by Will Self
entered … my significant year. A home screen appeared … I’ve got
a home on-screen, on this a Pietà: Mother, Son … and the wholly
ghostly – Mark, temporarily discharged from hospital, his smile fat
with chemical fatuity, one bloated arm slung round Camilla’s
shoulder, the other dolloped on his seventeen-year-old son’s weighty
shoulder. Behind them Busner could make out the monumental
shelving unit that half blocked the bay window in their front room
… then, now – perhaps forever … the companion of the units in
Ben’s room, and two further ones in the strangulated hernia of
a corridor. This shelving unit – then, as now – presented to the
camera’s avaricious gaze yet more stuff: a tight joinery of seedees,
deeveedees and other seepeeyou disks – the buff grain of piled
newsprint, the shiny clapboard of magazines – stacking crates full
of plastic animals and figurines, cardboard boxes jumbled up with
battered toys – black plastic bags bulging with hanks of old electrical
flex. The photo had been taken ten years before – change, if it
could be called this, had come solely in the form of more stuff …
and less Mark. Associative mating, they called it: obsessive hoarders
attract, mate, and so solder together the hanks of their old electrical
flex, out of which is sparked a still more obsessive hoarder – but
also one who catalogues … Not by anything intelligible, such as
type, genre, artist or subject – instead, the hyperactive little boy,
shackled into his high chair, had crumbled his rusks and sorted
those crumbs according to size, weight, colour, consistency, and
minute gradations of taste and smell discernible only to him, but
nonetheless of such epochal importance that, were they to be disordered
in any way, he screamed and screamed for … aeons. This
had been the first symptom … if that’s what they are his grandfather
noticed. His mother, however, what with her zest for seeking out
reasons to be anxious, had read all the books, and pretty much as
soon as she’d pushed the blob out – putty-faced he was, and with a
visibly depressed fontanelle – began saying, He won’t look at me –
he looks past me. He always looks to the light, Gramps – do you
think he might be an angel, fallen to earth amongst us? And Mark,
an upsetting presence, had chuckled maniacally: Angel? I don’t
think so, Milla – he’s more like an alien. You’re a star man, aren’t
you, Mandinkulus? Chucking the baby under the chin, making
toothless gums click, its father’s expression had been … worrying.
Ever since then, Mandinkulus is what Mark calls both his son and
the supreme leader of the confederation that rules a distant star
system. Mandinkulus belongs to an aggressive and brilliantly innovative
species whose deep-penetration agents – having been long
resident on earth, playing the part of surgeons and anaesthetists –
had, during Mark’s tonsillectomy, aged fifteen … Why did I spout
anatomy at him when he was a child? Because he showed such fascination
for it … implanted a galactic hyper-beam transceiver in his sphenoidal
sinus cavity … It hurts, Daddy – it hurts … enabling them to
give him instructions in real-time, while he could send them back
– by speaking very fast in a hushed and monotonous whisper – what
he called humint. It’d taken a while for Mark’s father to realise that
humint was in fact human intelligence – another irony to further
ironise an experience of paternity which was, taken in toto, ironical.
And never more so than when it came to his eldest son, who, rather
than flamboyantly breaking down like his Uncle Henry, instead
had little bits and pieces of his psyche drilled away by distress
until … he was a pile of psychotic pieces. That his own son’s malady
had been, at least in part, the inspiration for Busner’s principal academic
contribution to the understanding of mental illness wasn’t
ironic – it was and is … monstrous: I sectioned him myself! kept him
under observation and … took bloody notes! The Quantity Theory of
Insanity may have made the names of Zachary M. Busner and his
young colleagues … a reputation I squandered soon enough, but, while
blinkered by my own paradigm, he hadn’t doubted the purely circumstantial
character of Mark’s distress … there simply wasn’t enough
sanity to go around. As the years passed and hospital admissions or
arrests followed high-street fracas with … unflagging regularity, so
Zack had … despaired – what’d I done? Oh, good kind God – what’d
I done? My poor baby … Schizophrenia – if that’s what ailed him –
had made of Busner’s bright darling prattling boy … a dull and
unlovable man. It was Mandinkulus who called the tune – Mark
merely sang it. It was the sheer crassness of the illness that most
appalled his father – the way it crudely remodelled his son’s character,
misshaping all its finest features, so that Mark became a dullard
with … dreadful taste who watched ice dancing, horse racing,
election specials – whatever was on the box for hour upon hour, and
who used a Sainsbury’s shopping bag for an attaché case … I have
some photocopies here of the alien star fleet’s battle order – they’re clean …
they’re fresh … and ate with his mouth agape … Oh, love, love, love –
why did you abandon us? Miriam and Zack, Mark’s hippocratic-hypocritic
parents, never abandoned him, though. Miriam, who
died a couple of years ago … or possibly five, went to Golders Green
Crematorium still convinced he’d be … cured, bless her. They may
well’ve used balled-up pages from the British Journal of Psychiatry
to light her pyre, because she was still searching it for signs of a
breakthrough up until the moment she expired. Poor Miriam!
