The Man Who Turned Into Himself (6 page)

I was going to have to find another way.

***

It was dusk when I woke. I was in my room but strapped to the bed in a half sitting-up position. Drowsiness did not abate my anger and I refused to eat or swallow the now familiar little plastic cup of pills that was pushed under my nose. They rigged up a drip-feed and fed whatever they wanted direct into a vein.

The rest remains in my memory as a blur of more injections, questions, tests, and streams of bitter, bilious invective pouring out of me with a force that defied my physical exhaustion. The dam had broken and I came apart. It was like grief held in too long. The two selves within me, relieved of the strain of keeping up appearances, went to war with one another and with everything around them. I was I think, for a time, truly insane. The irony is that during this 'insanity' I told my story time and again, sometimes in more detail, sometimes in less; sometimes weeping, sometimes screaming, sometimes with quiet weariness. I told the simple truth. And for that I was kept strapped like a dangerous maniac to my bed, manhandled humiliatingly on to bedpans by the hockey players, held in their vice-like grip to be washed and have my incipient bed-sores treated by one of a rotating group of faceless nurses. Every demand to see my wife, my lawyer, or anyone else, was refused with the chilling finality of people who enjoyed total power over me.

A numbing, dull despair began to seep into my bones. I would have said into my soul if I'd thought I had one, but I didn't dare use words like that with their overtones of immortality, because that would have left me stranded and alone in that limbo for eternity. I would have been in hell. So I settled for a wretched, tortured here and now, in which I longed for death as my only escape.

Then Emma Todd returned. It was, I think, a morning, but I wasn't sure. Time meant little any more. I was trying to make it mean nothing — a defence mechanism, I suppose. I heard the tap of her cane as she found my bed. When I opened my eyes she was pulling up a chair. She smiled almost shyly in greeting, blind eyes staring across me at the wall.

'Hello, Rick. How are you?'

I'd lost the habit of being called Rick and it sounded strange. Then I remembered I'd told her to call me Rick at our first meeting. 'What are you doing here?' My voice, I realised, was dry and cracked. 'D'you work here?'

'No. But I was one of Dr Killanin's students . . . ' I gave a grunt and muttered something obscene. She went on quickly, obviously aware that we were being watched and listened to on television. 'I asked to be allowed to see you.'

I looked at her. 'Why?'

'Because I heard you were being difficult and I wondered why.'

'You heard
I
was being difficult!' I spluttered, trying to sit up.

Her smile broadened, as though she was teasing me. 'Don't get excited. I know how things must seem to you. Please believe me, you're not being tortured and nobody here is a sadist — I believe those are two of your favourite accusations.'

'When I get out of here that bastard's going to jail,' I growled. 'Either that or I'll kill him.'

She was unfazed by the threat. 'All right, but let's worry about that when you get out. That's what I'm here for — to get you out as soon as possible.'

Of course I didn't believe her. It was another trick. 'They haven't let anyone see me, not even my wife!' I could hear a whining tone in my voice that I didn't like. I sounded close to tears of self-pity. 'I want to see my wife, I want to see my lawyer, I'm going to sue this fucking establishment to Kingdom Come! They've kept me strapped down like a prisoner in some fucking mediaeval dungeon, they've used drugs on me like I'm some experimental fucking guinea-pig, they've — '

'Rick, Rick ... I know how you feel, but calm down. Of course your wife has wanted to see you, but that might only have upset you more. She agreed that for the time being she wouldn't come. You've only been here four days.'

That came as a shock. 'Four days? You're lying. I must have been here for . . . '

'Four days. I can prove it if you like, or you can take my word.' I didn't answer. 'Dr Killanin knows perfectly well that nothing he's tried so far seems to have helped you. On the contrary, you've got worse. Now listen to me, Rick, none of the drugs that have been used on you have been in any way unusual. In fact the doses have been smaller than is normal. So whatever it is that hasn't been working — '

'Is my fault?' I snapped.

'No. It just means that we haven't understood the problem yet.'

