Bedlam Burning

by Geoff Nicholson

  ‘“One’s first impression might be that these insane voices form a discourse claiming to be independent of dominant ‘sane’ ideological practices, and if that were the case one might indeed carp at this overweening ambition. Yet Mr Collins is more ambitious and more slippery still. It dawns on the reader that for all Mr Collins’ inventiveness and virtuosity, he can’t successfully impersonate so many different voices. We feel he has bitten off more than he can chew. But then, slowly, and what a thrill it is when the realisation comes, we see this is, so to speak, the whole point. One realises that these voices are not intended to be so very different after all. They are in fact all one. They are acts not of ventriloquism but of soliloquy. Mr Collins is, if you will, speaking all the lines, and speaking them to himself. The patients do not exist, the ‘real’ Gregory Collins does not exist either, and the fictional author is locked in the asylum of his own head, a sort of literary madhouse. The author is the only patient, the book’s only begetter. All we are reading is words, words, words. The book is the diary of a literary madman, and it is magnificent.”’

  Bentley folded the pages and placed them on Kincaid’s desk. Nobody else moved. I cannot imagine blanker faces than the ones that stared at Bentley and then at each other.

  ‘I don’t know what this means,’ said Dr Gutteridge.

  He spoke for all of us I think, and yet Bentley’s revelation was so different from the one I’d been expecting, that I found myself garrulously on the offensive.

  ‘Well, it’s obviously just nonsense, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Are you really trying to say I made it all up, wrote the whole of Disorders? That it’s a novel?’

  ‘I’m not saying that,’ said Bentley. ‘But somebody is.’

  ‘Who wrote this review, anyway?’ Alicia asked.

  ‘Somebody called Michael Smith,’ said Bentley. ‘A name I’m not familiar with.’

  And then he winked at me again. I started to sweat. Where had this review come from? Why was my name on it? Who’d written it? Why was Bentley doing this? What was he going to get out of it?

  ‘But it’s transparently not true,’ I insisted. ‘I didn’t make up this clinic. I didn’t make up Dr Kincaid. I didn’t make up the patients.’

  ‘No, the reviewer is clearly mistaken there. The charge is more simply, and more seriously, that Disorders is not a work of collective pathology, but a work of fiction created by a single hand.’

  ‘Well, that’s obviously not true either, is it?’ I said with some passion. ‘Why would I do that? Why would anyone? What would be the point?’

  Bentley shrugged extravagantly.

  ‘Well,’ said Dr Driscoll, very slowly and judiciously, ‘one point might be in order to validate an experimental form of therapy, mightn’t it? An unscrupulous doctor might, I suppose, employ a professional writer to create an accomplished piece of writing and attribute it to his patients in an attempt to prove that his therapy worked, and that his patients were, so to speak, cured.’

  This sounded like Alice in Wonderland stuff to me.

  ‘I can show you the manuscripts,’ I protested, and then I realised that I couldn’t. Gregory or the publisher now had them, and if I’d thought about it any further it was obvious that thousands of sheets of typed manuscript actually proved nothing at all.

  ‘It just didn’t happen,’ I said. ‘I’ll take a lie detector test. Anything.’

  The moment I said that I wished I hadn’t. God knows how I’d have done on a lie detector. Would it have picked up the fact that I wasn’t even who I said I was? Fortunately nobody took me very seriously.

  Dr Gutteridge turned to Bentley and said, ‘Are you asking us to believe that the assertions in this review are true?’

  ‘I’m asking nothing,’ Bentley replied.

  ‘But you’re saying that Disorders may be, what, a literary hoax?’

  Bentley said. ‘I’m merely presenting you with a text. It is no part of my intention to influence your interpretation of that text.’

  Kincaid looked paralysed, as though he might be about to give in to some explosive, calamitous impulse, and could only hold himself in check by adopting a sort of catatonia. Alicia tried to come to his aid.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘A moment ago we were all perfectly content. We were moving forward. I don’t see how one over-ingenious book review can make such a big difference. It’s only one person’s opinion and we know it’s wrong.’

