Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 21. In Loco Wyatt Earpis

With the stress of two realities, one of which was not officially allowed to non-crazies, my head was badly in need of reorganisation. I didn’t think I was crazy but I wasn’t too sure of my sanity. I had abandoned Professor Beard and I was with a new psychotherapist, recommended by Olivia, Dr Levy. He was short, bald, wore very thick glasses and a Wyatt Earp moustache.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s the problem?’

‘I seem to be living in two kinds of reality,’ I said. ‘Two kinds of time. Do you know what a hippogriff is?’

‘Yes, it’s an imaginary animal.’

‘Well, I have a kind of relationship with one.’

‘Sexual?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you dream about him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing in the dream?’

‘Sitting on his back while we fly through a greyness.’

‘To where?’

‘Nowhere, I told him that we weren’t getting anywhere.’

‘Is your father alive?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him for a long time and I don’t know where he is.’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘This hippogriff may very well be a displacement of sexual longings for your father. Have you read my comparative study of the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults?’

He took a book with that title off his desk and thrust it into my hands. On the back cover was a large photograph of him dressed more or less like Wyatt Earp.

‘No,’ I said. ‘What have the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults to do with me?’

‘Imaginative displacement and believing that wishing will make it so.’

He looked at his watch, wrote a prescription and gave it to me.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘It’s a placebo, extra-strength. Take two with water as required.’

‘But a placebo’s all in the mind. The word is the Latin for “I shall please”. If you think it’ll work, it will.’

‘There you go. Get my secretary to book a session for you for next week.’

Is there a placebo effect, I wondered, for ‘Everything is OK’? So if you think it is, it is? I tried it but I didn’t really think it was and it wasn’t.