Drug of Choice

Lefevre had an additional comment about the food. “You know,” he said, “most of our guests lose weight during their stay here. They think they are eating heartily, and think it is excellent, but in fact they don’t eat a lot. So they lose — two pounds, three pounds, five pounds. They notice it on the way home, and are invariably pleased. They think they’ve been so active and vigorous that the weight was lost despite their heavy eating. It is a peculiarity of our culture,” he said, “that nobody is unhappy about losing weight.”

The guests spent nearly all of their time in their rooms. On sunny days, they would be taken out to the balcony to lie in the sun and get tanned; otherwise, they were hardly bothered. Every second day a group of “fixers” would go around to each room, talking to the guests. The fixers were people who reinforced fantasies by altering the environment.

There were three fixers, a psychologist, a sociologist and Lefevre himself. Clark went with them on their rounds one day.

They talked to one guest who said, “I made love to my wife on the beach last night and I got sand in my trousers.” He chuckled. “Tore them, too.”

Lefevre poured sand into the man’s trouser cuffs, and tore them slightly.

“What else?”

“I had a wonderful meal last night, but I was a little tipsy. I got some shrimp sauce on my tie.”

The sociologist went to the closet, found a tie, and poured catsup over it.

In the next room, a woman reported that she had gone swimming in the ocean and had forgetfully taken her watch; it was now stopped.

“So it is,” Lefevre said, slipping it off her wrist and dropping it into a glass of salt water.

“You see,” Lefevre said, “the fixers do this kind of minor, necessary environmental change, to correspond with guests’ fantasies. In fact, the changes are easy. They tend to fall into a small range of problems — like stains on clothing, watches in salt water, and unstrung tennis rackets.”

Clark nodded, remembering his own racket.

“We also provide minor scrapes and injuries to our guests. Usually local anesthetic, and then coarse sandpaper does the trick. Once in a great while, we get some guest who fantasizes an unimportant but major injury. One man thought he was badly cut by a knife while fishing. Another thought he was blinded in one eye by powder while he was hunting.”

“What do you do then?”

“That,” Lefevre said, “is a job for our psychologist.”

The psychologist, a thin man in a sportshirt and rumpled slacks, smiled shyly. “I investigate the underlying reasons for the self-destructive fantasy. And I correct it. It can be a slow process, sometimes it takes days. That is why we counter-suggest to the guests when they first arrive — we tell them all how fabulously safe our facilities are, and how no one has ever been seriously hurt at the resort. This makes it more difficult, you see, for them to build a well-integrated fantasy of bodily harm.”

“Meanwhile,” Lefevre said, “our sociologist handles other matters. When we first started this resort, we planned it as an isolated hideaway, with no communications to the outside. No telephone, no telegraph — guests couldn’t communicate out, and couldn’t receive messages coming in. We tried to make it work, but it wouldn’t. We could convince businessmen that their business would wait, that they needn’t bother with long-distance calls daily to New York or London. That was simple. But what do you do when a man’s wife is seriously ill, or his business associate has died? What do you do with some major crisis?”

Clark turned to the sociologist.

“That’s where I come in,” the sociologist said. “I help in the process of making a guest’s responses to stress appropriate. I help the guest to draft communications, letters and cables. I help to plan the guest’s early return home, and help him to deal with his guilt over a tragedy which occurred while he was off having a good time. A common situation is one where a man is off with his secretary and meantime his wife develops cancer, or has a severe auto accident, or something. The guy oozes guilt, and it is manifest in various ways, depending on his personality structure, his place in society, his education, his background, his occupation, and so forth. I help him deal with these problems within the context of his life.” He smiled. “It’s a lot more difficult than pouring whiskey over a cocktail dress, or catsup over a tie.”

Clark said, “You seem to have thought of everything.”

“Yes,” Lefevre said.

The resort had a kind of fascination for Clark, it was such a grand illusion, so carefully maintained and prepared. For several days he watched the process with absorption, and did not think about the future. But eventually, he began to wonder.