The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

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by D. G. Compton


  I was risking opinions — far too early, of course, but Katherine Mortenhoe was one of those people (when would I ever learn?) you can read like an open book. She was a romantic. She thought of her vocabulary as manly, and used it as a device for getting on in what no doubt her father had described as a ‘man’s world.’ There weren’t many of her left. She had the romantic’s distaste for the present and the romantic’s belief in some other time, either past or future, that had been or would be better. It was going to find her, with her love-is-all-so-who-needs-a-bra-type clothes, very difficult to work with. I thought.

  Dr Mason let her talk, then led her around, without much difficulty, to her symptoms over the last few weeks. These were formidable. She discussed them readily enough, although -again in the romantic tradition — only in the most general terms, as if palpitations or cloudy urine or double vision were likewise pure and beautiful, only to be thought of in situations of purity and beauty. They were quite unreal to her, closely related to the vapors and discreet declines of her Victorian models.

  Then she burst into tears.

  Certainly I’d been expecting flailing and wailing, but hardly as early in the session as this. I thought of the White Queen who got all her crying over well before she was hurt. But Katherine Mortenhoe was no White Queen. Before, during, and after, if I knew anything . . . Beside me Vincent tried to knock ash that wasn’t there off the end of his cigar. He wasn’t like me, embarrassed. Other people’s emotions excited him.

  ‘What is to become of me?’ she said. But the pretty period effect was ruined by soggy Kleenex.

  ‘Aren’t you rushing things a bit, Katherine?’

  ‘I can’t go on pretending.’

  ‘Pretending?’

  ‘Pretending not to know why you got me here.’

  He could have blocked even that. I was glad he had the grace not to.

  ‘An administrative balls-up wasn’t all that improbable.’ How easy it was to be gentle, when you were god. ‘There was a fair chance you might have believed in it.’

  ‘You knew me better than that, Doctor.’

  He offered her his hands. ‘What was I to do?’ he said.

  ‘You needn’t have kept me waiting.’ God’s lies were quickly forgiven. ‘You could have seen me at once.’

  The delay had been our fault. It takes time to set these projects up. . . I think that was the moment when I began to hate Katherine Mortenhoe for what was going to happen to her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Katherine. It’s like a madhouse here. I fitted you in as soon as I could.’

  ‘I’m here now. So get on with it.’

  He did things with his hands, reached in the drawer of his desk for the printout. ‘It’s rather complicated. We ran a check program, just to be sure.’

  I was seeing her now. She was calm, her tears in abeyance, and unafraid. Her attitude was nunlike, one of submission before an expected (deserved?) chastisement. I liked ‘nunlike.’ The viewers would like it too. But she and I both had a long way to go.

  ‘I don’t want the technicalities. Just tell me.’

  ‘As I said, it’s rather complicated.’

  ‘I want surgery.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘I want surgery, whatever the risk.’

  ‘Listen to me, Katherine.’

  ‘Surgery, Doctor. There’s my renewal coming up. It must be out of the way before my renewal.’

  ‘Katherine, listen to me.’

  But she was listening to herself. ‘He’s too kind. He’ll renew out of kindness. So it’s got to be surgery. He mustn’t renew out of kindness. I want surgery, whatever the risk.’

  He let her run down. I saw that the nunlike calm depended on her chastisement being what she had decided was just. I doubted if even she, so romantic, had enough guilt for the real penance.

  Vincent nudged my arm and grinned. He must have guessed I needed encouragement.

  ‘Katherine, you must understand that no surgery is possible.’

  ‘But that’s nonsense. It’s always possible.’

  ‘People like to think that. Unfortunately it’s not entirely true.’

  I told myself the scene had overrun. Bad movies always choked me up. It’s horrible the way bad movies choke up most people far more than reality. It’s the simplification, I suppose. Certainly my feelings for Katherine Mortenhoe at that moment were laughably simple.

  ‘A few weeks in the hospital, Doctor. I could easily manage it.’ She battered like a moth.

  ‘Stop it, Katherine.’ It helped them both for him to be angry. ‘Stop it. There is no cure for your condition. You must listen to me. There is no cure for your condition.’

  For a moment, before the shutter went down, I saw her poor face. Vincent had said he didn’t mind a bit of involvement. He was going to get it.

  Her skin pricked. All over she felt so hot.

  She didn’t ask Dr Mason what he meant. Neither did she argue. She understood him instantly, what he was telling her, and she believed him because she had always believed him and he had always been right. He was her one way through the professional carapace . . . To the new truth she applied the old shift, moving it away, relating it to anxieties she could understand. She thought of the renewal.

  ‘How long have I got?’ she said.

  ‘We should have contacted you earlier.’

  ‘How long have I got?’

  ‘The check program held things up.’

  ‘How long have I got?’

  ‘Not very long.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘According to the computer, four or five weeks.’

