Cryptozoic! (26 page)

"You've still damned well got to persuade me!" she said.
"I'll persuade you," Bush said. "But first I'm going to find Wenlock
and give him the word."
"Good idea," Howes said. "Come with me to the rebel hideout -- they'll
give you the name of the mental institution where Wenlock's being held."
Turning, they followed him through the ruins of their own trans-Himalayan
age.
A nurse was walking along the grey corridor. James Bush, L.D.S., jerked
his head up and came fully awake. Looking at his watch, he saw that he had
been sitting waiting on the uncomfortable metal seat for twenty minutes.
The nurse came up to him and said, "The supervisor is still engaged,
Mr. Bush. The deputy supervisor, Mr. Frankland, will see you, if you
will follow me."
She turned about and marched off in the direction she had come, so that
the dentist had to rise hastily and follow. At the far end of the corridor,
they climbed a flight of stairs, and the nurse showed him through a door
on which the name ALBERT FRANKLAND was painted.
A plump, untidy man with rimless spectacles and a fussy manner rose from
behind his desk and came forward to offer James a chair.
"I'm Mr. Frankland, the deputy supervisor of Carlfield Advanced Mental
Disturbances Institution, Mr. Bush. We're very pleased to see you here,
and of course if there is anything we can do to help, you have only
to ask."
The words released the sense of grievance that had been building up
in James. "I want to see my son! That's all! It's simple enough, isn't
it? Yet this is the fourth time I've come here in two weeks, only to be
sent away each time without any satisfaction! It costs money, you know,
getting up here, and the traveling isn't easy nowadays."
Frankland was beaming and nodding and tapping a finger approvingly
on the desk edge, as if he understood exactly what James was getting
at. "You're implying an oblique criticism of the party when you condemn
public transport like that, I expect," he said conspiratorially.
His smile, from the other side of the desk, suddenly looked ugly. James
drew back. More calmly, he said, "I'm asking to see my son Ted, that's all."
Looking hard at him, Frankland bit his lower lip. Finally, he said, "You
know your son's suffering from a dangerous delusory madness, don't you?"
"I don't know anything. I can't learn anything! Why can't I even see him?"
Frankland started picking his nails, looked down to see what his hands
were doing, and then shot a glance at James under his brows. "To tell you
the truth, he's under sedation. That's why you can't see him. The last
time you came to this institution, he had escaped from his cell on the
previous day and ran about the corridors causing quite a bit of damage
and attacking a female nurse and a male orderly. In his delusory state,
he believed he was in Buckingham Palace."
"Buckingham Palace!"
"Buckingham Palace. What do you make of that? Too much mind-travel, that's
the basic trouble, coming on top of, er -- hereditary weaknesses. He spent
too long in mind-travel, Of course, we're still in the early days of
mind-travel, but we are beginning to understand that the peculiar anosmic
conditions pertaining to it can help to fragment the mind. Anosmic,
meaning without sense of smell -- the olfactory centers of the brain are
the most ancient ones. Your son started to believe he could mind into
human-inhabited ages, and a long series of delusions followed which we
are hoping to record and study, to help with future cases."
"Look, Mr. Frankland I don't want to hear about future cases -- I just
want to hear about Ted! You say mind-travel upset him? He seemed all right
to me when he came home after being two-and-a-half years away, after his
mother died."
"We aren't always good judges of another's mental health, Mr. Bush.
Your son at that time was ready to be pushed into madness by any sudden
shock. He was already suffering from an aggravated form of anomia."
"No sense of smell?"
"That's anosmia, Mr. Bush. I'm speaking now of a far more serious state,
anomia. It looks like being the great mental disease that is going to dog
mind-travelers. An anomic individual is quite isolated; he feels cut off
from society and all its broad social values; he becomes normless and
disgusted with life as it is. In mind-travel, seeing a world about him
he is powerless to influence in any way, the anomic individual thinks
of life as being without goal or meaning. He tends to turn back into his
own past, to turn back the clock, to regress into a catatonic womb-state."
"You're blinding me by science, Mr. Frankland," said James, aggrievedly.
"As I say, Ted seemed okay when he came home that time."