Who’d carried on practising but never reached any perfection – who
in her latter years had sunk into a slough of semi-senility, only to be
lassoed by the phone line and hauled back into that practice by a
referral. Each new client was her renaissance, and for a few months –
perhaps a year – she’d reconstitute her being around the work …
soul-after-puling-histrionic-arsehole, until eventually her body gave
out. Meanwhile, Zack, despite age and infirmity, kept on hobbling
after Mark, picking up the pieces of his … shattered mind. Oh,
Miriam! he’d loudly sobbed last night – sobs silently now, and
adjured himself: You should’ve gone with her – should’ve been there
at the crematorium … should’ve climbed on to the conveyer belt.
And if not that should’ve put a telephone in there with her, because it
was frankly preposterous that the young woman he’d once made
love to with such carefree abandon was now a heap of cremains …
I shan’t believe it until she calls to confirm. For a long time Busner
viewed Camilla – even Ben – as simply more of these shattered pieces
… Mark and Camilla had got it together in a manner familiar to
his father from decades of observing the strange ways
of the …
severely distressed. One minute the one-bedroom flat they’d found
for their eldest son on the small cottage estate in Enfield had just
the one tenant – who sat there at all hours, and throughout all
seasons, with the thermostat … cranked right up, the old family
picnic rug over his knees, rolling up and sucking down one limp
cigarette after another – the next, arriving armed with tins of
beans and tobacco, and shielded by my chequebook, Zack discovered a
heavily pregnant young woman in the kitchenette. She was wearing
bib-and-braces overalls, and as they’d made … the paltriest of talk,
she’d rearranged the thick coating of grease on the hob with a
wadded Jey-cloth. Soon enough, though, she’d … dropped her
bombshell: My name’s Camilla, she’d said – and, running a small,
scuffed hand over her burgeoning belly, added: And this is your
grandson, Ben, Gramps … It’d been his first Gramps, and he’d
borne it stoically while wondering how the hell a man that full of
haloperidol, Stelazine and Largactil could possibly … get it up. But
then he’d been puzzling over his patients’ sexual misadventures for
decades by then – ever since, in fact, his first psychiatric residency.
Over the years he’d seen female patients fall pregnant by drinking
fluoridated water, dallying with ducks or simply having the misfortune
to be standing in the path of the great sperm-generator
that orbits Betelgeuse shooting out a tightly focused beam of
X-chromosomes … for thousands of light years. Just as no explanation
for their condition was too wacky, so no location was dispiriting
enough to dampen their crazed ardour: he’d come upon patients
engaged in coitus on garage roofs, in water butts and in medical
incinerators. At the other extreme, on one notable occasion, passing
by the cryogenic tissue storage unit in the basement of Heath
Hospital, he’d heard the faint yet unmistakable sounds of mammalian
mating. When they’d been prised apart, all her lips were blue!
While his penis had had to be amputated. Yet if Mark and Camilla’s
coming-together had been mysterious, still more incomprehensible
was their remaining so. Oh, no, no, no, noooooo! Busner had
howled into the stalely fresh confines of Room Five-Twenty the
evening before, as the great reservoir of grief slopped about inside
of him: How many more generations of Busners would be passed
the pathological baton? Looking once more at the Pietá resting
in his palm … give the dog a bone, Zack had chewed over the matter
of autism, along with handfuls of Mister Porter’s Luxury Nibbles, a
jar of which he’d extracted from the minibar and opened … with
no conscious thought whatsoever. Both nibbles and malady were so
moreish … perhaps because autism’s credentials as an organic dysfunction
were even more threadbare than those of schizophrenia.
