The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  We started at once. Alkan’s analytic method, which still has some practitioners to this day, despite the impact of Quantity Theory, was commonly termed ‘Implication’. Its full title came from Alkan’s 1956 paper of the same name, ‘Implied Techniques of Psychotherapy’. Put simply (and to my mind it was a ludicrously simple idea), instead of the analyst listening to the patient and then providing an interpretation, of whatever kind, Alkan would say what he thought the analysand would say. The analysand was then obliged to furnish the interpretation he thought Alkan would make. Alternatively, Alkan would give an interpretation and the analysand was required to give an account that adequately matched it.

  The theory that lay behind this practice was that the psyche contained a ‘refractive membrane’. An interior, reflective barrier which automatically mirrored any stimuli. Naturally the only way to ‘trick’ the reflective membrane was to present it with information that was incapable of ‘reflection’. Information that assumed the reflection from the off. I suppose the remarkable thing about Alkan’s method – and indeed its subsequent practitioners – is that all their published case histories bear a startling resemblance to those of entirely conventional methods. In other words, the implication technique made no difference whatsoever to either the actual content of an analysis, or the ultimate course.

  I lived in digs in Colchester during the final two years I spent under Alkan’s supervision. My doctoral thesis grew by leaps and bounds, until I was unable to pay for the typist. As far as Alkan was concerned, Implication gave me the confidence I needed to reach my full, neurotic potential. If I had been withdrawn before, I now became positively hermitic. I never saw my fellow postgraduates, except for the monthly post-graduate meetings.

  Alkan implied, time after time, that I was a colourless, deliberately bland individual whose whole psyche was bent to the task of deflecting whatever stimuli the world had to give me. My studies, my personal habits, even my appearance, were merely extensions of my primary defensive nature. He was right. I hated to socialise; I had no sense of fun at all. I deliberately affected the utmost anonymity. I was obsessively neat, but devoid of any redeeming idiosyncrasies. My room at Mrs Harris’s was the same the day I left as it was the day I arrived. The bedside lamp stood on the same paper doily, the gas fire whiffled, the puppies sported on the wall, the plastic-backed brush and comb set was correctly aligned. Mrs Harris was a stolid, taciturn woman and that suited me just fine. I would sit silently at the breakfast table and she would lay impossible mounds of food in front of me. I would eat the food and suffer accordingly. It is the great success of a certain strain of English puritan to have almost completely internalised the mortification they feel it necessary to inflict, both on themselves and others.

  And so the most banal of things were effortlessly metamorphosed into experiences over a period of some months. There was no real progress until the day Alkan disappeared. Arriving early (as was dictated by the psychopathology that Alkan had himself implied for me) for the monthly meeting of Alkan’s analysand/students I found the group prematurely assembled. They ignored me as I slid awkwardly into a tip-up chair and desk combination at the back of the classroom. Adam Harley was speaking.

  ‘There’s no sign of him anywhere, no note, no indication of where he might be …’

  ‘Run through it all again, Adam, from the beginning. There may be something you’ve neglected,’ Sikorski broke in.

  ‘All right. Here it is. I arrived for my session with Alkan at about 9.30 this morning. I knocked on the door to his rooms and he shouted “Come in”. I entered. He wasn’t in the main room so I assumed he was in the bathroom. I sat down and waited, after about five minutes I became a little restless and began to wander about. I took some books out of the bookcase, leafed through them and put them back. I was trying to create just enough noise to remind Alkan that I was there without being intrusive. Eventually I became curious, the door to the bathroom was ajar, I pushed it open … the bathroom was empty, there was no one there.’

  ‘And you’re absolutely sure that you heard him call to you.’

  ‘Certain. Unless it was one of you with a tape recorder.’

  There was general laughter at this point. I took the opportunity to slip out of the prefabricated classroom. I had a hunch.

  Across the receding chessboard of flagstones whipped by the wind, I skittered from side to side. The crux, as it were, of my early experience lay in this decision, this leap into the unknown; this act of what could only be called initiative. It could be argued (and indeed has been, see Stenning: ‘Fluid Participles, Choice and Change’), that I was merely responding to an appropriate transference, in the appropriate infantile/neurotic manner.

