Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

I know the power of words. They seem a trifle

Fallen petals beneath a dancer’s feet

But they hold a man’s soul, and lips, and bone.

When I think of my children, I tend to remember them when they were little, before their difficult-to-negotiate passage into altered teenage carcasses. These are two snapshots: Lucius, launching himself into a stumbling run towards some climbing apparatus with the asymmetrical bulge of a sodden nappy halfway down one trouser leg; Sarah, perched naked on a toilet seat, calling imperiously for Leonora to wipe her bum.

But how? My eyes have never seen such things. What other memories have been extirpated to admit these ones? Yet what can I do but express the soul I find imprinted on me? You cannot choose what to love. Beliefs, as Webster said to Ron, are what we invest our emotions in.

The tremor in my left hand is like the ominous grating note of a failing engine. I am growing weaker daily. What is this testimony but the collateral sparkings of a dying consciousness? I am the shadow thrown by a guttering candle. But while the flame still burns, I will complete this task.

*

Dr Philip Marshall White, Webster’s much-admired PW, had stolen up on me while I was working at the computer. I had the presence of mind to turn and shield the screen from him. He insisted on seeing it. I pulled out the power cable from the back of the monitor; the display contracted to a tiny dot and vanished.

This minor act of insubordination was the pretext he needed to cancel my access to the computer. That wasn’t all.

‘We think it’s counterproductive for you to have therapy at the moment,’ he told me. ‘You’re too unbalanced. We’ll be looking for better pharmaceutical outcomes before we risk overstimulating you again.’

They started me off with oral doses of antipsychotic drugs which made me nauseous and confused. For a couple of days, I was able to avoid taking them by concealing the pills under my tongue or palming them and then flushing them down the toilet, but the nurses had the instincts for deception of Las Vegas croupiers. When blood tests confirmed that I hadn’t been taking the medicine, Dr White confronted me. This time, I lost my temper with him and called him a fraud and liar. He summoned the restraint team and they forcibly injected me with a massive shot of Acuphase. I was asleep in the seclusion cell for almost seventy-two hours. They didn’t bother with pills after that, they simply stuck me with a fortnightly injection of haloperidol and whatever else they thought would keep me pliant.

With no computer access and my mind too washed out with drugs to read, I found the time passed terribly slowly. There was a careful hierarchy of activities for the clients in the DHU: creative writing and pottery for the most biddable, painting for others, but the hard cases, of which I was now one, had to be content with watching daytime television through the fog of antipsychotic medication.

And the drugs had a whole raft of unpleasant physical side-effects. I had muscular spasms, an agonising tightness in my neck and back and uncontrollable twitching in my face. The medication induced a sense of restlessness that could find no outlet. It was intolerable to sit for any length of time. I ate standing up so that I could keep moving, and I spent hours in my cubicle shifting from foot to foot, trying to console myself by muttering poems under my breath. There was a whole number of them in there, intact, that I couldn’t remember ever reading: Hopkins, Esenin, Mandelstam; I knew they were among Vera’s favourites and it crossed my mind that she’d coded and tossed them in, just as my mother used to sew a five-pound note into the jacket lining of my school uniform for emergencies.

We had a lot of religious nutcases in the DHU. One of the most likeable was the mixed-race man who called himself Caiaphas. He would pad around the unit most afternoons with a tattered stack of Watchtowers , the Jehovah’s Witness magazine, which he would hand out and then come by to collect about fifteen minutes later. It says something about the basic decency of the loonies in there that everyone colluded with his harmless nuttiness, accepting the magazines and then returning them without complaint almost immediately.

One afternoon, he came by, selected a magazine from the big wad in his hand, changed his mind, selected another and dropped it at the foot of my bed. ‘Haven’t seen you around much, brother.’

I explained, through my involuntarily clenching jaw, that I’d been in the seclusion cells and that White had put me on a punitive dose of neuroleptic drugs.

‘Someone’s been looking for you,’ he said. ‘He knows your name.’

Dimly, through the hum of interior noise, I could tell that this information ought to be important to me.

‘Staff or client?’ I asked him.

‘Client.’

‘Does he know who I am?’

‘Not from me, brother.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Doesn’t say.’

It took me so long to formulate my next response that by the time I had, Caiaphas had gone.

*

In a world as empty of solace as the DHU, the most humanising thing we had was the caress of water. I took showers as often as I could, at least once a day. We couldn’t control the temperature, or even the pressure; the shower ran in twenty-second bursts each time you depressed its button. But for each of those twenty seconds, the water on my scalp was an angel’s fingers, and I could stand still, and the heat on my spine relieved its constant aching.

The shower rooms themselves were unsupervised. An attendant sat outside, checking us in and out: we had to book our slots in advance.

Two or three evenings later — it’s hard to be precise because of the time-bending quality of the drugs I was on — I flapped round to the washrooms in my dressing gown and flipflops. There were six shower cubicles, three on each side at one end of the room, and a changing area with plastic chairs and hooks to hang clothes and towels; but they were rarely, if ever, fully occupied.

Someone came and went in the stall next to mine. Through the steam I was aware of someone in the changing room undressing and folding his clothing scrupulously into a tidy pile.

The hiss of water drowned out the buzz of the chemicals in my head. I closed my eyes and for a brief and blissful moment the carcass was at rest.

In the next instant, I was struck a huge blow across my back and shoulders and fell to my hands and knees. Something closed round my neck. I was able to slip my right hand through it as it tightened and leather bit into my wrist. Yielding to the upward pressure, I allowed my assailant to pull me back onto my feet as he tried to choke me, then I moved with him, adding my bulk to his, and slammed him into the thin partition that divided mine from the neighbouring cubicle; it surrendered and split. We fell together. Someone was cut from the splinters of laminated plywood. Still throttling me from behind, my attacker brought his knees repeatedly into my ribs, encouraging me to drop my right hand to parry them and leave my throat unguarded. As I struggled to shake him off my back, I sensed myself weakening.

‘Who are you?’ I croaked.

He gave no indication that he had heard. He was breathing more heavily and his kicks had slowed a little, but he continued to tighten the belt. My vision grew strangely sharp: I could see beads of moisture on the wall tiles, mildew on the grouting. I glanced down to my left. For an instant, I mistook his leg for mine. There, on the upper face of his left thigh, was a roundel identical to the one that marked me: the same size, the same pattern, the same location; the colours fresher and more sharply delineated.

The surge of adrenalin that followed brought a measure of lucidity to my drug-clouded brain. I remembered the sessions at the clinic in Baikonur.