks like mud. The medic takes it all in, but doesn’t enquire about how Bethany became injured. Or indeed, why she is here.

‘Ready?’ he asks. She nods. For both of them, it’s a familiar routine. He puts the anaesthetic bag over her nose and mouth, then wipes her temples with a wet sponge.

A few moments later, Bethany’s eyelids have closed and she has succumbed. I hold my breath. The medic flicks the timer on and applies the electrodes to her temples. He presses them in place, but after a few seconds he frowns as though dissatisfied.

‘Her brain’s built up a resistance,’ he murmurs. The seconds tick by. Five, six.

‘How do you know? I thought the point of the muscle relaxants and the anaesthetic was to make sure that whatever happens, it’s confined to the brain.’

‘There are small signs. And I’m not seeing any of them. I can tell you now, the machine’s working fine, but it’s not having an effect.’

The ten seconds are up. He removes the electrodes. There is still no movement from Bethany, not even the curl of toes that I saw when I watched this before, like bracken unfurling. In the distance, a phone rings.

‘Can you do it again?’ I whisper. ‘And give her longer?’

He presses his lips together in a line of disapproval. ‘Unsafe to do it twice in one day.’

‘You said her brain’s built up a resistance. There must be variations anyway. Aren’t there?’

He looks annoyed. ‘I’ll wait for her to come round and then I’ll make a decision.’

Within two minutes, Bethany’s eyes have flickered open. I remove her mask. It leaves a faint red suction mark around her mouth, like the unhappy grimace of a clown. ‘Didn’t fucking work,’ she slurs through the rubber mouth-guard. The muscles of her face have gone slack and distorted, and she’s sweating. Even her hair looks greasier, as though the volts have somehow ravaged her, and spooled her life through years rather than seconds. She spits out the guard. ‘Give me more of it, you fuckwit. A proper shot this time. Give me thirty seconds.’

He blinks and addresses his answer to me. ‘I’ll give her twenty,’ he says, rolling up his sleeves, picking up the mouth-guard, and wiping the saliva off it with a paper towel. As he does so I notice the puncture marks on his arms. The stark fact of his addiction, which should have been obvious to me from the start, now shoulders its way into the equation.

‘Twenty’s not enough,’ Bethany protests, as she succumbs to the anaesthetic. ‘What kind of doctor are you anyway?’

He plugs her mouth with the rubber guard and she is silenced.

‘One who’s worried about being struck off?’ I suggest to him, when her eyes have closed.

His smile is dry. ‘Too late for that. I lost my licence to practise a year ago.’

I should have worked that out too. ‘You’d better tell me why.’

‘Sure,’ he says, checking the dials on the metal box. ‘I killed someone.’

Oh Christ. ‘With a machine like this?’

He considers. ‘Nope. A more up-to-date version.’

‘Performing this procedure?’ I can hear the panic in my voice, the shrillness.

He looks at me. ‘I can’t imagine what other procedure you’d perform with it. Yes. But I’m not prepared to do that again. I won’t go over twenty seconds. I made that clear from the start.’ And if it’s not enough? What then? ‘Want me to stop?’

‘No,’ I say, detesting us both for it. ‘You’re here now. Just get it over with.’

He presses the switch and we both hold our breath. Only a slight twitch of Bethany’s toes indicates that anything has happened, until at the end of twenty seconds a tiny noise escapes from her: a high sigh like the start of a groan.

‘Do you think it’s worked this time?’

He stands up, checks his mobile and pats his pockets, then heads for the door. ‘I’m not staying to find out.’

‘Stop,’ I tell him. ‘Look. I don’t know your name. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never met you. This equipment isn’t traceable to you. If it hasn’t worked, can’t you try again?’

‘I don’t think you heard me the first time,’ he says from the doorway. ‘I told you. I killed someone. I have to live with that. But I don’t have to repeat it.’

‘Please, can’t you even wait till—’ But he has left the room. I know there’s no point chasing after him, that he has made up his mind, that this was the deal he struck with Ned or, more simply and more importantly, with himself.

After five minutes, with the sound of the medic’s car starting in the background, Bethany’s eyes flicker open and I remove the mask from her face and let her spit the guard into my hand. I pass her a glass of water which she gulps down sloppily. She looks even more destroyed than before. It’s almost obscene.

‘Hi, Bethany.’

She looks at me fuzzily and speaks from the side of her mouth. ‘Hi, Wheels. It didn’t work.’

The disappointment is like a strong, ugly taste. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Why?’ Her lower lip seems to be in spasm.

‘He had reasons I couldn’t argue with.’

I find the others assembled in the kitchen, deep in gloomy discussion.

‘Harish Modak rang,’ says Frazer Melville, looking up. ‘He’s on his way.’