The Call-Girls: A Tragi-Comedy With Prologue and Epilogue

  ‘Does that also serve a therapeutic purpose?’ grunted Blood.

  ‘It may, in certain cases,’ Valenti said cautiously, realizing that he had gone too far in alluding to certain rather esoteric lines of research.

  ‘What’s wrong with good old mas-tur-bation?’ Blood wanted to know. ‘You don’t need platinum needles for that.’

  Valenti’s smile became even more polite, but he ignored Blood. ‘There have also, been successful experiments in which we use the electrodes to establish two-way radio communication between the subject’s brain and a computer. The computer is programmed to recognize disturbances in the electrical activity of the brain which signal the approach of an epileptic attack or a fit of violent rage; when the computer is thus alerted, it activates by radio the needles in the inhibitory centres which block the attack … And now, I think, I have given you the necessary information, and we can proceed with the demonstration.’ He signalled to Gustav: ‘Call Miss Carey, please.’

  Most of the participants had paid no attention to the fact – or had not even noticed it – that Miss Carey was absent from the session, and the tape-recorder was operated by Claire.

  ‘Miss Carey,’ Valenti explained while they were waiting for her to appear, ‘was sent to me as a patient with severe anxiety alternating with violent episodes in which she attacked members of her family, particularly her younger, married sister …’

  There was an uneasy silence while they waited, as in a dentist’s waiting-room with its collective awareness of the unpleasant experience ahead. At last the glass swing-door was flung open with a flourish by Gustav, who held it courteously for Miss Carey to pass. She was smiling, and fingering the grey bun on top of her head. All glances were momentarily on that bun, then hurriedly lowered to dossiers and writing pads.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Carey,’ Valenti smiled. ‘Will you please sit over there?’

  He indicated a chair which stood isolated in a corner of the room, placed there at his request before the beginning of the session. Miss Carey sat down primly, apparently enjoying the occasion. Half the participants had to turn their chairs round.

  ‘Now, Miss Carey,’ Valenti addressed her, adjusting his wrist-watch which was of an unusually large size, ‘you don’t mind taking part in this little demonstration?’

  ‘Love it,’ Miss Carey replied. ‘Anything you say, doctor.’

  ‘Before you came to the clinic, you were not too well?’

  ‘I was terrible,’ said Miss Carey.

  ‘What was troubling you?’

  ‘All sorts of foolish things.’

  ‘Won’t you tell us about it?’

  ‘I was a silly girl,’ Miss Carey giggled.

  ‘What were you afraid of?’

  ‘I don’t like to remember. Just silly things.’

  ‘But you must tell us. You are all right now, and you know that by co-operating in these demonstrations you are helping other patients to recover.’

  Miss Carey nodded, still giggling. ‘I know, doctor, but I just don’t like to remember.’

  ‘Shall I help you to remember?’ He again adjusted some dial on his complicated wrist-watch. ‘Now, Eleanor. Tell us what it felt like to be frightened.’

  A ghastly change took place in Miss Carey. Her face went ashen, her breath became laboured as if she had an attack of asthma, her spindly fingers gripped the arm-rests of the chair as if sitting in an aeroplane that was going to crash.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she panted. ‘Please stop it.’

  ‘What are you frightened of?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel that something dreadful is going to happen.’ She was twisting and turning in her chair, exploring the corner of the room behind her back. ‘I feel that a man is standing behind me.’

  ‘There is only the wall.’

  ‘I know but I feel it. Please stop it, stop. For the love of Christ.’

  ‘You were also frightened of being sent to hell for your sins. But you know there is no hell.’

  ‘How do you know? I have seen those pictures.’ A tremor ran through her body and did not stop.

  ‘What pictures?’

  ‘Stop it…’ Suddenly she screamed. Blood got up noisily and shambled out of the room. Miss Carey screamed a second time and seemed on the verge of hysterics. Valenti adjusted his dials. Her body suddenly relaxed, she took several deep breaths and her colour returned.

  ‘There you are, Eleanor,’ Valenti said. ‘All is well again.’

  She nodded. Both were smiling.

  ‘Do you mind having gone through the experiment?’

  ‘Not in the least, doctor, I was just being silly again.’

  ‘Do you have any hostile feelings towards me?’

  Miss Carey shook her head vigorously. She was becoming increasingly animated. ‘I would like to kiss your hands, doctor,’ she giggled. ‘You are my saviour.’

  She watched him adjusting a dial. ‘Ah,’ she sighed. ‘This feels lovely. It must be the naughty needle. Naughty, naughty. You are doing it…’

  Her expression became ecstatic. Suddenly Harriet shouted:

  ‘Rot. Stop it. This is an obscenity.’

  Solovief rapped the table. ‘I think you have made your point, Dr Valenti.’

  But already Miss Carey had returned to normal. Doctor and patient were again smiling at each other. ‘Some of these gentlemen – and ladies – seemed to be upset,’ Valenti said to her. ‘Do you understand why they were upset, Miss Carey?’