  Today, if I remember that day at all, it is summed up for me by one of my last, powerfully retentive fugues. The sharp, East Anglian gusts cut into me. I looked around and was visited with a powerful urge to rearrange the disordered buildings that made up the campus, many of them at unsatisfactory angles to one another. The steps that spirally ascended the core of the Monoplex shone bright beams of certainty at me. I took them four at a time, pausing to pant on landings every three flights where black vinyl benches reflected the chromium struts of the ascending banister.

  I lingered outside Alkan’s door until a lapine huddle of research chemists had waddled past and round the bend of the corridor. For a brief moment their incisors overbit the twenty miles of Essex countryside, which was visible from the twentieth floor. Then I entered. In the bathroom, by the subsiding warm coils of Alkan’s recently worn clothing I found a clue. A card for a cab service. The office address was on Dean Street in Soho, London.

  Soho at that time was a quiet backwater where vice was conducted with a minimum of effort. The aspidistra of English prostitution was kept flying down pissy alleys. And the occasional influx of kids from the suburbs, or men from the ships, flushed the network of drinking clubs and knocking shops clean for another fortnight.

  Vice still had the same scale as the architecture, it was only three or four storeys high. Homosexuals, jazz musicians and journalists formed companionable gaggles. Things that people did were still risque before they became sordid.

  I put up at the Majestic Hotel in Muswell Hill, a pink, pebble-dashed edifice. Originally it must have been intended for an Edwardian extended family, but it had become home to riff-raff from all over the world: salesmen, confidence tricksters, actors and graduate students. I ventured by juddering bus down into the West End on a daily basis. The cab company the card in Alkan’s bathroom referred to was easily found. It was a cubbyhole tenanted by an Italian speaker in a flat tweed cap. He made no sign of remembering a tall, thin man, somewhat like Le Corbusier. Indeed, it could have been a resistance to the Modernist movement as a whole that made him so abusive towards me when I pressed him for information.

  I took to wandering hither and thither, aimlessly crossing and recrossing my steps. I was convinced that Alkan was in the West End of London and that he wanted to be found. I saw his behaviour as purposive. I gave no thought to the fact that my grant had run out, that I was due to appear before the supervisory panel in a matter of weeks, and that my leviathan of a thesis lay beached on the nylon counterpane of my foldaway bed in Chelmsford.

  One of the main disadvantages of an impoverished, nomadic metropolitan existence is that in winter you cannot have privacy without either purchasing it, or gaining access to it in a lockable toilet cubicle. I desperately needed privacy, for, during my years of retreat from the world, I had developed certain private habits, certain rituals combining magical twists of thought with bodily functions that I had to perform on a four-hourly basis. Lacking the wherewithal for a hotel (we were formally expelled from the Majestic every morning at 9.00 and not allowed back in until 5.30), I took to the conveniences, becoming adept at selecting the toilets where I would have the most genuine peace and quiet. This was a difficult and absorbing task. So many of the public toilets and even those in large hotels and restaurants
were frequented by homosexuals. I had no argument with these people, either moral or psychological (and I may point out at this juncture that Quantity Theory as a whole maintains no defined perspective), but the push, shove and then rasp of flesh, cloth and metal fastener against ill-secured prefabricated panels and grouted gulleys tended to interrupt my rituals.

  So, I elevated my search for the ideal cubicle – warm, discrete, well lit – to an exact science. Unnoticed by me, this search was beginning to usurp the primary quest. It is ironic, therefore, that unknowingly, unintentionally, I began to find evidence of the great psychologist where I myself sought refuge.

  I could avoid the actual congress of homosexuals quite easily. However, without abandoning my private study altogether I could not hope to avoid the evidence of their activities: crude but believable advertisements, scrawled in Biro or neatly lettered; seemingly hacked with an axe, or delicately carved with a penknife; they drew the reader’s attention inexorably to penile size:

  I’m 45 and my wife gives me no satisfaction coz shes too slack. If you have a 9″ cock, or better, meet me here after 6 any wensday. I will take on any number of lusty boys.

  and:

  Boys under 21 with 6″ or more meet me here. You do it to me I’ll do it to you.

