“Dissociation. No. You don’t have that.”
“But what is it?”
“It emerged at the turn of the century. A roving spirit. Called a fugue state. It’s questionable whether it’s an actual condition. It is disputed within the profession.”
“But it makes you lose your identity?”
“Some say so, others disagree. Like I said. But there are very few case studies and no reliable ones. It’s the same with Ganser syndrome. Things having to do with identity loss are all very controversial. If you want my opinion—”
“And the symptoms?”
“Of which one now?”
“Fugue state.”
“Fugue state,” said Dr Cockcroft, “happens within a discrete and usually limited time frame, which you have already exceeded. And it also involves the complete loss of a sense of self and an overwhelming desire to stay on the move. Something you, too, showed a modest amount of. And all triggered by a psychologically traumatic event. Torture, childhood abuse—whatever the current fashion is. But you are far too rational and collected for that. Your story is altogether too lucid and linear. Just your imaginary or not imaginary pursuer—”
“They are not imaginary.”
“That’s a complicating factor. An imaginary pursuer would be useful for a nice little personality disorder… but unfortunately real pursuers don’t fit in a dissociation narrative.”
“Four men following me and smashing my head in doesn’t count as traumatizing?”
“Having one’s head smashed in doesn’t constitute trauma in this instance. It must involve psychological distress. I don’t mean to trivialize it, but I’m afraid that to lose one’s memory it takes a bit more than four halfwits in white frocks swinging a carjack.”
“Swinging a carjack and threatening to kill me.”
“No.” Dr Cockcroft lowered his chin into his hands, which were resting on his chest, looked deep into his patient’s eyes and shook his head. “No, no, no. Can you imagine how many traumatized people we’d have running around if that were the case?”
“What about before? Not the blow to the head. Whatever came before it, that I can’t remember? Couldn’t something… a prolonged event, beforehand, have happened? Involving psychological distress—that was the cause; and the blow to the head and all the rest came afterward?”
“You would make a great detective. Truly. But they don’t talk about the roving spirit aspect of a fugue state for nothing. A person in a fugue state is empty inside: he roams around because he roams around. He sees a pretty river and thinks to himself, I’ll follow this pretty river, and he’ll walk for a hundred kilometers, and sometimes he’ll be stopped and if he’s asked why, he can’t answer. He has completely forgotten what made him set out. He’s filled with indifference. First. Second: if your pursuers are in fact real, that is a nice starting point for psychological distress, as you correctly figured out in your role as Sherlock Holmes just now.” Dr Cockcroft closed his eyes for a moment as if he were trying to picture the four men. “In that case you were abused and put under such extreme pressure by these guys out there in the desert that you were deeply traumatized. Then we don’t even need the gratuitous blow to the head, that’s just an extra, the icing on the cake, so to speak. But. And here comes a major but. Trauma so severe that it causes your entire identity to disappear would, among other things, also erase your pursuers. In fact, first and foremost them. Do you understand? The thing that traumatizes you is the first thing to disappear. That’s the whole point. If everything is erased, then so is the memory of the traumatic event. In particular, four men and a carjack. You can call me Watson.”
Carl looked at the psychiatrist. He looked at the bare walls, the notebook and the table. He rubbed his eyes with his hands, thinking. He listened to Dr Cockcroft pour himself another bourbon. Something about the psychiatrist’s argument struck him as illogical. It bothered him more and more that Dr Cockcroft seemed almost more interested in the sequence of events in the desert than in the phenomena in his psyche. Or was he fooling himself? He tried to picture the doctor in a white djellaba.
“I’m sorry,” said Dr Cockcroft. “You wanted a diagnosis from me. That’s it.”
That of the poor, unsteady doctor. The stark furniture. The soccer match.
“You are sure,” said Dr Cockcroft, leaning forward, “that you’re not keeping anything from me?”
“And you are sure that you’re a psychiatrist?”
“Do you have any doubt about that?”
