If you want to, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube…
We are in what looks like an orderly suburban garage (there is a fridge, and a mower or motorbike under tarps); orderly and ordinary, although it would serve perfectly well, cinematically, as the lab or rec room of some relatively unpretentious serial murderer. After a while heavyset men are purposefully busying themselves, while the viewer concentrates on a two-plank table of bare pine, supported by A-frames and tilting slightly downwards to the right, where a bucket lurks. The Hitch appears, under escort and black-hooded as if for execution (no eye-slits), and is helped into a seated position. Fade. Now he is strapped down on the sloping board so that his heart is higher than his head (and his loafers higher still). A hunched operative leans over him and says, with the plodding and patronising menace that marks the voice of American officialdom (do I make myself clear?),
‘All right, listen up. I’m going to give you some instructions…Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘We’re going to place metal objects in each of your hands. These objects are to be released if you experience unbearable stress…Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You have a code word you can use for distress. That word is red. R-E-D. Say the word.’
‘Red.’
‘Again, what is the word?’
‘Red.’
‘That is correct.’
Now the Special Forces veterans go about their work with ominously practised movements of their gloved hands. One of them aligns and steadies the subject’s body while another folds a white towel over the subject’s mouth and nose, and produces…a plastic jug of Poland Spring. And then the towel – a white mask upon a black mask – is assiduously drenched.
Seventeen seconds later the metal objects (which look like steel batons) are dashed to the ground. The men at once desist, the straps are loosened, and the hood is whipped off to reveal a face both flushed and tumid, as if about to burst.
‘All right, are you breathing?’
The live footage soon fades. What we don’t see is Christopher asking ‘to try it one more time’…When he did, the specialists, after a by-the-book interval with repeated and elaborated warnings (‘racing pulse’, ‘adrenaline rush’), duly obliged.
The most difficult position
I glanced out of the window at the familiar towers of MD Anderson, as odiously changeless as the daily Tex-Mex blue. For I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens: this was more, now, than an often-used conversational flourish. I said,
‘You wanted another go to see if you could last longer.’
‘Of course. You know, family honour.’ He was sitting in his dressing gown on the padded chair beside the bed – the hospital bed, with his computer open on its detachable meal tray. ‘You seem to want me to spell it out. My ancestors, Little Keith, who faced peril on the sea. When they struggled in an alien element, their courage did not desert them.’
‘Mm.’ No one who knew him at all well would discount Christopher’s reverence for the ‘Navy Hymn’ and the no-nonsense fortitude of Commander Hitchens and all the rest. In his torture piece he talked of the ‘shame and misery’ he felt after his prompt capitulation in North Carolina (‘shame’ could be merely gestural, but ‘misery’ feels authentic, and peculiar – peculiar to him). ‘All right, you struck a blow for your ancient mariners. And as a result you’ve got PTSD.’
‘So it would seem,’ he said. ‘PTSD. Yes, I know, I used to sneer at those abbreviations and so did you. When the kindergarten shrinks were raring to drug Alexander, I’d think, Attention Deficit Disorder – these are just fancy names for the little sins of childhood. Messy Eater Syndrome. Won’t Sit Still Spectrum. But PTSD…I think it’s a real condition.’
‘So do I.*3 But the point is you went looking for it. You went cruising for a bruising, mate. Twice.’
‘Yes yes, Mart, but it was worth doing. Now we know that waterboarding’s not a “simulation” of torture. It’s an enactment.’
‘Someone had to do it – maybe – but not you. Your history ruled you out. On several counts.’ And I ticked them off: lifelong fear of drowning, waking up with air hunger (plus ‘acid reflux’), acute breathlessness after mild exertion…He said nothing. I said, ‘I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens.’
And it was true. I didn’t – and I don’t – understand him. And I reduced my thoughts, that night in Houston, to stupefied silence as I tried and failed to understand Christopher Hitchens.
…His attraction to perversity was familiar enough to everyone. In the journalistic narrative the adjective of first resort – ‘contrarian’ – was now something like Christopher’s middle name. And he did seem to covet the disapproval, even the ostracism, of his peers. Time and again I watched him do it, watched him seek the most difficult position, difficult anyway and quite exceptionally difficult for Christopher Hitchens.*4
This trait of his was always mysteriously self-punitive. Still, though – to go out of your way to volunteer for torture? In all other cases it was his intellectual reputation he put at risk, not his physical instrument – not his life.
He was obscurely compelled to embrace complication, to test his courage, to walk into his doubts and fears. And so it was that in 2008 he decided that the most difficult position, for him, was lying on his back (with his face under two layers of sopping cloth) on a narrow board that sloped downwards, so that his heart was higher than his head.
Courage
‘It is so very difficult for a sick man not to be a scoundrel,’ observed Dr Johnson, as he embarked on one of his most magisterial paragraphs:
It may be said that disease generally begins that equality which death completes. All distinctions which set one man apart from another are very little perceived in the gloom of the sick chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay,