"And the outside world conspired to give your son that requisite extra
push." Frankland continued, nodding slightly to James as an indication
that he reckoned it kinder to ignore his interruption. "That push,
of course, was the death of his mother. We know he had an incestuous
fixation for her, and the discovery that she had finally eluded his
desires sent your son off on a startling manic trajectory that was a
masked attempt to turn back to the womb."
"It doesn't sound like Ted at all."
Frankland rose. "Since you don't seem disposed to believe me, I will
give you a little proof."
He walked over to a portable tape-recorder, selected a tape from a nearby
rack, set it on the spindle, and switched on.
"We have recorded a great deal of what your son has said in his hallucinatory
periods. Here's a fragment from very early in his treatment, when he was
first brought here. I should explain that he collapsed while waiting to
be interviewed by Mr. Howells, his superior at the Wenlock Institute.
For reasons we do not yet understand, he was convinced that our great Head
of State, General Peregrine Bolt, was imposing an evil regime on the country.
This sort of case always regards itself as persecuted. Later, in his mind,
he supplanted General Bolt by a figure he could more satisfactorily regard
as evil, an Admiral Gleason; but at the time of this recording, he was not
too deeply sunk in his delusions. At least he still believed himself to be
in this age, and had some sort of conversation with his doctor and some
students, as you'll hear."
He switched the recorder on. Muffled noises, a groan. An indistinct mutter,
resolving itself into a name: Howes. A precise voice, neutral in tone,
commenting, "The patient when reporting to the Institute believed his
superior, Howells, to be a man named Franklin. Franklin is a distortion
of my name, Frankland; the patient was brought before me when he collapsed.
The name Howells occurs, again slightly distorted, as one of the participants
-- a captain -- in the patient's military imaginings. Your son was caught
in a distorted subjective world when we recorded this."
The muttering voice on the tape came suddenly to clarity and was recognizable
as Eddie Bush's; he asked, "I'm not dying, am I?"
It sounded as if there were several students about him, talking to each other
in low tones.
"He can't understand a thing you say."
"He's tuned only to his own needs."
"He imagines himself in another place, perhaps another time."
"Hasn't he committed incest?"
Again came Bush's voice, now very loud: "Where do you fellows think I am?"
And again the other voices, mainly admonitory.
"Quietly!"
"You'll wake the others in the ward up."
"You're suffering from anomia, with auditory hallucinations."
"But the window's open," Bush replied, as if the mysterious remark
explained everything. "Where is this, anyway?"
"You're in Carlfield Mental Hospital."
"We're looking after you."
"We believe you are an anomia case."
"Your meeting's scrambled," Bush said.
Frankland switched off the recorder, pursing his lips, shaking his head.
"Very sad case, Mr. Bush. At the time of that recording, your son believed
himself to be in some kind of a barracks room; he was unable to accept that
he was in a hospital ward. From that time on, he retreated farther and
farther from reality into his own imaginings. At one point, he became
violent and attacked a specialist with a metal crutch. We had to place
him in isolation for a while, in the new Motherbeer Wing here -- "
James broke in on the recital, crying, "Ted's all I have! Of course,
he was never a religious boy, but he was a good boy! He'd never meant
to be violent. . . . Never . . ."
"You have my sympathies. Of course, we are doing what we can for him.
. . ."
"Poor old Ted! At least you can let me see him!"
"That would not be advisable. He believes you to be dead."
"Dead!"
"Yes, dead. He believes he entered into a deal with army authorities who
agreed to supply you with drink, significantly called Black Wombat, with
which you drank yourself to death. Your son thus managed -- mentally,
of course -- to murder you and lay the guilt at someone else's door."
James shook his head, almost in imitation of Frankland. "Anomia . . .
I don't understand at all, I really don't. Such a quiet boy, a good artist
. . ."
"Yes, they're always the type who go, I'm afraid," Frankland said,
looking at his wristwatch. "To tell you the truth, we hope art therapy
may aid him a little. Art enters into his hallucinatory states. So do
most strands of his life. I would not agree with you that your son is
not religious. One aspect of his ease presents itself as what the layman
would probably term religious mania. You see, the search for perfection,
for an end to unhappiness, is very strong in him. At one time -- this
was when he was in solitary confinement -- I mean, in Motherbeer --
he attempted to construct an ideal family unit in which he could find
peace. We have the tapes of that period of his illness; they are very
harrowing. In that hypothetical family unit, your son plays the father
role, thus symbolically usurping your part. The father was, significantly,
an out-of-work miner. Members of the nursing staff were pressed into
other roles of his fantasy."
