Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 66
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
‘Really?’ Elmley knew better than to ask for a clarification of terms – this would emerge.
‘Yeah. He was high as a kite, talking nine to the dozen, told me he couldn’t help this because of the transmitter they’d implanted in his brain. But despite this he was able to give me a sustained, coherent account of what had caused his disorder.’
‘Which was?’
‘After a brilliant school career he gained a place at Cambridge when only seventeen. While studying philosophy and physiology he was approached by a recruiter from MI6. A second-generation immigrant, with all the insecurities that go along with it, Kabir was flattered by this attention and responded to their overtures. So much so that he was eventually inducted into the Service, and during his long vac he underwent a training course at their HQ which ended with him being awarded a commission.’
‘But why,’ Elmley objected, ‘why did they want this guy?’
‘Please, David, remember this is a delusion according to Busner and several other doctors. Anyway, after he graduated he was persuaded by these spooks to take up a graduate research post in Tel Aviv. Israel! I ask you, a British Muslim kid studying in Israel! Still, this is what he says happened, by day he got on with confusing rats or whatever, and by night he infiltrated one of the many groups of militant Israeli Arabs, a group with connections to Hamas extremists.’
‘Do you want the end of my cod?’ Elmley prodded at it with his fork. ‘I can’t be doing with it.’
‘No, I don’t want your fucking cod. Tell me’ – Shiva glared at him – ‘is none of this grabbing you at all, do you not find this story remotely interesting?’
‘Well … yes, I do, it’s only that you’ve told me plenty of your patients’ delusions before.’
‘This one is special. Frightened out of his mind, this poor kid is pushed by his controllers to penetrate these groups deeper and deeper. He’s taken to clandestine gatherings deep in the Occupied Territories, where men in keffiyehs brandish Kalashnikovs and swear death to all Jews and American imperialists. He’s made to swear terrible oaths and agree to participate in terrorist attacks. Then, the inevitable happens –’
‘The Palestinians discover he’s a British agent?’
‘No, no, worse than that, he’s being brought back across the line of control one night when he’s captured by the Israelis. Far from supporting the story he gives to his interrogators, British intelligence deny all knowledge of him, and he’s left to fend for himself in the hideous bowels of the Mossad torture cells.’
‘Steady on –’
‘Steady on nothing, David. If you don’t believe such places exist you’re living in a playground world where the biggest danger you face is knee socks that won’t stay up! No, they torture him, these thugs, and, of course, eventually they break him, he confesses to everything they suggest and he’s sentenced by a kangaroo court to centuries in jail.’
Shiva paused, partly for effect and partly so that he could exercise his paranoia. Elmley looked in the wake of Shiva’s wary eyes as they scrutinised the whey faces of junior doctors who were flirting with canteen workers wearing nylon snoods. Elmley wondered if Shiva ever thought nowadays of his first marriage. If only he hadn’t bowed to his parents’ pressure and David had – mysteriously, impossibly – been in the right place at the right time, then perhaps he would be sharing a bed with the ineffably beautiful Swati? He imagined that her heavenly body made no impression on the marital mattress at all, and that when she arose it was as if a desiccated dandelion head had lifted off in a spring breeze …
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Yeah-yeah.’
‘I’m saying that not content with torturing the man and committing him to almost certain death in their foul gulag, the Israelis then leave him to be grossly assaulted by hardened criminals.’
‘C’mon, Shiva, you’re really going too far now, anyone listening to this would think you were an anti-Semite!’
‘It’s a delusion, David, remember that, a fucking delusion. So, he’s buggered remorselessly and Kabir begins to get ill, very ill, so ill that it looks as if he’s going to die. Then, at long last, Her Majesty’s poodles do come sniffing around. Apparently it’s one thing to abandon one of their own to torture and disgrace, but to let him die would cause all sorts of inconvenience – the family are getting suspicious and they’re on the verge of going to the press. One minute Kabir is in the depths of an Israeli prison, the next he’s being stretchered on board a British Airways flight out of Ben Gurion Airport, hours later he’s back at home in Birmingham. The government, naturally, deny everything, he receives no official acknowledgement of what’s happened, no follow-up treatment, and certainly no compensation. And that, my dear David, is what the National Health was presented with. That was what Busner got walking into his consulting room. So, what d’you think he does?’
