So what was a good death? Was it possible to have a good death anymore; or was it in any case an illusion to believe that there had been good deaths—brave, stoical, consoling, affectionate deaths—in the past? Was “a good death” one of those phrases which didn’t, in fact, have anything to which they referred; was it like naming an animal that didn’t exist—a winged crocodile, say? Or perhaps a good death was simply this: the best death you could manage in the circumstances, regardless of medical help. Or again, more simply still: a good death was any death not swamped by agony, fear and protest. By that count—indeed, by almost any count—Uncle Leslie had had a good death.
Jean remembered China. Perhaps this was why she hadn’t felt as much of a stranger there as she had expected: because being in China was like living with a man. Men juggled with goldfish and expected you to be impressed. Men gave you fur coats made out of dogs. Men invented the plastic bonsai. Men gave you very small address books which they thought would meet your needs. Men were in places very primitive: they rode to market with pigs roped across the back wheels of their bicycles. Most of all there was the way men talked to you. In Asian times. The temple was repented. We grow ladies. Here is the sobbing centre. They talked at you through a megaphone even though you stood only a couple of yards away. And when the batteries failed, they still preferred to shout down the instrument at you rather than adopt the frail equality of the voice. Or else they talked at you from the other side of a curving wall, and as you craned your neck you could barely detach their voice from dozens of others. And when you asked them the simplest questions—“Do you want to go to Shanghai?”—they would not answer. They pretended there was something wrong with the question. That is not a real question. Why do you ask such a thing? There is no answer because there is no question. Here is the sobbing centre. Put your finger on the knot and help me rope the pig. The temple was repented. In Asian times. Do not forget we live in Asian times; we have always lived in Asian times.
3
Immortality is no learned question.
—KIERKEGAARD
HHOW DO YOU TELL a good life from a bad life, a wasted life? Jean remembered the forewoman at the jade factory in China who was asked how you could tell good jade from bad jade. Through an interpreter, and through a megaphone that didn’t work, came the reply, “You look at it and by looking you tell its qualities.” Nowadays, this answer no longer seemed so evasive.
Jean had often wondered what it would be like to grow old. When she had been in her fifties, and still feeling in her thirties, she heard a talk on the radio by a gerontologist. “Put cotton wool in your ears,” he had said, “and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear Vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: instant ageing.”
It was a good test, but it naturally contained a flaw. You never did age instantly; you never did have a sharp memory for comparison. Nor, when she looked back over the last forty of her hundred years, did it seem to be initially, or even mainly, a matter of sensory deprivation. You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you. It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk as far as you used to, it was that other people didn’t expect you to; and if they didn’t, then it needed vain obstinacy to persist.
At sixty she had still felt like a young woman; at eighty, she felt like a middle-aged woman who had something a bit wrong with her; at nearly a hundred she no longer bothered to think whether or not she felt younger than she was—there didn’t seem any point. She was relieved not to be bedbound, as she might have been in earlier times; but mostly she took the medical advances of her lifetime for granted. She lived increasingly inside her head, and was content to be there. Memories, there were far too many memories; they raced across her sky like Irish weather. Her feet, with each succeeding year, seemed a little farther away from her hands; she dropped things, stumbled a little, was fearful; but mostly what she noticed was the smirking paradox of old age: how everything seemed to take longer than it used to, but how, despite this, time seemed to go faster.
At eighty-seven, Jean had taken up smoking. Cigarettes had been finally pronounced risk-free, and after dinner she would light one, close her eyes, and suck on some tangy memory from the previous century. Her favourite brand was Numbers, a cigarette which when first introduced had been divided by dotted lines into eighteen mean smoking units. These MSUs were numbered one to eighteen—a benevolent ploy by the manufacturer which was designed to help people know how much of their cigarette they had smoked. After a couple of years, though, in a summer when subjects for computer-lobby had been hard to find, a row took place (one which, in the manufacturers’ eyes, got way out of hand) over whether it was paternalistic and oppressive to number Numbers. Finally, after an 8 percent nationwide canvass and a few unpleasant incidents (the marketing director’s car had been painted with dotted lines and divided into eighteen sections from bonnet to boot), the manufacturers agreed to produce unnumbered Numbers.
Even so, Jean still automatically thought of her cigarette as containing eighteen puffs. Six, six and six; she would lay it down between each of the three sections. The first six puffs inflated her with sudden pleasure; they were a new burst of life. The second six were less active, striving to keep her on the plateau she had naively attained without difficulty; the final six contained a streak of panic: she would watch the fire burn closer to her fingers, and sometimes try to turn six into seven. But this never made any difference.
Jean also enjoyed sitting in the sun. Perhaps, she thought, this was something to do with your skin: as it grew leathery, spotted and reptilian, so it made you start behaving like a lizard. Sometimes she would put on an old pair of white gloves rather than look at her hands.
“Is your skin itching?” Gregory would ask.
“Just keeping my herb sausages out of sight.”