“If you think I’m faking, if you are sure—then I am just as sure that you are no doctor.”
Dr Cockcroft didn’t answer.
“Why for example do you keep asking questions that have nothing to do with amnesia? Why does this place look like… like…”
“What questions?”
“Take the question about alcohol, what’s that about?”
“Have you already forgotten?”
“No. And I also haven’t forgotten that you said: a Korsakow can’t even put together a sentence with a clause. The brain is completely destroyed. So why all the questions? What’s the point, when it’s self-evident that I—”
“Can’t you figure it out?”
“No, I can’t!” Carl leaped up and then sat back down again. “I can’t. Or have binge drinkers started to make their own stuff?”
Dr Cockcroft’s conciliatory hand gesture signaled that he was at least willing to take his patient’s agitation seriously.
“Trust,” he said. “Please stay calm. Trust is the most important thing. The reason I’m questioning you so thoroughly is because we’re trying to figure out your identity, in case you’ve forgotten. And when someone wakes up covered in blood, with a smashed skull, out in the desert, surrounded by equipment for distilling alcohol, there is the suspicion that he himself could be the bootlegger and it could be his own distillery—actually a likely scenario, wouldn’t you say?” Dr Cockcroft held his fingers out in the shape of an imaginary funnel, then drew his fingertips together. “Only now we can eliminate that possibility. You don’t know any more about alcohol and its production than anybody else does. And that’s not a lot.”
“And what about sex?”
“Pardon me?”
“Why did you want to know whether I’d had sex with Helen—”
“Routine,” said Dr Cockcroft. “Purely routine. A test to see whether you were prepared to answer honestly.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“No serious doctor would ask that. He would ask something else.”
“What do you know about what a serious doctor would ask?”
“Hasn’t my functional knowledge remained unaffected?”
“Good that you remember that. Less good that you—”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“You really have doubts? And since what point, if I may ask?”
“As soon as I came in here. The whole time. As soon as I saw your flyer.”
“What flyer?”
“Introductory rates.”
“What about that gives you pause?”
“No normal doctor would write introductory rates. Thanks to our grand opening. And this isn’t how a doctor’s office looks. Why is the TV on? Where are your… devices? And you don’t have any medical books. You don’t have a lab coat on. You—”
“A lab coat!” For a moment, Dr Cockcroft seemed incensed. “And if I had a lab coat on you would believe my diagnosis? I’m sorry, but psychiatrists don’t wear… though I do own one, actually. It must be upstairs. My library of medical books is upstairs, too. And as for the TV, I’m sorry, but the power switch is broken. You have to unplug the cord, and that’s tricky. And as you no doubt remember, when you showed up here it definitely wasn’t during my office hours.”
Dr Cockcroft kicked at the TV. A newsreader flickered eerily, disappeared into wavy lines and lost his head. The picture slowly took shape in the middle of the picture tube a
gain except for a piece of his head, which remained stuck in the corner of the screen.
“I can tell you something else,” said Dr Cockcroft. “I don’t know whether I will win back your trust or lose it for good—but you are of course correct. It doesn’t look like a doctor’s office in here. You probably have no idea how one earns a living here. Patients like you are the exception. To be frank: you are my first patient, my first proper patient.”
The TV newsreader straightened up a stack of paper on his desk and Dr Cockcroft tipped back the last of his whiskey.
“But this is Africa. How many psychiatrists would you guess practice here? There’s supposed to be another one in Cape Town. You can’t do any business with the natives. They have their own methods. A bit of drumming, a bit of singing: for the most part that’s sufficient for their so-called problems. The African soul is still in its infancy. There’s no comparison to the web of neuroses in an average American housewife. And if you want to know how I make my money: ugly mothers in giant sunglasses. Wide-hipped teenagers from reputable families. Tourists. That’s what this place is gauged for. A little holidaymaking, a little stress on the beach, a little sexual misconduct here or there—I work more or less in conjunction with the leisure industry. If that answers your question. My practice belongs to the hotel. And every two weeks we offer introductory prices for our grand opening—it’s been a successful strategy.”
