The Weight of Numbers (25 page)

Eyes straining against the dying light – he hates, and will hold off as long as possible, the yellow claustrophobia of electric light and blackout blinds – Pál slots and bolts the couch together. The piece has been manufactured precisely according to his instructions. How delightful it is, to have his idea come to life like this in his hands. He turns a brass wheel. The back of the couch rises. Another wheel: the pads supporting the legs articulate smoothly downwards; the headrest inches forward. Another: the pads supporting the torso part and curve to accommodate the larger patient. Pál sighs. Bliss. He casts around for the canvas bag containing the restraints.

Though he went along to that mews house in Notting Hill armed with several original ideas regarding the immobilization of his clients, in the end he left these details pretty much to the craftsman's discretion. The chap was astonishingly expert in these matters. In his bright, chilly studio, on high stools beside an angled drafting table, the two men contemplated the design in silence. Pinned to the table, the shape of
Pál's couch-to-be seemed to hover in front of the paper. It had been rendered in an exploded orthographic projection which suggested something sleeker and more streamlined than a mere piece of furniture. A space plane, perhaps, from the
Flash Gordon
serial.

‘A sheepskin lining will provide security and comfort,' the craftsman opined. He was a big, liquid man with a big, liquid face.

Pál wasn't sure what to say.

The man bit his lips, then let go; the lips emerged, wet and red, and – has he got this right? – did the man actually
wink
at him?

‘Compression fractures of the spine are my biggest concern,' Pál explained, confused.

The man closed his eyes and trembled. ‘Yes. Yes.'

‘Then there is the matter of the gat.'

The man's eyes sprang open. ‘The what?'

‘The gat. Or something, normally it is a gat – is this the right word? Excuse me. A rubber piece to bite on. To stop from swallowing the tongue.'

‘Oh. Oh, yes. Yes.'

Another silence.

‘Why—?' More biting of his lips. ‘May I ask what will, ah,
occasion
the, ah—'

‘The application of electricity.'

The man's enthusiasm for Pál's work was very gratifying. ‘Oh, yes! Yes!'

Pál takes the straps out of the bag and reads the accompanying notes. Eccentric as he was, that strange jelly of a man has done an excellent job. It is no laughing matter, this business of immobilization: there's precious little point to Pál's therapy if his every other client ends up in a wheelchair.

Pál threads a braided calico tape experimentally through metal loops on either side of the headrest. Won't this strap interfere with the placement of the electrodes? Ah, no, he understands now, this part crosses
that
, comes
over
the skull to this attachment point here…

Pál, shaking his head, succumbs to a little light melancholy. Here he is, pioneering the most exciting advance in psychiatry this century, and all he can think about is how to lace these silly straps. How can a mere
couch
excite him, he who has the secrets of the human psyche to explore?

Life is like this, he has found. Petty details moss over and obscure the dramatic features of one's life. Pál puts down the bag – it really is too dark to work now – and climbs on board the couch. It is firm, cool and comfortable. Good. So now, perhaps, it is time to think about other things.

Closing his eyes, he wills himself back to the moment that ought to define him, and which, in dark moments, he replays behind his eyes, reminding himself of who and what he wants to be.

He remembers the morning von Meduna first administered camphor to a human patient.

For four years the man had barely moved. A catatonic stupor had rendered him little better than a vegetable. Extreme measures seemed justified, if not positively welcome: anything to break the tension. The man's mother, ashen-faced, had gravely bestowed her consent.

Pál recalls the forty interminable minutes while they waited for the seizure. The terrible tension in von Meduna's face.

It came, at last, with a terrible violence.

Steadily, von Meduna tested the patient's reflexes, he examined the pupils of his eyes, he spoke as steadily as he could. No one was fooled. Meduna's sweat spattered everyone and everything.

Pál remembers von Meduna's achievement chiefly through the look on the great man's face as the seizure took hold: a look that stared the world straight in the eye and would not look away – no, never – not until the world itself was changed.

As for the patient – what does Pál remember of the patient?

