Chapter 1
Blisterpinch and Sorescrape,
To interrupt your bickering with facts, you are both wrong. The fact I must spell this out to you explains why we must nowadays send two devils per patient instead of one.
A cursory glance at the story of Job would have told you, Blisterpinch, that the new pestilence and its consequent legal restrictions will not be enough to defang your patient's faith. As for your suggestion, Sorescrape, that a forced isolation will make your patient a saint because some saints were hermits… that is the defeatist attitude one expects from humans. If she had been alive in London three and a half centuries ago - if she had watched pile after pile of friends and strangers being nightly rolled away like Sisyphus's boulder - either one of you might have been right. Those humans were a different kind of beast. They were either with others whom they could comfort or take comfort from, or they were alone (at least to the extent that a human is alone). Recent technological advancements have muddied their options.
You cannot get your woman through the internet any more easily than the Enemy. Vigilance is required. Has she some secret wantonness of which she is ashamed? Is she looking at old boyfriends, perhaps, hoping that their lives will fall apart spectacularly on her screen if she just keeps checking? Humans now make pacts to destroy each other's internet history should one of them die. If she's looking at something she shouldn't, see if you can arrange technical problems: frustrated curiosity can be doled out as annoyance.
Christians have talked much of curiosity; we have even convinced them that the Enemy dislikes it, and that this was why they lost Eden. Far from it. A curious person is fundamentally a courageous one, for they would rather have the right answer than the comfortable one. This can provoke some worrying lines of thought, for example, "How would I feel if someone did that to me?" or "What is the best use of my talents?" Tempting these humans is like juggling hedgehogs: a new spike of reason pricks you every time you jostle them. Of course this does mean we lose out on the Josef Mengeles of newer generations but we might have lost out on such men anyway: these men enjoyed authority and believed they would never be punished regardless, to the extent that they sweetened their transgressions by bringing in sweeties for the same children they were torturing. The modern human can see more find evidence of their sins than any generation before it if they are brave enough to seek it. Therefore, pure curiosity is best avoided. Jealousy and suspicion are much more desirable subtypes.
The internet fuels jealousy here by blending imagination with reality. Few humans are jealous of people they know well: too much exposure to their prettier, richer, wittier friend will quickly reveal something that makes your patient think, "I'm glad I don't have to deal with that." Experiments of this nature have snatched so many aspiring adulterers from our plates that we would starve to death if we only could. Books are similarly unhelpful. When the patient reads a story, they knowingly enter an imaginary situation and they do not expect the real to match the imagined any more than they expect to jump off their roofs and fly. (You have to get a patient much sooner to get an idiot of that calibre.)
Fortunately, your patient believes her experiences are either real or imaginary, but not both. Convince her that what she looks at on her screens is entirely real, and she will become jealous. Expose her to just enough of a disliked person's good fortune and you can use her sense of justice to twist curiosity to entitlement: "How did that happen?" can very quickly become, "Why did it happen for them instead of me?" From there, self-pity and sulkiness will do much of the work for you if you nurse it.
Of course, jealousy is irritating because it relies on what a person has as much as what they don't. While her health is good and her family safe, she may be too grateful to really commit to jealousy. If so, suspicion is the next option. Rather than convincing her that everything she reads is real, you might persuade her that her normal happiness is imaginary. The current uncertainty makes this a good strategy. Last week she could go wherever she liked whenever she liked with whomever she liked. Of course, that is a real loss. Suspicion, like jealousy, boils down to an imagined injury: you're trying to get your patient thinking they might have been tricked out of their just deserts.
Flicker across the patient's screen some great but quiet domestic calamity – an overdose, perhaps or an affair – and sprinkle in some innocuous details that mirror her own life – the teenager's overeating, for example, or the husband shutting his laptop down just as the patient entered the room. Bear in mind that this type of thing will take up more of your patient's attention now that she cannot visit her friends. Encourage her to think of how other innocent details might be suspicious, especially in light of That Thing That Happened. Most of the earth have at least one Thing That Happened – or Thing I Did, or Thing That Was Done to Me – lodged in them like an old splinter. Find hers and jostle it.
A quick skim through a mobile phone, or a grope about in jacket pockets while doing the laundry is good. Let her think she has found something. Now I must warn you that this will likely lead to that horrid and painful phenomenon humans call relief. You know, that horrible slackness the Patient gets when the bus she's running for doesn't pull away from the stop (on that note: don't rely too much on our infiltration of the public transport system – He knows). You will have to endure it. Relief is an evolutionary pat-on-the-pat: "Well done, all is well." It is not a pleasure except to our Father Below, because relief only returns humans to their original state. Furthermore, it goes much further than a real pleasure ever would. Greed, lust or even vanity would never make her rifle in her husband's private things: in earlier generations, women would even accept that their husbands had a little house behind the family home wherein to keep any gadgets they wanted! But convince her that something is wrong and these courtesies can be unlearned.
Just like the pleasures, relief can be addictive, and if you tempt her with a little a few times, you can eventually make her look for it where there is none. You have no doubt seen a poor man searching his home for money – ripping up the sofa cushions, emptying old teapots, yanking pockets inside out. You've seen them, haven't you? People seek relief in places they would never go for mere pleasure: the mother's purse, the father's desk, the child's piggybank. Suspicion is similarly effective. There may yet come a day where you can have her searching on her hands and knees for hours on end - ignoring healthy and wholesome enjoyments in her pursuit of a phantom injury – if at the end of that, you can get her thinking, "It must be truly awful if I can't find any evidence at all – what is he hiding from me?" Get her there… She will be yours forever. This does, of course, rely on you making sure that she doesn't talk to her family about The Thing That Happened or the scabs will fall from her eyes.
Yours unfaithfully,
Scabtree
P.S. See if you can grab Tweakear or Tonguesnip for a minute to discuss your patient's husband. Humans faced with punishment for sins they haven't committed can easily be persuaded to balance the cheque book. Many banquets were enjoyed from this truth.
I'm keen to make this relevant to the modern day so if anyone has any topics they're particularly interested in seeing in this, please do let me know.
