The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  A few months more and it would be time to reassess yet again and take the next (and hopefully final) step towards regular existence. Back to integration and some possible future, though Johanna hesitated to use the word. A real home in a real climate, though a far less luxurious way of life. And maybe, as his friends and fans no doubt hoped, back to music – any kind of music. After the events of this unusually sunny and most confident day, even that notion seemed possible. Thanks to the care John Nightly had received at SUMHA, this module, this position, this new creative possibility, was all plugged up and ready to go. All the boy had to do was to walk back into his cell and hit PLAY.

  Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout a new way of walkin’

  Do you want to lose your mind?

  Walk right in, sit right down

  Daddy, let your mind roll on

  ‘Walk Right In’, The Rooftop Singers, 1963

  (Vanguard 35017)

  Four weeks later… Week 1,339, series 29, session #1.

  The consultant psychiatrist paddled through the double swing door, along the plant-infested corridor, into the box room at the end. A cul-de-sac of greenness, the patient’s glass box resembled nothing so much as the subtropical dorm of a local garden centre. Not overgrown, out-there or wild but self-contained, in-here, temperate, cultivated. Safe. A real control zone for a real control freak. An exotic contradiction, the rich man’s conservatory. Like the one Philip Marlowe visits in The Big Sleep, or the spymaster’s glasshouse in Minority Report. Or the greenhouse in outer space in Silent Running. Each fake tropic existing for a reason beyond the cultivation of plants. The room, though airy and spacious, still somehow oppressive. Dead but for plant life. Humid not only with vegetation but also with the uneven inhaling and exhaling of the creature that has made its home there.

  Johanna grabbed a high-back chair from a stack. She pulled it over to the left of where the resident lay, as she did twice a week during a ‘series’; the inhabitant never in all this time having been kind or thoughtful enough to place the chair in position for his guest prior to her arrival.

  Never a greeting passed between them, but over the years this single piece of business became the first contact-event proper, in analysis terms, of each two-hour stint. Johanna stood for a moment, admiring the bright-orange starflowers neatly arranged along the floor-to-ceiling window. The patient gazed up at her. Deigned to look up. Something was different today; something was wrong. He frowned, trying to fathom as he continued to look her up and down. She seemed younger, for a start, he thought. More girlish… more vulnerable… flimsier somehow. He viewed not admiringly, not desirous, figuring whether or not he had any real interest in the interloper this afternoon.

  In normal circumstances, outside of work, Johanna Zorn was an attractive proposition. Happily married with two youngsters, as John had been informed by one of the groundsmen the day of their meeting; she was a statuesque, big-limbed sportswoman. In normal life. And in his own previous life the patient would have been trying to dazzle her. Try it on with her. Charm and capture along with other seductions. But right now, able to think only in the moment, trying to gaze, figure and fathom all at the same time, he looked at her in a most unmanly way.

  Johanna turned back towards the patient, a good deal more relaxed in the presence of her charge these past few months. Betraying a relief that there was now an end in sight, a cadence, perfect or otherwise, to these six long, drawn-out summers.

  ‘flat shoes!’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Flat shoes! That’s what it is! I knew there was something!’ The man seemed worryingly excited. ‘Never seen you in flat shoes before. Hah!’ He smiled. ‘It… well, it makes you look a lot less “important”… I mean… “formal”.’ John bit his lip. ‘“Superior” is what I…’ He cleared his throat a little sheepishly.

  Johanna sat down and crossed her legs, flower-patterned flip-flops dangling from varnished toes. ‘Had a strap break on me… getting out of the car… It doesn’t quite give me the height…’

  ‘No… it doesn’t. So… well then…’ he mumbled. ‘The shrink has shrunk!’

  The patient became consumed with his own brilliance ‘The shrink has shrunk!’ John repeated a couple times more.

