9
Sebastian was dressed in exactly the same outfit he had worn for the consultation last week: jeans, dirty trainers and a green sweater with a large hole in its right elbow, surrounded by thick, unravelling threads of wool. He sat down in the chair, crumpled up his hooded anorak and pressed it to his stomach, perhaps from anxiety that he would put it down in the wrong place, Martin felt, but also to comfort himself by not entirely letting go of the outer layer of protection he had brought with him.
‘I’m on my meds,’ said Sebastian listlessly, ‘so I’m feeling topped and tailed. I might try lying down on the couch. That’s what they do in films, isn’t it? It might feel more real, I suppose.’
Martin restrained himself from asking whether ‘real’ or ‘reel’ or ‘unreal’ or ‘unravel’ might be the right word in this case, but more immediately he wanted to restrain Sebastian from lying down on the couch.
‘Well, at our first meeting,’ he said, ‘we sat facing each other, as we are now, and perhaps we should go on doing that for some time, while we get to know each other, and face up to things together.’
‘I might try the couch,’ said Sebastian, as if he hadn’t heard.
‘Of course, you’re welcome to, but the couch is really there to help people “free associate”, and you have no problem free associating.’
‘I did when I was in the hospital.’
‘No, not in that sense. It’s a term we use for letting the mind make unexpected connections, but you make them spontaneously all the time.’
‘When do we start?’
‘We started when you came into the room,’ said Martin, ‘and you told me that your meds make you feel “topped and tailed”.’
‘Now I feel you’re spying on me.’
‘Well, in a way I suppose I am, but only because we’re working on the same team, like codebreakers, trying to uncover the same secrets, so that you don’t have to suffer so much.’
‘Like Bletchley Park.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re building a Turing machine, so less boats get sunk.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Nobody has ever wanted to be on the same team as me. At least not since my episodes began.’
‘Well, I want us to be on the same team,’ said Martin.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Sebastian, but then he looked as if he wanted to cry. He eventually compromised by staring vacantly at the carpet.
There was a long silence.
‘My mother always used to ask me to top and tail the beans for Sunday lunch. Now I’m topped and tailed because of the Clozapine; but also because of the reason I take it. They’re inseparable. Siamese twins. David Bowie’s brother had schizophrenia, but David Bowie was a superstar. It’s Russian roulette. If you’re a has-been, at least you’ve been something. I’ve never been anything. In the centre, there’s only drowning cats attacking each other in a sack someone is holding just high enough for one of them to survive by climbing on top of the rest.’
Martin let the connections come to rest, without any comment, like an ornithologist trying to stay still as he sees a flock of migrating birds settle on the water nearby. He mustn’t frighten them away, he mustn’t ask who was holding the sack, especially since Sebastian didn’t yet know.
‘So, would you like to tell me about your first episode?’ he asked.
‘Okay,’ said Sebastian.
He moved over to the couch, and lay down, still holding his scrunched-up anorak tightly against the middle of his body. Although he would have preferred him to have remained seated, Martin decided not to derail the story.
‘The first time it happened I’d been smoking skunk with Simon. We’ve been friends since primary school, although I only see him a couple of times a year now. It’s like charity visits, because he wants to seem loyal, but he doesn’t enjoy seeing me any more. In those days, people used to say we were “inseparable”, which is the sort of stupid thing people say. Anyway, we went to the Portobello Road, and I started to hear everybody’s thoughts, like running through all the radio stations very fast and getting bursts of words exploding in my head. I said to Simon, “It should be called the Portal Bello Road, because it’s a portal into another dimension,” and Simon laughed, because he thought I was just being stoned and taking the piss. Sorry,’ Sebastian interrupted himself, ‘this is too intense. I feel like I’m having a flashback. I think I want to sit down again. I don’t feel safe on the couch, because I can’t see what you’re doing. You might stab me with a pen, stab me in the eye, or stab me in the back.’
‘I’m not going to do that,’ said Martin.
‘Yeah, I sort of believe that,’ said Sebastian, rocking back and forth on the edge of the couch, pressing the rolled-up anorak against himself. ‘In a way, I know it’s a fantasy, because I’m on my meds, but the feeling is just too strong. Sometimes things are more powerful when you know they’re not true, because you have to imagine them so hard, if you see what I mean.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Martin. ‘I think that’s very well put.’
‘Now you’re buttering me up. Topped and tailed and buttered up. A dish fit for a king. My mum would be proud.’
Sebastian moved back to the chair. He looked at Martin with a strange mixture of suspicion and yearning.
‘So, I said to Simon,’ he resumed, ‘“No, don’t you get it? Everyone thinks it’s the cameras and the smoke detectors and the people on television that are watching you…” “Well, the frigging cameras are watching you, aren’t they?” said Simon. And I said, “Yeah, but it’s the mirrors that are really watching you! When you look into a mirror, it sucks you in so you can look at yourself and then you get trapped behind it.” Simon got angry and said I was a paranoid wanker and I was doing his head in and he left me on my own.’
Sebastian suddenly grew furious.
