Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  I should, I suppose, count my blessings. Things could be worse. When I try to reconstruct the chain of events that brought me back home from the island, here to the kitchen counter and my glass of sparkling water, I see so many moments when I could have been lost, figuratively or literally, and all that prevented it was the determination of our friends. Mostly it was Rei. She saved me, and of course that makes me ashamed. I shouldn’t need to be saved. And I ought to be able to put my hand on my heart and say I could do the same, that if she were lost I’d have the grit and tenacity to find her and pull her back to me. I know I’d want to do that. I know I’d try. But would I be strong enough? That question hangs over my head like the blade of a guillotine.

  * * *

  —

  THE POLICE OFFICERS I saw on the island beach approached me and asked me to identify myself. When I refused, they arrested me for breaking into the bothy. They weren’t armed and I thought about running, but there was really nowhere to go. Even if I’d made it back up the hill and been able to lose myself in the bracken, my way would have been blocked by the cliff. Perhaps I could have followed the sea path and hidden in some cave or cleft, but I would have been trapped, and without food or water I’d have had to give myself up before too long. So I surrendered, and was put in the back of a car, watched from his doorstep by the farmer who’d seen me the previous day and was, I presumed, the one who’d reported me.

  The police had come all the way from the mainland to make the arrest, and I was taken back there on a boat and held overnight at a police station in a little town several miles from the coast. They asked me some questions, but I kept my mouth shut, and since I had no means of identification (I must have left my wallet and passport somewhere, though I don’t recall throwing them away) they took my belt and shoelaces and left me in a cell to sleep as best I could, stretched out on a narrow bench under a scratchy blanket. I remember that the light was left on all night, and every few minutes someone opened the spyhole and banged on the metal door until I moved or made a sign. The next morning I was fingerprinted and a haggard-looking psychiatrist was sent in to make an assessment. He tried his best, which didn’t count for much. As he asked his questions, I looked deliberately up into the corners of the room. He was a youngish man with a ginger beard and a shapeless tweed jacket so old and greasy that the collar had a dull shine. He stank of cigarette smoke, and as he drummed his fingers on the table in frustration, I saw that the nails were stained yellow with nicotine. A twenty-a-day man. Maybe more.

  A female police officer, who spoke with an accent that made her only intermittently comprehensible to me, explained that the owner of the bothy had declined to press charges. Was that Anton Bridgeman, I asked. Gary Bridgeman, maybe? It was the first time I’d spoken in her presence, and it startled her. She said she wasn’t able to give me that information, and since I’d done no damage, I’d have been free to go had I been able to prove my identity or in some other way account for my presence on the island. This not being the case, and because I seemed to be distressed, for my own care and protection it had been decided to remove me to a place of safety as designated by something or other, some numbered act or statute. I was frightened, though that word doesn’t convey the depth of what I was feeling, the radical terror of a world where nothing, nothing whatsoever, was certain. The conversation was taking place in a shabby little interview room that smelled of mildew and some kind of pine-scented cleaning product. I suspected that Anton was about to walk in and reveal that the police and emergency service personnel were all crisis actors. My worst fear was that his need to prove a point would go further, that in order to demonstrate his power he would put me through some kind of ordeal or torment like that of the victims on Blue Lives. I kept watching for clues, signs that the policewoman was not a real policewoman, or that she was in communication with someone through an earpiece. When two other officers arrived to escort me (to where, I had no idea) I panicked, and had to be physically restrained. My memory of what followed is patchy. I think the haggard psychiatrist was called to administer a sedative. I know I spent the next two weeks on a locked ward in a hospital in Glasgow, a Victorian building of reddish-black stone that reinforced my sense that I was participating in a performance, its echoing corridors and pervasive smell of boiled cabbage too precisely what would be expected of an “asylum,” an old-fashioned institution that for the most part no longer existed.

