Exchange Place

Locus Suspectus

I’d forgotten my drugs. Medication that is. Some years ago, not too long after Harland disappeared, I had been diagnosed with high blood pressure. Subsequently I underwent an echocardiogram, familiarly referred to as an ECHO among the medical profession. In this procedure the patient is asked to undress to the waist and lie on the couch. An ultrasound probe is placed on the chest; lubricating jelly is placed on the chest so that the probe makes good contact with the skin. The probe is connected by a wire to the ultrasound machine and monitor. Pulses of ultrasound are sent from the probe through the skin towards the heart. The ultrasound waves then echo from the heart and various structures in the heart. I sat in the waiting area until the nurse called my name, John Kilfeather, and I went into the ECHO room.

As I lay on the couch I could see the sonogram of my heart on the monitor. It looked like a video of an alien planet, fuzzy with static, its chambers like continents expanding and contracting in time-lapse tectonic shifts; I could hear its movements, a coarse-grained rhythmic swash and back-swash as if of surf purling and collapsing on those alien shores, gathering itself for onslaught after exhausted onslaught; and I thought of how little we know of what goes on within ourselves, what phantoms wander the uncharted regions of the brain, unknown to ourselves. The ECHO showed I had stenosis, or narrowing, of the mitral valve which connects the left atrium and the left ventricle of the heart. I was prescribed a regime of drugs to lower blood pressure and increase blood flow. These included clopidogrel, atoravastatin, bisoprolol, amlopodine and perindopril, words that I have difficulty remembering. But I have the packets bearing the names before me now, having retrieved them from my home.

Home is where the heart is, they say. When I got off the bus at Elsinore Gardens the street was still sealed by white security tape and manned by a police officer. I explained my case to him; after pondering it, he held up the tape to let me through. Five minutes, sir, he said. As I stooped under the tape I heard the tap of a cane and out of the corner of my eye I saw the blind man coming down the Antrim Road, dressed in his familiar nondescript anorak, his long white cane swinging metronomically from side to side like the antenna of a mine-detector, and I thought how the white security tape had made a blind alley of the street where I lived. I walked towards my house, my home, feeling like one who has been away for so long a time that he has become a stranger. It was an eerie feeling to turn the key in the lock and enter the hallway, knowing that I had but a brief temporary access to the house where I had lived all my life, that soon I would be homeless again. Though I was in the house, it seemed haunted by my absence.

In retrospect I am reminded of Sigmund Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, and his teasing out the meaning of the German word unheimlich, literally ‘unhomely’, but translated into English as ‘uncanny’; into Greek as xenos, ‘alien’; into French as sinistre; and into Latin as suspectus, as in the expression locus suspectus, ‘an eerie place’. Heimlich is ‘homely’; yet, as Freud observes, there are contexts in which the word becomes increasingly ambivalent, moving from meaning homely, comfortable, tame, familiar, intimate, to secret, privy, inscrutable, hidden, locked away, removed from the eyes of strangers, until it finally merges with its antonym, unheimlich.

At the heart of Freud’s essay is an analysis of E.T.A. Hoffman’s story ‘The Sandman’, which revolves around the fear of blindness. Freud reads this as fear of castration. As a child, the protagonist Nathaniel is told in the evenings that he must get to bed because the sandman is coming, and on occasions he hears something clumping up the stairs with a slow, heavy tread. When he asks his mother about the sandman, she tells him of course there is no sandman, it’s only a figure of speech, a way of saying that you’re sleepy and can’t keep your eyes open, as if someone had thrown sand in them. But when he asks his sister’s old nurse, she has a different story. The sandman is a wicked old man who comes after children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out of their head all bloody, and then he throws them into his sack and flies off with them to the crescent moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there and have beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children. Nathaniel becomes increasingly obsessed with this figure, identifying it with a frequent visitor to the family home, the lawyer Coppelius, a loathsome fellow who might or might not be the doppelganger of an Italian optician called Coppola, or of a Professor Spalanzani, who has made a female automaton with which Nathaniel falls in love, neglecting his sweetheart Clara. At one point he is assured by her that his obsession with the sandman is just that: perhaps there does exist a dark power, she says, which fastens to us and leads us off on a dangerous and ruinous path which we would otherwise not have trodden; but if so, this power must have assumed within us the form of our self, indeed have become our self, for otherwise we would not listen to it, otherwise there would be no space within us in which it could perform its secret work. This power can assume other forms from the outer world; but they are only phantoms of our own ego.

I was interested to learn that Hoffman was a Jekyll and Hyde figure: by day a respectable lawyer in the Prussian civil service, by night a user of laudanum, debauchee, and author of bizarre tales and satires. In 1819 he was appointed to the Commission for the Investigation of Treasonable Organizations and Other Dangerous Activities. Within two years he had written a satire on the commission that employed him; it came to the attention of the authorities, but proceedings against him were halted when it was discovered he was dying from a combination of syphilis and years of alcohol and drug abuse. On his gravestone are carved the words, ‘Died on June 25th, 1822, in Berlin, Councillor of the Court of Justice, excellent in his office, as a poet, as a musician, as a painter. Dedicated by his friends.’ He was forty-seven. The formal cause of death was given as locomotor ataxia, inability to control the limbs, or paralysis.

I take my medication: a tablet each of clopidogrel, atoravastatin, bisoprolol, amlopodine, and perindopril, and it strikes me that I do not know what these words mean. For the first time I read the accompanying leaflets, and learn that among the possible side effects of these drugs are dizziness, constipation, diarrhoea, anorexia, muscle spasms, nausea, nightmares, insomnia, hearing loss, fever, liver failure, blistering of the genitals, impotence, loss of memory, hallucinations, paralysis, and blindness.