The Devil in Detail, page 7
“I don’t really relax very far,” I warned him. “Mind like a steel blade—highly resistant to hypnotic suggestion.”
“”As I say, the first session only involves conscious relaxation. As for the induced hypnotic state of the second session, you might be surprised. The limited testing we’ve done suggests that our method of taking a subject down through the various levels of semi-consciousness into a dream-state is highly effective. You do sleep, don’t you, Dr. Stableford, so your brain knows perfectly well how to navigate through all the phases of semi-consciousness, even if your mind sometimes refuses to take notice of conventional inducements?”
“I rarely remember my dreams,” I told him. Unless they’re about bookshops, I didn’t add, although I certainly thought it. “If you put me to sleep, I probably won’t remember a thing when I wake up.”
“That’s a possibility. We’re not aiming for sleep, though, but a particular hypnotic state, objective measurable by brain-wave analysis. Have you ever done any meditation, by any chance?”
“Not seriously. Mostly, I let my endorphins do their own thing. I figure that if I start inducing bliss states on a daily basis I might get addicted to them. A writer needs his presence of mind around the clock—clarity of mind too, if he can manage it, although I will admit that there seem to be plenty of bestsellers who have probably never even got close.”
“That’s good,” he said, amiably. “We’re not aiming for a bliss state, as it’s sometimes called, but something beyond that. We’re trying to reach much more deeply into the primitive parts of the mind than standard meditation techniques, in order to try to establish a more intimate contact with the contents of the collective unconscious.”
“Or the Cosmic Mind?”
“If you wish. That’s a phrase I find sometimes useful in trying to explain my ideas to lay people, although it’s really just a restatement of ‘collective unconscious.’ It has the advantage of avoiding Jungian paraphernalia, without taking aboard the alternative paraphernalia attached to the idea of God. In brief, yes, we hope that our method of induced hypnosis will enable our subjects to access a part of the mind that isn’t individuated and idiosyncratic, but general to the entire human race, and perhaps to the mentality of the universe itself.”
It sounded highly dubious to me, but I didn’t want to get into a philosophical debate over the phone. There were more down-to-earth issues that required clarification. “What sort of music do you use?” I asked him. “Conventional mood music, I presume—low key muzak?”
“To begin with, but we also try to employ the familiarities and particular tastes of individual subjects. We ask people to bring along some of their own favorite music: something they know well, enjoy and play for their own pleasure. It doesn’t have to be particularly relaxing—the main thing is that it’s something you like. It’s necessary that the second phase of the process relates to artificial rhythms that already have built-in responses in the brain.
“It’s an interesting approach,” I conceded, although I wasn’t at all sure that my favorite music, most of which was Gothic rock, would be ideal for getting in touch with the Comic Mind, if any such thing were possible—which, of course, I doubted extremely.
“It’s a vital accessory to the particular hypnotic process with which we’re experimenting and the goal we’re trying to achieve. Claire’s fond of saying that trance and dance equals transcendence.”
“I don’t dance,” I told him, only a trifle frostily. The equation sounded vaguely familiar, but it was more Russell Hoban than Deepak Chopra, so I wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. I don’t mind life imitating art, so long as it shows a modicum of good taste.
“No, you don’t have to.” Axel replied, a fraction too earnestly. “You can’t actually dance while you’re hooked up to the equipment. Not physically, that is. It’s more like dancing inside. Within the trancing, that is.”
I didn’t waste any time imaginatively pursuing possible puns on the word trancing, that being the kind of thing best left to the managers of boy bands.
“My favorite music’s Goth rock,” I warned him. “I think the TM brigade prefer Hindu chants to Fields of the Nephilim.”
“”I’m not familiar with their work,” Alex told me, which completely failed to surprise me, although it showed a dramatic absence of good taste, “but the essential thing is that you have an affinity with it. Music can function as a gateway to alternative states of consciousness, with the right guidance. Once the electroencephalograph has measured your responses to familiar music, it will then be in a position to synthesize a soundscape that guides the neuronal responses. It takes a while, I’m afraid, and will require more than one session, but with the computer power now available to us and the synth equipment, our program ought to be able to design a musical sequence specifically for you, that will hopefully enable your brain to open pathways to the depths of the unconscious.”
“Opening the doors of perception?” I queried.
He understood the reference. “It’s not a matter of psychedelic tripping,” he said. “We’re hoping to produce more focused and more consistent results than the old LSD experiments, which I think of as being more like haphazard explosions of mental fireworks than controlled odysseys in the collective unconscious. We’re not presuming the accuracy of the detailed Jungian analysis of the archetypes of the unconscious, although it will be interesting if we do locate some of his archetypes. We’re endeavoring to keep an open mind about what the contents of the collective unconscious might be and the way they operate, in relation to consciousness on the one hand, and their collective and universal aspects on the other. We can talk more about the background to the project when you’re here, of course, but I hope I’ve told you enough for you to be able to decide whether or not to come aboard.”
