by Will Self
With the nurse, too, I forbore from backchat: my addiction was an assassination squad, roaming the bombed-out streets in a West Belfast of the mind. I’d got my friend Dave to smuggle some cocaine on to the ward, and together we’d shot it up in the toilet. Paranoid, he’d split right away, leaving me with my grazed throat and revving heart to endure the agonies of an unanticipated ward round: the consultant, wading between the limpid beds, the stork’s plumage of his white coat parted at the breast, dipped down to peck at my wrist, yet seemed quite indifferent to my Max Roach pulse. No jazzer he.
It was my long-suffering GP who had referred me to Busner. She was understandably fed up with the house calls she had to make on my behalf: trips to the bathrooms I had locked myself inside, and where I lay on the mat, mewling as the intestinal reef knots of opiate withdrawal tightened inside me.
‘I think you’ll get on,’ she had said. ‘He’s a very, um, unusual man. I don’t expect he’ll want to treat you in any orthodox fashion – just go up to the hospital and have a chat with him.’
There were steely-green filing cabinets in Busner’s office and a chequerboard of institutional carpet tiling. The wall-mounted shelves were piled with everything from Wilhelm Reich to ‘Just William’. The hardwood kneehole desk lugged in from another era, the fronts of the shelves, the windowsills – in fact every available horizontal surface was blobbed with fossilized shits. Later, Busner told me that the coprolite collection had begun as a ‘juvenile riposte to the founding father of psychoanalysis’s own rather more aesthetic bibelots, his ancient tabletop statuary, but then ... Well, it all rather got out of hand.’
On the walls there were four ‘imaginary topographies’, hefty clay bas-reliefs that I later learnt had been given to Busner by Joseph Beuys after he had treated the artist – I assume, successfully – for a drug-induced psychosis. They were ugly and rather threatening things, heavy tablets scored with miniature ravines and pinnacles. They distorted the scale of the cluttered and stuffy room – Busner had disabled the air conditioning because he couldn’t bear the noise. The view from the window was also disorienting: the gravelled roof of a wing of the hospital, upon which hunched four large rectangular water tanks – or were they, perhaps, very little?
I was aware that, together with Harold Ford, Busner had been one of the originators of the Quantity Theory of Insanity, and so assumed that he would be impressed if I brought up a half-digested splurge of Foucault with chunks of Bataille floating in it. He wasn’t dismissive, only cleared the ground between us, sweeping away the clutter of identity so that we faced one another unadorned.
We must have talked for fifty minutes or so minted lamb;* then Busner said, ‘I’m afraid my caseload is such that I won’t be able to see you on any kind of regular basis. Still, I’ve enjoyed chatting to you and I hope you have to me. I don’t want you to feel rejected and if you’d like to pop in now and again to see me you’ll always find my door open.’ He pointed at the institutional plank, its Judas window reinforced with steel mesh; it was, indeed, ajar, although I found out later this was due to severe warping.
Before we parted Busner gave me a Riddle set. This was the ‘enquire within’ game that had made the psychiatrist simultaneously a household name and a laughing stock among his peers. Alone, or with a few select friends and a bottle of wine; a scented candle lit – or smelling only of your own desperation – Riddle players were encouraged to arrange the brightly coloured acrylic tiles in patterns they found pleasing, or suggestive, or unsettling – essentially, the thing was a DIY Rorschach test, the key for which had been written by the great soul doctor himself.
Everyone had played the Riddle at some time or other in the late 1970s; it was a hula-hoop for the mind and, like all such crazes, it soon became impossibly hackneyed; lost Riddle tiles lay trapped beneath the carpet underlay of the entire culture. ‘I’m solving the Riddle!’ – which Busner mouthed on a television quiz programme where he appeared in a grid of similar celebrities, answering facile questions – became one of the catchphrases of the era – and not in a good way. Still, I thanked him for the gift and tucked it into the side pocket of whatever Oxfam jacket I was wearing that month. Forty-five minutes later I was in a walk-up flat in Camden Town trying to barter the thing for a five-quid bag of smack.
