The Anti-Death League

by Kingsley Amis

  "I'm for that," said Pearce, getting up briskly and draining his glass.

  "Off we go, then."

  At the door of the flat Pearce looked at Hunter, hesitated, and said, "Don't forget to thank your pal Vince Lane for his hospitality."

  "Not on your life. I'll drop him in a bottle of champagne from both of us."

  Hunter shut the door. They went down the stairs and into the street, where the pavements were less crowded than they had been fifteen minutes earlier. Two men were standing talking outside one of the sheds on the far side of the canal. Their voices, calm and businesslike, were just audible across the water.

  When he and Pearce drew level with the hotel where they had dined, Hunter stopped.

  "I think I must have left my lighter in here," he said. "If you could hang on a moment I'll just dash in and see."

  Inside the building he went to the doorway of the restaurant and hung about. Within half a minute the waiter he was looking for came hurrying over.

  "Can I help you, sir?"

  "I was hoping so. I very much enjoyed my meal this evening, thanks largely to you, and I was thinking of lunching here one day later this week. On my own this time. I wondered whether you could recommend a good day."

  "Now let me see, sir… Would Thursday suit you?"

  "Yes, Thursday would do very well."

  "The chef does a very nice steak-and-kidney pie on Thursdays which I can thoroughly recommend, sir. There's just one point, though, and that is I'd advise your coming in comparatively early, because some of the staff go off at two-thirty that afternoon. Including myself as a matter of fact."

  "I see. Well, would twelve-forty-five be early enough, do you think?"

  "Twelve-forty-five would be fine, sir." The waiter turned through a booking register that lay on a nearby table. "Stationed in the town, are you, sir?" he asked conversationally.

  "Not exactly. I've got a flat just down the road from here."

  "Very convenient, sir. Oh, what name is it, please?"

  "Lane. Captain Vincent Lane."

  "Thank you, Captain Lane. I'll look forward to seeing you on Thursday, then. Good night, sir."

  "Good night."

  "Ah, now here's an interesting case which will round off our tour in an appropriate fashion."

  Dr. Best took Leonard fraternally by the arm and led him down the steps in front of the main entrance of the mental hospital to where a man of about fifty was sitting in a slumped position on the mossy stone surround of the ornamental pond. Nearby stood a wheeled invalid-chair. The sunlight was very strong.

  "This man is called Underwood," said the doctor cheerfully. "Insult him."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "You heard what I said. Insult him. Call him names. Abuse him. His hearing, by the way, is as good as yours or mine. Go on, Captain Leonard."

  Leonard swallowed and coughed. "You swine," he said indistinctly to the man.

  "Oh, you can do better than that. Be offensive. Imagine that he's your lifelong enemy and you now have him helpless in your grasp without fear of retaliation. You hate him deeply. Try again."

  "You revolting… sod. You unpleasant idiot. I hate you. You're the most, uh…"

  "No, no, no. Hopeless. Now listen to me."

  Dr. Best faced the seated figure, which had not so much as blinked since their arrival, and crouched forward slightly.

  "Underwood?" His voice was soft and level. "You can hear me. I know that and you know I know. Now, how would you like me to bring you a nice boy? A nice boy with beautiful fair hair and lovely pink cheeks? So that you could undress him and play with him and do all the things you've always wanted to do? You'd like that, wouldn't you? Yes. What would you do to him first? Perhaps you'd-"

  "Stop that," said Leonard. "You've gone far enough. Leave him alone, poor devil."

  "Captain, you're reacting quite inappropriately. This is a scientific experiment. I'm asking for your co-operation. I was indicating to you the lines on which you should proceed. I want you to accuse this subject of what in your view is the most heinous and disgraceful crime in the world. By so doing you'll have the opportunity of adding to knowledge."

  Leonard calmed down and thought for a moment. Then he said in measured tones, "You traitor. You renegade. You Communist spy."

