Double Blind

by Edward St. Aubyn

  ‘So far!’ said Hunter, with a sudden laugh. ‘Anyhow, it’s great to have you on the team, Lucy. I want you to select bulletproof projects to protect me from charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. I don’t want to be the Citizen Kane of science funding, hiring an opera house for my squawking, tone-deaf wife to caterwaul on stage, while the opera lovers heckle from the stalls.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Lucy. She decided that she would just let Hunter wash over her, agreeing now and again to whatever he said. In a way, Hunter was a very simple person, who just wanted to be right all the time. It was easier to play along while she sheltered in her little enclave of rubble. He spoke unstoppably all the way to Oxford. Occasionally, she would slip in a smile, an expression of wonder, or an approving comment. Hunter was sometimes charming, sometimes needlessly confrontational, but nothing he said or did could possibly compete with the horror of her existing situation. Still, on the surface of her mind, she could remember wanting him to like the visit she had organised.

  They were due to make an affable start by having a breakfast meeting with William Moorhead. Moorhead was a known ally and a business partner and despite his remark to Lucy – ‘In my opinion “Breakfast” and “Meeting” are two words that should never be seen side by side’ – he had of course agreed to come. Hunter was extremely genial to begin with, but when Moorhead said that the reasons for YouGenetics not having yet made a profit would ‘require at least two PhDs in biochemistry’ for Hunter to understand, there was a rapid shift in mood.

  ‘You know, Bill,’ said Hunter, ‘there are a hell of a lot of professors crowding this little planet of ours, and I could have landed a meteor of money in any one of their backyards and watched them fall to their knees to thank me for saving their children from eating another can of dog food for dinner, but I chose you, because Saul assured me that you were the guy with a database we could turn into a great company. And yet all you can think of doing is to insult my intelligence. Well, guess what, Professor? I bought half the fucking company! Don’t patronise the patron, Bill. In fact, read the contract. You didn’t want me to have more than fifty per cent, but as CEO of Digitas I control YouGenetics and since you can’t monetarise the data, I’ve given it to Lucy to run.’

  Hunter seemed to calm down after his explosion and began again in a gentler tone, albeit with a frighteningly accurate impersonation of a pompous English accent.

  ‘Now, if you want to wait for the next “tranche” of spare change to come in from your publishers, be their guest. But if you want to be my guest,’ he went on, returning to his own voice, while waving at the waiter to bring the bill, ‘learn some fucking manners!’

  ‘I will not be spoken to like that,’ said Moorhead vehemently.

  ‘What do you mean you “will not be spoken to like that”? You just were spoken to “like that”. Don’t they teach you logic in this place?’

  Hunter burst out laughing and slapped Moorhead on the back.

  ‘You can always buy the shares back, but then you’d have to sell Little Pisswell Manor, or whatever your Cotswold idyll is called. You wouldn’t get the Stamp Duty back and you’ve taken the roof off, so it’s not looking as imposing as when you bought it. Besides, your wife is knee deep in swatches; it’s her compensation for decades of humiliating infidelity. So why don’t you just make the company profitable, Brains?’

  As they hit the pavement outside the Randolph Hotel, Hunter appeared to be in a thoroughly cheerful mood.

  ‘He can add some PTSD to his dumpster of PhDs,’ he chuckled. ‘Was I too harsh on him, Lucy? Be honest with me.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Lucy, ‘he was insufferably condescending.’ Lucy had unobtrusively taken a second Xanax while the two men locked antlers over breakfast. She would have given the same answer even if Hunter had plunged a fork into the back of Moorhead’s hand.

  ‘Talking of PTSD,’ she went on, ‘I’ve been looking at the virtual reality therapy that’s being developed at the Psychiatry department, where we’re going next, and they’ve been having very positive results, not just with schizophrenia, which I know you have your doubts about as a profitable market, but also with PTSD, depression, attention deficit, obsessive compulsive disorder, social anxiety, certain kinds of autism…’

  ‘Sounds great,’ said Hunter. ‘I don’t know a single parent whose kids don’t have one or more of those problems – or a single kid who doesn’t have parents with one or more of those problems!’

