Night of the Animals(6)
(Electroencephalographic headwear made of fibronic cloth, Nexar hoods—of a pyramidal shape and in ubiquitous NHS élite blue—were fitted on people, often but not always voluntarily, and usually at government-operated Calm Houses, and used to send soothing signals down their neuronal axons. The signals could also be “read,” monitored, and manipulated. Over the course of sessions lasting from hours to days on end, the hoods would smooth and desplinter brain activity like a kind of mental wood plane. The effects lasted for weeks.)
With the new Acts, the old National Health Service had also split into the tiny, private NHS Legacy (for hereditary or purchased peerages, certain public workers, and the thousands of hangers-on in the vast new aristocracy), and the ragged, more and more depleted free NHS élite (for Briton’s seventy million Indigents and a handful of others from the shrinking lower-middle class). Many middle-class Britons not crippled by various WikiNous distractions had already been decimated by the popular suicide cults, which attracted them in droves. Millions of the rest in the middle, having lost suffrage with the Positive Disenfranchisement Act, fell to official Indigent status during the so-called Great Reclamation of the 2020s, when trillions of pounds of value were written off financial markets.
As a physician under the Baronetcy Alimentation Act, Dr. Bajwa would normally be accorded a nonhereditary peerage, but he hadn’t saved nearly enough money for even one of the new “baby-baronetcies,” as they were known, and the Bajwas lacked connections. (The physician’s own younger brother, Banee, a former republican activist, had overdosed on heroin years ago, despite all his family’s effort to “sort Banee out,” as their father put it, and this had marked the whole clan as rather dubious.) Moreover, Baj far too often spoke his mind and showed benevolence for the poor—ruinous habits under Henry IX, or “Harry9,” as Indigents called him.
Baj’s casual denunciations, spoken among supposed friends, of NHS élite’s emphasis on palliative neurology—in which the relief of pain supplanted research and one-on-one care—had got him assigned to an NHS élite surgery in offices across the Holloway Road from a betting shop and a Szechuan masturbation stand. It was a far cry from the wealthier central London districts, where serene greens for spawn-ball—a slow-paced kind of tennis with genomic, hour-lifetime lagomorphic spawn-balls carefully “played” across a grassy court—art galleries, duty-reduced luxury shops, and some of the new schools for women’s etiquette had all taken root.
“Your misapprehensions,” he said to Cuthbert one day. “Listen. If you don’t take your meds as prescribed, and you don’t keep off the Flōt—Cuthbert, listen, you listen to me—this is the price. That’s one thing I must say. And that’s just one. You know what I mean, surely. If you do something foolish, in public, you’re going to find yourself wearing a hood, my friend. Or going for a burton.”*
“I don’t care,” said Cuthbert. “At least it’s not Whittington.”
“You have no idea what you mean. There is . . . nothing . . . really . . . wrong with Whittington,” the doctor said, wincing a bit. As the last decent free hospital in London, and the only remaining NHS élite site for addiction treatment, the Whittington Hospital, close by in Archway, was scandalously overstretched.
“Whittington doesn’t work. It’s hopeless. I can’t understand why King Harry’s let it go this way. It’s not much better off than banjaxed in a Nexar hood, is it?”
“You are. The hood is . . . the end. Of everything. Whittington can be a start. There’s an effort there. There’s hope. A hope and a prayer.”
Cuthbert blinked a few times and smiled in a strange, sour way. “The most I’ll ever do is get a few days past the first Flōt withdrawal. I admit they’re very clever at the Whit, I s’ppose. And I feel like that lot . . . loiks me. In their way.”
“See? You have friends there, thank you,” said the doctor. “You go to Whittington. I’ll get you in, fast-tracked. Anytime. At a moment’s notice. And why worry about the second withdrawal? That’s years away.”
Flōt’s bell-curved dual-withdrawal syndrome arose from its unique twin-cycle neurotoxic effect on the brain’s serotonergic system. Unlike most abstinence-based drug recoveries, in Flōt recoveries the peril went from bad to better to lethal as years clean passed. The most recovering addicts could hope for were some comparatively peaceful years between first and second withdrawals, typically about ten to fifteen, followed by a dark time of anger, insomnia, and floridly hypomanic delirium that marked second withdrawal’s arrival.
Cuthbert leaned his chair back on its hind legs for a moment, then brought it down. He tilted his head slightly, listening. He crossed his legs and gazed upward, smiling more thoroughly now, as if staring at the credits screen of a deeply gratifying film.
“I wish I could tell you more, but it’s not possible,” he said. “The animals, see. Again. I hear them. Foxes now. They want to say . . . thank you? To all the people in this dirty owd town.” Cuthbert chuckled a bit. “Thank you! Ta! Funny, eh? ‘Cheers!’ What’s there to thank?” Cuthbert’s smile fell. His eyes glistened. “Them foxes are innocent—and foolish. Thoi’ve no bloody idea.”
The doctor noticed a tremor in the aged man’s lips as he spoke. He took a relatively small daily dose of the ancient, crude antipsychotic med Abilify, in a desultory manner, but his massive Flōt intake negated most of its benefits.