Angelica's Grotto

10 First Session

Dr DeVere was in his early forties and didn’t wear a tie. He had short hair, no beard, and nothing on the walls of his office but an unframed laser copy of the Redon pastel, Roger and Angelica. It was stuck to the wall with Blu-Tack and it moved with DeVere from office to office in his professional travels.

‘You’re the first doctor I’ve seen with a Redon on his wall,’ said Klein.

‘And you’re the first visitor who’s commented on it. You like Redon?’

‘I’ve done a monograph on him.’

Dr DeVere struck his forehead. ‘Of course! You’re that Harold Klein: Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon. I’ve got it at home.’

‘At last,’ said Klein, ‘a reader. Have you read Orlando Furioso?

‘Parts of it.’

‘The part where Ruggiero rescues Angelica from Orca the sea monster, yes?’

‘That’s why Redon’s up there on my wall.’

‘Have you got it there for aesthetic or professional reasons?’

‘Both. It seems to me that each of us contains an Angelica chained to a rock, threatened by an Orca, and waiting for a Ruggiero. Would you agree?’

‘I would. You’re my kind of shrink. Am I going to be with you for a while?’

‘As long as it takes. Still no inner voice?’

‘No. I’ve started whispering into my hand or talking to myself under my breath before I say anything to anybody, so I’ve kept out of Casualty for a while.’

‘That’s very sensible. I’m trying to imagine how it must be for you.’

‘Very strange. Most of my thinking is in words, and until this happened the words were spoken by my mental voice. Now I still hear music and see pictures in my head but the only way I can do word thoughts is by speaking out loud or writing them down. When I’m at my desk it’s not a problem because my words appear on the computer screen. When I’m elsewhere I go about muttering to myself or scribbling in a notebook or both, which makes me feel a little crazier than usual.’

‘The words you mutter, the words you write — are you hearing or seeing anything unusual?’

‘Unusual compared to what I ordinarily say or write but nothing remarkable — mostly rude words and sexual thoughts of the sort that might slip out when I’m drunk; it’s pretty much what was described in the Times piece: there’s no censor on duty.’

‘Would you say, Mr Klein, that when your inner censor’s working it has to work pretty hard? Or not?’

‘What would be your guess, Dr DeVere? Would you expect the inner censor of a little old man to have to work harder than that of a large young man? Or not?’

‘I see your point but I’d like to hear you spell it out for me if you would.’

‘All right. I have a certain reputation in the world of the arts but in the streets of daily life I am an object of no significance to anyone.’ He told DeVere what he had told Mrs Lichtheim about his apparent invisibility. ‘I won’t bore you with more examples,’ he said, ‘but my inner censor used to be kept pretty busy.’

‘So you’ve got a lot of anger in you. What about the rude words and sexual thoughts?’

‘I sometimes think a dirty old man might be the only kind of old man there is.’

‘Go on, please.’

‘My interest in women has become obsessive; one of these days I’ll be hit by a car while crossing the road with my eyes on a female bottom. I marvel at the action of hips and thighs, the articulation of knees and ankles. I love to see good flesh over good bones, women walking around in really classy skeletons and moving like thoroughbreds. The streets are full of beauties and I can’t stop looking and wanting.’

‘Are you married?’

‘I was. Her name was Hannelore. She was eighteen years younger than I when she moved in with me in 1970; I was forty-five; she was twenty-seven. She’d been my editor on the Daumier book I did for Hermetica. She was with me for seven years, then one day when I was at the British Library Reading Room she set the timer clock to start Die Schöpfung on the record player about the time I was expected home. Then she emptied a bottle of Tomazipan tablets and half a bottle of gin. When I got there she’d been dead for about three hours and the chorus were belting out ‘Und es ward Lichf. She was a very methodical person.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Then, after a few moments of silence, ‘Do you know why she did it? Was there a note?’

‘No. She was a mystery to me, and as time passes I know less and less about her. I think about her all the time; now that I have no words in my head I see her face and I talk to myself. I was never her kind of person; she liked to go out and I like to stay in; she liked parties and I like to work. I got her by being a good wooer but I never properly recognised the uniqueness of her. She was a handsome woman and tall. People wanted to be thought well of by her.’

Dr DeVere paused for another sympathetic silence, then he said, ‘Any children?’

‘No. She had two miscarriages, then a hysterectomy.’

‘Was she very depressed after the hysterectomy?’

‘Very. Actually she never got over it.’

‘You’ve been alone since she died?’

‘There’ve been women from time to time but nothing that lasted. I’ve never been a whole lot of fun to be with except at the beginning when I was courting Hannelore. What I had with her only happens once.’

‘How do you feel about your life right now?’

‘I’m afraid I might lose control altogether.’

‘And do what?’

‘Touch the woman ahead of me on the escalator in the Underground, or start making indecent proposals.’

‘Do you think you’re a danger to the public at large?’

‘More to myself. As you see.’