It did sound harmless, and also intriguing. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll sign up. When do you want me? I’m perfectly flexible, being self-employed and not actually engrossed at the present.”
“That’s great. We should have everything set up and ready to go by the end of the week, and we’ll do a few final test runs over the weekend and launch the experiment proper on Monday. Would Tuesday afternoon suit you for the first run? You’ll need to stay overnight here, but the second run on Wednesday should terminate the experimental run, and you can be back home that evening, if that’s satisfactory.”
“It’s fine,” I assured him. “How many CDs should I bring along?”
“Four should be entirely adequate, but you can bring along a couple of extra ones if you want. Lionel Fanthorpe will be here doing sessions on Monday and Tuesday morning, and he’s volunteered to meet you at Pontyprydd station, drive you to the hotel and then bring you out to the lab, if you can let him know what time your train arrives.”
“Will do,” I said, unsurprised that Lionel had volunteered to be guinea-pig number one.
“I’ll see you a week today, then,” he said, sounding full of youthful enthusiasm.
“Okay,” I said. “Notify the Cosmic Mind to expect me, and not to be too intimidated by my reputation.”
I hung up, and then began to wonder whether I’d done the right thing.
It seemed, in one sense, likely to be a useful distraction. Telling the amiable Axel that I wasn’t seriously engrossed at the moment had been a drastic understatement. Not only wasn’t I seriously engrossed but I was having considerable difficulty settling down to anything. Even relatively brief articles such as the introduction to the Pamely collection that I’d done a few days before, were proving unusually taxing.
I was seriously annoyed with that, because it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been left by one of my wives before. The Ex had dragged the process out for an excruciating year, and although **** tended to disappear much more abruptly, she also tended to change her mind after a matter of months, weeks, or even days. In the five years since she had left me for the first time I’d already lost count of the times she had repeated the disappearing act, although the present absence was only the third time that she’d actually moved all of her ever-diminishing possessions out of the house, leaving nothing behind but a gap. I should, in theory, have been used to it by now, and capable of simply working through it—and, indeed, of using work as a means of focusing my attention and absorbing my concentration. In practice, though, it wasn’t that straightforward.
As I say, I was appalled by my own fragility, but being appalled by it wasn’t the same as being able to deny it. The patent fact was that I was a bit of a wreck at that particular moment in time, and although I had been able to maintain a reasonably brave face while doing my stint in Martin’s bookshop, and had been able to employ the episode as the kind of distraction that I probably needed, the prospect of a sensory deprivation experiment in which some kind of computer program was first going to probe my brain in order to explore its particular sensitivities and then use them to open up channels of thought that were usually sealed off—perhaps for good reasons—seemed a trifle more challenging. However, I was sufficiently proud of my carefully-cultivated reputation for stubborn hard-headedness not to be reluctant to test my actual psychological defenses, even while I knew that they were under stress. I wasn’t sure that it was the ideal time to be making attempts to peer into the abyss, and allowing the abyss a chance to peer into me, but precisely because I wasn’t sure, I didn’t want to back down from the challenge.
The thought that it might actually do me good, as a cheap alternative to lying on a shrink’s couch, never occurred to me; I had always held firm to the opinion that I wouldn’t lay on a shrink’s couch even if he paid me, on the grounds that a true Yorkshireman does not suffer fools gladly, and I took it for granted that all psychoanalysts, of whatever stripe, were ipso facto fools. At least Axel Castle had made one decisively good move by dismissing the existing fantasies of Jungian thought and claiming to be going deep-psyche diving with an open mind as to what he might find. I wasn’t at all convinced that I believed him, especially given his fondness for the idea of the Cosmic Mind, but the fact that he was willing to make the effort to pretend was a point in his favor.
After some thought, however, I decided that there was probably no risk. It wasn’t as if the electroecephalogaph would be able to read my mind. All that Axel Castle would ever know about what I experienced under the stimulus of his synthesized music track was what his instruments recorded and whatever I cared to tell him. Not that I was anticipating having anything to tell him that would be in the least discomfiting, or that I was planning to lie—but knowing that I had the last redoubt of blatant deception available to me seemed a safety-net of sorts, in the unlikely event that I might need one.
I didn’t start the bookworm story; indeed, I discarded the idea as unworkable even as an exercise in humorous absurdism, and tried to think of something else instead.
Usually, that wasn’t too difficult; I’d never been overly prone to writer’s block, and if I’d had some commissioned non-fiction on hand I’d surely have been able to throw myself into it with a certain method even if I lacked enthusiasm, but I was left to my own devices. At least I had my usual stack of books for evaluation piled up—I was a judge for one of the annual science fiction awards at the time, which compelled me to keep on reading at least forty or fifty candidate novels a year—albeit mostly without enthusiasm. In 1997 I was still a couple of years away from the point at which the deterioration of my eyesight forced me to give up such work, but it was already becoming a bit of a strain.
At any rate, that was how I spend the latter part of the afternoon.
