The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  McCarthy shook his head in disbelief and put the letter from Winnicott back in his pocket.

  As he was doing so, another letter was arriving at the house he had just left. Alice heard the letterbox clatter and, irritated at another late delivery, went out into the hallway and picked up the white envelope. When she took it upstairs he seemed to be asleep, but he opened his eyes as she put down the letter on the bedside table. She handed it to him and he started to shuffle upright. She almost put her arms around his shoulders to help him, but she hesitated and the chance was gone. He smiled at her and she smiled back. Then she left the room. The envelope was of good quality, Conqueror, and irritatingly this meant that so was the glue and he struggled to open it. Finally succeeding, he took out two pieces of folded paper, one of them sealed with a piece of sticky tape. He read the letter then looked at the sealed piece of paper that remained. He did not attempt to open it for a minute or two, then broke the seal. There was a single word on the inside written in capitals. He looked at it for almost five minutes, puzzled and frustrated. But then exhaustion swept over him and, still upright on his pillows, he fell asleep.

  Fifteen minutes later Alice came in to check on him with a now habitual sense of dread at what she might find. His eyes were closed but he was breathing. She saw the two pieces of paper lying on the bed. Normally she would not have dreamt of looking at a letter addressed to him, but there was only one word on one sheet and the letters were so large that she could not help but read it. Alarmed, she picked it up and examined it. She was about to reach for the letter itself when he opened his eyes.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, I . . . didn’t mean to read your letter but this was open and . . . well, it’s so strange. I . . .’ She didn’t know what else to say. He looked at her for a moment, puzzled.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘it’s nothing sinister. It’s not a poison-pen letter offering a judgement on my life or anything.’ He settled into the pillows, easing his aching back. ‘Michael McCarthy gave me a crossword clue to solve.’ He stopped. ‘Oh, I’ve told you.’ He looked at her again. ‘Have I?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, pretending that she could only vaguely remember. ‘It was very difficult. You passed it on to . . . um . . . that Hendrix man.’ This was how she always referred to him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling at her refusal to compromise, even now. ‘Apparently that’s the answer. The clue is E, thirteen letters and the answer is printed on the paper there.’

  ‘Why did he do it on a separate piece of paper?’

  ‘In case I still wanted to work it out for myself. Not much chance of that now.’

  Alice looked at the paper she held in her hand. ‘So the answer is “senselessness”?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  She looked at it carefully, trying to work it out. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. And neither does he.’

  Dictating the last of his notes about George Winnicott into NEMO was a melancholy task, and as soon as he finished, Hendrix poured himself a large glass of brandy. He drank most of it in five minutes and closed his eyes. Exhausted and depressed, he fell asleep. Ten minutes later he woke up and was about to go and lie down properly when he saw that the icon with the circle had come up on the computer screen and was flashing. He stared at it dully. It must, he thought, be about that stupid bloody crossword.

  ‘What is it, NEMO?’

  I have made my preliminary assessment of the case of George Winnicott. Would you like to hear my conclusions or would you prefer me to print a hard copy?

  ‘I don’t understand – what preliminary assessment are you talking about?’

  You have been dictating files to me since the fifteenth of February. I have now arrived at a conclusion. Would you like to review that conclusion?

  ‘I didn’t ask for an assessment of any of my clients.’

  A request was not necessary. The process is automatic. This is what I’m designed to do, Mr Hendrix. Anything you dictate is assessed and when enough information is gathered a conclusion is suggested.

  At first irritated and bewildered, Hendrix suddenly became alarmed.

  ‘You haven’t passed these files on to anyone else, have you?’

  There is no mechanism for doing so. It might be possible for Dr Anne Levels to access the information, but even that would be extremely difficult.

  It certainly would, thought Hendrix.

  In addition, I have just been informed that Dr Anne Levels is dead.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Dr Anne Levels is no longer alive. She was killed in a car crash on the M40 motorway thirty-three days ago.

  I know she’s dead – what do you. mean, you’ve just being informed?’

  When I used her name a program automatically updated information about her. I have not had any reason to use her name since her death. For this reason I was not brought up to date until now.

  A thought struck Hendrix. ‘Do you know what death is?’

  Death is the condition of not being alive.

  ‘Are you alive?’

  No.

  There was a brief pause.

  Do you want to hear my assessment on the case of George Winnicott?

  ‘Yes.’

  The patient is a forty-five-year-old male, employed at a senior level in a large regulatory organisation responsible for investigating and prosecuting complex financial fraud. He came to you complaining of fainting episodes and the feeling that he was being followed by a young woman who hated him. Subsequently he admitted that he had been hearing voices claiming that the speaker knew a secret of profound importance to the human race. He revealed he had been too ashamed of this to admit it in your initial consultations. Under hypnosis performed by Edwin Haynes . . .

  ‘That should be Edward Haynes.’

