Doris Lessing: Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Wind parts the leaves

And the black beast crashes from the cave.

My love, when you say:

“Here was the storm,

Here was she,

Here the fabulous beast,”

Will you say too

How first we kissed with shut lips, afraid,

And touched our hands, afraid,

As if a bird slept between them?

Will you say:

“It was the small white bird that snared me”?

And so she sings, each time I pass, around and around, and on and on.

DOCTOR X:

Well, how are you this afternoon?

PATIENT:

Around and around and around …

DOCTOR X:

I’d like you to know that I believe you could snap out of this any time you want.

PATIENT:

Around and around and around …

DOCTOR X

:

Doctor Y is not here this weekend. I’m going to give you a new drug. We’ll see how that does.

PATIENT:

In and out, out and in. In and out, out and in.

DOCTOR X:

My name is Doctor X. What is your name?

PATIENT:

Around and …

I think he may very well have reverted to age eleven or twelve. That was the age I enjoyed sea stories. He is much worse in my opinion. The fact is, he never acknowledges my presence at all. Doctor Y claims he reacts to him .

DOCTOR X. 24TH AUGUST.

DOCTOR Y:

What is your name today?

PATIENT:

It could be Odysseus?

DOCTOR Y:

The Atlantic was surely not his sea?

PATIENT:

But it could be now, surely, couldn’t it?

DOCTOR Y:

Well now, what’s next?

PATIENT:

Perhaps Jamaica. I’m a bit further South than usual.

DOCTOR Y:

You’ve been talking practically non-stop for days. Did you know that?

PATIENT:

You told me to talk. I don’t mind thinking instead.

DOCTOR Y:

Well, whatever you do, remember this: you aren’t on a raft on the Atlantic. You did not lose your friends into the arms of a flying saucer. You were never a sailor.

PATIENT:

Then why do I think I’m one?

DOCTOR Y:

What’s your real name?

PATIENT:

Crafty.

DOCTOR Y:

Where do you live?

PATIENT:

Here.

DOCTOR Y:

What’s your wife’s name?

PATIENT:

Have I got a wife? What is she called?

DOCTOR Y:

Tell me, why won’t you ever talk to Doctor X? He’s rather hurt about it. I would be too.

PATIENT:

I’ve told you already, I can’t see him.

DOCTOR Y:

Well, we are getting rather worried. We don’t know what to do. It’s nearly two weeks since you came in. The police don’t know who you are. There’s only one thing we are fairly certain about: and that is that you aren’t any sort of a sailor, professional or amateur. Tell me, did you read a lot of sailing stories as a boy?

PATIENT:

Man and boy.

DOCTOR Y:

What’s George’s surname? And Charlie’s surname?

PATIENT:

Funny, I can’t think of them … yes of course, we all had the same name. The name of the ship.

DOCTOR Y:

What was the name of the ship?

PATIENT:

I can’t remember. And she’s foundered or wrecked long ago. And the raft never had a name. You don’t call a raft as you call a person.

DOCTOR Y:

Why shouldn’t you name the raft? Give your raft a name now?

PATIENT:

How can I name the raft when I don’t know my own name. I’m called … what? Who calls me? What? Why? You are Doctor Why, and I am called Why — that’s it, it was the good ship Why that foundered in the Guinea Current, leaving Who on the slippery raft and …

DOCTOR Y:

Just a minute. I’ll be away for four or five days. Doctor X will be looking after you till I get back. I’ll be in to see you the moment I’m back again.

PATIENT:

In and out, out and in, in and out …

New treatment. Librium. 3 Tofronil 3 t.a.d .

DOCTOR X. 29TH AUGUST.

