Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [110]
There was a furious silence.
Then he said: “I’m sorry. I know that that is dishonest. Or it could be. But I suppose if I am Professor Thingabob and I have a home then I can have people to stay?”
“You’ve settled for that. Why, why, why?”
The Professor examined the two sleeping men in the beds opposite him, and then the man on the same side of the room as himself who sat straight up in bed, smiling with pleasure, and sometimes laughing a little out loud, as he listened to the radio programme.
The Professor said: “There’s only one thing they all seem to agree on. It is that the electric shock might jolt me into remembering.”
“Yes and it might not. You know as well as I do what some of them get like. They’re like shadows. They’re like zombies. It isn’t as if you haven’t seen what happens.”
“But some are perfectly all right and they improve.”
“But you are taking the chance.”
Feet were coming along the passage to this room, and a cheerful voice was saying Goodnight, Goodnight, Goodnight, and lights were going out in the wards off the passage.
“But supposing I remember what I want to remember? They take it for granted that I’ll remember what they want me to remember. And it’s desperately urgent that I should remember, I do know that. It’s all timing, you see. I know that, too. It’s the stars in their courses. The time and the place. I was thinking and thinking … I lay awake last night and the night before that and the night before that … I was working something out. Why do I have this sense of urgency? It’s familiar. It’s not something I’ve had only since I lost my memory. No. I had it before. Now I think I know what it is. And not only that. There are lots of things in our ordinary life that are—shadows. Like coincidences, or dreaming, the kinds of things that are an angle to ordinary life, do you follow me, Violet?”
She nodded. Her sad woman’s eyes were looking towards the door, where the nurse would stand in a few moments. This was the last ward of this set of wards.
“The important thing is this—to remember that some things reach out to us from that level of living, to here. Anxiety is one. The sense of urgency. Oh, they make an illness of it, they charm it away with their magic drugs. But it isn’t for nothing. It isn’t unconnected. They say, “an anxiety state,” as they say, paranoia, but all these things, they have a meaning, they are reflections from that other part of ourselves, and that part of ourselves knows things we don’t know.”
“Well now,” said the nurse, arriving, and seeing the man and the girl in bedtime chat. “It’s time you were in bed and asleep Miss Stoke.”
“I’m just going,” said Violet, instantly transformed into a sulking three-year-old.
The nurse was turning off the ward’s central lights.
“My sense of urgency is very simple,” said the Professor. “I’ve remembered that much. It’s because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that’s what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand to mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else before they die—and so the mental hospitals are full and the chemists flourishing.”
“Would you like a sleeping pill, Professor?”
“No thank you, Nurse.”
“And I must remind you not to eat anything in the morning, please. You’ll have your breakfast after your treatment.”
“I’ll turn out the light in just a minute. Can I?” demanded the girl peremptorily, all flashing eyes and pouting lips, trying out her three-year-old powers.
“All right, Miss Stoke. But please, the Professor needs his sleep tonight, and so do you, dear.”
She went out. “Dear yourself,” muttered the girl.
The two now sat close, in a half dark. The man sitting up listening to the radio laughed out loud, held his breath in anticipation of an expected joke, and laughed again.
“So that’s why, you see, Violet. The shock might shock me into remembering what it is that