  While Underwood still took no notice, psychiatrist and Security man looked each other over carefully. Dr. Best smiled. Leonard frowned. Each glanced away and back at the same instant. At last the doctor's manner grew professional again.

  "Complete withdrawal. He's unreachable by any normal stimulus. Now let me show you a characteristic of this condition that may be new to you."

  Underwood's arms were hanging loosely by his sides. Dr. Best took one of them by the wrist and lifted it until it was nearly horizontal, then turned the hand palm upwards. When he released the arm it stayed in the same position, as if the man were begging or testing for rain. Then the doctor raised one of Underwood's legs so that its heel was about eighteen inches off the ground. It too stayed where it was when released.

  "This characteristic is known as waxy flexibility, found in cases of total withdrawal. A notable feature is that the subject will sustain the postures in which he has been placed long after a normal person would be forced by intense physical pain to adopt a more restful posture."

  "What a terrible thing."

  "Not at all. It makes him portable. He can be brought down here and enjoy the sun. Or rather his skin can benefit from exposure to its rays. A more satisfactory state of affairs than lying permanently on his back."

  Dr. Best turned away and made as if to resume walking.

  "You're not going to leave him like that, are you?" asked Leonard incredulously.

  "I told you his reactions aren't those of a normal person."

  "But good God…"

  "Oh, very well."

  With ill grace the doctor put Underwood back as he had been. Watching this, Leonard suddenly caught sight of the lion-like figure in the center of the pond. He screwed up his eyes against the sun.

  "What on earth is that thing?"

  "Oh, our mascot." The doctor seemed gratified. "That was done by one of our paranoiacs, as occupational therapy originally. It worked very well from that point of view, in the sense that as soon as he'd finished it his personality suffered rapid and complete disintegration. We couldn't allow him anywhere near a chisel now. Well, I got the idea of having the carving set up where everybody could see it. There was a poor copy of a Romanesque statue there originally, some nymph or other, a piece of sentimental trash quite frankly. This thing is much more… arresting. And useful. We get quite a lot of people in here of whose condition one could say little more with any certainty than that they are mad, in a generic, undifferentiated sort of way-screaming and weeping and so on. Then, perhaps overnight, such a case will issue in a fully crystallized, distinctive, autonomous psychosis-anything from suicide attempts to unsocial behavior with excrement. I've been interested to note how often, in this asylum, progressants of this type have indicated the experience of seeing our mascot as the one which triggered off their psychic shift. There was even one fascinating case last year of a woman who believed she had counterfeited violent mania in order to be confined in one of the closed wards and thus escape the sight of our mascot, which, as you'll have noticed, lies unavoidably in the path of anybody entering or leaving the main building. A delusion, of course-she was as mad as a hatter-but a significant one.

  "Long before the human mind became an object of scientific study it was recognized that abnormal mental states were highly communicable, not to say contagious, and I've often admired the instinctive good sense of those early practitioners who, without any body of theory to assist them, knew empirically that, by throwing together raving lunatics and those who were merely disturbed-as in Bedlam and other such mad-houses-they were encouraging the latter type of patient to make his psychic shift and bring the real nature of his illness into the open. This communicability is, a
s I say, notorious; but I don't think it's ever been adequately noted before that this can work via an outward symbol or artefact, so that state-of-mind produces object which in turn produces state-of-mind. There are obvious analogies here with aesthetic theory, in particular with Eliot's notion of the objective correlative."

  Dr. Best had evidently ceased to notice that it was Leonard he was talking to. The sunlight was reflected from his spectacles in such a way that they seemed to flash and glisten with the disinterested love of his profession. Now, however, as the two men strolled past the water-tower towards the entrance to his quarters, the doctor paused in his discourse and glanced briefly at his companion.

  "I noted just now," he said, "that when I invited you to accuse the man Underwood of the deadliest crime you could think of, you chose to accuse him of being a Communist spy. Why was that, Captain Leonard?"

  "Because it is the deadliest crime I can think of. What other reason could I have?"

  The doctor beamed. "Deadlier than murder?"