  To Lucy’s amazement, Hunter was enthralled by the virtual reality demonstration. He watched various paranoid, phobic and anxious volunteers have fake encounters on fake trains with neutral or vaguely amicable avatars, and listened with interest to their reports on the benefits of the simulation. He also tried on a virtual reality headset himself and wandered around in front of a screen in a concrete basement enchanted, as anyone might be, to have his actual surroundings replaced.

  ‘That was a hell of a meeting, Lucy,’ said Hunter afterwards. ‘Thanks for setting it up. I see a lot of potential there.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Lucy, wondering whether she could make it through the rest of their schedule without passing out. ‘I can’t believe this is really happening.’

  8

  There were corrugated-iron shelters dotted around the Howorth estate and one of Francis’s jobs was to check them twice a week and record the number of grass snakes, common lizards, toads and slow worms he found hidden under the refugia. While he walked through the scrubland from one shelter to another, he tried to rest in the basic awareness out of which his attention, concentration, observation, judgement, discrimination, emotions and all other secondary states emerged. There was nothing wrong with the states themselves, in fact they were indispensable for navigating life and performing any specific task; it was being engrossed in them that was the problem. Of course, while he was counting the amphibians and reptiles he might find today he would be calculating, but the calculation was only an expression of the basic awareness, a wave on the water, not made of anything different from the rest of the sea, but taking on a particular and transient shape. Just as the American citizen’s famous entitlement to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ was in fact a guarantee of unhappiness, since a person can only pursue something that is missing, so he needed to rest in awareness, like a man lying on the grass, rather than pursue it, like a man getting up from the grass in order to search for somewhere to lie down. Nor did he have to think about awareness, it was the nature of his mind to be aware; to imagine that he was depriving himself of awareness because he stopped contemplating it as a precious object was like imagining that putting on a glove would rob him of his hand. As long as he recognised what he was doing while he was doing it, he could pay attention to where he was stepping, record the absence of any animals under the first shelter, and still be completely reconciled with the content of his own mind. Not that there was anything, strictly speaking, to be reconciled with, just a natural state to recognise; and yet a huge amount of work was needed before that naturalness seemed like anything but a dogma or an abstraction. His particular sensibility continually generated metaphors to remind himself of a natural state that should have come, well, more naturally, but in his case, came with a caravan of similes and arguments. As he walked to the next corrugated cover, he pictured a great sphere of stable and constant awareness surrounding the immediate scene, the world, and the universe, but then he abolished the image, since a sphere must have a centre and an edge, and awareness was limitless and centreless. Did the extravagance of that claim make him a panpsychist? Maybe, but at the moment he had no interest in placing himself on the troubled spectrum of consciousness studies, just in the bare fact that he was resting on the ground of consciousness, rather than impaled on its conceptual summit. He refreshed his attitude by remembering that the relationship of everything to everything else was constantly changing, as an earthworm in the ground beneath him digested another grain of soil, or he moved his hand to lift another cover, and that each reco
nfiguration was occurring for the first time. As he thought of this continuous arising of novelty out of the bedrock of habit, he immediately pictured heat waves shimmering on a desert road. Still, in the end, there was no need to cancel that image, it didn’t matter whether his mind was busy or relatively restful, it was the act of recognition that constituted the resting and generated a spontaneous sense of the weightlessness of the sensations and thoughts and metaphors and arguments, a sense of the ‘mirror-like nature of the mind’, its ability to reflect everything without the mirror itself being stained or cracked by the reflection. The ‘mirror’ in that comparison was, of course, another metaphor, but a self-cancelling one: in the ‘mirror’ of the mind the metaphor of the mirror didn’t stick or stay any more than anything else, although it could be gazed at credulously for as long as anyone chose to, like any other object. The point was not to assert beliefs, but to remove the rubble of delusion that constituted almost all beliefs. It was true that he had to start with the confidence that the mind, in its natural state, was clear and had no need to ‘believe in’ anything at all, since all knowledge was inferred from that clarity. What was unknowable fell away into irrelevance, or into ‘noble silence’, to put it more traditionally and politely, and what was known, in that clarity, could do without the cheerleaders of belief to kick and spin it into a frenzy of assertion. Lifting the second cover he found two