  She shook her head, her wrinkled face resuming its look of the benevolent, ageing nun. ‘No, doctor. I just noticed Sir Evelyn leaving the room.’

  Valenti bowed to her politely. ‘Thank you very much, Miss Carey. Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is the end of the demonstration. As you may have noticed, our electronic wizards have succeeded in reducing the radio-stimulator to the size of a wrist-watch.’ He put the gadget down on the table. ‘If anybody is interested, I shall be glad to explain the mechanism. And now, to bring my chatter to an end, we may perhaps draw certain conclusions from these studies, which apply not only to individual patients, but to mankind as a whole…’

  But after the demonstration with Miss Carey, Valenti’s diagnosis of the human condition met with a certain resistance, if not hostility. He pointed out that Miss Carey had evidently been conscious of her experiences under electrical stimulation, and remembered them afterwards, but was not in the least upset by the memory. She remembered her thoughts, but this did not receive the emotions which had accompanied them. Similarly, those ideas – like eternal damnation – which had frightened the wits out of her at the time of her illness, now that she was cured, appeared to her merely as ‘all sorts of foolish notions’. But even now, after her cure, those attacks of ghastly fear could still be evoked by stimulation of the deep, archaic structures of the brain in which they originated. Similarly, feelings of elation or love and devotion could be elicited from other areas of that ancient and primitive part of the brain which man had in common with his animal ancestors – the seat of instincts, passions and biological drives, These antediluvian structures at the very core of the brain had hardly been touched by the nimble fingers of evolution. In contrast to this anachronistic core, the modern structures of the human brain – the rind or neocortex – had expanded during the last half a million years at a truly explosive speed which was without precedent in the whole history of evolution; so much so that some older anatomists compared it to a tumorous growth. But explosions tend to upset the balance of nature, and the brain-explosion in the middle of the Pleistocene gave birth to a mentally unbalanced species. If anybody were to doubt this statement, he only had to look at human history through the eyes of a dispassionate zoologist from another planet. The disastrous historical record pointed to a biological malfunction; more precisely, it indicated that those recently evolved structures of the brain, which endowed man with language and logic, had never become properly integrated with, and coordinated with, the ancient, emotion-bound structures on w
hich they were superimposed during their explosive proliferation. Owing to this evolutionary blunder, old brain and new brain, emotion and reason, when not in acute conflict, lead an agonized co-existence. On one side, the pale cast of rational thought, of logic suspended on a thin thread all too easily broken; on the other, the native fury of passionately held irrational beliefs – which, as Dr Epsom had pointed out, were responsible for the holocausts of past and present history. The neocortex had been compared to a computer; but when a computer was fed biased data, the outcome was bound to be disastrous…

  ‘My good man,’ interrupted Blood – who had shambled back to his seat after the demonstration, ‘there is nothing new in this. I can quote you a hundred sonorous passages written by the best professional diagnosticians – the poets – who assure us that man is mad, and always has been.’

  ‘But if you will forgive me,’ Valenti smiled, ‘poets are not taken seriously, and never have been. Today, however, we possess the evidence, from anatomy, psychology and brain research, that our species, as a whole, is afflicted by a paranoid streak, not in the metaphysical but in the clinical sense; and that this condition, by an evolutionary mistake, is built into our brains. My eminent colleague, Dr Paul MacLean, has coined the term schizophysiology for this condition; he defines it, if I may quote him, as a “dichotomy in the functions of the philogenetically old and new cortex that might account for differences between emotional and intellectual behaviour. While our intellectual functions are carried out in the newest and most highly developed part in the brain, our emotive behaviour continues to be dominated by a relatively crude and primitive system, by archaic structures in the brain whose fundamental pattern has undergone hardly any change in the whole course of evolution from rat to man…”

  ‘And this brings me to the conclusion of my chatter. Evolution has made many mistakes; the fossil record shows that to each surviving species there are hundreds that perished. Turtles are beautiful animals, but they are so top-heavy that if by misadventure they fall on their backs, they cannot get up again. Many elegant insects are victims of the same engineering mistake. If evolution is under divine guidance, then the dear Lord must be very fond of experimenting. If it is a natural process, then it must proceed by trial and error. But man, although mad, has engaged in a dialogue with God; he has acquired the power to transcend biological frontiers and correct the shortcomings and errors in his native equipment. The first step, however, is a correct diagnosis. This, I believe, dear friends, modern brain research can provide. If our diagnosis is correct, the therapy will follow. We already have the power to cure individual patients – who are the extreme examples of the collective disorder which afflicts our species. Soon we shall have the power to attack it at its roots, and produce an artificial mutation by neuro-engineering. As I have said before, a desperate situation needs desperate remedies. And to quote another of my eminent colleagues, Professor Moyne: “It appears that the scientists in brain research stand on a threshold similar to the one on which atomic physicists stood in the early 1940s.” This is the end of my chatter.’

