Bedlam Burning (29 page)

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 doesn'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.'

‘Oh, OK,' I said.

I did my best to oblige, though in the main I was one of those
mute
, fierce, drooling lunatics. On this occasion Alicia didn't seem to object to my silence. She was verbose enough for both of us. And when it was all over, as we were lying together on her office floor with a chair leg pressed into my flank, Alicia said to me, ‘That was very good. You make a very convincing lunatic. Rather more convincing than some of the ones in the clinic.'

Was that meant to be a clue? Was Alicia trying to tell me something about what was going on in the Kincaid Clinic, something that should perhaps have been obvious from watching Carla's behaviour? I had always known that none of the patients was quite what he or she seemed. Some were perhaps, in Kincaid's terms, malingering. They were exaggerating or even inventing symptoms. They wanted to appear madder than they really were, but I knew that didn't mean they were completely sane. Just because someone claims to be adopting an antic disposition doesn't mean they aren't antic. Others were making great claims for their sanity, but in ways that tended to confirm their madness. When they told me their stories, when they made their confessions, their claims to madness or sanity, did they really think I believed them? Did they even want me to?

And something else occurred to me. I remembered how everything had changed at that session in the lecture room at the end of the
second week, right before I threatened to walk out of the clinic, right before the ‘new deal'. It embarrassed me to think of it now, to recall my easy, knee-jerk response, when I'd abused the patients and told them how crazy they all were. But they'd liked it, and maybe that was the whole point. The moment I called them insane they became very happy, as though they'd won, as though they'd managed to convince me, as though their performances of madness had worked. I felt very foolish, very gullible.

So then I entertained another possibility. I tried to imagine what it would mean if all the patients were actually perfectly sane. What if they weren't mad at all, but for one reason or another they'd decided to appear that way in order to be admitted to the Kincaid Clinic? It was easy enough to imagine reasons for them doing that: reasons to do with wanting to feel protected, of finding the real world too difficult a place. It would be a pretty eccentric thing to do but it wouldn't necessarily mean they were mad. Once they'd convinced Kincaid of their madness and secured a place in the clinic they were therefore happy enough, they'd proved their point, but they still needed to display madness from time to time in order to avoid being pronounced sane, and sent home again. And they displayed it especially well in their writing.

This had some profound consequences for Kincaidian Therapy. For a start it meant that the patients' ‘madness' had nothing to do with exposure to images. If their madness was all simply mimicry then both cutting off the flow of images and building this legendary linguistic bulkhead were a complete waste of time. The writing was not a means of alleviating their madness, but an opportunity for them to show it off.

I would have liked to talk to someone about this, and although I didn't feel I could ask Alicia directly, since I was fairly certain she'd fly into a rage, I did get up the courage to say, ‘If I wanted to prove to you I was completely sane, how could I do it?'

‘You couldn't,' she said. ‘And I wouldn't want you to. Only the truly demented need to go around proving how sane they are.'

Yes, that sounded coherent and yet it didn't quite satisfy me. I suppose I was looking for a beautifully simple answer. I wanted all the patients to be completely mad or completely sane: either/or, yes or no. And I recalled a writing exercise that I'd come across in one of the lost textbooks I'd brought with me. The teacher asks the students
to write down five true statements about themselves, and then a sixth statement that's a lie. Then the others in the group try to identify which is which. The point of the thing is to show how easily fact and fiction can blend together. The book also warned that there's always some clever dick in the group who tries to sabotage the exercise by writing five lies and only one truth or writing all lies or all truths. I wondered what kind of mayhem the patients would make of it, if they'd been prepared to write to order, which of course they weren't.

I spent a lot of time sitting in my hut, wandering round the grounds trying to think this thing through, wishing I had someone I could discuss it with, and I wasn't getting anywhere. I was thoroughly preoccupied and as I walked past the clinic's front gate I was only dimly aware of the car parked outside, and I took no notice of the woman who got out until she'd come right up to the gate and was shouting at me. And it still took me a moment to realise it was Ruth Harris, owner of the bookshop.

‘Hello, handsome,' she called to me. ‘How's business?'

‘Oh, hello, Ruth. Business is just fine,' I said. Yes, I needed someone to talk to but Ruth Harris wasn't the one.

‘Mine too,' she said. ‘It turns out you were right. Since I got rid of some of the dead wood things seem to be looking up a little.'

‘Glad to be of help.'

‘So I wanted to thank you. How about letting me buy you dinner?'

‘Thanks, Ruth, but no, I can't.'

‘No?'

‘I'm very busy. The patients need me.'

‘I need you too, Gregory.'

She was joking, but it was one of those spiky, awkward jokes.

‘I'm very flattered,' I said, ‘but I can't.'

‘Well, I'm not going to beg, Gregory.'

‘Good,' I said.

I couldn't tell if she was really offended or not, but she pretended to be in quite a huff. ‘I was going to give you a little something,' she said, and I looked embarrassed, and she added, ‘Don't worry, it's only a
very
little something.'