Grey Area

by Will Self

  Very gradually the hive began to succumb to parasitically induced decadence. Unless the queen and her remaining workers managed to summon the energy to abandon the hive and swarm, the hive’s economy became moribund. Eventually, all that was left was a dying queen surrounded by starving drones. It was as if the collective consciousness of the hive – if such an entity can be posited – had given in to a form of apian anomie.

  The Maeterlincki regard this process as a necessary part of their relationship with the bees. They couldn’t tell me for how long they had been harvesting the defunct hives, nor how they discovered the psychoactive properties of the dust made from the mites’ crushed corpses and sub-hives. Legend had it that in some previous dark age, the Maeterlincki had been beset by an abiding and terrible collective depression, a truly pathological boredom and lack of interest. Remnants of this pre-bee mite era remained embedded in their language (they have, for example, over twenty different words to express the concept of eyes ‘glazing over’).

  My cell-mates then made much of my own frequent bouts of apathy and tedium vitae. They urged me to cast aside my reservations and embrace the great spirit of the beehive.

  The bamboo tube was primed with the dust. One end was rammed into my nostril and Colin blew hard from the other. My other nostril received the same treatment, with Paul as the blower this time. We then did the same for Colin and Paul, rotating roles and nostrils. When we were done we returned to the Maeterlincki’s longhouse and life went on as before. Thereafter, for the duration of my stay, I was expected to ingest more of the mite powder on a daily basis.

  And what was the effect of this peculiar dust ? To begin with I noticed nothing at all. Perhaps this was because I had been expecting something really radical, like the psychotropic drugs used by other Amerindian tribes: ayahuasca, yopo, yage and datura. But the bee-mite powder wasn’t painful as it was absorbed into the mucous membranes, nor did it produce nausea. There were no hallucinations, no sensations of a paradigm shift in either body, or ego-awareness.

  But over the next few days I began to feel more firmly bound into the culture of the Maeterlincki than before. Little things that they did, such as basket weaving, pottery decoration and cicratisation, began to interest me in a way that they hadn’t formerly. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I became like the Maeterlincki, but the idea that my mind was the dream of an individual bee did acquire a comforting sort of plausibility, in so far as spiritual beliefs go.

  During this period I conducted a number of tests on the mite powder, but I was unable, using my field-test kit, to analyse the active ingredient. It belonged to none of the major classes of psychoactive drug: narcotic, analgesic, hypnotic, sedative, stimulant or hallucinogen.

  That’s the end of the photocopied extract from Sumner’s report. The A4 sheets were folded twice before being pasted into Busner’s notebook. When you unfolded the sheet a drift of grey powder was caught in the paper cranny. Some of it got on your fingertips, and idly, as one might taste anything, you dabbed your lips.

  There’s also an old Worminghall Co-operative Dairy bill caught in the folds of the photocopy, which reads as follows:

  30th December

  Milk (40 pints)

  £12.64

  Yoghurt (30 pots, assorted)

  £15.84

  Single cream (5 pots)

  £7.25

  Total

  £35.73

  Busner must have tucked the thing inside the photocopy and forgotten it. Either that, or he is/was an unusually anally retentive man – even for a psychiatrist.

  You turn back to Busner’s log and glance at the next few entries. They are unilluminating. During his first few weeks at the Worminghall Facility Busner was preoccupied with the routine work of getting any institution going: arranging catering, interviewing auxiliary staff, ensuring the buildings and laboratory were fully equipped.

  Although there is some of Busner in all of this, it is hardly self-revelatory stuff. On occasion he complains about the grind of having to commute from London on a weekly basis, the tediousness of the M40 motorway, and the lack of a decent service centre between Junction 1 (the M25) and Junction 5 (Stokenchurch). But for the most part he gives a flat account of events.

  By the middle of December most of this work had been completed. Busner’s staff was in place (both those required to keep up the pretence that the Worminghall Facility was a rest home, and his own assistants), and the trial was ready to begin:

  17th December

  I have made contact with a Dr Anthony Bohm at the Thame Health Centre. He’s a rather Chekhovian figure, white-haired, with a great pink bum of a chin. He’s been out to the Facility several times to play chess with me. He’s not a bad player, although I find his habit of neighing whenever he moves his knights intensely irritating.

  This evening I broached the question of Inclusion with him for the first time. I was highly circumspect, saying merely that I had been reading in an American journal about a new anti-depressant that seemed to be having phenomenal success with both exogenous and endogenous depressions.

  He rose to the bait effortlessly, saying that he would positively murder for such a drug – if it worked. The numbers of patients he saw with depressive symptoms have been steadily increasing over the last few years, and hardly any of them are responsive to treatment.

  Often these people appear psychologically blameless, but for all that they lapse into states of almost catatonic despair, neglecting themselves, their families, their jobs and careers. I put it to him that this was quite a reasonable response to living in the Thame area. We both laughed heartily at this.

  23rd December

  Anthony Bohm was up again last night for chess. He’s added to his repertoire of irritation. He now says, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ every time he moves a bishop. I steered the subject back gradually to the issue of medical ethics and what a general practitioner should be allowed to prescribe to his patients. I wasn’t disappointed.