"What happened?"
"Your son was unable to sustain the illusion of peace for long; the pressure
was on him to slip back to a state of more open terror, to a paradigm of
hunters and hunted, kill or be killed. So the family unit construct
was brutally dissolved in self-hate: he ended with a symbolic suicide,
which heralded a complete abdication of reason and a return to the
womb-state which is the ultimate goal of incest-fixated natures. He
ceased to relate. You invited these details, Mr. Bush."
"Ceased to relate . . . But it doesn't sound like my boy. Of course,
I know he was involved with women. . . ."
Frankland permitted himself a short growl of laughter.
"'Involved with women'! Yes. Your son, Mr. Bush -- your son knows only
one woman, his mother, and all other females he meets are identified
with her. Hence, he never seeks or finds permanence with any of them,
for fear they might dominate him.
"His obsessive-compulsive tendencies have collapsed into schizophrenia
oriented about this psychic disturbance. He experiences his anima --
his
anima
, or female actuating spirit, not to be confused with anomia
or anosmia -- as detached from himself, as a separate entity. This entity
he called his Dark Woman. She originally fulfilled the classic function
of animae by watching over him."
"Dark Woman? Never heard of her!"
"Now, in the later stages of your son's illness, the Dark Woman becomes
transformed into yet another replication of the incest-figure, a female
at once mother and daughter, this signifying the accelerating mental
deterioration of the subject."
James Bush looked about the hateful room without particularly wishing to
see it. The chilly words, which he did not fully understand or fully
believe, drove him back into himself. He needed escape as much as he
needed to see Ted; and of escapes, he could not say which he most needed,
a good long prayer session or a good deep drink. Frankland's voice droned
on, not always without a certain relish in its tone.
"On his last mind into the Devonian, when this tragic illness was
brewing, he had intercourse with a young woman called Ann. She also
became involved in your son's fantasies. That wasn't too successful,
either. He believes she is now watching this institution, and will
soon lead an attempt to rescue him. Significantly, he pictures her
as a scruffy, dirty, undeveloped girl. 'Lank-haired whore!' he called
her once. Very significantly, he killed her off at one point and then
resurrected her. Very tragic, a brilliant mind! 'What a brilliant mind
is here o'erthrown!,' as the poet has it. But I really mustn't take up
any more of your time. . . ." He rose, and inclined his head.
"Mr. Frankland, you've been very kind," James said desperately. "Let me
just have a peep at the poor lad. He's all I have, you know!"
"Oh, indeed!" Frankland looked surprised and leaned forward over the desk,
putting on his conspiratorial air again. "I understood you had connections
with a Mrs. Annivale, a widow?"
"Well, yes, I -- there is a lady of that name lives next door to me."
Somewhat excessive nodding. "The mind plays strange tricks with names.
And, of course, there are strange coincidences to be accounted for.
Ann, Annivale, anomia. Do you know what an amnion is?"
"No. Can't I just
peep
in?"
"He'd be upset if he saw you. I told you, now, Mr. Bush, he believes
you to be dead."
"How could he see me if he was under sedation?"
"He is working on his latest groupage. We give him materials to keep
him quiet. It absorbs all his time, but he might turn and notice you
and become upset."
"You said he was under sedation."
"No, no, that was yesterday. I said he was under sedation yesterday.
And now, Mr. Bush, really . . ."
James could see the interview was at an end. He made one last desperate
effort. "Why don't you let me take him away from here? I'll look after
him -- he won't come to any harm! I mean -- what are you doing for him
here? What hope is there of a cure?"
Looking. extremely grave, Frankland prodded the top button of James'
mackintosh with an extended finger and said, "You laymen always underestimate
the gravity of extreme mental illness. Sometimes the mind seems to be thrown
into civil war. Your son believes that time is flowing backwards! He does not
belong in your universe any more, Mr. Bush, and he needs official restraint.
To tell you the truth, a cure is hardly to be hoped for at present. Our duty
is to keep him quiet. Now, I'll see you as far as the hall, if I may."