I didn’t eat until late, but the delay didn’t allow me to build up much of an appetite, and when I’d finished I couldn’t find anything on television that I could actually bear the idea of watching, so I decided to go back to reading simply for something to do. I still had a faint headache, and still felt slightly disorientated, but there was nothing wrong with me that I would have qualified as being ill—merely slightly off color. Given my situation, ****-wise, it would have been more surprising if I hadn’t felt off color. When depression and obsession are your natural states of mind, as they had always been mine, you have relatively low standards for what actually qualifies as feeling well.
I went back into the front room, sat down on the sofa, and reached out for the book that I’d left on the coffee-table—but I never picked it up, because that’s when I saw the Devil.
CHAPTER VIII
It wasn’t dark yet, and the sun hadn’t actually set, although it was low on the horizon. There was no possibility, therefore, that he was just a trick of the gloom. He was sitting in the armchair, quite relaxed.
I knew who he was, and never had a moment’s doubt about it, although I can’t say exactly how it was that I know. I had never seen him before, and he didn’t look like any of his conventional representations, but I recognized him immediately. I knew him. He wasn’t unduly tall—maybe five-ten or so—and he didn’t have any conventional paraphernalia along the lines of horns, a beard or even piercing eyes; indeed his gaze was mild and slightly amused. He was handsome without being movie-star handsome, and dressed in a casual dark gray lounge-suit with a cream shirt; his one concession to sartorial flamboyance was a crimson cravat.
A number of questions went through my head, but I didn’t voice any of them. I’m not often left speechless, but I think that finding the Devil in your front room without him having bothered to open the door, let alone telephone in advance, qualifies as the kind of occasion that might have that effect.
It was therefore left to him to break the ice, which he did by saying: “Have you got anything to drink?”
I suspected that he didn’t mean tea.
“Only red wine,” I said.
“I suppose that’ll do, if you haven’t got anything stronger,” he conceded. “You wouldn’t care to open a bottle, by any chance, would you? I need a drink.”
I felt in need of a little pick-me-up myself. The wine-rack was in the kitchen. I went to get a bottle, a corkscrew and two glasses.
I half-expected that the Devil might have vanished by the time I got back, as a more discreet hallucination might have done, but he was still there when I returned with a bottle of Pinot Noir. He watched me uncork the bottle and pour a reasonable measure into each of the two glasses.
I took a sip before saying: “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Is it a pleasure?” he asked, slightly surprised.
“I was just being polite,” I told him, although it might have been more honest to say sarcastic “I suppose that there’s no point in asking you whether I’m asleep and dreaming, because I wouldn’t be able to believe you if you said no.”
“You’re not asleep,” he assured me, “and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t believe me.”
“And I haven’t gone mad, either?” I said, just to check.
“You’re perfectly sane,” he informed me, “in spite of the obsession and the depression.”
“Okay,” I said. “So if this isn’t a dream and I’m not mad, let me ask again: to what exactly, to I owe the fact that I’m sitting in my front room talking to the non-existent Devil?”
“I didn’t say that you’re not dreaming,” he pointed out, “I only said that you’re not asleep. The simplest answer to your question is that you owe my presence to the psychotropic dust that you inhaled in such considerable quantities yesterday, and the association you made in your imagination between the carbonaceous materials therein and the ideas derived from the nickname of the pit.”
“So I am dreaming?” I asked, uncertainly.
“Yes and no,” he replied. “You knew as soon as you stepped into the upstairs room in the bookshop that the relevant states of consciousness had begun to overlap. Clearly, the overlap is intensifying, and becoming more intricately confused. It’s an interesting situation, if you think about it—and an opportunity, of course, which you might not have again.”
Watching him sip liquid wine from a solid glass made him appear perfectly material, as hallucinations go, but matter, as every Berkeleyan knows, is the possibility of sensation, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to unduly surprised by his apparent solidity.
“You are just a figment of my imagination, then?” I asked him, warily.
“That is one way of looking at it,” he conceded.
“You don’t actually exist, though,” I suggested, accusatively.
“I do and I don’t,” he countered. “But for the moment, at least, you might do well to accept the working hypothesis that there’s a sense in which I do, even if the question of what I am remains open.”
“Now I know that you’re a figment of my imagination,” I said. “Nobody I know talks like that, except me.”
“I do,” he replied.
“But even if there’s a sense in which you do exist,” I probed, “it’s not the same sense in which I exist, is it?” I guessed even before I’d completed the observation, though, what response I was going to get.
“Oh,” he informed me, not without a certain smug self-satisfaction. “I exist far more reliably than that. Whereas you’re ephemeral, I’m eternal; whereas your existence is continually interrupted by periods of unconsciousness, I never cease to exist; and whereas you’re hardly the same from one day to the next, I’m far less fickle and far more disciplined in my metamorphoses.”
I supposed that I ought to be grateful for the fact that he hadn’t pointed out that practically the entire human race was ignorant of my existence, whereas they all knew about him, in one guise or another. I didn’t want to get into a quiddity context, though.