I gave a cynical laugh. 'My dear Dr Todd, if you understood the problem, you'd be as crazy as I am — and probably strapped down in the next room.'

'Call me Emma.'

'Not while you're working for these bastards.'

'Rick . . . '

'Piss off!'

She sighed audibly. I felt a momentary rush of satisfaction; I had made a shrink sigh. Then immediately I thought: this is pettiness beyond all reason, I'm becoming as crazy as they think I am. 'Sorry,' I mumbled, ashamed.

'Have you ever been hypnotised?'

I looked at her, taken by surprise. 'No.'

'Would you be willing to try it?'

'D'you mean I have a choice? I haven't had a choice about much else in here.'

She smiled again, acknowledging my complaint, indulging me. 'It isn't possible to hypnotise anybody against their will, so it's entirely up to you whether we try it or not. As a matter of fact, some people can't be hypnotised at all, no matter how willing they are. If you're one of those, then the whole question's academic. But I'd like to try.'

'You?'

'I know what you're thinking. How can a blind person hypnotise you? You're thinking about somebody waving their hands and staring into your eyes, but that's just stage magic. It doesn't work like that at all. As a matter of fact, hypnotism's kind of a specialty of mine.'

'How do you do it?'

'I light a candle and have you look at it while I talk to you. That's all.'

'And that's enough?'

'If it's going to work at all, yes.'

I thought this over. 'How would you know I wasn't faking?'

'I'd know.'

I thought it over some more. I couldn't deny I was curious. 'All right,' I said.

***

Under Emma's instructions the nurse partially closed the curtains — enough to ensure that the daylight didn't drown the flickering candle that she then had the nurse light and place on a tray across my bed. I had been freed of my restraining sheet and fresh pillows were put behind me. The nurse then went to sit quietly in a corner and I forgot she was there.

'Just make yourself comfortable, relax, settle back, watch the flame . . . don't try to see anything in it, don't look for shapes, because that's your mind working, and I want you to empty your mind . . . just look into the flame, right into the heart of the flame, see if you can find the point where the flame begins, that little halo around the candle wick where the flame begins to burn . . . ' Her voice went on, saying nothing, just coaxing gentle, soothing rhythms from the air, while I sought and found the heart of the flame and gazed into it. 'You can see it, can't you, Rick? You can see it now, you see the heart of the flame . . . and the still, quiet centre at the heart of the flame . . . keep looking into it, Rick . . . deeper, deeper . . . into the centre of the centre . . . deeper, deeper, down and down . . . ' And so on and so on. I paraphrase, because I frankly don't remember too much of the detail. The experience was not disagreeable, in fact fairly pleasant and surprisingly restful after what I'd been through. But I didn't think anything was happening. I certainly didn't feel drowsy, but then I heard her telling me to close my eyes, and I obeyed instinctively. She then told me that all I would be aware of from now on was her voice. I would not want to open my eyes, I would not hear any other sound. And in that silence and that stillness I would speak with her.

After that, oblivion.

Until I heard: 'One, two, three.' I opened my eyes. I felt wonderful — refreshed, confident, a new man.

'How d'you feel, Richard?' she asked.

'I feel great. Wow! I don't know what you did, but it was worth it.'

'Tell me, Richard,' she said, 'who is Rick?'

For an instant my mind was a blank. I didn't know what she was talking about. Then the whole incredible story came flooding back. I felt embarrassed. I think I actually blushed. But I knew I had to answer — and I knew I had to tell the truth. 'Rick was just, I guess, a figment of my imagination. A kind of alternative version of myself.'

'You made him up?'

'Well . . . yeah, I guess so.' I gave a slight, self-conscious laugh, feeling acutely silly.

'And Charlie. Who was Charlie.'

'Oh, come on,' I said, starting to be really mortified by the absurdity of the whole thing. 'Gimme a break, will you? I mean I know I've been hallucinating, but that's all over now. Can't we just forget it and make a fresh start?'

