Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  I stopped myself saying ‘what’ again. Instead I said, ‘Well, Charles, if there are all these orgies of yours going on there must be no end of visual stimulation for you.’

  He looked at me rather less pleasantly than usual. ‘Oh you’re smart, aren’t you? I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make me believe I’m seeing things. You think I’m making it up. You think I didn’t see Sita giving Anders a hand job, is that it?’

  Maybe he didn’t say ‘hand job’. I think it wasn’t a term we used much in those days.

  ‘No, Charles,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying you’re hallucinating. I saw the same thing you did – Sita and Anders, doing God knows what exactly. But I’ve never seen any of these orgies you talk about.’

  ‘And only seeing is believing?’

  ‘Well in a way, yes.’

  ‘Although sometimes you can’t believe your eyes. And sometimes your eyes deceive you.’

  ‘Well yes,’ I agreed.

  ‘Tell me, Gregory, what do you do when you masturbate?’ he enquired.

  ‘What?’ I knew exactly what he’d said but it seemed best to pretend I hadn’t understood.

  ‘I’m not enquiring about physical technique,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in whether you run, as it were, dirty films in the cinema of your imagination. And are you the star of these films? A supporting actor? A spear-carrier? And are these mental films reruns or remakes or sequels of events you’ve actually participated in, or are they scenarios you’d like to participate in, or scenarios you couldn’t possibly participate in, but enjoy thinking about, nevertheless? And who’s in the cast? Is it Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren and Julie Ege, or is it the girl from the corner shop or your old gym mistress or the Queen?’

  ‘I don’t really want to share my masturbatory fantasies with you, Charles,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing personal.’

  Charles Manning looked understanding but troubled.

  ‘You see, I’m wondering whether it’s bad to have these fantasies,’ he said, ‘to run these pictures through my mind. I’m frightened they might be ruining all the good work Kincaidian Therapy is doing for me.’

  I couldn’t tell whether he was really concerned about this or not, but I thought it was best to say, ‘I don’t know. You should ask Dr Kincaid.’

  ‘Or Dr Crowe,’ he said slyly.

  That offended me. I didn’t want him discussing his masturbatory fantasies with Alicia, and he obviously knew that; yet at the same time I realised I was being absurd. Alicia was a grown woman, a doctor, a professional; she was hardly going to be harmed by answering a few questions about sex from one of her patients.

  ‘Yes, why don’t you,’ I said.

  ‘And what if I find I’m having masturbatory fantasies concerning Dr Crowe herself, or about Dr Crowe and you, or Dr Crowe and you and Dr Kincaid and Sita and Anders all together in a kind of sexual snarl-up?’

  ‘Then I think you should go and have a cold shower,’ I said primly.

  ‘And tell me,’ he said, ‘what role do you think visualisation plays in coitus?’

  ‘Oh please, Charles,’ I said, but that didn’t stop him either.

  ‘I’ve never been sure of the morality of picturing one person while you’re having sex with another. It seems at best distasteful, at worst an act of betrayal. But supposing your current partner doesn’t arouse you sufficiently? What if you have trouble sustaining an erection? You need to stay hard in order to please the one you’re with, and so you begin to think of someone else or perhaps of many others. Your arousal is renewed. The erection remains, the act of coition is satisfactory, you’ve pleased your partner. Who’s to say it’s such a bad thing?’

  ‘Not me,’ I said dismissively. I was too young to consider this an issue worth thinking about.

  ‘Then there’s the other side,’ Charles Manning said, ‘when you need to slow yourself down, when you’re in danger of coming too soon. No point trying to visualise in those circumstances. I did briefly try fantasising about women I didn’t find attractive, but it never worked. Once the blood is up, all women are attractive, all women are arousing. Some people suggest doing mathematical problems or thinking about sports results, but again those methods never worked for me either. You want to know what works for me?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, though I knew it would do no good.

