The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  “How much?” she asked sharply, like a skinflint housewife at a market stall. “Out of these sixty-four subjects that we have to interview, how many would have to recover dramatically after the removal of their Parasite Person, before it would be counted as ‘statistically significant’?”

  Martin hesitated. Statistics were tricky things, and a lot depended on the particular editor, and on the power currently wielded by those likely to be ranged against whatever it was you were trying to prove.

  “Six?” Ruth suggested tensely. “Eight?”

  Still Martin would not commit himself. Certainly, six or eight case-histories of instant cures such as Ruth was envisaging would make some impact: If not in academic circles, then certainly in the popular press, if you could once get the facts through to them. It was the kind of hypothesis that would catch on. There is a paranoic streak in almost everyone, not least in depressives, and the notion that their troubles were all someone’s fault, and that they were being literally battened-on by their nearest and dearest, could become the big craze of the decade.

  The rationale of it, though. Some sort of explanation would have to be adumbrated as to how the transaction could possibly take place. One person’s energy being physically misappropriated by another—it all sounded too airy-fairy for words, even by today’s permissive standards of scholarship. “Tapping” energies; “Draining away” happiness; as if it was gas or electricity, and plugging it into your own mains … This was science fiction stuff. Too intrinsically improbable to warrant serious investigation.

  It’s not fair, was his next thought, like a child deprived of an ice cream. In the field of astronomy they were allowed—nay, encouraged—to investigate things far more intrinsically improbable than anything Ruth had dreamed-up. Solar Wind, Galactic Noise, the Black Holes, the Expanding Universe, the Red Dwarfs, the White Dwarfs, the Supernovae—and no one ever demanded of them an explanation of why the universe should be like this rather than like something else. It just is, would be the smug reply, and what lucky, lucky people you are to have us here to tell you so.

  And the sub-atomic physicists, even more so. They only had to come upon a particle that contravened the known laws of physics, and, as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, they altered the known laws of physics accordingly.

  Why couldn’t the Social Sciences be more like that? It was most inequitable; but there you were. You had to take your chosen discipline as you found it and play the game according to the rules. Unless, of course, you became one of the giants, like Freud, and invented a new game which caught on because it was more fun to play, and thereafter, as the inventor, you were allowed to make up the rules as you went along. Martin’s mouth fairly watered at the mere thought of it.

  Aloud, he summarised to Ruth such of these meditations as seemed relevant to her project.

  “And so you see,” he finished, “even if we ended up with quite a number of case-histories illustrating your point, it still wouldn’t get us anywhere, unless we could come up with some plausible explanation as to how it actually, physically happens. Without that, they’ll naturally …”

  “I told you. Faith-healing,” interrupted Ruth impatiently. “Faith-healing turned predator. I don’t understand why you’re so surprised; it’s merely a criminal instead of a benevolent use of an established mechanism. It’s always happening. Like a cash-register is designed for giving people the exact right change, but once you understand it, it can be used just as easily for cheating them. I know. I’ve done it. Why should you think it’s so impossible for the same sort of thing to happen in the psychological field? What’s so unlikely about it? People are like that.”

  Martin’s mind was in a whirl. He no longer knew what he believed. For a moment, he felt that he was undergoing the Temptation in the Wilderness; but then suddenly it was a wilderness no longer, but a rich and virgin land, burgeoning with ideas of unprecedented brilliance and with new-minted facts sprouting up like dragons’ teeth, everywhere, in a buzzing, blooming confusion.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “She lives upon his shrieks and cries,

  And she grows young as he grows old.”

  IT WAS AMAZING, now that he knew exactly what he was trying to prove, how everything seemed to fall into place around it, as if by magic. Relevant and supportive material simply flowed into his mind, effortlessly, from every imaginable direction, all of it ready-shaped, in some extraordinary way, for inclusion in this whole, vast, exciting structure that was taking shape inside his head.

