Lights Out in Wonderland Read online

“Ah, David.” Dalí Girl cranes from reception, cheered by his appearance. “Mr. Brockwell needs some assistance.” And mouthing silently: “He seems agitated.”

  This is an alarm code. They look at each other, and pause. Dalí Girl uses blinking to lure David to my form on the bench, angling it for his convenience. In a gesture of fake brotherhood, some cynical technique of human touch, he grips my shoulder as he passes to read it. But when he reads he begins to droop like a hiker finding the distance way farther than he thought.

  Finally he turns to the girl—“Would you get Gabriel’s file?”—before saying to me: “Gabriel, Gabriel—so baroque! I don’t know whether to treat you or publish you!”

  Now he’s a funny man. This doesn’t sit well with me. “Hm.” I look around. “If I could just have my things.”

  He hovers closer, chewing his lip. “You should know I’m disappointed. We’re here for you, but you have to take the first step. Let us in, Gabriel. It’s a contract—and it has to work both ways. I can’t let you hide from that.”

  I vaguely scratch my curls. “Mr. West—two weeks’ charges for a one-night stay doesn’t much suggest that things will work more than one way.”

  “Listen,” he says, “you might not be the model shopper. And that’s fine. But you’re from the same planet, you know how things work. This isn’t a hotel. For us to be serious about helping you, your room has to be held for the full course. I feel the same way as you about terms and conditions, but—”

  “Then why don’t you do what you know is fair?”

  “Gabriel, this is also our trade. It’s how we live. No person, under any system, can be expected to forfeit their livelihood. Survival isn’t a capitalist concept.”

  “Excuse me—a thousand percent penalty in small print is a capitalist concept. And a little above survival.”

  “But it’s not a penalty; you booked a product of two weeks’ duration. It’s specified on the contract for you to accept or reject—the terms are clear.”

  “And that’s fine and good except for one fact—I personally booked no product, of any duration, under any contract.”

  David pauses, checking his watch. Then he sighs: “Whether it was your father or you doesn’t change the facts. And actually, as it was your father who guaranteed the booking, should we discuss the contract of trust you stand to break with him? On top of everything? Couldn’t your forfeiture be construed as a kind of theft? From your father?”

  “I was asleep when he brought me.”

  “Asleep.” This brings a gleam. “Or unconscious?”

  My face reminds him that both states are plainly sleep. But he goes on: “You see, Gabriel, the course lasts two weeks because it takes at least that long to get to the bottom of things. It’s complex. You’re complex. You can’t spend less than a day here and complain of poor value for money. Forty-two sessions—one individual, one group, and one ad hoc session per day—try getting that in London for what we charge.”

  Dalí Girl returns with a lilac folder and hands it to David. I turn on her: “Can you just get my things!” and she jumps.

  “Now, now.” David raises a hand. “Susanna has a right to a civil working environment.”

  As he speaks I notice his skin: it’s dry and thin like paper. This, along with his pinched features, makes me realize a sign is being sent by the Enthusiasms:

  David West is an origami person.* Spread, creased, and folded by culture into a clever likeness of a man, a napkin adornment without ideas outside his own folds, unfolding others to crease them back in his own image. As he looks up from the folder he must see a horror in my gaze, because his face gets even sharper.

  “You’ll make me quite mad,” he says. “I’m being very patient with you, even though you’ve made me late for the other clients. Aren’t their issues as important as yours? Should everyone forfeit their right to treatment because of your behavior?”

  I wait as these next turds slither out of his psyche. Now we find out he also favors the anal ploys of a police officer. Only police officers and eight-year-old girls open their dealings with such stupid questions: “Do you always leave your vehicle in the middle of the street, sir? I suppose you call that a correct way to behave, sir? How would you feel, sir, if somebody did that to you?” and et cetera. These, while expressing native smugness, are also ploys meant to force your submission; because an honest answer would make you an idiot—and a sensible response would leave you a prisoner.

