Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. Doris Lessing
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X.
DOCTOR Y. Well, now, nurse tells me you are Sinbad today?
PATIENT. Sin bad. Sin bad. Bad sin.
DOCTOR Y. Tell me about it? What’s it all about?
PATIENT. I’m not telling you.
DOCTOR Y. Why not?
PATIENT. You aren’t one of Them.
DOCTOR Y. Who?
PATIENT. The Big Ones.
DOCTOR Y. No, I’m just an ordinary sort of size, I’m afraid.
PATIENT. Why are you afraid?
DOCTOR Y. Who are they, The Big Ones?
PATIENT. There were giants in those days.
DOCTOR Y. Would you tell them?
PATIENT. I wouldn’t need to tell Them.
DOCTOR Y. They know already?
PATIENT. Of course.
DOCTOR Y. I see. Well, would you tell Doctor X.?
PATIENT. Who is Doctor X.?
DOCTOR Y. He was in yesterday.
PATIENT. In and Out. In and Out. In and Out.
DOCTOR Y. We think it would help if you talked to someone. If I’m no use to you, there’s Doctor X., if you like him better.
PATIENT. Like? Like what? I don’t know him. I don’t see him.
DOCTOR Y. Do you see me?
PATIENT. Of course. Because you are there.
DOCTOR Y. And Doctor X. isn’t here?
PATIENT. I keep telling you, I don’t know who you mean.
DOCTOR Y. Very well, then. How about Nurse? Would you like to talk to her? We think you should try and talk. You see, we must find out more about you. You could help if you talked. But try to talk more clearly and slowly, so that we can hear you properly.
PATIENT. Are you the secret police?
DOCTOR Y. No. I’m a doctor. This is the Central Intake Hospital. You have been here nearly a week. You can’t tell us your name or where you live. We want to help you to remember.
PATIENT. There’s no need. I don’t need you. I need Them. When I meet Them they’ll know my needs and there’ll be no need to tell Them. You are not my need. I don’t know who you are. A delusion, I expect. After so long on this raft and without real food and no sleep at all, I’m bound to be deluded. Voices. Visions.
DOCTOR Y. You feel that—there. That’s my hand. Is that a delusion? It’s a good solid hand.
PATIENT. Things aren’t what they seem. Hands have come up from the dark before and slid away again. Why not yours?
DOCTOR Y. Now listen carefully. Nurse is going to sit here with you. She is going to stay with you. She is going to listen while you talk. And I want you to talk, tell her who you are and where you are and about the raft and the sea and about the giants. But you must talk more loudly and clearly. Because when you mutter like that, we can’t hear you. And it is very important that we hear what you are saying.
PATIENT. Important to you.
DOCTOR Y. Will you try?
PATIENT. If I remember.
DOCTOR Y. Good. Now here is Nurse Kincaid.
PATIENT. Yes. I know. I know her well. She fills me full of dark. She darks me. She takes away my mind.
DOCTOR Y. Nonsense. I’m sure she doesn’t. But if you don’t want Nurse Kincaid either, we’ll simply leave a tape recorder here. You know what a tape recorder is, don’t you?
PATIENT. I did try and use one once but I found it inhibiting.
DOCTOR Y. You did? What for?
PATIENT. Oh, some damned silly lecture or other.
DOCTOR Y. You give lectures, do you? What sort of lectures? What do you lecture about?
PATIENT. Sinbad the sailor man. The blind leading the blind. Around and around and around and around and around and …
DOCTOR Y. Stop it! Please. Don’t start that again. Please.
PATIENT. Around and around and around and around and …
DOCTOR Y. Around what? You are going around what? Where?
PATIENT. I’m not going. I’m being taken. The current. The North Equatorial, from the North African Coast, across, past the West Indies to the Florida Current, past Florida around the Sargasso Sea and into the Gulf Stream and around with the West Wind Drift to the Canaries and around past the Cape Verde Islands around and around and around and around …
DOCTOR Y. Very well, then. But how are you going to get out?
PATIENT. They. They will.
DOCTOR Y. Go on, now. Tell us about it. What happens when you meet them? Try and tell us.
He gives lectures. Schools, universities, radio, television, politics? Societies to do with? Exploration, archaeology, zoology? Sinbad. ‘Bad sin.’ Suggest as a wild hypothesis that just this once patient may have committed a crime and this not just routine guilt?
DOCTOR Y.
Accept hypothesis. What crime?
DOCTOR X.
Setting off from the Diamond Coast, first there is the southerly coastal current to get out of. Not once or twice or a dozen times, on leaving the Diamond Coast, the shore-hugging current has dragged us too far South and even within sight of that African curve which rounded would lead us in helpless to the Guinea Current to who knows what unwanted landfalls. But we have always managed just in time to turn the ship out and pointing West with Trinidad our next stop. That is, unless this time we encountered Them. Around and Around. It is not a cycle without ports we long to reach. Nancy waits for poor Charlie in Puerto Rico, George has his old friend John on Cape Canaveral, and I when the ship has swung far enough inshore wait to see Conchita sitting on her high black rock and to hear her sing her song for me. But when greetings and farewells have been made so many times, they as well as we want the end of it all. And when the songs have been heard so often, the singers no longer are Nancy, alone, poor Charlie, alone, or any of us. The last few journeys past the garden where Nancy waits, she was joined by all the girls in her town, and they stood along the wall over the sea watching us sail past, and they sang together what had so often called poor Charlie and his crew in to them before.
Under my hand
flesh of flowers
Under my hand
warm landscape
You have given me back my world,
In you the earth breathes under my hand.
My arms were full of charred branches,
My arms were full of painful sand.
Now I sway in rank forests,
I dissolve in strong forests,
I am the bone the flowers in flesh.
Oh now we reach it –
now, now!
The whistling hub of the world.
It’s as if God had spun a whirlpool,
Flung up a new continent.
But we men stood in a line all along the deck and we sang to them:
If birds still cried on the shore,
If there were horses galloping all night,
Love, I could turn to you and say
Make