For all the years I had taken the lift to the eighth floor of the hospital I had continued to find Busner’s door open – once it was right off its hinges, laid across trestles and being planed down by a maintenance man. Busner stood in the doorway, rolling and unrolling the frayed end of his tie, watching the man work while speculating on what ailed the door as if it were a particularly unresponsive patient. Nevertheless, the next time I came it still wasn’t pulled to.
Busner said he didn’t mind the malfunctioning door – it reminded him of the 1960s, when, shortly after qualifying, he had started a ‘concept house’ in Willesden, where therapists and patients had lived together communally with no distinctions between them. While Busner had long since enacted professional closure, abandoning his conviction that mental pathologies were in reality semantic confusions, he still counselled an inter-personal approach – even when liberally dishing out Largactil.
Our own long-term therapeutic relationship certainly had a playful character; in the nearly three decades his door had been open to me, Busner had sent me for psychotherapy with a succession of colleagues. There had been an anally retentive orthodox Freudian analyst whose consulting room was a garage conversion in Dollis Hill. There was a plump cat-furred humanist in West Hampstead, whose ability to feel my pain seemed to entail her crying a lot about her own. There was a media-friendly intellectual with jet-black kiss curls and the foam-rubber voice of the insincere, who encouraged me to view my life as a narrative that might be rewritten – by him. Then there was the group therapy, the rebirthing, and even a shamanic purification rite conducted in a polythene hogan off the A303. All the while Busner lurked in the background, ready to step forward whenever my condition deteriorated.
Over the years he must – at one time or more – have prescribed me most of the neuro-pharmacopoeia, from anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives, through tranquilizers and anti-psychotics, to opiate and alcohol blockers, lithium and methadone. On one occasion he smuggled me in the dead of night into Friern Barnet Hospital. There, using equipment dusty with desuetude – the rubber leads perished – he administered electroconvulsive therapy to me. During the aeons-long seconds when the current surged through my cortex, I broke the restraints and surged up from the couch, then plunged through the fire-resistant ceiling tiles and flew into the suburban night. Up there I was a superhero, with no mission other than to curvet above the rain-slicked roofs.
I was not insensible to the possibility that Busner was exploiting me. After all, he had always been frank about what ailed me and my prognosis, saying early on: ‘Essentially, yours is a mimetic malaise. You have an addictive personality, certainly, also a borderline personality disorder. You are a depressive, and, without certain strategies that you’ve devised for yourself, you would undoubtedly be crippled by phobias. Any treatments that I advocate for you are not to alleviate the symptoms of these conditions – which I regard as pretty much incurable – but to legitimate them.’
At least, I think that’s what he said – it’s certainly the kind of thing he would, as is: ‘Look on the bright side – your strategies work, by and large; mine will too, and your psyche is ... um, ebullient and productive. I’m not some potterer in the allotment of the mind, offering to weed out your hysterical misery and replace it with commonplace unhappiness – for you this is impossible; the best you can hope for is a rollercoaster of despair and euphoria. Still, I like rollercoasters – don’t you?’
But what was it in for him? I’ve no doubt that like the majority of shrinks he was a psycho-empathetic voyeur, who, to begin with, clutched the safety bar alongside me and screamed along for the ride. Could he also have foreseen the curious creative symbiosis that would grow u
p between us? For, just as I incorporated him – thinly veiled – into my novels and short stories, so he made use of me in the numerous articles and case studies he published.* Our collaboration – if that’s what it was – was a greater constant in my life than any other relationship, possibly for Busner as well; during it we were both married (in his case remarried), divorced and married again. Between us we added six more heads to the human herd: Busner had twin boys with his third wife, Caroline Byng, although he already had several grown-up children, one of whom, X, was a cabinet minister in the first Blair government.