  Johanna breathed deep. Snatching an opportunity when (for once) the patient wasn’t acting, she looked him up and down – trying to gaze and fathom also. There he sat, paper-thin, but seemingly healthy, full of himself today, entombed in this sunlit capsule. Lying in wait. But for what exactly?

  The CP fixed on the boy’s blue, blue eyes; eyes that had dazzled so many. She wondered just how much he really cared for her, looked forward to her coming, missed her when she didn’t come. In terms of his inner self, quite a lot, she imagined. There had never been any person-to-person chit-chat, no close relations, not even a polite friendliness between them, but Johanna was reasonably convinced that the patient quite ‘liked’ her, in whatever ways there were left for him to like. If not that, he respected her. And therefore she guessed – and most probably, somewhere deep within, hoped – that he did indeed look forward to her visits.

  Ordinarily, Johanna would have had the patient home by now. An afternoon at first, then an overnight; a weekend if things went particularly well. A slow fade back to the ordinariness, the regularity, day and night hours; all of the innate boredom of real everyday life, reinstating the natural ups and downs, psychological and physical, the drab timetable of existence. Essential for those for whom, in the outside world, life had become just that little bit too exciting.

  Visit 1: she’d get the houseguest to make coffee, burn the toast, wash dishes. Visit 2: a bit of superficial gardening, clean the place, help cook dinner. Visit 3: repeat the practical tasks, go to the store and maybe take a couple of hours off during this final stage of the programme, bringing back a hopeless case who was otherwise ‘real gone’.

  Taking the patient home, male or female… There was always a chance it might not come off. Might lead to the odd unforeseen situation or difficulty. Possible resentment of the keeper’s other-world stability. The Freak might freak out, in which case a switch would be pressed and the cavalry summoned.

  This home-visit final act could continue for months. Johanna would have three or four outpatients rotating at any one time. But dependency, or freaking out, was the opposite of how John Nightly was likely to react. The CP was convinced of that. John had been dependent on a number of people all his life. From Frieda to Jana, Pondy to Iona, and RCN of course. John became dependent on everyone who walked right in. What he needed now, and what Johanna had been building towards, was a stand-alone ‘need no one’ independence.

  Were she being honest, the consultant psychiatrist was resigned to the fact that this degree of self-reliance would never come. Already SUMMER had entered into an agreement, a long-term one – at least as long as a major recording contract – for John Nightly to be looked after, more or less locked up, for the rest of his days. Arranged long ago; the actual ‘going back’. Now all of the hard work, the ace-serving and the volleying, the wear and tear on both players, was to be rewarded.

  John Nightly was about to become another Johanna Zorn success story. A case study to be added to her forthcoming lecture programme, repositioned at the top of her already impressive CV. An inclusion which would stir up even more interest in her practice, earning her a couple more notches, and lead to more exclusive highly paid high-profile work. Famous whacked-out cases were what she specialised in. Celebrity nutters, from which the CP would be able to extract an even greater monthly sum in order to remain at the very top of her tree. Number 1, in Santa Monica mind control. The truth was, it was as much about the keeper keeping busy as the captive staying ‘level’. Crucial to Johanna’s own state of mind was that she stayed as busy as a busy, busy bee.

  Had Ms Zorn been killed in a hit and run or gunned down in a liquor-store midway through John Nightly’s rehabilitation, John would never have walked out of the Center alive. There wo
uld’ve been no recovery stories and no conclusion. The end of Johanna would have been the end of John. That’s how big an impact she had. For the first time since Frieda mothered and smothered, a woman had the upper hand. And although a lot had been taken out of him, Johanna did, in a way, respect, even trust, the resident. The CP considered all this as he mocked her now.

  ‘I was thinking that… as we had quite a… a sad, or “indifferent” kind of week last week, all in all…’

  ‘did we?’ John shifted around on his lounger. ‘Wasn’t aware of… to be totally… brutally… ’

  ‘I think we did… with those particular memories… I thought this week we might go over – remember – a time that might perhaps be described as a particularly “happy time”.’

