Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  The good news, Dr Blake says reassuringly, is that AMD is not a degenerative condition, and many live with it for years without even noticing any problem. But where does it come from in the first place?

  ‘I hear wild scare stories that you can get AMD from spending too much time watching television, playing computer games or using mobile phones. There is no evidence for this,’ says Dr Blake. Other environmental factors being studied include food colourings and agricultural organophosphates. ‘We just don’t know what causes AMD,’ says Dr Blake. ‘But my advice is to eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and get regular exercise.’ It clearly works for her, and the raven-haired medic will set male viewers’ hearts fluttering next year when she fronts a four-part TV documentary taking a serious look at the history of mental illness, titled Loonies.

  Harry handed it back to his companion.

  ‘So now you know why you’re here,’ she said. ‘You’re part of Dr Blake’s experiment. Whatever she tells you is probably her way of seeding a false memory, so she can see what it grows into.’

  ‘And what name have they given you, in this so-called experiment?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Clara.’

  ‘What’s your other name?’

  ‘I don’t have one. When I was found, someone decided I was Clara, so Clara it is.’

  ‘When you were found?’ Harry asked incredulously. ‘What do you mean?’

  She explained that some time ago, in a wretched and confused condition, she was brought to the hospital by police unable to find any evidence of her identity. She had been walking in the surrounding hills, with little protection against the weather, and had become lost. ‘At least that’s what they tell me; though I don’t remember any of it.’

  ‘Have your family come here yet?’ he asked her.

  Clara shook her head. Nobody had come looking for her. ‘Then I saw the newspaper article,’ she said, ‘after the cleaner left it by mistake. If it really was a mistake. And I understood why Dr Blake is so keen for me to be kept in isolation. She probably knows everything about me, but she’s waiting to see what false memories I come up with.’

  Harry was shocked by what he was hearing. ‘Why don’t you discharge yourself, or call the police?’

  Clara shook her head gently. ‘There must have been things I needed to forget. Everything in life has a purpose.’ Then she turned her head towards the door, as if afraid that someone might come in and find her. ‘I’d better go,’ she said, and without any further comment got up and left the room, closing the door after her.

  Harry was still puzzling over the newspaper article when he heard a knock. He thought it must be Clara again, but immediately the door was opened by a new female visitor of indeterminate age and uninspiring appearance, with long carrot-coloured hair and a purple dress that radiated an air of ethnic poverty.

  ‘Hello,’ he said to her. ‘Are you Margaret at last?’ He quietly hoped she wasn’t.

  She came and stood at the end of his bed. ‘Priscilla Morgan,’ she said, extending a bangled hand he couldn’t possibly shake unless he had arms like a gibbon’s. ‘Writing therapist.’ She retracted her hand with a metallic jangle.

  ‘What a busy day I’m having,’ Harry said patiently. ‘Did you bump into Clara in the corridor?’ Priscilla didn’t know what he was talking about, so Harry explained, without mentioning the article.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone,’ said Priscilla, and Harry realized he must have had another lapse of consciousness. ‘Anyway, I don’t think patients are supposed to go around chatting to each other without permission. Dr Blake is very particular about the sort of things that can safely be said to people with AMD. It has to be done properly, gradually. Otherwise it’s like giving a gallon of water to someone dying of thirst: the shock could be lethal.’

  All Harry knew was that Dr Blake wanted to feed him information as part of her experiment. And this curious creature at the foot of his bed was apparently meant to do some of the feeding.

  ‘Are you really a writing therapist?’ he asked her. ‘Or has Dr Blake made that up?’

  Priscilla gave a laugh, then with an irritating scrape drew up the chair that had somehow moved back across the floor in the moment since Clara’s visit. ‘Dr Blake thinks I might be able to help you. I’m the health trust’s writer in residence.’

  ‘You mean you actually choose to live here?’

  Priscilla laughed again, jangling as her shoulders trembled. Harry couldn’t be sure whether this noise came from her excessive jewellery or her internal workings. ‘My job is to help patients put their experiences into words,’ she said. ‘Some of the pieces get published in a special magazine – the spring issue’s got a really lovely poem sequence about hip replacement.’