  Like the other call-girls, Valenti had started haltingly, with well-worn clichés and oratorial tricks, but had gradually warmed to his subject and ended on a note of sincerity, even passion. But was not that passion, too, inspired by the archaic structures deep down in the spongy tissues of his brain; and were the data presented to the computer perhaps also biased by them?

  2

  The discussion after Valenti’s paper was chaotic, as usual, but ended in an unusually dramatic fashion. Von Halder spoke first, repeating what he had said before: aggression was endemic in homo homicidus; individual therapy – however clever the methods of Valenti and his colleagues – was not enough; the urgent need was for MAT – Mass-Abreaction Therapy – organized on an international scale.

  Harriet wanted to know whether Valenti’s needles were able to block out not only aggression but also misguided devotion – to immunize against morbid infatuation with a Circe or a Duce.

  John D. John Jr objected to the comparison of the neocortex with a computer that was fed biased data. From the cybernetician’s point of view the whole of the nervous system was a computer which could not be programmed to mislead itself, otherwise it would go haywire.

  ‘Perhaps it does,’ giggled Wyndham.

  ‘That is not the communication theorist’s view,’ John D. Jr replied drily.

  Burch objected to the distinction Valenti had made between so-called reason and so-called emotion, and his references to a so-called mind, that hypothetical ghost in the machine which nobody had ever seen. All these terms belonged to the vocabulary of an outmoded psychology; modern science considered only the measurable data of observable behaviour as legitimate subjects of study, providing the basis for social engineering.

  When it was Petitjacques’s turn to speak, he produced with a flourish a roll of Scotch tape and stuck it across his lips. Nobody could make out what the gesture was meant to symbolize, and it failed to impress. Tempers were getting rather frayed; it was past lunch-time. Halder seemed particularly irritable; his gastric juices turned nasty when a meal was delayed.

  Wyndham confessed to having been profoundly impressed by Valenti’s demonstration, but he wondered whether it really pointed in the right direction for a possible therapy. He could not help still believing that the future of our species would be decided by what he had called ‘the battle of the womb’, and ‘the revolution in the cradle’; and thus ultimately by certain new methods of education to which he had referred in his paper …

  Tony apologized for feeling impelled to make a frivolous remark. The Middle Ages had made a sharp, and perhaps wise, distinction between white and black magic. It had struck him at certain moments on that morning that the same distinction could possibly be made between the experiments he had referred to in his own talk, and those shown in Dr Valenti’s somewhat terrifying demonstrations…

  Miss Carey, in her chair, was becoming increasingly fidgety as one critical speech followed the other. Her rather fixed stare, however, was directed not at the actual speaker but at Claire, who was usurping Miss Carey’s rightful place at the tape-recorder. Claire noticed the stare and tried a sympathetic smile, which made no impression. On the contrary, that hypocritical smile reminded Miss Carey even more of her married sister. For a while she fingered the bun on her head, then she produced a half-finished pullover of hideous colours from her bag, and busied herself with knitting.

  Valenti’s reply to the discussion was brief, delivered in a somewhat strained voice. Owing to the late hour, he explained, he had to concentrate on what seemed to him the most relevant points. He felt confident that neurophysiology would soon find the answer – if it had not already been found by one of the many research teams working in that field – to inhibit not only aggressive impulses, but also what Dr Epsom had called morbid infatuation – whether with a person, a totem or a dogma. As for von Halder’s objection, he wholeheartedly agreed that individual therapy was not enough. But he begged to disagree with Halder’s whole concept of abreaction-therapy. The methods von Halder proposed, instead of inhibiting aggression, were designed to enhance it. His own methods, and those of his colleagues, aimed in the opposite direction: to enhance the inhibitory control which the new brain exercised over the archaic structures of the old one. This could be done, and was being done, in both animal and man. But it was only the beginning. Science had only just started exploring and mapping that unknown continent, the brain. As our knowledge of it increased, and the maps became more precise, so would our methods of physiological control. We had progressed from the surgeon’s knife to the radio-controlled electrode. The next step would perhaps lead from electrical to biochemical controls, Certain aggression-centres, and aggression-blocking centres in the brain were sensitive to particular hormone balances. Already in the 1960s it was shown that the savage rhesus monkey could be readily turned into a friendly animal by the administration of librium – not sedated, but tamed.
Other preparations had a comparable effect on violent psychotics … He paused, then continued slowly in a voice which he tried to make sound casual: ‘It is not unlikely that in a few years, and after a few more wars and massacres, it will be realized that the only salvation for our species is to put specific anti-hostility agents into the water supply, in addition to chlorine and other approved anti-pollutants. Needless to say…’

  Valenti had almost finished when Halder made the mistake of interrupting him, though he could not have foreseen the ghastly consequences. Ruffling his white mane with the familiar King Lear gesture, he shouted, pointing at Miss Carey in her chair: