I gave him his bath, talking to him sensibly as if he could understand what I was saying, a technique one of the psychiatrists had suggested. I had hoped that sooner or later at least some of my words or even the tone of my voice might awaken just the slightest response in him. That evening he’d gone from hyperactive to passive and withdrawn. The bathing went without incident. Joanne was watching television.
Earlier he had refused to eat. I thought he might now be hungry. When I had got him into his pyjamas and dressing gown I led him into the kitchen and hauled him up onto a chair by the table. He sat with one arm rigidly extended across the table and the other loosely by his side, his head turned sideways and eyes staring at the blank wall. I opened a can of mandarin orange slices and spooned some into his plastic dish. It would have been wildly optimistic to have said that my son liked mandarin orange slices; all I knew after eight years was that often it was easier to feed him these than most other things. So I placed the dish in front of him and held the spoon up with two slices of orange on it, and spoke his name, tugging gently at his extended arm. Sometimes he would take the spoon; sometimes he had to be fed.
Now a terrible, horrifying thing happened. He turned his head and looked down at his arm. I took my hand away. His eyes flickered over the orange slices and back to his arm. The arm, still rigid, lifted, stopped, banged down on the table, lifted, banged down again, and again. He looked at it with a detached curiosity. Then he frowned, and a determined fierceness went across his face for a moment. His arm stopped banging and rested tense on the tabletop. He seemed to concentrate on it. My hand, holding the spoon, trembled. His arm relaxed and lay soft on the table, fingers uncurling. Then it moved towards the dish and stopped. It went no further. The determined look faded from his face. In a sudden movement he jerked his head back and stared straight at me. It was a gaze focused for the first time directly on my eyes, totally conscious and aware, only achieved with enormous effort. The message was unmistakeable, of immense pathos; it sprang from some trapped and defeated source of will inside him which said in effect, I don’t know why my arm behaves like that, I don’t know why I am like this, there’s nothing I can do about it, I hate it. And his eyes brimmed and there was a sudden run of tears down the sides of his cheeks before his head wrenched itself in another direction and ignored the world again as though nothing had happened.
I was devastated. My throat had gone dry and when I tried to say his name I couldn’t speak. I put the spoon down. After a few moments I pronounced his name and placed my hand on his arm. There was no response. In a way, it was not ‘his’ arm at all. It was not under the control of the intelligence which had just unblinked itself at me; there was nothing else he could do. I took my handkerchief and dabbed away the tearstains from a face as blank and indifferent to my presence as an abstract sculpture. In my own daze I fed him the orange slices, lifting them to his lips one by one on the spoon, knowing that he wanted to eat them. His mouth functioned. His throat swallowed them. When I had fed him I manoeuvred him to his bedroom and into his bed. His head lolled to one side and he made strange convulsive movements with his shoulders and hands as I took off his dressing gown and I gave way to the selfish weakness of embracing him for a minute, but was repaid with the usual inertia. I sat in the dim room and watched until he fell asleep. Joanne came and looked in and said, ‘Well?’ and when I didn’t reply she watched him for a few moments and then went away.
I sat there thinking: how much does he know? Does he understand what we say? There had never been any very certain way of knowing. But now I was sure that some part of him knew that he was locked fatally, for always, in an uncontrollable physical shell in a world where every conscious instant could produce neural nightmares, the realities of his own cerebral cortex which he could never escape and which—I assumed—were getting worse, becoming more repellent to him.
And perhaps knowing this, some inner force was trying to find a way to end the whole organism, to self-destruct. Whatever happened, I knew there was one certainty: I would never abandon or fail him. It was possible that the look I had just seen in his eyes was purely the expression of a frightened animal and that no part of him knew any emotion as complex as love or had any awareness of other people’s feelings or of the passage of time and what it would mean to be sat down at a table day after day for seventy years in an institution with a plastic spoon pressing congealed baby food into a mouth which would never speak. But I would never abandon him because I knew myself what it meant to be deserted and if there was only a one-tenth of one percent chance that some tiny fragment of the child’s mind would feel what I had felt, I could never risk that. He had, after all, looked at me.
‘What happened?’ Joanne asked, when I returned to the front room.
‘Nothing.’
‘Something happened. I can tell.’
I sat down and stared at the television screen. Newsreel pictures of a soldier firing a heavy-calibre machine gun from a helicopter into thick jungle; then bodies being dragged into a clearing. She got up and switched it off.
‘I don’t know why you are so secretive.’
‘What? Why should I be?’
‘You are. You never told them the truth about the research centre.’
‘I told them as much as I could. Anyhow it was irrelevant.’
‘You could have let them decide what’s relevant. Unless you were afraid of what they might find.’
We had battled through all this years earlier. Now it resurfaced. I ignored it.
‘Don’t you think we tell each other the truth, then?’ I said.
‘Did we ever?’
There was a long pause. We avoided looking at each other. Then I said, ‘I never had any illusions.’
And she had said, ‘You get worse.’
A few nights later I was supervising Peter’s bath when he suddenly slid beneath the water. I tugged on his arm. He resisted. His face, pallid and neutral, drifted under the surface of the clear liquid. There was a weird determination about the way he pushed me back. I had to haul him up with both my hands hooked under his arms. He exhaled, spluttering. Perhaps he was testing me. But the silent plunge and struggle had been frightening.
If he wanted to kill himself, what could we do? I knew what the official answer would be; he would have to be placed under close watch in a mental hospital. If necessary, under restraint. So he would be forced to survive. Because this hypocritical society insisted at this level that life was sacred. At every other level it encouraged people to smash themselves to bits, to inhale cancer, to drink themselves to death, all for fat taxes on the profits. But officially, life was sacred. To want to escape it to stop pain was listed a crime.
When I thought, I don’t want him to die, that was only a natural reaction. Yet considered more carefully and objectively perhaps it was little more than my selfishness operating again.
Now I stood in the dark hotel room and shone the torch down on the gun. Death seems difficult for so long but then it must become easy. How very hard to find the easy part. The brain seems demented for survival. It has a core of power to protect its functions from termination, to drag its host organism back from actions which spell body death. Pathetic arrogance and panic even invent the idea of an essence within the self which is immune to extinction. For some reason this is supposed to be consoling. I had never understood why I would be afraid of a universe which arranged immortality for people so incapable of coping with something as small as life. It would be a sick joke, an obscenity. I never had any illusions about that. What prevented me from killing myself now was ice-cold cowardice. No. More than that. Worming inside the absurdities of what should have been the final reduction there was still something of mortal importance to discover. It had no firm shape. But it would impel me to go on. No matter what I saw.