Bedlam Burning (21 page)

‘What?'

‘You perhaps feel resentful that a member of a dark race has dominion over you.'

I was not stupid enough then, and I'm certainly not stupid enough now, to believe that I'm entirely free from prejudice, racial or
otherwise, but as far as I could see, such problems as I'd had with Kincaid weren't about race. Also, in the current situation, it seemed he was having more of a problem with me than I was having with him.

I said, ‘I don't think so.'

‘So,' Alicia replied thoughtfully, ‘is it simply the fact that he's an authority figure?'

Yes, I did have the odd problem with authority, but who doesn't? The best reply I could come up with was, ‘I don't think filling the library with books makes me that much of a rebel.'

Kincaid and Alicia conceded that as a hypothetical argument this had merit, but they continued to behave as though I'd done something terrible. Kincaid started pulling books out of the boxes and sent me to fetch a second load. By the time I got back, the contents of the first two boxes were spread across the floor and Kincaid and Alicia were picking up books at random and scrutinising them.

‘Is this a good book?' Alicia asked.

She held up a book called
Lone Riders of the High Mesas
. Its cover showed snaggly cowboys, anthropomorphic cacti, a yolky yellow sunset.

‘I've never read it,' I said.

‘Even so.'

‘You can't judge a book by looking at its cover,' I said. ‘And beggars can't be choosers.'

These old clichés made me feel comfortably reassured, and only offended Alicia mildly.

‘To be fair to you, Gregory,' Kincaid said, ‘there is a psychological concept, rather outmoded these days, called bibliotherapy.'

‘Yes?'

‘Using texts as a therapeutic tool,' said Kincaid.

‘But surely, Dr Kincaid,' Alicia butted in, ‘those texts must be very carefully selected by the therapist for each specific patient. We can't simply take pot luck.'

‘You mean patients can't just read whatever they want?' I said.

‘Of course not,' Alicia insisted. ‘They might want something that would exacerbate their condition. Supposing you were a belonephobic and you read the
Naked Lunch
?'

‘Belonephobic?'

‘Fear of needles,' she explained.

‘Well, if I was a belonephobic I suspect I'd give
Naked Lunch
a fairly wide berth,' I said.

‘But you wouldn't know what it was about until you'd started reading, would you?'

‘Maybe not, but the moment I started I'd know and then I'd stop. That's the great thing about books. If you don't like what you're reading you don't have to carry on. It's not like being strapped into your seat in front of a film with your eyes and ears pinned open. You just close the book and it stops.'

Kincaid didn't want this debate going on in his office and he waved me away to fetch a third load of books. When I got back this time I thought he must have gone mad. He appeared to be systematically mutilating the books, tearing off covers, ripping out pages, while Alicia looked on admiringly.

‘What's going on?' I asked.

‘Dr Kincaid is making sure the books are fit for consumption by the patients.'

‘Censoring them?'

‘Oh come on, Gregory, don't be pathetic,' Alicia sneered.

‘Then what?'

Kincaid broke off from his page tearing. He looked irritated.

‘I suppose it's time,' he said.

‘Yes,' Alicia sighed, ‘I suppose it is.'

‘All right, Gregory,' said Kincaid. ‘Apparently this is the moment when I need to explain the basis of Kincaidian Therapy to you.'

From looking irritated Kincaid became suave, perfectly at ease, the public man. He knew exactly what he was going to say to me. Perhaps he'd said it many times before, to individuals and groups far more knowledgeable or sceptical or hostile than me. And Alicia, who must surely have heard it many times before too, gave the impression that she never tired of listening to these wise words.

‘I shall be speaking in layman's terms for your benefit,' Kincaid said.

I took note of the insult, but what was I going to say, ‘No, no, please talk in medical jargon that I don't understand'?

