The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  ‘It’s nearly finished,’ said Jim. ‘Today I’m going to paint and glaze it and then I’d like you to arrange for it to be fired.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see any problem with that. Tell me, what’s the story behind this sculpture?’

  ‘It’s not a sculpture.’ He sucked in air through teeth, the weary sigh of a child. ‘It’s an altarpiece.’ He picked up the model flyover and went over to a table by the window with it. Tom giggled.

  ‘Jim’s got a messianic complex. He thinks that the Apocalypse isn’t coming.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a bit complicated. The Apocalypse will come when enough people have accepted that it isn’t coming.’

  ‘That just sounds stupid.’

  ‘Well it isn’t fucking stupid, it’s you who are fucking stupid, Mister Squeaky, get it!’ Tom’s voice switched from light mockery to the hair-trigger aggression of the subnormal thug. It was a startling transformation, as if he’d been possessed by a weird demon. He stalked away and joined his friend. I dismissed the insult. Busner had told me about him; it was clear that this was another act.

  Over the next half-hour or so, most of the other patients on the ward trickled into the association area and came over to where their peers were already at work, mixing powder paint, working clay with fingers, cutting and pasting pictures from magazines. I was astonished by their quiet industry as a group. There seemed hardly anyone on the ward who was genuinely disruptive. Two or three of the patients stood like metronomes around the working area, swaying and rocking, marking the beat of the others’ labour.

  Hilary sat at the window and worked on one of her tiny watercolours with hairline brushes. She had propped up the scrap of artboard on a little easel made from lolly sticks and she worked with deft strokes, each one pulling the mobile stand attached to the catheter in her arm, back and forth. The plastic bag that dangled from it contained a clear fluid and a particular sediment. As the stand moved back and forth this sediment puffed up in the bag, the motes occasionally catching and then gleaming in the afternoon sun that washed in through the huge windows.

  Simon came over and asked me for scissors, glue and stiff paper. He took a half-finished collage from one of the cupboard shelves and sat down near me. It depicted the machine he’d taken me to see that morning, but recreated out of pictures of domestic appliances cut from colour magazines. I went over and stood by him for a moment. He smiled up at me, cracking the pusy rime at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Unfinished work, left it when I last went out …’ He bent his dirty carrot head to the task again.

  I confined myself to handing out materials. I sensed that now was not the time to comment on the work that the patients were doing. When they began to trust me they would volunteer their own comments. There was a still atmosphere of concentration over the bent heads. I went and stood by the window, listening to the faint sounds of the hospital as it worked on through the afternoon. The distant thrum of generators, clack of feet, shingled slam of gates and trolleys. On the balcony below, two chronics in blue shifts struggled clumsily with one another, one of them bent back by the other against the parapet. I stared at their ill-coordinated aggression for a while, blankly, sightlessly. The ‘O’ I was looking at resolved itself into the stretched mouth of a geriatric. At the point where I snapped out of my reverie and realised I ought to do something an orderly appeared on the balcony and separated them, dragging the younger one away, out of sight beneath my feet.

  Eventually I went and sat down at a table occupied only by a curly-haired man who had lain his head in the crook of his arm like a bored schoolboy. He was doing something with his other arm, but I couldn’t see what. We sat opposite one another for ten minutes or so. Nothing happened. Around us the workers relit cigarettes and built up the fug.

  ‘Psst …!’ It was Tom. ‘Come here.’ He gestured to me to join him and Jim. I went over. They were working diligently on the altarpiece. Jim was doing the painting, it was Tom’s job to wash the brushes and mix the colours. Jim had finished on the blue-brown surface of the road and was starting on the white lines. Tom was pirouetting lazily, a pathetic string lasso dangling in one hand, his voice modulated to a crazy Californian dude’s whine; he had the part down pat. But wrong.