Mythic skies, empurpled cloud ruptured above the cruising grounds of West Heath – a crumpled tissue snagged by a limp twig. The façade of the burnt-out Chinese restaurant at the junction of Belsize Lane and Haverstock Hill remained soot-stained for years – some people said the Tongs had done it, and the blackness under the gouged-out windows did suggest the agony of a tortured soul. Strange miasmas pooled in the hollow of Southend Green, where, when I first began visiting Busner, old Jewish émigrés still played chess at the Prompt Corner Café, slamming down the levers on their time clocks. Over it all loomed the vast hospital, its access ramps rearing up from the rooftops, while the Classic Cinema smarmed against its flank.
In there, one wet winter night, I saw Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing on its first run. My date was psychotic – something I was too wasted to realize until the feature had started, and she began burbling merrily decoction of dog-eared damp Penguin classics, as she ran her sweaty hands over my face, tweaking my nose, pinching my cheeks and poking her fingers into my dry mouth. It was by no means the last time that sort of thing happened to me.
What I’m trying to say is that I accepted all of this, not unthinkingly, or out of passivity – but joyfully. Busner remained for me the fixed point of a turning world, so that no matter how many times I walked the quarter-mile from Belsize Park tube, it was a homecoming: I may have wandered from city to city, but Laius remained right where he’d always been, playing with his fossilized shits while he dispensed Riddles, waiting to be killed afresh. I may have been in distant lands, yet in my mind’s eye I accompanied him on his ward round: a long dolly down one corridor, then through the core of the building, then back through the women’s ward on the far side. It was a technically demanding shot – especially before the perfection of the steadicam – but the absence of cutting meant that nothing diminished the impact, when, at the very end, the camera panned 180 degrees to reveal: me, enormous, swathed in grey gabardine, moon face cratered with debauchery, lurching up from my uneasy chair and heading towards that always open door.
It was a Tuesday and hot in the tube. Cans of human stewed in their own farts. I used to observe the anonymity that crowded in on me and at least see its feeling face. Not any more. Now I saw the features ageing would impose on all these suburbonauts as they rumbled through the clayey void; they were wearing not space helmets – but time ones. It was hotter still above ground, and the plane trees in the triangular plot beside St Stephen’s were sticky with sap and fret-worked by caterpillars. I stood, pissing, hidden by a redbrick buttress of the derelict church, then climbed back gingerly over the railings and continued downhill to the hospital.
Busner must, I thought, be seventy by now – yet to me he appeared unchanged. For as long as I’d known him he’d been a little overweight, yet his fleshy face, with its suggestion of jowls, resisted wrinkling. It seemed I had been doing the deteriorating for both of us. He was standing with his back to me when I squeezed through the door – in his shirtsleeves, with a Vaseline sheen on his fat neck as he rearranged his coprolites.
‘How has the CBT with Shiva Mukti gone?’ he asked without preamble, or even turning.
‘OK, I s’pose.’ I looked about for a chair – they were all piled high with ring binders, loose papers, and even some dry cleaning still perving in its polythene. I began clearing one.
‘He’s a well-meaning fellow, Shiva,’ Busner said; ‘perhaps a little prosaic.’
‘He shot films of me while I was in my ... obsessive phases; then played them back to me.’
‘Did it help?’
‘Um, help ... well, with film maybe, and a little bit with reality as well.’
‘A little bit, eh – how about the survivor guilt?’
I didn’t want to talk about the events on Foula; I could still see the human stain on the rocks below the Kame, the wheeling gulls and the plastic trousers – a speck on the swell.
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said testily, ‘but the fact is I haven’t written anything serious since last September and I’ve got mouths to feed. I’ve an idea for an investigative piece and I’d like to pursue it.’
‘And this involves a trip?’
He was behind his desk and at the tie again, rolling and unrolling. I’d once asked him how long, on average, it took him to twirl one to shreds. He said nylon ones lasted the longest – but he hated the feel of them. Silk was pretty good – but too expensive. Wool he found most comforting – and mohair in particular. ‘It’s a sort of carding, really,’ he told me. ‘I’m straightening my own neurons and glia, smoothing out my cortex so that I can spin it into threads of thought.’ Frankly, it was a little rich that such a man believed he could help anyone else with their neuroses.
