The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  Conclusion

  I’m surprised he’s come to me, given the obvious resistance to analysis. This is the kind of man who would put off going to a shrink at all costs. The fainting is disturbing given that there’s no medical reason – but he claimed (perfectly reasonably) that the doctor might be mistaken. A man like this would seize on the fact that hospitals frequently misdiagnose as a good reason not to come to someone like me. He’d get a 2nd medical opinion or a 3rd – he wouldn’t go to an analyst. He claims, for example, that the origin of the banking dream is entirely straightforward. He had been reading a book the day before [ Portrait of an Old Lady. Get a copy and check out the similarities], an account of the workings of the Bank of England and the financial collapse outlined in the dream. He dismissed the Dark Figure as typical of the nonsense you get in dreams but it may be a symbol of the extent to which he is feeling profoundly persecuted. After all, at the close of the dream he discovers that he’s the one really on trial. Allied to the belief that he is being watched by a woman who hates him, this might be evidence for a diagnosis of schizophrenia with severe paranoid tendencies. On the other hand, its severity is mitigated by the fact of his clear sense that this is abnormal. Possibly he can’t bring himself to tell me what’s really brought him here because it’s just too embarrassing for such a repressed individual to talk about – he wouldn’t be the first patient I’ve treated to suffer from Lying-Bastards Syndrome. Still, while misleading other people about your interior state of mind is a symptom of schizophrenia, it’s also a symptom of being human.

  As Hendrix laboriously finished typing with two fingers his receptionist buzzed him. ‘The police are here.’

  ‘I’m Inspector Geoffrey Healey and this is Sergeant Roache,’ said Healey.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ said Hendrix, irrationally nervous at being interviewed by the police, yet unable to rid himself of a vague feeling of guilt. The avuncular smile of the man sitting in front of him seemed only to make matters worse, as if he knew facts so incriminating he had no need to be intimidating in any way. Affability would do it.

  ‘How long was Maria Vaughan your patient?’

  ‘Nearly two years.’

  ‘And why was she coming to see you?’

  Hendrix moved awkwardly in his seat. ‘Normally, I’d be very reluctant to discuss a patient with the police for obvious reasons of confidentiality. Let me make it clear that in this case the circumstances alter that general principle.’ His integrity established, he got to the point. ‘She came to me suffering from serious clinical depression. I don’t mean she was just unhappy, I mean that she was close to becoming what we used to call “a danger to herself”.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what I’ve been hearing. But she got better under your care?’

  Hendrix laughed. ‘No, not really. You see, the fact is, I was pessimistic about her long-term recovery. I couldn’t get through, not really. People with her kind of depression, deeply rooted in childhood, seem to go through some kind of point of no return. To most people she would have come across as a nonentity – drab, a defeated person. In fact she was a disappointed, angry woman, but it was all turned inward. The violence was aimed at herself. To be honest I felt that there was little I could do. During the first year I came close to having her committed under the Mental Health Act.’

  ‘So do you have any idea what caused this change?’

  ‘She turned the corner very slowly indeed at first. But after a few months it was . . . actually, miraculous is a pretty good word. Within a couple of months she must have put on about twenty pounds. She was seriously underweight, not much better than anorexic when she came initially. I have to say that I’ve never seen anything like it, not really.’

  ‘So if it wasn’t the treatment that caused this change of heart, what was it?’

  Hendrix laughed. ‘My professional opinion – technically – is that she fell in love. Or, perhaps more accurately, someone fell in love with her.’

  ‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ said Healey to Roache, as they sat in the window seat at the Finsbury Park tea room. ‘Why middle-class people are so nervous of the police they’re too scared to offer you a cup of tea. I mean, if you go to question a working-class person in their home and you haven’t actually turned up to drag them away to the nick . . . seven times out of ten they’ll offer you a cup of tea. You’re from a good home, Roache, why is that?’

  Roache pushed the sugar around in the bowl using his spoon to break the slight crust that had formed from exposure to damp air and central heating. ‘They’re all guilty,’ he said at last.

