She knew that Olivia had given her Brainwashed to help her undermine the hypnotic power of neuroimaging, on which Lucy had found herself, as her scans came around, understandably but morbidly fixated. In a sense Olivia’s efforts were misguided. There was no doubt that MRIs could detect structural abnormalities in the brain and there was no chance, alas, that Dr Gray was going to ring her to say that her brain tumour turned out to be a smudge on the lens. At a more subtle level, though, Olivia was right that she must stay rooted in her own sense of well-being and not allow the limited authority of neuroimaging to disembody her. The Keppra had her seizures under control, her mobility was unimpaired, she was not in pain and her mind was lucid. These facts should impress her at least as much as her quarterly glimpses of an iridescent image on a computer screen. The further trouble with a brain tumour was that the dominant physicalist doctrine made it seem to be a mind tumour. How could you get your brain off your mind when your mind was purportedly in your brain? Equanimity or acceptance, or humour, or detachment, or profundity might give you a chance to get another tumour off your mind for a while, but a brain tumour was much more prepositionally intimate: it needed to be taken out of, not merely off, your mind. Under the physicalist dispensation, that could only be done with a surgeon’s knife.
Hunter had told her this morning about the way Saul used to get obsessed with the ‘explanatory gap’ between experience and experiment, between science in its current form and subjectivity in its perennial form. To them, it had been a talking point, but to Lucy it had never seemed more urgent or more real. A physicalist, like Moorhead, who was content to reduce consciousness to cerebral activity, created the problem of why there was any consciousness at all, why the brain bothered to generate this distracting display of mind when it was doing all the real work on its own. This so-called ‘zombie problem’, which might keep zombies awake at night, didn’t worry Lucy any more than the problem of why her television went to the trouble of generating the news. It was simply a false description. Who was it who had said, ‘Consciousness must be a strange kind of illusion if you have to be conscious to have it’? Consciousness was primary and everything else we knew, including data about cerebral activity, derived from it.
‘Hi, Luce,’ said Olivia, stepping into the White House. ‘Wow, this place is so like the movie.’
‘Yeah, Hunter got the same people to do it. Didn’t you bring Francis?’
‘No, he’s off seeing that Tantric slut, whoops, I mean incredible human being, Hope Schwartz, as well as Jim “Titan” Burroughs.’
‘Maybe you should run this past your dad,’ said Lucy cautiously, ‘but I think I’m detecting a hint of jealousy.’
‘Me? Jealous? What on earth makes you think that?’
‘Maybe my amygdala is too large,’ said Lucy.
‘That would explain it,’ said Olivia. ‘Or too small.’
‘The smaller the better, I suppose,’ said Lucy, ‘given that it’s a site for fear – oh, and happiness, anger and sexual arousal.’
‘And it has the most receptors of any part of the brain for testosterone,’ said Olivia.
‘Testosterone! The aggression hormone,’ said Lucy, horrified.
‘But also, aggression in the defence of status,’ said Olivia, picking up Lucy’s book and running her thumb through its familiar pages. ‘If someone acquires status from fighting to save the humpback whale, testosterone could be correlated with compassion. Maybe you haven’t got to that bit yet … Hang on, I think I can hear a car. Perhaps it’s Francis.’
Olivia walked down the curving path to the edge of the bamboo.
‘Oh, no, it’s Saul,’ she said, disappointed. ‘And he’s spotted me. Where is Francis?’
‘Planting trees,’ said Lucy soothingly.
‘As long as he’s not planting wild oats,’ said Olivia, resting her hands on her bulging belly, as if to reassure her baby of its uniqueness. She sat down next to Lucy.
‘Francis totally adores you,’ said Lucy. ‘Are you okay? I’ve never seen you like this. You two are so solid.’
‘I don’t know. It’s just…’
Before Olivia could finish, Saul appeared through the bamboo.
‘Hello, ladies,’ he said, ‘what are you doing in the feng shui chalet? I wasn’t sure I’d see you both before the Brainwaves launch in London. Are you looking forward to it? I’m telling you, Happy Helmets are going to be huge. Huge,’ he repeated, spreading his arms wide. ‘I smell money!’