“But you are… a real psychologist?”
“Psychiatrist. Studied at Princeton,” said Dr Cockcroft, rattling off a series of hospitals and universities that naturally meant nothing to Carl.
“And do you have a diploma? Something that proves you are a doctor?”
“Perhaps a lab coat?”
Carl didn’t want to nod or shake his head.
“You want to see my lab coat?” Dr Cockcroft rephrased the question. He smiled. Not an insecure smile, more of a watchful, cunning smile, as if he had asked: You want to see your mother’s vagina?
“Yes,” said Carl.
“It’s upstairs. As I said. I think. It’s also possible that it’s at the cleaners.”
“Or a diploma. Or medical books.”
“The books are upstairs. You want to have a look?” (Do you want to enter the vagina?)
Carl wrapped his hands around his head and, with the healthy hand, massaged his scalp. Dr Cockcroft watched his patient placidly.
“In all seriousness,” said Carl, “would you mind going up there with me and—”
“If you’d like. If I can win back your trust that way. Therapy is useless without trust between the doctor and patient… no, it’s no trouble.” Pushing on the arms of his chair, Dr Cockcroft raised himself a few centimeters. “I’d be happy to show you my beautiful lab coat. Is that what you would like?”
His entire demeanor oozed such a willingness to co-operate that the walk to the next floor seemed unnecessary. Carl couldn’t insist on it without looking like an idiot. He sensed that, but he also sensed that that might also be the secret purpose of this cordial co-operativeness, and so he said: “Yes. Yes, that’s what I would like.”
33
The Library
ED: “Night has fallen. And there’s nothin’ we can do about it.”
JOHN BOORMAN,
Deliverance
A WIDE WOODEN STAIRCASE led to the second floor. It opened onto a long, dark corridor with four or five doors off the right and left sides. Carl followed two steps behind Dr Cockcroft; he could smell what had become a strong scent of alcohol billowing out behind him.
“My library,” said the doctor. He had stopped in front of a door, opened it grandly and flipped on the light. The glow of a dim bulb illuminated a minuscule room. A broken sink lay in the middle of floor surrounded by dust and crumbled bricks, and two pipes stuck out of the wall.
“Whoops!” said Dr Cockcroft. He closed the door nonchalantly, went a few more steps down the hall and reached for the handle of the next door.
“My library!” he said. He pulled on the handle. He yanked at it. The door was locked.
“Really not a good idea to call on me so late in the day,” he said, shaking his head.
He turned around and, less confidently, tried a door on the other side of the hall. This time he didn’t make any pronouncement about what waited behind the door. Four fluorescent bulbs flickered on and lit up a room that was almost completely empty. The walls were bright white, paint-splashed newspaper lined the floor, it smelled of solvent. A white plastic bucket lay to the side, tipped over. A table, also covered with newspaper, stood in the middle of the room on four slim, round legs that ended in pointed brass feet. One of the feet was broken and the leg was resting on one thin and one thick book.
“Your library?” asked Carl.
Dr Cockcroft smacked himself on the forehead like a slapstick actor and said: “Totally forgot! The workmen were here today.”
He leaned down to the two books, took a quick look at them and then picked them up and handed them to Carl with a triumphant smile. A narrow volume wrapped in gray paper and a voluminous tome bound in blue linen.
“Specialist literature from the motherland of psychoanalysis!”
“In German?”
“And before you ask: I can’t read them. They’re not mine. They belonged to my missing predecessor…”
Carl took the thin book and turned it around in his hand. On the gray paper cover was written in pencil: Albert Eulenburg SUM I.
“… from whom I took over the practice. The practice, the patients and the library. All he took with him was, understandably, his wife. And no!” He waved his hands drunkenly in the space between him and Carl. “Don’t get your hopes up! He went back to Europe. Probably. He was Austrian. And anyway, if you were a psychiatrist, we’d have noticed that, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” said Carl, although he was thinking no, and he opened the thin book. The first thing to catch his gaze was a poem in gothic lettering.