  ‘That man there.’ He pointed at the curly-haired man.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s a real coup for Dr B.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Cocaine psychosis, authentic, full-blown. Used to be an accountant. Not just some scumball junkie. A real coup. Dr B diagnosed him, all the other units around here are real sore. Go and see what he’s doing, it’ll crack you up. And on your way back bring us another beaker of water, OK, fella.’

  I did as I was told. Passing by Lionel, the drug addict, I bent down to pick up an invisible object and looked back to see what it was he was hiding in the crook of his arm. It was nothing. He was deftly picking up and ranging his own collection of invisible objects on the tiny patch of table. As I bent and looked he turned his face to me and smiled conspiratorially. His eyes stayed too long on my hand which was half closed, fingers shaping the indents and projections of my own invisible object. I hurriedly straightened and walked off down the short corridor to the staff kitchenette.

  Halfway down on the left I noticed a door I hadn’t seen before. It had a square of glass set into it at eye level, which cried out to be looked through. I stepped up to it. The scene I witnessed was rendered graphical, exemplary, by the wire-thread grid imprisoned in the glass. It was a silent scene played out in a brightly lit yellow room. A man in his early forties, who was somehow familiar, sat in one of the ubiquitous plastic chairs. He wore loose black clothes and his black hair was brushed back from high temples. He was sitting in profile. His legs were crossed and he was writing on a clipboard which he had balanced on his thigh. His lip and chin had the exposed, boiled look of a frequent shaver. The room was clearly given over to treatment. It had that unused corner-of-the-lobby feel of all such rooms. A reproduction of a reproduction hung on the wall, an empty wire magazine rack was adrift on the lino floor – the poor lino floor, its flesh scarified with cigarette burns. In the far corner of the room, diagonally opposite the man in black, a figure crouched, balled up face averted. I could tell by the lapel laden with badges, flapping in the emotional draught, that it was Jane Bowen.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in silence and concentration. At 5.40 I gathered in the art materials and stacked all the patients’ work in the cupboard in as orderly a fashion as I could manage. It took some time to tidy up the art materials properly. The patients for the most part stayed where they were, hunched over the tables, seemingly unwilling to leave. Tom and Jim muttered to one another by the window. They had the pantomime conspiratorial air of six year olds, still half convinced that if they didn’t look they couldn’t be seen.

  I found Busner in his office. He sat staring out of his window at the lack of scale. On the far corner of the hospital a steel chimney which I hadn’t noticed that morning belched out a solid column of white smoke. Busner noticed the direction of my gaze.

  ‘A train going nowhere, eh, Misha?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s true. We’re a holding pen, a state-funded purgatory. People come in here and they wait. Nothing much else ever happens; they certainly don’t get appreciably better. It’s as if, once classified, they’re pinned to some giant card. The same could be said of us as well, eh?’ He shivered, as if he were witnessing a patient being pierced with a giant pin. ‘But I’m forgetting myself, don’t pay any attention, Misha, it’s the end of a long day.’

  ‘No, I’m interested in what you say. The patients here do seem to be different to those I’ve met at Halliwick or St Mary’s.’

  ‘Oh, you think so, do you? How’s that?’ Busner swivelled round to look at me over his glasses.

  ‘Well, the art work they do. It’s different … it’s … how shall I put it …
rather contrived, as if they were acting out something. Like Tom’s behaviour.’

  ‘An involution?’

  ‘That’s it. It’s a secondary reference. Their condition is itself a form of comment and the art work that they do is a further exegesis.’

  ‘Interesting, interesting. I can’t pretend that it isn’t something we haven’t noticed before. Your predecessor had very strong views about it. He was a psychologist, you know, very gifted, took on the art therapy job in order to develop functional relationships with the patients, freed as far as possible from the dialectics of orthodox treatment. A very intense young man. The direction the patients have taken with their work could well have something to do with his influence.’