  I have overestimated David West.

  I take a cigarette from my pocket.

  “Not in here, come on.” He lowers his voice: “Don’t let’s get off on the wrong foot. You’re living through hard times, and I’m sorry. You’ve lost a partner, lost your job. You’ve lost all that goes with that. You’ve lost—”

  “All this is in the file, is it?”

  “Don’t forget, I signed you in from your father. My point is, Gabriel: things have been a struggle, and I empathize—but you don’t have to struggle alone. It doesn’t have to be this hard. Just pay me one courtesy: sit with me for a moment and open a dialogue. We can start anywhere—for instance, these bipolar issues I see in your notes.”

  “I was depressed.” I fumble for my lighter. “Now I’m fine.”

  He shuts the folder. “Well, here’s my concern—manic depression doesn’t swing between depression and fine. Or it’d be called fine depression. Don’t you think?”

  I light the cigarette.

  “You’re going to make me very mad.”

  Hoisting my gaze, I take a wholesome drag and look along the room’s high cornices, elegant braidings of vines, cornet-shaped flowers and leaves, some cuddling droplets of water. All are now painted a dull cream. I picture them gilded, bordering an aquamarine fresco of treetops and sky, as might be seen looking up from inside a grave.

  “Gabriel: you are breaking the law.”

  Dalí gives a cough. It’s unconvincing. She means to evoke cancer, but comes across like a housewife signaling boogers on someone’s lip. I quietly continue my restoration of this demoralized structure, throwing Italian marble on the floors, erecting in the lobby a Frascati villa fountain overgrown with sacred lotuses and water poppies.

  “Gabriel: you are violating our rights and breaking the law.”

  What a psychological sewer the place is. How rotten and insane. I turn to David, after a thoughtful drag on the smoke:

  “How dare you violate this place?” I say. “You cunt.”

  3

  Mistake. I should’ve just walked out. Fading daylight gives the Quiet Room sofa the tone of an infected wound. The nurse steps out, leaving me alone.

  The door latches shut behind him.

  Women were right: cunt used to be a harsh word. I wore Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas the first time I heard it. That was the night things started going downhill. I say night—it was a late afternoon passed off as night by adults manipulating time for their own gain. One minute I was skipping up the hall, fluffy after my bath, singing like a fool. I was seized by this sudden flamboyance, one of those little deliriums that can erupt in the young like bubbles from insanity’s worm: “Wo-wo,” I sang, “take the money and run!” I didn’t know what it meant, I just liked the tune. And I never guessed what significance it had at that time.

  Next thing I knew, my father smacked me through a glass door:

  “Cunt,” he hissed. “You little cunt!”

  I didn’t know what that meant either, but its sound was cutting. It blended well with the boosh and clank of my body through glass. Afterward I lay on the hallway rug, coated like a sauce ladle in blood from all the jags quietly in me. And I remember thinking cunt was just the right sound for that action.

  I thought this while trying to get back on my feet.

  But in a certain way, I never got back on my feet.

&
nbsp; That little dude has lain there bleeding ever since.

  My friend Nelson Smuts was over to stay. He ran alongside me in cowboy-gun pajamas, with his tan fresh from Cape Town. After the crash he stepped through the door, gathered up shards of glass, and solemnly laid them on my chest. Where they belonged, I guess, with all the other fragments. That’s Smuts.

  The glass door was a turning point for me. To seal the lesson, my father, hearing his then-girlfriend’s footsteps, stood over me to yell: “How many times have I told you don’t run indoors!” When she arrived he added: “Nicht hier drinnen!” He was playing the Euro-man with her. Guy Brockwell was one of those beardie guys who went to East Berlin after the wall came down. He put a shoe through a deserted factory window and started a club with a car stereo and a bottle of ginger wine. When the glass door happened we’d only recently returned from that last lanky phase of his youth. All he had to show for it were some weird pants and a few German phrases he could use around women. As for me, I still think some things in German today, even after all these years. The infant brain is as soft as oatmeal, those raisins sink in.

