Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Give me ten minutes.

Twenty minutes later, he returned.

There’s a Pakistani army flight for Islamabad in half an hour. You have a seat on it. Let’s go.

On the first night in the hospital I slept as soundly as if Death had cradled me. Even in my sleep, I vaguely perceived an unfamiliar quality, as if I were weightless, as if I might even have acquired an immaterial form. I might have come there of my own volition, but now that I was there I felt I couldn’t leave, and for a while, in fact, I wouldn’t be permitted to do so. I had holed myself up, strangely comforted by the knowledge that human influence on my consciousness would be curtailed: I wouldn’t see anyone whom I didn’t want to see. I felt protected from others and, I think, because of that I felt protected from myself.

That Zafar had been in hospital was not news to me, of course. In an earlier conversation, Zafar had said, I was once the patient of a psychiatric hospital. Now, when Zafar began to talk about his experience in hospital, I wondered if that earlier mention, however parenthetical, had been deliberate — the parentheses there precisely to hide the design. I had expressed no surprise, no shock or concern. Had I thereby confirmed something to him? Was his intention to see my reaction and from it draw conclusions about what I knew, had known? If I had anxieties about what Zafar knew (or didn’t know), they were soon to give way to the discovery that it was I who knew so little and he who had figured out even more than I knew.

On the morning of the fourth day, the consultant came to visit, continued Zafar. Until then I’d been seen by a junior doctor, whose only function appeared to be to check that I was taking my medication, something the nurse could have done. The consultant, Dr. Villier, was a tall, slim Englishman, with soft blue eyes. If his smile was insincere, I certainly could not tell; the man was the embodiment of doctorly bedside manners. I’d first met Villier a month before, in his offices on Harley Street, when I learned that, as well as practicing as a consultant psychiatrist, he had a practice as a psychoanalyst, the combination of which made him interesting in my eyes. On his rounds in the hospital, Villier was accompanied by a junior doctor, a plump and balding South Asian man — Indian, I thought — with round features, a bulbous nose, and earlobes that sagged as if weights were clipped to them. Gold-rimmed spectales circumscribed the tiny black points of his eyes. Whenever those eyes weren’t focused on Dr. Villier, they darted suspiciously about my room, moving from one to another of my few possessions. I laughed at my own suspicion.

You’ve met Dr. Mirchandani, of course.

I nodded.

How are we feeling today? Villier asked.

I could not but grin.

Villier was smiling. I’m sorry, he said, but what’s the joke?

Your use of we … in a psychiatric hospital. We are well.

I see, he said. He allowed a chuckle that settled back into a smile.

It can’t have been, I thought, the first time this had been pointed out to him. I’ve been sleeping very well, I said irrelevantly.

I’m glad to hear that. As I expect you know, we gave you something to help with the sleep.

Mirchandani looked at a clipboard and, in what I took to be a Punjabi accent, read off the prescription for Dr. Villier’s benefit. Mirchandani sounded unconfident and Villier thereby became yet more elevated in my estimation. The South Asian doctor stood rigid, his knees locked. Villier’s body, however, was that tiny bit removed from stillness that is the mark of a kind of Englishness. As he sat on the edge of the bed and spoke, his hands and lower arms moved in small circling gestures. The senior physician appeared to occupy more of the room, and I sensed that the two men didn’t have an entirely easy relationship. Mirchandani will know, I thought, that I’d met Villier before I arrived here, and that Villier and I therefore had the narrowest but altogether important history that he, Mirchandani, did not have with this patient. Mirchandani’s only conversation alone with me, by the way, would take place in my second week, when, leaning forward, as if to take me into some confidence, he would ask me if I was sure I needed to be here, if I knew what kind of people came here, and if I was aware how much it cost. If this was his way of winning me over, it not only failed but allowed me to write him off altogether.

How have the days been? asked Villier.

I’ve been reading and writing.

I noticed the books by your bedside. Dante’s Inferno. And this, he said as he picked up the other: Go for Gold: Five Steps to Super-Success.

Gifts, I said.

An interesting choice.

Christmas past and Christmas future.

Which one’s which? he asked, again smiling.

You tell me.

May I ask why you brought these particular books with you?

I didn’t. They arrived yesterday. They’re gifts from Emily, I said. Express mail, you know, because there’s no time to lose.

Villier’s eyebrows shot up.

What do you make of that? I asked.

That is interesting, he replied.

You can do better than that.

It’s very interesting, he answered, still looking surprised.

Are you always quite so surprised to find a thing interesting?

Villier said nothing. I’m not sure he heard me.

You can assume there is no irony in it, I said. She has, in fact, no sense of irony — none for making ironic jokes, anyhow, I added.

Had we been alone, I thought, he might have engaged me more easily. I didn’t have the gauge of the men’s relationship to one another, but I wondered if Villier needed to appear more in control in front of Mirchandani.

I’m sorry, I said. I’m feeling a little grumpy.

The truth was that I’d never felt better, not in months or even years. I had slept soundly with clear, simple dreams, deeply and long. And I had awoken unaided and early enough to witness the growing light of a new day. I put my good spirits down to that happy sequence.

Villier was Penelope’s psychiatrist, and she had arranged the initial consultation, even coming along with me.

At the time, I had moved out of my apartment in Brixton into a bedsit in Hackney. I had left work, having taken unpaid leave, my cases handed over to others, but not before a disastrous quarterly review. I was spending waking hours watching television. I lived on one meal a day, either pizza, which I ordered in, or fast food, for which I ventured out into the world under cover of evening. At night, unable to sleep, I lay in bed reading, never taking in much and rereading paragraphs without effect, the words on the page coalescing into alien forms.

I resisted the argument. It was a long time, the interval between that first consultation and the days in hospital, before I stopped fighting, if not fully yet accepting, the psychiatrist’s statement, what might have been a casual remark but for his fixing on my eyes, but for the silence he maintained after delivering it, but for the studied regard for my response. I could not accept that I was there because of Emily, however much his point was separated from moral responsibility. How does one person cause another to fall ill?