‘How do you think that made me feel, Dr Emotions? You’re supposed to be the fucking expert. I was abandoned in the middle of a crowd, in the middle of my first episode by my so-called best friend, so I felt abandoned, didn’t I? Fuckwit.’
‘We don’t know how you feel until you tell us,’ said Martin calmly. ‘You might have felt sad, or frightened, or angry, or indifferent, or relieved.’
‘I did feel relieved, that’s right,’ said Sebastian, suddenly eager to agree. ‘I felt that if he couldn’t understand, I was better off without him. He was holding me back when I was seeing something really important, really deep.’
‘About the mirror?’ asked Martin.
‘Yeah, I realised that the whole sky was a mirror, the ultimate mirror, like a silver dish cover, keeping us warm until Death makes a meal of us. I knew I was the last one who wasn’t under its control, and so I concentrated and sent a blue beam from my forehead into the sky to shatter it, but the mirror sent a yellow beam down from the sky to push the blue beam back into my head and make it melt down. I used all my concentration and after a massive struggle, I managed to shatter the sky and it rained down bits of mirror all over London. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I could feel that all the mirrors in the city had gone black, and that I’d set everybody free.’
‘You must have felt very powerful,’ said Martin.
‘Yeah,’ said Sebastian, ‘it was the best feeling I’ve ever had, but I was terrified at the same time. I knew the sky was going to go mental and try to take revenge on me. That was when the two policemen came up to arrest me, saying that I was causing a public disturbance, because I’d been screaming at the sky when we were fighting and throwing bits of clothing at it and I was almost naked, although I hadn’t noticed. I tried to run away, but they caught me and twisted my arm and forced me into a car and took me back to the station and all the time I was screaming through the window, trying to warn people because I could see the bits of sky floating back up and rebuilding the dome. That’s when I was sectioned for the first time. They tried to give me pills in the hospital, but the pills were yellow, so I knew where they
came from and I refused to take them. In the end, they started giving me injections once a fortnight and said I was all right to go home and live with my parents. They call it “care in the community”, but seeing as I hate being there and my parents hate having me there, it doesn’t seem like a very good description.’
‘What would be a good description?’ asked Martin.
‘“A cat in a hat” would be a better description, because at least it rhymes,’ said Sebastian.
‘Or a cat in a sack,’ said Martin.
Sebastian darted a look at him. ‘I see what you’re doing,’ he said, ‘I see what you’re doing, but it’s all just dead words, isn’t it, like “schizophrenia”? The doctors say that I have “schizophrenia”, but that’s just a word. It doesn’t mean they understand anything. They say it’s genetic, or caused by a chemical imbalance, or it’s because of the skunk, or the speed, but they don’t know what it is, what it really is…’
Sebastian seemed gridlocked from trying to use words to affirm the impotence of language.
‘All we care about here,’ said Martin, ‘is what it feels like for you, what it is, as an experience, and I promise you that the better we understand that the less you will suffer.’
‘It’s hard to stay on my meds because they make me fat and sleepy,’ said Sebastian, ‘and that first time was the most important day of my life, the most alive, but when I go off the meds now it’s not like the first time any more. It’s more chaotic and frightening each time, but that might be because the Clozapine has weakened my powers. Pin me to a bed, pin me to a wall, pin me to a pin. I call it the Wizard of Ozapine, because when you get there, it’s all fake, like the Wizard of Oz, it’s just a trick. It doesn’t cure you at all, it just tricks you and makes everything fake.’
‘Well, if you agree, we’re going to find out what’s true,’ said Martin.
‘That could be the biggest trick of all,’ said Sebastian, like a child creating an infinite regress by saying, ‘Why?’ to every answer. ‘People who talk to me about the truth are always trying to prove that I’m “delusional”, so “the truth” is their trick for stealing my truth: I know that I shattered the sky.’
‘What is true can’t also be fake,’ said Martin, ‘that would be an untenable position and that kind of logic generates the word “delusional”, but here we are less interested in that kind of logic, we’re interested in a symbolic truth, where those contradictions might be reconciled. It’s true that at that particular moment you felt you had to shatter the sky to save yourself and the rest of humanity, and it’s also true that there is an emotional history that led to that symbolic act. We’re not here to talk you out of your “delusions”, we’re here to understand your symbolic language, your own network of images. Your mind is not like a great lazy river that everyone can see from the aeroplane window, meandering its way through the plain, it’s like a mountain stream that goes underground and then bursts out of the hillside in what seem like haphazard places, but that doesn’t mean we can’t follow its course and find out why it goes underground and why it reappears.’
‘A mountain stream,’ said Sebastian, seemingly pleased. ‘So, can I stay here?’
‘We’re coming to an end of the session now, but I think we’ve made a very fruitful start.’
‘So, you’re just going to throw me on the street? You and Simon,’ said Sebastian, becoming agitated and aggrieved. ‘“You’re a mountain stream, now just fuck off.”’
‘I’m not throwing you on the street,’ said Martin firmly. ‘It’s because we’ve had a fruitful session that you want it to go on, and it will go on, at the same time next week.’
Double Blind Page 8