  This quotation from Blake, for instance. He hadn’t read Blake in years, not since O-levels, and he could have sworn that every line of the beastly stuff had been wiped from his brain completely, like recovering from a fever, the moment the exam was over.

  But somehow, below the level of consciousness, and for reasons unimaginable at the time, these two lines had been stored away in his memory-bank all ready to emerge on cue at this supreme moment, twenty-five years on, when his genius was suddenly bursting into flower. If he was to use them in a chapter heading—and how superbly appropriate they were!—he must find out which poem they came from, give a proper reference. Or get Helen to. She actually liked this sort of thing, very likely knew the poem by heart already. Unless it was one of those ghastly Visions, of course, hundreds of pages long, and not much more comprehensible than a Punk Rock lyric.

  Of course, Blake had been a manic-depressive. Interesting, that. Maybe he could use it some way? It would be a matter of locating the Parasite Person in Blake’s life, and establishing some sort of correlation between the bouts of depression and the presence of this person in his vicinity.

  The wife was the most likely candidate. Mrs Blake must have been one of those tolerant, supportive people because of that anecdote of the two of them playing Adam and Eve stark naked in a summerhouse—he remembered the whole Fifth Form guffawing over it—and for a woman of those days to co-operate in such an adventure, what with servants and neighbours and everything, she’d need to be very supportive indeed. Just the type to qualify as a Parasite Person. Did Blake’s depressions seem to be worse when she was around; better when she wasn’t, when she was away visiting, or having a baby, or whatever? If only some sort of statistical correlation could be established, from letters and diaries and stuff … The idea excited him considerably, until it occurred to him what an awful lot of reading would be involved—all those great, fat biographies, it was just too daunting. Of course, Helen could do the reading for him, she often did, when he couldn’t be bothered with some ghastly great tome; and he had to hand it to her, she was an adept at extracting the sense from such a volume and handing it to him on two neatly-typed quarto pages. But in order to exercise this invaluable talent she needed, naturally, to know exactly what Martin was getting at, and for some reason which he preferred not to analyse he didn’t want Helen to know anything at all about what was going on in his mind just now. That something had suddenly inspired him during the past two or three days, she could not fail to be aware, what with his long, passionate sessions at the typewriter, his tranced, preoccupied air at meal-times, his reluctance to leave his work and come to bed until far into the night.

  She must have noticed the transformation; she must, in fact, be dying of curiosity about it; but, like the good girl she was, she asked no questions. Any other woman, he thought gratefully, would at least have done some heavy probing by now: “How’s it going, darling?” “Is it working out at last?”—that kind of thing.

  She was a wonderful girl, really; wonderful at helping, and wonderful, too, at leaving you alone. A rare combination.

  So, what with one thing and another, he decided to shelve Blake for the moment. Apart from anything else, there was no knowing where such a project would end. Because if Blake, then why not Tolstoy? Or Meredith? Or Tennyson? Depressed geniuses were two-a-penny during the nineteenth century, and most of them had self-sacrificing, supportive wives, who could well be Parasite Persons. They lived so bloody long, too, and ev
en the ones who mercifully didn’t, like Keats, or Schubert, didn’t really give you any kind of a break, because all that happened was that the biographer would set himself to make a meal of the few years available, so that there would still be nine hundred pages or so to slog through.

  So that line of research was out, at least until Helen had been brought in on the project. But no matter. Other ideas, even better, and more brilliant, were already surging through his mind, faster than he could get them down.

  *

  It was like being young again. He had forgotten it could feel like this, his brain so light, so swift, fitting his skull so exactly, no weight, no pressures anywhere, no blanks, no gaps, no areas of darkness or muddle. His mind was darting hither and thither, like a lizard in the noonday sun, snatching at everything, rejecting nothing, relying absolutely on some mighty synthesising power within him to make sense of it all, to notice correspondences among all this disparate material where none had ever been noticed before.