slow worms, legless lizards with tiny eyes often mistaken for snakes. There was also one of the less and less common examples of ‘The Common Toad’ sitting, with warty imperturbability, under the same refugium. Just as it was almost irresistible to test an infant’s grip by gently holding its tiny hand, it was tempting to lift up one of the slow worms from the ground, knowing that it would coil itself around his finger in a series of tight rings, allowing him to form a momentary connection with another way of being and another set of instincts, but he left the slow worms undisturbed; he was connected to them enough already. It was good to see these protected species, which, like so many others, had started appearing at Howorth in growing numbers. They were, of course, other sentient beings, but he felt that his involvement with them was more fundamental than that. Unless consciousness was downloaded from another dimension, an idea that he found disagreeably Platonic, like a scented handkerchief of perfect forms pressed to the sensitive nostrils of a courtier picking his way through the open sewers of the actual world, then it must permeate everything. Space, instead of being a desolate interval between pinpricks of sentience, must be the conscious medium in which these more obvious forms of consciousness were concentrated. If matter was not inherently conscious, then one had to fall back on the official story that the pinpricks of sentience existed in an otherwise inanimate universe thanks to a mind-numbingly long poker game in which the elements of the Periodic Table had been dealt out again and again until one bit of deadness haphazardly acquired the Full House of life, and then only a few million hands later, the Royal Flush of consciousness. This Royal Flush Theory was defended by three rowdy musketeers: Randomness, Complexity and Emergence. Hurrah! They came with all the plumage and the inane bravado of swashbuckling heroes who love nothing better than to get themselves into an impossible position: fighting for reductionism’s attempt to subsume the irreducible. Despite all their rooftop antics, the only proposition they really had to offer was that luck multiplied by time transubstantiated matter. It was like claiming that if a child played Lego for long enough her mother might come down one day and find a blue whale emerging from the carpet. After the initial struggle to get her smartphone back from the whale in which enough consciousness had emerged for it to google the location of the nearest beach, and after telling her daughter to please stop playing with that Lego set, a certain perplexity might set in about how matter had rearranged itself so unexpectedly. The authoritative answer would be that it had become complex thanks to Complexity, and that once Complexity passed a critical threshold, consciousness emerged thanks to Emergence, and that it was forbidden to think that consciousness was involved at any earlier stage because Randomness had been placed there to banish superstition. This explanation might not strike the puzzled parent as entirely persuasive. It was, after all, a creation myth with many rivals. The ferocious Yanomami of Amazonia, for instance, believed that the world had been sneezed out by a god who had taken a high dose of the snuff to which the tribe was itself coincidentally addicted, and that his chosen people were leading their violent lives in a jungle of divine mucus. Christians believed in an omnipotent artist, who tossed off his masterpiece in six days, without accepting any editorial guidance, except from his most ardent enemy who suggested, after a wearisome pilot episode of Innocence, that introducing Evil would help to boost the viewing figures. And so on and so forth. Science had swept away these childish stories of sneezing gods and dreaming gods, of divine artists and divine sperm, of golden rain and copulating swans, in order to place some thoroughly sanitised but equally non-explanatory concepts at the inception of its narratives: biology had chemistry’s random poker game to thank for its existence, while physics had ‘Initial Conditions’ presiding tautologically over the microseconds before the Big Bang embarked on the longest story ever told: fourteen billion years of collisions. As a code word for the inscrutability of origins, ‘God’ at least had the advantage of brevity, rather than rambling on for six syllables, like the equally mysterious ‘Initial Conditions’. According to Occam’s Razor, the minimalist aesthetic that was supposed to adjudicate over intellectual life for the rest of time, like a fashion editor in a black pencil skirt who simply refuses to retire, decade after decade, despite the screams of protest from an art department longing for a little moment of Baroque excess and a splash of colour, the parsimony of that single syllable should have won the day. How an opaque giant like Complexity was supposed to sit comfortably on Occam’s Razor was another question. Presumably, Complexity was sometimes the most parsimonious explanation, although in the case of consciousness, it explained nothing at all; taking parsimony a little too far, even from Occam’s austere perspective. Oh no, Francis scolded himself for getting engrossed in the rapid internal murmur of an imaginary debate. He was supposed to be resting in How It Is, rather than generating opinions about How It Began, a subject to which the only