Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 123
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Of a truth too fantastic to believe he retains the meaning:‘Save Money. Live Better.’ At 4650 North Avenue I stood in the parking lot and read my receipt. I’d bought a single pair of mixed merino and acrylic socks, which, at $4.94 (plus 45 cents sales taxes), didn’t seem that cheap to me. I’d walked out to North Avenue from the Loop, through maybe nine miles of tracts that got blacker and poorer, until a handwritten sign in a shop window read ‘N-Word Not Allowed Here’, while there were taquerías, storefront Baptist churches and immigration lawyers all along the shattered boulevard.
My mobile phone rang and it was so long since I’d answered it I took a while to find it, searching through six stuffed pockets. Then I was detained by the ringtone – stylized as a minuet – and then by its Art Deco fascia. Technology had moved on faster than walking pace.
‘I’m in hospital, in New York,’ Sherman’s voice said.
‘What happened?’ My heart limbered up in my ribcage.
‘Deep-vein thrombosis – they took me off a flight from Moscow, my right leg looks like a fucking turnip—’
‘I’m coming!’ My heart broke into a trot. ‘I’ll be with you this evening!’
‘Why?’ He chuckled. ‘Have you got a stash of low-molecular-weight heparin in that dumb Barbour of yours?’
5.0625
Rat Poison
Which was more shocking: the monitors menacing Sherman with their winking readouts, the trails of plastic tubing seeping drugs into him, or the artist himself, tucked in tight at the head of the hospital bed, while an angular bulge beneath the covers hid the clotted leg? Baltie was propped on the windowsill reading The Tatler.
‘They won’t let me have my phone!’ Sherman yelped as soon as he saw my hangdog face. ‘And he’– a significant lash of a drip – ‘is too dumb to make calls for me. Be a love, will you …’
He had a list. I sat on a bench beside Riverside Drive and postponed press conferences and speeches, apologized for Sherman’s nonattendance at dinners and awards ceremonies. I called Prima at her gallery and she said she’d tell the family. It was drizzling and I was grateful for the Barbour.
‘Did you speak to Herve?’ Sherman quacked as soon as I returned.
‘We-ell, I think it was him – my French is, um, rather inadequate. But Sherm, don’t you think you should try to rest?’
‘No, no, I don’t – I’m fucking flat out here as it is.’
‘What do the doctors say?’
‘They say hooray, we’re coining it, then they send in a nurse with another bag of rat poison.’
‘Is that what that stuff is?’
‘Yes, yes, nothing quite like it for thinning the blood.’
Baltie had been sent out to buy petits fours, which was what Sherman most wanted besides his phone back. I sat on the bed – there was plenty of room. My friend’s head moulded the pillows, and for the first time I wondered about the process involved in casting his body forms. I reached out to take his hand but he jerked it away:
‘What the fuck’re you crying for?’ he said.
5.03125
Light Aircraft
It was the smallest check-in desk either of us had ever seen – more like a lectern, with the Loganair logo plastered across the front. ‘Loganair!’ Sherman guffawed. ‘Should be logan berry.’ He stumped over to a drinks dispenser and began punching buttons distractedly. I wondered if he was already withdrawing from his phone habit.
Sherman’s doctor had said ambulation was the key to longterm recovery from DVT. ‘He means walking,’ the artist explained to me, ‘so if you’re still game for this northern jaunt let’s go.’
It had been a grim winter in London – I scratched my wrists so much one of them went septic. It was all right now, though, and as the twin-engined plane motored towards the thousand-foot sea cliffs of Foula I felt the unfamiliar turbulence of optimism. Sherman was in the co-pilot’s seat telling the pilot what to do.
5.015625
Paying Guests
An off-white cloud hung above the hills behind Mrs Field’s bungalow; tractor tyres weighted down the roof. She didn’t seem that pleased to see me again – although Sherman soon charmed her.
‘I’ve another chap staying,’ she explained, ‘and to be honest I don’t like the extra work.’
It was the man from the boutique hotel in Brighton, he was amazed by the coincidence – I couldn’t remember his name. Mrs Field grilled mini chicken Kievs for tea.
