Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 141
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
So I did my best to conform and called Stevie Rosenbloom to say goodbye – and got Ellen DeGeneres: ‘That’s you gone, is it?’ she said, and I could only mewl:
‘You knew, didn’t you?’
‘I kinda did,’ she admitted, ‘although I wasn’t in on the whole thing, I mean it was like the tag line for the movie, “The Strangest Vengeance Ever Planned”.’
‘What movie?’
‘ Touch of Evil.
I broke the connection without saying goodbye. Of course! And that’s why when I reached the colonnade in Venice I had felt so peculiar. I had never circumambulated Los Angeles at all, only remained standing exactly where Welles had executed his famously circuitous tracking shot while the entire city walked around me.
The Heathrow flight was called and I staggered towards it. Then we were taxiing and then we were taking off, accelerating along the timeline of the Sierra as it described civilization’s boom and bust, and then the plane lifted off from the runway of LAX and began almost immediately to bank round over the ocean, bumpily gaining altitude. I looked back and below to see enormous cracks snaking across the Los Angeles Basin, some following the boulevards, others cutting through the freeways. I watched, bored, as the Baldwin Hills slid into Crenshaw and Hollywood tumbled down into the Wilshire corridor. The Downtown towers bowed, then curtseyed, then disappeared in boiling clouds of dust, the Sierra itself humped up into a vast breaker of earth, lava and fire that came surging down, annihilating all of Pasadena and East LA in a matter of seconds.
The final thing I saw before the first clouds began flickering by was the dome of the Shrine Auditorium standing proud of the maelstrom, the crescent atop its elegant spire glinting in the rays of twilight’s last gleaming.
12
Will Hay and the Fat Boy
‘And that’s what happens to you when you don’t take your medication,’ Shiva Mukti said in the matter-of-fact way psychiatrists affect in order to cope with the extremities of mental delusion.
We sat and stared for a while, first at the pots and packets of my medications, which he had lined up on the desk – the Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin – then at the near-obsolete VDU monitor with its mushroom plastic casing that sat whirring at a queer angle on the fake wood veneer of a refectory table.
‘Humph.’ I was not to be persuaded so easily. ‘You say that, but perhaps that’s what happens to entire civilizations when they don’t take their medication.’
‘Listen,’ Mukti said, solicitous, ‘I understand that you may feel a little … put out.’
‘Put out! Of course I’m put out – wouldn’t you be if you discovered it had all been a videotape that your psychiatrist had made of you? And such lousy production values as well.’ I drummed the table with my quick-bitten fingertips and longed for a cigarette.
‘You have to appreciate, don’t you, that these symptoms are potentially very dangerous: the paranoia, the visual and auditory hallucinations—’
‘Next you’ll be telling me that everyone I meet isn’t played by a well-known screen actor!’
He took a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket and began to draw a series of boxes on the sheet of paper next to my medication. What was this, the beginnings of a storyboard?
‘No, that’s right – they aren’t actors, any more than you are. Capgras and Fregoli’s delusions, these are well described in the literature: the impersonation of people known to the, ah, patient – either by the famous, or by doubles. I admit, you seem to be experiencing a rather unusual combination of both, but, as Dr Busner has remarked, yours is an especially ebullient and productive schizothymia.’
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I countered. ‘I like my delusions. They’re a form of entertainment for me – what the hell else is there to amuse me any more, now that film is dead?’
This seemed to stymie Mukti and he left off his doodling to examine me more intently through his antiquated pince-nez. Really, it was a ludicrous bit of miscasting: the white skin, the fluting voice, the thinning hair and the hoary old comic delivery – still, I was happy with it if it kept the credits sequence short. What I was less happy with was my trousers, which were painfully tight. Holding Mukti’s gaze, I surreptitiously loosened my belt – it wouldn’t be good if he realized that I had realized that he was being played by Will Hay.