  ‘Reciting poetry,’ Charles Manning said. ‘To myself. In my own head, not aloud obviously, that would undoubtedly spoil the moment. But if I turn my mind to Kipling or Vachel Lindsay or T. S. Eliot, they slow me down very effectively indeed.’

  I. A. Richards, or at least Byron, might have wanted to ask Charles Manning if he ever visualised poetic images as he recited, whether he saw boots or the Congo or ash on an old man’s sleeve; and whether it was the images or the words themselves that delayed him. But I didn’t ask that question. I simply said, ‘Surely there aren’t many occasions when you need to sustain yourself or slow yourself down, are there, Charles? You told me you weren’t here for the sex.’

  ‘There are all too many,’ he said sadly. ‘All too many.’

  ‘Maybe you should write about it,’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh no, Gregory. Some things are far too precious to write about. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll retire to my room so I can pollute myself before the memory of Anders and Sita loses some of its sharpness.’

  I had no desire to detain him. Returning to my hut I found the memory of seeing Anders and Sita anything but erotic. I wasn’t disgusted or offended, but I had the feeling that I’d seen something I shouldn’t have seen, that I didn’t want to see. I liked to think I’d watched them not out of any voyeuristic impulse, but out of simple curiosity. I’d heard Anders’ voice and I’d wanted to see what he was up to. I wanted to know what was going on in the clinic. Was that so odd or so terrible?

  One thing apparently going on was a general, steady undermining of the principles of Kincaidian Therapy. Kincaid was trying to keep out the images but they kept creeping right back in, via sawdust or flames, drugs or clouds or masturbatory fantasies. The subversive in me was quite content with this. You wouldn’t want the head of the clinic to be able to wield absolute power, would you? At the same time, if Kincaidian Therapy was to be given a chance, the patients should surely be trying to stick to its tenets. Sometimes it was almost as if they wanted to stay sick. I wondered why they could possibly want that.

  21

  All too often as I tell the story of my time at the Kincaid Clinic I’m struck by how slow and stupid I seem to have been. I don’t think I should necessarily have known from the beginning exactly what was going on around me, since parts of it remain fairly inscrutable to me even now, but sometimes it does seem reprehensible that I didn’t worry more about how little I knew. Such discoveries as I made were forced on me rather than sought out. For instance …

  Alicia and I were with Kincaid in his office where he was about to conduct a session with Carla. She came into the office, sort of skipped, sort of stumbled, tripped over the edge of a non-existent carpet, then made an attempt to sit down on a chair, but she missed the seat by a foot or two and performed a pratfall, like a physical comedian of the old, unfunny school. Kincaid and Alicia took no notice of the pantomime. Having picked herself up, Carla managed to take up a position on the edge of the chair, but her knees flapped back and forth as she opened and closed her legs, her fists clenched and unclenched, and her features now adopted a series of extreme, rapidly changing expressions, as if she were engaged in exercises designed to limber up the facial muscles.

  ‘Hello, Carla,’ Kincaid said to her.

  Carla abruptly straightened in her seat as though invisible strings had yanked her upright. ‘Och, hello, doctor,’ she said in a thick, foolish, unconvincing Scottish accent. I was already finding this spectacle both profoundly irritating and profoundly embarrassing. I’d seen enough of Carla around the place to know she was an habitually silly girl, but in the close confines of Kincaid’s off
ice the effect was much more concentrated and much less tolerable.

  ‘Do you know what day it is today, Carla?’ Kincaid asked her.

  ‘Christmas?’ Carla asked all dewy-eyed.

  ‘No, Carla, I think you know it’s not Christmas.’

  ‘Then is it Mother’s Day? Or St Swithin’s? Or Fat Tuesday? Or Maundy Thursday? Or the seventh Sunday in Michaelmas? Don’t tell me, doctor, I really want to guess this one.’

  ‘It’s Monday,’ Kincaid said.

  ‘No,’ Carla said sweetly and sadly, ‘I’d never have got that.’

  ‘Do you know who this is, Carla?’ and he nodded towards me.