  ‘I don’t know any such thing,’ said Dr Driscoll.

  ‘This really does make a difference,’ Dr Gutteridge agreed, and he picked up the photocopy of the review, scouring it for undiscovered clues.

  ‘We understand that,’ said Alicia. ‘We understand your position completely, but still …’

  She was trying to sound optimistic, as though the mere fact of understanding their position somehow meant we were all on the same side, but we clearly were not, and the visiting doctors were quite unconvinced.

  Dr Gutteridge turned to Bentley and said, ‘Let me ask it more simply. Do you think the text of Disorders is the work of a single hand?’

  Bentley sucked air in between his clenched teeth. He wanted us to know this was difficult stuff. He was not a man for rash decisions, for easy conclusions. He was prudent, thoughtful, authoritative. But at last he had to say, ‘If you really press me, if you really demand an opinion from me, then I think it probably is, yes.’

  ‘So you think that Mr Collins here wrote every single word of Disorders?’

  Bentley spread his palms wide and said, ‘He is a very clever, skilful and persuasive young man. And if not him, then who else?’

  Doctors Driscoll and Gutteridge nodded gravely. Here was a man they could trust, one of their own, someone whose opinions they had to take seriously, someone they could believe in. I felt almost deranged with anger. What was wrong with these people? How could they think I was the author of this book, I who could barely string two paragraphs together? And regardless of whether I was capable of doing it or not, the simple fact was, I hadn’t. And I knew there was no way I could possibly convince them.

  My God, Bentley was good. I stared around the blank walls, looking for inspiration, and my eyes fell on the window. I got the fright of my life. As did the trustees.

  ‘Oh my God, what’s that?’ said Dr Driscoll.

  There was a face at the window, actually a whole body. Charles Manning had found his way up a drainpipe and was now perched on the window ledge, peering in, spying on us. As a covert operation it lacked finesse. The ledge was narrow and he had to press himself against the glass in order not to fall off. Then we saw another detail. His fly was open, his penis was out, and it took on a squashed, doughy appearance as it was flattened against the pane.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ said Alicia.

  Then the office door flew open again and a naked Charity pranced in looking zonked, and did a circle of the room, arms and legs flailing, while singing some song of undifferentiated mysticism.

  ‘Perhaps we should—’ Alicia said, but she was too late. The trustees had already gathered up their belongings and were heading for the door, although Bentley seemed less inclined to run away. He was enjoying this. Nevertheless, we all followed the two doctors as they left the office, Alicia mouthing what she took to be words of reassurance. Kincaid and I were both speechless but we too felt the need to keep up.

  Charity danced and twirled ahead of us, like a naked sprite leading us who knew where. When we had passed through the clinic and stepped outside into the open air she left us and ran full tilt towards the dried-up fountain. We didn’t go after her since the trustees were rapidly moving in the opposite direction, towards the gate and an immediate exit, but we couldn’t help following Charity with our eyes, and the events taking place in and around the fountain were undeniably compelling.

  I expect the word orgy is often applied rather casually and inexactly. Let’s just say that Charity leapt into the fountain and joined the other nine inmates of the Kincaid Clinic who were alrea
dy arranged around the statue of the mermaid. They were stripped down and participating in an ornate and spectacular bout of group sex. One small consolation was that at least Gregory Collins wasn’t part of the show.

  I expect once you’ve seen one orgy of lunatics you’ve seen them all. There are only so many things hands and mouths and genitals are capable of, and certainly the patients weren’t doing anything beyond the bounds of possibility. They were just doing everything they could. Only three things really stood out for me. One, that an otherwise naked Carla was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt that looked identical to the one I’d once owned. Two, that Byron, who was only intermittently involving himself in the activities, was taking photographs with what looked very much like my missing camera. And three, that Charles Manning, having come down from the window ledge and removed the rest of his clothes, was masturbating while looking at what was undoubtedly a naked picture of Nicola that had been in my missing collection of photographs.