  And the direct, if disturbing:

  Give me big dix.

  There was one of these water-closet communicants who was more readily recognisable and more prolific than the rest – I began to see his entreaties in a lot of my favourite haunts, and to come across them occasionally when I broached new territory. This person was distinguishable by his rounded, laboured writing in red Biro, which reminded me of the hand of an adolescent schoolgirl – especially the characteristic of drawing small circles in place of the point over the ‘i’. Furthermore, his graffiti were always written neatly on the wall directly above or below the point where the toilet paper dispenser was mounted. They were also very carefully executed. With some of the best examples I could actually see where the artist had used a ruler to get his script to line up just so. As for content, alas that was wearisomely predictable:

  Meet me here on Friday or Saturday evening if you are better than 7″. I have a 9″ cock which I like to have kissed and sucked till I come in someone’s mouth. I like young boys of around 16, but also more experienced men.

  This I noted down in my leather-bound journal from the wall of an unpretentious, unfrequented, spotlessly clean, underground municipal convenience in Pimlico. I had no idea why I had taken to recording such things. I had been in London only a fortnight or so; I had no fixed view about the status of my quest for Alkan. On the whole I was inclined to view it as spectacularly important. I had, after all, given up my forthcoming exam in order to find him. My analysis with him was incomplete, I had no family or friends to support me. On the other hand I could just as easily feel dismissive and indifferent about the quest for Alkan. Who needed the daft old coot anyway? Nonetheless I did immediately notice the connection between the advertisement above and this:

  I like to suck young boys cocks and to have mine sucked as well. I’ve only 5″, but it’s hard all the time. If you’re 16 or under meet me here on Tuesday at 9.00.

  neatly scripted beneath the Smallbone of Devizes ceramic, interleaved sheet-holder clamped to the distempered wall of the warm and capacious gents at the Wallace Collection. And this:

  Fun time every evening here or at the xxxx [illegible] club. All experienced men better than 8″ meet me for sucking frolics. I am 27 and I have 9 good inches which you can nip and lick.

  incongruously proclaimed from a bare space of rendering, framed with grout, left available, as if on purpose, by the absence of a tile in the checkerboard that skirted the commode in the denizens of the Reform Club.

  If I idly noted down this smut cycle it was not for any reason but boredom. It wasn’t until later, days later, that, glancing on passing, in the canted, cracked, oval mirror that capitulated on top of the dead bureau in my L-shaped wind-tunnel at the Majestic, I saw the hidden significance of these three bites. I saw it as a sequence solely of numbers, integers, detached from the penises-in-themselves, thus:

  7, 9, 16, 5, 16, 9, 8, 27, 9

  This in itself obviously represented an intentional sequence. The very fact of the way relation between primes and roots was organised, implied a capricious mind intent on toying with a willing enquirer. I immediately felt the presence of Alkan in that simple sequence. I knew that I was in no real position to analyse the sequence as it stood – and that infuriated me … I knew that if the sequence was to prove meaningful it must have a progression.

  My cottaging became more intense. I spent virtually all my days in toilets. The one day I had to abandon my quest and attend the National Assistance Board, I managed to contrive to wait for some hours in the toilet. When I emerged my number was called, an example, I feel, of perfect timing.

  Eventually I began to find little outpourings, here and there, which were unmistakably more elements of Alkan’s coded message. Each set of figures was couched in the same form, written in the same hand and situated within the toilet cubicle in the same place. After a fortnight I had an impressive set of integers of the form:

  16, 3, 19, 19, 5, 17, 27, 9, 8, 13, 33, 11, 4, 9, 9, 14, 16, 27, 7, 9, 16, 5, 16, 9, 8, 27, 9 …

  but running to some four handwritten sides. I submitted this sequence to rigorous analysis. On the face of it there seemed no reason to think that the sequence had been devised in the order in which I discovered it. So I cut it up into individual strips which I arranged and rearranged and rearranged, for hour after hour after hour, until a lattice work of discarded strips of exercise paper overlaid the bilious pastel lozenges which snicker-snacked across the wind-tunnel at the Majestic.

