The Kindness of Women

by J. G. Ballard

  However, as I pointed out to Cleo, the film satisfied the logic of Dick’s life. He had felt fully alive only on television, and in a macabre way would be fully dead only if his last weeks, and even the moment of his death, took place under the camera lens. A BBC producer had already shown an interest in the project, and a format had been devised which would incorporate Dick’s film into a documentary series about the taboos surrounding this most unmentionable of topics.

  “Taboos?” Cleo scoffed at the word, when we talked it over at her publisher’s office, careful to separate herself from me behind a barricade of wholesome children’s books. “He’s actually going to make a snuff movie. Jim, he’s staging a sex-death in which he’s raped out of existence by the whipped-up emotions of all those peak-time viewers. And you’re going to take part?”

  “Cleo … that’s unfair. Think beyond the film. Aldous Huxley took LSD as he died—perhaps this is Dick’s way of coping with a challenge he can’t face. The film will probably never be shown, and I dare say he knows that.”

  “But do you know it? Piffle!”

  Three weeks earlier, after an exhausting struggle against his thyroid cancer, Dick had discharged himself from hospital. A makeup girl preparing us for a late-night discussion programme had first noticed the goitre. I remembered waiting to take Dick’s chair in front of the mirror, and how he sat surrounded by all the lights and cosmetic jars, his throat bobbing as the makeup girl pointed out his enlarged Adam’s apple. He caught my eye in the mirror, as if aware that a dimension had entered the script for which all his years in television had never prepared him.

  He was subdued during the recording, though outwardly his confident and charming TV self. I thought, unkindly, that it took only this modest swelling, probably a cyst or mild iodine deficiency, to touch his one vulnerable point—his own body. As he smiled and spoke to camera his familiar repertory of gestures and mannerisms suddenly seemed like so much decorative armour breaking loose from a stumbling warrior. When I drove him home to Richmond, before going on to Shepperton, he was already complaining about his sore throat, almost needing to punish his body. I knew he had been slightly ill during the past year and urged him to see his doctor.

  Soon after, Dick entered hospital for observation, passing into the paradoxical world of modern medicine, with all its professional expertise, ultra-high technology, and complete uncertainty. As Dick pointed out on my first visit to Kingston Hospital, the qualities traditionally ascribed to patients—self-delusion, a refusal to face the truth, irrational hope, and a despair born of underlying pessimism—in fact were those of their doctors.

  “You have to realise,” he whispered to me when a nurse had declined to answer a direct question about his suspected cancer, “that the first and most important job of medical science is to protect the profession from the patients. We unsettle them and make them feel vaguely guilty. We ask questions they know they can’t answer—the one thing they really want us to do is go away, or pretend that there’s nothing wrong with us. What they like best of all is to admit us to hospital and then hear us say we feel fine, even if we’re at death’s door.”

  Despite the prospect of exploratory surgery, Dick had already recovered his spirits. He flirted with the nurses and tamed the formidable senior sisters, promising them parts in his next TV series. But the reductive and grinding logic of hospital life began to take its toll, and he was astute enough to see behind the façade of ward-level optimism.

  “The nurses are amazingly sunny,” I commented. “I feel as if I ought to climb into the next bed.”

  “Not a good idea, on the whole. Remember, they’re like hostesses in a nightclub who know the customers aren’t going to enjoy the floor show.” Dick leaned against the big pillows, his keen eyes scanning the ward. “It’s interesting that the higher you move up the professional ladder the more depressed the doctor becomes. Your local G.P. and the junior housemen are reasonably cheerful—they can pass on the serious decisions. But as you meet the senior consultants you find this deepening gloom, because they realise there’s almost nothing they can do to help you. Serious cancers are the worst thing they have to face—they remind them of how helpless medicine really is.”

  But Dick’s good humour had passed when I next saw him. He had woken after surgery in acute pain, unable to swallow and convinced that another throat had been transplanted into his own. Lowering the loose cotton dressing, he showed me the wound running from ear to ear, held together by a score of metal clips and covered with dried blood. He was discharged three days later, and within a week returned to the specialists to learn the results of the biopsy.