  ‘happy?’ John persevered with the tone, stroking his chin as if trying to fathom one of Justin’s crosswords. Johanna smiled, but in terms of progress having been made, John finally being able to leave the Center for good, she found it difficult to hide her disappointment in the resident’s attitude.

  ‘Shall we talk about a happy time? It’s always good to remember a happy time.’ It was as if she were addressing a 5-year-old.

  ‘… this is true.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I said it’s true. Always good to remember a happy time – Jojo.’

  ‘Shall we talk about the old days, maybe?’

  ‘you mean the “good” old days… or… the “bad” old days?’

  ‘We should try the “good” old days, don’t you think?’

  No response.

  The resident slipped his finger inside the strap of his sandal, eased it off, and lifted his foot onto the daybed.

  ‘Most certainly!’

  Hearing a positive response, even a mocking one, Johanna fell silent. The resident checked his watch and counted 120 seconds before he spoke.

  ‘exactly how “old” do you mean, though? We talking old old, like schooldays old? The… reasonably okay good old days or…’ He yawned, very self-consciously. ‘The really quite… bad good old days, which would be… “much more recent” old?’

  The psychiatrist swallowed. John Nightly could be quite a comedian.

  ‘I guess old old is what we mean. I didn’t think you’d want to talk about the… more recent, good old…’ Johanna transferred her pen from one hand to the other, ‘you don’t, do you, John?’

  No response. John put his playful foot on the floor, using it to support him while he leaned back and balanced on the bed, at the same time staring up at the spotless ceiling.

  ‘not yet…’ he sighed. ‘I think it’s kind of a… a “never” to the more recent… “good old… days”… far as you’re concerned.’

  He repositioned himself and put both feet up on the crossbar of Johanna’s chair, something he had never dared do before, coming over all ‘confident’ in the knowledge that he was about to take them both back to the ‘old’, reasonably acceptable, even ‘vintage’ days of yore.

  The CP needed to speed things up a little.

  ‘Let’s find a music memory,’ she began. ‘Music memories are always nice for you, I think.’

  ‘are they? Hmm… some are. The early ones, anyway. Earlier the better, I guess.’

  ‘Tell me when you first became aware that people were “playing”… performing music, instead of just listening to it… That it could be… played, and maybe you realised that you had the ability to… to do that.’ Johanna sat back. ‘You said you had a friend who…’

  ‘I didn’t actually have any friends… so I didn’t say that. Except the dog. And he didn’t make a lot of noise… at all.’

  Now they were at least out of the pen.

  ‘Once upon a time…’ he started, ‘one day, anyway! Once upon a time I was walking home from school. It was a very hot day, always a hot day in those days… as I remember it. Lot of kids walking in front of me with tennis racquets and other bats and things… in shorts… It was a really hot day.’ He squinted. ‘I remember these things… all these memories, as always taking place in summer. We were walking along Mill Road in Cambridge and we got as far as the Meadowsweet Dairy. Just outside there… in – can’t remember where exactly – what road that was… what year either.’ He scratched his head. ‘But it was…’ John looked up, ‘sometime in the middle of the century! It was in Cambridge as well…’

  ‘Mill Road…’

  ‘yeh. How’d you know that?’

  ‘Did you know the guys in front?’

  ‘No… no. I didn’t know anybody in Cambridge, but sometimes I… I used to… tag on to a gaggle… of kids, follow them around a bit, if they were walking somewhere. I’d… walk a bit with them, behind them. I was sort of a… you know… I’d pretend I was with them, if you understand what I mean. That I had some… friends… mates, I s’pose.’ He turned to Johanna. ‘I used to wonder where the hell all these kids were going. People used to… those days… walk around a lot? Really did. Kids everywhere. Maybe because there never seemed to be anywhere to actually… go. Not in Cambridge, anyway.’ John cleared his throat as if he’d accidentally revealed something about himself. ‘I used to… get as close to them… as I could. As if I was with them… and… well, that was what I used to do sometimes.’ He began to fidget. ‘They were probably a bit older than me, the kids in front… a year, two years or something, but at that age… well, one year is a long time. Anyway, and… I didn’t want to lose them, so when they stopped I stopped as well, and I kneeled down, so I wouldn’t pass them. Pretended I was tying my shoelace, because my mother would never allow me to have “slip-ons” – slip-on shoes; they were the latest thing.’ John stopped abruptly. ‘I was always aware of fashion, Johanna, even at an extremely young age.’

