by Will Self
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.
INTERMISSION
What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.
T.K. Marshall
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.
I say you, but I mean me. I'd dive below the line and use direct marketing for this one. I'd go to a list broker of my acquaintance. A nervy man in an electric-blue Anzio suit, his body a twitching live-wire but poorly earthed to the keyboard of his computer.
Whenever I go to see him, he is vivified by his connection with so many passive consumers; their purse-mouths suck greedily at his psychic account. His fingers are splayed out so that he can feel the very pulse of hundreds of megabytes of information flowing into him. The hard disc holds the teeming registers of potential purchasers and his own mind is merged with this other, faster random-access memor
y, so that he can turn to me and say, ‘You want ABC ones with late four-door Volvos? We've got it. You want certified accountants in Acorn areas 117 through 492 with a proven history of competition entering? We've got it. You want eighteen to forty-four-year-old ethnic minority home owners? Hey, we've got it.’
More than that he can mash these lists of prospects together to produce delightfully implausible juxtapositions: exercise-bike owners who take educational holidays to the Ukraine (there are only seven in Greater London); lepers with a penchant for Janet Reger lingerie (suprisingly enough, several hundred in Roseland alone); Liberal Democrat Nintendo enthusiasts who are also Wagner buffs (not as many as one might have hoped for).
After twenty minutes or so with the list broker you start to see the world as he does. His vision is a disconcerting one, his eyebeams shoot out, clear but solid room-dividers that slice any gathering, any grouping of people, into their listable characteristics. He has geo-demo vision (geographic and demographic breakdown, to you). He peers into a bar and instantly this reticulated gaze comes into play, falling over the assembled suits, so that each one is caught by their vent-gills in the apropriately sized mesh square, struggling to free themselves before the marketeers close in, wielding stunning Free Offers.
My fridge album is really going to test the list broker, push him to the very limit. ‘You want what?’ he'll say. ‘You want a list of people whose idea of fun is listening to the fridge at three o'clock in the morning? You don't ask for much, do you, mate?’ He shakes his head, he ums and ahs, his Thelonious Monk fingers chop at the keyboard in talented frustration. But then he has it, he's off and running, he's merging and purging that database with frantic abandon.
‘Let me see . . . Let me see – yeah, yeah’ – plastic keys riming – ‘we've got a list that tells us who's bought fridge freezers in the central London area in the past year . . . Um, um about sixteen thousand prospects on that one. And we've got a list of people who have responded to telesales offers for ambient music compilation albums – about three thousand on that one . . . Hm, hm, merge and purge, what do we get? A hundred and fifty-two prospects. Now, to be fair, you'd have to say that only a few of these are going to be wacky enough to go for the fridge compilation album, but which ones? Let me see . . . Let me see – ‘
He's back at the main menu, he's calling up the directory, the very List of Lists, the brain surgeon's own encephalogram. There's a murky region of the VDU, as if someone has rubbed grease on to it. Through this opacity I can see more lists listed. These are the secret lists, shadowy rankings of unacceptable groupings. ‘We've got a list of patients being treated for major psychoses at London hospitals – yes, yes, I know that strictly speaking that's a bit unethical, but let me tell you, not nearly as unethical as some of the other things we have here. Like what? We-ell, how about Nazi war criminals with late four-door saloons registered in the Potteries? Or cabinet ministers more than fleetingly attached to exotic prostheses? Or company directors who like to make free with their own ca-ca? That one's broken down by business size, and all of them are available on cheshire or self-adhesive labels. Now then, merge and purge, merge and purge – Whassat? Data Protection Act? Don't make me laugh, squire. Let's see, let's see – humph. Just the one. Just the one nutter who listens to the fridge and can heave his plastic in our direction – ‘
Me of course. It would have to be me. It is me, after all, who has been subjected to the direct marketing of my very soul. You've heard of the rogue male, I am his modern descendant, the junk male. Let me tell you an anecdote, insert a bitable narrative McNugget into your fast mind, that will illustrate this point.
I recall a weekend when I was maybe nineteen or twenty, at any rate shortly before his disappearance and after his transformation, his farting out of his new identity. We went up to Yorkshire to seek out some of my grandfather's haunts. We didn't actually call on Old Sidney – according to my mage that wouldn't be ‘politic’. Instead, we ended up wandering over the moors above Hebden Bridge. It was around Easter, and perhaps it was this that led him to wax theological as we bounced across the heather and gorse.
The moors were painfully beautiful that day. In the sky cumulus clouds formed a startling upside-down scape. On the ground their scudding shadows dappled the hills, hills that tumbled down to the ragged but level line, where the uplands ended and the deep gorge-like valleys began.
