My Idea of Fun: A Novel

by Will Self

  The following afternoon as I walked across the campus, I didn't know it but I was about to commence my full rehabilitation. But I did know that Gyggle was the shrink for me the minute I saw him. It was the beard, I suppose, a beard that was the exact opposite of Hargreaves's beard. Whereas his beard was so clearly a compensation, a making up for unachieved virility, Gyggle's beard was positively rampant, priapic. It was only a beard – true enough – but it had been connected to a man's face for many many years. Clearly it was a transitional object, purpose-built to drag me back into the world of men and affairs.

  When I was shown into his little office in the administration block Gyggle was sitting reading something. His forearms were lying on the desk and his skinny torso was framed by a proscenium arch of ring binders, set on shelves that marched up and over his head.

  The Gyggle forearms were covered all over with a regular pattern of tight ginger curlicues of hair. In fact, it would be true to say that my first impression was of a man entirely dominated by a regular pattern of tight ginger curlicues of hair. His sleeves were rolled up – which was what led me to make such an assumption – but really it was his hair that set the tone. The curlicues massed at his collar and from here a series of well-defined ginger ridges ascended to his nude pate. Waves of this same hair swept around the back of Gyggle's head, from coast to coast of his oval face. They formed galleries, which seemed so regular they might have been the honeycombed nestings of some breed of super-lice that had reached an advanced accommodation with their host. But however striking, the hair had to be viewed as merely a trailer to the main feature of Gyggle's appearance, the beard.

  The beard was a kind of super beard, a beard to end all beards, a great reprise on some of the world's finest and most significant beards. Obviously the way it tumbled – nay, cascaded – down on to the Gyggle chest had close associations with those prophetic beards that lingered in my memory from many hours of tilted observation in cathedrals and museums, yet something about the beard's rigidity, its apparent inflexibility, said Assyria, Sumeria. Whispered epics in the bouncing back of war chariots, chanted louder as the warriors attack – entirely in profile, of course.

  When he looked up and turned to greet me Gyggle's real profile showed the beard off to even greater effect and teased me with its diversity. Here was the suggestion of the spreading fan of an eminent Victorian, a beard clotted with high-flown phrases and guilty secretions, a beard of mad power that then faded at the edges into the ineffectualness of a declining constitutional monarchy. What a beard, I thought.

  ‘You must be Ian Wharton.’ He looked up from his reading and the beard parted in such a way as to suggest that there might be an affable grimace lying some way behind it.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Tim Hargreaves said that you'd like to have a chat with me about some things. He said you'd been out of sorts recently.’

  ‘Not so recently.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I've always been out of sorts, I've always felt like this – oh, you know – almost as long as I can remember.’ (As long as the heaving green adumbrates the land, as long as time has refused to be some time but always now, as long as the humungus titles have zipped up from the seam between sea and sky, as long . . .)

  ‘Oh yes.’ His voice was soft, honey soft. It was like a net of sound falling over my mind ready to trawl the truth. ‘And what is “feeling like this” like?’

  Everything was happening so fast – he couldn't be aware of the crisis he was dragging me towards. The room was a pressurized cabin suddenly ruptured. I sensed the warmth screaming out of the atmosphere to be replaced with the absolute zero of his clinical persona but I couldn't stop myself. ‘I – I, I'm an eid-eid . . . I've got an eidetic memory.’ I stuttered and then blurted. Gyggle steepled his freckled fingers and tucked them under a tier of the beard. He looked at me with yellow feral eyes.

  ‘You don't say. How fascinating. I've done a little work on eidesis myself. What kind of eidetic memory have you got?’

  I was flummoxed. ‘I – I didn't know there were different kinds. ‘

  ‘Oh yes, there's eidesis that concentrates on form and proportion; eidesis that acts mnemonically, producing near-instant recall through combinations of letters or numerals; there's a kind of mathematical eidesis whereby equations and aspects of calculus are viewed spatially and of course there's common-or-garden eidesis, which people call “photographic memory” – ‘

  ‘That's me!’ I was embarrassed by my exclamation; it sounded like a yelp of boyish enthusiasm.

  ‘I see.’ Gyggle was unperturbed. ‘While it's true that an awful lot of eidetikers have problems with communication and some are even autistic, those that aren't don't tend to be overly neurotic or unhappy. On the contrary they usually put their gifts into some satisfying but resolutely unimaginative task. They acquire multiple degrees, purposelessly log facts, or do photoreal drawing after photoreal drawing – each one notable only for its lack of – how can I put it, emotional bite?’ The ragged hole appeared in the beard again; it occurred to me that the shrink was baiting me in some way, teasing me. ‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘these eidetikers are usually terribly ordinary people, unimaginative in the extreme, hmmm?’