Very little. Only one little memory survives. But such a one! Pál chuckles to recall the chap's friendly little wave, a few days later, as he trotted, fully recovered, down the steps of the hospital in his borrowed
clothes and into the arms of his mother.

At the open door of Pál's consulting room, a stifled cry.

Pál sits up.

Another, sharply indrawn breath.

Miriam stands in the doorway. ‘I—' she begins, fighting for breath, ‘I thought no one…' She is blinking against the last of the daylight. The sun is very low now, it is shining in her eyes.

‘Hello, Miriam.' Pál slides smoothly from the couch. Miriam, he has decided, is a good-looking woman, if only she would learn to relax a little. He tries his warmest smile.

Miriam raises her hands to cover the blue bow at her neck. From where she is standing, Pál's smile is invisible. He is reduced to a silhouette. His solid shadow rises and straightens against the blood-red window, the rust-red room. His form is as distinct and mobile as a spillage of ink on a metal plate. Pál indicates the couch. ‘Miriam, dear Miriam, would you care to experience my device?'

With a scream she barely bothers to stifle, Miriam runs back to her office and slams the door.

‘“Poofter! Nancy! Queen!”'

Mr Anthony Burden shrinks in his chair as he recalls his shame.

A year has passed. It is the summer of 1943, and Pál finds himself engaged in work far different from the sort he expected from his London practice. Arriving in England, he had imagined wards of raving lunatics, bomb neurotics, crazed suicides and padded rooms. The mass panic the authorities expected has never come to pass. The people of London, through a combination of denial and habituation, have turned their backs on the Blitz: ‘Business as usual'. Such stray neurotics as pass Pál's way are usually referred to him by interested sponsors at University College Hospital, down the road, and he has an uneasy sense that he is their circus dog; they want to see what tricks he can perform.

At least this chap has referred himself. Still, Pál wonders, who exactly is this Anthony Burden? Does he really want to be expending his professional energies on the sort of frayed intellectual that haunts the Society's library?

From Mr Burden's own account it is impossible to understand why he was never called up. He says that he ‘tinkers'. That he is ‘a tinkerer'. Eventually the words Dollis Hill crop up in conversation. Pál, a stranger here with no great appetite for general knowledge, does not understand their significance at first. Later, following some phoned enquiries, he establishes that his client works at the Post Office Research Station. So Burden is no mere ‘tinkerer'.

‘Oh, you know, I have these schemes, good enough that I can flannel my way through meetings. They never get me anywhere, they're not important.' Melancholics churn out this self-abnegating rubbish by the yard. In truth, Burden is an expert in telecommunications, in wireless telegraphy, in switching systems. This is why his occupation is reserved.

Loránt Pál records his enthusiasm in his notes:
‘The man is an ASSET.'

For Pál, no shirker, the treatment of Anthony Burden now acquires a special urgency. Yes, he would like to see more of him. Yes, he will be happy to arrange further appointments. For this will be no mere ‘treatment'. This, at long last, will be war work!

Pál writes in his journal:

AB presents the classic symptoms of melancholia. He is agitated. He is underweight. He cannot smile. Already there are manifest signs of the patient's lack of personal care. His appearance is dishevelled beyond even the generous norms of English eccentricity. His face is a mass of razor cuts (first hints of hesitation marks?). His fingernails are black. The hands, sooted, unwashed, tremble in his lap.

Anthony Burden gulps and sobs – a little boy's stereotypical boo-hoo. Impossible to gauge what actual emotions underlie such a display. ‘She
knew
!' Really it is very embarrassing. ‘She never even saw my face, she never even cared to see my face, and still she
knew
!'

Thrown out of gear by the astonishing lewdness of Mr Burden's tale, the youthful therapist instinctively tries to make it less than it is. ‘Perhaps she meant it as a joke,' he offers. A friendly act, and of absolutely no therapeutic use to his client whatsoever.
Concentrate!
Pál admonishes himself.
Concentrate. You are new here. Every client is a test. Even this one.

‘A joke?' Anthony Burden echoes, doubtfully.