‘There used to be seahere,’ he remarked, sweeping his conning tower of an arm around in a wide arc. ‘Note how the exposed stratification where the valley falls away resembles a shoreline. If you fill in the valleys with the absent ocean, what d'ye get? Why, a beautiful inland archipelago, of course. Charming emerald islands set amongst the lapping waves.’
I did as he told me, eidetically filling in the missing mass of water. I watched it course in up the dry fjords, finding its correct level, until the two of us, the big man and I, were standing aloft, looking out from our vantage point over the primordial scene, the liquid heart of England.
‘That's why this part of the world is so important to me,’ he resumed, taking a cumbersome leather cigar case from his pocket. ‘It puts one in touch with the sheer scale of geological time, and therefore with the infinite and the ineffable. ‘ He pulled the sides of the case apart and peered at the tobacco projectiles it contained, each one as potently dangerous as a Sam-7. ‘This one, I think.’ He drew one out, bit off its tip and then lit it with the licking tongue of his petrol lighter. ‘Only a Montecristo number one, but then anything more substantial would be wasted in the open air.’
We walked on. He swung his alpenstock vigorously, teeing off tussocks of grass. He was dressed for an Edwardian shooting party in a full suit of tweed plus fours. On top of the boulder of his head sat a tweed hat with a grouse feather stuck in its band. For some reason the rumpled appearance of the hat drew my attention. It was like a deliberately faked natural object, a hide, beneath which the ornithologists of his beady consciousness kept watch on a shy world.
‘You're thinking about my head, aren't you?’ I started, almost treading in the muddy ditch that ran alongside the path.
‘Possibly you are meditating on the fact of my baldness.’
‘I – I wasn't.’
‘No, perhaps not. But even if you were you needn't expend any sympathy on my behalf-my tonsured condition is a matter of design rather than accident. A little idea I picked up during a sojourn among the dipsomaniacs of Mother Russia. Those lost souls are so impoverished that they shave their heads in order that they may rub alcohol into them. The embrocatory variety of the spirit is, you see, the cheapest available. Care to try it?’ He pulled a generous hip flask from his other pocket, unscrewed the cap and with one abrupt movement swept off his hat and dashed a handful of the stuff against his brow. The breeze blew a gust of reeking astringency in my face, whilst he shook himself, his cetacean-sized body wobbling, like an upright dugong. ‘Brrr!’ he exclaimed. ‘That does me a power of good, I can feel the aqua vitae percolating into my brain, freeing up its function, its Babbage clunk, its differential engine.’
The way we had taken was winding down towards a small lock or tarn. A pool was contained under a miniature cliff, broken half-way up its face by the route the path took in looping round and pressing on down the valley. It was here, under a straggle of dwarf oaks and rowans that a troupe of elderly walkers had decided to halt for their feed. They were all sitting, legs stuck out into the path, backs against the cliff, munching on sandwiches and swigging from plastic cups. Even from across the pool we could hear the yammer of their animated conversation.
‘Harumph!’ He prodded the ground with the tip of his stick. ‘If I'm not far mistaken this must be what is termed “an area of outstanding natural beauty”. It goes without saying that this designation is solely a function of the propensity of such locales to attract the very ugliest examples of Homo erectus. Observe them, lad, consider their raddled aspect married to the sophistication of their ambulatory equipment and garb.’<
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I did as he said. It was true, the old ramblers were both ugly and kitted out in the very best of outdoor clothing. Gore-Tex cagoules tented over their bony collars and bent spines; plastic map-cases and complicated orienteering compasses dangled against their concave poitrines; their curving shanks were sheathed in fashionable moleskin or corduroy breeches; and their flat feet and weak ankles were shod in flexible casts of the finest shoe leather. If they had been younger, they could have scaled the Rockies in this high-stepping habit.
‘Absurd, isn't it?’ He took a vigorous pull on his Montecristo and French-inhaled an Old Smoky-sized plume of fume. ‘These pensioners’ preposterous kit calls forth from me a paraphrase of one of the toy Alsatian philosophe's most renowned apophthegms, to whit, “Hell is other people's trousers”. D'ye like that? Ahaha, hahaha!’ He disgorged merriment and vapour in equal parts.
‘What's that!?’ He swung back to face the walkers, who were stirring now, as if responding to his pejorative comments. They screwed the caps back on to their thermos flasks, and jammed down the lids of their now empty plastic sandwich containers. Gingerly, they attempted to get up. Liver-spotted hands grasped one another. It was difficult to tell if those who had already risen were trying to help their fellows, or if those still recumbent were actually pulling the feistier ones back down, into the grave.
Eventually they were all standing, dusting off crumbs and twigs. Stringing themselves out in a ragged line, a scout-masterish type at the head, they set off down the valley.