  Busner started stuffing his case with paper filling, as if it were a giant pitta bread. ‘I’m off, Misha. I shall see you in the morning, bright and early, I trust. I think it would be a good idea if you really sorted out that materials cupboard tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ I got up, scraping my chair backwards and left the office. In the corridor the long lights whickered and whinnied to themselves. The ward was quiet and deserted. But as I passed the door to one of the utility cupboards, it suddenly wheezed open and a hand emerged and tugged at my sleeve.

  ‘Come in. Come on, don’t be afraid.’

  I stepped in through the narrow gap and the heavy door closed behind me. It was dark and the space I was in felt enclosed and stifling. There was an overpowering odour of starch and warm linen. I almost gagged. The darkness was complete. The hand that had grabbed my wrist approached my face. I could feel it hover over my features.

  ‘It is you,’ said the voice, ‘don’t say anything, it’ll spoil it.’ It was Mimi. I could smell the tang of her sweat; it cut right through the warm, cottony fug.

  The hand led mine to her breast which seemed vast in the darkness, I could feel the webbing of her bra and beneath it the raised bruise of her nipple. She pushed against me, her body was so soft and collapsed. Her flesh had the dewlap quality of a body that has had excess weight melted off it, leaving behind a subcutaneous sac. Her jeans were unzipped; she pulled at my trousers, a cool damp hand tugged on my penis and pressed it against her. We stood like that, her hand on me, mine on her. She led me forwards and hopped up on to what must have been a shelf or ledge, then she drew me, semi-erect, inside of her. My penis bent around the hard cleft of her jeans, the skin rasped against ridged seam and cold zipper. There was something frenzied rather than erotic about this tortured coupling. I clutched at her breast and tore away the two nylon layers. I plunged rigidly inside her. She squeaked and waves of sweat came off her and tanged in my nostrils. I ejaculated almost immediately and withdrew. There was a long moment while we panted together in the darkness. I could hear her rearranging her clothing. Then, ‘till tomorrow,’ a light touch on my brow. The door split the darkness from ceiling to floor, wheezed once and she was gone. After a while I straightened my clothing, left the linen cupboard and went home.

  It wasn’t until I stepped out of the tube station and started the ten-minute walk back to the house where I lived that I noticed the outdoor scent. The smell of the ward and the hospital had become for me the only smell. The cold privet of the damp road I trailed along was now alien and uncomfortable.

  At home I boiled something in a bag and sat pushing rice pupae around the soiled plate. Friends called to ask about my first day in the new job. I left the answerphone on and heard their voices, distantly addressing my robotic self. Later, lying in bed, I looked around the walls hung with my various constructions, odd things I had made out of cloth that may have been collapsed bats, or umbrellas. The wooden and metal struts filtered the sodium light which washed orange across the pillow. I fell asleep.

  I dreamt that the man I had seen in the treatment room, the man taking notes in the chair while Jane Bowen crouched in the corner, was doing some kind of presentation. I was in the audience. We were sitting in a very small lecture theatre. It was enclosed and dark, but the descending tiers of seats, some fifty in all, were stone ledges set in grassy semi-circular banks.

  The man in black stood in the centre of the circular stage and manipulated a kind of holographic projector. It threw an image of my head into the air, some four or five feet high. The image, although clearly three-dimensional, was quite imperfect, billowy and electrically cheesy. Gathered in the audience were all the people I’d spoken with on the ward: Busner, Valuam, Mimi, Jane Bowen, Tom, Simon, Jim and Hilary. Clive stood in the aisle, rocking.

  The man in black took a long pointer or baton and passed it vertically through my holographic head. It was a cheap trick because it was quite clear that the hologram wasn’t a solid object, but the audience annoyed me intensely by sycophantically applauding. I began to shout at them, saying that they knew nothing about technology, or what it was capable of …

  * * *

  Morning. I had difficulty finding the hardened coils of my socks. And when I did there was something hard and rectangular tucked into the saline fold of one of them. It was a piece from The Riddle. I had no idea how it had got there, but nonetheless I murmured automatically, mantrically, ‘I’m solving The Riddle …’ Suddenly the events I experienced on Ward 9 the day before seemed quite bizarre. At the time I accepted them unquestioningly, but now … Busner and his game, the concave Bowen, the foetal Valuam, Simon’s unfeeling mother, Tom with the mimetic disease, the encounter with Mimi in the linen cupboard. Any one of these things would be sufficient to unsettle; taken together …