Ich habe so viele Gedanken
Und pervers bin ich außerdem;
Ich bin in der Tat für alle
Ein ungelöstes Problem!
“Can you figure it out?” asked Dr Cockcroft.
“Sorry?”
“Can you read it?”
“Yes,” said Carl, mystified. He flipped through a few pages. Non-fiction with lots of long, difficult sentences. The poem was the exception. There were no illustrations. And all of it in gothic lettering.
“You didn’t say that you spoke German.”
“I didn’t know myself. I can only… sort of.”
“Those weird letters. What does it say?”
“It’s about women.”
“And does it evoke any feelings in you? The language, I mean.”
Carl stared at the book and mutely moved his lips.
“No. It’s too complicated for me. I understand most of the words, but not the meaning. It’s not my native language.”
“What do you understand?”
“That women aren’t cruel. When it comes to sex. That’s just something men imagine.”
“That corresponds to the stand taken by science,” said Dr Cockcroft pensively. He took the book from Carl’s hand to have a look at the puzzling script. As he was doing so he suddenly froze as if he had spotted a rat in a dark corner of the room, then went over to the corner. He triumphantly held up a white lab coat and brandished it the way a soldier would a conquered flag. It could have been a lab coat; covered with splatters of paint, however, it bore a bit more resemblance to a painter’s smock.
Carl picked up the other book and began to flip through it energetically once he had convinced himself that the doctor, who was flapping around in the lab coat, tangled in the sleeves, wasn’t going to let him out of his sight. It was another German book, a dictionary published by Brockhaus in 1953 in Wiesbaden, the volume covering letters A to M.
Mindererus, mindset, mindsight, mindstuff… mine. He skimmed quickly through the entry once, twice, and
tried to memorize the contents.
MINE [French], Mil.: a cavity in the earth, or a container, holding an explosive charge. 1) Landmines are used to destroy enemy personnel, material or works and are ignited by contact or by electrical means. Minefields are entire spaces occupied or commanded by mines either on land or in the water, particularly as defense against vehicles or watercraft. 2) Wurfmines are the munitions used by a Minenwerfer, or mine thrower, a muzzle-loading trench mortar. 3) naval mines are explosive charges contained in cases and placed in the water to destroy or impede enemy vessels, called buoyant mines when held in place beneath the surface by cables and anchors, or ground mines when fixed to the bottom. Enemy naval mines are cleared by military ships called minesweepers. 4) Luftminen are aerial bombs with steering mechanisms. 5) a pit or excavation in the earth, from which ores, precious stones, coal or other mineral substances are taken by digging or by any of various other mining methods.
MINE: 1) ancient Greek coins, = 1/60 of a Talent = 100 Drachmas. 2) an ancient Greek measure of weight.
MINE: 1) Isadora, actually Minescu, Romanian-French surveyor and biologist, * Mamaia 1837 † 1890, visited on behalf of—Pélissiers North Africa in search of—Ouz, completed first-rate cartographic material and authored a travel report, On the Golden Sources, Marseilles 1866, 2 volumes. 2) Aimable-Jean-Jacques, son of 1), playwright,* Algiers 1874, portrays the vacuousness of cosmopolitan society in humorous, finely detailed sketches, later turned to adventure novels with trivial elements. Chief works: Mama’s Big Voyage (1901), Mama’s Next Big Voyage (1903), Sons of the Sands (1934), The Invisible Fata Morgana (1940) and The Shadow of Yellow Death (1942). He received the 1951 Prix Goncourt for the novel Beach With No Sea. 3) Wilhelm,* 1915, German astronomer.
“Pencil lead is missing,” said Carl.
“Sorry?” Dr Cockcroft looked at him through a sleeve.
“There’s an ancient Greek coin called a mine?”
“What exactly is the question?”
Sand Page 17