  During that time I was put on a regime of medication that left me sluggish and nauseous. My expectation of Anton’s arrival gradually ebbed, until I was no longer certain he was even involved in my predicament. The experience of being in the hospital was formless and boring. It had none of Anton’s visual or narrative style. Though other patients occasionally shouted or caused a disturbance, these events were few and far between. Mostly people sat in a common room and watched a TV tuned to some channel that ran endless cooking and home improvement shows. I slept in a room with three other men, and though I observed them closely, none of them said or did anything remarkable. Like a member of a millenarian cult after the promised doomsday has come and gone, I began to edit my recollections, persuading myself that I’d never thought Anton was directing my actions, that I’d gone to the island in search of enlightenment or peace or revelation or some other reputable spiritual experience, and what had happened to me, what was still happening to me in the hospital, was part of a process of learning or “growth,” something I’d initiated or volunteered to do. I’d still not spoken more than a few words to my doctors, or given them any details of my identity, but my physical description must have made its way onto some kind of database, because one afternoon I was staring blankly out of the common room window, watching pigeons fight over a sandwich wrapper near the hospital’s front entrance, when a voice behind me said hello and I looked up to find my older brother, who I hadn’t spoken to for over a year, standing in the doorway wearing a purple Lakers cap and looking just as out of place as he did anywhere that wasn’t a sports bar in a second-tier American city.

  It turned out that when I didn’t arrive in New York on my scheduled flight, Rei went into panic mode. Believing (rightly) that something bad was happening to me, she used her legal connections to have my description circulated to law enforcement in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The police were not particularly responsive, taking the view that I was an adult man and probably had my reasons for breaking off contact. She was asked, I heard later, whether I was having an affair, or perhaps had a second family somewhere. Frustrated, she hired an investigator, who pulled my credit card records and ascertained that I had gone to the UK. By painstakingly calling hospitals and police authorities, they discovered that someone fitting my description was a patient in a Glasgow mental hospital. A cell phone picture taken by one of my nurses confirmed it and because Rei was in the middle of a case, my brother took time off work and flew from Chicago to bring me home.

  I don’t have many clear memories of my return to New York. I was heavily sedated. I remember sitting in a window seat on the plane looking down at endless fields of white cloud, as my brother watched Marvel movies and worked on his laptop. He didn’t try and make conversation, which was a relief. When I needed to go to the bathroom, he went with me and stood outside the door. I was pushed through JFK in a wheelchair, unable (or not trusted) to walk by myself. Was Rei waiting at arrivals? I can’t be sure. I know I saw her later, after my brother had said goodbye with all the emotion of someone going out to get groceries and I’d been admitted to a private mental health facility on the Upper East Side, paid for by Rei’s good insurance.

  We sat in a beige room beneath a reproduction of an Abstract Expressionist painting by Franz Kline, all jagged black lines on a patchy white ground. I remember thinking that the painting was an edgy choice for a place that would conventionally display something brighter, a landscape or Van Gogh sunflowers. I concentrated on thinking about the painting because Rei was crying, actually
holding her head in her hands and sobbing, sitting across from me in an armchair and shaking with the force of her tears. Her pain was too hard to process, the pain I was putting her through, so I thought about art as a form of avoidance, and at that moment I intuited or realized something terrible—that in my chest, instead of a heart, there was some kind of alien device, something inorganic that was emitting a regular pulse, ticking away and governing my emotions, proof that I would never be able to connect to this woman, the woman I loved, or had loved back when I was human, before my heart had been removed and this thing planted in my chest, and I stood up and made some attempt to get rid of it, to pluck it out, and whatever I did must have been violent or alarming because other people came into the room and Rei left and I didn’t see her again for several days.