  Healey enjoyed mocking Roache, not so much about his middle-class origins as about his lack of interest in books. He was mildly irritated that Roache had been given a good education yet had done almost nothing with it beyond getting a degree in a subject in which he had no interest. ‘You mean they’re all guilty in some existential sense?’ teased Healey.

  ‘I don’t really know what existential means,’ replied Roache, unashamed. ‘But I don’t mean anything deeply psychological, I mean most middle-class people are on the take in one form or another . . . paying builders in cash, fiddling their expenses, finessing their tax returns, you name it. They know it’s wrong but they pretend they’re not really doing it even when in the process of exaggerating the insurance claim on the stolen car or the burn hole in the Axminster. But because they’re middle class they haven’t got the guts to admit it to themselves. Deep down they feel guilty. That’s why they’re terrified of policemen. That’s why they never offer you a cup of tea – they’re too shit-scared to think of anything but the clang of the prison gates they can hear in the distance.’

  ‘Your education was wasted on you,’ Healey said amiably and without resentment. He couldn’t understand Roache. He was smart but he just wasn’t interested in anything.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Roache, equally amiable, ‘you should have had it. I agree. Absolutely.’

  Healey stood up. They left the café and walked back to the car they’d left near Hendrix’s house. As Healey was waiting for Roache to let him in at the passenger door, he looked across at the therapist’s front door. A man was ringing the bell. It was George Winnicott.

  About a hundred yards away from behind a telephone booth a tall, angry-looking woman, young and with long, expensively cut hair and a shapely figure, was watching them. In the far distance there was a boom. It sounded like, but was not, thunder.

  At the same time as the woman was watching the policemen outside David Hendrix’s house, Anne Levels was stuck in traffic on the M25. She had been becalmed for nearly an hour. A policeman walking past had informed her that one of the IRA’s splinter groups had planted a device at an unspecified bridge on the motorway, and that was that. Of course, by now everyone knew that there was probably no such bomb and the interesting thing, thought Anne, was why it had taken the men of violence so long to work out that this was the way ahead for brutality. Like everything else, cruelty had to keep up with changing times. In the future perhaps there would be hardly any real bombs, few actual bloody murders, there would mostly be relentless inconvenience, a virtual terror in which people would be annoyed and aggravated into compliance. The mad dog would be replaced by the pest and the nuisance, the outrage by the endless irritation. From now on the bully would only rarely twist, shatter or punch, mostly he would just get on your nerves. Permanently.

  Anne picked up her mobile and dialled.

  ‘Fraud Secretariat.’

  ‘Could I have the Information Technology department?’

  She was put through and put back her presentation to four o’clock.

  When, as a young woman, Anne set out to make her mark, the world of artificial intelligence had been like the alchemical world of 1670. Here were the origins of a true science: systemisation, the rudiments of chemistry. But what really drove these seventeenth-century magicians, hucksters and conmen were transformations and universals: alcahest, gold from lead, a way of making life itself. A
rtificial intelligence was a new science at a time of magical inflation in which the snake-oil salesman lurking in every scientist – his shadow self – had leapt the boundaries of methodology, disinterested purity and thrown itself into a marketplace where visionaries of every kind were promising the wonders of the earth from a device given the breath of life by an inspired employment of noughts and ones. What these men were offering was the reproduction of life itself in wire, glass and silicon: a machine that thought, understood, perceived, outclassed. It was Anne, disdainful scientist and daughter of the commercial manse, who pointed out that this new version of the dream of something from nothing was all a matter of mirrors, secret drawers and sleight of hand.

  It was at the Fourth Annual Congress of Artificial Intelligence in Chicago that Anne Levels, gorgeous twenty-five-year-old nobody, stunned this new world with a demonstration that made her famous overnight and earned her the hatred of a flock of department heads at Yale and Harvard, MIT and Rand. Like all scientists, they were as vengeful as Sicilians, and the humiliation she had heaped on them that afternoon had returned to haunt her many times since.