  Need I tell you, nothing about this spectacle was remotely erotic? The patients were whooping it up, making inarticulate noises that in other contexts might have seemed joyous or abandoned, but to me it sounded like the soundtrack of a bad porn film – forced and very badly acted. There was nothing spontaneous or authentic or even very sexual about it. Obviously they weren’t faking as such, since they were really having sex, and yet I felt they were doing it for effect, not for pleasure. And when they started wordlessly signalling to the doctors Bentley, Driscoll and Gutteridge, inviting them to come and join in, the effect was complete.

  Our visitors were out of there in seconds flat, and perhaps the orgy would have ended then regardless, but to make absolutely certain, the porters arrived dragging garden hoses behind them and started spraying down the patients with icy water, bringing things to a drenched and inevitable conclusion. Then the porters began to manhandle the patients, brutally strapping them into straitjackets and, in a move I hadn’t seen before, putting thick black nylon bags over their heads, and dragging them away to their rooms. You might have thought the patients had numbers on their side and could have put up quite a struggle if they’d wanted to, but they didn’t resist much, not even Anders. It was as though they thought this punishment was their due.

  Alicia watched sadly but did nothing to intervene and it was left to me to make a feeble, futile protest, to say to Kincaid, ‘And is this part of your precious Kincaidian Therapy too?’

  He was not in the mood to be doubted. He gestured to the porters and I was instantly silenced. They grabbed me and did to me what they’d already done to the patients: the straitjacket and the bag over the head. I was outraged. Nothing is more maddening than being treated like a madman. I struggled and shouted, but only in the most ineffectual way. I could hear Alicia asking the porters to be gentle with me, but that had predictably inverse results. They kicked and punched me a little, and then dragged me back to my writer’s hut, where they abandoned me and where I remained for some considerable time.

  29

  A man can entertain some strange thoughts while he’s lying on the floor of his hut, bound in a straitjacket with a black nylon bag tied over his head, and the particularly strange thought I came to entertain was that I finally knew what was going on. Something clicked and I was certain I knew what Kincaid and the patients were up to. Consequently I felt myself seething with indignation and righteous anger, desperate to communicate this precious truth that I’d worked out.

  My opportunities for communication were strictly limited, however. At first there had been bangs and crashes outside the hut, shouting, some laughter, some barked orders from Kincaid, the sound of glass breaking, a noise that could have been someone being pummelled with a truncheon. And then it had all gone perfectly quiet, though that in itself was no source of comfort. I wondered what kind of coshes, chemical or otherwise, what kind of shock treatments, what ‘experimental techniques’, Kincaid and the porters might be performing out there. And where was Alicia in all this?

  Time passed painfully. I tried to breathe slowly and regularly, tried not to fret too much about the cramps developing in my arms and shoulders. Finally, hours later, I heard footsteps coming into the hut, just one person, not the two porters as I feared, and it sounded like a woman’s tread. Then a pair of hands was on me, pulling the bag from over my head. It was Alicia, and I was exquisitely relieved. I thought everything was going to be all right now.

  I was expecting a great flood of light when the bag came off but it was night, the hut was in darkness and Alicia was working by the glow of a small pencil torch. It seemed a little melodramatic but perhaps it was necessary.

  ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ Alicia said. ‘It’s all my fault. I should probably never have brought you here.’

  It was tempting to agree with her, but I said, ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

  ‘You’re an interesting case,’ she said.

  ‘More than you might imagine.’ And then with the flawless confidence that the hero always displays, I said, ‘Listen, I can explain everything.’

  ‘You can?’ said Alicia, and I thought she sounded impressed. ‘What do you mean by everything?’