coherent response was silence. He didn’t have to have an argument, let alone win it, nor did he even have to stop having an argument, if it came to that, he just had to recognise what he was doing while he was doing it. Looking down at the slow worms twisting on the ground, he remembered that they had the strange ability to autotomise: to break off their tail in order to escape a predator. He broke off his own tale, without falling deeper into the trap of self-reproach, lowered the lid carefully back over the refugium, and made a record of what he had seen. As he continued on his walk, the imaginary debate faded away. He hadn’t yet told Olivia about the meditative aspect of his life. She would gradually find out as they grew closer. He was in no hurry to explain or justify or be cross-examined. The drive behind his patchy practice was an obsessive enquiry into whether freedom meant anything at all, not just freedom ‘from’ something (hunger, torture, depression) or freedom ‘to’ do something (debate, vote, protest) but freedom itself, beheading the Medusa of determinism before it petrified the world. For a true determinist, events only seemed unpredictable because there wasn’t enough information about them; if all the causes and conditions leading up to them were known, they would be just as predictable as oxidisation turning iron rusty or copper green: it was only ignorance that made accidents seem different from decisions, and habits from spontaneous actions; they were all in fact caught in a continuum of inevitability, like a ripple of tumbling dominos. There was something superficially impressive about the grinding logic of determinism in the sense that the present, as Nabokov had said, is ‘the top layer of the past’, and since the past is defined by the fact that it cannot be changed, the present is the necessary product of that irrefutable model. Nevertheless, it was a model and not an experience. Wha
t did that ‘top layer’ consist of? Was it a layer of sand waiting to be trampled into sandstone, or was it the cusp of an unprecedented wave arising from an essentially impersonal ocean of awareness in which the neurotic habits of any individual could be drowned, as long as that person was ready to surrender them? The way the word ‘determined’ denoted the complete absence of volition, as well as a special abundance of volition, was what Francis thought of as Schrodinger’s homonym, sitting in a semantic box, not knowing whether it meant something or its opposite, whether it was dead or alive, existing in a determined universe it was determined to subvert. Like the cat in Schrodinger’s famous thought experiment, the homonym was in a thought experiment of its own, and whether it referred to a world that was inevitable or volitional depended, in this experiment, on whether the observer was attending to causality or awareness. Just as physics had offered a legalistic description of the world on the one hand, including relativity and thermodynamics and, on the other hand, a probabilistic one generated by quantum mechanics, and the descriptions could not be integrated, unless they turned out to be two aspects of something more fundamental, the argument between free will and determinism could never be resolved while the antagonists insisted on referring to different fields of knowledge. Francis’s passion for freedom might have been determined by his conditioning, but wherever it came from, the project had to begin, modestly enough, by training a mind that was able to place its attention where it chose. Oh dear, he had drifted off again into another argument. Where had he been? What did it matter where he had been? His subject wasn’t one line of thought or another, it was seeing all the lines of thought for what they were as they crossed his mind. Still, yes, Olivia. She had come to stay again and although she had only left that morning, he already missed her. Their microbiomes, those colonies and clouds of microorganisms that inhabited and surrounded each person’s body, were no doubt still mingling ‘without obstruction of limb or joint’, but unlike Milton’s angels, he quite wanted the limbs and joints back, as well as the conversation. On Saturday night, they had continued to discuss the complications of her adoption. It turned out that when Karen had wanted to give Keith away as well as Olivia, Henry had threatened her not only with physical violence but also with exotic metaphysical retributions, about which he was sinisterly well informed, thanks to his fervent, if narrow, grasp of religion, focused almost exclusively on damnation and the tortures of hell. He was particularly preoccupied by the fact that suicide resulted in damnation, and therefore offered no escape. This thought, said Karen, was probably the only thing that kept such a tormented man alive. She wondered every day about going to the police but felt that her claim to have been impregnated by a vicious lunatic was probably too banal to command any attention, without at least a fractured skull to support it. Attitudes to domestic violence were more laissez-faire in those days. Henry was adept at twisting Karen’s arm or half stifling her with a pillow without leaving any signs of his attacks. He basked in the confidence of having established that he was capable of anything, reframing his current nastiness, which he alternated with shows of clinging sentimentality, as a form of heroic self-restraint that it