Ian Watson: The Embedding

Warm and innocent then-but now that Vidya, Vasilki, Rama and Gulshen and the others were learning their lessons in the Special Environments at the Hospital, Pierre’s triggering of memories of that happy mood came with an accusing force.

As though Eileen had read his thoughts she looked up from the boy and said sharply:

“Chris, there’s something I wanted to ask you. You can finish reading the letter later on.” “What?”

“Nothing very important, I don’t suppose. Only, I was talking to one of the village women whose husband does gardening at the Hospital. She said something odd—”

“Yes?”

“That you’re teaching the children there bad language.”

Shock.

“Bad language? What does she mean? Doesn’t she know it’s a hospital for kids who can’t speak properly-who’ve suffered brain damage? Of course they speak bad language.”

Glancing at the paragraphs he’d just read, he found himself assaulted by certain phrases that would not leave him alone.

Such as ‘human zoo’ and ‘political project’.

The words had a faint aura round them on the paper-they blurred into a fog as though his brain was reluctant to process them. But wouldn’t disappear. Their very indistinctness irritated him, brought them nagging to his attention. Perhaps rain had dripped on to the paper while Pierre was writing, smearing these particular words before they had a chance to dry.

Eileen was watching her husband calmly.

“I know what the Unit’s supposed to be doing. That’s what I told her, what you’ve just said to me. But you know how these country wives go all mysterious and confidential. She knew the Hospital was up to something else, she said-something secret and shameful. And what it was, was teaching children bad language—”

“So what does she mean by bad language then? What’s her definition?” he demanded.

“I said about the brain damage and speech defects,” she shrugged, “but that wasn’t what she meant.”

Sole drank some coffee swiftly, scalding his mouth, and laughed.

“I wonder what the poor gossipy bitch thinks we’re up to? Teaching the kids to lisp out ‘fuck’ and ‘bugger’?”

“No, Chris, I don’t feel she was talking about ‘fuck’ and ’bugger’.”

The Victorian wrought-iron pub table by the window was piled with spice jars and cook books-it had cost twenty pounds at an auction and they’d painted it white together when she was five months pregnant, imagining the child sitting at it in a high chair while Sole sat opposite, drinking a glass of beer maybe and steering the child’s early efforts at speech.

“The gardener’s wife! It’s just a bit of nonsense.”

But Eileen persisted, touching Peter anxiously as though the boy was threatened by events at the Hospital.

“You used to talk to Pierre about bad language. You didn’t mean swearing then. You meant wrong languages.”

“Listen Eileen, a child speaks bad language when its brain’s damaged. It has difficulties-has to be taught by roundabout routes.”

“She also said—”

“Yes?”

“There’s a front and a back to the Hospital. The real work goes on in special rooms you can’t get into without a pass. And it isn’t curing the children at all but making them sick. That’s where the bad language comes in. Or do I say bad languages, plural? Is that more accurate, Chris? What is going on at the Unit? Is it despicable-or something I can admire?”

“Damn it, the woman’s just describing any hospital! There are always closed wards.”

“But it isn’t a mental hospital.”

Sole shrugged, noticed the blue ghost of a ‘human zoo’ trying to catch his eye.

“Any hospital dealing with damaged brains is a kind of mental hospital at the same time as it’s a physical hospital. You can’t draw a line between the two. Language is a mental thing. Damn it, they hired a linguist in me, not a doctor.”

“So they did.”

Eileen watched curiously as he folded the airletter, stuffed it back into the envelope and put it in his pocket. She didn’t raise any objection to his taking it away.

As he walked up to the Unit, Sole watched the sky lightening into a calm crisp blue day, sucked in the clean cold air and blew it out ahead of him as white smoke.

How about being in Alaska, where your spittle hit the ground as a tight ice ball that bounced and rolled? That would be something.

Or in Brazil?

How about being Pierre? Confident anguished idealistic Pierre.

So difficult to imagine the otherness of another person. Yet wasn’t that his own task at the Hospital-to create otherness? Oh Vidya, and all you others: will you really tell us so much about what humanity is, through our little act of inhumanity?

Inevitable that somebody somewhere should try out this set of experiments sooner or later. It had cropped up in the literature for years. The yearning to try it out became a kind of pornography after a while, a sort of scientific masturbation. To raise children in isolation speaking specially designed languages.

He walked up a gravel drive between lofty skeletons of poplars and bushes like wire sculpture models of mind that might have been made in the Hospital and thrown out as too simple.

The Unit itself was a large country house with modern functional wings added on at the sides and rear, where it jutted back into several dozen acres of close-packed firs that stretched half a mile behind the building and along its flanks in a great green skirt that grew taller and thicker year by year.

Sole had been into the plantation a couple of times but found it hard going. All the low interlocking branches and uneven sods underfoot. Anyway, there was nothing to see among the trees except more of the same. No dells or glades in there, no rides cutting through them.

(Fifty feet inside the green gloom, and it’s another world. The traveller loses all sense of direction. The monotony and alienation of endless wastes of savage vegetation bear down on him. To journey a hundred yards he has to crawl on his belly, humping himself over fallen logs, and wriggling through a network of creepers; or hack a path clear for himself in the most exhausting and futile manner imaginable…)

The elegant central mansion was bracketed incongruously by the concrete wings. Before it, twin stone lions thrust out their paws on to a lawn pocked with molecasts. Brown eruptions marked the turf like boils on a once-lovely complexion. Gardener, indeed!

The figure in the purple raincoat striding along the field path was the biochemist Zahl.

Sole thrust Pierre’s letter deeper in his pocket, feeling otherwise it might fall out and be lost before he had time to read it.

Half a dozen cars stood parked on the gravel, and a lowslung United States Air Force ambulance.

The brass nameplate read:

HADDON NEUROTHERAPY UNIT.

He pushed the heavy door open and was assaulted by the hot dry air within. Crossing the hallway between the wards in the righthand wing and the service areas in the left, where computer room, kitchens, surgery and lab were, he paused by the Christmas tree at the foot of the great oak staircase leading to the nurses’ quarters.

It was losing so many needles in this heat. What a scurf of green it was scattering on the tiles.

A nurse passed behind him, wheeling a trolley stacked with dirty plates from the kids’ breakfast, rolling it gently on rubber wheels, the only noise to mark its passage a faint percussion of china rocking against greasy china.

Paper streamers crisscrossed the corridors and hallway. Balloons, pinned over doorways, seemed to summon different kinds of attention. Blue attention. Green attention. Red attention. Different areas of the injured brain blowing empty speech bubbles.