Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
Read Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Online
Authors: Doris Lessing
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Psychological
DORIS LESSING
BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL
Doris Lessing is the author of numerous award-winning books of fiction and non-fiction, including
The Golden Notebook
and
The Grass Is Singing
. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in London.
ALSO BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass Is Singing
The Golden Notebook
The Summer Before the Dark
Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diary of a Good Neighbour
If the Old Could …
Playing the Game: A Graphic Novel
(Illustrated by Charlie Adlard)
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
The Fifth Child
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog
The Cleft
The Good Terrorist
“CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES” SERIES
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
“CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” NOVEL-SEQUENCE
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
OPERAS
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
(music by Philip Glass)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
(music by Philip Glass)
SHORT STORIES
Five
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories
Winter in July
The Black Madonna This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Studies
, Volume 1)
The Sun Beneath Their Feet (Collected African Studies
, Volume 2)
To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories
, Volume 1)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories
, Volume 2)
London Observed
The Old Age of El Magnifico
Particularly Cats
Rufus the Survivor
On Cats
The Grandmothers
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
DRAMA
Each His Own Wilderness
Play With a Tiger
The Singing Door
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Going Home
A Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
African Laughter
Time Bites
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin, Volume 1
Walking in the Shade, Volume 2
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2009
Copyright © 1971 by Doris Lessing
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1971.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77763-8
v3.1
This is for my son John,
the sea-loving man.
Contents
Category: Inner-Space Fiction
Central Intake Hospital
Afterword, or End-Paper: A Small, Relevant Reminiscence
CATEGORY: INNER-SPACE FICTION
For there is never anywhere to go but in
If yonder raindrop should its heart disclose,
Behold therein a hundred seas displayed.
In every atom, if thou gaze aright,
Thousands of reasoning beings are contained.
The gnat in limbs doth match the elephant.
In name is yonder drop as Nile’s broad flood.
In every grain a thousand harvests dwell.
The world within a grain of millet’s heart.
The universe in the mosquito’s wing contained.
Within that point in space the heavens roll.
Upon one little spot within the heart
Resteth the Lord and Master of the worlds.
Therein two worlds commingled may be seen …
THE SAGE MAHMOUD SHABISTARI
,
IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
(The Secret Garden)
This minuscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and flora of the capillary water are single-celled animals and plants, water mites, shrimplike crustacea, insects, and the larvae of infinitely small worms—all living, dying, swimming, feeding, breathing, reproducing in a world so small that our human senses cannot grasp its scale, a world in which the microdroplet of water separating one grain of sand from another is like a vast, dark sea.
MARINE BIOLOGIST RACHEL CARSON
,
TWENTIETH CENTURY
(The Edge of the Sea)
CENTRAL INTAKE HOSPITAL
Friday 15th August 1969
ADMITTANCE SHEET
NAME:
Unknown
SEX:
Male
AGE:
Unknown
ADDRESS:
Unknown
| GENERAL REMARKS: | At midnight the police found Patient wandering on the Embankment near Waterloo Bridge. They took him into the station thinking he was drunk or drugged. They describe him as Rambling, Confused, and Amenable. Brought him to us at 3 A.M . by ambulance. During admittance Patient attempted several times to lie down on the desk. He seemed to think it was a boat or a raft. Police are checking ports, ships, etc. Patient was well dressed but had not changed his clothes for some time. He did not seem very hungry or thirsty. He was wearing trousers and a sweater, but he had no papers or wallet or money or marks of identity. Police think he was robbed. He is an educated man. He was given two Libriums but did not sleep. He was talking loudly. Patient was moved into the small Observation ward as he was disturbing the other Patients . |
| | NIGHT NURSE. 6 A.M . |
| | Patient has been awake all day, rambling, hallucinated, animated. Two Librium three-hourly. Police no information. Clothes sent for tracing, but unlikely to yield results: Chain-store sweater and shirt and underclothes. Trousers Italian. Patient still under the impression he is on some sort of voyage. Police say possibly an amateur or a yachtsman . |
| | DOCTOR Y. 6 P.M . |
I need a wind. A good strong wind. The air is stagnant. The current must be pounding along at a fair rate. Yes, but I can’t feel it. Where’s my compass?
