D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘I just hope I’m not going to hate her,’ I said.

‘I never mind a bit of involvement. You know that.’ Vincent liked his interviewers taking a positive attitude. It made for brighter viewing. But the program we were planning this time was rather different. If the thing went according to plan, and Vincent’s things always did, I was going to be sitting on Katherine Mortenhoe for the next six weeks.

‘I’d rather like her,’ I said. ‘For both our sakes.’

And that was how I really thought of it — sitting on her, I mean. Which shows just how subliminal you can get. Vincent lit a cigar. It was put about that he had them custom-rolled for him. Put about by whom, I wondered.

‘Just so long as you steer clear of the mush,’ he said.

He was joking, of course. They wouldn’t have spent that much money on a mush-merchant… I remember looking up at the monitor in the corner above the one-way mirror, and finding it still disturbing that I shouldn’t see in it the face I had seen in lash-up studio monitors from Nova Zembla to Bangkok. The face, eyes off camera, that was my external measure of self. For what it was worth: faces too were pretty horrible things if you really looked at them. But there, still disturbing me, in the monitor in the corner above the one-way mirror was a picture of the monitor in the corner above the one-way mirror. And in that, a picture of the monitor in the corner above the one-way mirror. And in that… But where, in all that mirror trickery down to infinity, down to the smallest significant pattern the tube’s 605 lines could produce, where in all that was I?

Idiotically, I tried looking away, and then back again quickly, as if I could catch it out. I knew it was idiotic, but I tried. The image naturally (unnaturally) remained the same. In the monitor above the one-way mirror, the monitor above the one-way mirror. I closed my eyes. My eyes.

When I opened them again I looked instead through the mirror into the office beyond. Dr Mason had his ball-point upright on the desk in front of him. He slid his thumb and forefinger down it, then turned it the other way up and slid his thumb and forefinger down it again. If I concentrated on my peripheral vision I could just make out the monitor image of Dr Mason as he turned his ball-point the other way up and slid his thumb and forefinger down it again.

Image-framing, they called it. Fiendishly clever, these Micro-Electro-Neurologists, MEN for short. Which, if you’ve ever met one, is one of my better jokes.

‘Headache?’ said Vincent.

I didn’t envy Dr Mason his first bite at Katherine Mortenhoe. With what he had to tell her, and bearing in mind her previous case history, he could expect flailing and wailing. Suffering nobly born would bring out the best in me, and I’d willingly hold out a (professional) hand in its direction. But suffering wallowed in, suffering without dignity — in short, flailing and wailing — would shut me right off. It was like an animal’s — except that animals you are allowed to put down.

‘Are you still getting those headaches?’ Vincent said, a little louder, frowning his frown.

I’d had more than enough of people asking me about my headaches, about the tingling in my extremities, about my nasal passages, about the frequency of my bowel movements. If I’d listened to them I’d have walked around the last three months with one finger on my pulse and the other up my rectum. And made half-hourly reports on what I discovered.

So, ‘Only when I laugh,’ I said, but not sharply. Vincent was my Program Controller.

The mirror must have been thinner than it should have been: Dr Mason cocked his head on one side and winced. As if he were the one with the bloody headache.

Vincent nudged me. ‘She’ll be on her way up now,’ he said. It was a ventriloquial trick, the words reaching precisely to me and not a centimeter farther, while his lips barely moved and his eyes were fixed on the far corner of the room, a trick learned at cocktail parties and official executions.

I turned to him and said, loudly, ‘I thought this mirror was supposed to be soundproof.’

Dr Mason looked sideways in my direction, not at my eyes as he would have done if he could have seen me, but farther down, somewhere around the knot in my tie. He shook his head reprovingly and I’m afraid I put my tongue out. Vincent pretended it all wasn’t happening. Dr Mason went back to his ball-point, sliding his thumb and forefinger down it and turning it the other way up.

‘It would have been marvelous,’ Vincent said, invisibly, ‘to have been able to use this. We tried a reconstruction once, you know. But it doesn’t work.’

‘I know.’

‘It wasn’t that it lacked spontaneity. And the chap was most cooperative. He seemed genuinely to be reliving it. The agony, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘But we couldn’t use it. We knocked it around the office a bit, and then said no. Use just one reconstruction and you’ve lost. Lost credibility.’

If I’d said ‘I know’ just once more I’d have been pushing it. Taking advantage of my position. A man, a sensitive man, who is fire-proof in an organization has an obligation to be mannerly… They could see to it that I never worked again, of course, but it wouldn’t get them much of a return on their investment. And they’d never get the insurance company to pay up the fifty thousand they had on me. On the reliable, sensitive me.

‘It’s a pity,’ I said instead, ‘that there isn’t some way of signing subjects up in advance. Telling them some story, just to get their names on a bit of paper. Then we could use it right from kickoff.’

‘Now you’re suggesting that we mislead the public.’

We both laughed, neither of us — at that time with the slightest shade of irony. The idea was preposterous. Even if we’d wanted to, which I at least, with my concern for the truth didn’t, even if we’d wanted to the idea was still preposterous. The Civil Liberties Act, the Invasions of Privacy Act, the new Government Code, all these made — and still make — the game on the face of it not worth the candle. The legislation was basically of our own making, and for our own protection, and we’d have been mad to think of bucking it. That way led straight back to Stevenson’s Last Stand, and that — though we media men made jokes about it — wasn’t funny. Not that it hadn’t been his own fault, but one still doesn’t like to think of that sort of thing happening to a colleague.

I wondered, in passing, if he’d ever got his mike out from where I’d heard they put it. Possibly Vincent’s thoughts had been following mine, for we both laughed again, though less easily.

The intercom buzzed on Dr Mason’s desk. ‘Mrs Mortenhoe to see you, Doctor.’

He put away his ball-point, checked in his desk for the computer printout I’d seen him put there not five minutes before, blew his nose, wiped his eyes, and cleared his throat. He was leaving nothing to chance, our Dr Mason.

‘Show her in, please,’ he said.

His checking for the printout had reminded me of probably the best computer joke I’d heard. There’s this fella, see, goes along to his doctor for a diagnosis. Spots, pains, odd sensations, you build up the middle bit how you like — symptoms the wilder the better. Anyway, the doctor writes it all down, and feeds it in. Long pause. Flashing lights, whirling tapes, clicking relays. Finally the computer spits out one of those long blue diagnosis printouts. Only this one’s only got seven words on it. Just seven words. ‘That’s marvelous,’ the fella says. ‘What’s it say?’ The doctor passes the printout across his desk. The fella doesn’t dare look. ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘tell me what it says.’ The doctor looks down at the paper. ‘There’s — a — lot — of — it — about,’ he reads.