The Serpent and The Staff

Sometimes you've just got to get away.

There’s thirty years between my gristly, overused, under-washed, penis and her coin-slot of a vagina. In fact, ‘vagina’ is too vulgar a word for what’s really got to be – and I’ve seen a few – one of God’s finest incisions. A hairless, almost invisible – until you see it with your fingers – until you feel the slight ripple, dream of a cunt she’s got down there. Expected I suppose with a wife thirty years my junior. What’s your wife’s gash like Dr Wabyen, like a discarded Steak and Cheese sandwich from Subway that even the septicemic homeless and rats won’t go near?

Wabyen farts, I don’t hear it but he curves his spine to the side and his top lip vibrates for a split second as he carefully squeezes it out. He’s well beyond my insults. He deals with crackpots, fools and the ‘mentally ill’ for a job. He chose that job, but not to help people in need, but because they fascinate him. Dr Wabyen - like the entire discourse of psychiatry - is a fetishization of a thing they call madness - because it expresses difference, and Wabyen’s life is otherwise so mundane and, God bless him, pointless, he needs me. He sucks on the nipple of my insults and vulgarity whilst fiddling a bit through his trouser pocket.

On the wall behind Wabyen is his Psychiatric Doctoral certificate, presented in a cheap, wooden framed, glass covered, affair. It looks like he bought it off the internet. ‘Dr Wabyen’ is large and central in some ye olde font, and there’s a red ribbon, blob of sealing wax, all bit. It lacks authenticity. Yet with psychiatry lacking authenticity and being in a world of its own where it treats behaviors like diseases, it hardly matters. Had he actually studied this fraud, this confidence trick, he’d only have been more dangerous. I’m reassured that on top of a few other tells over the time I’ve been seeing him that he is in fact just a crook, a liar, a player of games. Actual or ‘proper’ psychiatric training wouldn’t have changed that.

I need treatment. I don’t. I need to get off work with full pay for three months. Away from my family, who can spend my wages however they like, eating and stuff, and I get myself some time to think, time to make some decisions; and I need space - perhaps space even more than time - to take a good look inside. So, I grabbed hold of what’s been described as ‘great book of fiction’, the DSM-5, the psychiatrists guide to mental health - weaponizing medicine - and set about talking myself into treatment. Research and express.

The DSM – 5, in full, ‘The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Edition 5’. Psychiatry was forced to invent this book since medicine in general was totally unconvinced with their ideas and refused to include their (I’m going to say it) ‘crazy’ ideas in their medical texts.

It’s not hard to trick these fools. Their jobs depend on it. Even a five-year-old can do it. A five-year-old whose parents work too much, sleep too much, go out too much, or do whatever too much of what they do, leaving the kid void of the adequate attention he needs, so he works out pretty quickly that he can get loads of attention if he plays the game. You see he doesn’t have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, you can’t ‘have’ a behavior, you conduct it, you do it. The kid is just not getting enough attention, that’s it, that’s all, there’s a deficit of attention, it’s not a disorder, it’s not a disease. So, with his limited but clever little brain he does what he needs to do to get attention, he gets busy, really busy. He gets active, really active, which is then diagnosed as being ‘hyperactive’.  ‘Active’ alone wouldn’t have got him anywhere, the poor little bleeder needs to stand out from all the other kids who are active. He needs to smash windows, cut off girl’s ponytails in English class, drink his parent’s brandy, and scream his vocal cords raw in public places when he’s forced to confront himself through the eyes of others. Then he gets attention, and the ball of his treatment starts rolling. His parents have to take him to clinics and psychiatrists, he has to perform stupid tests with coloured shapes and plastic things, speak to more specialist counselors, key-workers, then social services – the lot - but he’s now getting attention, loads of it. Now he’s no longer deficit of the attention he needed. Then they prescribe him drugs– and wouldn’t you know it – the drugs seem to work!

They’ve drastically changed his personality mind you, and there’s a bit of a perpetual somnambulism about him. He’s not the boy he was, and with his brain still developing, pumping him full of speed to overload him and cause him to shut down – ‘That’s how it works, you see’, says the likes of Dr Wabyen, happy they got the kid into line and the parents can go back to ignoring him again.

