The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (12 page)

I meant to say goodbye. I was going to come back and pick up some clothes when you were back from school. And that was when I was going to explain what I was doing and say that I would come back and see you as often as I could and you could come down to London sometimes to stay with us. But when I rang your father he said I couldn't come back. He was really angry. He said I couldn 't talk to you, I didn't know what to do. He said that I was being selfish and that I was never to set foot inside the house again. So I haven't. But I have written you these letters instead.

I wonder if you can understand any of this. I know it will be very difficult for you. But I hope you can understand a little.

Christopher, I never meant to hurt you. I thought that what I was doing was the best for all of us. I hope it is. And I want you to know that this is not your fault.

I used to have dreams that everything would get better. Do you remember, you used to say that you wanted to be an astranaut? Well, I used to have dreams where you were an astranaut and you were on the television and I thought that's my son. I wonder what it is that you want to be now. Has it changed? Are you still doing maths? I hope you are.

Please, Christopher, write to me sometime, or ring me on the telephone. The numbers at the top of the letter.

Love and kisses,

Your Mother

Ji Ji Ji Ji -A- Ji

Then I opened a third envelope. This was the letter that was inside 18th September

Flatl

312 Lausanne Rd

London N8 5NG

0208 756 4321

Dear Christopher,

Well, I said I'd write to you every week, and I have. In fact, this is the second letter this week, so I'm doing even better than I said.

I have got a job! I'm working in Camden, at Perkin and Rashid, which is a Chartered Survayors. That means they go around looking at houses and work out how much they should cost and what work needs to be done on them and how much that work will cost. And also they work out how much new houses and offices and factories will cost to build.

It's a nice office. The other secretary is Angle. Her desk is covered in little teddy bears and furry toys and pictures of her children (so I've put a picture of you in a frame on my desk). She's really nice and we always go out for lunch together.

I don't know how long I'll stay here, though I have to do a lot of adding up of numbers for when we send bills out to clients and I'm not very good at doing this (you 'd be better at it than I am!).

The company is run by two men called Mr. Perkin and Mr. Rashid. Mr. Rashid is from Pakistan and very stern and always wants us to work faster. And Mr. Perkin is weird (Angie calls him Pervy Perkin). When he comes and stands next to me to ask a question he always puts his hand on my sholder and squots down so his face is really near mine and I can smell his toothpaste which gives me the creeps. And the pay is not very good, either. So I shall be looking for something better as soon as I get the chance.

I went up to Alexandra Palace the other day. It's a big park just round the corner from our flat, and the park is a huge hill with a big conference center on the top and it made me think of you because if you came here we could go there and fly kites or watch the planes coming into Heathrow airport and I know you 'd like that.

I have to go now, Christopher. I'm writing this in my lunch hour (Angie is off sick with the flu, so we can't have lunch together). Please write to me sometime and tell me about how you are and what your doing at school.

I hope you got the present I sent you. Have you solved it yet? Roger and I saw it in a shop in Camden market and I know you 've always liked puzles. Roger tried to get the two pieces apart before we wrapped it up and he couldn't do it. He said that if you managed to do it you were a genius.

Loads and loads of love,

Your Mother

\ Ji Ji \

And this was the fourth letter 23rd August

Flatl

312 Lausanne Rd

London N8 5NG

0208 756 4321

Dear Christopher,

I'm sorry I didn 't write last week. I had to go to the dentist and have two of my molars out. You might not remember when we had to take you to the dentist. You wouldn't let anyone put their hand inside your mouth so we had to put you to sleep so that the dentist could take one of your teeth out. Well, they didn't put me to sleep, they just gave me what is called a local anathsetic which means that you can't feel anything in your mouth, which is just as well because they had to saw through the bone to get the tooth out. And it didn't hurt at all. In fact I was laughing because the dentist had to tug and pull and strain so much and it seemed really funny to me. But when I got home the pain started to come back and I had to lie on the sofa for two days and take lots of painkillers. . .

Then I stopped reading the letter because I felt sick.

Mother had not had a heart attack. Mother had not died. Mother had been alive all the time. And Father had lied about this.

I tried really hard to think if there was any other explanation but I couldn't think of one. And then I couldn't think of anything at all because my brain wasn't working properly.

I felt giddy. It was like the room was swinging from side to side, as if it was at the top of a really tall building and the building was swinging backward and forward in a strong wind (this is a simile, too). But I knew that the room couldn't be swinging backward and forward, so it must have been something which was happening inside my head.

I rolled onto the bed and curled up in a ball.

My stomach hurt.

I don't know what happened then because there is a gap in my memory, like a bit of the tape had been erased. But I know that a lot of time must have passed because later on, when I opened my eyes again, I could see that it was dark outside the window. And I had been sick because there was sick all over the bed and on my hands and arms and face.

But before this I heard Father coming into the house and calling out my name, which is another reason why I know a lot of time had passed.

And it was strange because he was calling, "Christopher. . . ? Christopher. . . ?" and I could see my name written out as he was saying it. Often I can see what someone is saying written out like it is being printed on a computer screen, especially if they are in another room. But this was not on a computer screen. I could see it written really large, like it was on a big advert on the side of a bus. And it was in my mother's handwriting, like this

durnfrvfiw dtfighrfiw

And then I heard Father come up the stairs and walk into the room.

He said, "Christopher, what the hell are you doing?" And I could tell that he was in the room, but his voice sounded tiny and far away, like people's voices sometimes do when I am groaning and I don't want them to be near me.

And he said, "What the fuck are you. . . ? That's my cupboard, Christopher. Those are. . . Oh shit. . . Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit."

