by J. S. Monroe
It’s a measure of the paranoia in those days that we had to resort to such lengths in order to carry out tests on animals (mainly canines), but that’s how things were.
I managed to get into the building this afternoon through the broken window, but there was still a heavy padlock on the floor panel preventing me from gaining access to the basement. I’m planning to go back there tomorrow, on my daily cycle ride (these days A expects me to be gone for at least three hours), with a pair of bolt cutters in my rucksack. I’m hoping there’s still some equipment in the basement – we left there in a hurry, I remember.
Rosa’s been hanging from the shelf for six minutes now, the normal duration for the tail-suspension test. It’s not dignified: she should be in a proper lab. At first, her body wriggled and writhed, but now she is still, shrewdly conserving energy, or limp with despair, depending on your point of view.
What we do know is that antidepressants decrease the duration of immobility, making the test another useful method of primary screening. But there’s only so much you can do with animals. Everyone agrees there are limits to the sort of psychiatric problems that can be modelled in a mouse: complex human bipolar disorders and schizophrenia are far removed from the ‘state of despair’ that a rodent feels in a beaker of water.
It was Protagoras who said that ‘man is the measure of all things’. He had a point. Unfortunately, clinical trials of antidepressants in humans have long been plagued by controversy. Their efficacy is best demonstrated in the severely depressed, but such people are rarely recruited for trials. Instead, tests are carried out on patients with only mild to moderate conditions. The placebo response in depressed patients is also quite high, partially negating the treatment’s effectiveness. The result? Big Pharma has put on hold much of its research into antidepressants.
I quoted Protagoras in my resignation letter, but senior management didn’t want to know, even if a rethink of first-in-human trials is the only thing that’s going to save the antidepressant industry.
I still stand by the basic premise that chronic high stress is a key component of most depression. And if, like me, you want to validate a next-generation antidepressant that you’ve been working on for almost all of your career, one that you know will transform the lives of millions of depressed people, then human patients, rather than rodents, need to be put into high-stress situations before being administered trial drugs. Big Pharma missed a trick in Guantánamo. I won’t.
Rosa’s eyes have closed.
81
It happened so quickly: the mistake.
He had only been in my cell a few minutes, long enough to remove my chains and administer the medication he always gives me before the session begins, when his mobile phone rang. I couldn’t hear what the other person was saying, but it made him angry. So angry.
He left almost immediately, the door snapping shut behind him, but there was no sound of a padlock, no scraping noise. He always locks the cell door and something is dragged across it. But not today. And he forgot to chain me back up, too.
I waited five minutes before I moved, 300 seconds. He’s done this before: tested me. On the last occasion I was left unchained, he kept the door open and disappeared. After two hours, I still hadn’t moved from the floor. I had no desire to escape. None. When he returned, he congratulated me, gave me some fresh food – rice, chicken – and told me I was an example to other prisoners, a credit to science: ‘a paradigm of learned helplessness’.
Today, though, something is different. I know it. He didn’t mean to leave me like this. I’ve changed into the clothes he brought me a few months earlier, the ones I’ve been keeping for this moment: the Ali Baba trousers and fleece.
He’s made a mistake. There’s no other explanation. Now I must run.
82
‘A my, it’s me, Jar. Did I wake you?’
‘I got your text. I was up anyway.’
It’s 3 a.m. and Jar had hoped that would be the case. She’d once told him about her insomnia, when the pills wear off or after she has secretly failed to take them. Jar is still in Max’s office in Canary Wharf. He’d texted her a few minutes earlier, asked if she was awake, if he could call her. She had texted back straight away, told him to ring in ten minutes.
‘Is Martin with you?’
‘He’s upstairs. Asleep.’
She sounds disconnected, unconcerned by being rung at this hour of the night. It’s six days since Jar saw her in Greenwich Park, when she hadn’t been looking well. He takes a deep breath, wonders where to begin, how much to tell her. He needs to get hold of Martin’s journal, the one he mentioned in the comment he posted about the torture video, in which he’s ‘too honest about his Seligman experiments’.
‘I need you to do something for me,’ Jar says.
‘Are you OK? Where have you been? You sound—’
‘I’m fine. I was away.’ Now’s not the time to tell her about seeing Rosa in Cornwall. He doesn’t know how she will react. ‘Have you ever been into Martin’s shed?’
‘His shed? No, why?’
‘I need you to go there now.’
‘He doesn’t allow anyone inside.’
‘Is it locked?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you know where the key is?’
‘He hides it in a tankard on the kitchen dresser, but I—’
‘I need you to go down there.’
Amy pauses. Jar can hear her breathing.
‘Amy?’
‘What is it, Jar?’
He wonders if she has had the same thoughts as him, buried, never acknowledged.
‘I just need you to look for something.’
‘I can’t do this. He’ll go crazy if he finds out.’
‘He’s asleep.’
‘Is this about Rosa?’ Amy is beginning to sound more engaged, Jar thinks. No need to tell her about his worst fears, not yet.
Two minutes later, Amy says that she is standing outside the front door of the shed, at the bottom of the garden.
‘What’s this about, Jar?’