Spurn Head
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
– Philip Larkin, ‘Here’
1
Daycare
It was not long after I returned from Los Angeles, in the middle of June 2008, that I began to suspect there was something wrong – with the wider world, certainly, but perhaps also with me. At first I linked the fuzziness and forgetfulness that increasingly plagued me with the bizarre experience of walking to Hollywood; it seemed only just that the extraordinarily rich ebullition gifted me – particularly on the morning when I walked from the Chateau Marmont to Venice along Santa Monica Boulevard – should be compensated for by mental impoverishment.
The body, always a sturdier vessel, had righted itself soon enough: the superpowers I had possessed in LA – enabling me to leap tall buildings, stop buses with the palm of my hand and warp the trajectory of bullets – faded as soon as I reached home. When I tried to show my smaller sons what a hero I’d become by leaping over the wire-mesh fence of the all-weather football pitch in the local park, I threw myself straight into it. The five-a-side players left their ball pattering and came over to mock me where I lay.
But, while physically I simply returned to normal – the dull accommodation of my body, its strip-lit limbs and identical en suite organs – my mental faculties continued to deteriorate. When I came to consider the matter, the fact was that my memory had been eroding for some time: the grey waters of Lethe undercutting its soft cliffs, so that individual recollections – which, no matter how tasteless and bogus, nonetheless had the virtue of being owned outright, not mortgaged – tumbled on to the beach below. I could only posit forgetfulness-within-amnesia to explain how I had confused this with the standard-issue agnosia of middle age: names and faces shuffled together, so that I often spent a half-hour or more at a party talking to someone I knew perfectly well, yet whose identity remained obstinately hidden.
Stupidly, I had indulged in special pleading on my own behalf – and for several years this did act as a groyne with which to impede the longshore drift. There was my notoriety, which served to make me more memorable to those I had met than I would’ve been otherwise, and so encouraged them to come forward: ‘You don’t remember me, do you, but …’ Then there was also the nature of my work, which meant that either I was in solitary reclusion, or else revolving around the country promoting my novels at bookshops and literary festivals. Thrust, blinking, on to podium after stage, I suspected that, while I might be providing sharply etched vignettes for audiences, to me the experience was but part of an on-blurring.
It was true that in the decade since I had stopped drinking and taking drugs my short-term memory seemed to have improved; at any rate, I no longer needed the elaborate system of Post-it notes stuck to the walls of my writing room that had for years served me as a kind of random access. If I maintained this, it was more as an art installation, or magic ritual, designed both to represent the combinatorial powers of the imagination – and to stimulate them to order, then reorder, the tropes, gags, metaphors and observations with which I built my papery habitations. Recency may have been a slippery proposition, happy sociable families a demanding game, but I cleaved to the notion that my textual memory was better than ever. Sadly, this was a delusion; rather, it was my skill alone that had improved: I now wrote books with the workmanlike despatch of a carpenter turning out tables, this busy practice obscuring the loss of much I had once known.
In London, walking from the tube station, before I reached the grey whales’ backs of Frederick Button’s 1952 ferroconcrete bus garage, I passed a row of lime trees planted in circular beds raised above the pavement. Around the low brick walls the tarmac writhed with the slow subterranean flexing of the limes’ roots; while at the base of their trunks was all manner of rubbish: cigarette packets, aluminium cans, beer bottles and sweet wrappers were impaled on spiky shoots. It made an arresting image – this coppicing of trash – and ever since the winter, when I’d first noticed it, I’d reminded myself almost daily to go and photograph the waste-withies. Now it was summer and a thick canopy of leaves hid the mundane fruit. Now it was foetid summer – the atmosphere super-saturated with sweat-metal – and I realized, belatedly, that I had taken the limes for granted.