  It was suddenly terribly unfair that he should be so cross with her. It wasn’t his renewal they were talking about. He, lucky man, had been married fifteen years. She decided it was time Barbara did another of Aimee Paladine’s doctor books.

  ‘Thank you for telling me.’ Aimee’s doctors were definitely more sympathetic. ‘If it’s only that long, then I shan’t have to worry.’

  ‘You must try to understand—’

  ‘I do understand.’ She smiled to prove it. ‘Well, we all have to die some time.’

  She stood up, crumpled her Kleenex, and threw it into the bin by his desk. ‘Well,’ she said again, ‘I’ll be on my way, then. There’s a lot of things to see to.’

  Quite final. She was going. She wanted to go. Then he stood up also. ‘I think you should hear me out,’ he said. I want you to understand your condition. And the progress you can expect in your symptoms.’

  ‘Will they be messy?’

  ‘Sit down, Katherine. You must realize that this has been a terrible shock. It’s no use pretending anything else. It would be better if you talked about it.’

  ‘I am talking. I asked if my symptoms would be messy.’

  But she sat down. He was expecting her to cry again. Crying was supposed to be therapeutic. It was strange to think that she would never cry again. She turned and stared at herself in the mirror: she didn’t look like a woman who would never cry again. She looked just like the woman she had seen in the mirror some ten minutes before. She imagined Barbara sorting phrases: Was it really only ten minutes? Only ten minutes that had changed Amanda from a vigorous, beautiful woman with all her life before her, into a gaunt, walking corpse? ‘Walking’ corpse was strong, of course, but it had gone down well in the past.

  ‘Is that a one-way mirror?’ she asked.

  ‘What an odd question.’

  ‘It’s just that I feel I’m being watched ... I don’t mind being watched, I expect I’m worth watching. Something special. You know?’

  ‘One in twenty million.’

  ‘I thought so. Nobody of my age dies very much.’

  ‘You asked me about your symptoms.’

  ‘Go on — tell me about my symptoms.’

  ‘It is necessary first of all to understand the atypical nature of your physiological and psychological condition.’

  Understand the atypical natu
re of her physiological and psychological condition . . . ‘Fuck your long words, Doctor,’ she said, having only four weeks. ‘Just fuck ‘em. For me. Will you? Please? Please?’

  And then, but not to oblige him, she cried.

  She cried for Harry. She watched herself cry, watched in the mirror, watched herself change, her face lose its pinched-up shape, her elbows cease to matter, and was pleased with the tragic effect. She was crying precisely, exactly, and solely for Harry — who would cry in his turn for her, but not enough.

  ‘Basically, yours is an affliction of the brain cells, Katherine. Or rather, of the circuits connecting them. In physical terms, these connections are breaking down: a condition that snowballs once it reaches a certain point, and is quite irreversible. We used to attribute this condition solely to information overload, and postulate inherent physical limits to the amounts and speeds of image processing possible in the human brain. Exceeding these limits over lengthy periods induced a complex of symptoms we called Gordon’s Syndrome. After the famous pathologist. Our difficulty was in differentiating between true Gordon’s Syndrome, which was terminal, and the more usual stress conditions that were not. . .’

  Outside the window she could see the topmost branches of a tree, misty with tiny yellow-green leaves. She cried for these instead, but decorously now that Dr Mason thought he had her attention, poor little things in a world with only four weeks to live.

  ‘. . . We now understand that information overload is only half of the picture. True Gordon’s Syndrome occurs only when the breakdown of neural circuits is accompanied by certain psychological phenomena. Very subtle and far-reaching phenomena. For want of a better word, I must call it outrage. The wave patterns it produces in the brain are unique. The nearest we have found to them are the patterns produced during acute physical nausea. But in the case of true Gordon’s Syndrome the nausea is not physical, but psychological. It induces, instead of abdominal spasm, a species of neural spasm. This aggravates the neurological overload already present to the point where nerve-endings burn out, circuits become permanently destroyed.’

  No, the little leaves would go on after her. Of course they would. Everything, everybody, would go on after her. She turned back from the window, and nodded intelligently. Quite clear. Neurological overload. Destroyed circuits. She got her mouth back into the shape it had been before she started crying, and began to make a list in her head of the people she would tell. Darling, it’s the neurological overload, you see. It’s the burned-out circuits, he says. They’re like permanently destroyed . . . The list of people was like her Christmas list: it started long and got shorter upon examination. Upon examination it was found to have names, but no faces. Even her father’s face was vague, blurred by the stepmothers in between. She moved around: jobs, flats, districts, cities. The names moved around also. Did you send cards to, did you mention neurological overload to, people whose faces you couldn’t remember?