‘Yes. A joke. Maybe she was teasing you. I mean—' Pál can only plough on, with false jocularity. ‘You did in the end decide to try and take her up the, ah,
passage
…' He feels a blush spread across his cheeks, hot enough to prickle. He wishes he felt better prepared for this. It's not as though he wasn't forewarned. When a previously buttoned-down civil servant blunders raving into an ARP patrol in the middle of the night without his trousers…

In a small, intense voice: ‘This makes me a faggot, doesn't it?'

Pál weaves his hands about in front of his chest like an Anglican priest explaining the Trinity. ‘Um,' he says. He knows next to nothing about the invert personality, and cares even less. ‘Ah,' he says.

In fact, Pál feels a great deal of sympathy for Anthony Burden. The man's sexual indiscretion was unpardonable, of course, but to have your co-respondent turn around afterwards and look into your heart's deepest, darkest place! To have her drag that repressed Thing, pallid and blinking, into the harsh light of day:
‘Poofter! Nancy! Queen!'

If only the woman had had the good sense to keep her mouth shut. Then Mr Burden might even have had his little peccadillo with nothing worse to follow. It was a strange time, after all, in a city made stranger by bombing. He could have put his sordid little knee-trembler behind him – or found a more conventional way to satisfy his taste for
anonymous encounters. The red-lit room. The sink in the corner. Money on the table. As things stand…

These are wild times for electroconvulsive therapy. It has only just wrestled free, strongest of the litter, from out of that slew of somatic therapies – malarial fever therapy, prolonged sleep therapy, insulin coma therapy – whose false dawns brightened many a psychiatrist's breakfast-table reading during the twenties and thirties. ECT works, but no one knows why. The relative therapeutic benefits of electrical dosage and strength of convulsion have yet to be established. The philosophical foundation is missing.

In this atmosphere, it is inevitable that Pál, though he has no great respect for the work of Lucio Bini, will be influenced by that pioneer's theories. What other resources has he? Following the precedent set by the Italian's 1942 ‘theory of annihilation', Loránt Pál considers himself a sort of mental hygienist, using electricity as a loofah to slough from the grey enamelled brain the scum of past mistakes and long-held misapprehensions.

It is clear to him, after a few preliminary consultations, that Anthony Burden is a sexual invert. A homosexual, in other words. It takes no
a priori
assumption on Pál's part to establish that this affliction lies at the heart of Burden's spiralling melancholy.

Now ECT's efficacy as a treatment for melancholy is beyond question. Six to eight treatments have, in Pál's experience, always sufficed to bring about an improvement. The sixth session's unclouding effect can be positively miraculous.

Some patients, however, require many more treatments before any improvement is seen. In addition, at the back of Pál's mind there is always the daring possibility that their sessions might eventually root out, by the annihilation method, the inversion that lies at the root of Mr Burden's despair.

Besides, the patient approves. He
encourages
. This is the first time in Pál's career that therapy has taken on the quality of a collaboration, and
the doctor is flattered as well as enthused. It is as though the two men have embarked upon an adventure together, at this pioneering and dangerous time, into the mysteries of the sexually deviant personality.

Pál does not think to question his client's enthusiasm. Why should he? Who is he to stand in Mr Burden's way when he begs, tears pouring down his face, that everything – from his first, moist, prep-school fumblings in his best friend's Y-fronts to the close relationship he enjoyed with his mother, from his navy father's frequent absences to the precise sensual recall he has achieved, with the professor's help, of his wife's anus at the moment of penetration (‘Does it tighten? Does it suck? Tell me your impressions, Mr Burden, leave out nothing. Does it welcome like a mouth or repel like a tightened fist?') – that everything, the lot of it, the very meat and veg of sex, and everything to do with spit and spew, should go?

Beyond the Society's front door, a sumptuous fitted red carpet lies like a spillage of fur over the entrance hall floor, and a wide staircase leads, with barely a creak, to the upper rooms. The industrious clatter of Miriam Miller at her typewriter rises, greatly muffled, through the rugs lain across the first-floor waiting area.