  Far from clarifying the real nature of his condition, the operation had only served to confuse it. A specialist had eventually seen Dick, and embarked on an enthusiastic account of the educational benefits of TV medical programmes. Dick described, with grim relish, how his use of the word “cancer” was met with a silent rebuke, followed by a disquisition on the meaninglessness of the term in the context of modern medicine. At last, as an afterthought, the specialist recommended the complete excision of the thyroid gland, reassuring Dick that he would reopen the old scar and so preserve his neck for the TV cameras.

  “The remarkable thing,” Dick confided to Cleo and myself, “is that no one will tell me I have cancer. It’s as if they want to hide the news from themselves, just when I’ve been able to face it. Now I feel almost guilty. A brain tumour with lots of secondaries in the lungs and liver would have been the decent thing…”

  Cleo and I admired Dick’s courage and humour, which sadly deserted him after the second operation. The complete removal of his thyroid lowered his metabolism, and he became lethargic and dispirited. His appearance radically changed. A long, pointed jaw jutted from his eroded neck, and we both noticed that he no longer glanced at himself in the hand mirror that a nurse had given him.

  When we arrived he stared at us as if we belonged to an alien species and his true companions were his fellow patients in the ward. I sensed that he regretted his own self-delusions, of which the greatest had been his apparently sincere attempt to discover the truth about his cancer. This was a bluff that had now been called. His attitude to the nursing staff had also changed. All irony and humour had gone, and he was far more docile and cooperative, like a rebellious prisoner at last accepting the unwritten rules of an institution.

  Exhausted by the radiation therapy, Dick lay against his pillows, his bald head covered by the NASA baseball cap that Cleo had found in his computer room at Richmond. He had lost interest in himself, and neither the nurses nor the registrar to whom we spoke seemed to have any clear idea of his real condition. Concerned with its own needs, the hospital moved in a parallel world to that of its patients.

  * * *

  After three weeks of radiation therapy, Dick learned that the last of the malignant tissue had yet to be eradicated. He was now completely hairless and no longer bothered to wear his NASA cap or conceal his ravaged neck. Leaning on my arm, he walked with difficulty to the ambulance that would take him to what, in a moment of brave but tired humour, he described as the “Caesar’s Palace of cancer therapy”—the Royal Marsden Hospital to the south of London.

  As it happened, this ultra-modern hospital might well have been a hotel-casino on the Las Vegas strip. Its airy corridors were hung with Pop Art posters, and Dick was given a ward to himself, with telephone, television, and disposable toilet. In fact, this room was an isolation cell, in which he was imprisoned for nine days, watched by the Geiger counter above his bed, until he had excreted the last of the radioactive iodine. When he spoke to us on the telephone, as Cleo and I stood by the lead-glass windows under the warning neon sign, his voice seemed to lift from a tape played at wavering speeds. The nurses who entered his room to take his blood and urine samples wore heavy gloves and protective overalls, and left him as quickly as they could, like conspirators setting a lethal device with the shortest of fuses.

  Despite some success in eradica
ting the tumour, malignant cells had rooted themselves in his spine and liver. Too weak to bear any further treatment at the Marsden, Dick was returned by ambulance to Kingston Hospital and the chemotherapy ward of last resort.

  Here, left to recover and without medication, he began to improve. I felt a surge of affection for him as he rallied himself, sitting up in bed to try on his new wig, shuffling along the landings with us as he craned through the windows for a distant view of the river and his Richmond house, even asking Cleo about her publishing career. When he was strong enough to submit to chemotherapy he would be moved to a sterile room, which would give his depressed immune system the best chance of fighting off any passing infection.

