As a physician under the Baronetcy Alimentation Act, Dr. Bajwa would normally be accorded a nonhereditary peerage, but he hadn’t saved nearly enough money for even one of the new “baby-baronetcies,” as they were known, and the Bajwas lacked connections. (The physician’s own younger brother, Banee, a former republican activist, had overdosed on heroin years ago, despite all his family’s effort to “sort Banee out,” as their father put it, and this had marked the whole clan as rather dubious.) Moreover, Baj far too often spoke his mind and showed benevolence for the poor — ruinous habits under Henry IX, or “Harry9,” as Indigents called him.
Baj’s casual denunciations, spoken among supposed friends, of NHS Élite’s emphasis on palliative neurology — in which the relief of pain supplanted research and one-on-one care — had got him assigned to an NHS Élite surgery in offices across the Holloway Road from a betting shop and a Szechuan masturbation stand. It was a far cry from the wealthier central London districts, where serene greens for spawn-ball — a slow-paced kind of tennis with genomic, hour-lifetime lagomorphic spawn-balls carefully “played” across a grassy court — art galleries, duty-reduced luxury shops, and some of the new schools for women’s etiquette had all taken root.
“Your misapprehensions,” he said to Cuthbert one day. “Listen. If you don’t take your meds as prescribed, and you don’t keep off the Flōt — Cuthbert, listen, you listen to me—this is the price. That’s one thing I must say. And that’s just one. You know what I mean, surely. If you do something foolish, in public, you’re going to find yourself wearing a hood, my friend. Or going for a burton.”*
“I don’t care,” said Cuthbert. “At least it’s not Whittington.”
“You have no idea what you mean. There is. nothing. really. wrong with Whittington,” the doctor said, wincing a bit. As the last decent free hospital in London, and the only remaining NHS Élite site for addiction treatment, the Whittington Hospital, close by in Archway, was scandalously overstretched.
“Whittington doesn’t work. It’s hopeless. I can’t understand why King Harry’s let it go this way. It’s not much better off than banjaxed in a Nexar hood, is it?”
“You are. The hood is. the end. Of everything. Whittington can be a start. There’s an effort there. There’s hope. A hope and a prayer.”
Cuthbert blinked a few times and smiled in a strange, sour way. “The most I’ll ever do is get a few days past the first Flōt withdrawal. I admit they’re very clever at the Whit, I s’ppose. And I feel like that lot. loiks me. In their way.”
“See? You have friends there, thank you,” said the doctor. “You go to Whittington. I’ll get you in, fast-tracked. Anytime. At a moment’s notice. And why worry about the second withdrawal? That’s years away.”
Flōt’s bell-curved dual-withdrawal syndrome arose from its unique twin-cycle neurotoxic effect on the brain’s serotonergic system. Unlike most abstinence-based drug recoveries, in Flōt recoveries the peril went from bad to better to lethal as years clean passed. The most recovering addicts could hope for were some comparatively peaceful years between first and second withdrawals, typically about ten to fifteen, followed by a dark time of anger, insomnia, and floridly hypomanic delirium that marked second withdrawal’s arrival.
Cuthbert leaned his chair back on its hind legs for a moment, then brought it down. He tilted his head slightly, listening. He crossed his legs and gazed upward, smiling more thoroughly now, as if staring at the credits screen of a deeply gratifying film.
“I wish I could tell you more, but it’s not possible,” he said. “The animals, see. Again. I hear them. Foxes now. They want to say. thank you? To all the people in this dirty owd town.” Cuthbert chuckled a bit. “Thank you! Ta! Funny, eh? ‘Cheers!’ What’s there to thank?” Cuthbert’s smile fell. His eyes glistened. “Them foxes are innocent — and foolish. Thoi’ve no bloody idea.”
The doctor noticed a tremor in the aged man’s lips as he spoke. He took a relatively small daily dose of the ancient, crude antipsychotic med Abilify, in a desultory manner, but his massive Flōt intake negated most of its benefits.
“What makes them innocent?”
“They trust us,” said Cuthbert. “They oughtn’t.”
Dr. Bajwa started on the desk with his finger, making tiny circles. Then he began tapping powerfully — hammering, really.
“This is only your brain — and the Flōt.” Tap, tap, tap. “You need to be careful. about what you say. You understand?”
“I try to be careful,” said Cuthbert. “But the animals are speaking to me. for a reason. It’s something I’ve waited for my whole life. This was supposed to happen, see?”
The doctor’s knowledge of what could happen to Cuthbert in the clutches of NHS’s mass psychotherapeutic division, EquiPoise, made it hard to give him the space he needed to talk freely. He feared openness. Even very casual talk therapy was considered a luxury reserved for the new aristocracy. EquiPoise’s Psyalleviators, or P-levs, whose official role was to battle the era’s viral cults and political radicals on behalf of the king, had convoluted the simplest rites of doctorly care among the masses.
There were smaller, new nuisances in Dr. Bajwa’s life, too. Unusually, lately, he felt easily winded and kept getting bronchitis; his boyfriends kept dumping him for blue-eyed English boys; his family criticized him for not “aspiring” enough; his friends were all moving to the controversial new colonies in Antarctica. But the way Harry9’s government had come between him and his patients — this, more than any other problem in his life, incensed him. Stunningly, despite all the cruelties Indigents such as Cuthbert suffered under Harry9, Cuthbert himself — and he wasn’t alone among Indigents — held the monarchy in the highest regard, and he could be quite jingoistic.
“There’s not one thing on earth that’s not better in England,” he would sometimes slur at Baj. “We’ve got the best cats — and best football. And good ’ole Harry’s the best of all the bloody bunch.”
Such statements quietly infuriated Baj, yet something about Cuthbert’s blend of good-heartedness, reactionary nationalism, and almost artistic grandiosity also, despite his knowing better, mesmerized him. He wanted to understand it.
The doctor one day had looked up from his antique linen-paper notebook and smiled purposefully at Cuthbert in the consultation room.
“O-T-T-E-R-S,” said Baj aloud, writing each letter with a strong hand in black ink with a big gold-plated fountain pen. The pen was inscribed with Sanskrit script that translated as, “Only action will define us.” Unlike most of his colleagues, few of whom knew how to use a pen, he loathed the trendy SkinWerks digital aerosols that let one write and read on the skin.
“Why otters? Why them?”
Cuthbert looked askance. “They’re. very godly creatures, too. Do you want to know why?”
“Yes, I do.” Bajwa tried to speak in a friendly but resolved tone, but a trace of irritability crept in. “I certainly do. Now wait just a moment. ”
He took his stethoscope from his desk drawer.
“Let me,” he said, unbuttoning the top of Cuthbert’s shirt and deftly, with two fingers, holding the stethoscope’s diaphragm against Cuthbert’s chest. He heard the tattered hwoot-dub hwoot-dub of his murmur. The fact was, the fat old man — six foot four and twenty-two stone — could drop dead at any moment.