Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

I was devastated. My throat had gone dry and when I tried to say his name I couldn’t speak. I put the spoon down. After a few moments I pronounced his name and placed my hand on his arm. There was no response. In a way, it was not ‘his’ arm at all. It was not under the control of the intelligence which had just unblinked itself at me; there was nothing else he could do. I took my handkerchief and dabbed away the tearstains from a face as blank and indifferent to my presence as an abstract sculpture. In my own daze I fed him the orange slices, lifting them to his lips one by one on the spoon, knowing that he wanted to eat them. His mouth functioned. His throat swallowed them. When I had fed him I manoeuvred him to his bedroom and into his bed. His head lolled to one side and he made strange convulsive movements with his shoulders and hands as I took off his dressing gown and I gave way to the selfish weakness of embracing him for a minute, but was repaid with the usual inertia. I sat in the dim room and watched until he fell asleep. Joanne came and looked in and said, ‘Well?’ and when I didn’t reply she watched him for a few moments and then went away.

I sat there thinking: how much does he know? Does he understand what we say? There had never been any very certain way of knowing. But now I was sure that some part of him knew that he was locked fatally, for always, in an uncontrollable physical shell in a world where every conscious instant could produce neural nightmares, the realities of his own cerebral cortex which he could never escape and which—I assumed—were getting worse, becoming more repellent to him.

And perhaps knowing this, some inner force was trying to find a way to end the whole organism, to self-destruct. Whatever happened, I knew there was one certainty: I would never abandon or fail him. It was possible that the look I had just seen in his eyes was purely the expression of a frightened animal and that no part of him knew any emotion as complex as love or had any awareness of other people’s feelings or of the passage of time and what it would mean to be sat down at a table day after day for seventy years in an institution with a plastic spoon pressing congealed baby food into a mouth which would never speak. But I would never abandon him because I knew myself what it meant to be deserted and if there was only a one-tenth of one percent chance that some tiny fragment of the child’s mind would feel what I had felt, I could never risk that. He had, after all, looked at me .

‘What happened?’ Joanne asked, when I returned to the front room.

‘Nothing.’

‘Something happened. I can tell.’

I sat down and stared at the television screen. Newsreel pictures of a soldier firing a heavy-calibre machine gun from a helicopter into thick jungle; then bodies being dragged into a clearing. She got up and switched it off.

‘I don’t know why you are so secretive.’

‘What? Why should I be?’

‘You are. You never told them the truth about the research centre.’

‘I told them as much as I could. Anyhow it was irrelevant.’

‘You could have let them decide what’s relevant. Unless you were afraid of what they might find.’

We had battled through all this years earlier. Now it resurfaced. I ignored it.

‘Don’t you think we tell each other the truth, then?’ I said.

‘Did we ever?’

There was a long pause. We avoided looking at each other. Then I said, ‘I never had any illusions.’

And she had said, ‘You get worse.’

A few nights later I was supervising Peter’s bath when he suddenly slid beneath the water. I tugged on his arm. He resisted. His face, pallid and neutral, drifted under the surface of the clear liquid. There was a weird determination about the way he pushed me back. I had to haul him up with both my hands hooked under his arms. He exhaled, spluttering. Perhaps he was testing me. But the silent plunge and struggle had been frightening.

If he wanted to kill himself, what could we do? I knew what the official answer would be; he would have to be placed under close watch in a mental hospital. If necessary, under restraint. So he would be forced to survive. Because this hypocritical society insisted at this level that life was sacred. At every other level it encouraged people to smash themselves to bits, to inhale cancer, to drink themselves to death, all for fat taxes on the profits. But officially, life was sacred. To want to escape it to stop pain was listed a crime.

When I thought, I don’t want him to die, that was only a natural reaction. Yet considered more carefully and objectively perhaps it was little more than my selfishness operating again.

Now I stood in the dark hotel room and shone the torch down on the gun. Death seems difficult for so long but then it must become easy. How very hard to find the easy part. The brain seems demented for survival. It has a core of power to protect its functions from termination, to drag its host organism back from actions which spell body death. Pathetic arrogance and panic even invent the idea of an essence within the self which is immune to extinction. For some reason this is supposed to be consoling. I had never understood why I would be afraid of a universe which arranged immortality for people so incapable of coping with something as small as life. It would be a sick joke, an obscenity. I never had any illusions about that . What prevented me from killing myself now was ice-cold cowardice. No. More than that. Worming inside the absurdities of what should have been the final reduction there was still something of mortal importance to discover. It had no firm shape. But it would impel me to go on. No matter what I saw.

Peter began to utter screams. There would be no word in the dictionary adequate to describe the actual noises which came from him; ‘screams’ would fall far short. He didn’t seem in any physical pain. His expression hardly altered, there were no warnings beforehand or traces of any trauma afterwards; it was as if the screams were being irregularly transmitted through the child’s throat and mouth from a distant source. They suggested dreadful terror and agony. The doctors and psychiatrists did tests, summoned us, and spread out encephalograms on their desks showing the jagged electrical pulses inside the child’s brain like edges of broken ice. Then they said: Well, we really don’t know. They spoke of electro-convulsive therapy. At any rate they proposed that we consider placing the subject in a special clinic. Whilst we talked, the subject sat in another room waiting, ignoring the nurse who was there; it was a soundproofed room, and we could see him through a one-way mirror. At one point he turned and seemed to stare towards us and his mouth opened in what may have been a scream; only later did I remember that he was not looking at us but towards his own reflection.

We took him home, and argued as usual. I felt my opposition weakening. The screams, sporadic, shocking, were unbearable. I had seen history-book pictures by medieval painters, where faces were spread out in terror and split open soundlessly, the noise left to your mind. Peter’s cries were like that, as if a door had opened and slammed shut on hell.

What followed, a few weeks later, was still not easy for me to remember because my mind had insisted on being evasive, and this was part of the nightmare, the thing I wanted to elude. Now it presented itself in the form of disconnected images as a waking memory, held in me like a shout without sound.

I am sitting on the edge of the bath. Peter’s eyes are devious, they glance in all directions and then again with a wrench of his head they fix on my face. I know what will happen. Holding the sides of the bath, he sinks back, slowly. His face goes from the air by inches, mouth closed, the edge of the water sliding up his face in a silver glint of surface tension, the trapped bubbles of air bright like chromium beads, his eyes open beneath the water. His hair floats and drifts, rising from his forehead, combed in slow motion by the lift of the silver line. Now I have to decide. Ten seconds. Wet skin glitters. The eyes widen. I stand, trembling, the reflections slipping over the brilliance. Goodbye Peter. He will only see my lips move. Then the lights.