Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘My problem is quite the reverse,’ I said emphatically. ‘I think I may be suffering from an excess of imagination, either that or. . or. .’ And there it was, it struck me that I had nothing to lose, I was damned either way. If I betrayed the pact between myself and The Fat Controller he would undoubtedly destroy me, fillet me, excarnate me in the screaming void. But if I said nothing, turned tail and ran from Gyggle, what hope was there for an ordinary life for Ian Wharton? What hope was there of love?

‘Or what? Do you think you are going mad?’ I nodded. Gyggle got up from behind his desk and came round to the front of it. He was very tall, perhaps six foot five, all elbow and forearm, like an enormous ginger praying mantis. He propped his absence of arse against the rim of his desk and contemplated me. ‘Look Ian, I'm here to help you, I'm not here to grind my own axe. I'm not a very orthodox kind of counsellor or psychiatrist but if there's anything within my power that I can do to help you, then I'll do it. Now tell me what it is about your eidetic ability that is causing you so much distress.’

I told Gyggle. I told him everything. I told him in great detail. I omitted nothing, nothing, that is, save for The Fat Controller. I explained how it was that as a child I had been told I was an an eidetiker but that it had meant nothing to me. And how it was that I had rediscovered the gift in pubescence, as if prompted by my burgeoning sexuality. I told him how I could freeze my eidetic images, then project my phantom body into them, to discover things that I could not possibly have known. I told him that this bizarre gift had frightened me, made me feel vulnerable; and that I had felt compelled to develop a magical system of my own to prevent my hyperactive visual memory from destroying me altogether.

The whole time I spoke Gyggle maintained his desk-propping position, fingers steepled to beard, impartial eyes cast down into my own. When I had finished he had only two things to say.

‘It's very interesting that in all of this you don't say anything about your relationships. Most of the students who come to me with problems are absolutely preoccupied by their parents, their friends, their sexual partners — ‘ I grunted noncommittally. ‘And the other thing is that if what you say is true then you have a form of extra-sensory perception. You know, there are certain tests — scientific tests — that can determine whether or not this is the case.’

‘No, I didn't know that. ‘

‘Well, there are and what I would like to propose to you is this, that you allow me to do these tests on you. There are the facilities here, in the experimental psychology faculty. I don't want you to imagine for a moment that I don't believe every word of what you tell me. It's just that whatever the reality of your condition verifying it will constitute a kind of catharsis — do you know what that means?’ I tried to give him a withering look. ‘Of course you do; Tim Hargreaves told me that you are an exceptional student. Now, if you'll excuse me I believe our hour is up. Could you make an appointment with the secretary for next week? We'll meet here and then go over to the lab together, OK?’

I rasped my chair backwards and got up, I muttered good-bye.

As I was pulling the institutional door of his office shut behind me he looked up from the reading matter he had taken up again and said, ‘And Ian — ‘

‘Y-yes?’

‘Try not to worry, lad, I'm here to look after you.’

In the mathematical corridor with its shown brickworking and angled spotlights, a young woman was waiting to go in. She regarded me warily from under a fringe of split ends. One small hand, the nails surrounded by gnawed raw flesh, clutched a wad of tissue paper against her seeping eye. For some cruel reason I took heart from the very ordinariness of her misery.

I now entered the empirical and experimental phase of my life. Every Thursday afternoon I would join Gyggle in his office and together we would cross the campus to the squat blockhouse that housed the experimental psychology faculty. We would descend to the basement and make our way through a maze of waist-high partitioning. Under the hum of stroboscopic strip lighting, fidgeting, rodentine psychology students scampered this way and that, clutching streamers of computer printout, clipboards and calculators. So pre-programmed did their behaviours seem, that they themselves might have been the subjects of some meta-experiment and the pallor of their laboratory coats a function of their caged confinement.

First of all Gyggle tried me on the same sort of rudimentary exercises that I remembered performing as a child. He would make me look at pictures and then reproduce them with coloured pencils, or else ask me to rotate a figure mentally a certain number of degrees around a given perpendicular before attempting to redraw it. But soon we progressed to more state-of-the-art experimentation. Sequences of words would be flashed up on a VDU, so quickly that — in theory — they could only be perceived subliminally. These tests established exactly what they had done before; namely that I did indeed have an exceptionally accurate visual memory. I was able to recall perfectly quite long sequences of words even when I was exposed to each for little more than twenty milliseconds.

Throughout the testing Gyggle was solicitous and gentle. He said nothing to me about my fears for my sanity and behaved as if what we were doing were a common exercise, undertaken for purely scientific purposes. It was this manner of his, more than anything else, that seemed to have a therapeutic benefit. For, as the testing progressed, so my life outside of the sessions began to acquire the lineaments of a normalcy I had never felt before.

I took to spending more time with my mother again, rather than shutting myself up in my caravan. Our talk was unemotional, inconsequential. With her new-found gentility Mother had bought the ability to make endless small talk. Coming from her tight mouth, the county trilling on local lawlessness and moral decline made these cankers seem wholly benign. She was transformed from the young trollop I remembered to the middle-aged reader of Trollope she had always wanted to be. There was a slackening of the tension in the psychic umbilicus, and more importantly, there was no reference to Mr Broadhurst.

At the university I came out from my shell. I actually talked to my fellow students and built up some relations with people, which, if not quite friendships, at least satisfied the definition of acquaintance.

One day, coming across June in the corridor alone, instead of hurrying past, my face to the wall, I stopped and spoke to her. I knew she now had a boyfriend. I had seen them together, arm-in-arm, taking their mutual attraction for a walk. Perhaps it was this, the fact that she now had someone else to love her, that made it possible for me to make a proper apology, to stutter out confusedly, red-faced, that I was sorry about what had happened. I told her that I had had a sort of a breakdown, and that I was appalled by what I had done. I wish I could have said that she was sweetly understanding, but she looked at me as if I were an incubus that had raped her and scraped along the brickwork, desperate to get past.

After a couple of months like this Gyggle changed the nature of our experiments. ‘Well, lan,’ he said, stroking the beard as if it were a favourite pet that had curled up on his chin, ‘I think we have established incontrovertibly that you are an eidetiker of sorts. Now let's test the veracity of your rather more extravagant claims.’

Gyggle had obtained a series of computer-visualisation models from an extra-sensory perception researcher in Texas. These involved the experimental subject in observing three-dimensional figures on a VDU, and then answering questions about aspects of the figures that were knowable — but hardly at an intuitive level. For example, if the figure was a line diagram of a room with four windows set at different heights, the programme would ask me whether a line of sight from the far corner of the room would enable me to see a particular point outside the window nearest to me, a point that shifted on the screen at speed.