Then he said nothing for a while.

Then he put his hand on my shoulder and moved me onto my side and he said, "Oh Christ." But it didn't hurt when he touched me, like it normally does. I could see him touching me, like I was watching a film of what was happening in the room, but I could hardly feel his hand at all. It was just like the wind blowing against me.

And then he was silent again for a while.

Then he said, "I'm sorry, Christopher. I'm so, so sorry."

Then he said, "You read the letters."

Then I could hear that he was crying because his breath sounded all bubbly and wet, like it does when someone has a cold and they have lots of snot in their nose.

Then he said, "I did it for your good, Christopher. Honestly I did. I never meant to lie. I just thought. . . I just thought it was better if you didn't know. . . that. . . that. . . I didn't mean to . . . I was going to show them to you when you were older."

Then he was silent again.

Then he said, "It was an accident."

Then he was silent again.

Then he said, "I didn't know what to say. . . I was in such a mess . . . She left a note and. . . Then she rang and. . . I said she was in hospital because. . . because I didn't know how to explain. It was so complicated. So difficult. And I. . . I said she was in hospital. And I know it wasn't true. But once I'd said that. . . I couldn't. . . I couldn't change it. Do you understand. . . Christopher. . . ? Christopher. . . ? It just. . . It got out of control and I wish. . ."

Then he was silent for a really long time.

Then he touched me on the shoulder again and said, "Christopher, we have to get you cleaned up, OK?"

He shook my shoulder a little bit but I didn't move.

And he said, "Christopher, I'm going to go to the bathroom and I'm going to run you a hot bath. Then I'm going to come back and take you to the bathroom, OK? Then I can put the sheets into the washing machine."

Then I heard him get up and go to the bathroom and turn the taps on. I listened to the water running into the bath. He didn't come back for a while. Then he came back and touched my shoulder again and said, "Let's do this really gently, Christopher. Let's sit you up and get your clothes off and get you into the bath, OK? I'm going to have to touch you, but it's going to be all right."

Then he lifted me up and made me sit on the side of the bed. He took my jumper and my shirt off and put them on the bed. Then he made me stand up and walk through to the bathroom. And I didn't scream. And I didn't fight. And I didn't hit him.

163. When I was little and I first went to school, my main teacher was called Julie, because Siobhan hadn't started working at the school then. She only started working at the school when I was twelve.

And one day Julie sat down at a desk next to me and put a tube of Smarties on the desk, and she said, "Christopher, what do you think is in here?"

And I said, "Smarties."

Then she took the top off the Smarties tube and turned it upside down and a little red pencil came out and she laughed and I said, "It's not Smarties, it's a pencil."

Then she put the little red pencil back inside the Smarties tube and put the top back on.

Then she said, "If your mummy came in now and we asked her what was inside the Smarties tube, what do you think she would say?" because I used to call Mother Mummy then, not Mother.

And I said, "A pencil."

That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds. And Julie said to Mother and Father that I would always find this very difficult. But I don't find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it.

It's like computers. People think computers are different from people because they don't have minds, even though, in the Turing test, computers can have conversations with people about the weather and wine and what Italy is like, and they can even tell jokes.

But the mind is just a complicated machine.

And when we look at things we think we're just looking out of our eyes like we're looking out of little windows and there's a person inside our head, but we're not. We're looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.

And you can tell this because of an experiment which I saw on TV in a series called How the Mind Works. And in this experiment you put your head in a clamp and you look at a page of writing on a screen. And it looks like a normal page of writing and nothing is changing. But after a while, as your eye moves round the page, you realize that something is very strange because when you try to read a bit of the page you've read before it's different.

And this is because when your eye flicks from one point to another you don't see anything at all and you're blind. And the flicks are called saccades. Because if you saw everything when your eye flicked from one point to another you'd feel giddy. And in the experiment there is a sensor which tells when your eye is flicking from one place to another, and when it's doing this it changes some of the words on the page in a place where you're not looking.

But you don't notice that you're blind during saccades because your brain fills in the screen in your head to make it seem like you're looking out of two little windows in your head. And you don't notice that words have changed on another part of the page because your mind fills in a picture of things you're not looking at at that moment.

And people are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can have pictures of someone in another room. Or they can have a picture of what is going to happen tomorrow. Or they can have pictures of themselves as an astronaut. Or they can have pictures of really big numbers. Or they can have pictures of Chains of Reasoning when they're trying to work something out.

And that is why a dog can go to the vet and have a really big operation and have metal pins sticking out of its leg but if it sees a cat it forgets that it has pins sticking out of its leg and chases after the cat. But when a person has an operation it has a picture in its head of the hurt carrying on for months and months. And it has a picture of all the stitches in its leg and the broken bone and the pins and even if it sees a bus it has to catch it doesn't run because it has a picture in its head of the bones crunching together and the stitches breaking and even more pain.

And that is why people think that computers don't have minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there looking at the screen, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting in his captain's seat looking at a big screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind, which is called a homunculus, which means a little man. And they think that computers don't have this homunculus.

But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads (because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is another bit of the brain watching the screen.

But the brain doesn't see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.

And this is why people's brains are like computers. And it's not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is something they can't see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can't see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.

Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.

167. After Father had given me a bath and cleaned the sick off me and dried me off with a towel, he took me to my bedroom and put some clean clothes on.

Then he said, "Have you had anything to eat yet this evening?"

But I didn't say anything.

Then he said, "Can I get you anything to eat, Christopher?"

But I still didn't say anything.

So he said, "OK. Look. I'm going to go and put your clothes and the bedsheets into the washing machine and then I'll come back, OK?"