  Because the organiser of the congress forlornly hoped to get her into bed, Anne had been given a prime spot before a keynote speech by Arthur Gein, in which, it was widely known, the top man in the field would claim a breakthrough in the search for evidence of true machine intelligence. The hall was packed for Gein, but interest in Anne was plain to see among the assembled largely male audience, not least because her reputation as a beauty had preceded her. Her lecture, of which she knew the audience would approve, attempted to demonstrate a program that implied a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language. Called ZARDOZ, it ran a simulation of a non-directive psychiatrist interviewing a patient. She produced an unlikely-looking machine about four foot square, apologised for its string-and-sealing-wax construction and made a joke about poor British funding, which was patronisingly well received. She talked about the origins of the project, and to the surprise of the audience proposed a demonstration using a real patient who would interact with ZARDOZ protected by the anonymity of a phone line specially patched in for the demonstration. She apologised for the machine’s slow speed, stressing that it was a prototype. A court stenographer was produced and Anne explained that she would type the woman’s responses into ZARDOZ as the audience heard them. The woman being interviewed would receive the questions from ZARDOZ printed on a monitor in her room somewhere in the recesses of the conference centre. The questions would be shown simultaneously to the audience on another monitor next to the podium.

  The woman’s voice was as uncertain as the hands of someone feeling for the light switch in the dark. ‘Hello, is anybody there?’

  The monitor flashed up a soothing greeting. ‘Hello, could you please tell me your first name?’

  ‘Madeleine.’ The shy uncertainty of her voice captivated the audience.

  ‘Hello, Madeleine. How are you?’

  ‘Not too bad . . . Well . . .’ She paused and there was an awkward laugh made up more of defeat than humour. There was a silence. The stenographer stopped. ‘Hello . . . are you still there?’ came Madeleine’s uncertain voice. The stenographer’s hands raced.

  ‘Hello, Madeleine.’

  ‘This is kinda difficult,’ said Madeleine. She paused again.

  ‘In what way is it difficult, Madeleine?’

  ‘I’m not really used to talking ’bout my problems, I guess.’

  ‘Tell me about your problems.’

  ‘My problem is me, I guess . . .’ She was starting to talk more naturally, ‘. . . my husband.’

  ‘What’s your husband’s name, Madeleine?’

  ‘John.’

  ‘Tell me about John.’

  ‘We’re not getting along too well right now. We’re arguing a lot more . . . all the time.’

  ‘Why are you arguing?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I reckon just about everything these days ends in a row – money, the kids and . . . You know how it is.’

  ‘Tell me how it is, Madeleine.’

  ‘We used to get along real well, least I thought so. I thought we were happy. I mean it wasn’t perfect now, it wasn’t a rose garden or anything. I mean he always used to drink a lot. His buddies use to call him “Miller”, after the beer, y’know; but he was good to me. He was a nice man.’ She said this with evident pride. ‘Now he’s just mean. He’s real angry.’ She stopped. The silence was heavy with a sense of loss as well as resentment.

  ‘Why is he angry?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know. If he can’t find his shaver he gets mad. If the kids are making a noise he gets mad. If someone drives a car a way he don’t like, he gets mad; if the Yankees lose a game you’d think they did it on purpose, just to make him feel bad. I’m fifty years old and if I can talk to my husband depends on whether the Yankees are gonna win or lose. Is that living?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Everybody thinks he’s turned real strange.’

  The disconnected sentences resonated oddly around the hall.

  ‘Are you thinking of somebody in particular, Madeleine?’

  ‘No,’ she said, revealingly quickly. ‘I want . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘What do you want?’

  There was no reply.

  ‘What do you want, Madeleine?’

  Still there was no reply.

  ‘Perhaps you need time to think,’ came up compassionately on the monitor.

  ‘Yes, yes, I do,’ said a relieved voice. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you for talking to me, Madeleine.’ The intercom went dead and the screen remained blank.