‘Really?’ said Lucy. ‘What does it smell like?’
‘Freedom,’ said Saul.
‘And what does freedom smell like?’ asked Olivia.
‘Money,’ said Saul.
‘Okay, so total equivalence,’ said Lucy.
‘You’d better believe it!’ said Saul. ‘And you know what? I’m really happy that we’re all going to be getting rich together, as part of a team, a really great team.’
He raised both his clenched fists and shook them, smiling fanatically at Lucy and Olivia.
‘Wonderful,’ said Lucy, wondering what was wrong with Saul.
‘Ah, I think I hear another car,’ said Olivia, releasing herself from the awkwardness of Saul’s manic solidarity and getting up to see if Francis had finally returned.
18
No need to tie himself in knots trying to tie a knot in his tie. Over once, over twice, under and through the over and over, tighten, straighten – job done! Not quite right, start again. Was it better to be tied up or tied down? They sounded like opposites, but they were really the same. He often spotted that, opposites being the same. He hadn’t worn a tie in donkey’s years, but Dr Carr always wore a tie, and he wanted to wear one today to tell him, in person, about getting the job, not that you needed a tie to work in a kitchen; in fact, it would be considered an industrial hazard, dangling in the soup, sweeping the starters aside like an elephant’s trunk, getting caught in the InSinkErator and then dragging you in after it – gobbling you up – or gobbling you down. Same thing. Ties in that sort of workplace didn’t bear thinking about. Health and Safety would go bananas. He wasn’t starting work until next Monday. The owner of the company had lost his son in a mental health tragedy and, in memory of his beloved child, he had created an opportunity for someone who had faced ‘serious mental health challenges’ to have a proper job in a supportive work environment, and Sebastian had aced the interview. The owner had said that he was ‘the best possible candidate’, and now he was dressing up properly to tell Dr Carr, because he felt proud of the work they had done together. Credit where credit was due, Dr Carr was a good man and the best bloody mind reader on the planet. It was literally as if your mind was a book written in Double Dutch and Dr Carr turned out to know Double Dutch, which everyone else thought was pure and utter nonsense. Dr Carr had got him from there to here in a trice. Three times a week for a year was a trice by any standards. ‘An amazing transformation’, that’s what they had called it at the halfway house, halfway between there and here, but also halfway between here and there – not the first there that he had come from, not that again – but the far there on the other side of here from the there he’d started from, and which he hoped he had left behind for ever, after a long journey, a hard slog, a forced march, after the fall of Kabul in the documentary he saw, and a forced march through the Khyber Pass and there was only one survivor, an army doctor who had the honour of being presented to Queen Victoria in person, not on the phone, but in person. Dr Carr said it was very important to come in person. And it definitely helped, especially if you had a history of your mind and body not being in the same place at the same time, like he had. He used to have a really annoying, stupid fucking psychiatrist who said, ‘Where did you go just then?’ when he fell silent. She thought he had ‘wandered off’. She didn’t seem to understand that when his mind wandered off there was no you to say where you had been, because the first you and the second you were not the same and they were not you anyway. Or I, as he would now say. There were
seventy-one gender preferences on Facebook, which was a blow for diversity but, as he had said to Dr Carr, he’d had enough diversity to last him a lifetime. What he wanted now was coherence. That had made Dr Carr smile. There might have been a time when he would have wanted to have been called ‘Them and Us’, or ‘Every-Nobody’, or ‘Here It Comes Again’, but now he said ‘I’ when he was talking about himself and answered to ‘you’ when someone addressed him, or ‘he’ or ‘him’ when he was being referred to, or ‘we’ when he was part of a group, or ‘they’ when he was part of a group that the speaker was not part of, or when he was referring to a group that he was not part of. Phew, got there in the end. Grammar was the ground everybody stood on to speak. Even if it was wrong grammar, it could only be wrong because there was right grammar there in the first place. It might sound ordinary not to have a special preference, perhaps boring in other people’s eyes, but for him to be ordinary was a massive victory, like Trafalgar Square. Dr Carr had told him that Sigmund Freud had said that being well was ‘ordinary unhappiness’, which must sound like a bit of a let-down to a lot of people, and not make much sense, because they were pursuing their right to happiness. But that right was really a trick, because they should have been pursuing their right to ordinary unhappiness. It was wrong right, an opposite same. To Sebastian what Sigmund Freud had said made perfect sense. All he’d ever wanted was ordinary unhappiness – being caught in the rain, running out of money before the end of the week, being too shy to talk to the girl without wanting to kill himself; that sort of thing – anything, really, other than extraordinary unhappiness, diabolical torment, cruel and unusual punishment; episodes, one episode after another, bleeding into each other.