  She was right to make me define my terms. There was a certain amount I was still going to leave unexplained, like who I was for instance, but I said, ‘For a start I know why the patients suddenly went crazy like that.’

  ‘Crazy?’

  ‘Yes. I think having group sex in front of the visiting trustees is crazy in anybody’s book.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said grudgingly.

  ‘Could you take this straitjacket off me?’

  ‘First tell me your theory.’

  I was disappointed not to be instantly freed, but I was so eager to tell my story I was prepared to tolerate it.

  ‘The patients went crazy simply because they wanted to,’ I said. ‘They wanted the trustees to see they were mad. Carla was listening at the door, remember? She heard them say that Kincaidian Therapy had worked and it was time for the patients to move on. They don’t want to move on, so they have to prove they aren’t sane. She reported back to the other patients and they knew they had to do something pretty spectacular.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Alicia.

  ‘But they were obviously in a double bind, the one I now see they’ve been in all along. If they appear completely sane then Kincaidian Therapy is declared a success and they’re sent on their way. But if they appear completely mad then Kincaidian Therapy is declared a failure and they’re sent somewhere else anyway. So the trick all along has been for them to show just enough progress to make Kincaid continue the treatment, but also to make sure they’re never completely “cured”, whatever that means.’

  ‘They were playing us along all the time, you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Malingering if you like. But the so-called literary evening threw everything out of kilter. The trustees were right. The patients did behave like more or less sane people on that night, and that was their undoing. They looked too good. So obviously they had to behave like totally insane people today. Personally, I think they went about a million miles too far, but obviously it’s a tricky thing to get right.’

  ‘Poor Dr Kincaid,’ Alicia said.

  ‘Kincaid I’m coming to, but wait. Now, obviously Carla didn’t hear Bentley read out the review of Disorders. She’d gone by then, so she couldn’t have known that I was being accused of having written it all. She didn’t know that part of the game was up, although I’m absolutely sure she knew I wasn’t the author. And, for reasons I’ll explain, she obviously knows who is – Kincaid.’

  ‘Dr Kincaid?’ said Alicia in slightly extravagant wonderment.

  ‘Yes. Bentley may have been out to get me, but he knows what he’s talking about. If he says there’s textual evidence that Disorders was all written by one person, then I’m prepared to believe him. But it’s not me. It’s Kincaid. He’s the single author who wrote the whole book. I don’t know exactly how he ma
de it work, but if I had to guess I’d say he probably did it in his therapy sessions, in his office when the blinds were drawn.’

  ‘How?’ said Alicia.

  ‘I think he probably just dictated things to the patients. Maybe he was doing preparation when I saw him pacing in his office at night, and then when the patients came in to see him he let it all pour out, giving vent to his literary ambitions. The patients wrote it all down in their notebooks, then they went to the Communication Room and typed it up and gave it to me as their own.’

  ‘But would they do that?’

  ‘They would if Kincaid told them to. If they’d refused he’d have kicked them out of the clinic.’

  ‘But why would Dr Kincaid do it?’

  ‘For all the reasons that Dr Driscoll said. To make himself look good, to prove to the world that Kincaidian Therapy actually worked. And he might have got away with it if it hadn’t been for Dr Bentley. And of course it was very handy for Kincaid that Bentley accused me of doing the dirty work. It let him off the hook. It made him look like the innocent party. And it’s even more convenient that he can now use me as a scapegoat.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alicia. ‘It’s very ingenious. You’re very clever, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s not just clever. It’s true.’

  Alicia looked at me a little less tenderly and admiringly than I’d have liked. I wanted her to acclaim me as the all-knowing hero, instead she looked troubled. But, then again, why wouldn’t she? Even if she accepted what I said was true, it didn’t solve anything. What was the next step? A break out? An insurrection? The lunatics taking over the asylum?

  ‘It’s got a little bit crazy out there in the clinic,’ Alicia said.

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘All the patients are in their rooms, straitjackets on, bags over their heads.’