  . . . Edward Haynes, the patient claimed to be inhabited by an alien presence sent here to conduct an investigation into current economic practices. This alien alter ego, a woman, asserted that she was in possession of information about the origin of the purpose of human existence which she had been inhibited from revealing. Eventually, the alter ego alleged that a dying civilisation had visited the Earth at some unspecified but distant point and attempted to create an experimental creature from the combination of reptilian and mammalian creatures available, combined with certain elements of their own DNA. The purpose of the experiment was to create an intelligent, social but hyperactive creature which would be capable of exhibiting complex behaviour that combined the destructive and cooperative in a mixture that would be balanced in favour of the destructive. In this way it was hoped that the aliens could understand more readily the processes of change and decay which, they believed, threatened their own civilisation with a terminal decline too complex to understand and therefore prevent.

  There was a short pause, as if something were being downloaded.

  This is a delusion of unusual complexity and interest but its origins are both clear and support the view that such delusions are not a symptom of madness but an attempt to escape from it by the creation of a story which makes sense of the internal incoherence threatening the patient. In this instance the patient is a deeply repressed middle-aged man whose emotional difficulties have their origin in the death of his mother at an early age. He has taken on a public role that involves him in an extreme degree of pressure of a highly complex kind. A notable feature of his personality is an intense but unmet emotional longing combined with an unusually strong superego, which has kept this disturbed interior world at bay throughout his adult life. The struggle to maintain an ordered emotional life involved a form of selective inattention in which the subject censored out emotions and conflicts likely to raise his level of anxiety. He inhabited a delusional world where anything he was unwilling or unable to face was simply ignored. This is a process at work in all human beings. Indeed my first conclusion is that if sanity involves the ability to grasp the underlying nature of reality, all human beings, to a grea
ter or lesser extent, are delusional. Selective inattention is one of the fundamental processes by which they maintain a grip on a reality which may bear little resemblance to the facts as they could be established by an objective intelligence. For Winnicott the difficulties of maintaining the delusion that he could manage the public demands made on him while also repressing the deep emotional nature of his own psyche proved to be too much. This, importantly, does not preclude his own view that physical damage to his brain was the instigator of these episodes. It is entirely probable that the origin of the alien voice lies in the damage to Wernicke’s and Broca’s area revealed in his medical tests involving functional magnetic resonance imaging. These tests revealed that both areas were simultaneously active. When a normal person is thinking, only Broca’s area lights up. Those subject to simultaneous activity in these areas for whatever reason actually hear voices . . .

  ‘Hold on. How did you get this medical information? I didn’t know any of this. It’s confidential.’

  The medical records at the hospital where Mr Winnicott was treated are not secure against the kinds of program at my disposal. As he is your patient also, the issue of confidentiality did not seem relevant. Should I inform the hospital that you are in possession of confidential material?

  Hendrix was appalled. The consequences if anyone found out would be unimaginable. But his conscience was also trying to be heard above the racket of self-preservation. Shouldn’t he warn the hospital?

  ‘No. I don’t think so. Just don’t do it again.’

  Shall I continue, Mr Hendrix?

  ‘Yes.’

  What is important in George Winnicott’s case is the way in which this particular individual attempted to make sense of the auditory hallucination caused by this physical damage. Mr Winnicott is not a schizophrenic. He is in some ways no more than an extremely unhappy human being with brain damage of an unusual but not particularly rare kind. But the story his psyche constructed to explain these experiences did not involve the typically schizophrenic descent into a world of primitive delusions. Instead it is not only highly organised but also mirrors reality in a precise way. It is possible to say that this delusion is more accurately reflective of the real world than the view he has had of reality prior to the onset of these episodes. The reason for this is that the apparently nonsensical claim that human beings were created from a mixture of the reptilian, the mammalian and some sort of higher creature is fundamentally rooted in evolutionary biology. The human brain is very old. Indeed it is not accurate to speak of it as one brain but as three brains in one. At its centre lies the reptilian brain responsible for instinct, the origin of the automatic urgency of so much human behaviour. This reptilian carry-over is the root of the compulsive craving which drives the free will in men and women to step aside so that they act as they feel forced to do, even if they despise themselves in the process for their hatreds, lies, compulsions and guile. This corresponds to the inclusion of the reptile in the alien experiment. The next level of the brain is the mammalian, corresponding to the second creature used by the imaginary aliens in their attempt to make a living paradox. In this mammalian mid-brain are located such fundamentals as maternal attachment and courtship. Erotic behaviours of all kinds have their origins here – the source of memory and meaning and desire. And then, of course, comes the alien contribution itself: rational empirical thinking, language and speech. Each of these brains has its own special intelligence, its own special memory, and its own sense of time and space.

  There was a brief silence, as if NEMO were pausing for effect.

  You should remember, Mr Hendrix, that the next time you ask one of your patients to lie down on a couch, you are asking them to lie down with a horse and a crocodile.