‘Please, just unlock the door.’
‘You’re frightening me.’
Jar’s frightening himself. Canary Wharf is a lonely place at night. He hears her fiddle with the padlock, imagines her hands trembling, struggling to see what she’s doing in the darkness, looking back up at the house in case Martin stirs.
‘I’ve never been in here before, tell me that’s weird.’
‘A man’s shed is his castle,’ Jar says. And maybe his prison cell, he thinks. ‘But yes, it’s weird.’
‘What am I looking for?’
Jar tries to picture the scene. He knows he should focus on the computer, get Amy to search for Martin’s journal, but he can’t stem the flow of thoughts. There might be a basement in the shed, or a hidden room, concreted over. A place where Martin makes his films, where…
‘Tell me what you see,’ he says.
‘Some garden chairs, his croquet set.’
‘Is there just one room?’
‘There’s another, at the back.’
‘How many keys are on the ring?’
‘Two.’
‘Open the second door.’
Jar waits, listens to the sound of a padlock being sprung open.
‘Are you in?’
‘There’s a strange red light in here.’
‘What else?’
‘A desk, a computer, some TV monitors. That’s for the security CCTV. The cameras will have picked me up coming down here, Jar. There’s one on the outside of the shed, and one on the back of the house, the back door.’
‘He’ll only look at the tapes if he suspects a security breach.’ Jar’s bluffing, but he can’t think of anything else to say. CCTV tapes are usually wiped after a few days, aren’t they? Unless there’s been an incident.
‘I want to go back to the house, Jar. I shouldn’t be in here.’
‘Tell me what else you see. Is there a door, a trap door?’ He
knows she should be searching the computer, but he can’t help himself.
‘There’s a wine cellar somewhere, he mentioned it once. When I was drinking all his best claret. I can see a panel on the floor.’
Jar’s heart is racing as he pictures the scene: Rosa, confined in a dark space, terrified, out of her mind.
‘Can you lift it up?’
‘There’s a box of files half covering it.’
‘Try, please.’
He hears Amy put the phone down, move the box, but then there’s silence.
‘Amy?’ Has she found her?
‘Martin’s up.’ Amy is whispering.
‘Can he see you from the house? Is there a window?’
‘No. Not in this room. I can see him on the screen. There’s a camera on the landing.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He’s coming down the stairs. He’ll kill me, Jar, if he finds me out here. You don’t know Martin.’
‘You need to lift up the panel,’ Jar says. ‘The wine cellar door. Tell me what you see.’
Another pause.
‘I’m lifting it up.’
Jar closes his eyes. ‘What can you see?’
‘It’s just some wooden boxes of wine. Lots of boxes. What am I looking for, Jar?’
Martin’s her uncle, Jar tells himself. John Bingham’s a common enough name.
‘Are you sure there’s nothing else?’
He wouldn’t keep her there, not so close to the house.
‘Nothing. I’m sure. I want to get out of here, Jar. He’s downstairs now, in the kitchen.’
‘Lock up and then go for a walk, away from the shed. You’ve just gone for a night-time stroll, unable to sleep.’
‘OK.’ Jar’s never heard Amy sound so scared. ‘He’s going upstairs again – to his bedroom. We’re sleeping separately.’
Jar sighs with relief and then remembers the computer. ‘There’s one other thing. Is the computer on?’
A pause. ‘Sleep mode, I think.’
‘Can you activate it?’
‘Jar, I want to go back to the house.’
‘Please?’
Silence. He thinks he can hear Amy suppress a sob.
‘You’re doing brilliantly. Is it a Mac?’ Jar asks.
‘Yes.’
‘There might be a password.’
‘I’m looking at the desktop now. I think he left in a hurry. His desk is a mess.’
‘Can you search for the word “journal”?’
‘OK.’
‘Anything?’
‘I’m no good with computers.’
‘You’re better than you think. Is there a file called “Journal”?’ Jar tells himself not to be so impatient. Amy’s taking a big risk for him. For Rosa.
‘Nothing’s coming up.’
‘Try “diary”.’
‘No.’
Jar knew it wouldn’t be easy. He thinks of key words or phrases that Martin might have used in his journal. If he was recording everything, did Martin write about Jar’s visits to Cromer?
‘Try searching for “peyote”.’ He can hear Amy typing.
‘Lots of files are coming up – what’s a peyote?’
‘Dried cactus. Try “Jar + peyote”,’ Jar says, remembering the conversation he’d had with Martin about writing, drugs and the Beat Generation.
‘It’s found one file with those words in it,’ Amy says. ‘A Word doc called “My Struggle”.’
‘That’s it,’ Jar says, remembering Martin’s interest in Knausgaard’s autobiographical novels of the same name. Nothing if not ambitious.
‘Should I open it?’
‘Not so easy.’ Jar assumes that Martin has encrypted the journal. Carl, or maybe Anton, if he ever resurfaces, should be able to decode it for him.
‘Jar, I think it’s already open, on the screen.’
‘Are you sure?’ Jar’s palms begin to moisten. If the document is open, it won’t need decoding.
‘It’s off the bottom of the screen, but I can drag it up.’