5.0078125
The Confession
‘Why would I want to hear about—’ His words were snatched away by the wind screeching up over the cliff edge.
A giant skua hung above a perfectly round pool in the sward.
5.00390625
Top of the World, Ma
‘You know nothing of what I feel, believe me – you never have.’
5.001953125
La Jetée
I hurt him and there was only this way.
5.0009765625
Left Behind
Some rolled-up plastic trousers.
5.00048828125
The Earth Summit
And a mobile …
5.000244140625
Global Reach
… phone.
Walking to Hollywood
I’ve been around the world several times and now it’s only banality that interests me – I track it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.
– Chris Marker, Sans soleil
1
The Consultation
In early May of 2008, my treatment with Dr Shiva Mukti having reached a conclusion, with, I think, the feeling on both sides that there had been a measure of success, I decided to take a walking tour of Los Angeles.
Mukti showed me the last of the series of films he had made of me on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the same basement room at St Mungo’s where he had conducted our cognitive behavioural therapy sessions. In addition to using all the standard techniques, Mukti also videoed psychotics during their flamboyant episodes, then showed the films to them when lucid, in order to persuade these patients of the necessity of taking their medication.
‘In your case,’ he told me during our first meeting, ‘the situation is a bit different. Your reality testing seems wholly adequate; rather, your obsessive-compulsive thought patterns appear to have become, um, engrafted in the external world. It’s as if by continuously viewing the world through the anthropomorphic lens of distorted scale, you have projected on to it a form of body dysmorphic syndrome. This would account for the fugues you experienced while travelling in the States, the loss of the medium sized, your perception of the world as wholly comprised by the awesome and the very—’
‘Little.’
‘Quite so, the very little.’
The near-obsolete VDU monitor, with its mushroom plastic casing, sat whirring at a queer angle on the fake wood veneer of a refectory table. Was this a fungal growth, nurtured overnight under strip-lighting? On the screen, which lacked vertical hold, images of me flickered and kinked. In answer to questions from someone off-screen, I contended that I could sign my name on a dust mote and play billiards with Higgs bosons while simultaneously apprehending the sixty-mile span of the Middlesex tertiary escarpment.
My dottiness was obvious, yet what struck me more forcibly was the concentration of all this effort, expertise and resources into these mean and institutional images of the very mean and institutional room we were currently sitting in: I sat on the plastic stacking chair watching myself writhe on the same plastic stacking chair, and, although I felt removed from the on-screen antics, it was a disjunction of perspective alone – the man in the room watching himself in the same room insistently demanded another recursion of this POV, another plastic stacking chair, another me.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Mukti said as we watched the last film: ‘you’d like some Powerade.’ And he companionably passed me the pink bottle.
I had been referred to Dr Mukti by Zack Busner, the consultant psychiatrist at Heath Hospital, who for over a quarter of a century had played a major role in my life – part therapist, part mentor, part friend, part inspiration, part hierophant, part demiurge … wholly suspect. If I summon Busner up now it is as I first saw him. I was a troubled adolescent with a piebald horse face and wasted legs in drainpipe jeans; he was a plump, frog-faced man, his nondescript hair not so much thinning as giving the impression it hadn’t grown since birth. He leant back in the swivel chair behind his cluttered desk, his legs outstretched, and as he spoke, with great dexterity – as a card sharp in a Western runs a silver dollar over and under his fingers – rolled and unrolled the furry tongue of his mohair tie.
‘I have a patient,’ Busner said on that first meeting. ‘Who’s a very well-known jazz musician – a highly talented chap. He tells me that he takes cocaine, he takes heroin – for him it isn’t a problem. Tell me, why’s it a problem for you?’
I forbore from making the obvious point: if it wasn’t a problem for this jazzer, why the fuck was he seeing a shrink? Forbore for several reasons. First, aged nineteen, I was intimidated by Busner and his environs. His office was at the end of a corridor, which in turn was at the far end of the hospital’s general psychiatric ward. This wasn’t the locked ward where sectioned patients were confined, but nevertheless there was plenty of flamboyant mental distress on display.