It was the same with the trees in the local park. As evening shadows flowed between the tower blocks, young men would bring their Staffordshire bull terriers out to be exercised. They tacked back and forth along the spore-smelling streets, human leaning away from canine as if hauling on a rope attached to a wayward boom. Then, in the park, the boys would complacently observe the dogs as they shat, before urging them on to attack the trees. The dogs broke the boughs’ necks, they gored the wrinkled hides – when they were done the oaks, rowans and birches looked as if a shell had exploded nearby, stripping long, white-green slats from their trunks. Eventually, these fell away, leaving only a necklace of dead bark immediately beneath the crown of the tree – and it was this that I forgot to record.
I couldn’t remember names, faces, places I had been and books I had read – but there was also a sinister awareness of estrangement from my immediate vicinity. London, the city of my birth – which I knew, not exhaustively, but well enough to set out from home and find my way almost anywhere intuitively – was becoming alien to me. Weaving among the lunchtime joggers along Rotten Row, then rounding Wellington’s old gaff at Number One, London, I would find myself in uncharted waters, with the effortlessly oriented gulls wheeling insultingly overhead: ‘Heeeere! Heeeere! Heeeere!’ That middle-aged Italian couple – he with puff of smoky beard, she with too youthful T-shirt and bum-bag – would it be too perverse to enquire if I might consult the map they held stretched between them? For I no longer recognized this city, this Londra.
At home, every day I expected to be exposed: my wife or children to arrest me on the stairs and cry, ‘I do not know you!’ Or, worse still, ‘You do not know me, do you?’ Basic mnemonics, long used by me to recall PIN numbers, or the name of the man in the bike shop, now had to be contrived for my nearest and dearest: she is not fat; fat people are D-shaped side on – therefore, her name begins with a D.
I linked the amnesia and the facial agnosia with my growing myopia. Print wasn’t attending to personal grooming: the index of the A–Z began to grow stubble; next it was the turn of the thesaurus. There seemed some logic to this: first I became disoriented – then I was unable to check my orientation; first I failed to recognize my interlocutors – then I was unable to search for synonyms, and so all shades of meaning were balled into monism. ‘This,’ as De Niro’s character in The Deer Hunter philosophized upon a bullet, ‘is this.’ But what did ‘this’ mean? I’d forgotten and could no longer consult the dictionary without glasses.
Still, I kept writing. I was correcting the proofs for a story-cycle that was to be published that autumn. For all that I professed – to friends, colleagues, whoever would listen – that I was no longer focused on producing books (like tables, or bullets), but rather thought of the work as my fundamental praxis, my way of mixing my mind with the world and so extending my being – bits of text still had titles, the author’s name and my mugshot on the jacket.
The only memory I could summon with complete clarity was of a series of events that hadn’t happened to me at all, scenes from a documentary about a woman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s that had been made – simply and affectingly – by her daughter. The woman was still feisty at the beginning of the film; thrice-married, but now on her own, she was only in her late fifties. She had her house, her garden, a job as a librarian in the university town where she lived. After her diagnosis, with sickening rapidity, she tipped backward into the coalhole of amnesia.
To begin with she was giddy with the fall – amused by her own forgetfulness. Like me, she devised mnemonics and stuck up Post-it notes; she kept a laboriously calibrated chart attached to the fridge, so she could discover what she should be – or actually was – doing. At first she checked this from day to day, then hour to hour, and eventually moment to moment. Soon enough she became depressed – and this coincided with her trips to a daycare centre, her raven hair nestling on the minibus beside all those snowy cowls.
Depressed and distressed. She sought alleviation, and throughout her miserable deterioration kept asking her daughter to take her to Southwold on the Suffolk coast, a picturesque resort where they had often holidayed and she had loved to sea bathe. But her daughter – in frank asides to the camera – explained that this was a wish she felt unable to accede to, for fear that her beloved mother would simply swim out to sea and submerge her own incomprehension in the liquid unknown.
Mercifully, the woman’s memory quickly became so circumscribed that she was encased in a mere droplet of self-awareness, a permanent Now, the silvery surface tension of which gifted her once more with girlish high spirits. Purged of foresight and all but a few dregs of sensual recollection, she was free to simply Be; and it was then, finally, that her daughter – no longer fearful that she would commit suicide, for she lacked the capacity to formulate a plan – granted her boon.