‘Well, I mean, I’m not … but I s’pose …’
‘C’mon, David, you haven’t listened to me bang on about psychiatry all these years without learning something.’
‘Well, I s’pose he diagnoses him as schizoid and puts him on medication of some kind.’
‘Exactly! Exactly – that’s exactly what the swine does, and that’s what every other shrink who’s been in contact with the poor man has done. Not one of them has stopped to consider the validity of his story, not one has bothered to do a proper physical examination, not one has troubled to get in touch with the family and find out their version of things. Busner, with all his posturing over the years about the existential-phenomenological approach to mental disorders, is the very worst, the most pernicious and self-serving of hypocrites, but the rest of the so-called healers who’ve had contact with this man are almost as bad –’
‘But you have.’ Elmley prompted the inevitable bout of self-congratulation, eager to get it over with so he could choose between apple crumble and a small, cellophane-wrapped plate of cheese and biscuits.
‘I most certainly have, oh yes indeed I have. I examined Kabir, I did his bloods, I called his family and spoke to them, I even fought my way through the bureaucracy of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – what a euphemism! – and you know what I found out?’
‘What?’
‘It’s true! It’s fucking true – all of it!’
‘All of it?’
‘Well, when I say all of it – as much as I could find out. MI6 are hardly likely to admit the whole extent of their disgusting behaviour to the consultant psychiatrist at St Mungo’s. But the facts are there for the finding – all Busner and those other charlatans had to do was pick up a phone. Mohammed Kabir has a British Army commission, and although he was circumspect with his parents, they still had a pretty good idea what sort of work he was doing. As for his mania, that was so readily explicable that Busner’s failure to spot it is tantamount to malpractice – the man has syphilis, full-blown bloody syphilis!’
David Elmley took his time in responding to this tirade. It wasn’t that he didn’t necessarily believe Shiva, or that he was unimpressed by his detective work, but the self-righteous – almost fanatical – vehemence was difficult to take. From his – admittedly lay – perspective, it seemed as if Dr Mukti was manifesting all the symptoms that he attributed to these patients; and, as with them, Elmley suspected the cause to be quite other to the obvious one. ‘Um, Shiva,’ he cautioned, ‘are you suggesting that this Kabir fellow was infected with syphilis by the Israeli prisoners? What about the transmitter thing, you said he told you he has a transmitter implanted in his brain. What’s that about?’
‘I’m not making any claim about the Israelis – I’ve got no proof; nor have I had it directly confirmed by the secret services that Kabir was working for them, they’d hardly be secret if they had. But look at it this way, suppose you’d been through what he has? And suppose you ended up as he has, wouldn’t the idea that your tormentors had planted a transmitter in your brain be entirely reasonable – rational even?’
‘So what’re you gonna do?’
‘What am I going to do? Why treat him, of course. Moffat can look after the venereal infection, I’ll see if I can ameliorate the dementia; although frankly I think our chances of bringing him back are pretty small. Then there’s the question of compensation to be considered.’
‘Compensation?’
‘Why certainly, after all someone has to be made to pay for this.’
When he said this Shiva was thinking of the Ministry of Defence, but when he returned to his niche and lodged himself – like a lifelike carving of a worried deity – in its plaster confines, his sense of triumph and clarity of purpose began to waver, distort and then transmogrify into the most monstrous of suppositions. Surely it was the crudest of tactical thinking to presume that his enemy’s enemy was his friend? At the very least – knowing full well that the man had syphilis – Busner had sent him Kabir as a way of wrong-footing Shiva’s diagnostics, and at the very worst – exactly as Shiva himself had intended with the unfortunate Rocky – Busner was trying to assassinate him, employing the psychotic as a remote out-of-control weapon, a dumb bomb, an unmanned bio-mechanical drone.
