Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

Jake started to disagree but found herself, once again, cut short.

‘That is standard practice, Chief Inspector: to shoot and kill all armed criminals. Or don’t you read your own police policy documents?’

‘Yes and I’ve written some of them too,’ said Jake. ‘All the same, we owe it to criminology to bring this man into custody. There’s a great deal to be learnt from a subject like this in terms of forensic profiling.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘That’s your speciality, isn’t it? Well Chief Inspector, the only thing the voters are interested in learning about this maniac is that he cries for his mother when they come to stick the needle in him. I hope I’ve made myself clear to you. Goodnight.’

The screen flashed and then went blank. After a couple of seconds, the machine asked Jake if she wished to save the automatic recording that had been made of her conversation with the Minister. Jake stabbed the ‘yes’ button angrily, sensing that it might be useful to keep a record of all her future conversations with a woman like Mrs Miles.

Jake swung around in her chair and stared at the blackened window in which her reflection was floating.

That was probably what it was like to be in a punitive coma, she decided. To be there and yet not there at all. A half-existence between life and death. Awful. She knew very well that Mrs Miles had not exaggerated about criminals facing an icy hypodermic full of limbo crying for their mothers. She herself had been obliged to attend the induction of several punitive coma states. As punishments went it was worse than a long term of imprisonment and almost worse than death itself. But this was what happened when society had become morally squeamish about capital punishment and when prisons had become too overcrowded and expensive to be practical for any but minor offenders.

Jake knew all the arguments in favour of PC. Coma was cheap compared with the cost of keeping a man in prison for ten or fifteen years. The advent of so-called intelligent beds, self-controlled pods operating, by means of individual computers, inexpensive heart/lung machines and intravenous feeding devices, as developed for the health-care sector, but hi-jacked by the prison system, meant that a convict could be kept in a year’s coma for less than a tenth of the cost of an equivalent prison term. Coma removed the opportunities for engaging in further criminality that had been afforded by prison. Overnight, it destroyed criminal society and made expensive prison riots a thing of the past. And depending on the choice of chemical substance, coma was reversible with few deleterious physical or mental effects. There was even evidence from the United States, which had been the first country to introduce PC, that it was helping to deter violent, drug-related crime.

The arguments against PC were harder to maintain. To the objection that depriving a man of his consciousness was analogous to depriving him of life, the proponents of PC asserted that coma was more analogous to sleep, and that to be sentenced to a long period of sleep was, if anything, kinder than depriving a conscious man of an equivalent period of liberty, with all its attendant discomforts and indignities.

To the objection, heard in the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, that PC was a cruel and unusual punishment, it had been successfully argued that since the whole future of manned space-travel was dependent on deep-sleeping astronauts who had volunteered for their five-year missions to Mars and Venus, PC could not therefore be regarded as cruel.

The argument that in a subjective respect death concerns only consciousness did not survive the evidence of those convicts who had been returned from coma and reported their comatose dreams, which was itself confirmed by observations of electrical neuron activity in the brains of nearly all comatose convicts.

But a cold shiver ran down Jake’s spine as she stared into the void and tried to imagine it. She knew that she was ambiguous in her own attitude to PC. There were obvious advantages from the point of view of society in general. But from the viewpoint of the individual she could think of life as being of value only as a necessary condition of consciousness.

What had Wittgenstein said about it?

Jake retrieved her increasingly dog-eared copy of the Tractatus from her desk drawer, turned to the last few pages and read.

‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.’

That seemed logical enough. And this propositional form could easily be adapted to show that being unconscious was without question an event in life, and that it was perfectly feasible, with so much of the average human life being spent asleep, that people did live to experience the unconscious state as well. Hadn’t Freud proved that consciousness was not a necessary condition of an interesting life?

Where then was meaning? Where in that impersonal black sky of frightful grandeur that was the universe was significance?

As Jake stared at her reflection, the depth of what lay beyond helped to bring herself into focus. A sense of other realities, of the trivialities of everyday life, of something different from the routine, all of these sensations gradually made themselves felt within her. To see yourself you had to look where you were not. To find meaning you had to have the will to turn away from yourself.

Was that why men like the one calling himself Wittgenstein killed? For a momentary flash of identity? For a few seconds of significance? To escape from a lifetime’s lack of meaning?

Earlier that same day, Jake had felt a brief hatred for him. But now she found she could feel real pity.

I suppose you would like me to say something to the effect that I killed my victims when I heard the voices and that I believe that the voices came from God.

Naturally I’ve read of how other killers (although I hardly like to put myself in the same class as them) have tried this one on, and managed to have themselves adjudged insane, thereby escaping the needle. And I dare say you’ve been expecting me to claim something along these lines.

But the fact of the matter is this: we have you and I drunk up the sea. We have taken a sponge and wiped away the horizon. We have unchained the earth from the sun. And we are moving away now — away from all suns. We are perpetually falling backward, sideward, forward, in all directions. There is no up or down left. We are straying as through an infinite nothing. Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not the night coming inexorably upon us? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition?

All right, I’ll admit it. This is hardly an original thought. Not these days anyway. I can’t claim this as my own. But you take my point. I mean, the contention that I killed when I heard the voices and that the voices came from God just won’t do. I mean, it’s hardly the claim of a sophisticated killer, now is it? It is too melodramatic, too theatrical for words. I mean, where’s the imagination there, for God’s sake?

Now if you were to suggest something along the lines of how I killed when I heard the voice and that I believed the voice was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, then at least we’d be heading in the right direction. It sounds a bit more original. And what’s more, it’s considerably nearer to being true. Because each time I kill one of my brothers, I am, of course, killing God.

But just a minute, I hear you say: if someone kills God and God does not exist, then surely he’s killing nothing at all. It makes no sense to say ‘I am killing something’ when the something does not exist. I can imagine a god that is not there, in this forest, but not kill one that is not there. And ‘to imagine a god in this forest’ means to imagine a god is there. But to kill a god does not mean that... But if someone says ‘in order for me to be able to imagine God he must after all exist in some sense’, the answer is: no, he does not have to exist in any sense. Except one.