Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. Doris Lessing
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I fell on my face on the earth and I wept. Oh, I’ll never know such sorrow again. I’ll never know such grief, oh, I cannot stand it, I don’t wish to live, I do not want to be made aware, of what I have done and what I am and what must be, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, around and around and around and around and around and around …
I must record my strong disagreement with this treatment. If it were the right one, patient should by now be showing signs of improvement. Nor do I agree that the fact he sleeps almost continuously is by itself proof that he is in need of sleep. I support the discontinuation of this treatment and discussion about alternatives.
DOCTOR Y.
DOCTOR Y. Well, and how are you today? You certainly do sleep a lot, don’t you?
PATIENT. I’ve never slept less in my life.
DOCTOR Y. You ought to be well rested by now. I’d like you to try and be more awake, if you can. Sit up, talk to the other patients, that sort of thing.
PATIENT. I have to keep it clean, I have to keep it ready.
DOCTOR Y. No, no. We have people who keep everything clean. Your job is to get better.
PATIENT. I was better. I think. But now I’m worse. It’s the moon, you see. That’s a cold hard fact.
DOCTOR Y. Ah. Ah, well. You’re going back to sleep, are you?
PATIENT. I’m not asleep, I keep telling you.
DOCTOR Y. Well, good night!
PATIENT. You’re stupid! Nurse, make him go away. I don’t want him here. He’s stupid. He doesn’t understand anything.
On the contrary. Patient is obviously improving. He shows much less sign of disturbance. His colour and general appearance much better. I have had considerable experience with this drug. It is by no means the first time a patient has responded with somnolence. It can take as long as three weeks for total effect to register. It is now one week since commencement of treatment. It is essential to continue.
DOCTOR X.
I did not wait to see the beast cut up. I ran back to the edge of the landing-ground and tried to bury my fears in sleep. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, but the fact I was afraid at all marked such a difference between now and then that I knew it was a new condition for me. I could feel my difference. Now, I was afraid of the moon’s rising and its rapid growth towards full. I wanted to hide somewhere, or in some way, but to hide in a perpetual daylight until that night of the Full Moon when—I was certain of this—the Crystal would descend to my swept and garnished landing-ground. But daylight was not a time to take cover in, to use for concealment. I piled branches over my head and lay face down with eyes blotted out and made myself sleep, when I had no need of it, but my sleep was not the sleep of an ordinary man. It was a living in a different place or country. I knew all the time that I was living out another life, but on land, very far from the life of a seaman, and it was a life so heavy and dismal and alien to me that to go to sleep was like entering a prison cell, but nevertheless, my new terror of the night and its treacherous glamorous sucking light was enough to make me prefer that land-lubber’s living to the Moon Light. Yet I woke, and although I had not wanted to, and had decided to stay where I was, watching the skies for the Descent, yet I could not prevent myself getting to my feet, and walking through the now mocking and alien city. This time I went Northwards, and beyond the city I saw great trees, and somewhere under the trees a gleam of red fire. I walked openly, without disguising myself or trying to be quiet, through the patched moon-and-shadow of the forest glades, till I stood, on a slight rise, looking down into a hollow that was circled by trees, yews, hollies and elms. There I saw them. They were about fifty yards away, and the intervening space was all sharp black shadows and gleams of brilliant moonlight, and the leaping running shadows of the fire played all around the scene, so that I could not see very clearly. It was a group of people, three adults and some half-grown ones, and as I leaned forward to stare and settle my eyes against the confusion of lights and shade, I saw that they were roasting hunks of meat on the fire, and singing and shrieking and laughing as they did so, and a terrible nauseating curiosity came over me—but that curiosity which is like digging one’s fingers into a stinging wound. I knew quite well who they were, or rather, I knew what faces I would see, though there was a gulf in my memory, blotting out the exact knowledge of where these people fitted into my long-past life. They turned, as the sound of my footsteps alerted them, and their three faces, women’s faces, all the same, or rather, all variations of the same face, laughed and exulted, and blood was smeared around their stretched mouths, and ran trickling off their chins. Three women, all intimately connected with me, alike, sisters perhaps, bound to me by experience I could not remember at all. And there were three boys, yes, the boys were there too, and a baby lying to one side of the fire, apparently forgotten in the orgy, for it was crying and struggling in tight wrappings, its face scarlet, and I rushed forward to pull the child out of the way of those hostile tramping feet, and I opened my mouth to shout reproaches, but Felicity pushed a piece of meat that had been singed a little, but was still raw and bloody, into my mouth—and I fell on the meat with the rest, pulling gobbets of it off a bloody hunk that was propped over the fire with sticks that sagged as they took fire, letting the lump of meat lower itself to the flames, so that all the forest stank of burning flesh. But I swallowed pieces whole, and at the same time laughed and sang with them, the three women:
‘Under my hand,
flesh of flowers
Under my hand
warm landscape
Give me back my world,
In you the earth breathes under my hand …
Now we reach it, now now,
Now we reach it, now now now,
Now we reach it, now,
Now now now now now now now now …’
and the three boys my sons who were as bloody-drunk and as crazed as their mothers kept up a stamping dance of their own and sang
‘Now we reach it, now, now,’
over and over again. They were all laughing at me, laughing with malicious pleasure because I had joined this bloody feast, and later I saw that it was over, the women were walking soberly away, leaving the fire burning, and the piles of stinking bloody meat lying to one side of it. I looked for the baby, but it was not there. Then I saw that it was dead and had been thrown on the heap of meat that was waiting there, quite openly in the glade, all purply-red and bleeding, for the coming night’s feast. The baby was naked now, a little reddish newborn babe, smeared with blood, its genitals, the big genitals of a newborn boy baby, exposed at the top of the bloody heap. I understood that I was naked. I could not remember when I had lost the clothes with which I had left the ship. Presumably I had landed naked on the beach off the porpoise’s back, but I had not thought once about being naked, but now I needed to cover myself. The bloody hide of the dead cow lay in its rough folds to one side of the glade, where the women and the boys had thrown it. I ran to it, and was about to wrap myself in it, all wet and raw as it was, when I chanced to look up, and saw that the sun stood over the trees and the treacherous moon had gone. And so had the fire, the pile of bloody meat, the dead baby—everything. There was no evidence at all of that night’s murderous dance.
I walked back through the forest, which was now full of a calm morning light, and then across grasslands, and then into the suburbs of the empty ruined city until I reached the central square, and I examined it anxiously to see if the past night had affected it at all. But no, there it lay, exposed and tranquil under the clean sunlight, and there was no sound but the invisible water’s running, and the song of birds.
I was terribly afraid of the coming night. I was afraid of the laughing murderesses and their songs. I knew that when the moon rose that night I would be helpless against its poisons. I tried to think of ways I could tie myself, bind myself, make myself immune to the Moon Light, but a man cannot tie himself, or not with bonds that cannot be undone—can’t,