Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

No one more embodies the illuminating potency of reason. Johnson was devastating in his capacity to sniff out the fake in its different guises, to know what the real is, or the réal , if you follow Hunter’s comical etymology. But this very power was riddled with its opposites: melancholy and uncertainty; fear of his own loosening grip on the nature of reality.

*

As they fetched Jack up from the cells, he walked like a criminal being led to the scaffold: unsteadily, and with his eyes fixed on the floor. When I said his name, he looked up and his face brightened with relief.

‘Dr Slopen? How come you here?’ His voice was hoarse and he was wearing unfamiliar clothing.

‘Let’s get you home,’ I said. Jack took my arm. His grip seemed frail and desperate.

The police were only too happy to release him with a caution.

‘We’d prefer not to charge him, anyway,’ said the shaven-headed policeman. ‘In cases like these’ — he looked pityingly at Jack — ‘the law is a blunt instrument.’

He explained that Jack had made his way into 17 Gough Square, ignored the clerk at the ticket counter and, when challenged by an attendant, had become confrontational. A guide who was showing a group around the house at the time had been so alarmed by his manner that she fetched a policeman.

I understood that Jack’s size, his odd manner of speaking and the implied truculence of his peculiar physiognomy had been met not with compassion and gentle handling, but with a misplaced machismo. The upshot was that the police had overpowered him and wrestled him into a van.

And still I wondered what impulse had driven him east, down Fleet Street, towards the dome of St Paul’s and into the nest of alleyways around Gough Square.

On our departure, the officer gave me Jack’s original clothes in a plastic bag and told me they’d need a wash because the arresting officers had been forced to use pepper spray. He was obliging enough to recommend a particular detergent.

*

As soon as we were out of sight of the police station, Bykov pulled the car over and undid his seatbelt. He sat for a moment looking in the rear-view mirror. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him. ‘Are we being followed?’

‘ Podozhdi ,’ he said. Wait a second.

Suddenly, with a speed that I would never have associated with his squat physique, Bykov withdrew something from his top pocket, turned in his seat and stabbed Jack in the leg.

Jack let out a roar of discomfort and surprise. He gripped Bykov’s wrist, and then I watched his hands slacken almost instantly and his eyelids grow heavy. He fell forward onto his seatbelt. Bykov shifted him back with his forearm until he slumped against the headrest. It took me a few seconds to recover my composure.

I could see Bykov was enjoying my discomfiture. ‘You’re feeling sorry for him, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘But it’s more cruel to let him get into a state like that: police arresting him, and God knows what. He’s crazy, Nikolai. You have to protect him. Take this and use it!’

He handed me the instrument he’d used to dose Jack. It was a hypodermic pen of the sort that insulin-dependent diabetics use. ‘It paralyses the soft tissue. It doesn’t affect the brain. When you need to, give him one an hour.’ A crimson bead of Jack’s blood clung to its tip. ‘At least I know you can use a pen,’ he muttered as he pulled roughly away from the kerb.

Extracted from Dr Webster’s Journal

*

Request from Patient Q this evening for antidepressants. I ask him why; he is reluctant to give me an answer. From his affect, it’s clear that he is sad about something. The appearance of unfeigned emotional response seems, in the context of his previous delusional behaviour, a positive outcome. I ask his permission to record the session.

— Why do you think you’re sad?

— You wouldn’t understand.

— What makes you think I wouldn’t?

— Because you’ve understood fuck all so far.

Q is silent for half a minute and then his manner becomes conciliatory:

— I haven’t got long, you know.

— Long?

Q is silent again, then asks if I like haiku. I tell him I do. Q recites.

— This world of dew is a world of dew. And yet, and yet .

His recitation is slow and full of affect. For the first time in our sessions, the countertransference produces a pronounced sense of melancholy. I ask him again why he’s sad.

— I miss my family.

— Your family?

— My children, Sarah and Lucius.

— Dr Slopen’s children.

– [muttering] What’s the fucking point?

I explain the reality principle. I tell him that one of my roles is to constantly challenge his delusions. In a sadistic retaliation for my intervention, he corrects my use of the split infinitive. After a pause of several minutes, he makes a fresh attempt to communicate.

— That’s the thing about a carcass. We’re like one of those spare tyres that are just supposed to get you to the end of your journey. There’s no longevity in them.

— And what will be at the end of your journey?

— I’d like to see my children again. I’d like to be able to tell them how much I love them. And I’d like people to know the truth.

— The truth?

— The truth.

— Some people might say that truth is a slippery concept and that there’s more than one kind of truth.

Q gazes at me with evident contempt.

— Who?

I instance cases of so-called alien abduction and suggest to Q that while untrue in one sense the accounts may truly reflect traumatic experiences the victims underwent as children.

— There’s only one kind of truth. That’s why it’s called THE truth. Because there’s one of it.

— And what’s the truth here?

Q falls silent. His gaze softens.

– [almost to himself] The truth is that Chwang Zoo’s [sp?] butterfly is not a metaphor. And I’m a dreamer who has forgotten his waking name.

— That sounds like a riddle.

No further response from Q.

The above is Dr Webster’s most recent entry — but dated over a week ago. I can’t explain her lack of diligence. ‘Chwang Zoo’, indeed. Heaven help us: she’s turned the Taoist sage into an animal sanctuary.

Though she’s added nothing to her journal lately, she appears to have settled on a new tack with me in our sessions — our ‘work’ together, as she calls it with no trace of irony. Last night, my protective phantasies not only passed unchallenged but were positively encouraged by the doctor.

The atmosphere of the session was different as soon as I entered the room, or ‘safe space’ as we clients are encouraged to think of it.

She told me she wanted to turn over a new leaf in our work. ‘Tell me about this man, this man you claim to be.’

‘Nicholas Slopen?’

‘Yes. What kind of man is he?’

That threw me completely. I’m not exactly the same man I was before. The Procedure has given me a handle on the old Nicky Slopen, the strained and over-conscientious ice-man, and in doing so, it has altered me. I tried to explain this to her.

‘So, you’re saying you’re not Nicholas Slopen after all? Well, that’s a big admission.’

I told her not to be obtuse, adding that one of my regrets in this, one of many, is that I didn’t have the chance to be the person I’ve become with my wife and children. She let that assertion pass without comment and I felt emboldened to ask if she had any children herself.

‘My personal life is out of bounds, as you know,’ she said; but I know, in any case, that she doesn’t.

I attempted to explain to her the pain I felt at being separated from my family, and the pain of being able to recognise my shortcomings as a husband and a parent without being given the concomitant shot at redemption. ‘I’m Scrooge with no third act,’ I said, ‘I’m like a character in Greek myth: the Cassandra of personal development, who knows the truth but isn’t believed or allowed to act on it.’