  So far, this latest therapy proposal excited Harry about as much as a course of suppositories. He said, ‘How can anyone expect me to write about my experiences when I can’t remember any of them?’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Priscilla, ‘writing doesn’t have to come from real events.’ She spoke on the subject with the disagreeable animation of a specialist.

  ‘What sort of things do you write?’ Harry asked, then soon wished he hadn’t, as it was an invitation for a lecture.

  ‘I do short stories, primarily,’ she said. ‘I’ve had seventeen published to date. So you see, I really am a genuine writer.’

  ‘But not a poet, novelist, or any other kind with its own job title?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed, in the casually dismissive way Harry had already begun to loathe. ‘You could say I’m something in between. The short story is a neglected medium, and a good one is the hardest thing in the world to write.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt it is,’ Harry agreed. ‘Which is perhaps why it’s so neglected. But you’re also a therapist?’

  Priscilla shrugged, jangled, and then – still exuding an unhealthy interest in the mechanics of her career – explained. ‘The therapy aspect is merely part of the job while I’m doing the residency here. The only way to write short stories for a living these days is to do stints like this: it’s not like the old times when the Board of Literature subsidized everything. Free market and all that. But it’s so interesting! I’ve worked in schools, prisons, day-care centres. I was even writer in residence on an oil rig. Now that really was fun!’ She leaned towards him and gave him a hearty nudge he could have done without.

  ‘Yes,’ Harry agreed, ‘writing short stories in the middle of the ocean must be quite exhilarating. And do you draw on experience?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she told him, then began to explain the plot of a three-page tale (Gash magazine, Issue 4) in which an old woman looks out of her kitchen window. ‘That woman was me, really. When I’m older. And also my aunt, who died last year. But the whole point, you see, is the moment when she notices the wilting hydrangea and it brings everything back. We call that sort of thing an epiphany.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ said Harry, feeling as humbled and bewildered by this technical secret as he had been by Dr Blake’s dinoxene analysis. In the hands of someone like Priscilla, a hydrangea could, it seemed, hold the key to the entire human condition, if only you knew how to understand its meaning. And with seventeen published stories under her belt, it was clear that Priscilla was as much an expert in her field as Dr Blake was in hers.

  Of those seventeen stories, Priscilla soon, for Harry’s benefit, had outlined four. She’d reached one in which an oil worker has gone home to his wife for the weekend and finds a postcard from his son on the kitchen table. Kitchens, Harry realized, were a recurring motif in the Priscilla Morgan oeuvre.

  ‘Was the oil worker someone you met on the rig?’ he asked with as much interest as he could muster.

  ‘Actually he’s a mixture of three or four people. And also my English teacher at school, Mr Michaels.’

  Harry deduced that when Priscilla said she only ‘sometimes’ drew on experience she was being unduly modest. In fact it appeared her creative budget was subs
tantially overdrawn, given the number of living souls she could cram into a single fictitious character.

  ‘I might even use you one day,’ she told him playfully, as if he should be any more flattered by such attention than by his appearing as a case study in Dr Blake’s next conference talk.

  ‘Would you use my name?’ Harry asked her.

  ‘Of course not. It would be quite wrong to use real names. I only use the essence of a person.’

  ‘My name was quite possibly invented by Dr Blake,’ he told her, ‘so as far as I’m concerned, you can do what you like with it. As for my “essence”, whatever that is, I think I’d prefer it to be left alone.’

  Priscilla said she thought Harry Dick would be a good name for a fictional character; preferably one of a symbolic or possibly humorous kind.

  ‘Have you ever heard of someone called Thomas Mann?’ he asked.

  Priscilla pensively put a finger to her lips before shaking her head. ‘No, I don’t recognize the name. Why?’

  ‘When it first came back to me I thought he must be a relative. But now I think he may have been a writer, in which case you ought to know about him.’

  ‘Reading other writers isn’t an important part of the creative process,’ she said, ‘except to the extent that you need to be aware of the market. When I did my MA in creative writing three years ago we only read one novel during the entire course, and that was so as to practise turning it into a film script.’