  I rallied myself. Any psychiatric ward is a test of the therapist’s capacity; to embrace a fundamental contradiction, to retain sympathy whilst maintaining detachment. The previous day had been bizarre, because I had failed to maintain my detachment … it was said that if you empathised too closely with the insane you became insane yourself. Busner himself had had a period after the collapse of his Concept House project in the early Seventies when he had spent his time strumming electric basses in darkened recording studios, mouthing doggerel during radio interviews and undertaking other acts of revolutionary identification with those classified as insane. It was only fitting that I should start to fall victim to the same impulses under his aegis. Today I would have to watch myself.

  I took the long route across the Heath and passed by my father’s sculpture. I have no idea why he gave this specific one to the municipality. He had no particular love for this administration zone. And certainly no real concern with the aesthetic education of the masses. Not that the masses ever really come here. This is an unfenced preserve of the moneyed, they roam free here patrolled by dapper rangers in brown suits.

  It is a large piece, depicting two shins cast in bronze. Each one some eight feet high and perhaps nine in circumference. There are no feet and no knees. No tendons are defined, there are no hairs picked out, or veins described. There is just the shape of the shins. It was typical of my father’s work. All his working life he had striven to find the portions of the body which, when removed from the whole, became abstract. With the shins I think he had reached his zenith.

  I walked on towards the hill from where I had viewed the hospital the previous morning. The idiot was tucked up in a dustbin liner underneath his bench residence, his face averted from the day. His chest was sheathed in a tatter of scraps, reminiscent of Simon’s collage. I looked ahead. The hospital had today achieved another feat in distortion. Flatly lit, two-dimensional, depth eradicated, there was a strip of city, a strip of sky and interposed between these two the trapezoid of the sanitorium.

  Sanity smells. How could I have forgotten it? No one can lose their reason under the pervasive influence of the nasal institution. It is too mundane. The doors of the lift rolled open and the pad clamped across my face. All was as the day before. Tom sat behind the nurses’ station, and his violet eyes focused on mine as soon as I emerged in the short corridor that led from the lift.

  ‘Colour-coded this morning, are we?’ Tom’s accent is a strange mixtu
re of clipped pre-war vowels and camp drawl. I looked down and noticed that I had pulled on a particularly bilious V-neck.

  ‘Not intentionally.’

  ‘Dahling, never is, never is.’

  I left him and went over to the materials cupboard. Opening wide the two ceiling-high sets of double doors, I gathered up felt-tip pens and isolated them. Then I did the same with the crayons, the charcoal sticks, the pastels, the stained enamel trays of impacted watercolours, the few squiggled tubes of exhausted oils, the sheets of sugar paper, the rough paper, the rulers, and the encrusted brushes. Amongst the jumble were lumps of forgotten clay, grown primordial.

  At length Tom came over. He had draped a stole of pink toilet paper around his shoulders and smoked a roll-up with quizzical attention. He stood akimbo and regarded me without speaking.

  I started work on the works themselves. They were jumbled up, like the materials. The layered skin of some exercise in papier mâché had been torn by the rudely carved prong of a wooden boat. Crude daubs of powder paint on coloured sheets of rough paper had run into one another and finally impacted over the ubiquitous spiralled vessels. I prised all of these apart gingerly. I only discarded the hopelessly battered. On the rest I imposed order.

  As I worked, the association area remained empty. Except for Tom, who paraded back and forth from the nurses’ station to the great windows, to the serving hatch and back to my side, trailing his flushable fashion accessory and a second mantle of smoke. From time to time he paused and struck an attitude of such ridiculous campness that I was driven to stifled giggles. He came back just as I was reaching the higher shelves.