  The discovery that I had an electronic heart was terrifying. I’d been the victim of a monstrous crime; without my knowledge one of my vital organs had been stolen. When I was lucid enough to think at all, I tried to work out when the substitution had taken place. Why was I unable to remember such a traumatic event? Luckily the feeling came and went, and after a few days it began to fade, until once again I consistently experienced the organ as mine. Other assaults on my bodily integrity were more insidious. As a patient in a mental health facility it was objectively true that I was under surveillance, but I developed an exaggerated sense of its intensity. I believed that my captors had implanted sensors under my skin, so tiny that although I examined myself thoroughly, running my fingertips over each scratch and blemish, I couldn’t detect them. These microscopic devices were using the radio spectrum to transmit information about everything from the airflow through my lungs to the chemical compounds in my blood. The people watching me were analyzing this data and using it to predict and control my behavior. I thought of Monika, and the vast resources that the East German state had used against her. I thought about the leaps in technology since the GDR’s collapse. I was entangled in a system of oppression so total that things I could not voluntarily control—the conductance of my skin, the rate of secretion of hormones in my brain—were relentlessly betraying me. Numb with unhappiness, I spent long hours staring at my hands, the pattern of pores, the fine black hair on the knuckles, the raised veins branching out like indecipherable runes.

  I was prescribed antipsychotics and a mood-stabilizer, designed to lift my depression without inducing manic episodes. The treatment worked, more or less. My suspicions began to subside. My relationship with my body became manageable, and though I couldn’t have said I “owned” it, or identified with it in an uncomplicated way, it was at least bearable to live inside it, and the pressure brought to bear on me by external influences was curbed or moderated, which allowed me a level of dignity, the feeling that although I wasn’t autonomous, I could carry on existing in the world.

  Most of this struggle was internal, and I knew better than to discuss it with the various doctors and therapists at the clinic. When I was asked how I felt, I was judicious in the way I answered, neither exaggerating my anxiety nor trying to persuade them that I felt fine. The failure to acknowledge one’s illness is the primal sin of the psychiatric patient, the quickest way to intensify the regime of control. I would say things like “better today, I think,” hoping to give them a sense of achievement, never questioning their authority, their right to make judgments about what was reasonable or proportionate for me to feel or believe. And I did get better. The medication, the soothing environment, the relative lack of stress—all of it helped to restore a sense of control. My actual world-picture was another matter. I didn’t talk about the inhuman future that Anton was trying to realize, or about the sense I’d had, before I ever encountered him, that we were all slipping towards disaster. I understood that my reaction had been faulty, that in the face of terror I had failed, broken down. But nothing about my treatment touched on these questions. My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming?

  After a month of in-patient treatment I could simulate normality with a high degree of precision and since Rei’s insurance wouldn’t go on footing the bill, a pragmatic judgment was made that I was well enough to go home.

  On the day of my release, Rei didn’t feel she could face me on her own, so she enlisted an old friend of mine to come with her to pick me up from the clinic. Femi was one of the people that she liked best from what we semi-ironically termed “my former life.” Before we got together I’d done a lot of depthless druggy socializing at gallery openings and book launches. When I became a father, I preferred to spend what little personal time I had on my work, and most of my acquaintances from the art scene naturally fell away. Femi’s life had taken a similar path to mine. He lived in our neighborhood. His partner, Zoe, had become friends with Rei and the two of them had been pregnant at around the same time. Femi and I often spent bleary mornings piloting buggies round the park, clutching coffees and swapping rueful stories about sleep-deprivation and work. He was a screenwriter, the kind who seems to make a good living without ever having anything produced, and he had a freelance schedule that allowed him to come into Manhattan during the day. When he and Rei arrived at the clinic, I was waiting in the reception area. He looked around nervously, and I wondered what he’d been expecting to find there, instead of the muted rugs and Danish Modern chairs. He insisted on taking my bag and launched into some story about Nina and his daughter that lasted until we were in a car, sitting in traffic on Canal Street, waiting to get onto the Manhattan Bridge.

  Rei held my hand, scrolling through her email without speaking. Femi had obviously decided to blow through the whole question of my breakdown, treating me as if we were just catching up after some ordinary hiatus, a vacation or a work trip. Beyond a perfunctory “how you doing?” he didn’t ask me any probing questions, and though he was typically gracious and charming, I realized that he was pouring out words to fill every silence. One minute he was catching me up on gossip about mutual acquaintances, the next insisting I had to try some kind of grain bowl at a new neighborhood café. Everything’s a bowl now, man, he said. Have you noticed? I was grateful that he was being cheerful, and a little sorry that he seemed so ill at ease. I looked out of the window as we sped across the river, and for a fleeting moment, I thought that the view of the Dumbo waterfront seemed blocky, simplified, like an image that hadn’t been sampled at a high enough rate. I told myself to ignore it, that it was just a side effect of my medication, perhaps my eyes weren’t focusing properly, and when I blinked and looked again I couldn’t reproduce the effect. Rei asked if I was OK. I was jerking my head around. I said I was fine, just a sore neck. Maybe you ought to book a massage, Femi suggested.

