The Drowned World. Martin Amis
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Riggs, the base and the testing station into the next lagoon, he stopped and steadied himself against the rail. Smiling ruefully at the absurdity of the fantasy, he wondered why he had indulged it.
Then he noticed the heavy cylinder of the compass dragging at his jacket. For a moment he peered down at it thoughtfully.
“Look out, Kerans,” he murmured to himself. “You’re living on two levels.”
Five minutes later, when he entered the sick-bay on B-Deck, he found more urgent problems facing him.
Three men were being treated for heat ulcers in the dispensary, but the main twelve-bed ward was empty. Kerans nodded to the corporal issuing penicillin band-aids and walked through to the small single ward on the starboard side of the deck.
The door was closed, but as he turned the handle he could hear the restless heaving motion of the cot, followed by a fractious muttering from the patient and Dr. Bodkin’s equable but firm reply. For a few moments the latter continued to speak in a low even monologue, punctuated by a few shrugging protests and concluded by an interval of tired silence.
Lieutenant Hardman, the senior pilot of the helicopter (now being flown by his co-pilot, Sergeant Daley) was the only other commissioned member of the survey unit, and until the last three months had served as Riggs’ deputy and chief executive officer. A burly, intelligent but somewhat phlegmatic man of about 30, he had quietly kept himself apart from the other members of the unit. Something of an amateur naturalist, he made his own descriptive notes of the changing flora and fauna, employing a taxonomic system of his own devising. In one of his few unguarded moments he had shown the notebooks to Kerans, then abruptly withdrawn into himself when Kerans tactfully pointed out that the classifications were confused.
For the first two years Hardman had been the perfect buffer between Riggs and Kerans. The rest of the crew took their cue from the Lieutenant, and this had the advantage, from Kerans’ point of view, that the group never developed that sense of happy cohesion a more extravert second-in-command might have instilled, and which would have soon made life unbearable. The loose fragmentary relationships aboard the base, where a replacement was accepted as a fully paid up member of the crew within five minutes and no one cared whether he had been there two days or two years, was largely a reflection of Hardman’s temperament. When he organised a basket-ball match or a regatta out on the lagoon there was no self-conscious boisterousness, but a laconic indifference to whether anyone took part or not.
Recently, however, the more sombre elements in Hardman’s personality had begun to predominate. Two months earlier he complained to Kerans of intermittent insomnia—often, from Beatrice Dahl’s apartment, Kerans would watch him long after midnight standing in the moonlight beside the helicopter on the roof of the base, looking out across the silent lagoon—and then took advantage of an attack of malaria to excuse himself from flying duty. Confined to his cabin for up to a week on end, he steadily retreated into his private world, going through his old notebooks and running his fingers, like a blind man reading Braille, across the glass display cases with their few mounted butterflies and giant moths.
The malaise had not been difficult to diagnose. Kerans recognised the same symptoms he had seen in himself, an accelerated entry into his own ‘zone of transit’, and left the Lieutenant alone, asking Bodkin to call in periodically.
Curiously, however, Bodkin had taken a more serious view of Hardman’s illness.
Pushing back the door, Kerans stepped quietly into the darkened room, pausing in the corner by the ventilator shaft as Bodkin raised a monitory hand towards him. The blinds over the windows were drawn, and to Kerans’ surprise the air-conditioning unit had been switched off. The air pumped in through the ventilator was never more than twenty degrees below the ambient temperatures of the lagoon, and the air-conditioner normally kept the room at an even 70 degrees. Bodkin had not only switched this off but plugged a small electric fire into the shaver socket over the hand-basin mirror. Kerans remembered him building the fire in the laboratory at the testing station, fitting a dented paraboloid mirror around the single filament. Little more than a couple of watts in strength, the fire seemed to emit an immense heat, blazing out into the small room like a furnace mouth, and within a few seconds Kerans felt the sweat gathering around his neck. Bodkin, sitting on the metal bedside chair with his back to the fire, was still wearing his white cotton jacket, stained by two wide patches of sweat that touched between his shoulder blades, and in the dim red light Kerans could see the moisture beading off his head like drops of white-hot lead.
Hardman lay slumped back on one elbow, his broad chest and shoulders filling the backrest, big hands holding the leads of a pair of headphones clasped to his ears. His narrow, large-jawed face was pointed towards Kerans, but his eyes were fixed on the electric fire. Projected by the parabolic bowl, a circular disc of intense red light three feet in diameter covered the wall of the cabin, Hardman’s head at its centre, like an enormous glowing halo.
A faint scratching noise came from a portable record-player on the floor at Bodkin’s feet, a single three-inch disc spinning on its turntable. Generated mechanically by the pick-up head, the almost imperceptible sounds of a deep slow drumming reached Kerans, lost as the record ended and Bodkin switched off the player. Quickly he jotted something down on a desk-pad, then turned off the electric fire and put on the bedside lamp.
Shaking his head slowly, Hardman pulled off the headphones and handed them to Bodkin.
“This is a waste of time, Doctor. These records are insane; you can put any interpretation you like on them.” He settled his heavy limbs uncomfortably in the narrow cot. Despite the heat, there was little sweat on his face and bare chest, and he watched the fading embers of the electric fire as if reluctant to see them vanish.
Bodkin stood up and put the record-player on his chair, wrapping the headphones around the case. “Perhaps that’s the point, Lieutenant—a sort of aural Rorshach. I think the last record was the most evocative, don’t you agree?”
Hardman shrugged with studied vagueness, evidently reluctant to co-operate with Bodkin and concede even the smallest point. But despite this Kerans felt that he had been glad to take part in the experiment, using it for his own purposes.
“Maybe,” Hardman said grudgingly. “But I’m afraid it didn’t suggest a concrete image.”
Bodkin smiled, aware of Hardman’s resistance but prepared for the moment to give in to him. “Don’t apologise, Lieutenant; believe me, that was our most valuable session so far.” He waved to Kerans. “Come in, Robert, I’m sorry it’s so warm—Lieutenant Hardman and I have been conducting a small experiment together. I’ll tell you about it when we go back to the station. Now”—he pointed to a contraption on the bedside table which appeared to be two alarm clocks clipped back to back, crude metal extensions from the hands interlocking like the legs of two grappling spiders—“keep this thing running as long as you can, it shouldn’t be too difficult, all you have to do is re-set both alarms after each twelve-hour cycle. They’ll wake you once every ten minutes, just enough time for you to get sufficient rest before you slide off the pre-conscious shelf into deep sleep. With luck there’ll be no more dreams.”
Hardman smiled sceptically, glancing up briefly at Kerans. “I think you’re being over-optimistic, Doctor. What you really mean is that I won’t be aware of them.” He picked up a well-thumbed green file, his botanical diary, and began to turn the pages mechanically. “Sometimes I think I have the dreams continuously, every minute of the day. Perhaps we all do.”
His tone was relaxed and unhurried, despite the fatigue which had drained the skin around his eyes and mouth, making his long jaw seem even more lantern-like. Kerans realised that the malaise, whatever its source, had barely touched the central core of the man’s ego. The element of tough self-sufficiency in Hardman was as strong as ever, if anything stronger, like a steel blade springing against a fencing post and revealing its sinews.
Bodkin dabbed at his face with a yellow silk handkerchief, watching Hardman thoughtfully. His grimy cotton jacket and haphazard attire, coupled with his puffy, quinine-tinted skin, misleadingly made him look like a seedy quack, masking a sharp and unresting intelligence.