The sea is rougher than it was. As the raft tilts up the side of a wave I see fishes curling above my head, and when the wave comes crashing over me fishes and weed slide slithering over my face, to rejoin the sea. As my raft climbs up up up to the crest the fishes look eye to eye with me out of the wall of water. There’s that air creature, they think, just before they go slop over my face and shoulders, while I think as they touch and slide, they are water creatures, they belong to wet. The wave curls and furls in its perfect whirls holding in it three deep sea fish that have come up to see the sky, a tiddler fit for ponds or jam jars, and the crispy sparkle of plankton, which is neither visible nor invisible, but a bright crunch in the imagination. If men are creatures of air, and fishes whether big or small creatures of sea, what then are the creatures of fire? Ah yes, I know, but you did not see me, you overlooked me, you snatched up my comrades and let me lie squeaking inside my fold of smelly blanket. Where are they, my friends? Administering justice, are they, from the folds of fire, looking at me eye to eye out of the silkily waving fronds of fire. Look, there’s a man, that’s an air creature, they think, breathing yellow flame as we breathe H 2O. There’s something about that gasping gape, they think — George? poor Charlie? — that merits recognition. But they are beyond air now, and the inhabitants of it. They are flame throwers. They are fire storms. You think justice is a kindly commodity? No, it razes, it throws down, it cuts swathes. The waves are so steep, they crash so fast and furious I’m more under than up. They are teaching men — men are teaching men — to have fishes’ lungs, men learn to breathe water. If I take a deep breath of water will my lungs’ tissues adapt in the space of a wave’s fall and shout: Yes, yes, you up there, you, sailor, breathe deep and we’ll carry you on water as we carried you on air? After all They must have had to teach my friends George and Charles and James and the rest to take deep lungfuls of fire. You’re not telling me that when the Crystal swirl enveloped me with the others it was ordinary air we breathed then, no, it was a cool fire, sun’s breath, the solar wind, but there are lungs attached to men that lie as dormant as those of a babe in the womb, and they are waiting for the solar wind to fill them like sails. Air lungs for air, but organs made of crystal sound, of singing light, for the solar wind that will blow my love to me. Or me onwards to my love. Oh the waves rear so tall, they pitch and grow and soar, I’m more under than up, my raft is a little cork on the draughty sea and I’m sick, oh I’m so sick, pitch and toss, toss and pitch, my poor poor head and my lungs, if I stay on this thick heavy slimy barnacled raft which is shrieking and straining as the great seas crash then I’ll puke my heart out and fall fainting away into the deep sea swells. I’ll leave the raft, then.

Oh no, no, no, I’ve shed my ship, the good ship Why, and I’ve clung like limpets to my new hard bed the raft and now how can I leave, to go spinning down into the forests of the sea like a sick bird. But if I found a rock or an islet? Silly, there are no rocks or isles or islands or ports of call in the middle of the wide Atlantic sea here at 45 degrees on the Equator. But the raft is breaking up. It breaks. There were only ordinary sea ropes to fasten the balsa poles side by side and across and through, and what ropes could I ever find that could hold this clumsy collection of cross rafters steady in this sea? It’s a storm. It’s a typhoon. The sky is thunder black and with a sick yellowish white at the cloud’s edge and the waves are blue Stephen’s black and higher than the church tower and all the world is wet and cold and my ears are singing like the ague. And there goes my raft, splitting apart under me like bits of straw in the eddy of a kitchen gutter. There it goes, and I’m afloat, reaching out for straws or even a fishbone. I’m all awash and drowning and I’m cold, oh I am so cold, I’m cold where all my own inside vital warmth should be held, there along my spine and in my belly but there it is cold cold as the moon. Down and down, but the corky sea upsends me to the light again, and there under my hand is rock, a port in the storm, a little peaking black rock that no main mariner has struck before me, nor map ever charted, just a single black basalt rock, which is the uppermost tip of a great mountain a mile or two high, whose lower slopes are all great swaying forests through which the sea buffalo herd and graze. And here I’ll cling until the storm goes and the light comes clear again. Here at last I can stay still, the rock is still, having thrust up from the ocean floor a million years ago and quite used to staking its claim and holding fast in the Atlantic gales. Here is a long cleft in the rock, a hollow, and in here I’ll fit myself till morning. Oh now I’m a land creature again, and entitled to a sleep steady and easy. I and the rock which is a mountain’s tip are solid together and now it is the sea that moves and pours. Steady now. Still. The storm has gone and the sun is out on a flat calm solid sea with its surface gently rocking and not flying about all over the place as if the ocean wanted to dash itself to pieces. A hot singing salty sea, pouring Westwards past me to the Indies next stop, but pouring past me, fast on my rock. Fast Asleep. Fast. Asleep.