The last we, the viewers, saw of the woman was her entering the glaucous waters, looking baby-like in her one-piece black bathing costume, and striking out for the horizon through the gentle swell. The entire film was unutterably poignant, but what struck me most forcibly was that she swam with the same idiosyncratic stroke as my father used to; a sort of sideways doggy paddle, hands pawing at the water, feet ambling through it. And like my long-dead father, the senile woman had an expression that was at once effortful and seraphic.
This image, the woman’s joyful face as her mind swam in the Now, and her body in the enduring sea, as I say, returned to me again and again, breaking the silvery surface of the bathroom mirror on the mornings when I remembered to shave; and, had I known of the malaise termed ‘paramnesia’, I would’ve understood that these things – the checklist on the fridge, the trips to the Cambridge daycare centre, the awkward hobble down over the Southwold shingle, my adipose body, seal-black and seal-slick in its nylon skin – hadn’t happened to me at all.
Someone had sent me – in the way that kindly people do – a book on coping with Alzheimer’s. I read it and wondered if my wife had read it as well. Either she had, or she understood intuitively that the way to deal with people who are confused and upset is to provide them with simple cues from their concretized past that match currently baffling situations.
Who is that child?
Why, it’s your friend Julian. You love playing with your friend Julian, don’t you? Riding your bikes through Sandy Wood, climbing trees and making secret dens.
She stopped asking me questions and only provided answers: You’d like to go upstairs now and do some typing.
She grasped that properly managed I could spend all day existing solely in the manifold of those things that I had once enjoyed: typing in my secret den, while prattling to childhood companions who were, in fact, my own children.
Nevertheless, as the surface tension of June bulged seamlessly into July, I made the decision to undertake another walking tour; one that would, I hoped, either heal, or at least legitimize, what was happening to me.
Of course, all of my little walking tours were methods of legitimizing. Towards the end of my drug addiction it had occurred to me that the manias of cocaine, the torpors of heroin and the psychoses of the hallucinogens – all these were pre-existing states of mental anguish that only appeared to be self-induced, and so, perhaps, controllable, because of the drugs. So it was with the walking, which was a busman’s holiday; for, while I trudged along, through fields, over hills, beside bypasses, I remained sunk deep in my own solipsism – then I returned to the chronic, elective loneliness of the writing life. The only real difference I could see between walking and writing was that engaged in the former my digestion achieved a certain … regularity, while when I wrote I became terribly constipated: a stylite typing atop a column of his own shit.
Walking my six-year-old son to his school, I held his hand fiercely. I ran my fingers over his knuckles, acutely sensitized to skin, bone, muscle and tendons; hugely aware of scale, the way his hand was a smaller version of my own. Yet, while he sought my big hand out – a gentle fluttering – it was I who needed his small one to make love intelligible.
He asked me to resume the story I had been telling him the previous morning, ‘George and the Dragon’. With their fierily seductive breath, dragons had burnt up his previous passion, puppies; but, of course, I couldn’t remember to what point the free-forming narrative had progressed. ‘The cardboard dragon,’ he prompted me – and then I got it: George had flown to the top of the mountain. The little dragons had wings, but George, being a human boy alone in Dragonia, had been given a balloon made from sloughed-off dragon skin. Little George had a special mouthpiece, which meant he could breath fire and so fill the balloon with hot air.
At the summit they discovered a whitewashed cottage with a neat garden. The little dragons flew back down – the mountaintop was taboo – but Little George landed his balloon and encountered old Sir George, the knight, who had come to Dragonia many years before in pursuit of dragons and ended up exiled here. However, he told Little George that his reclusion hadn’t been too awful, for every day the dragons brought him a packed lunch consisting of a cheese sandwich, a Nutri-Grain bar, a shiny red apple and a carton of mango juice. Sir George had saved all the empty cartons, and over the years used them to build a spectacularly realistic, near-life-sized model of a dragon.