  Plus I came back with a book called Frederick. Frederick was a mouse who saved up colors in summer; then, in winter, when fellow mice only had gray things to think about, he recited back all the colors he’d saved. At the end the mice rejoiced, saying: “Frederick, Du bist ja ein Dichter! You’re a poet!”

  I knew Frederick was me. I even looked like him. I used to pull up a chair in front of our bullet-holed building in Prenzlauer Berg, climb on top, and tell poems. I never looked at anyone, I hid behind the rhymes. But I always began my readings as Frederick did: “Ihr lieben Mäusegesichter—my lovely mouse-faces.”

  East Berlin after the collapse of communism was like a kindergarten sandbox. Nobody knew who owned anything, nobody needed money or permission for their projects, all they needed was a beanbag chair, some wistful music, or a watering can with an eyeball painted on it. Westerners flocked to wear bad clothes and lurk around like little gray Workers from the East. Eastalgia became a new human condition.

  Not that I recalled this as I lay bleeding that night in England. My father treated me on the kitchen table with iodine and tape, trying to sound calm through gritted teeth. The kitchen smelled like a clinic. Highlights flashed off Smuts’s eyes in the dark of the doorway. We were all afraid, as animals are after violence.

  My father was worried about money, that’s why he was aggressive. To be fair, he didn’t even look for the worries—like most people he just got lighthearted one day and signed something to boost who he thought he should be. Some carefree music, vivid colors, pictures of young women, and he signed something. Catheters slid into his accounts and his money trickled, flowed, or flooded out depending how the faucets of the economy were turned. He grew troubled, I watched him change. His sense of himself came to rely wholly on the flow of goods and credit.

  Profit smashed me through that glass, not him.

  And the infection soon laid him waste. I confirmed it years later when he saw the book of Frederick and sneered. The pointless mouse found a niche in the market, designed a product to fill it—then gave it away for free.

  A loser’s guidebook, Dad called it.

  My father had embraced capitalism. It was the system that said he didn’t have to grow up. That said he could just be his child’s best friend. The same system that’s now asking what have things come to.* What things came to is that for thirty years there were no parents.

  Only casual friends you couldn’t trust.

  Anyway. I won’t burden the notes with history, it doesn’t matter now. Beyond the Quiet Room door I hear David West’s voice approaching. From his pauses and inflections I sense my father is on the line. The next obstacle.

  “Technically he could be,” says David. “Into your care. But I’d advise against it until we assess him at law.”

  My brow falls. He means Mental Health Law. I drift back to the window, watching autumn whip the dark outside. At some point all summers are over, the view seems to yell. And did I enjoy the summer just past? Did I squeeze every drop of its juice? No. Because I didn’t know it was the moment before this moment here. Had I known I may have scampered through sunlit fields, tossed my shoes up at the sky. But who can know which moment is the one before? And even if you knew, how could the moment be preserved? These are the riddles behind living.

  So badly packed for life am I with my baggage of riddles.

  Limbo has faded. It makes me thirst for death. Which brings the idea: I don’t have to do it immediately. Which lands me back in limbo. It’s a circuit.

  And the first stress emerges: what if my determination weakens? I can’t risk losing momentum. If I’m going to die, then I should be prepared at all times. At every new place, in every new room, I should look for potential instruments of death.

  Starting here, I guess, if I’m serious about this.

  4

  The wedge of lemon comes dripping from my water. Leaning over the sofa, I switch on the lamp and jockey the plug slightly out

  of the wall. It has a spring mechanism that makes it pop out after a certain point, but I take magazines from the table and wedge them between floor and socket. This leaves a gap between socket and plug with power still flowing through.

  I push the lemon in.

  Whoosh. Crack! A throb shoots up my arm. Machines and lights click off across the building. I thud back in a swoon.

  Darker quiet falls. Is it death?