As I had sat in the miserable little outpatients’ waiting area – a couple of uneasy chairs, a pained pot plant, a racked magazine rack – an anorexic had danced with her drip by the window, toying with the plastic chains that shackled the vertical louvres. Then she came over and sat beside me, breathing in my face caustic acid down a cracked commode leaking sewage. I studied Chat magazine’s great new recipe for banana bread, until a civil enough young schizophrenic came by and offered to sell me the alien implant he had instead of a leg. The anorexic had been replaced at the window looking out over Hampstead Heath by an old man – a catatonic I supposed – who rocked not back and forth on his heels, but from side to side like a metronome, while emitting a buzzing noise, Did he have a horsefly trapped in his mouth?
Were these people, I wondered, my new gang? The psychic insurgents I had fantasized joining as, fractured by acid, I riffled through the pages of R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self? I didn’t want to join now I was in the recruitment office – yet feared I already had. A few months previously I’d been an in-patient at Heath Hospital on a surgical ward. I’d had my tonsils taken out – a painful operation at that age. Ostensibly, this was because of all the sinus attacks I kept getting, which felt like thumbscrews being tightened – on my brain; but the real reason I kept getting sick in my nose was all the powder I shoved up it, the bathtub amphetamine, the cocaine cut with baby laxative, the scouring smack – and worse.
The nurses sussed me out and were less than nurturing. There was a tubby squaddy in the bed beside me, who, when he was conscious, spun me yarns about how he was a sergeant-major in the SAS, and had been shot in the neck by the IRA on the Falls Road while working undercover with an assassination squad. I put him down as a fantasist, but one of the nurses, tucking me in until it hurt, leant down and hissed in my ear: ‘He’s a real hero, you shoulda seen him when they brought him in. He had an infection on the back of his neck that was bigger than his head!’
With the nurse, too, I forbore from backchat: my addiction was an assassination squad, roaming the bombed-out streets in a West Belfast of the mind. I’d got my friend Dave to smuggle some cocaine on to the ward, and together we’d shot it up in the toilet. Paranoid, he’d split right away, leaving me with my grazed throat and revving heart to endure the agonies of an unanticipated ward round: the consultant, wading between the limpid beds, the stork’s plumage of his white coat parted at the breast, dipped down to peck at my wrist, yet seemed quite indifferent to my Max Roach pulse. No jazzer he.
It was my long-suffering GP who had referred me to Busner. She was understandably fed up with the house calls she had to make on my behalf: trips to the bathrooms I had locked myself inside, and where I lay on the mat, mewling as the intestinal reef knots of opiate withdrawal tightened inside me.
‘I think you’ll get on,’ she had said. ‘He’s a very, um, unusual man. I don’t expect he’ll want to treat you in any orthodox fashion – just go up to the hospital and have a chat with him.’
There were steely-green filing cabinets in Busner’s office and a chequerboard of institutional carpet tiling. The wall-mounted shelves were piled with everything from Wilhelm Reich to ‘Just William’. The hardwood kneehole desk lugged in from another era, the fronts of the shelves, the windowsills – in fact every available horizontal surface was blobbed with fossilized shits. Later, Busner told me that the coprolite collection had begun as a ‘juvenile riposte to the founding father of psychoanalysis’s own rather more aesthetic bibelots, his ancient tabletop statuary, but then … Well, it all rather got out of hand.’
On the walls there were four ‘imaginary topographies’, hefty clay bas-reliefs that I later learnt had been given to Busner by Joseph Beuys after he had treated the artist – I assume, successfully – for a drug-induced psychosis. They were ugly and rather threatening things, heavy tablets scored with miniature ravines and pinnacles. They distorted the scale of the cluttered and stuffy room – Busner had disabled the air conditioning because he couldn’t bear the noise. The view from the window was also disorienting: the gravelled roof of a wing of the hospital, upon which hunched four large rectangular water tanks – or were they, perhaps, very little?
