Will Self - My Idea of Fun

She spoke of him occasionally, as if blithely unaware of any possible alter-egos that he might have. ‘I had a card from Mr Broadhurst the other day,’ she bleated. ‘You remember him, dear?’

‘Yes, Mama, how could I forget him.’ (And how could Gyggle have been stupid enough to imagine that he was dead?)

‘He's getting on now, of course, poor man.’

‘Yes, he must be very old now. ‘

‘He tells me he may have to go into a rest home. He can't really manage by himself any more.’ Apparently he had become nothing more than this, forage for commonplace family small talk.

And as for those alter-egos, his trade name ‘Samuel Northcliffe’ still cropped up in the financial and marketing press. He was a member of syndicates involved in leveraged buy-outs, he was a prominent Lloyd's underwriter, he was a consultant for this corporation and an adviser to that emirate. But when I concentrated on the postage-stamp-sized photographs bearing his name that had started to appear, I could no longer be certain that he and The Fat Controller were one and the same. It seemed far more likely that, as Dr Gyggle suggested, I had become aware of Samuel Northcliffe separately and incorporated information I had gleaned from the newspapers into my fantasy.

Dr Gyggle wasn't satisfied with my progress. He regarded my attainment of ‘full genitality’ as the ultimate goal of his therapy and he was determined that I should enjoy a complete cure. Not until the spectre of the Fat Controller was fully exorcised from my psyche would I be able to form an adult relationship.

‘I'm convinced that the resolution of all this lies buried deep in your unconscious,’ he told me as we sat chatting in his office at the DDU. ‘I can talk to you, you can talk to me. We can try all sorts of techniques to get in touch with the hinterland of your psyche but my feeling is that, unless you your self are prepared to voyage there, it will prove impossible to extirpate this negative cathexis. Somewhere deep down, your idea of what it is to be a person, to truly engage in the world, has become critically interfused with childish fantasy. Your choice of iconography is of course highly significant in this context. ‘

To begin with Gyggle tried me on sensory deprivation. He had hijacked a proportion of the Unit's budget to buy a sensory-deprivation tank which he kept in a basement of the hospital. It was such wacky financial apportionments as this that — or so he claimed to me — made him a voguish and sought-after practitioner.

Unfortunately, whatever remnants of my eidetic ability remained made me entirely unsuitable for this particular therapy. Going down to the hospital basement and disrobing in a utility room full of bleach bottles and moulting mops was a tantilisingly prosaic prelude to my voyages into inner space. But once Gyggle had positioned me in the tank — which crouched there like a miniature submarine, or a twenty-first-century washing machine — and swung shut the rubber-flanged door, I found it impossible to lose — and therefore as he hoped, reencounter — my self.

The lulling cushion of blood-heat saline solution I floated on did help me to neglect those bodily fears that were so much a part of me. Awareness of time and even of whether I was waking or sleeping soon drained away. I would sink down into a velvet void so entire and impenetrable that whether it was I or I was it, became moot. But then, just at the point where my doubts about the external world had become a crescendo and I was certain that revelation was nigh, some glitch would occur. Either the salt would sting into a cut or raw spot on my body, bringing back bodily feeling in one fell swoop, or else, from somewhere in the bowels of building, my ears, questing for the remotest of stimuli, would pick up on the sound of a toilet being flushed, or perhaps a trolley banging against a wall. In a split-second I would build on this particle of noise and construct an idea of the kind of world that could produce such a phenomenon. Needless to say, this new world always bore an uncanny resemblance to the one I had so recently abandoned.

Gyggle wasn't to be put off by this; instead of retreating or retrenching he suggested even more radical measures. ‘It isn't altogether ethical,’ he said, while watching me shower hexagonal salt crystals from my inner thighs, ‘but then you and I haven't had an orthodox therapeutic relationship.’

‘What isn't altogether ethical?’

‘They used to advocate it for withdrawing heroin addicts naturally they had little success. Then they tried it with various kinds of depression, even psychoses. Invariably the cure proved far worse than the disease.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Deep sleep, that's what I want you to let me do, Ian. I want to put you under for at least forty-eight hours. I think that only by maximising long periods of REM, or dream sleep, will we be able to summon up this demon of yours. Then once he's rematerialised we will be able to fight him, hmm?’

Why did I let him persuade me to do this? The answer is simple. Sure, I had a good job and a comfortable home, I even had people who invited me to their houses. I had the trappings of success, of social acceptability. I had got over a particularly traumatic childhood and adolescence and looked set fair for a modicum of stability as an adult. But there was this sex problem, of course, and there was something else, a rootlessness, an atemporality about my life.

Try as I might to be in the present, to subsume myself to history, to see myself as just another corpuscle coursing along the urban arteries, I couldn't. There was an anachronistic feel to my whole life, a kind of alienation that I couldn't quite understand. It came out with particular force in my work. It didn't matter how innovative the products I set out to market actually were, I could not prevent myself from seeing them already in some illimitable bazaar of the far future, long obsolete and hopelessly dated, so much cosmological car-boot-sale fodder.

It impinged on me, this business of always being in the Now. Riding along in my automobile there was no particular time to go to, just a moiling moment. I agreed with Gyggle, only by entering the dreamscape, the hypercast of my hotted-up mind, could I hope to resolve this paradox and once and for all free myself from the malevolent force which I felt had shaped my life.

He told me that in the past insulin had been used to put people in coma states but he wouldn't dream of doing anything as crude or violent; a silky drip of valium sedation was all that was required. Gyggle would store me in a spare room of the hospital and keep me under twenty-four-hour observation while I was unconscious.

So, where were we? Listening to the fridge, right? Listenmg to the modulated hum, the gaseous cough, the rubber shudder.

Twenty Great Fridge Hits, now that's an album you could market truly effectively. There has to be a demand out there for this kind of thing, everyone is so hip to the idea of ambient music nowadays, and what could be more consummately ambient than a fridge? It's both in the environment, of the environment and apparently a smidgeon of a threat to the precious fucking environment.

OK, granted, perhaps forty-five minutes of different fridge noises alone might be a bit of a non-starter. We'd have to jazz it up a little, get a few prominent vocalists to sing over the coolant's bubble, a few name producers to chip the chilly vibration down to its component cubes and then restack it into a great wall of freezing sound. Then I think we'd be in business, then I'm sure you'd have a nice little earner on your hands.