‘No problemo,’ he said to the mirror, like Arnie in Terminator. ‘No pro-ble-mo.’
He had tied the knot. Job done! It was looking as if it wouldn’t fall apart, or strangle him, which was another way of saying perfect. Dr Carr would be amazed. ‘The perfect tie is a halfway house between disintegration and strangulation,’ that’s what he was going to say, like Oscar Wilde, or Jeeves, or someone like that. He’d been planning it for a while. Not everyone would get it, so he was keeping his made-up quotation for Dr Carr. He was much better now – ‘an amazing transformation’ – but he still had to be careful not to talk too much, not to be too cheerful or over-familiar, not to plunge in at the deep end. He was so relieved to have ordinary unhappiness that sometimes he wanted to tell the whole world, like someone in a musical who stands up and starts singing to the whole bus. If you weren’t in a musical, though, instead of singing along, the other passengers would probably call the police. And what you had to keep a firm handle on was that you were not in a musical (unless you were in a musical).
He couldn’t manage the Underground yet, although it was more direct, but he did love travelling to Belsize Park on the bus. As a sign that things were going his way, he got the seat he wanted at the top in the front. He was king of the world, master of all he could survey. In his imagination. They had talked a lot about his strong imagination and his talent – it turned out to be a talent – for connecting unexpected things. When he was six he had been on summer holiday to France with his fake parents and they all went to visit a very old church, and when he saw the rounded arches, he had said to his mum that he thought the church had been built by special dolphins who had leapt out of the ground and left arches hanging in the air behind them and that you could see that they had been playing and criss-crossing all through the vaulted cloisters; and he had broken into a run and thrown his arms out and spun around and shouted, ‘Dolphins!’ And his mum had hissed at him and told him to shut up and not make a spectacle of himself, and his dad said that dolphins lived in the sea and not to be so stupid. And they were both embarrassed by him and wished they had never adopted such a strange child and he was burning with shame and longing to be gone. And he’d sworn then not to think like that any more, but it went on happening in a separate part of his mind that he didn’t tell people about, except for Simon when they started smoking skunk together, and then he only mentioned the bits that sort of exploded on to the scene. He had told Dr Carr quite recently about the dolphins, and Dr Carr said, ‘What a beautiful idea!’ and Sebastian had started crying and then he had cried so much he was worried he might not be able to stop. Now they called it ‘the dolphin session’, and they both knew what they meant by it. At the end of the Friday sessions, when they weren’t going to see each other until the next Wednesday, Dr Carr often said ‘I’ll be holding you in mind’ and Sebastian hadn’t really taken it in as a kindness until a few weeks ago, and then he had said that it sounded like a cradle, and Dr Carr hadn’t batted an eyelid and had said that the work they were doing was ‘like a psychological cradle’, and so he had got on the floor and curled up and sucked his thumb, to test the theory, and Dr Carr hadn’t batted an eyelid (or battered an eyelid, like some people he could mention), just sat there and let him be in his cradle, because that’s what he needed at the time.