  “Faith-Healing and Human Evolution” he wrote, and in his excitement underlined it three times, in the blackest of black ink. Because Ruth was quite right: faith-healing had become respectable over the last few years. He’d spent all yesterday afternoon in the Medical Reference Library, and had succeeded in running to earth no fewer than a dozen articles on the subject in perfectly respectable learned journals; and though not all of them came down on the side of the magicians, they were all serious studies by serious and reputable authors with strings of okay letters after their names. Alternative Medicine, it seemed, was fast coming in out of the cold, with Martin Lockwood hot on its heels and about to overtake it.

  The introduction of Natural Selection into the argument was going to be his pièce de résistance. As Ruth had so rightly insisted, if faith-healing works at all, then it must work in both directions. Whatever is the mechanism by which you can pour health and vigour into another person, by that same mechanism you must be able to draw it out, and the exciting thing was that if you believed in Natural Selection at all, then the latter capacity must by now be far more highly evolved than the former.

  “Look at it this way,” Martin found himself scribbling, in this first, headlong draft, “if there is in the human animal this capacity to transfer health and energy from one individual to another, then it is perfectly clear that the selective advantage of this capacity will lie not with those individuals who use it to benefit others at their own expense (the Faith-healers), but rather with those who use it for the reverse purpose, namely, to draw out the energy from their neighbours and use it for themselves. With the passing of the millennia, would you not expect these latter individuals—those who used their power selfishly—to have left more progeny than those who used it unselfishly? Thus it seems reasonable to believe that, whatever number of successful faith-healers may now exist among us, they must by now be far outnumbered by their opposite numbers, the Parasite Persons …”

  The elaboration of this idea filled several pages, and by the end of them Martin had the whole of Evolution ranged solidly on his side: no small achievement. He had proved to his own satisfaction that, by the processes of natural selection, this kind of psychosomatic parasitism must have spread through human population like, geologically speaking, wildfire; and must still be spreading. And as the numbers of the Parasite Persons increase, so, pari passu must the numbers of their victims, i.e. the Depressives. And, lo and behold, is it not the case that depression is on the increase nowadays …?

  And so there! Q.E.D.! Hooray, hooray, hooray!

  Martin drew a line, with a great flourish, under this section, and felt like dancing round and around the room.

  But not yet … not yet. More ideas were coming … more and more of them … each one seemed to be burning a hole in his brain like money in the pocket of a spendthrift. He must get them down on paper, fast … fast …!

  All those depressed geniuses, whose Lives he couldn’t for the moment be bothered with, Tolstoy and so on? They were depressed, weren’t they, because of the depredations of the Parasite Persons around them. Yes, okay, but why did they so consistently have such persons attached to them? Answer: Because a Parasite Person, like any other thief, chooses a rich victim rather than a poor one to rob. It’s common sense. And since great men are, by their very nature, exceptionally rich in all the qualities—energy, zest and so on—which the parasites are most eager to steal, these are the victims they prefer to set upon, just as a professional burglar prefers to set his sights on a film-star loaded with diamonds….

  The whole thing hung together incredibly well, especially when you took into account the fact that these Parasites, like any other criminal, vary widely in their degree of skill and daring. Some—and these correspond to sneak-thieves and pickpockets—are capable of snatching only a little, and only rarely, from their undistinguished victims; and in these cases, the effects are barely noticeable. At the other end of the scale, however, are what you might call the big-time parasites, the really outstanding psycho-somatic criminals….

  Outstanding … Outstanding … Wasn’t there a quotation from Adler illustrating what he was trying to say? Martin went to the bookshelf. Yes, that would be it: ‘The Science of Living’. Oddly, he could remember exactly where on the page the quote came, but had not the least idea of the context, or in which chapter it might be found. He persevered, however, flipping the pages back and forth, and was finally rewarded: here it was, the very paragraph he needed:

  “If one person out of a family is more outstanding than the others, the latter will suffer. This is always so, whether the favoured individual be the father, one of the children, or the mother. A very difficult situation is created for the other members of the family, and sometimes they cannot bear it …”

