Will Self - The Butt

They reached the top of the rise, and Von Sasser urged Tom down on to a flat rock. He didn’t take much persuasion. The sun was plunging, and Tom’s remaining energy reserves were falling with it. Straight ahead there was a vertical escarpment parted by a wide gorge; through this could be seen the drained sea bed of the desert floor, a tired expanse of tide-ground hills and wave-scoured depressions.

The anthropologist got out his pipe and began to fill it. ‘ ’Course,’ he meditated, ‘I don’t mean that literally, but the trouble with Anglo civilization is that it’s a left-brain business, all to do with order, systematization, push-button-bloody-A. Papa understood this, as well as knowing enough anatomy — and anthropology — to see the solution. He became the first neuro-anthropologist the world has ever seen, and I’ — he inflated with pride — ‘am the bloody second.’ He paused to light his pipe, his limbs twisting into a protective cage for the wavering flame.

‘The corpus callosum — that’s the bloody enemy, Tom, it’s a tough little bugger.’ He swished his pipe stem in the gloom, slicing grey matter. ‘Information-bloody-superhighway of the human brain, that’s what it is, yeah. Same as the internet, the corpus callosum fuses together two hemispheres, the right and the left. Movement, speech, sensation, visual recognition — they dominate, yeah, they’re the Anglos of the brain. But over on the right, well, that’s where dreams are, that’s where the spirits find their voice, and that’s where humans have the imagination to actually hear what they’re bloody saying!

‘Look.’ The neuro-anthropologist put an avuncular hand on Tom’s leg. ‘I’ll grant you, we may’ve got our act together now, but quite a few of the early oppos. .’ The boy’s hair with its scent of warm hay. The dreadful scar seaming the back of his sweet, small head . ‘But even these, er, failures, have turned out to be pretty useful. Obviously, with better equipment — scanners, lasers, that kinda thing — it’d be a whole heap easier, yeah.’ It wasn’t as if he was stupid — he was in the same grade as other kids his age, he was just a bit. . cut off . ‘We either go straight down through the longitudinal fissure. .’ The white trough of a scar that bisected the old wino’s grizzled head from nape to crown . ‘. . or angle our way in between the parietal lobe and the parieto-occipital salens. ’Course, wherever we make the incision, we stretch and suture the scalp so the scar won’t be below the hairline.’ Adams, was bent over the three-panelled mirror on the vanity table, examining the back of his head . ‘The important thing to hold on to, Tom’ — for once Von Sasser had a kindly twinkle in his deep-set eyes — ‘is this: it isn’t painful; it doesn’t hurt.’

The foody perfume of pipe smoke braided with the clean-smelling desert breeze; the sunset, as ever, was spectacular: a ruddy blush rushing up the face of the sky. Tom found his external voice. ‘B — but a little kid, a baby?’

‘Like I say, mate, there were some balls-ups, but b’lieve me, by far the majority of those early oppos were done on patients that already had some, y’know, neuroses — or even actual brain damage. It wasn’t like we were messing with something in working order, right.’

Tom, dodging dream fists, levering the weight off his chest, searched for the sympathy he knew he didn’t have. Yet if only he could find it, he was sure the appropriate outrage would be there too.

‘He — Tommy, my, uh, son. Y’know he isn’t. .’ He dredged up one of Martha’s weary pronouncements: ‘Adequately socialized.’

Von Sasser snorted. ‘Tell me about it, Tom. Those boys up in the north aren’t adequately-bloody-socialized either! Some of ’em can be pretty vicious — we aren’t talking clean-kills here, yeah. There’s rape — torture even. Lissen, I’m not saying I condone such behaviour, but you’ve gotta offset it against the positive impact the insurgency has on the left-brain hegemony: their infrastructure, mines, their financial-bloody-services, their drinks industry, and especially the Tuggy foot soldiers who do the Anglos’ dirty work for ’em.

‘Thing is’ — the neuro-anthropologist brought his sharp knees up under his sharper chin, a surprisingly adolescent posture for a middle-aged man — ‘say they don’t, I dunno, function that well, at the very least they can advance the desertification programme. I mean, y’don’t haveta be a makkata to string a length of chain between a couple of utes, now do you?’

Despite the impression that he and Von Sasser were speaking wildly at cross purposes, Tom persisted: ‘If — if you can’t be, uh, can’t know, definitely, what the results are gonna be, then how does this, like, operation, work to, y’know, modify behaviour? I mean, it seems to me that in this case, uh, castration might be, I dunno, more effective.’

Von Sasser sighed, a long exhalation of waste-compassion: ‘Ye-es, it’s true, the human brain is — viewed with the Western medicalized paradigm — a complex system; it seems always to be striving to reach homeostasis. Even with all connection between them severed, left-brain functions can be reestablished on the right, and vice versa. Still, these are only minor drawbacks, while the benefits can be astonishing, and anyway, when it comes to a case such as this, I don’t think castration is a good comparison at all, yeah. I mean, that’s a punishment, isn’t it? Whereas you can try thinking of the oppo — and I suggest you do — as a reward.’

‘A reward?’

‘You’ve got it: a reward, a reparation payment that I can help you to give, if you help me.’

‘Me? In the, uh, oppo?’ A cut — a nick even — the very image of scarlet pulsing from capillaries made Tom gag. ‘H — how? How the hell can I help?’

‘Lissen.’ Von Sasser smiled at him again. ‘What’s your idiom. .’ He thought for a second. ‘That’s it: “sucks”. Coercion, Tom, sucks in my view, right. I mean, I could make you, but I’m certain once you get to considering all the possible benefits — the goodwill of my brother, Hippolyte, Atalaya and the Intwennyfortee mob’s as well — you’ll come round to the idea of volunteering, yeah.’

And Tom, who no longer had any power to resist this outrageous proposition, understood that, by default, he had already come round and round again, and round once more, until he was all dried out, the last desiccated guest in the roach motel.

‘Schweinsaxe?’ Von Sasser asked Adams, holding up a pair of serving tongs with a whole pig’s trotter wedged in them.

‘Thanks, Erich,’ the Consul replied. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

Von Sasser deposited the truncated foot on a plastic bowl, then ladled thick brown gravy on top. The Tayswengo waitresses in their starch-stiff dirndls were still loitering by the kitchen door, but this evening the neuro-anthropologist had elected to serve the food himself.

Tom supposed this was partly to promote an atmosphere of cosy domesticity, but also because — with some sensitivity — Von Sasser didn’t want to draw attention to Prentice. After all, if the Tayswengo had refused to serve him, he might have made a scene. At the very least, it would’ve looked as if a ‘Nil by mouth’ sign had been hung from his scrawny neck. In the event, when it was his turn, Von Sasser simply passed over Prentice in silence, and dished up for the next person at the table.

When Tom’s turn came, Von Sasser neglected him as well. For a moment, Tom thought to protest, but then his volunteer status came back to him, and he appreciated that a full stomach wasn’t something he wanted to have on his first outing to an operating room.