‘I know this is a difficult time for you, Mr Klein. I can’t really imagine what it’s like to live without the constant companion of an inner voice but it must be a terrifying kind of aloneness. And I can understand how frightened you are of what you might do or say. What we categorise as normal behaviour is an unbelievably complex and fragile system of the most intricate checks and balances. I’m always amazed that it doesn’t break down more often than it does. Let’s go back to the moment when you lost your inner voice: can you remember the very last thing it said? After you read the Times piece, did it say something before it went silent?’

‘It said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’

‘Some might say that your It wanted to plunge you into inner voicelessness.’

‘My It?’

DeVere opened a desk drawer, took out The Book of the It by Georg Groddeck, and handed it to Klein.

Klein held the book in his hands. It was a hardback, small and compact, heavy for its size. There came into his mind the Big Little Books of his small-town childhood in Pennsylvania. He used to buy them at the local Woolworth’s, called ‘the five-and-dime’. They were perfectly square little hardbacks about six by six inches and three inches thick with board covers. They were printed on coarse paper with text on one side and a black-and-white picture on the other of each spread: Mickey Mouse at Blaggard Castle; Terry and the Pirates; Dick Tracy. Unlike modern comic books, they had only the occasional speech balloon. He recalled the feel of them in the hand: pleasantly chunky.

‘Have you read this?’ said DeVere.

‘No, I haven’t.’ He turned the pages, came to LETTER II, and read:

I hold the view that man is animated by the Unknown, that there is within him an ‘Es’, an ‘It’, some wondrous force which directs both what he himself does, and what happens to him.

‘OK, I’m animated by the Unknown,’ said Klein as he closed the book. ‘What else is new?’

‘Groddeck was contemporary with Freud and Freud was so impressed by the It idea that he developed his theory of the Id from it. It’s the sort of book that got passed around when Ronnie Laing was doing his thing and lecturing barefoot in the seventies. A lot of what Groddeck says is utter bollocks but this idea of the mysterious It is a useful one, I think.’

‘What’re you leading up to, and should we burn some incense?’

‘I’m leading up to asking you if you’ve been friends with your It.’

‘I’ve been friends with my head, or I thought I was.’

‘All right — forget about Groddeck for now; do you think of your inner voice as coming from you or is there another entity that speaks those words?’

‘There’s nobody in my head but me, and the me in my head has gone silent.’

DeVere found nothing to say for a few moments while he rubbed the back of his skull as if to stimulate that part of his brain. Presently a light bulb appeared over his head.

‘What?’ said Klein.

‘If you were now to visualise a speaker in your head other than yourself, who or what would it be?’

Now it was Klein’s turn to rub his head. After a time he said, ‘I’ve just been looking at Oannes. Do you remember Number 14 in Redon’s lithographic series. Tentation de Sainte-Antoine? The god who’s half fish and half human: “I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.” He’s hovering half-seen in a sea of black, wearing a pharaonic headdress, observing us from the dimness. I think he’s the one I’d like to hear from.’

‘Oannes was the Babylonian god of wisdom.’

‘That’s what it says in the mythology books — science, writing, the arts, all that sort of thing, but Redon’s Oannes, the one that I visualise, is deeper and darker than wisdom — he’s nothing safe, nothing explicable.’

‘Is it possible that you’ve already heard from him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can you remember anything your inner voice said in the time shortly before it said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’

‘OK, the afternoon before that morning I was walking down the Fulham Road and a good-looking young woman passed me walking a lot faster than I was: statuesque, classy walk, black suit, short skirt, great ass, wonderful legs, black stockings, shiny black high heels. I say stockings rather than tights because I imagined a suspender belt. I tried to keep her in good viewing distance but she kept pulling farther away and I was getting angina; so I had to stop and do some glyceryl trinitrate and rest a little while she got smaller and smaller and finally turned a corner and disappeared. And I said to myself or it said or he said, “One day you’ll drop dead while something like that walks away from you and out of sight.”’

‘What do you mean by “something like that”?’

‘I mean everything that I can’t have. I’m an old man but I want what I wanted when I was young and I want it maybe more than when I was young. And there’s not a lot I can do about it.’

‘Did the inner voice say anything more after that first observation?’

‘It said, “Well, that’s life, innit.”’

Dr DeVere scratched his head, massaged his face, cleared his throat. ‘Might that have been a more Oannes sort of utterance?’

‘Maybe; I don’t know. I hadn’t really been thinking about an Oannes voice until you asked me about a speaker in my head.’

‘Things change, you know. The fact that you visualised Oannes makes me think there might be an Oannes element in you that wants to be heard, an aspect of you that you haven’t been in good touch with. Maybe you’re going to have to meet it halfway. What do you think?’

‘I think,’ said Klein, ‘that if I hang out with you too long I could get more confused than I am now. Just tell me, do you think I’ll ever have an inner voice again?’

‘I doubt very much that the shutdown will be permanent. You can borrow Groddeck if you like.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll stay on standby for Oannes.’

‘That’ll have to be it for today. Good luck, mind how you go and watch your mouth.’ He made a note in Klein’s folder: Inner-voice shutdown — buffer lost?