  The boy smirked then turned pale. He looked down at his shapeless Sta-Prest and orthopaedic sandals. Johanna didn’t react.

  ‘Like I am now!’ John continued, ‘and in the yard at the Dairy there was a girl with a skipping-rope. Using the forecourt to practise. Skipping real fast… real impressive… and the kids sat down to rest, ’cos it was so hot. They started to clap and cheer… sort of cheer her on; she started to go faster and faster… till she fell over.’

  ‘Was she okay?’

  ‘She was okay. And these kids got up and… helped her up, and she started to go… a bit odd. Dizzy probably. And the kids started to get up and leave. She didn’t look very well, though she righted herself and started to… but in the other direction. ‘So… because I didn’t really know what to do… these kids were going off in one direction and she was going off in the other direction. I thought I’d follow her…’

  ‘And she was a pretty girl?’

  ‘Oh… she was pretty. That’s why I noticed her… should think I was eight… maybe six, seven years old.’

  ‘She got up to go…’

  ‘Yeh, but she left something behind. A little case. One of the boys ran after her, but by that time she’d turned a corner… so the boy stopped and he looked round and there I was behind him, following behind him, so he gave the case to me. And I had seen her turn the corner, so I got up speed and ran after her, and she was there and I shouted out and she stopped and turned around and I went up to her and gave her the case and she said, “My violin!” or whatever it was, and… then I realised that there was a violin inside this case and that the girl with the skipping-rope was also the… the violin player.’

  ‘And did she thank you?’

  ‘She was very… polite. Well… I didn’t know what was inside the case; I knew it was something… special… “intricate”. Not intricate – you know what I mean… fragile… “valuable”. Maybe a jewel or something. Like jewellery, I thought, in my stupid head… It was a special weird-shaped case, and now I’m thinking… for some reason I think I thought it was a telescope!’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, don’t know why, but she just opened the case and took this bit of green cloth covering it and checked it was okay, not damaged, and sort of plucked the strings – “Hey,
it works!” I guess… I was so impressed with her just… you know… the way she plucked these strings… sort of “in rhythm”… Beautiful sound… and… I’d never seen anybody do anything like that before.’

  Johanna, bored out of her skull, did what all psychoanalysts do when they’re about to fall asleep. She feigned an undue amount of interest in the patient’s very personal and (from her point of view) potentially most revealing flashback so far.

  ‘Did you ever see her again?’

  ‘Saw her a lot after that… yeh. Well… that was my girlfriend… Jana… my first girlfriend… I told you about her a lot. She’s an architect now.’

  ‘So that was much later?’

  ‘… what was?’

  ‘When she was your girlfriend?’

  ‘… lot later, yeh. I don’t know how late that was.’ John put a hand over his eyes. ‘Never told her about this and she doesn’t know about it either, this… particular story…’

  Johanna remained silent.

  ‘… thought it would show… weakness, you see… But that’s the way you talk about things… isn’t it?’

  Johanna, mainly due to the extreme humidity in the room this afternoon, began to yawn enthusiastically.

  ‘So… you never told her you’d met before… when you were small?’

  John opened his mouth wide and yawned, making no attempt at good manners.

  ‘And when did you meet Jana again?’

  ‘that’s what I said… when I was eleven or twelve… when Hank Marvin came out.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘A group. I mean… it’s a band. Of course it’s a band! Something special… proper band. Hank’s group.’

  ‘And when did you last see Jana?’