  ‘I’m not suggesting that this sense of outrage is conscious, Katherine. I’m sure it lies much more deeply than that. All we know is that on a fundamental level it has caused you to resist. When you refuse to accept a physiological reality — in your case, neural overload — the prognosis is bad. In your case, recurrent seizure. Cell damage. The computer shows a clear pattern. Irreversible. And cumulative.’

  Harry. She’d have to tell Harry. But he thought her appointment wasn’t until tomorrow. She could tell him then. Or perhaps even later. Or perhaps not at all. A Celia Wentworth heroine would believe things weren’t really real if they weren’t really talked about.

  ‘You possess outstanding sensitivity, Katherine. I hardly have to tell you that. Somewhere along the line that sensitivity has rebelled. Against a person, against a single event, perhaps against a whole life-style. And a pattern has been established, gradually gaining momentum ... I hope you understand that we cannot help you. And I hope you understand why.’

  She noticed that Dr Mason had stopped. He appeared to think he had said enough. Burned-out circuits... It reminded her of poor Barbara. In two years, the last two years, three hundred Wentworth, Paladine, Pargeter volumes, each fifty thousand words to page-proof stage in fifteen minutes, each first impression of ten thousand blocked and bound within four days, three million books, a hundred and fifty million Wentworth, Paladine, Pargeter words. Poor Barbara.

  She tried not to be angry with Dr Mason. It wasn’t his fault.

  ‘My symptoms,’ she said, watching herself in the mirror. ‘You were going to tell me about my symptoms.’

  ~ * ~

  The symptoms went on and on. After a while I couldn’t listen. It was as if they were to be mine almost more than hers — which in a sense they were. Mine, and through me the pain-starved public’s. I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. I’d seen her face before the screen came down, and I’d seen that face before.

  It was the face of my son. Before we’d learned to listen for his tiny noises, in the days when we didn’t go up to him in his cot until our own bedtime, often after eleven, by which time the hairy monkey behind the curtains and the white owl on the cupboard that would both come down on him if he ever dared to shout for help (come down on him and do exactly what I never discovered, he didn’t know, but their vengeance would be terrible), when these creatures that he finally managed to tell me about, and others that he never did, when all these creatures had so paralyzed him and for so long that his face was white, empty, painful . . . My first, and only, son, that is. By my first, and only, marriage. He was a fine child, and clever. The marriage had been equally fine, but rather less clever. Not surprisingly. I had neither of them by the time I reached the office viewing room with Vincent.

  That, then, was Katherine Mortenhoe’s face before the screen went down. Afterward there was no more than a series of director’s tricks: women watching themselves in mirrors, women flailing and wailing, women saying fuck. It diverted me (and distanced me) to wonder which had come first, directors watching women’s tricks or women watching directors’ tricks. Certainly human behavior had changed since the coming of TV behavior. But the symptoms went on and on . . .

  Rigor, paralysis, coordination loss, sweating, double vision, incontinence ... all with a timetable and a brisk itinerary like a package vacation brochure: in the first week customers all do this, in the second week customers all see that, in the third week customers all feel something else. In the fourth week customers all drop dead. At last Dr Mason, who had been addressing the opposite wall rather than the living woman in front of him, closed the final glossy page, where there should have been a picture of a lot of brisk happy people waving good-bye at a brisk happy funeral. If the picture was there, he didn’t let her see it.

  The particularization had seemed to me a needless cruelty, but Katherine Mortenhoe brightly took in every word, nodding, and sometimes asking for clarification. If I hadn’t just once seen her real face (Vincent must have been proud of having arranged that), I’d have thought she was enjoying it. I’d have thought that it at last gave her an importance. But the brightness was only another director’s trick, though she did it rather well.

  Then she stood up, and promised to keep in touch, and formalized the occasion by shaking Dr Mason’s hand, and went. As simply and plainly as that. Maybe the romantic in her demanded a sort of stylized nobility.

  I was glad I couldn’t follow her, couldn’t see her out in the corridor, couldn’t go down with her in the elevator. One way and another she had precious little privacy left.

  Dr Mason, who had gone with her to the door, closed it behind her and returned to his desk. Once there he appeared to have nothing to do. People move about so. It was Vincent, of course, who got things going again.

  ‘Can do?’ he asked me. ,

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘You always feel like that,’ he said. Then, ‘Mason should have made more of the Syndrome thing. How special she was. This special sensitivity. She’d have liked that.’

  I didn’t a
nswer. He pressed the intercom switch.

  ‘Mason? I think you should have made more of the Syndrome thing. How special she was. This special sensitivity. She’d have liked that. Don’t you think so?’

  I heard Dr Mason squaring papers, presumably the computer printout. ‘I never want to have to do that again,’ he said.

  ‘But we agreed you should emphasize her special sensitivity. For God’s sake, the poor woman needs something to cheer her up.’

  ‘I kept talking. It was all I could do -just keep talking.’

 

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