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Must escape!

John Farquhar Young

    Duncan, a middle-aged, maritime electronics and communications officer, now on home leave after falling and sustaining a minor head injury in a Moroccan bazaar, sits uneasily in the waiting area of his doctor’s surgery thinking about the pieces of papers in the inside pocket of his leather jacket. The pages bear the transcription of a Morse code message tapped out, as it seems from inside his head - the same message repeated many times during preceding days.
    He is unsure whether to mention the message to the doctor. He’ll think I’m nuts! he tells himself. Alarming images flash before his inner eye: being confined in a locked psychiatric ward; given frequent injections in his bottom; then, walking about like a zombie. Probably an exaggeration, he thinks. Even so, I need to be cautious about what I say. His mind scampers on. Perhaps I have a brain tumour! He easily imagines himself on an operating table getting bits of his brain scooped out.
    “So, how can I help?” asks the young doctor, smiling, as Duncan takes a seat.
    “There is a tapping noise in my head,” Duncan replies, now firmly resolved to avoid any reference to the messages.
    The doctor nods and begins to examine Duncan’s head gently probing around his forehead and beneath his eyes. “Any pain?”
    “No,” Duncan replies.
    The doctor nods again. “I’m pretty sure that you have a problem with your sinuses. They’re draining unevenly.” He returns to his seat beside his desk and makes out a prescription. “Take these tablets, one tablet three times per day for a week. That should do the trick. If you continue to have a problem, we’ll take another look.”
    Duncan tries to appear appreciative of the doctor’s effort and slips the prescription into his pocket alongside the pieces of paper with the repeated scary message - always the same message tapped out in Morse: “Must escape. Must escape. Must escape.”. He is sceptical about the potency of sinus pills in blocking this perplexing intrusion into the privacy of his inner life.
    Several days later: The medication has not worked. No surprise there, Duncan concludes as the tapping episodes continue.
    That evening, Duncan’s mood, now dark, is briefly shot through by red flashes of irritation. He feels attacked - besieged - by the tapping.
    He ruefully reflects that his affliction would, almost certainly, be the source of very considerable hilarity among acquaintances.
    “Old Duncan’s got a problem with his head,” he imagines someone passing on the news to a mutual friend. “He’s hearing things.”
    “Oh dear,” the friend might say trying to appear sympathetic.
    “He’s getting Morse code messages from inside his head.”
    “He’s WHAT?” A shared burst of laughter.
    “Poor guy.” Been too long at sea.
    Maybe that’s the problem, Duncan wonders.
    Recalling that he has a long-neglected bottle of expensive Scotch malt whisky at the back of a kitchen cupboard, he decides that useful insights about dealing with the tapping, might be generated by a liberal dose of the golden, heavily peated liquid. Or, he reflects with an inner shrug, if the primary objective is not achieved, then one generous glass– or perhaps several - might pleasurably transport him to a place where he could, at least temporarily, regard the messages with indifference.
    As the alcohol gradually asserts its influence, the tapping subsides. Interesting, Duncan notes. Maybe the Morse code tapper likes good scotch.
    Now in a more relaxed state of mind, his thoughts return to the early months of his career when, as he was drifting towards sleep, he sometimes became aware of inner voices, engaged, as it seemed, in some form of debate. The topics of these interchanges were varied but frequently dwelt - though always tentatively - on questions to do with the purpose of his life. He concluded that thoughts could develop at levels beneath normal consciousness and that the ‘voices’, as he came to call them, were merely expressions of ongoing, deeper mental activity which sometimes filtered into his awareness when the concerns about his day-to-day duties were abandoned.
    Over time, as anxieties about his professional competence diminished, and his pleasure in dealing with various difficult technical challenges increased, the voices faded, intruding less and less often into his near-sleep moments. At length they ceased.
    But, he also recalls, that as his career progressed, solutions to work-related difficulties often occurred out of the blue, surfacing at times when his attention was no longer closely harnessed to close consideration of some aspect of the problem.
    Now another memory nudges its way forward into his awareness. He searches for a slim volume, which he locates under a neglected pile of books and magazines in a dusty corner of his bookshelf: R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The corner of one page is turned down and parts of two sentences are underlined: “... man is not truly one ... and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.” In the margin of the page in very small, neat capital letters he has printed a question to which he has from time to time returned over the years: WHO AM I – ONE OR MANY??? OR BOTH?
    Returning to his seat, he wonders if his head injury has distorted some of his internal wiring. Is the source of the message some ‘independent denizen’ inhabiting his mind? Or, could the tapping be a sign that an unconscious problem-solving element of his brain is showing itself in a bizarre way? Must escape! Is he being told something significant about what he should do with the rest of his life? The nocturnal ‘voices’, he recalls again, were often concerned with the topic of the purpose of his life. The tapped message: Friendly or not? he asks himself. Suppose it’s friendly - a friendly message? Escape - why escape? From what to what?
    He remembers that occasionally he has considered a land-based career; but the familiarity of his life at sea and his solid confidence in his abilities merely served to strengthen what he ruefully came to accept was a pronounced tendency to procrastination when addressing future possibilities. Guess I’ll just keep going until I retire, he often thought.
    But now he becomes acutely aware of the inadequacy of his lethargic approach to the remaining years of his life. He struggles to find the correct word to articulate the raw edge of his dissatisfaction with himself. Self-betrayal? Abdication? Self-abandonment? Thoughts about possible futures, previously only briefly toyed with solidify in his mind. He has, he recalls, more than once been attracted to the idea of undertaking a specialist master’s degree.
    The tapping starts again.
    “Must escape. Yes, yes, escape, escape. Message received.” Duncan mutters impatiently.
    The notion of a new future endows his thinking with a new and exciting sense of purpose. Then a new flash of resolve: But first, for better or worse, get your head checked out!
    Four weeks later in the doctor’s surgery: “We should have looked at this sooner.” There is a more than a little note of reproach in the doctor’s voice. “At any rate, the MRI scan is completely satisfactory. There’s no problem with your brain. From what you say about that bang to your head in Morocco, I think you were slightly concussed.” The doctor pauses and smiles. “The Morse code messages could be linked to disruption of the auditory centres of your brain related to the concussion. The brain is a complex and quite a delicate organ.”
    Duncan smiles and nods. Very complicated! He knows he can easily tolerate the Morse code episodes which have, as the weeks pass, been intruding less and less often. And the message itself: Must escape! In fact, the message was very useful, he thinks, as he considers new challenges marking his journey towards a crisp, exciting horizon.

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