  ‘I think Thomas Mann may have lived quite a long time ago,’ Harry added.

  ‘Then I would definitely have heard of him if he was any good,’ said Priscilla. ‘So I can only assume he wasn’t.’

  Was she telling the truth? Harry had no way of deciding. In Dr Blake’s regime, truth and falsehood had been replaced by new categories: the things he was meant to know, and those he wasn’t.

  Priscilla said, ‘While we’re on the subject of names, you don’t happen to know who the First Minister is, do you?’

  The remark was made in a calculatedly off-hand way. Harry could easily imagine the list of tick-boxes Priscilla would later complete for Dr Blake’s benefit. He thought hard. ‘Now then … is it … Gordon Robinson?’

  A frozen smile of indecision hovered on Priscilla’s lips. Then she said animatedly, ‘Well done, Harry. You see how much you can remember, though you don’t even realize it!’

  She stood up and fetched the wheeled table, bringing it to Harry’s bed, then cranked him into a more upright position. For a moment he thought he might be about to get some food; but next she dumped her capacious hand-bag on the tabletop and said, ‘I have a suggestion to make.’ She rummaged in the bag and pulled out a large amount of paper, a pen, and an assortment of objects including a broken toy car, a stone, an old key, a cheap ring. Harry looked at all this rubbish she had strewn before him, waiting for some explanation, but none came.

  ‘Do writing therapists habitually carry around items like these?’ he eventually asked her, wondering if such detritus was the equivalent of a thermometer and stethoscope, or that little torch with which Dr Blake had probed his flickering eye half an hour or three days ago.

  ‘I want you to look at these objects,’ Priscilla instructed. ‘Let your mind relax, let it wander freely. Pick anything that interests you, and write whatever comes into your head. It could be a story, a poem, anything.’

  ‘About this stuff from your handbag?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said earnestly. ‘I often do this exercise with my writing groups, and it’s amazing what comes out of it.’

  ‘It’s certainly amazing what comes out of your handbag,’ said Harry. ‘Haven’t you got a book in there I could read? I’d even settle for one of your seventeen stories.’

  Priscilla shook her head. ‘Dr Blake expressly forbids it. Now, see what you can come up with, and I’ll collect it later.’

  In this way Dr Blake would obtain some more data for her research project, Priscilla would get a few lines of verbiage to put in the hospital magazine, and Harry would be kept harmlessly occupied. The useless junk on the table made him feel anything but relaxed.

  She could sense his unease. ‘Don’t worry, Harry. I know there’s nothing more soul-destroying than the sight of a blank page.’

  He would have put ‘writing therapist’ higher on the list of depressing sights, but already Priscilla was making him take hold of the pen. ‘Write anything,’ she said. ‘Anything at all. Don’t worry about art or inspiration. Remember, it’s only therapy.’

  Then she picked up her handbag and jangled to the door, promising to come back in a day or two to see how he was getting on. Once she was gone he stared at the white, empty page, finding it a lot easier on the eye than her purple dress.

  Richer by far than her collection of objects was this clean sheet of paper. It was like a field of snow; like mountain crests or the caps of breaking waves. It offered Harry’s mind some welcome relief after the strange sensation of waking up – it seemed no more than a few minutes ago – in a world he was unable to understand.

  How long had he been here? Why did he not feel hungry, or in need of the toilet? Were these things attended to during phases of altered awareness? He wondered how much of his life was becoming lost to his other self: the one Clara saw, mumbling and staring into space.

  He was about to cross a road, he reminded himself, and there was something in his hand. A book. But what was it, and why did it mean more to him than the traffic he ignored? As he tried to recreate its weight and appearance, Harry instead saw only the unpolluted page before him. An eternal whiteness. A dumb blankness, full of meaning.

  FROM PROFESSOR FAUST

  by Heinrich Behring*

  A promising young scientist was travelling, just before Christmas 1925, from the city of Zürich where he was employed, to a rest clinic at Arosa, on a three weeks’ visit.