That
went days ago, don’t you remember? I need a wind, a good strong wind. I’ll whistle
for one. I would whistle for one if I had paid the piper. A wind from the East, hard on to my back, yes. Perhaps I am still too near the shore? After so many days at sea, too near the shore? But who knows, I might have drifted back again inshore. Oh no, no, I’ll try rowing. The oars are gone, don’t you remember, they went days ago. No, you must be nearer landfall than you think. The Cape Verde Islands were to starboard—when? Last week. Last
when?
That was no weak, that was my wife. The sea is saltier here than close in shore. A salt salt sea, the brine coming flecked off the horses’ jaws to mine. On my face, thick crusts of salt. I can taste it. Tears, seawater. I can taste salt from the sea. From the desert. The deserted sea. Sea horses. Dunes. The wind flicks sand from the crest of dunes, spins off the curl of waves. Sand moves and sways and masses itself into waves, but slower. Slow. The eye that would measure the pace of sand horses, as I watch the rolling gallop of sea horses would be an eye indeed. Aye Aye. I. I could catch a horse, perhaps and ride it, but for me a sea horse, no horse of sand, since my time is man-time and it is God for deserts. Some ride dolphins. Plenty have testified. I may leave my sinking raft and cling to the neck of a sea horse, all the way to Jamaica and poor Charlie’s Nancy, or, if the current swings me South at last, to the coast where the white bird is waiting.
Round and round and round I go, the Diamond Coast, the Canary Isles, a dip across the Tropic of Cancer and up and across with a shout at the West Indies to port, where Nancy waits for her poor Charlie, and around, giving the Sargasso Sea a miss to starboard, with Florida florissant to port, and
around and around, in the swing of the Gulf Stream, and around, with the Azores just outside the turn of my elbow, and down, past the coasts of Portugal where my Conchita waits for me, passing Madeira, passing the Canaries, always
en passant
, to the Diamond Coast again, and so around, and so around again and again, for ever and ever unless the current swings me South. But that current could never take me South, no. A current is set in itself, inexorable as a bus route. The clockwise current of the Northern seas must carry me, carry me, unless … yes. They may divert me a little, yes they will, steering me with a small feather from their white wings, steadying me South, holding me safe across the cross not to say furious currents about the Equator but then, held safe and sound, I’d find the South Equatorial at last, at last, and safe from all the Sargassoes, the Scillas and the Charibs, I’d swoop beautifully and lightly, drifting with the sweet currents of the South down the edge of the Brazilian Highlands to the Waters of Peace. But I need a wind. The salt is seaming on the timbers and the old raft is wallowing in the swells and I am sick. I am sick enough to die. So heave ho my hearties, heave—no, they are all gone, dead and gone, they tied me to a mast and a great wave swept them from me, and I am alone, caught and tied to the North Equatorial Current with no landfall that I could ever long for anywhere in the searoads of all that rocking sea.
Nothing from Police. No reports of any small boats yachts or swimmers unaccounted for. Patient continues talking aloud, singing, swinging back and forth in bed. He is excessively
fatigued. Tomorrow: Sodium Amytal. I suggest a week’s narcosis
.
DOCTOR Y. 17TH AUGUST
.
I disagree. Suggest shock therapy
.
DOCTOR X. 18TH AUGUST
.
Very hot. The current is swinging and rocking. Very fast. It is so hot that the water is melting. The water is thinner than usual, therefore a thin fast rocking. Like heat-waves. The shimmer is strong. Light. Different textures of light. There is the light we know. That is, the ordinary light let’s say of a day with cloud. Then, sunlight, which is a yellow dance added to the first. Then the sparkling waves of heat, heat waves, making light when light makes them. Then, the inner light, the fast shimmer, like a suspended snow in the air. Shimmer even at night when no moon or sun and no light. The shimmer of the solar wind. Yes, that’s it. Oh solar wind, blow blow blow my love to me. It is very hot. The salt has caked my face. If I rub, I’ll scrub my face with pure sea salt. I’m becalmed, on a light, lit, rocking, deliriously delightful sea, for the water has gone thin and slippery in the heat, light water instead of heavy water. I need a wind. Oh solar wind, wind of the sun. Sun. At the end of Ghosts he said the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, the Sun, and at the end of When we Dead Awaken, the Sun, into the arms of the Sun via the solar wind, around, around, around, around …
Patient very disturbed. Asked his name: Jason. He is on a raft in the Atlantic. Three caps. Sodium Amytal tonight. Will see him tomorrow
.