‘Yes, I want to walk to Hollywood.’
‘All the way?’
‘Don’t be facetious – you know my methodology: I’ll walk from my house to Heathrow – probably via Pinewood Studios where they’re shooting the new James Bond film – then I’ll fly to LAX, and walk from there on to Hollywood.’
‘Dangerous territory for you, I should’ve thought – given the events of last year.’
‘That was different, I, I was caught unawares – I didn’t have an objective.’
‘I see, and what’s your objective now, precisely?’
I didn’t like the way this was going; it wasn’t exactly that Busner was being hostile – it was more that his tone was off, his voice pitched a shade too low. And, now that I stopped to consider it, wasn’t there something sinister about the way he hadn’t aged over the years? He wasn’t merely familiar to me – I knew every hair that sprouted from the tragus of his annoyingly complicated ear – but overly familiar; his mannerisms were exaggerated, his coughs studiously rehearsed. It seemed he was an accomplished actor, called upon to play the part of Dr Zack Busner.
I swept this useless paranoia aside: I needed him to share my enthusiasm.
‘I want to find out who killed film – for film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age. I don’t know if film was murdered – but I suspect there’s a killer out there!’
My melodramatic words hung in the air – THERE’S A KILLER OUT THERE! – meaning-motes aglow in a sunbeam projected from between the louvres.
‘Ahem,’ Busner cleared his throat, frog in Froggy. ‘I see. There may be something in what you say – change is definitely in the, ah, air – new media, streaming, that sort of thing ...’ His fingers fluttered so as to suggest he was entirely au fait. ‘But why now? I’ve never known you take any especial interest in film.’
‘Me?’ I snapped back. ‘I’ve been a film critic – I’ve even written a screenplay ... well, most of one. You, on the other hand, probably don’t even know there’s a screenwriters’ strike on, and I can safely say that in all the hundreds of hours I’ve spent talking to you I’ve never heard you reference the movies once. Once!’
He was unfazed by my anger.
‘It’s all those credits that get to me,’ he remarked, swivelling to face the scuzzy window. ‘You know the kind of thing: Fifth Assistant Director, Manuel P. Zlotnik; Personal Assistant to Miss Pearlstein, Carol Goodenough – then, marching up the screen, entire squads of carpenters, electricians, best boys, gaffers, gofers and key grips, to say nothing of the special effects technicians ... In my day all it took to make a film was Will Hay and the Fat Boy ... Anyway’ – he rotated back to
face me – ‘I know you like walking, but why walk to Hollywood? Los Angeles is hardly pedestrian-friendly.’
‘I – I, well, to be frank I think it’s safer that way – it’ll mean I can slip beneath their radar.’
‘They have radar? And there’s a “they”?’
‘Obviously I’m not suggesting there’s a conspiracy.’ I was wary of appearing paranoid; tolerant as Busner was of my more exaggerated phases, he’d never made any secret of the fact that he would section me if he saw fit. ‘I’m speaking figuratively: windscreens are screens, after all – or lenses. Vehicular transport is either a cinema that you sit in passively while the world is shown to you, or else, if you drive, you’re operating a camera, directing the movie of your journey.’
‘I see.’ He was looking at me vacantly, but I blanked him right back and continued:
‘If I want to discover who – or what – did for film I’ll be better off walking. Walking is so much slower than film – especially contemporary Hollywood movies, with their stuttering film grammar of split-second shots – and it isn’t framed, when you walk you’re floating in a fishbowl view of the world. There can’t possibly be any editing: no dissolves, no cuts, no fades, no split-screens – and, best of all, no special effects, no computer-cheated facsimiles of the world. You see, if I walk to Hollywood I’ll be creeping along outside the ambit of the filmic – like a Vietcong insurgent tunnelling through the jungle – and they won’t be able to see me coming!’