  I found that I could extract quite elegant sets of equations from the sequence whichever way I arranged it, some of which were quite tantalisingly pregnant. But although I could satisfactorily resolve them they remained mere abstractions devoid of real values, real content. From the shape of some of these equations I could deduce that Alkan was working on some kind of methodology for statistical inference, but just as clearly other sets seemed to indicate that his thoughts were running towards decision trees which reflected the organic structure of long-term clinical trials. But statistical studies of what? Clinical trials of what?

  I lapsed into torpor. There seemed no solution. I felt more than ever abandoned, washed up, beyond the pale of society. With no way of retreat from the tidal line of mental wrack, back down the beach and into the sea.

  Late one evening, a fellow Majestic resident, Mr Rabindirath, came in to challenge me to a game of Cluedo. We played in a desultory fashion for half an hour or so. Rabindirath was an infuriating opponent because he kept incorporating members of his own family into the game as if they were fictional suspects.

  Next to his cheaply suited thigh, on the Terylene counterpane of my bed, lay a well-thumbed A–Z. Open at pages 61a & b, the West End. I idly translated the coordinates into numerical values … Covent Garden, the coordinates were I, 16. Translating the I into a numerical value according to its position in the alphabet gave 9. 9, 16 – it was a fragment of the sequence! My head began to spin. Rabindirath barked angrily as I swept the Cluedo board off the cork-topped bathroom stool and began to labour feverishly over the A–Z.

  By morning I had worked it all out. All the sequence was a set of coordinates which mapped a journey across central London. A journey which at every juncture prefigured my own. Clearly Alkan was tailing me from the front; damnably clever. He had started by tailing my simple and monotonous circuit and once I had become obsessed by following him he had led me on. Now I looked at the route laid out on the map it was quite clear that I had been mapping out a basic geometric configuration. I had simply to extrapolate the next set of coordinates in order to confront the errant psychologist.

  By ten that morning I was waiting for him in the public toilet under the central reservation on High Holborn
. It was a snug place, well warmed, with an attendant on duty all the time. Not the sort of toilet anyone would tend to linger in, nowhere to really hide yourself away. I waited and collected different versions of disgust from the insurance salesmen and civil servants who marched through, dumped their steamy load and strode out shaking their legs and heads.

  I became uneasy. If something didn’t happen soon I would be running the risk of harassment or even arrest. Then from the solid row of cubicles which framed a corridor at the far end of the tiled submarine came a cough, and then a flush, and then a door wheezed ajar … nothing … no one emerged … I footed down to the end and gingerly pushed open the door. Alkan was turning to face me. He was wearing a grey flannel suit and a belted Gannex mac, he carried a briefcase and was in the middle of tucking an umbrella under his free arm. He looked terribly shocked to see me. The first thing he said was, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

  It turned out that the whole thing was an utter fluke, an example of the most preposterous chance, an amazing coincidence; or, laden synchronicity, evidence of fate, karma, the godhead. Alkan thought chance. I was inclined to agree with him. For he had nothing to say to me, absolutely nothing, but a kind of chewed-up, pop-eyed obsession with a set of conspiracies being fomented against him by Communist psychiatrists. Alkan had gone completely mad, psychotic, subject to delusions. His abrupt flight from Chelmsford had come in the midst of an extended paranoid interlude. He was a useless husk. After sitting with him over tea for a while, I gave him the rest of my money. It was the only way I could convince him that my presence in the toilet was not due to my involvement with the conspiracy of conspiracies. My last sight of Alkan was of him sitting at the coated table, hands tightly clasped, eyes eroding from the stream of edginess that poured out of his brain. I looked into those eyes for too long while I ate my toast. By the time I’d finished, all my faith in Alkan was quite burned away.