  Making sure that the nurses were elsewhere, he showed me briefly into the small, sterilised cell that was being prepared for him, a cubicle stripped of all furniture and fittings that might harbour bacteria, with a sealed door and windows and a ventilation system that resembled a midget submarine’s. Eerily, the screen of a TV set was set into the wall behind a thick glass plate, as if even television was withdrawing from Dick.

  “Cosy, isn’t it?” Hunched inside his dressing gown, Dick straightened his wig and beckoned me away. “Just the place to take your last view of the world. Did you notice the TV screen? Like a retina seen from the rear.”

  “Dick, come on…” I held his arm as he hobbled away, aware how much stronger he was, like a wiry and determined old man. “You’re so much better—you may never move there. I can feel it.”

  “I can feel it, all right…” He let me help him onto a settee in the patients’ dayroom, then pulled up a wooden chair for me. As he stared around the room I realised how much he had changed. He had lost all illusions about himself—he had always enjoyed being recognised in public, but no one now, neither the nursing staff nor his fellow patients, remembered the handsome presenter-psychologist who had fronted so many popular-science programmes. Dick appeared not to care. To show his indifference to his earlier self, he had selected an oversize golden wig, almost a caricature of his sandy hair.

  “You’ll have time to read,” I commented. “Cleo has the keys to your house, she can pick anything you want from the shelves.”

  “No—I’m too busy watching everyone here.” He pulled my arm and whispered: “You have to admire people. Most of them are far worse off than me—yards of gut cut out, half their jaws gone, ribs and God knows what. Yet they look like film extras ready to play a party scene.”

  “Perhaps you should bring a camera in here?”

  “It’s a thought. In fact”—Dick glanced at me, as if recognising me for the first time—“they say factory production always goes down after a film-crew visit. Here I’d expect the opposite effect. Perhaps there are too many TV screens in hospitals and too few cameras. Jim, tell me about Cleo and the children. It’s good to see you, by the way.”

  My suggestion had taken root. He was rallying himself, trying to be interested in our inconsequential world. Looking at his long, jutting jaw, I sensed his gathering will, if not to survive, at least to impose himself on whatever time was left to him.

  The following Sunday, when I visited the hospital, I learned that he had discharged himself and returned home.

  * * *

  “It looks as if I have three or four months, possibly six,” Dick explained as we sat in his computer room. “Omnibus and Horizon are both very interested…”

  “Dick, are you sure?”

  “They’ll set up the lights and equipment for me, and some kind of static video camera we can talk into. The idea is to show what actually happens as we approach the end, and break through all the taboos and preconceptions. No high-flown stuff about life and death, but as close to our ordinary talk as we can get. We’ll start with something easy to get the ball rolling, the ten best films ever made, our last trips to New York, Chomsky versus Skinner. Most of it will be taped down here, but we’ll move upstairs towards the end…”

  He spoke in a confident and matter-of-fact way, sitting comfortably at his desk as if he were back in his old office at the Institute of Psychology. I was impressed by his easy command of his situation—he had found a role for himself, which I considered to be quietly heroic but which he saw as merely the most interesting way of using the time left to him. He had lost even more weight and wore a high-collared shirt and silk scarf to cover his chin. A smaller and neater wig allowed him, in a certain light, to resemble his former self, but I felt once again that he had begun to reject the affable and good-humoured personality I had known for so many years.

  Altogether he had made a marked recovery from the months of medical treatment. Was he enjoying one of those periods of remission that give false promise to the victim or, as I still hoped, had he made a genuine return to health? As for his macabre documentary, at its worst this was a last gamble that his own survival would invalidate the project. Or, perhaps, having rid himself of all illusions in the radio-iodine room at the Marsden, he was now free to choose whatever maverick notion he needed to fill his last days.

  As we soon learned, the improvement in Dick’s condition was a brief upward tremor on a steadily downward graph. The specialists at the Marsden had arranged with Dick’s doctor in Richmond to provide the drugs that would hold back the metastasising tumours. Now the cure, rather than the disease, would kill him. The cancer would not spread, but the increasing doses of chemotherapy would destroy his immune system, so that the smallest respiratory infection would turn into a fatal pneumonia.