  ‘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.

  When Gyggle first explained this experiment to me I almost laughed at how facile it was. For me – who had consciously to struggle against the imagaic maelstrom implicit in the idea of retroscendence – to have to deploy my powers in this pedestrian manner seemed nothing less than absurd. I said as much. ‘I think you've missed the point about my eidetiking, Dr Gyggle.’

  ‘Oh yes, and why's that?’

  ‘Well, you see – I thought I explained this to you – if I were to eidetik now I would go into a kind of a trance. No time would pass for you but during that trance I could unpack whatever reserves of information this particular visual scene contains.’

  ‘Give me an example.’

  ‘Well, I could, for instance, discover what shape your chin is under that beard. ‘

  It was meant to be a jocular observation but even as I said it I knew that I had transgressed some important Gyggle taboo. It's like that with beards, particularly medical beards and even more so psychiatric ones. Although their wearers adopt them as naturally woven badges of individuality, the second they are challenged, taken out of context, they rise up to form chin-borne hackles.

  ‘I don't see that my beard has anything to do with it,’ his honey voice huffled. ‘But if you think you can – do.’

  I went into a full-blown eidetic trance. I encapsulated the whole scene, the dingy cubicle with its plywood partitions; the warped lino, as undulant as the earthen floor of a barn; Gyggle's hideous cheesecloth shirt, the buttons pulled apart to the sternum, revealing still more tight ginger curlicues. I took in both the general: lunar dust motes caught in the sidereal glare of neon light, and the particular: the smear of cobweb on an inch of mushroom flex that protruded from the ceiling above.

  When the eidetic image of the room was fully and accurately frozen inside of me, I made my move, or tried to make my move, because nothing happened. I was somehow reversing that pivotal moment in my eidetic career eight years before, when Mr Broadhurst had bade me look in his waistcoat pocket and then made his move. Now it was I who couldn't move; more than that I wasn't even able to form an idea of what it would be like to move. Formerly my eidetic body, the tool with which I worked upon my visions, had felt as defined as if three-dimensional crop marks had been described in the air. My wilful grasp upon it had been entirely unproblematic, as sure as neat fingers picking up pins, or knitting, and then casting off the atomic stitches of the material world.

  I couldn't even imagine what this sensation might be like any more, so utterly had it evaporated. I conceptually fumbled, struggled to get some purchase on the sempiternal sheen of the visual image; but there was nothing, no movement, no astral agility, it remained frozen. Or at least almost entirely frozen. Just before I snapped out of it, aborted the failed trance, I thought I saw – although I couldn't be certain – the ragged hole in the beard through which Gyggle addressed the world unravel a little at its edge, exposing a slug side of what might have been Gyggle's lip.

  ‘Well then,�
�� said the old fox, ‘have you eidetically removed the hairs from my chinny-chin-chin?’

  ‘I-I, I can't seem to. What I mean is – I'm trying.’

  ‘Trying,’ pronounced the psychiatrist sententiously, ‘is lying.’

  ‘I can't understand it.’ I was shaking and sweating. If I could no longer eidetik effectively, had my status as apprentice and licentiate of the Brahmin of the Banal been removed at one fell stroke?

  ‘I'm not surprised,’ said my therapist, ‘for nor can I.’

  ‘Whaddya’ mean?’

  ‘Well, put it this way, you claim to be able to derive information from internal visual images which you believe to directly correspond to the phenomenal world.’

  ‘Whaddya’ mean, “phenomenal"?’ It was the sort of jargon I expected from you-know-who.

  ‘I mean the commonsensical world of material objects and appearances. You claim that you can discover things that are unknowable in an orthodox fashion by moving about the representation of this world inside your own head. Is that right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So if I were to screen a feature film for you, and in it there was a scene that took place with two characters talking on a sofa, you would be able to tell me whether there was an object lying behind it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Supposing it was an animated film – would you be able to enter into that world as well?’

  ‘I s'pose so, but I've never really done it.’

  ‘But in the case of such an animated film, there wouldn't be anything behind the cartoon sofa; not only that, the sofa couldn't be said to have a behind at all. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘We-ell– ‘

  ‘No. Not “we-ell”. The point is that you are suffering from a complex delusion. There is nothing behind the cartoon sofa and if you find anything it's because you yourself have put it there. There can be no picture of the world in your head that exists independently of your assertions and beliefs about it. To know something is to participate in a communicable truth. Your whole belief in your eidetic power rests on a misconception of the nature of consciousness itself.’