  Carla tossed back her head, and her face was gripped by an agony of concentration. ‘Is it George Harrison, the quiet one?’

  That was near enough for me, and considering that when Kincaid then asked her who the prime minister of England was and she said Zsa Zsa Gabor, it was perhaps surprisingly close. Kincaid pointed at the clock on the wall, a plain, robust circular face with big, clear numbers that showed eleven thirty.

  ‘Now, Carla,’ said Kincaid, ‘if I asked you what the time was, I think you’d tell me it was midnight or seven o’clock, or a quarter to two, wouldn’t you?’

  Carla stared at him in amazement, an expression that was replaced a moment later by a sneer.

  ‘And if I raised three fingers,’ Kincaid continued, ‘and asked you how many I was holding up, you’d tell me it was one or two or four fingers or perhaps even seventeen, wouldn’t you? And if I asked you to give me the name of a country, any country, you’d say umbrella or apple or fuselage or any word in the dictionary except one that was the name of a country. I’m right, aren’t I? I’m not misrepresenting you here, am I, Carla?’

  She turned in my direction and looked at me in all innocence, as though this was news to her.

  ‘Now, in the old days,’ said Kincaid, and it seemed that Kincaid’s explanation must be for my benefit rather than for Carla’s or Alicia’s, ‘we might have described Carla’s condition as malingering. It’s a word that doesn’t sound very scientific, yet for a long time it was perfectly serviceable. If you were a murderer trying to prove you weren’t responsible for your actions, or a soldier trying to get out of the army, you would behave as absurdly, as insanely as possible, and try to convince the doctors you were mad. If you succeeded they’d let you go.

  ‘We have a bigger choice of vocabulary these days. Today it would be all too tempting to look at Carla and say, ah yes, here we have a factitious disorder, a form of hyperkinetic catatonia, an hysterical pseudodementia, a Ganserian twilight state or, if you will, a form of buffoonery psychosis, although, of course, these are merely words, merely labels.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Alicia agreed.

  ‘The premise is,’ Kincaid continued, ‘that if Carla is only pretending to be mad, then there must be a sane reason for that pretence. But what could that reason be? Carla is not accused of any crime. She’s not trying to get out of military service. Her family life is stable. By a great many touchstones Carla would seem to be quite sane. In fact the only indications that she isn’t, are her displays of malingering. I believe this is what people have started to call a Catch 22 situation.’

  Kincaid’s way of talking about Carla as though she was either absent or unable to understand what was being said about her made me very uncomfortable. It seemed disrespectful, as though the girl’s presence, perhaps even her existence, was irrelevant, that she was just a guinea pig, a piece of data. Not that it bothered Carla. She was staring at the ceiling now and tugging at her left nostril.

  ‘Surely,’ Kincaid said, ‘no sane person would pretend to be mad. Does it therefore follow, that if there’s no reason there’s no pretence? Obviously we can’t take the patient’s word on these matters. To believe that a patient is mad simply because she says so would be as absurd as to believe she was sane simply because she said that.’

  ‘I think I get the point,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you would,’ said Kincaid. ‘I knew you’d respond to this little linguistic-philosophical conundrum. I think it will stay with you and give you food for thought in the days ahead. It might make the basis for a short story or a prose poem. Do you write prose poems?’

  ‘Not lately,’ I said.

  Carla was now looking alert and baby-faced and her head was swivelling back and forth.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to ask Carla one or two questions yourself,’ Kincaid suggested.

  A malingerer or not, psychotic or not, I had no real desire to speak to her. It was obvious that whatever I asked her she was going to give me some lunatic reply. What would be the point?

  But then Alicia said, ‘Yes, go on, Gregory,’ so I thought I’d give it a go.

  I tried to appear caring and concerned, but not gullibly so, and I said, ‘Carla, what would you do if Dr Kincaid said you were well enough to leave the clinic?’