  "Of course. A successful spy is far more destructive than even a mass murderer."

  "Oh, do you think so? More repulsive, too? More horrifying?"

  "You didn't ask me for that. Anyway, why did you choose to accuse him of those disgusting things, or at least of wanting to do them?"

  "Because my experience tells me that such accusations are the likeliest to produce a reaction in withdrawn subjects."

  "He didn't react, though, did he?"

  "No. I wasn't expecting him to. But you did."

  "Good God, that was just because I thought you were being unkind to the poor swine."

  "Weren't you being unkind by accusing him of what according to you is the worst crime in the world?"

  "That was different, doctor. I knew he couldn't be a spy, but he might quite conceivably have had some sort of hankering after the things you mentioned to him."

  "Ah. You knew he couldn't be a spy, and yet you accused him of being one. Why?"

  Leonard hesitated. "It's the sort of accusation a lot of people might resent even if it was utterly untrue."

  "Or is this accusation the one you instinctively bring against people whatever the circumstances and whatever your reason tells you about its inapplicability? Aren't you perhaps in danger of seeing spies everywhere?"

  "In the circumstances," said Leonard with more than his habitual urgency, looking hard at Dr. Best, "it's necessary that I do see spies everywhere."

  This came just as the doctor was stepping aside to allow Leonard to precede him through the outside door of the staff block. He looked as if he had found himself stepping aside further than he had intended, perhaps at a convulsion of laughter.

  "You really are a character, Captain Leonard, I do declare," he said. "Really quite a card in your way. Now, if you'd like to leave your things here… That's right, come along."

  Leonard arranged his cap and cane on a hallstand that sheltered an immense golf-bag. Then he followed Dr. Best into what might have been the board room of a small but prosperous private company. There was shoulder-high oak paneling and the ceiling was buttressed in the same wood. On a handsome Jacobean sideboard was ranged a double row of bottles and cut-glass decanters and what looked like a silver-plated ice-bucket. Some elaborate lilies in elaborate bowls gave off a thick and rather nasty scent.

  Two men in their thirties wearing dark suits and silk ties with transverse stripes came forward at their entry. One was very tall and very thin with ears at right angles to his skull. The other was just a man.

  "Captain Leonard, may I introduce my assistants? Dr. Minshull"-the very tall one-"and Mr. Mann"-the one who was just a man.

  Leonard shook hands with each in turn. Minshull kept his gaze level, so that it went over the top of Leonard's head. Mann smiled and nodded.

  "Now," said Dr. Best, "what's it to be? Sherry or Martini?"

  "Sherry, please," said Leonard.

  "Manzanilla, fino or amontillado?"

  "Amontillado, please."

  "Pedro Domecq or Harvey's?"

  "Harvey's, please."

  "A lot or a little?"

  "A little, please."

  Dr. Best gave Leonard what was certainly a little, reaching as it did less than halfway up a cylindrical glass with a bore of about an inch. He gave himself what was presumably a lot, something like two-thirds of a tumbler. He looked at the glasses in the hands of Minshull and Mann, each of which held some liquor, and said he saw that they were all right.

  "Did you enjoy your tour, Captain Leonard?" asked Mann pleasantly.

  "It was most interesting."

  A high, dry, crooning laugh broke from Minshull and went on for some seconds.

  "Are you perhaps professionally concerned in these matters?" continued Mann, raising his voice slightly. "I know the Army's very high-powered these days on psychological warfare and so forth."

  Leonard made his prepared reply to this question, which for the last hour and a half he had been vainly expecting Dr. Best to ask. "I am involved to some extent. We take an interest in probing the minds of prisoners and safeguarding our own people against it. But my main job is Security. I expect you've heard there are some rather secret goings-on over at the camp. I'm responsible for seeing that the wrong people don't get to hear about them."

  "And who would those wrong people be, Captain?" asked Dr. Best.

  "Ultimately, of course, the Russian or Chinese Communists."