Or was he being ridiculous? Granted, Busner’s treatment of Juniper, the Creosote Man, had also been neglectful, but even after the infection on his back cleared up Shiva’s own diagnosis had hardly been borne out. Once Juniper’s medication was tapered off, lo and behold! The church warden turned out to be seriously disturbed after all. True, he wasn’t in as extreme a condition as when he’d initially presented, but he remained convinced that it was his mission to bring creosote to an untreated – and decaying – world. After three weeks on Moffat’s ward, Shiva had to arrange for Juniper’s transfer to a mental hospital near his Buckinghamshire home, and so far as he knew it was there that he still languished.
Now there was Kabir, another case that might have either a medical or a psychiatric aetiology, but although Shiva felt certain that his senior colleague was toying with him, gloating over his discomfort, he also knew that to show any sign of the confusion he felt – let alone to acknowledge what was going on between them – would only be to invite disaster. No, he’d write back to Busner in the correct manner – with clarity and calmness – betraying none of the anxiety that plagued him.
1. The British Journal of Ephemera, Issue 19, Vol. 73.
Part Three
Dr Zack Busner stood at his office window staring distractedly past the massive trapezoid bulk of the west wing of Heath Hospital towards the green parkland that reared up beyond it. A fine rain was falling, shading in the houses in the surrounding streets and fizzing on their rooftops. Busner’s gaze wandered from the window to take in the well-ordered interior of the office itself. An entire wall of neatly shelved books – everything from Aquinas and Adler to Szasz and Zoroaster – three monolithic filing cabinets full of case histories and medical records; on the remaining wall space hung the three clay ‘imaginary topographies’ by Beuys, given to Busner by the grateful artist after he’d treated him for a drug psychosis in the early 1970s.
Yes, order was good, mused Busner, order was productive. In the heady days of his Concept House and the origination of the Quantity Theory of Insanity, Busner had taken entirely the contrary view. Then his life – like his mind – had been characterised by a wilful disregard for all categories, all classifications, all systems. But with advancing age – and the chaos of his home life presenting quite enough of a problem – he’d come to value whatever clarity he could obtain in the murky waters of mental healthcare. ‘All there is,’ he was fond of lecturing his students, ‘is the here and now. That’s all we have and we must make of it what we will.’
As if both to support and confute him in this contention, Busner’s unrivalled collection of coprolites, which had once ranged hither and thither over every available surface, now massed in an orderly array on his desktop, surrounding the computer as if it were an alien spacecraft impounded by a platoon of fossilised shit. Meditating on the objective and the definable brought the Great Man back to the matter in hand, the letter he’d received that morning from Shiva Mukti at St Mungo’s. There was a ward round beginning in a few minutes, and, while there was no necessity that he join it, Busner rather felt that he ought. Mukti had sent him another patient for an opinion – as he knew full well he would. He’d read the first part of Mukti’s letter – concerning Mohammed Kabir – with considerable interest, but why not encounter Mukti’s new referral unprepared, like an espontáneo leaping into the ring to confront an enraged bull, armed with nothing but his wits and his hastily removed jacket, with which to cow the creature? The idea of this pleased Busner, and a thin smile seamed his full and froggy features, while a plump hand went to the end of his mohair tie and commenced, dexterously, to roll it up, as if it were the tongue of some immensely specialised creature, a psychiatric predator, evolved so as to feed off the bombinating flies of psychosis. He turned as abruptly on his heel as was possible for a man in his late sixties and left the room. Behind him on the desk Shiva Mukti’s letter glowed with the intensity of its author’s rage:
St Mungo’s Hospital
Department of Psychiatry
Dear Zack
I’m writing to you concerning Mohammed Kabir, who you very kindly sent to me for a second opinion. What a richly rewarding case this has turned out to be. I have no desire to criticise your treatment of Kabir, but I have to report that your diagnosis has been superseded following my examination of him. Far from being an advanced case of hypomania, it transpires that Kabir’s condition may – in a large part – derive from late-stage syphilis. I discovered this with a routine blood test. Further, while it may have been considerably elaborated, the essence of what Kabir says is true. He has been a serving officer in the Army, and he was engaged, in Israel, in some kind of undercover work.