  Of course, I knew already that Bohm had susceptibilities in this area. The Cryborg people’s decision to locate the Facility here was partly due to their having positively vetted a number of GPs in the Oxfordshire region who might be prepared – for various reasons – to engage in the illegal Inclusion trial. I’m glad that I approached Bohm first, though; my other options included a doctor in Abingdon who Cryborg discovered was an illegal abortionist and one in High Wycombe, who has more than a passing affection for diamorphine. But Bohm’s motivation, if I can activate it, will be altogether purer.

  Bohm told me that he thought it was a physician’s prerogative and duty to cast his net as wide as possible for the right treatment. He is quite a libertarian. He even intimated that the whole notion of medical licensing seemed to him an infringement of personal rights. He then began to speak of what I knew already – namely his involvement in the use of MDMA as a ‘marital aid’ in the early seventies.

  Bohm was then a psychiatric intern at a hospital in the Midlands. He took to using MDMA with a vengeance – and achieved impressive results. The problem was he himself also took to using MDMA with a vengeance – and achieved an impressive number of patient seductions. He missed being struck off by a whisker. Only the fact that none of his patients would tesify against him saved his neck. He left psychiatry and retrained as a GP.

  Of course, he didn’t admit all of this to me. He gave a sanitised version. But the fact that he was prepared to own up to prescribing MDMA at all shows that he is beginning to trust me.

  9th January

  The cyclotron is now fully installed at Worminghall and today some technicians came up with Gainsford to give me a demonstration.

  I cannot claim to understand much of the physical chemistry involved in isolating pure Inclusion from the cadaverous and faecal matter of the bee mites. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a cyclotron being used in any similar process before. Gainsford told me that it was a method he, together with the other research chemist
s at Cryborg, had hit upon by trial and error. Although the bee-mite powder is effective in its raw state, the quantities needed are large and the correct dosage difficult to determine. Gainsford also implied that they had had some problems with side-effects, but when I pressed him he wouldn’t elaborate.

  I watched as Gainsford used a micron scale to measure the correct quantity of mite powder to be placed in the cyclotron. Obviously, this was far too small to be seen by the naked eye. When the process was complete and Gainsford’s technicians were working with mine to make the fresh Inclusion up into a batch of pills, he told me that less than four hundred thousandths of a milligram was required to synthesise a thousand doses.

  11th January

  I can’t help being fascinated by the Inclusion. The pills Gainsford made are sitting in the lab looking utterly innocent. Looking, in fact, just like Amytriptaline, which is what most of the potential Inclusion guinea-pigs will be taking already.

  Every few hours I find myself drawn to the locked cabinet in the laboratory. I open it – and scrutinise the Inclusion – as if it could tell me something. The technical staff look at me curiously, but they know better than to ask me what I am doing.

  16th January

  What if Inclusion really does work? The results Gainsford has shown me from animal experimentation are remarkable. Rats learning to conga; gerbils apparently meditating after taking Inclusion; beagles that have been blinded with detergents as part of product testing completely rehabilitated by the drug, seemingly more engaged with the world than when they were sighted.

  The human data is equally impressive, but as yet Gainsford has only tested the drug on a few isolated individuals, catatonics and severe autistics at a London teaching hospital where Cryborg have some insidious pull. He hasn’t done a proper trial on either a non-depressive, or anyone with an orthodox clinical depression.

  I have a great inclination to take Inclusion myself. It’s not that I wish to claim some part in its discovery – should it prove to be an effective palliative. It’s more that I feel that the only way to justify the unethical character of the trial is for me to break down some of the traditional – and, I believe, artificial – distinctions between the scientist and the supposed objects of his study. Why not think of my brain as a sort of culture, and Inclusion as a bacterium growing within it. I would become another Alexander Fleming – but a Fleming of the psyche!

  20th January

  I have taken Inclusion. If I was expecting an experience like that of Hofmann, when he accidentally took LSD-25 and unleashed the psychedelic revolution, then I would have been disappointed. But, of course, I wasn’t, and was delighted.

  I took two Inclusion tablets at about five yesterday evening and then retired to my quarters to see what would happen. At first I sat, straining with all my mental apparatus to try and discern some effect. Nothing happened. After an hour I grew listless and distracted. I tidied up the place a bit – it was in a fearful mess. Another hour passed, still no effect.

  Eventually I grew tired, and quite frankly, bored. I turned on the television and slumped in front of it. For some reason there was nothing on but sport, which has never interested me. I found myself staring blankly at a Senior League Curling Championship, being broadcast from Peebles.

  If most sport leaves me cold – curling positively curdles my mind. I can see nothing more asinine than hefting the ‘stones’, which look like outsize doorstops, down an ice rink so that they get as close as possible to a fixed point. If bowls is boring, how much more boring can frozen bowls be! A bowls that tends towards absolute zero.

  Yet, after about ten minutes of staring sightlessly at the set, I found that I was actually beginning to become absorbed by the curling. I started noting the names of individual players and how well they were doing. I listened to what the commentator was saying about overall averages and positioning. My attention was focused on questions of technique: how much sweeping of the rink is necessary to ensure a good run for the stones; what the best wrist action is for releasing the stone cleanly; what the regulations are concerning equipment and appropriate clothing.