  "Not immediately. That's to say you don't believe there are actual Russians and Chinese hanging about the place in disguise."

  "No, I don't. But I know there's at least one enemy agent in the area."

  "And what sort of person might he be, do you suppose?"

  "He might well be highly respectable," said Leonard. "Somebody widely known and accepted in the neighborhood. Holding the sort of position that enables him to move about freely and talk to anyone he may come across. Perhaps with a profession that enables him to ask all sorts of questions without arousing suspicion."

  "Somebody like me, do you mean?"

  "Yes. He might easily be somebody very like you."

  There was a loud sucking sound as Minshull drained his glass. Dr. Best turned to him and Mann, rubbing his hands together excitedly.

  "Isn't that wonderful, gentlemen? Isn't that wonderful?"

  "I don't see anything very wonderful about it, sir," said Mann. "Captain Leonard's reasoning strikes me as perfectly sound, speaking as a complete layman in his field. And even if we failed to follow his argument, we'd have to give him credit for knowing what he's about."

  Dr. Best grew rigid. "Haven't I always been good to you, Mann?" he asked.

  "I don't know what you mean, sir."

  "Don't you think that, if you were being rational, you'd admit that the presence of a guest makes this an unsuitable moment to start uncovering your hidden aggressions?"

  "I wasn't being aggressive, I assure you. I was simply giving an opinion."

  "We won't pursue the matter for the time being. Let's just say that it's surprising to find somebody of your qualifications evidently failing to identify one of the best-known types of proemial persecution-fantasy."

  "But, Dr. Best," said Mann, flushing, "Captain Leonard is a Security officer. It's his business to look for spies. And who's behaving unsuitably in front of a guest now, may I ask?"

  This defiance did not act as Leonard had expected and increase Dr. Best's annoyance. Instead, he turned to Minshull and said in a jesting tone,

  "Abercrombie and Kraft, July 1963."

  Minshull gave another laugh, this time with a keening rather than a crooning effect. Leonard looked wordlessly at Mann, whose flush had deepened.

  "A well-known paper on the effects observable when a subject's fantasies seem to be confirmed by something in his experience," said Mann. "As when, let's say, a man with a neurotic fear of being poisoned by his wife finds real arsenic in his soup."

  "You mean he thinks I'm mad," murmured Leonard.

 
; "Loosely, yes." Mann glanced over to where Dr. Best was talking up into Minshull's face. "But he's always… But you don't have to put up with this, you know. Say the word and I'll take you out to a pub."

  "Thank you, but I'll have to stay now. What we've just had isn't an unfamiliar line of defense, you know. Discrediting the motive of inquiry is always preferable to answering it."

  Mann drew in his breath slowly. Then he said, "You mean you think he's a spy?"

  "There are strong grounds for not ruling out the possibility. You said yourself you thought that was reasonable."

  "I merely said your theory of the-"

  The rest of Mann's remark was drowned in the pealing of a large brass hand-bell at the hand of Dr. Best, who spread his arms and urged the other three towards a table laid for lunch in the window alcove. Leonard found himself placed with his back to the window. He was thus in a good position to take in fully the entrance a moment later of two tall girls, a fair-haired one in a skin-tight suit of black leather and a dark one wearing a similar garment in white. The former approached and set down on its stand a silver ice-bucket with an open bottle of wine in it, the latter handed round plates of smoked salmon.

  "They must find it very hot in those clothes," said Leonard when the girls had retired. "Especially this weather."

  "Oh yes, they do, very," said Dr. Best, evidently pleased that this substantial point had been grasped. "They're always complaining. May I pour you some hock?"

  "Why do they wear it, then? Thank you."

  "They asked to, and I saw no reason against it. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was perhaps something of a coincidence that their respective fantasies proved to be reconcilable in such totally complementary forms. At any rate, I took advantage of the situation to test the possibility that the opportunity to act out a fantasy without social or other penalty might not bring about an alleviation of the condition giving rise to the fantasy, or at least make them happier."