ON WHAT THE VOICES SAID

of the man who heard voices it was not necessary to stipulate where they came from ... it was enough that he heard them and then confessed it ... so much for the commitment stage ... but when it came to housing storing and releasing the patients the identity of the voices assumed an administrative value ... did they threaten or soothe ... suggest or command ... if either what was it they wanted the patient to do ... now up in the capital there was a clerk in charge of correlating the responses and submitting to the secretary an annual report a summary of these messages ... for the last few years a section of the report had been growing in length and thereby attracted first the secretary's attention and then his alarm ... it was the section of the advice sometimes peremptory but never claiming to be more than a suggestion but for a growing class of patients the persistent advice to remember their oncoming death ... the clerk explained to the secretary this expanding number was a mere function of their ageing demographic ... but the ageing secretary himself began to brood