  Kincaid and Alicia both nodded to show they thought I’d asked a good question, while Carla began to chuckle, then laugh, rocking mechanically like one of those laughing policemen you used to get at the seaside. The motion slowly subsided and she said, ‘I’d put my head up my arse.’

  Kincaid looked at me smugly and sadly. He was pleased. I was proving something he already knew to be true.

  ‘Like to try another question?’ he said.

  I couldn’t imagine that the content of the question mattered much but I asked, ‘Read any good books lately, Carla?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  A straight answer. To my enormous surprise, I seemed to be doing something right.

  ‘Seen any good films?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Watched any good television?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Been to any good orgies?’

  I don’t know why I asked that. It just slipped out. And I knew that Carla’s reply would prove nothing, indicate nothing, but I was still interested to hear what she said, and I was equally interested to see Kincaid and Alicia’s reactions, both to the reply and to the mere fact that I’d asked the question. Their faces showed nothing I could read, slight frowns that might be taken to indicate that I’d asked a less good question this time, but not much more than that.

  Very quietly and simply Carla said, ‘Yes, I have actually. Would you like an invitation to the next one?’

  I thought it was a rather clever reply, although naturally I didn’t think it meant anything. Carla laughed at her own answer, and I found myself laughing too, though I suspected we were laughing at different things. Kincaid and Alicia didn’t join in, and Kincaid had apparently had enough of my questions, since he didn’t allow me to ask another.

  ‘I can see you’re struggling, Gregory, and I can’t blame you,’ he said. ‘You see, we have another word for what Carla is displaying. Pathomimicry. That is to say, Carla is mimicking pathologies she does not have. She is, if you will, adopting the image of someone else’s illness. And I think you’ll agree with me that this penetrates to the heart of what we’re dealing with at the Kincaid Clinic. Carla has not only seen too many images per se, she’s seen too many images of madness.’

  I wanted to say, wait a minute, where did she see these images? In the Kincaid Clinic? But Kincaid didn’t give me a chance to speak. He said, ‘I think it might be good for all of us to sit in the dark for a while.’

  I could’nt believe he’d said that. He got up, pulled the blinds down and turned off the office lights. The four of us sat there in silence and darkness for what seemed an absurdly long time. Was this really Kincaidian Therapy in action? Was that all that went on in these sessions? Sitting quietly with the lights off? When he reckoned we’d all had enough he dismissed us.

  Carla went her buffoonish way, and Alicia and I walked along the corridor towards her office.

  ‘Why in God’s name did you ask her a thing like that? About the orgies?’ Alicia demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered honestly.

  ‘It doe
sn’t take much to get these patients worked up, you know.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to get her worked up.’

  ‘Then why did you say it?’

  ‘I guess I’m just a natural subversive. We creative types tend to be that way, you know.’

  ‘Are you completely obsessed by sex?’

  ‘Well—’ I said.

  ‘And what is this thing you have about orgies? What do you want to do? Watch? Participate? Or do you want to watch me participate?’

  ‘What?’

  It came as absolutely no surprise to find that Alicia had a much livelier sexual imagination than I did, but for a fleeting second I was able to hold a horribly titillating image of Alicia at the centre of some sort of sexual scrum, surrounded, compressed, skewered by naked lunatics.

  ‘No, I don’t want that,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll find doctors, mostly in America, mostly in California actually, who’ll tell you that the only good therapists are the ones who fuck their patients.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think I’d want to have anything to do with that,’ I said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even in your fantasies?’

  I wondered if Charles Manning had been talking to her.

  ‘Well, fantasies are fantasies,’ I said, ‘but no, I still don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh, I think you could manage a little fantasy for me, couldn’t you, Gregory?’

  We had come to her office, and she pulled me inside. She slammed the door behind us, though I noticed she didn’t lock it, and then she drew the blinds to darken the room, just as Kincaid had. It wasn’t the kind of pitch blackness that usually pertained when Alicia and I had sex, but it served well enough.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Fuck me. Fuck me like some fierce, drooling lunatic would, with your fierce, drooling, lunatic cock.’