Anyway, it looks like I’ve achieved my goal. “I’m going to sign you off work for a three-month period, during which time you’ll be attending The St Martin’s Treatment Centre, where I’m positive through their groundbreaking work in this field (what field? No field has been established. This is a glitch in my plan, but if they’re anything like this twit, ‘field’ will mean a selection of otherwise random elements connected for the sake of having a field to speak of) you’ll get some benefit and rearrange some of those….’ Dr Wabyen pauses for a moment, twirls his pencil through his fingers as if to add a flourish to what in his deceptive brain considers a diagnosis “…ghosts, yes, ghosts, ghosts that seem to backseat drive the vehicle of your life.” Wow, he actually said that, and as he did, one of the aforementioned ghosts wanted to smash his head on his desk a hundred times until it looked like a doner kebab sticking out of his neck, with one eyeball contemplating – and being proud of - the length of the optical nerve of the other eye, amazingly maintaining the odd manner of his entire personality, even in that mess. Being in the driving seat though, I just signed a couple of forms, and made a note of the date and time they’d pick me up from my home. Just one week to go. There was a list of things to take: Debit Card, pen, pad. That’s all, it’s on. I’ve found some space and time.

The week couldn’t have gone any faster. My kids ignored me, my wife, who is actually older than me and has a vagina like a discarded Subway steak and cheese sandwich, treated the whole thing with the suspicion it rightly deserved and whose only other contribution to my impending treatment was to speak to the children about me and my failings as a father and a husband, but disguised as general observations about men, masculinity, and the idle abandonment of responsibilities. The kind of stuff twin six-year-old’s really dig.

I’d like to say I expected more, but I think I’ve always expected more, which is a weird reaction to a life that has never really provided, and I didn’t really know what to expect from The St Martin’s Treatment centre. So, when it appeared at the end of a long drive on a dismal and featureless road, it seemed more like something unfinished, or something intentionally void of aesthetic continuity. Architecture should have a message, create a statement at least, yet The St Martin’s Treatment Center from the outside at least was one slippery set of signifiers, leaving me to deal with an even slipperier set of signifieds with which to contend with upon entry, and when meaning is being sapped from your environment, you start to feel it being sapped from everything, yourself included.

I watched the car drive away before the door opened and I was invited in by a twenty-something woman, nothing much of a face to mention, similar void of aesthetic continuity of the building, wearing typical nurse attire, and holding a clipboard. She flashed a micro-smile, a smile for sure, but just enough to let me know there was nothing meant by it, less than nothing actually, a smile which marked its own absence. She turned and asked me to follow her as she began walking into the building.

The place was so unbelievably silent it was screaming. I had a friend once who bought an abandoned and largely derelict bank, complete with vault. If you went into the vault and closed the huge door, you could hear your heart beat, and the sound of your breathing would become unbearably loud. Well, that’s the story I tell people, he was actually a mate of a mate and I never got to go in the bank, let alone the vault, but I’ve told the story as my own so many times I actually believe it when I tell it. I have many of these second-hand experiences, that I’ve passed on as my own. It’s not a bad thing, everyone lies. In fact, it’s given me the ability to sniff it out in others a mile off. I can tell if someone’s passing off another’s story as their own – or just outright lying - within the first few words. From there I have many options depending on the level of social unease I feel like releasing. Sometimes none, sometimes everything, sometimes just enough to sow some seeds of suspicion to have the liar in question walking a tightrope, with him – or her, ladies lie more, I’ve noticed – knowing at any moment I can have them tumbling into social oblivion, the likes of which they may never recover and have to move on and find a new set of friends to deceive for reasons they don’t know. A new set of friends unconsciously chosen from a lower social stratum too, wrongly assuming less intelligence and achievement might protect them from ever going through such a humiliation again. I know this feeling well, having been caught out lying so much as a young boy and even as a teenager. And yet, the remedy to being caught out is so simple I am always perplexed when they just crumble. I don’t lie so much now, barely having, wanting or needing a social group. But upon the odd occasion I was caught out when I was younger, which was rare since I’d become quite the master, I would just say words to the effect: “Yes, I am lying, and you were not, but can you see how engaged everyone is with what I’m saying compared with the dreary responses and constant interruptions you endured with your wonderful truth? Your actual life could not hold the attention of a group of people as well as my lies. So, unless you want to send us all to bed early now with a debate on ethics, button it, because I’m about to get to the best bit.” You see, people don’t want truth, it holds little value in today’s culture, they want entertaining. But you need to know, and I mean know – truly believe that – before you can pull it off. Otherwise, it’s the tightrope, and no one wants to be that vulnerable when they’re that vulnerable.