  Then footsteps past the door.

  Health & Safety devices have intervened. I stretch my jaw open, move it left and right, blink a few times. And as my sense returns, a new feeling wells inside. I’m through another little door. Back in the limbo zone—but deeper, on a new level. That first limbo was barely a breeze against this lusty squall. Maybe because I’ve proven I have the courage for lethal risk and pain.* Perhaps limbo throws up tests along the stair to its boudoir, in the way of a true odyssey. Looking around, I find myself even more detached from the object world, almost as much as wearing an iPod; surely this can only aid in dealing with my father, who noises at the door suggest is the next obstacle. It’s clear limbo will have to expand. Maybe overnight—perhaps even to a day or two. Maybe Smuts and I even need to travel for last drinks. Why not—if nothing matters?

  I park this thought in that cache of the mind where Enthusiasms find wishes to work on. It sits there alone; all my old wishes are gone. Alongside death it’s the Enthusiasms’ only project. We’ll see what quirkiness they bring to the party—you’ll know that wishes rarely arrive undecorated by the Enthusiasms.

  Lights return, and after a few moments David steps in, frowning. “Are you smoking in here?” He sniffs the air. “Don’t smoke in here, please. Your father wants you.” He scans for cigarettes before handing me the phone.

  My arm throbs as I take it. Still scanning around, David motions me into the corridor and shuts the door behind us. I hear fizzing as we leave the room, and a crackle. The lights click off again. An orderly hurries up the hallway.

  My father says: “What’s it all about?”

  “I’m being held against my will.”

  “What? It’s because of your will. Are you smoking in there?”

  I let some silence pass to dilute his tone. Then I say: “It’s not meant to be a prison.”

  “You’re lucky you’re not in prison. Your commie pals are all over the news.”

  “Come on. And they’re not commies, they’re anticapitalists.”

  “Vandals, like that animal-rights crowd. Are you smoking?”

  “Listen—”

  “Charged, every last one of them.”

  “I didn’t do anything. That’s the point.”

  “What I find ironic is that it’s always the parents who have to bail you out.”

  I
pause while he vents at this and that, “parasites,” “contribute to society,” et cetera, and I reflect that age breeds conservatism, no getting away from it, unless you’re Californian. Finally there’s enough silence at my end that David steps away to excuse himself with the therapy group. I’m alone in the hall.

  “I hit a problem,” I eventually say.

  “You did. I’m surprised you could even lift a projectile.”

  “Not that, I didn’t touch a drink till later.* I’m trying to tell you I lost my faith. The building was too precious to damage. Capitalists restored her, this proud mid-Victorian monument with columns and flounces. Money restored her. It was an epiphany. I realized capital isn’t the problem—I’m the problem. We’re the problem. Nature’s the problem. Why was I there to harm such a fine building?”

  “Go back two,” says my father. “You’re the problem.”

  “I held my cash card up to the door of the bank—and they let me in. The action group cheered, thinking I’d breached the defenses for them. But I stood inside and watched them being arrested on the steps. I’ll never forget their faces. It just hit me: no matter who I align myself with, I’ll always be outcast by a majority. My efforts to be at one with civilization were pointless. There’s no single way. No single good. God’s gone, replaced by the markets. Now they’re going. We don’t know who we are anymore because there’s no we.”

  “What do you mean, God’s gone? You’re perfectly free to choose any system of belief you want, that’s the whole point of our day!”

  “Dad—there’s a film out there called Jehovah’s Wetness.”

  “You’re raving. Have they sedated you?”

  “A couple of weeks ago I started listening to Heart FM and it made me cry. Pop music. And I realized I’d spent my life saying goodbye to something without knowing what. We all have. It’s not nostalgia, not retro fashion—it’s the end of our flowering. Human progress is no longer a viable investment.”

  Guy Brockwell is quiet at first. Then, in emphatically spaced bursts: “What a load of undergraduate crap. In my day—”