Gregory, nearing sixty, still had the round, gentle face Jean remembered from their travelling days together, and occasionally a sudden, intense look in his eye would recall to her the things he had gazed at in his life: his rainbow battle fleet of aeroplanes, his computer chess set, his pallid girlfriends. But now only memory could make him young. She had become, she realized, the mother of an old man. His hair was quite grey, his round gold glasses looked like antiques, and his careful, quizzical manner increasingly had an air of elderly pedantry about it. Gregory went to work twice a week; he played with GPC; he sat in his room listening to jazz. Sometimes she felt that a morning mist lay over his life and had never properly risen.
Jean no longer cared to examine herself in the mirror. Not from vanity but from lack of interest. You could be intrigued or alarmed by only so many elastications of the flesh; another one was scarcely news. She wore her hair in a loose bun; she had not washed it for several years, and its whiteness had now moved into an accumulated yellowness. How strange, she thought: as a child I was approximately blond; now, in second childhood, I am allowed a second, false yellowness. She had shrunk an inch or two from her mature height; she stooped a little and held on to furniture as she moved about the house. She had long since given up following public events; her character seemed less important to her than it once had; her eyes had lost some of their blue and taken on the milky grey of a morning sky that has yet to make up its mind. It was as if the oxygen supply had a small leak in it: things were becoming slower and more general. The difference was that she knew it and so could not share the ignorant joy of those long-dead fliers who parodied old age as they strained towards the sun.
Occasionally, Gregory would try introducing her to other very old people and be disappointed by her lack of enthusiasm. “But I’ve never been very interested in old people,” she would explain. “Why should I start now?”
“But couldn’t you … I don’t know … talk about old times?”
“Gregory,” she replied with a certainty that sounded like severity, “I’m not interested in their old times, and as for mine, I’m keeping them to myself. Y
ou can be interested in old people when you’re old yourself.”
Gregory smiled. Old age? He didn’t even have a life insurance policy. The firm had offered him a special rate, of course, but he declined. People said that an insurance salesman without a policy was like a vegetarian butcher. The joke didn’t deter him. He would nod and think to himself that there was logic in being a vegetarian butcher: if you spent your day cutting up animals, you might well not want to go home and eat them for dinner. Even if you got a cut rate on your cut meat.
He was well into his fifties when he began to brood about suicide. It was a quiet, almost companionable brooding; not a melodrama with lightning across a carbon-paper sky, but a discreet, determined line of thought. Perhaps it had something to do with not having an insurance policy, whose terms would forbid melancholy action and presumably discourage melancholy speculation as well. Or perhaps it was just that suicide had been much in the news during the first decade of the century. It was said that some people fell in love only because they heard love being talked about; the same might be true of suicide.
All those old people killing themselves. Gregory could still remember some of the names: Freddy Page, David Salisbury, Sheila Abley. Plus the name everyone knew: Don Johnson. Predictably, the newspapers and television had misunderstood the first few Old People’s Suicides. Editorialists pointed out that euthanasia had been legal for eight years, that the state provided the best soft-termination facilities in Europe; why should these people kill themselves in such a noisy and public fashion unless they were seriously disturbed? In which case we must increase the Geriatric Monitoring Service in their areas, and see that soft-term leaflets are more widely available.
But the campaign only became more efficient. There was an Old People’s Martyr on the first of every month from March to September 2006; the OPS coordinating committee announced its existence; while the papers discovered that news about old people, if treated in a dramatic enough way, did not necessarily decrease circulation. When the OPS committee’s telephone was tapped, even this redounded to its favour: the view was openly expressed that it was wrong to bug old people’s phones.
On October 1, Mervyn Danbury, the popular cricket commentator, shot himself in St. Paul’s Cathedral Museum holding a birthday card signed by the prime minister. Shortly afterwards the OPS committee produced its first list of demands, assembled—or so it was claimed—after an unpublicized computer phone-in polling 37 percent of the over-seventies. The demands were as follows: (1) Stop all advertising of soft-termination facilities. (2) Close down all old people’s homes. (3) Eliminate the word geriatric and its cognates from official use. (4) Old people are to be known in future as old people. (5) Old people are to be loved more. (6) There shall be a special series of awards to recognize wisdom, and the achievements of old people. (7) Creation of an Old People’s Day, to be celebrated once a year. (8) Positive discrimination in jobs and housing in favour of old people. (9) Free fun-drugs for the over-eighties.
At first the government said it refused to negotiate under duress; but then Don Johnson burnt himself to death between the sentry boxes outside Buckingham Palace. Pictures of the blackened wheelchair and its sad sack of collapsed flesh were on the front page of every newspaper. The government’s slur campaign, which sought to establish Johnson as an unstable and dislikable character who had quite possibly been murdered in a grudge killing, misfired. Most of the committee’s demands were conceded within weeks; as a sign of repentance for its earlier scepticism, the government even suggested that Old People’s Day be named Don Johnson Day. Television helped make old people not just acceptable, but fashionable; there was a spate of marriages between very old and very young partners; stamps bearing the portraits of Famous Old People were issued; the Old People’s Games were instituted; and Gregory invited his mother to live in a small sunny room at the back of his house.