  Anne wound things up while Gein, the speaker who was to follow her, realised with a rueful smile that she had stolen his thunder. The flattering applause began. Anne looked modest and waited for it to die. To her surprise it swelled until it filled the hall, but when it slowed she brought it to a stop. The audience realised that she had more to say. It watched, perplexed, wondering if she would outstay her welcome, overplay her hand.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, ‘since you have been so kind I’d like you to meet ZARDOZ.’

  Anne walked over to ZARDOZ, moved behind it, bent down and opened a door. She reached in and led someone out. It was a little girl. Hand in hand they returned to the podium. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce ZARDOZ, more usually known as Diz Baker.’ Turning to the girl, she mouthed silently, ‘Introduce yourself, Diz.’

  The little girl curtsied proudly but shakily. ‘My name is Diz Baker. I am ten years old and I am in the sixth grade at the St Aloysius Convent School.’ The voice was strange, high and blurred. Diz walked off the stage smiling broadly.

  Anne turned to her audience. ‘I’d also like to introduce Madeleine.’ The horrified audience watched as a pretty woman in her early thirties walked onto the stage. ‘Madeleine, as you will now have guessed, does not exist. This is Martina Gassner, actress.’ Martina bowed theatrically and left.

  ‘You are entitled to an explanation.’ Anne was beginning to realise that her audience was not amused by the way in which she had duped them. ‘We chose a ten-year-old in order to demonstrate that no understanding of Madeleine’s complicated emotional state could be taking place. But even if she had been a psychological prodigy capable of leading a middle-aged woman through some of her own complex personal problems, she didn’t hear any of it anyway. Some of you may have realised when Diz spoke that although she is a happy, confident little girl, she is also profoundly deaf.’

  The audience, appalled, stared at Anne uncomprehendingly.

  ‘If you look at the monitor, we can see all of the information given to Diz.’

  She pressed the keyboard.

  The audience looked at the two columns of words as they appeared on the large screen. The left hand column was headed ‘Madeleine’, the other, ‘ZARDOZ’.

  Madeleine ZARDOZ

  1. Hello He
llo, what is your first name?

  2. Madeleine Hello Madeleine

  3. Hello Hello Madeleine

  4. This difficult In what way is it difficult?

  5. My problems Tell me about your problems

  6. Husband What’s your husband’s name?

  7. John Tell me about John

  8. We arguing Why are you arguing?

  9. You know Tell me

  10. He angry Why is he angry?

  11. ? What do you think?

  12. Everybody Are you thinking of somebody in particular?

  13. I want What do you want?

  14. 0 What do you want?

  15. 0 (2) Perhaps you need time to think?

  16. End

  Anne shifted the podium to reveal a keyboard at about waist height. ‘Madeleine spoke nearly three hundred words in her exchange with ZARDOZ. Of course, much of the information contained in what she said was implied and unspoken. However, ZARDOZ – or rather Diz Baker – received only twenty of these words and I was the one who typed them onto a printer in front of Diz. She took about three hours to get the general idea and two days’ practice to get up to speed. Aside from being impressively unflappable, she is also top in her typing class. If you take input Number Five,’ said Anne, gesturing at the monitor, ‘you’ll see that whenever I type in the word “My”, Diz typed, “Tell me about your . . .” What Diz – or the computer – asks to be told about will depend on whether the possessive “my” refers to “my holiday” or “my last suicide attempt”. A real computer program having all of Madeleine’s three hundred words fed into it would only recognise these twenty words and respond blindly to them. Any proper noun such as “John”, for example, will prompt it to ask, “Tell me about John.” There is, and can be, no connection between this automatic search for recognisable input and the search for understanding of a human counsellor. Such a counsellor would have endlessly rich attitudes to what they are hearing, commitments to what they ask, a capacity to read significance both in what is said and unsaid by the person talking to them. They will, of course, use professional techniques to get at the problem. But a human being employs a set of strategies; a computer is a set of strategies. A computer processes information and so does a human being, but the human being alone has an attitude to what it’s processing.’