***

I wasn't allowed home right away, of course. That would have been too much to expect. For one thing I was physically debilitated and in need of rest. The shots and pills they were giving me now were mostly vitamins, but the real reason for the swiftness of my progress towards recovery was psychological. I was at long last relieved of the terrible delusion that I was two people in one.

It would have been wrong to describe my former condition as schizophrenic. That is a loose, layman's use of the term. Schizophrenia is a very different, more generalised and less focused, form of the hallucinatory experience that I had been suffering from. Also schizophrenia arises largely, it now seems, from facts of body chemistry and less than was once thought from environmental influence. I don't think there are any instances of its having arisen, as my condition did, out of post-shock trauma. I learned a great deal after that first — the first of several — hypnosis session with Emma Todd.

One thing I learned from conversations not only with Emma but also with Dr Killanin and Steve Sherwood — both of whom I discovered to be charming individuals as well as front-rank, caring members of their profession — was the extraordinarily detailed nature of the hallucinations of which the human mind is capable. They told me stories and gave me books to read containing case histories of men and women who had imagined things far beyond the scope of my own rather limited 'alter ego'. One was the history of a young man, a scientist, who had fantasised that he was lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire in a distant universe. He was able to go there for weeks or months at a time, engage in the most complex political and military activities, then return to his life on earth and continue with whatever he had been doing — working at his desk, talking to a colleague, drinking a cup of coffee — as though he had suffered nothing more than a momentary loss of concentration. When he finally opened up about this secret 'other life' to an analyst, he was able to draw maps of incredible complexity and fill hundreds of pages with minute details of this distant civilisation. He even invented a whole language, together with historical notes about its origins and variations in other parts of the empire. It was fascinating, and I don't mind admitting that it made me feel a whole lot better about my own situation. He recovered, of course, as I was recovering; not in his case through hypnosis but through a lengthy and somewhat irregular form of analysis. But he returned successfully to normal life, after going through something which made my own inventions of a dead wife and nonexistent child seem puny by comparison.

I was unexpectedly nervous before Anne's first visit to me in the clinic. One of the extraordinary things about delusion is the patient's utter certainty that he is right and the rest of the world wrong. Part of my mind had pushed Anne into this 'rest of the world' category. That she should feel hurt, rejected and distanced from me was only to be expected. I was worried about reestablishing the intimacy that we had 
always taken for granted between us. Was part of her from now on always going to feel alienated from me by the memory of this episode?

In the event I need not have worried. She had spoken with Emma, Steve Sherwood and Dr Killanin, and they had prepared her well. Her main concern, it turned out, was that I should not feel as though she had abandoned me during those awful first few days in the clinic when she — on their advice — did not visit me. Happily, I was able to reassure her on this point very quickly.

After her first visit Harold came to see me. 'Richard,' he began, his gaze grave, affectionate, solidly reliable, 'the most important thing is you get well. The business is under control, so don't let any of that weigh on your mind.' Indeed, quite honestly, I hadn't given business much thought. The real estate market was in one of its periodic downturns. Fortunately, being cautious by nature, I had seen it coming and adopted strategies to ride it out. The company was cash rich and over-leveraged properties had been unloaded, cutting debt to a minimum. In view of rising interest rates, that was a very comfortable position in which to find ourselves. Gail sent in some paperwork from the office, but there was nothing in it to cause me any concern.

Exactly three weeks to the day after my first hypnosis session I was signed out. Anne came to collect me in her new Jaguar, the customised maroon XJ6 that I had given her on her last birthday. I shook hands with all the staff who had been so kind and kissed goodbye to the nurses. We set off down the long gravel drive and were saluted through the gates by the security guard.

It was good to be back home. We both knew, though we hadn't said anything — we didn't need to — what was going to be the first thing on our agenda. More than once she had been tempted to climb into bed with me in my room at the clinic, but despite Roger Killanin's discreet assurances that the TV surveillance system had been switched off at central control, we both felt constrained by the presence of that staring eye 
embedded in the wall. Maybe to some couples it would have been a stimulus, but we weren't like that.