  Of course they cannot. They have among them a Parasite Person of such monstrous appetite that he or she is able to eat not just one of them alive, but all of them. A sort of caterpillar in the family, eating six times its own weight in food every day. A caterpillar nearly two yards high, up-ended, fully-dressed, prowling the stairs, the kitchen, the living-room …

  Adler wasn’t the only one. Once he got around to studying them, there’d be loads of authorities whose findings could be so interpreted as to support his thesis, in one way or another. There’d be Laing, for instance. Because sometimes the exact opposite of Adler’s scenario can be observed, and a whole household of successful parasites will be found battening on a single depressive …

  *

  Altogether, Martin had a wonderful morning. Like police clearing the route for a royal procession, his mind was clearing away, briskly and efficiently, all the obstacles to the theory which had earlier seemed so insuperable. What was it he’d said to Ruth, only a couple of days ago? “It’s a theory impossible to test,” he’d complained to her. “What sort of experiment could you set up that could either confirm or refute it?”

  How doltish he must have been, only that short time ago! Today, he could think straight off of half a dozen ingenious experiments, any one of which, properly monitored, might give positive results. You could, for instance, on some plausible pretext, do a few performance tests on the parasite figure—Memory, Creativity, I.Q. and so on. The results might reveal that his performance tended to be at its peak at just those times when his victim—the depressive, that is—was at his lowest ebb. A negative correlation here would be exciting indeed! A certain amount of preliminary data on these lines could be obtained by simple questioning of the parties concerned.

  The questions must, on the face of it, seem perfectly innocent, of course: “At what time of day would you say you feel at your most energetic, most able to tackle difficult tasks?”—that sort of thing. And if the parasite figure, all unsuspecting, should more often than not reply “First thing in the morning”, then you really would be on to something! For is it not an established fact, proven beyond all doubt, that this is the very time of day when depressions are almost universally at their worst?

  If t
he results of this preliminary enquiry were to prove positive—and already it was beginning to seem inconceivable to Martin that they should not—then all sorts of supplementary investigations could be set in train to supply confirmatory data. His brain throbbed with the excitement of it, the certainty of success.

  Anti-depressants: that could be one angle. Why are these drugs so notoriously unreliable, working splendidly for one patient, and yet failing dismally for another, with apparently identical symptoms? Or even in the case of the same patient, it can commonly happen that during one depressive episode he will do marvellously on these drugs, and then a few months later, presenting with identical symptoms and being prescribed the very same drug, he may this time experience no benefit whatsoever. Many are the doctors who have been baffled by these discrepancies, many the theories that have been vainly propounded; and now here was Martin Lockwood coming up with a new and arresting hypothesis that would explain it all!

  The Parasite Person, of course! As fast as the anti-depressant begins to generate new energy in the patient, so fast likewise does the attendant parasite, the psychic tapeworm, devour it, sucking it out as fast as it is generated, leaving the victim as limp and listless as before. A study must immediately be mounted showing that these drugs only work reliably when the patient is free of his Parasite Person; when the latter is sick, or away on holiday, or for some other reason temporarily absent. It should not be difficult to establish such a connection, once you knew what you were looking for. It wouldn’t need to be 100% correlation, naturally, nothing ever is; indeed, such a figure would in itself be suspect. All that was required was a correlation well above chance …

  Martin felt his mouth dry, his heart pounding: the Eureka feeling, that he had never thought to feel again. That these projected studies might give negative, or merely non-significant, results scarcely brushed the outer rim of his consciousness, so immersed was he now in designing the set-up for these tests. Obviously, it was going to involve some pretty drastic changes in the existing questionnaire, including substantial additions; and it would involve, too, the interviewing of not one person but two, in respect of each of the 64 subjects. In every case, not only the depressive himself, but the likely Parasite Person would have to be questioned in depth; and on top of this there would have to be call-backs on each of the fourteen subjects already interviewed. Instead of the original 64, a total of 128 interviews would have to be undertaken: exactly doubling the original work-load.