This was his stop, his bus stop, or his Carr stop, as he called it. He liked to play with words, which was an improvement on words playing with him, like they used to, like the orcas in the documentary he’d seen, tossing a seal from mouth to mouth amongst the pod, letting it think it might get away, but then catching it again and hurling its bloodstained body through the air, to give it the feeling of despair, he supposed, although David Attenborough said it was practice for the baby orcas, and he was an expert on animals and a national treasure, and so it must be true as well, but Sebastian’s mind had stayed in the seal’s mind and he had to leave the TV room at the halfway house because he couldn’t bear to watch. Some words like ‘nothing’ and ‘vacuum’, and phrases like ‘burning flesh’ and ‘the devil is in the detail’ and ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’, used to drive him mental every time he heard them, which meant that he heard them all the time. Even ‘beyond’ had caused him a lot of grief in its day, but now he had much more control over his reaction to things and he could use those words and phrases, if he needed to. There was no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There! He’d said it and it hadn’t taken him over. ‘Throwing the baby out with the bathwater’: no pro-ble-mo.
He was on Dr Carr’s leafy street now, some of the leaves starting to turn yellow, but still thick and rustling. It made him calm just to be on the street. Whoops, he was fourteen minutes early. Walk to the end of the street and back, like the ads before a favourite programme. He had so much to tell Dr Carr. He hadn’t seen him since Friday. He always had this dam-bursting feeling on Wednesday, with so many things to catch up on. Turn around and walk back slowly. Four minutes. He went down the side of the house and waited by the doorbell. It was all right if he rang a minute early, but when he rang five minutes early, Dr Carr wouldn’t let him in, because he wasn’t ready for him and the session had to be contained.
Dr Carr was standing by the door of his consulting room, as usual, smiling at him warmly.
‘Notice anything different?’ Sebastian asked, before they had even sat down.
‘You tell me,’ said Dr Carr, as he settled into his armchair.
‘The perfect tie,’ said Sebastian, enunciating his words meticulously, ‘is a halfway house between disintegration and strangulation.’ He pointed to the knot he had spent so much care assembling.
‘I think that’s a brilliant remark,’ said Dr Carr. ‘You used to feel that you might fall apart, but that if you trusted someone, you might be stifled by the closeness of the relationship, but today you’ve brought the perfect tie here, one that makes you feel safe without feeling constricted.’
‘Yeah, yeah, contained,’ said Sebastian. ‘I knew you were going to use that word.’
‘I don’t think I did use that word,’ said Dr Carr.
‘Maybe not,’ said Sebastian, ‘but I thought it when I was standing outside … which is not the same thing,’ he admitted, with a fleeting smile. ‘I just wasn’t in the mood for an
interpretation.’ He fell silent, like a disappointed child.
‘As you may remember,’ said Dr Carr, ‘we sometimes used to hold back from making too many interpretations in one session, but since you’ve become stronger, I’ve felt that we could work more directly together with what you bring here, because you’re now able to process it much better.’
‘I just wasn’t in the mood,’ said Sebastian stubbornly. ‘It was more like a Jeeves thing.’
‘It did have the ring of a famous remark,’ said Dr Carr, ‘but I don’t think Jeeves often said anything as insightful about the perfect human relationship, the perfect tie.’
‘I got a job,’ said Sebastian abruptly, ducking the compliment and drinking it in thirstily at the same time.
‘Really?’ said Dr Carr.
‘Yeah,’ said Sebastian, ‘in a dungeon, I mean a kitchen.’ Sebastian paused. ‘That was a Freudian slip. I made one up as a joke and because you like them so much.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dr Carr, with a gentle laugh, ‘but it also resonates with the tie knot, doesn’t it? If the knot is too tight it constricts you, and if a kitchen is too confining, it becomes a dungeon.’
‘It was a joke!’ Sebastian shouted. ‘I made it up! It’s my bloody joke!’
‘It was a good joke, and a clever trick to play on me,’ said Dr Carr, ‘but I’m just expressing concern about whether it has a meaning connected with things you’ve brought here today, or in the past.’
‘Yeah, I get it,’ said Sebastian. ‘We mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ He started to giggle uncontrollably. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, after he had recovered. ‘I just love being able to say that.’ He breathed out slowly before resuming. ‘I suppose my life has been no laughing matter—’
He started to crack up again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, no laughing matter,’ he managed, ‘and I’m looking for some, well, some laughing matter.’
Double Blind Page 20