  For five minutes David Hendrix sat brooding in front of the computer. Then he switched off NEMO’s voice and re-read its conclusions from the screen. Then he read them again. Despite the irrationality, he could not forget the sound of NEMO’s voice as it spoke the last sentence, nor the sense of mocking distaste. The man from Machine Intelligence had told him what to do if he wanted to discover the source of any remark made by NEMO. The young man had laughed. ‘If you ever get the spooky feeling this thing is alive, just press this. Think of NEMO as an incredibly stupid and fraudulent student with the world’s longest crib sheet up its cheating arm and you won’t go far wrong.’

  Hendrix highlighted the last sentence and pressed Ctrl Alt and S. Immediately half the screen was covered in a drop-down window. It was a page from an article in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, vol. CXXXV, No. 4, October 1962, by Paul MacLean. Highlighted in blue was the line about the horse and the crocodile MacLean had written nearly forty years ago. But Hendrix did not feel reassured, he felt miserable. He did not feel its wit or its elegance. He felt its truth.

  How sad Alice felt watching the confusion and alarm at her husband’s failing grip, at his efforts, pointless now, to get out of bed without her help. Weary as she was, after so many interrupted and uncomfortable nights, she would not let him worry that he would die alone with no one there to hold his hand. But also, in the cold darkness of three o’clock in the morning, her resentments softly called to her, sour, acid, scalding, eroding the new feelings of compassion she felt for him, wearing them away to anger at having been denied something that was owing to her. Then quickly her habitual antidote to rage: oil of coldness, balm of frigidity, sedative of reserve. The long-term treatment she prescribed to calm herself was blandness of diet, a fast of bread and milk to starve what was afflicting her.

  For an hour her bitterness would summon her, testing her new resolve, receding at four o’clock as he woke up calling for water or the light.

  During the night Alice sat in the ugly but comfortable reclining chair her mother had given them. For the first few hours of her watch she would doze and wake, not allowing herself to sleep deeply, listening for his faint words or an irregular pattern of breathing, or none at all. She found that at around three in the morning she would become unusually alert for an hour or so. It was a bleak time, soundless outside and dark, little demanded of her because he slept most deeply then. Tonight she was not so much alert as restless. She tried to read a book but could not concentrate. There was a newspaper on the bedside table. Quietly she eased it out from under the papers on top of it. But it was awkward because a chair was in the way and some of the papers fell to the floor. He stirred but did not wake. She picked up the papers, took the Independent from the table and sat down again. First she sorted through the fallen papers, some scribbled notes, which she did not read, a few letters. One of them was the letter from the psychotherapist, Hendrix, along with the answer to the crossword puzzle. She looked at it: “senselessness”. Then at the clue: E13. For five minutes she tried to work it out. Then, for the first time in a long time, she smiled with pleasure. How very clever, she thought.

  ‘Why are you . . .’

  She looked up. George was awake, his face contorted with the effort to find the word he was searching for.

  ‘. . . smiling,’ he said at last, irritated at how much effort it took, at how simple and arbitrary the words that would not come.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No.’ He started to shift. She moved quickly and was by his side in a moment, putting her arms around his shoulders and helping him. It was not difficult. He had lost a good deal of weight in the last few weeks. He looked at her, grateful. She did not take her arms away but sat down beside him on the bed.

  ‘So,’ he said at last, ‘what was amusing you?’

  ‘I don’t know if you’d want me to tell you.’

  ‘You’re going to confess about your secret life.’

  She laughed. It had been a very long time since he had made her laugh. ‘No. It’s not about my secret life,’ she said. ‘It’s that crossword clue you told me about.’

  He gasped with pleasure. ‘You’ve . . .’ Then he groaned in irritation. ‘Da
mn! You know . . . found it . . . discovered it . . . revealed . . . solved! You’ve solved it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think so.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She looked around the room. ‘I need a pen.’ She had to move her hands to search and eased him back into the pillows gently.

  ‘In the . . .’ He pointed at the drawer in the bedside table. She opened it and took out a pencil and the writing-pad next to it. She sat down again and making sure he could see wrote out “senselessness” as three words:

  SENSE

  LESS

  NESS

  She did not want to rob him of the pleasure of at least some of the discovery. ‘Can you see?’

  He looked at it, frowning with concentration. He sighed and smiled, resigned. ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said, and felt as if she were going to cry.

  ‘Tell me. I can’t bear the suspense.’

  She took a deep breath, as quietly as she could so he would not see she was upset. ‘It’s the second word: “less”. Give me another word for less.’

  He sighed but wanted to offer something. ‘Ah . . . inferior!’ She shook her head. ‘Lower . . . nether.’ They both laughed at where such an obscure word had come from. ‘. . . Under . . . subordinate.’ He stopped. ‘Sorry. I know I mustn’t apologise. I can’t.’

  She shuffled closer and put her arms around his shoulder so she could show him the three words again. As if her hand were now his, next to LESS she wrote:

  SENSE

  LESS (take away)

  NESS

  ‘Do you see it now?’

  ‘No.’

  She stroked his forehead. ‘If you take the letters N-E-S-S away from the letters S-E-N-S-E what you’re left with is the letter E. The answer to E13 is sense less ness: E.’