As I followed the woman further into the building, I could feel that difference between truth and lies losing its significance, which should have been reassuring, considering my, and I hate to say it ‘personality’, but it wasn’t, it was unnerving, and within just a matter of say, thirty seconds, I was losing grasp of who I was. This was so powerful it was definitely intentional. The clever bastards.

All the walls were three quarters beige, divided by a two-inch black strip from an olive-green final quarter that met the shiny, black, vinyl, tiled flooring. I actively sought out the typical smell of institution cleaning products. That mixture of artificial pine and isopropyl alcohol. But there was nothing. It was like my nose had stopped working. Having spent a lot of time in various institutions during my life, from school, care homes, holding cells, hospitals, the occasional psyche ward the wife liked to frequent (for ‘her own good they’d say’, buy wow, it was quite the performance holding in my joy knowing I’d be free of her for a while), I’d always be struck by the odour of industrial cleaning fluids, delivered in hundred-litre barrels and pushed up and down the floors of the place on a mop by a man drained of life by twenty years of passive absorption and yet who felt strangely fidgety when not around the damn stuff. I gave the nose another go, but nothing. You’d expect at least the appetite suppressing stench of overboiled vegetables, the nutrients, flavour, and anything else that made the said vegetables previously attractive – worthwhile - disappearing in a steam that would fill the place, especially at this time of day, just before lunch. But no, nothing. “Don’t think about it too much” she said as she continued walking through the building, me struggling to keep up and considering which of my senses would be removed next, especially when I realized the black dividing line that split the colours on the walls didn’t actually run parallel with the floor, it went up the further down the corridor we walked, creating some kind of optical illusion, playing with perspective and giving my eyes the runaround.

And then a slight tap, as if someone had closed the lid on a plastic box of some type. She stopped so abruptly I almost walked into her back. She shook her head, made some notes on her clipboard and we continued up the corridor, turning left when we reached the end and began climbing a short set of stairs. At the top was a long corridor with doors on each side, same colour scheme as before, same perspective shenanigans, and just as I was contemplating how ‘colour scheme’ had never felt so linguistically correct, she pushed a door open and told me it was my room.

A beige room. Small beige mattress on the floor, a beige plastic chair, a plastic cup of water and a stack of paper on a beige, plastic desk. “Please complete the entrance questionnaire. There are no right or wrong answers, and it shouldn’t take more than eight or nine hours to complete. But before you answer any questions, please read through all the questions first.” And with that she was gone.

Nine fucking hours. What kind of questionnaire takes nine hours? And read them all first? I looked around the room a bit before starting. It was clean but not new. There were the odd signs of use, lines on the floor where the chair had scratched deep into the thick epoxy covering over time. The odd dirty fingerprint around the door frame. And then I noticed a very fine line, a rectangle, about window size on the wall above the desk. I leaned over the desk to take a closer look, it turned out to be a very fine wire, set into the plaster. I traced my finger along it a little bit and then right in the left-hand corner I noticed what at first looked like tiny hieroglyphs, but when I got really close, like inches from the wall I saw someone had scratched into the plaster, in the smallest writing they could, the words ‘I love you, little fly.’

The pages of the questionnaire were numbered, all fifty-five of them, with each page having about ten questions and a single dotted line underneath for my answer. The first question: “How do you explain ‘up’ to a man doing a handstand?” Question two: “An alarm definitely rings three times a day. How many times does it not ring?”

I didn’t bother reading the questions first, with about five hundred and fifty questions I would have about a minute a question in nine hours, and with no watch, no clock, no way of telling the time, I wanted to make an impression. I’m not sure what impression, but something more than not finishing the first task in the expected time.

It was such an endurance; the questions would get so extremely pointless (Question thirty-two: Answer this question positively. Question forty-one: Write down all the numbers (as numerals) between one and twenty that don’t require a curve.) But not reading them in advance was a mistake. The last question: If you’d rather have a cup of tea and watch a movie, you can. Just press the buzzer by the door. The questionnaire is not compulsory.

