Martin Amis - Einstein's Monsters

Ned's Diary

July 24. No break in the weather. Dan continues to come on wonderfully well. He has bouts of agitation and gloom -but who doesn't? No, he's much, much happier. Those chance meetings you have twenty times a day in a shared house are no longer a matter of courteous disquiet. I'm pleased to see the kid, and he's pleased to see me. We've put the baby back in her room, next to Dan's. She's a powerful little sleeper (twelve hours a night, plus naps!), and when she does wake in the small hours she just babbles to herself for a while and then checks out again. It doesn't bother Dan. But the heat does. Instead of getting cooler it just gets hotter. Someone has his thumb on the controls. Fran handles it with cold baths and about fifteen dips a day. Otherwise she schlepps around in that youthful world of TV, radio, and photoprint. Actually I'm touched by her appetite for all that garbage. What the hell. Even the Trib reads like a shock-sheet these days. Maybe the whole world is just turning to trash. Dan won't go in the water. He sits under the fan. I can talk to him now about his problem- the problem he has when relating to reality. And at last I have the freedom to address all my reality problems, the pump, the roof, the cesspit, the loose screens, that wreck of a jeep (I think I'll take the plates off and use it as a tractor). I had Dan help me shift the logs from the turkey hut to the storeroom. He ran back and forth all afternoon and stacked wood till his fingers bled.

Dan's Notebook

In all probability Fran senses that I am still a virgin.

How else am I supposed to explain her behavior? She swims bare-ass in the excited lake, and makes sure I am watching. I have strolled into the bathroom and seen her lying there in her birthday suit: for a while she pretends not to notice; then she asks me to leave but makes no move to cover herself. Her heavy flesh shines a deeper brown in the moisture. She breastfeeds the baby right in front of my nose.

Francesca has obviously taken it upon herself to initiate me into the so-called mysteries of sexual praxis. She goes to bed deliberately early, and Uncle Ned is soon obliged to follow. Most nights they make love in absolute silence (presumably she insists on this, to keep me guessing), but once, as I knelt there outside their room, she lost control and openly sought me out with her cries of pain and yearning. All these complications will make it much harder for me to break the truth to her about the baby.

Down at the Section, Dad had a Russian friend, a defector and a staunch American, though he often moaned and wept -and sang-about his beloved motherland when he'd taken a drink or two. (Everybody drinks up a storm, down at the Section; and Slizard heads a big team.) Whenever they said good-by, in person or on the telephone, they always signed off in the same way. Dad: "Death to the babies." Andrei: "And to your babies." Dad: "And to your babies' babies." Andrei: "And to your babies' babies' babies. " And so on. It was kind of a joke. After all, everyone jokes about their work, even people in the extinction business. They said it, let off steam. To stay sane.

I am a schizophrenic and my thoughts would be mad anyway (I know this, using insight), but there are mad thoughts everywhere now and at least mine are mine, not manmade, like Francesca's, all ditties and jingles and lies. Uncle Ned has run away with the idea that I have a reality problem. Oh yeah? Reality has the reality problem. Reality is right out of control and could try anything, anytime. It is like the lake, always ready to explode. Ned will understand this all too well when I tell him-and I will tell him soon-that the baby has schizophrenia.

Ned's Diary

July 27. Benson Holloway says,he'll give me $150 for the jeep and I have half a mind to accept. If I strip off the plates and use it only on the property then I don't pay tax or insurance-but the old crate still guzzles money anyway. In this weather it overheats in five minutes and starts to drip and gurgle with gook and fumes. Just coming back from town you have to drive with your head practically out the window. But Benson is a shrewd bastard and why is he interested? This time next summer, though, I'll have to pay somebody to come and haul it away. Hell, I'll take the $150 and look around for something more practical. Mother and baby blooming (Fran sleepily, Harriet noisily!) and Dan absolutely no problem. The sun is really going it. You look up there and you think-the sun is really going it. The sun is really going nuclear.

Dan's Notebook

Paradoxically, or at any rate surprisingly, the sun is powered by the weak force.

It is fueled by particle decay. If you want to witness nuclear fusion, then take a look at the sun. Ah, but you can't. Even at a distance of ninety million miles, it still hurts the eye. A thermonuclear detonation gives rise to temperatures appreciably greater than those to be found in the sun's core-or anywhere else in the universe, except for transient phenomena like exploding stars. At the Section one time, Dad showed me a film of a steel ball undergoing a significant fraction of this superstellar heat. It liquefies, and bubbles, like boiling water. And now the lake looks like boiling steel, what with the sun piling into it day after day.

Harriet, they tell me, was a premature baby. Well she has certainly made up for lost time. Many people believe that schizophrenia is a postadolescent occurrence. They are mistaken. An infant can show schizophrenic symptoms at a mere eight weeks. Harriet is eight months gone now and the condition is already far advanced. I'm afraid she is more or less a classic case.

Deviant pattern of receptor preferences. If you give her a rattle or a toy or anything else, what does she do? She shakes it, sniffs it, and puts it in her mouth. Thus the higher functions of vision and audition are rejected in favor of touch, taste, and smell.

Repetitive and stereotyped behavioral patterns. For meaninglessly long periods she bangs on flat surfaces with her palms. She shows a tragic failure to learn from her own errors. While babbling, she indulges in a random series of identical noises-then forgets them and starts making new ones!

Faulty depth perception. The baby shows early signs of deviant ambulation. She falls over all the time and bumps into things because, to her, spatial relationships are unstable and contingent.

Motor-normalcy loss and abrupt personality mutation. Often when Fran is trying to change her or clothe her or feed her or wipe her or indeed do anything which requires the baby's passive cooperation, Harriet will suddenly resist. She will go stiff, or flaccid, thus characteristically alternating between the rigid and the overrelaxed.

I could go on: time disperception, the way she often interprets humor as insult, her interludes of excessive affection, the hypomania that prevents her from sleeping. Of course, the baby is perfectly well aware that I am onto her, and that is why she has turned against me at night. She has deceived her parents very cleverly-schizophrenics often show great cunning-and I don't think either Fran or Ned suspects for a moment that the baby can talk.

Ned's Diary

August 1, A pinch and a punch, the first of the month. Born four weeks early on New Year's Day, the baby is now two-thirds of a year old. Keep it up, Hattie… Fran tells me of a rather spooky conversation she had with Dan. It happened while she was feeding the baby in the living room. Apparently Dan starts in by saying that he thinks he's a homosexual! Just blurts it out. Strange, the new precocity -they all feel they're wised-up in their heads. Fran asked him his reasons for thinking this and Dan shrugged, admitting that he had never had a homosexual experience or encounter of any kind. He said it was to do with his "histamine count"-at least, that's how Fran remembers it. Also he accidentally busted her in the tub the other day. Fran says he was out of that door like a scalded cat. Now he leaves the room or turns his chair around whenever Fran hikes her shirt to give the baby a suck. He does say the damnedest things, and not all of them are off the wall by any means-he's bright, no question about it. This morning at breakfast I was fanning myself and scratching my hair over some new baby-battering atrocity in the newspaper and I said-Is it just me, or the media, or is there a boom in child abuse?