Phone

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