I’d been given no instructions what to do when finished so once I’d resigned myself to having been had, I started doing the work I was really here for, an inventory of sorts of my life so far; my past, my present and what the combination of those two meant for my future. But so overwhelmed, perhaps underwhelmed by my environment, I couldn’t seem to make any significant connections. The door opens. “My name is Nurse Hygieia…”, “Cool, my name is..”, “of no relevance to me. Please follow me as there’s a workshop you need to attend as part of your evaluation”, and she turned and left the room. I quickly chased after her and walked by her side, rather than shuffling along behind her like a reluctant child. “Where are you from?” I asked. “Why anyone would think that could matter always surprises me.” she said as she opened a door and we walked into a beige room with about ten other people, sitting on seats in a circle. We took the remaining two free seats. Just as I noticed everyone else had their pads and pen, Nurse Hygieia asked “Where is your pen and pad?”, “Ah, I wasn’t told to bring them.”, “You were not asked to bring your clothes but you are not naked”, “I am underneath” Bingo! I saw a hint of life from the other patients, micro-smiles, weirdly. I started to get up, “I’ll go get my pad and pen.”, “No need” Hygieia said as she walked to the corner of the room and picked up a pad about four feet high, two feet wide, and a pen the size of a rolling-pin, placing them on my lap which completely obscured me from the group. I leant the huge pad on my knees, the other end propped up on the toe-caps of my shoes. “So, you’re punishing me with intentional impractibility for not knowing the rules you’ve yet to tell me?”, “It’s not punishment! It’s a treat. Now be quite and listen or I’ll give you another one.”

“OK – I’d like to welcome everyone to The St Martin’s Treatment Centre, and to your first group class. I want you to write down a dream you’ve had, any dream, it doesn’t have to be dramatic, or anything spectacular, just a dream. No longer than fifty words. Begin.” Oh gosh, other people’s dreams, double plus dreary. As you know I’m fine with lies, everyone is. The history of art is a history of lies, of invention, of the freakish engagement of agency and reality bending truth itself. But dreams, other people’s dreams especially, the unauthored, exaggerated, and farcically encrypted trauma of humans parading itself like a circus act, by a clown. It’s not a story, it’s the antithesis of a story. A dream is a true lie, an utter and absolute waste of both.

And then we got to hear them, and only the person to your right could comment; had to comment. Nurse Hygieia would prompt them with a look, and under the incredible pressure the environment, the ‘treatment’ had put us under, that look – not much in itself, mind - would pull out, would extract, would dig its spiney fingers into your head and squeeze a comment out.

I needed two hands to use my pen, and both knees and both feet to hold the pad. Needless to say, I kept my dream short: At my cousin’s house a dog could speak. It was my cousin Nate. The man to my right, knowing the score by the time it got round to me, and not wanting to do anything wrong asked me how I felt. “I was asleep, I felt nothing.” Hygieia gives the look. “But when you woke up, what did you feel?”, “Nothing, I’d forgot the dream, in fact I only just remembered it here, today”.

It went on for hours, but it wasn’t the time so much as the waste of time that got to me, since it has the effect of stretching time. The whole experience was like waiting for something worthwhile to happen combined with the increasing awareness that it wasn’t going to. I was so numb and drained by the time it was over I don’t remember walking back to my room or falling asleep. Just waking up at some point, not knowing what time or day it was, and a kind of tasteless smoothie in a beaker on the desk.

Days continued much like that. There was absolutely no socializing apart from the controlled, structured workshops, no way of telling what the time was, and that was that. I didn’t have either the time or the space to think about the things I came here for because I was either at a workshop or so tired, I’d fall asleep the moment I got back to my room.

People started to disappear, and someone else would appear to replace them. Sometimes it would just happen – as in you’d not see someone any more and a new person would have taken their place in the next workshop. Other times it happened in the group, One man had an brutal asthma attack during a session where we were partnered up to mirror each other but we were instructed not to move. The thing is it went on for hours, perhaps an entire day, and through boredom, fatigue and all manner of other unavoidable effects of time that cause you to move, we all ended up on the floor, sleeping in symmetrical pairs. Another man had a seizure during a workshop where we had to read literary reviews to the group taken from English newspaper The Guardian.

After an unmeasurable and so unknowable period of time I decided to leave. I’d been placed into some radical treatment experiment where rather than being the patient I was part of the research. I should have known that cunt Wabyen had my number from the beginning. So, for the first time since arrival I pressed the button by the door and waited. Nurse Hygieia arrived in a minute or so and I told her I was done. She gave me a real smile and said a healthy discharge involves a short conversation with a selection of the senior therapeutic staff, so that we might learn something from your time here and better our treatment of others.