I was aware that, together with Harold Ford, Busner had been one of the originators of the Quantity Theory of Insanity, and so assumed that he would be impressed if I brought up a half-digested splurge of Foucault with chunks of Bataille floating in it. He wasn’t dismissive, only cleared the ground between us, sweeping away the clutter of identity so that we faced one another unadorned.
We must have talked for fifty minutes or so minted lamb;4 then Busner said, ‘I’m afraid my caseload is such that I won’t be able to see you on any kind of regular basis. Still, I’ve enjoyed chatting to you and I hope you have to me. I don’t want you to feel rejected and if you’d like to pop in now and again to see me you’ll always find my door open.’ He pointed at the institutional plank, its Judas window reinforced with steel mesh; it was, indeed, ajar, although I found out later this was due to severe warping.
Before we parted Busner gave me a Riddle set. This was the ‘enquire within’ game that had made the psychiatrist simultaneously a household name and a laughing stock among his peers. Alone, or with a few select friends and a bottle of wine; a scented candle lit – or smelling only of your own desperation – Riddle players were encouraged to arrange the brightly coloured acrylic tiles in patterns they found pleasing, or suggestive, or unsettling – essentially, the thing was a DIY Rorschach test, the key for which had been written by the great soul doctor himself.
Everyone had played the Riddle at some time or other in the late 1970s; it was a hula-hoop for the mind and, like all such crazes, it soon became impossibly hackneyed; lost Riddle tiles lay trapped beneath the carpet underlay of the entire culture. ‘I’m solving the Riddle!’ – which Busner mouthed on a television quiz programme where he appeared in a grid of similar celebrities, answering facile questions – became one of the catchphrases of the era – and not in a good way. Still, I thanked him for the gift and tucked it into the side pocket of whatever Oxfam jacket I was wearing that month. Forty-five minutes later I was in a walk-up flat in Camden Town trying to barter the thing for a five-quid bag of smack.
For all the years I had taken the lift to the eighth floor of the hospital I had continued to find Busner’s door open – once it was right off its hinges, laid across trestles and being planed down by a maintenance man. Busner stood in the doorway, rolling and unrolling the frayed end of his tie, watching the man work while speculating on what ailed the door as if it were a particularly unresponsive patient. Nevertheless, the next time I came it still wasn’t pulled to.
Busner said he didn’t mind the malfunctioning door – it reminded him of the 1960s, when, shortly after qualifying, he had started a ‘concept house’ in Willesden, where therapists and patients had lived together communally with no distinctions between them. While Busner had long since enacted professional closure, abandoning his conviction that mental pathologies were in reality semantic confusions, he still counselled an inter-personal approach – even when liberally dishing out Largactil.
Our own long-term therapeutic relationship certainly had a playful character; in the nearly three decades his door had been open to me, Busner had sent me for psychotherapy with a succession of colleagues. There had been an anally retentive orthodox Freudian analyst whose consulting room was a garage conversion in Dollis Hill. There was a plump cat-furred humanist in West Hampstead, whose ability to feel my pain seemed to entail her crying a lot about her own. There was a media-friendly intellectual with jet-black kiss curls and the foam-rubber voice of the insincere, who encouraged me to view my life as a narrative that might be rewritten – by him. Then there was the group therapy, the rebirthing, and even a shamanic purification rite conducted in a polythene hogan off the A303. All the while Busner lurked in the background, ready to step forward whenever my condition deteriorated.
Over the years he must – at one time or more – have prescribed me most of the neuro-pharmacopoeia, from anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives, through tranquilizers and anti-psychotics, to opiate and alcohol blockers, lithium and methadone. On one occasion he smuggled me in the dead of night into Friern Barnet Hospital. There, using equipment dusty with desuetude – the rubber leads perished – he administered electroconvulsive therapy to me. During the aeons-long seconds when the current surged through my cortex, I broke the restraints and surged up from the couch, then plunged through the fire-resistant ceiling tiles and flew into the suburban night. Up there I was a superhero, with no mission other than to curvet above the rain-slicked roofs.