  But Dick was beyond the reach of these ironies. He was conserving what strength was left to him in order to carry out an important psychological experiment that would test his audience as much as himself. During our first recorded conversation, a trial run of the equipment, I found it difficult to speak at all, as if my throat were trying to mimic Dick’s ravaged larynx. Our second appointment was cancelled when I developed a heavy head cold. But Dick was insistent; for reasons of his own he had decided that I should be the moderator, in part because I had first suggested the documentary to him, but also because he wanted to involve me directly in his death.

  Sitting in his study as we prepared for the first episode, I regretted raising the idea. When Dick at last settled behind his desk I could see that he was almost exhausted by the effort of calming himself for the interview. The youthful actor-psychologist had become a shrunken and wounded old man, visibly fading under his powdered wig, and I hoped that the BBC team would pull the plugs on the entire spectacle. But everything was now grist to television’s mill, like the razor-toothed rollers in abattoirs that stripped the last shreds of gristle from the bones of a carcase.

  While we waited for the sound engineer to check his levels, I noticed that Dick had taken down the California licence plates on the walls of his study, the Cocoa Beach beer mats and Cape Kennedy press badges. During the course of our interviews more of these snapshots of his past were to disappear, as if he were consciously dismantling a carefully constructed myth of himself.

  But when he spoke to camera he soon rallied.

  “… Many people have left detailed accounts of how they ended their lives, from the Greek Stoics to the Jewish doctors in the Warsaw ghetto who kept careful records of how they starved to death. In the past, of course, everyone knew what happened when a human being died—relatives sat around the deathbed, doing their best to comfort the dying, and most people died in their homes. Today, though, death is something we experience for the first time when it happens to us … most people die in hospital, surrounded by machines, and watching someone die, especially a person very close, is more than we can face. Why? What is it about death that so unsettles us? In this series we’re going to look at death through the eyes of a single dying person—me. I’m Dr. Dick Sutherland. Three months ago my doctor told me that…”

  While Dick rested from his introduction, I noticed the digital desk clock recording the date, September 23, 1979. The green rice-grain letters blinked through the minutes and hours, unmoved by the
camera or Dick’s commentary. He sat in a deck chair in the bathroom while the director and the series producer discussed the few fluffs and verbal slips. They decided that, given the nature of the documentary, these would only enhance its authenticity, despite the problems they posed for the dubbing of foreign-language versions sold abroad. My own role, thankfully, was limited to asking Dick a number of general questions about his state of mind.

  “… How do I really feel? Does the thought that all this is going to end in two months’ time—as it happens, before the last episode of my favourite TV series—throw me into a complete panic? Do I walk around all day with a feeling of terror, like a victim in a horror film? Surprisingly, the answer is no. If anything, I feel cool and detached, as if all this is happening to someone else. The brain seems to have developed a way of standing back from itself, like a locomotive uncoupling the carriages behind it. To tell the truth, the biggest problem faced by the dying is how other people feel, especially their friends. There’s a real sense in which the dying have to die twice, once for themselves and once for their friends…”

  Did Dick believe this? His sister and her husband, a retired Dundee accountant, had moved into the house to look after him, but they were unobtrusive, sensitive, and reassuring. As I drove home it occurred to me that Dick had many acquaintances but virtually no close friends other than myself. Did he resent my concern for him and my visits to his hospital bed? Or were the friends for whom he had to die the invisible TV audience that had invested its admiration in him for so many years and now needed to be placated?

  But all sense of an audience had gone by the time of our second interview. The first recording had left me light-headed. Unable to work, I roamed from room to room. Time seemed dislocated, like an endless afternoon in a strange city. When I arrived at Richmond, an hour early, Dick scarcely seemed to recognise me and consulted his diary as if to remind himself. During the recording he sat stiffly at his desk with a brave if bleak smile and described his activities in the past week, which seemed, eerily, to resemble my own.