My first thought was to refuse the offer. But I realized for the first time in my life I’d done what I’d been told from start to finish. I hadn’t tried to sabotage things for me, the other patients or the centre. I hadn’t tried to play it. I’d just done it. So, I agreed and followed Nurse Hygieia along a corridor, let her open a door and I walked in.

The difference was striking, vertiginous. So much culture invading the empty space that had been carved into my consciousness over the last however many weeks. Two men and a woman in everyday clothes sat on a variety of comfy seats in a room with paintings hung and other things stuck on the wall; a bit of clutter here and there, and even a basketball hoop over the waste paper bin. They all introduced themselves with names I forgot instantly, so busy was my head with cultural artifacts I’d been denied for however long and I sat down and accepted a cup of tea.

“Why have you chosen to leave now?” Asked the woman “But before you answer I’d like to let you know you’ve been here for fourteen weeks.”, “Good Lord” I said “I was sure I was leaving before time; I’d have thought there was no way I’d been here for longer than originally arranged. But in answer to your question, I want to see my children, my wife. I want to get back to work and start enjoying my life again.”, “But you weren’t enjoying your life. Dr Wabyen’s report doesn’t make for pleasant reading.”, “And that….” chipped in the other man, a younger, long haired, too many trips to India during med-school kind of guy “…is exactly what we do here. You see you’d taken everything you have for granted, rather than things and relationships you’d worked for, sacrificed for, earned. In short, you were completely bereft of gratitude. The St Martin’s Treatment Centre could be called a gratitude machine, where we put people like you in one end, wind the handle and….”, “it’s a revolutionary treatment showing remarkable results in all our centres around the world.”, interrupted the woman, leaning forward to add gravitas to her statement, and underplay talk of machines and winding. “We’ll drive you down to the station and give you the train ticket back home, where you can see your life afresh, and marvel at the wonder that is the gift of life you are.”, “If we could just have your debit card, we’ll process the arranged payment and get you a receipt.” In about thirty seconds after that was done, we all shook hands and I followed Nurse Hygieia out of a door on the side of the office into the first natural light I’d seen in fourteen weeks, down some steps and into the car, Hygieia walking back up the steps immediately and leaving me with the driver.

The drive to the station was nice enough. Pop music played on the radio and the driver filled me in on all the sports news he assumed I’d missed while in treatment. The world seemed busy, really busy. Really urgent and stressed. In thirty minutes, I’d be home. But I wouldn’t. Because in five minutes the high-speed train that doesn’t stop here will rocket through at about 90mph and smash my body into pieces, spreading my organs, blood, brain and all that other gunk along a few hundred yards of train track. Because while Wabyen had my number, I had his, and the centre’s. This revolutionary therapy was obviously a glorified and contrived ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ machine, I knew it the moment I arrived, being able to identify lies and all that.

I didn’t want to see my family. I didn’t want to see my children or go back to work. I wanted to stay at the centre, forever. Because there I didn’t have to do anything, didn’t have to think, worry - I didn’t have to do things – I didn’t have to play the complex social games we’re forced into just to get through the day. Life scares me, I lived in perpetual fear. And once I realized that, I realized the day would come when they’d realize that, and what horrors would await a person identified to be in such a position, to dare have those thoughts – to not only not have gratitude, but to not want any. A man who, in short, had already decided to dip out of life because he didn’t like it, want it, care for it, or need it. In fact, the only thing I had left in life was my choice to end it, and I wasn’t going to let them take that away from me, because that is a Hell worse than death, which admittedly is only fractionally worse than life, but at this level of sensitivity to yourself, such fractions count like mountains. Hashtag no Zen.

I heard the tracks twitch and crackle as the train approached. Somewhere out there, wandering around in the world, doing his job, caring for his children, is a man who scratched ‘I love you, little fly’ on the wall of a treatment centre room. The world is littered with these pathetic creatures. I shiver as I imagine him explaining that to his wife as her pussy turns in on itself and makes a seal only a rock-hard penis – which gratitude for a fly man will never know again – can penetrate.  I sat on the edge of the platform, the world around me already disappearing, and just pushed myself off, the train smashing into me, obliterating my body in an instant, and to never. Feel. Anything. Again.

The End

Chris Dangerfield

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