  We got in to find Paulette in the living room with Nina, who was wearing a dress and had her hair up in bunches, looking very grown up, no longer a toddler but a proper little girl. I experienced a rush of emotion and held out my arms to her. Oh my darling, I said. How I’ve missed you. But she wouldn’t come to me, hiding behind Paulette’s legs. I didn’t force the issue, just sat on the sofa and watched Paulette make tea. She seemed as nervous as Rei and Femi, clattering around with mugs and kettle as if it were the first time she’d handled them. She said politely that she hoped I was feeling better. I said that I did, and I was sorry I’d made extra work for her. She shook her head vigorously. No trouble, no trouble. I should just relax, she said, a refrain that was already wearing thin for me—I’ll know I’m trusted again when people are happy to hype me up, when they want me to experience strong emotions.

  The apartment seemed much the same. Nina’s toys were scattered around, books and magazines piled on every surface. Rei had, perhaps inevitably, spread out slightly while I’d been away. A pair of her shoes were discarded under the sofa. Severa
l folders of legal documents were wedged on the kitchen counter between the toaster and the fruit bowl. As ever, the windows were filthy. The landlord never responded to our requests to have them cleaned, and we hadn’t got round to organizing it ourselves. The late summer light filtered in, a dirty yellow, outlining a trapezoid on the dusty Afghan rug. Nina was using this shape as a sort of abstract table as she hosted a tea party for her dolls, slicing imaginary cake and telling off her guests for snatching before it was their turn. She paid no attention to me, which was good, since I was finding her little game almost unbearably moving.

  Rei disappeared to take a call. Paulette and Femi were chatting about some TV show. Caught up in Nina’s game, I paid no attention until their conversation flagged. Glancing over, I found that they were watching me watch my daughter, the same uncertain smile playing over both their faces. I tried to work out how I must appear, what signals I was giving off, a calculation of impossible complexity. I felt obscurely outraged—this was my daughter, I was just watching her playing—and I wanted to challenge them, to ask what gave them the right to monitor my interaction with my own child. Instead I mumbled something about needing a shower, as an excuse to leave the room.

  I went into our bedroom and changed my clothes, rediscovering the row of shirts in the closet, the contents of my dresser drawers. The bed had been made, but Rei’s smell was in the air, and I experienced another surge of emotion, a mix of relief and sorrow and unfocused yearning. I moved a pile of laundry off a chair and sat for a while, looking down on the yards and gardens behind our building. Our house-proud neighbor was pottering about with a rake and a garbage bag, wearing a big straw hat. On the other side, the musicians had painted a wobbly rainbow on their back fence. We had no access to those gardens. Our apartment was on the second floor, and if we wanted to be outside, we had to go to the playground or the park. I tried to do as I’d been told, to relax, to feel at home, looking down on my rented view. I found I didn’t feel much beyond a sort of generalized familiarity. I realized that I could hear Rei’s voice, talking to Nina in the kitchen, and went out to find that both Femi and Paulette had gone. As Nina worked on a coloring page, I looked at my wife and she looked at me, the two of us as still and stylized as a couple in a medieval painting. She’d come from the office, so she was dressed in a suit, her hair tied back in a ponytail, little pearl studs in her ears, a woman at home in the world, comfortable with worldly ways, with convention and compromise and negotiation. It occurred to me that both the suit and her hair had a bluish tint, while the light falling on the side of her face was orange, and something about that worried me, the contrast too perfect, too designed. Opposite sides of the color wheel. Are you back, she said. I nodded. She reached out and touched my arm. Is it really you?