There were the usual jokes made: he’s hoping you’ll become a videostar and put him on your show; he’s only after your fun-drugs; and so on. Occasionally, she worried about Gregory’s motives; but as soon as she asked herself whether people should be bullied into goodness, she would snappily reply that of course they should because that was the only way most of them were going to get there. In fact, she and Gregory never discussed his motives for asking her; nor hers for accepting.
The General Purposes Computer was begun in 1998 after a series of government enquiries. Previously, in the late eighties, there had been various pilot schemes which had sought to put the whole of human knowledge onto an easily accessible record. The Funlearn Project of 1991–92, with officially sponsored prizes and scholarships, had been the best known of these schemes; but its purity of principle had been impugned when it was linked to a government campaign to decrease the child-user percentage in state videogame parlours. Some had even accused Funlearn of didacticism.
Inevitably the early schemes had been book-oriented; they were attempts to create the ultimate, perfect library where “readers” (as they were still archaically known) could obtain access to the world’s accumulation of knowledge. Objections were raised, however, that these schemes were all too scholar-biased: those accustomed to use books would now be able to use them more efficiently, whereas those who were not would be further disadvantaged. Three government reports in the mid-1990s all suggested that a more democratic user-base was required before one of these pilot schemes could qualify for full state backing.
GPC was thus constructed to be information-centred; the enquirer called up not book titles but subject categories. Sources, while relevant at the input stage in assessing the reliability of the facts, were held to be irrelevant at the output stage and were therefore suppressed. Scholars claimed that such an absence of supportive bibliography invalidated the whole of the GPC programme; but democrats dismissed them as melodramatic and argued that this suppression would draw off the conceit of writers—or source-providers, as they became known: Rendering information anonymous was like milking the venom from a snake, they said. Only now would knowledge become truly democratic.
GPC, finally opened in 2003, stored everything hitherto contained in all books published in all languages; researchers had emptied radio and TV archives, book, record and tape libraries, newspapers, magazines, folk memory. ALL THINGS KNOWN TO PEOPLE ran the slogan carved on a stone videoscreen above the entrances to municipal GPCHQs. Scholars complained of defective input in several areas, and that the concept of “Total Knowledge” was at odds with what they referred to as “Correct Knowledge”; cynics observed that the only things you couldn’t ask GPC about were its own input, sources, principles and personnel; but democrats were happy, and when asked to join the debate about total versus correct knowledge referred to angels dancing on a pinhead. Of course, GPC might be used for settling bets and calling up football results; but there was no harm in that. More important, it permitted the setting up of a new range of personalized and flexitimed evening classes. Above all, democrats felt comforted by the symbol of GPC, by the idea of a final repository of information, an oracle of fact.
Not only was GPC democratic in input, it was also democratic in output. You keyed in with your social security number, and output was modified to your level of understanding. This initially contentious aspect of GPC was quickly accepted as necessary. It was said that GPC analysed your questions as you tapped them in and made its own continuous assessment of your understanding, which it then used, if necessary, to update your social security listing; but this had never been confirmed. People, especially democrats, soon learned to rely on GPC; they became fond of it. Some became more than fond, and there were cases of GPC addiction being cited in the divorce courts.
Gradually, legend began to grow like ivy round this silo of facts. It was said that, as well as the democratic output modifier, there was also a facility enabling secret operators to break into the circuit and alter responses. It was said that the way to get the best answers out of GPC was to lie with your questions. It was said that there
was a hookup between GPC and New Scotland Yard III, and that posers of dubious questions (where is the most valuable collection of silver belonging to an absentee owner?) had been picked up as they left the building.
Most of the legends, however, surrounded a function of GPC called TAT. It had been added as an information category in 2008, after a brief period of intense and mysteriously funded lobbying. TAT stood for The Absolute Truth. In the old days of book libraries, there had been private cases for works (obscene, blasphemous or politically contentious) which could be examined only on personal application; now GPC had an information category which could be keyed into only with special permission. Cynics made a historical comparison and claimed that Truth was now proved to be a blasphemous obscenity subject to political manipulation; but democrats affirmed the citizen’s inalienable right of access to the most serious speculations and conclusions currently available.
Since TAT was a late addition to GPC, its presence was not acknowledged in the official manifest. Some people didn’t even believe that the function existed. Others believed it did, but weren’t too interested. Most people knew somebody who knew somebody who had applied, or had thought of applying, for TAT; but nobody seemed to know anyone who had actually done so. Cynics maintained that you had to bring a doctor’s certificate, a will, and a permission slip signed by three members of your family; democrats replied that standard will forms and autowitnessing were naturally available in the TAT foyer, but that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.