  It was not the first time he had made this journey; on previous occasions, however, he had not travelled alone. Instead of his wife beside him on the railway carriage’s leather seat, there now lay a book, scarcely opened, brought in case of boredom, but which instead had proved merely to aggravate the condition our traveller hoped to avoid.

  Since the route could offer him only the modest pleasure of recognition, the scientist had chosen instead to think of the woman he was due to meet. He had written to her in Vienna; she had replied to his work address, perfuming her promises in a letter that now served as bookmark, jutting licentiously from the volume beside him. As the train rocked and jolted towards the enchanted mountains of his destination, our hopeful traveller sought to recreate mentally the shape and texture, not of the landscape that enveloped him, but of his former lover, whom he had not slept with for more than a decade.

  We call him young; the word, though, has a meaning that is relative. Such relativities, moreover, had become as fashionable, and as facile, as the latest show tune or hemline, thanks to Einstein, only eight years older than our hero, yet long hailed as a genius throughout the world.

  We call him promising; this too is a blade that cuts straight to the ambitious heart, since it is another way of saying that at the age of thirty-eight he had yet to make his mark upon the world. He was, to be sure, a renowned authority on his particular area of specialization; the theory of colour perception initiated by Goethe. His publications, though, as the English say, had ‘hardly set the world on fire’.

  We could damn him yet further were it our purpose to be ironic. Fame, however, lay but a short step away as Erwin Schrödinger – for such is our hero’s name – gratefully alighted at his station, there to be greeted from among the small throng of thickly clad seasonal tourists by a waiting driver who was heartily bellowing steam from his mouth into the cold air and cheerfully clapping his gloved hands, and who recognized his appointed passenger at once, having been instructed by Dr Schwarzkopf to look out for a gentleman whose round glasses, noble features and lofty brow were a mark of greater distinction than Professor Schrödinger’s eccentrically
humble dress.

  The driver, cordially announcing himself, swiftly took care of the professor’s luggage, loading the suitcases into the back of a handsome black car parked in the forecourt outside, an object of admiration for two small boys who stood staring at it in the chill breeze. It was only when Schrödinger climbed into the back seat and saw the driver glance round at him that the scientist suddenly realized his error.

  ‘Why, I left my book on the train!’

  It had been there beside him throughout the entire journey; and it was not the loss of the book that Schrödinger found alarming, but rather of the letter it contained.

  ‘Shall I go and inform the station master, sir?’ the driver asked. Already they could hear the train puffing away.

  ‘It is of no consequence,’ Schrödinger told him. ‘The book has my name and address on a note inside; if anyone cares to return it, they will have no difficulty locating the owner.’

  Such forgetfulness was an ill omen. The letter, should it fall into the wrong hands, might prove compromising. The world may not know his name, but any traveller on the line could now discover, merely by flicking the pages of a mislaid novel, that Zürich University had among its faculty members a professor of theoretical physics who chose to spend Christmas not with his wife, but with a woman ‘eager to rekindle passions that are dormant but not spent’. Zürich was Schrödinger’s first professorship; was it also to be his last?

  Love affairs were habitual and accepted among his circle; but bourgeois approval does not extend to behaviour one reads about in a newspaper. Even if it did not destroy his career, it would surely harm it, were he to enter public consciousness in such a laughably undignified way.

  Once more, therefore, our hero ignored the familiar surroundings during the final stage of his journey. With his wife Anny he had been to Arosa three times previously: first for a rest cure that lasted nine months until his lungs, displayed on Dr Schwarzkopf’s X-ray plates, were declared clear of tuberculous shadows; and then during the next two Christmases, when he and Anny came here on holiday. Now, in this fourth year, Schrödinger was to be joined by another woman; and he had no reason to suppose that Schwarzkopf or anybody else would object. Unless, that is, the matter were to find its way into the casual morning reading of office clerks and typists, delivery boys and shop workers, who expected better of their social superiors, and who must never be allowed to think that the fashionable, exclusive clinics dotting their country’s mountains were in fact devoted less to the curing of disease than to satisfying well-heeled clients’ needs for affection.