would be reckless to push any further. Besides, Karen was desperate to get her teaching qualification and since Henry worked as a night porter in a hospital, she saw very little of him, and at least knew that Keith would not be alone during the day. She inevitably became attached to her son, but at the same time resented and, to her horror, even hated him for being part of the trap she was in. The neighbours complained that he cried all day long, and yet by the time she came home he was listless and sleepy, a state that was eventually explained by the empty bottle of gin she found one evening next to the tin of formula. She was too frightened to confront Henry about it, and in a guilty way grateful for the hours of rest it gave her before Keith woke screaming in the middle of the night. She told Olivia that she bitterly regretted forcing herself to believe the increasingly far-fetched mishaps that Henry described in order to explain Keith’s bruises and, when he was eight months old, his broken arm. When she found cigarette burns, individually placed, on Keith’s back and legs, she couldn’t deceive herself any longer. The next Sunday Henry had planned a day out in Kent with his hard-bitten old mother, a passionate fan of capital punishment, who felt that far from being abolished, the death penalty should have expanded, like a nuclear explosion, beyond treason and murder, through burglary and pickpocketing, until it finally engulfed and incinerated the little brats who had the cheek to drop sweet papers on the pavements of Ramsgate when she was out with her trolley shopping for teacake. She was the only person Henry was frightened of and Karen knew that he wouldn’t dare cancel the trip. She ran the thermometer under the hot tap and claimed that Keith had a temperature and regrettably would not be able to visit his dear old gran. The moment Henry left, she started packing everything she could fit into the two available suitcases and escaped, in a fever of anxiety, to a women’s refuge in Chiswick. The staff at the refuge helped her secure a restraining order against Henry, and she negotiated through lawyers not to press charges if he agreed not to oppose Keith’s adoption. The police told Henry that they had detailed evidence, including photographs of Keith’s burnt body, and that if he ever bothered Karen in any way, they would be delighted to send the evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service; in fact, they wanted to lock up a bastard like him right now, but were constrained by Karen’s refusal to collaborate. It had worked, and Henry had disappeared from Karen’s life, as had Keith, who was eighteen months old when she was finally able to hand him over for adoption. She told Olivia that she had never seen him again and didn’t even know whether he had been adopted or stayed in an institution, but that she was periodically overcome by an ungovernable sense of sadness when she thought about his early life and was haunted by the idea that her refusal to help prosecute Henry might have put other women and children in danger. Francis had listened to Olivia’s story while they were again lying together on the sofa staring at the fire. He felt its horror, but also its remoteness: Olivia had never met Keith ex utero and almost certainly never would, and she had come to the decision that an annual visit to Karen was enough to acknowledge her connection with a person whose motives she could now understand and forgive, but for whom there was no need to exaggerate her affection. The immediate point, thought Francis, as he squatted down to lift the cover of the third refugium, was that he and Olivia had gone through the ritual exchange of childhood stories that new lovers make, and it had only drawn them closer. In a brief short circuit between his current action and Olivia’s story, he half-expected to find Karen and Keith hiding under the corrugated lid, but instead of human refugees he saw a tangle of young grass snakes, with their distinctive yellow collars, knotted on the ground. They had probably been conceived in the heat of July and born quite recently from their leathery eggs. The grass snake was a protected species as well. Perhaps it would soon be redundant to bother with the words ‘protected’, ‘declining’, ‘endangered’ or ‘extinct’, since it would apply to every animal that was not a member of a billionaire clan like jellyfish, which seemed set to achieve a monopoly of the oceans, or the rat and cockroach families which flourished in the filth and warmth of great cities, but at least here at Howorth, in this little patch of Sussex, things were on the move, and nature was showing its regenerative power, not just in the return of vulnerable turtle dove, after its annual migration through Southern Europe, in an avian equivalent of the Battle of the Somme, past crowds of exploding shotguns in Greece and Italy, France, Malta and Spain, or the return of the thrilling liquid song of the nightingale, but also in less visible ways, in the density of earthworms underground, no longer sliced or exposed by the plough, or writhing their way through soil fatally drenched in pesticides, but renewing and fertilising the earth on which he was now kneeling with his notebook, admiring the grass snakes. The earth was reviving, but it was also resting after years of exploitation and he was resting too, after years of pursuing happiness
, resting on the ground of awareness.