Second opinion

WHEN I was young, I could explain everything, at least to my own satisfaction. With the passing of each successive year, however, my confidence in my understanding has waned to the point of not even understanding what it is to understand. The world has thus become utterly opaque and mysterious to me, especially that part of it called Man, God rot him.

What makes Man tick, exactly? That is the question. I just can't find out. Even the answer to so simple a question as 'why does he take heroin?' eludes me. As for addicts, they don't know either, and evince no interest in the question. When asked, they are surprised: the question strikes them as bizarre. One might as well ask them why there is something rather than nothing.

One day last week I was consulted by three addicts in quick succession. I asked them all why they took heroin. The first, a woman, replied, 'It takes me out of the living world.' The second, a man, replied, 'I'm trying to get off it, but people keep coming to my door with it.' He used to be a security guard, he said, 'but that went all on top of me.' The third, also a man, replied, 'Because I'm an addict,' by which he meant that, since addicts take heroin, and he was an addict, he took heroin — otherwise he wouldn't have been an addict, would he?

Of these answers, the first was by far the most interesting: the need to escape the living world. If by this is meant the world in which we find ourselves, this is a need I myself feel daily; for I can never wait to escape from reality to representations of reality, either in books or in pictures. Since this is the case wherever I might happen to be at the time, I suppose it means that I have a basic dislike, or mistrust at least, of existence. I don't believe it — existence, I mean — augurs any good.

Enough of autobiography, however: the world, horrible as it is, is too interesting for that. Let us return to what my patient called 'the living world' — her living world, to be exact.

She was waiting for her boyfriend — who had one of those names so commonly associated with criminality that preventive detention at birth would be justified — to come out of prison.

'What's he in for?' I asked.

'Violent disorder.' 'Towards you?'

'He has been. I've had the police out to him. But he's not in for that. He just loses it.'

'Loses what?'

'Control.'

'I suppose he strangles you.'

'And calls me names.'

'Such as?'

'Bitch, slag, slut and whore.'

I confess that, at that moment, though I should not have done, as it displays a lamentably commonplace and prejudiced mind, I could not but think of a firm of solicitors.

I asked her why her arm was in plaster. 'This bloke slashed me,' she replied. 'Which bloke?'

'I met my boyfriend's friend in a pub and he said he had nowhere to stay, so I put him up in my flat, but after a couple of days he wanted sex with me and I wouldn't give it to him so he threatened to throw my dog out of the window and he smashed a glass and slashed me up.'

'Do you want to stay with your boyfriend?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Because if I left him, he'd heat me up and lock me in my flat.'

Theodore Dalrymple