‘Let me ask you, Gregory,' he started, ‘what do you see when you look out of the window?' He held up his hand to make sure I didn't answer. ‘It's a question you might answer in any number of ways.
You might say you see the grounds, the tennis court, the writer's hut. You may see one or two of the patients, or a member of staff. Perhaps you see trees and sky. Perhaps you see sunshine or clouds. It probably all looks very familiar to you by now. Perhaps you see nothing remarkable. You might look out and say you see nothing at all.'

I wouldn't have said that, but I didn't contradict him.

‘But what happened when you went into town today? You saw things of a different order. You saw advertising hoardings, cinema posters. You may have looked in a shop window and seen television sets. You might well have seen a newspaper or magazine. You might have seen some boy wearing a T-shirt with the image of a pop star on it. You obviously went into a bookshop and saw any number of jacket designs, illustrations, author photographs. The number of images you saw in the outside world was infinitely greater than the number of images you could see in the clinic.'

‘I think I get the point,' I said.

‘I wonder if you do. Let me put it another way: how many madmen have you seen in your life? And how many madmen have you seen on television or in films? How did you know they were mad? Could you tell simply by looking? Did they have wild hair and rolling eyes? What were the signs? Did they dress like Napoleon? How do you know what Napoleon looked like? Have you ever seen Napoleon in the flesh or have you only ever seen pictures?' He stared at me, demanding an answer. ‘Well, have you?'

‘No, of course I've never seen Napoleon in the flesh.'

‘But if you'd come in here wearing the hat, your hand tucked into your tunic, we'd all have known you were dressed as Napoleon and we'd all have known you were mad. We would have read the signs, the semiotic, if you will. Am I making myself clear?'

‘Well, up to a point,' I said.

‘Look, Gregory, I have no desire to be biblical, but the truth is we're talking about images here, graven images. Not false images of God, but false images of the world. The human environment is awash with created images, and they get in the way. They cause confusion. People are bombarded with pictures, photographs, illustrations, cartoons, comics, films, television. And in some cases, in all too many cases, this bombardment is literally driving people insane.'

He smiled with grim satisfaction.

‘It wasn't always like this,' he continued. ‘Once you saw what you saw. You saw what was there. There was the thing or there was nothing. The world was the world. It was itself, not an image of itself, not a cheap copy. And quite simply things were better then. People were healthier, happier, saner. And why? To put it crudely perhaps, because what goes in must come out, you only get back what you put in. Looking at my patients I see that their output is scrambled. But why wouldn't it be when their input is similarly scrambled?

‘Our mission at the Kincaid Clinic is simple yet not at all easy. What we have to do is control the input, stop the flow of images. Turn off the tap. Let the dog see the rabbit. The real rabbit, not a picture of the rabbit. Am I making myself clear?'

‘I think so,' I said.

‘What we have here are ten patients displaying divergent forms of madness. What they have in common is that they've all seen too many images. As a first principle, therefore, we protect them from these sources of madness.

‘We're not against visual stimulation
per se
, you understand. We don't object to our patients looking at the view from a window, but we don't let them look at paintings or photographs of views from windows. It's fine for our patients to look at flowers, but not at still lifes of flowers.'

‘Or at the labels on tin cans,' I said, as a little something fell into place.

‘Quite. So we create an environment that is free from images. No television, no films, no picture books, no glossy magazines, no flowery shirts or wallpaper, and so on.'

‘And newspapers with all the photographs cut out.'

‘You're very observant. I suppose that goes with being a writer. Now, I have been accused of philistinism,' Kincaid said. ‘But that won't stick. We aren't against the visual arts, just against the
representational
visual arts. Anything Islamic is no problem whatsoever. Jackson Pollock, absolutely fine. Rothko perhaps. Hockney definitely not. Colour Field certainly, portraiture most certainly not; the Cubists I'm not so sure about, but I think it's better safe than sorry. And frankly, what's a little philistinism in the cause of such a great good? And, in any case, this is where you come in.'

‘Yes?'

‘Yes. It seems to me that the dilemma I've outlined here is at the heart of
The Wax Man
. No?'

I grunted non-committally, allowing that this might be one possible interpretation.

