But he would not give up. ‘What about the route you took?’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I shouted. ‘Are you deaf?’
Taking a deep breath, then letting the air out through his nose, the man shut down his computer. He glanced briefly at his colleague. The fleshy man’s face showed no discernible expression.
Even though I couldn’t recall any of the people to whom I had been exposed, the man with the glasses said, it was likely that I had been contaminated as a result. He would therefore be recommending a series of tests to determine the exact nature and degree of that contamination. He consulted his watch. Testing would begin at midday.
I slept poorly that night. Each time I woke up, my pillow would be hot, and when I lifted my head all I could see was a pale oblong hanging in the darkness. Guards had shown me to a small windowless room — a ‘secure unit’, as they called it — in the basement of the Ministry. There was a narrow bed, with sheets that smelled sharply of bleach, as though certain of my predecessors had soiled themselves. There was also a sink and a toilet, both made of metal. In the top half of the door was a single pane of reinforced glass. Once I had established where I was, I would turn my pillow over, cool side facing up, and then lie back. So the authorities had finally caught up with me … I couldn’t work out who the informer was. The woman who ran the hotel, perhaps. Or that sweaty waiter at the restaurant. Or perhaps De Vere had had good reason to be paranoid: if the police were keeping him under surveillance, as he suspected, then they couldn’t have failed to notice me. I remembered De Vere’s missing friend and wondered if I should be frightened.
Thoughts came to me one at a time, with no great urgency.
At midday I was taken to a room that resembled a laboratory. There were no windows here either, just pale-green walls and the steady rush of air through ventilation grilles. A technician asked me to remove my shirt, then she proceeded to wire me up to a number of machines. I was being put through various psychological tests, she said, but they would be monitoring my physiological responses at the same time, everything from heart rate and blood pressure to galvanic skin response, muscle tension and brain activity. Data of this kind added to the clarity of the picture that emerged.
I nodded.
‘We do pretty much the same where I come from.’
Though she gave me a smile, she didn’t seem remotely interested in the fact that I’d been involved in work that was similar to hers.
I spent most of the day in that room. To start with, I took a test designed to map out the basic structure of my personality. This was followed by a written paper, comprising several hundred true/false statements, which would allow the authorities to make predictions about my future behaviour. Later came the visual tests. In responding to a series of pictures, I would unconsciously reveal the kinds of ways in which I interacted with the world around me. In the middle of the afternoon I was allowed an hour’s break, during which I ate lunch in the Ministry canteen.
After the break, my levels of fear, anxiety and depression were assessed. Finally, towards seven o’clock, I was moved to a different room. I noted the seascapes on the walls, the scatter cushions, the stacks of monthly magazines. The atmosphere had been carefully constructed so as to prevent subjects feeling nervous or threatened. In the subsequent ‘diagnostic’ interview I was required to react to a sequence of questions and statements which were intended to tap into my emotions. My responses were so full of anger that I felt transparent. I couldn’t pretend the anger wasn’t there, though, and I couldn’t seem to disguise it either.
By the time I had completed everything that was asked of me, it was late in the evening and I could hardly keep my eyes open. They took me back to my room. I didn’t have much of an appetite, but they brought me supper anyway. Not long afterwards I went to bed. My tests would be processed overnight, they had told me, then I would see a psychological assessment officer who would inform me not only of the findings but of any action that might be taken as a result.
Since they had such a dramatic effect on people’s lives, and since they dealt with these people face to face, psychological assessment officers were routinely subjected to considerable levels of pressure and stress, and it was no wonder, perhaps, if they were prone to delusions of grandeur, and no wonder if, from time to time, they became brittle and over-sensitive. Like plants growing in rarefied conditions, they tended to assume unusual or even distorted forms, and Dr Maurice Gilbert, whom I saw at five o’clock the following afternoon, was no exception. He had the doughy, etiolated look of someone who seldom ventured outdoors. Only his hair had flourished: glossy, thick, oxblood in colour, he wore it swept back and a little too long, a sure sign that it was a feature of which he was inordinately proud.
‘It’s not often,’ he mused from behind his desk, ‘that somebody leaves the Red Quarter for the Blue Quarter. I mean, why would anyone do that? Life’s supposed to be so harmonious over there, so full of purpose and good cheer — so perfect …’
I let my eyes drift past him to the window. The blinds had been lowered, though, and the slats were tilted shut. There was no view.
‘But perhaps it’s too perfect,’ Gilbert continued. ‘Perhaps one craves a little discord, a little mess. Perhaps, in the end, we tire of harmony.’ He adjusted one of his gold cufflinks, then leaned back in his chair. ‘You know, I’ve often thought that I belonged in the Red Quarter, but the results never came out quite right. It’s almost as if the tests we use aren’t capable of picking up the nuances that make us what we are, as if our methods of assessment simply aren’t fine enough. Have you ever had that feeling, Mr Parry, that our procedures, our techniques, are failing us?’
I thought at first that he might be trying to trick me into admitting something, but then I realised that the question had been rhetorical. Wholly preoccupied with himself, Gilbert was in love with the sound of his own voice, and he would need nothing from me except an occasional prompting.
‘It sounds strange to say it,’ he went on, ‘possibly even a touch arrogant’ — and his eyes veered towards me, and he let out an abrupt, abbreviated sound, not unlike a dog’s bark — ‘but we know ourselves, don’t we? Surely we know ourselves better than all this’ — and he looked around the room — ‘all this cumbersome machinery with which we surround ourselves?’
I smothered a yawn, but once again I chose not to reply. My patience was running out. I didn’t know how much more of Gilbert I could stand.
‘However,’ he said, and he rose to his feet with a finger raised, as if warning me not to jump to any conclusions, and then began to pace up and down in front of the drawn blinds, ‘the machines, the tests, the inventories — they’re all we have at the moment, poor creatures that we are. At times, you know, I can’t help feeling that we live in an impossibly primitive age, and that future generations will look back at us and laugh.’ Staring at the carpet, he shook his head and smiled ruefully. ‘Still, that’s the way the system works — at this point in history, anyway — and if I find it primitive, well, who am I? Who’s going to listen to me?’
‘Nobody,’ I said.
Gilbert’s head came up sharply, and his eyes narrowed a fraction as he peered across the room at me. Until that moment, for reasons I didn’t completely understand, he had been treating me as an accomplice, a kind of ally, but now he saw that I was actually the enemy. I watched him return to his desk and flip through my case notes. I could restrain myself no longer.