‘Be careful.’ Martin must have been writing his journal this evening, left it open. Jar doesn’t want Amy to alter the document in any way, leave any trace of her visit – or look at it.
‘He’s written about Strelka, my beautiful dog,’ Amy says. ‘The day she died.’
‘Don’t read it, Amy, please,’ Jar urges, trying to stay calm. ‘I want you to listen to me, very carefully.’
He proceeds to talk Amy through how to open Firefox and log into her email account (Martin is signed into his own email in Chrome). He then gets her to copy and paste the entire contents of Martin’s journal into a message to him, before asking her to copy some blank text to cover her tracks and delete the journal from the copy-and-paste memory.
‘Now log out. That’s important,’ Jar says, after her email has dropped into his inbox.
‘OK.’
‘And quit Firefox, drag the Word window back to where it was, put the computer back to sleep.’
‘Done.’
‘Thank you, Amy.’
‘What’s this about, Jar?’
Jar takes a deep breath. He knows he owes Amy an explanation. ‘I saw Rosa. I found her four days ago in Cornwall.’
83
North Norfolk, 2012
I’ve been coming out here every day for a week now and the lab is finally ready. The bolt cutters made short work of the old padlock on the floor-panel door, and I’ve installed a new one that should be harder to break. I’ve also sealed off the smashed window, screwed down the catches so they can’t be opened, and put a new lock on the main entrance.
The lab is in relatively good condition, given it hasn’t been used for more than ten years. The white paint might be peeling, but there’s still a central experiment area, surrounded by worktops, and an operating table in the middle. Off to the side is a post-mortem room and at the back there’s a small incinerator, a washbasin and lavatory.
There’s no mains electricity – it must have been disconnected years ago – but there’s a sunpipe that casts an eerie, pale light. We used it to keep certain animals synched with daylight. There’s also more ventilation than there would have been when it was an air-raid shelter – vents were put in around the ceiling, again to make sure the animals stayed alive.
I’ve set up a video camera in the main area as there’s a lot of interest in learned helplessness from colleagues on the dark web, following suggestions that it was used to justify interrogation techniques at Guantánamo. Yesterday I announced that shortly I hope to be re-creating a version of the original experiments on dogs carried out by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. I’ll be low-res live-streaming to a select few. Although there’s no Wi-Fi here, there’s a 3G mobile signal. The dark web caters for niche preferences even more than the surface web: sixties animal testing meets CIA enhanced interrogation techniques, with a twist of BDSM. Talk about a long tail.
This is what I posted today in one of the secure Tor forums that I’ve come to trust:
Learned helplessness is a condition in which an animal – or human – becomes passive in the face of painful or unpleasant stimuli. Concluding that they have no control over their environment, they lose all desire and incentive to escape. For various misguided ‘ethical’ reasons, the experiments, pioneered in the 1960s by Martin Seligman, have not been continued in recent years, despite their efficacy in antidepressant drug testing.
An old colleague soon replied – a lab technician I haven’t heard from in a while. He was ‘let go’ too, for similar fabricated reasons. And he’s taken up cycling – we’re going to meet up, ride out together. The two of us used to conduct our own learned helplessness experiments at HQ, adapting Seligman’s canine tests for rodents and other animals, but when the antis started to make life tricky for us, we moved the more sensitive work from Norwich to the facility out here.
It’s strange being back, but I also feel very at home. Old habits die hard. The daily
precautions I take in order not to be seen entering the airfield – I leave my bike locked up in the woods and walk the rest via an overgrown footpath that runs along the southern perimeter – are not so different from the measures we all used to adopt at the lab (different routes to work each day, back doors, false commutes). And if A’s suspicious of my prolonged absences from the house, she’s not showing it.
All I need now is an animal on which to conduct my experiments.
84
Jar gets up from Max’s desk, his legs heavy with adrenaline, and walks over to the window, looking out at the neighbouring Docklands towers. It will soon be dawn, but not yet: the night feels darker than ever.
He’s been reading Martin’s journal for the past half an hour: his early scribblings about ‘first person on steroids’ writing styles, his own visit when they discussed George Smiley, peyote and beatniks, the drunken conversation with Kirsten, and now the lab out in the Norfolk countryside, his trips there disguised as long-distance bike rides.
Is Amy reading it at the same time? Did she go into her sent folder and open the email? Jar can’t get out of his head Martin’s throwaway line about the benzos he’s been prescribing her for the past twenty years: it’s made things simpler in the bedroom. What’s he been doing to Amy? And is it safe for her to be on her own with him? Jar knows that he should call the police, or at least social services, but he has an overriding compulsion to find out everything first.
He’s about to read another entry when he hears a noise in the corridor outside, like a door closing. He assumes it’s the cleaners, but there’s something about the sound, the suggestion of force, that makes him stand up and go to the door. He’s just over-tired, he thinks.
He walks out into the empty corridor. After listening for a few seconds, he turns to go back into Max’s office, but then the double doors at the far end of the corridor swing open and two cleaners walk through, pushing a trolley loaded with mops and buckets. They are both Hispanic, a man and a woman, in their forties.