‘You see, the most obvious objection to Kincaidian Therapy is that it is simply protectionist. It keeps the patients away from images and this brings about a great improvement. But when they return to the outside world they're back where they started. We have to do something to make them less vulnerable to images, to give them a way of protecting themselves. We need to use language to do this: language, the last great bulkhead against this anarchy of images. We stop the input of images, we substitute an input of language. Then we reverse the poles; we get the patients to create a bulkhead of their own, through their own writing. Yes?'

‘A bulkhead,' I said.

‘I knew you would understand.'

Did I understand? I wasn't sure if I did or not. I was well aware of my ignorance in matters psychological, and yet this description of Kincaidian Therapy sounded like pretty thin stuff to me. I didn't say that, naturally. And I didn't argue. I wouldn't have known how.

‘I know what you're thinking,' Kincaid said. ‘You're thinking it all sounds too good to be true. Trust us, Gregory, before long you'll come to see that's the whole point.'

‘Yes, you will,' Alicia agreed.

‘Good,' I said.

‘Yes, very good, Gregory,' Kincaid added. ‘I knew the concepts of Kincaidian Therapy wouldn't be beyond your grasp.'

Was he mocking me? I couldn't tell any more. Like any good liberal I was uncomfortable with the deluge of pap that issued from what we then called the mass media. A few of us had read Marshall McLuhan, and tried on the notion that the medium was the message and that our society was about to be retribalised, but to the limited extent that we understood what he was on about, I don't think many of us really took him very seriously. Even if we loved certain types of rock music and movies and television, most of us still thought the world was getting crasser and more absurd by the minute, and that the mass media, image-laden as it was, had a lot to answer for.

So yes, it did sound as though Kincaid might be on to something. Sort of. The diagnosis didn't sound unreasonable. On the other hand,
Kincaidian Therapy sounded suspiciously like rather a grand name for what amounted to no more than staying indoors and turning off the TV set. And, apparently, for tearing the jackets off books, and ripping out all the illustrations.

As for whether a few creative-writing exercises from me were going to be enough to enable the patients to protect themselves in the wicked, illustrated world beyond the clinic, I had my doubts. A part of me was extremely relieved that Kincaidian Therapy didn't involve anything more sinister, that it didn't involve orgies, for instance, but I did wonder if I'd been told the full story, and I certainly still wondered what the patients got up to in Kincaid's office when the blinds were down, and in Alicia's too, for that matter.

‘You'll need time to digest all I've told you,' Kincaid said. ‘You'll want to repack the books I've already dealt with and transfer them to the library while I continue with the rest.'

I wasn't sure I wanted to do that at all, but I did it. The work was hard and tedious but I was happy to get out of Kincaid's office and out of his presence. What Kincaid had just told me was surprising and yet somehow terribly obvious. Perhaps I should have worked it out for myself. Why hadn't I noticed the complete absence of images in the clinic? I felt the way I did when I was first told about sex: it was strange and improbable and yet it seemed to explain everything. But then, as you thought about it some more, it became stranger and more improbable than ever and it raised at least as many questions as it answered.

One of the most obvious questions that came to mind, regarding Kincaidian Therapy rather than sex, was whether or not the ten inmates of the clinic had seen more images than anybody else. If the whole world was being driven mad by too many images, then why were these ten
particularly
mad? Why wasn't all the world universally and equally mad? Surely madness had more diverse and complicated causes than this. And if a single diagnosis seemed suspect, how much more suspect was a single form of treatment? But then again, what did I know?

It was late in the evening before Kincaid had mutilated the last of the books and later still before I'd transported them all to the library. I got them out of the boxes and put them on the shelves in no particular order. I'd sort and alphabetise them the next day, maybe even get a patient or two to help me. I wondered if one of them
would want to take on the role of librarian. I was knackered by the time I'd finished, but I sat down at the library table, looked up at the filled shelves and I felt a certain amount of pride. I'd done a good job. Obviously the books were a strange collection, made stranger by having pages torn out and covers removed, but they were much, much better than nothing.