This may’ve been why both Leo Kanner in Baltimore and Hans
Asperger in Vienna had toyed with the notion that the peculiar
children presented to them by perplexed parents were afflicted
with … a juvenile form of schizophrenia. A wild analysis, indeed –
and one it’d been impossible to sustain for long in the ataraxic face
of the … innumerable facts. Facts that scuttled about all over the
shop – facts that dressed down in the faded denim of hearsay – facts
that refused to form up into verifiable data-sets. Busner, who still
read at least synopses of the clinical literature, had seen theories
come silver and thrashing, and theories tossed back in the sea …
inert, dulling. The Big One always got away – while, from a strictly
scientific point of view, it all … smelt fishy. The conflict between
mentalist and physicalist accounts of psychic dysfunction had been
going on throughout his professional lifetime, yet he’d never seen
anything quite like this: a stealthy purge of all the talking therapies
– their suspect practitioners rounded up at dawn and exiled to the
Siberia of breakfast television and the advice columns of women’s
magazines, leaving the treatment of vulnerable, confused, distressed
patients wholly in the hands of the box-tickers and the pill-pushers,
who in turn appointed clinical psychologists wet behind the bloody
ears to deliver partial explanations of poorly understood psychic
phenomena … as if they were matters of organic fact! He’d considered
the very essence of his metier to be this: not so much the privileging
of mind over matter – for all dualists are, by definition, Divided
Selfs – but convincing his patients … my children, my lovers that
changing their minds did at least … matter – and that such changes
could be effected without chemical assistance or bullying behavioural
modification. What they were now calling Autistic Spectrum
Disorder is – he believes – a canary in the coalmine of the human
condition, its cheeping heralding a decisive shift away from the
human psyche’s attempt to understand itself … by itself to the
conviction that enlightenment could be gained … from the screens.
Really, autism was a misnomer – the so-called selfists were
really … machinists, snipping, then sewing the long threads …
one-zero-zero-zero-one-one-zero-one-one-one-zero-one
… of their own
didginess. Could it be any surprise that theories spun from this stuff
were similarly digital, and so reduced the entire cat’s cradle of
infinitely subtle qualia … bevelled edge of glass to an ugly string of
algorithms? His grandson, the lethally double-barelled Benedict
Whitehouse-Busner, raged against metaphors … They’re lies! …
while breathily believing many things … yet he has no faith – only
the facts will do: There’ve been four studies conducted in the
YouKay, forty-three in the YouEss – a meta-analysis of outcomes by
Professor Subrata Gangooly at Stanford demonstrates conclusively
that between three and four hours of interaction with digital
media devices per day can enhance performance across a range of
cognitive functions – processing, executive, short-term memory –
by factors of between seventeen and twenty-two per cent. See
here … here … and here … Busner hears each dull tink of Ben’s
forefinger against the glass, as his grandson’s strange voice – its
timbre simultaneously breathy and mechanical – a baritone kazoo
blown by an air compressor sounds in his inner-ear, exactly as he
remembers it sounding the previous evening, slumped down on the
tightly tucked counterpane. Then, as now, it came palilaliacally
again: … can enhance performance across a range of cognitive functions
– processing, executive, short-term memory – by factors of between
seventeen and twenty-two per cent –. Stop! he’d cried then – cries
again now with such vehemence that Pete-the-Podium-Restaurant-Manager
ceases his rootling about in the wardrobe, rounds on him
and says, Stop? Stop what, cock? – Stop this relentless verbigeration!
You can’t just reel off figures like that, Ben darli
ng – you need to know a
lot more about the trials’ methodologies before any of this data becomes
meaningful – let alone a basis for a therapeutic approach! They’d been
sitting in Ben’s strange cranny of a bedroom – as they so often
did: the old fool and the silly young savant. Both of them wadded
down at the far end, where the trestle table’s wedged against the
permanently shut window, and his grandson’s plastic bags and crates
full of ring-pulls and ragdolls, cider bottles and shell ornaments,
reach a sort of … crescendo of stuff. This much he remembers: Ben,
hunched over the keyboard and rapping out as he’d tapped,
Promise me, Gramps – promise me you’ll be doing the things I have
instructed you to do and following these instructions … instructed
you to do and following these instructions … Camilla had entered
at this point and picked her way carefully from patch to patch
of vacant floor, the mugs full of tea on her tin tray … slopping.
She was a bitter woman nowadays – trapped in the third act of her
own self-penned … tragic narrative, the living, breathing typing
proof, if any were needed, of the fantasies which can be engendered
in fervid minds by a week-long residential course … in creative-bloody-writing.
To be honest, Gramps, she’d said, I don’t think you
grasp the seriousness of your situation – if you keep on hanging
out with ragamuffins like Simon and Ann, Dan’s going to have
you put away … Put away! Ragamuffins! The fusty locutions his
daughter-in-law employs – well, they summon out of retirement his
own superannuated slang: Oh, will you button your lip, Milla! And
place him in the same old steamer trunk as her parents – whom he’s
met several times over the years, most horribly at their children’s
bizarre wedding, performed at the Register Office in Judd Street.
Busner types them as … county people, the Pettigrew-Whitehouses
– and, although they’re a decade or so his juniors, Busner’s queer
position as the de facto father to their grown-up grandson means he
cannot stop … looking up at them with contemptuous, juvenile eyes.
They are, he imagines, the master and mistress of a wet-nosed
retriever, the drivers of a mud-spattered estate car. The organisers of
charity carol concerts – somewhere in the draughty depths of their