  When the programme eventually finished I was quite disconsolate. But my spirits rose when the announcer said that the next programme would be a film dramatisation of Betjeman’s ‘Summoned by Bells’. Then I pulled myself up short. Betjeman? It’s not that I exactly dislike his poetry, it’s just that I’m pretty well indifferent to it.

  It’s like that for so many things as far as I’m concerned. The idea of them interests me, and if my interest becomes positively engaged then I will take up with just about anything for a while, from car-boot sales to Kant. But I’m not one of these people who has ‘interests’, a real passion for model trains, or moutaineering. I have often thought that a suitable epitaph for me – given the gad-fly nature of my enthusiasms – would be ‘He had no interests but interest’. And yet here I was, looking forward to a film dramatisation of ‘Summoned by Bells’.

  It was the Inclusion. I realised this tremulously – if the drug was powerful enough to get me interested in curling and Betjeman, there was no telling what other properties it might have. I decided to run some simple psychodiagnostic tests on myself, perceptual, relational and conceptual, to check that I wasn’t becoming disoriented.

  I became so absorbed by the tests that I missed most of Summoned by Bells. But no matter – they told me what I already knew intuitively; that the only true effect of Inclusion was to make me feel more positively engaged with whatever I directed my attention to. I was experiencing no hallucinations, no distortions of space or time, no kinaesthesia or synaesthesia. My reality-testing was perfect and my intelligence quotient unaffected.

  Nor were there any perceptible toxic side-effects, or hangover. When I awoke the following morning I was quite clearly back to normal. When the alarm rang at 8 a.m. the thought of another working day was just as excruciatingly dull as ever.

  22nd January

  Bohm was up this evening. We played a few speed games. It helps if we play speed chess, because he doesn’t feel he has time to neigh, or say, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’ However, when he check mates, he picks up the piece of his that has mated my king and simulates intercourse between the two of them. He really is a most juvenile individual – if indispensable.

  As I anticipated I had no difficulty in encouraging him to try some Inclusion. I told him the effect the drug had had on me, and how completely localised and harmless it appeared to be, with no contra-indications. He took two pills and we went on playing.

  After about an hour Bohm went to the toilet. When he hadn’t returned after twenty minutes or so, I grew concerned. I went out into the corridor and found him standing there, rapt. Apparently, what had happened was that when he was in the toilet he became fascinated by the particulate structure of the fire-resistant tiles on the ceiling. He told me there was nothing disturbing about this, he merely found that the whole subject of fire-resistant tiles began to interest him. He admitted that he was one of those people who are normally fairly oblivious of their immediate environment, and that Mrs Bohm often complains when he doesn’t register some alteration she has made to the decoration of their home.

  He wanted to get back to the chess game, but felt that he really ought to undertake some sort of comparative study of the fire-resistant tiles in the Facility. He had visited the other buildings and spent some time studying their fire-resistant tiles, and then begun to work his way back towards my rooms. When I found him he was nearly finished. However, it’s an indication of just how benign and localised the effects of Inclusion are that when I suggested he cut this exercise short, he happily acceded.

  30th January

  Bohm has come up with the names of twenty of his patients who he anticipates having to prescribe anti-depressants to within the next month. In place of the tricyclics or SSRIs he will, of course, prescribe Inclusion. Another group of twenty patients who are currently on tricyclics or SSRIs will be put on to Inclusi
on; and a third group of ‘new depressives’ will be given a placebo.

  I will give the batches of prepared Inclusion to MacLachlan, the pharmacist. He will then make up the prescriptions in conformity with this schema. Bohm will, of course, have no idea which of his patients will be in receipt of Inclusion. His task is merely to record data as and when they present themselves to him. This is as reasonable a conformity to the principles of the double blind as we can manage under the circumstances.

  I did suggest to Gainsford that I introduce another level of blind to the trial, as Ford and I did for our now infamous double-double blind trial at my Concept House in the seventies. But Gainsford is too much of a plodder to recognise its brilliance and knocked me back.

  Gainsford is, needless to say, absolutely delighted with my progress on the trial. And he relayed a special message to me from the Cryborg Main Board, which said: ‘We are absolutely delighted.’ Gainsford hadn’t thought I would get to this stage for at least six months. In part this is fortuitous. If Bohm was an enthusiastic convert to the potential of Inclusion, MacLachlan is positively messianic about the stuff.

  He himself has been treated for depression on and off for a number of years. Although it’s a far from empirically sound assessment of the drug’s potential, its effect on MacLachlan was heartwarming. He came out to Worminghall with Bohm one night for a few hands of bridge. MacLachlan’s play was so diffident and unresponsive that he was hardly more proactive than the dummy.

  Bohm and I persuaded him to come out for two more sessions; and on the third we broached the issue of Inclusion. Initially, MacLachlan was sceptical – not suspicous, just sceptical. However, when Bohm and I reported our own experiences of the drug to him, he was eager to try it.