I have no wish to offend your personal sensibilities, but I’ve a duty to pursue Kabir’s case with the authorities, and to that end I’d like to include your name on any correspondence. I will, of course, keep you informed of any further developments.
It’s becoming quite a to-and-fro between us, because I also want to take this opportunity to ask you for another second opinion. You should’ve received the case notes of a Mr Tadeuz Wadja who’s been a patient of mine for the past couple of years. Wadja is a Polish émigré of fifty-seven, who until recently was employed as a health-and-safety officer. Wadja has no symptoms of major psychopathologies, except for a bizarre and pronounced form of echolalia. I say bizarre, because rather than echoing the speech of others, he exactly and entirely repeats himself, while otherwise observing the rules of normal conversation. In a sense it would be wrong to label this man with any pathology at all, since apart from his own discomfort, his family’s bafflement and the irritation of strangers, there is no functional impairment. However, Wadja has energetically investigated his own condition and unearthed a copy of your early paper, ‘Times Two, Repetition as Iterative Cognition’, with predictable results.
In short, he’s asked me to send him along to see you, in the hope that with your superior grasp of the psychology of cognitive dysfunction you’ll be able to help him. I’ve only to add that, should Wadja prove neither interesting nor fruitful for you, please don’t hesitate to send him straight back again. I know how annoying an annoying patient can be.
I remain yours, etc,
Dr Shiva Mukti.
To call ‘Mr Double’ as Dr Mukti had dubbed him ‘annoying’ was a dangerously irresponsible understatement. Mr Double was enraging: five minutes in his company would’ve had Albert Schweitzer chewing the keyboard of his organ. The man was a psychic leper, bits of whom flaked off on all those he came into contact with. It wasn’t the echolalia per se that was to blame, it was the way that Wadja responded to it. He bridled, he jinked, he hesitated – he tried every possible tactic to outwit his own rogue mind. A sample exchange with him might go:
How’re you today, Tadeuz?
– OK, OK, I – I guess-guess, tryingt’doalittlemore work on this, have you noticed – tryingt’doalittlemore work on – oh shit – this, have you noticed – oh shit. It hurts, damn it! It hurts like hiccups, damn it! Like hiccupsdamn-damn.
– Have you been taking the pills I prescribed, Tadeuz? I think their sedative effect might help you.
– Took two – took two. Sorry-sorry. Took two – took two. Sorry-sorry. Jesus, I can’t stand this – I read in the paper this morning that the Jesus, I can’t stand this Home Secretary …
And so it went on, with the inevitable histrionics. Shiva had tried cognitive therapy, he’d prescribed a galaxy of pharmaceuticals, he’d even attempted the fullest, most sympathetic engagement with his patient that he could muster. He’d become involved with Wadja’s home circumstances, which were predictably dreadful. There was an obese and angry wife; an obese, fanatically religious mother; and two grown-up children, who, like fat native-born cuckoos, refused to leave their immigrant nest.
Initially, Shiva dared to think that there might be a productive aspect to Wadja’s disorder. That just as Busner, his nemesis, had whittled his misshapen patients into the rungs of his career ladder, so Shiva would take Wadja – chemically muzzled – out to fashionable literary salons, where the Pole’s uncanny ability to repeat great tranches of his own dialogue would impress highly sexed women poets with its Beckettian absurdity. Later they’d wrap themselves around Shiva, reciting Symbolist stanzas with a mounting rhythm until they came with a great howl. Or so he’d fantasised, because he was soon forced to acknowledge that there was nothing remotely seductive about Wadja, echolalia or not. His appearance didn’t help. His great red-and-white cube of a Slavic head, with its iron-filing crest and its façade scaffolded with burst capillaries was set on top of broad shoulders from which dangled frightening mechanical-grabber arms. The idea that this runaway train of a man had ever been responsible for enforcing safety standards was ridiculous, especially when you considered the drunkenness.
