The Lunatic Messiah

  Armaita made a steeple with his hands, a cathedral vaulted monument to his own insightfulness, and rested his chin on it.

  'Things have deteriorated.'

  Joe didn't speak. He had seen Armaita often enough by now to know that it wasn't over yet. The man had showmanship, that was certain, and his pause was only for dramatic effect. Sure enough, he continued.

  'Your wife called me yesterday and raised certain concerns. She says that you've stopped with the medication completely, some time ago in fact, and that you appear to have... given up hope.'

  Joe shrugged.

  'I never had hope. I've given up caring is more accurate. My problems don't amount to much on a larger scale.'

  'You say this a lot, Joe. You seem to think that because there are people worse of than you in this world, that you don't deserve any better. Don't you see how destructive that is? There is always somebody worse off than you, that is a fact. There is always somebody worse off than them. I'm glad that you've accepted this, that is what we were aiming for, but there is a difference between accepting something and not caring about your own welfare.'

  'Well, yes, there is. Accepting something means that you pretend you don't care any more as opposed to actually not caring.'

  Armaita clucked like a chicken, which was supposed to indicate concern but didn't and Joe farted, quite surreptitiously. Although he didn't care what Armaita thought of him there were still certain social standards he adhered to.

  'Mary asked me to sound you out on the idea of surgery. What do you think about that?'

  'Well what do you think?'

  'I'm not a surgeon, Joe, but it sounds like your best chance. It sounds like you at least have the chance of getting better.'

  'Getting better? This morning, on the way here I saw fourteen people spontaneously combust from my window. Fourteen.'

  'What do you mean, combust?' asked Armaita curiously.

  'I mean they exploded. Or rather they disassembled violently into a sort of mist, leaving only their clothing lying in the street. Can you explain that?'

  'Hallucinations. Brought on by the tumour.'

  Joe considered this.

  'Maybe. But maybe I've lost my mind already and even if the tumour doesn't kill me I'm going to end up living in a world of crazy that's no better than the death I'm supposed to be scared of.'

  'Joe, I can't speak for the surgery, but I can tell you that you can get better mentally. There are people in this very building who were considered hopeless case not six months ago. In the upstairs ward there are nymphomaniacs, chronic depressives, sex offenders. Some of them could barely function around other people and had to be isolated, but now they've all come together and are actually going to put on a musical in the local community centre.'

  'A musical? This is what I have to look forward to? Getting well enough to perform in a musical with some social misfits?'

  Armaita unsteepled his hands from the cathedral formation and flipped them around to form some sort of frog. Or it could have been a bunny rabbit, Joe couldn't really make it out.

  'No. You're far more functional than those people, Joe. It's simply an example of how much progress can be made...'

  'So which musical is it? Is it a series of performances? You could have the nymphomaniacs doing Orgy and Bess and the chronic depressives could do Très Misérables...'

  'Joe, your need to denigrate everything is only a means of defending yourself against your own inability to deal with your problems...' started Armaita.

  'The sex offenders could do Kiddie Fiddler on the Roof...'

  'Joe, this gets us nowhere.'

  Joe paused for a moment and then laughed. He had come to the realisation that the man sitting opposite him saw him as little more than an interesting case study. Perhaps somebody to write a paper on and submit to the monthly medical journal "Who Gives A Fuck?". But to him, Armaita was not just an aspiring psychiatrist. Although in person he seemed harmless enough, Joe knew that there was more to him than met the eye. Gabriel was his progeny, with her piercing eyes, and she had taken a part of him to make herself. There must have been answers somewhere in Armaita's head.

  'Did you know I was fired?'

  Armaita clucked again, but to Joe's disappointment, no egg rolled from his chair and cracked on the floor.

  'I did.'

  'Did my wife tell you that, or was it your daughter?'

  Armaita looked rather uncomfortable all of a sudden, exactly the way a full grown psychiatrist might look if he was about to lay an egg, but again, Joe was disappointed.

  'Gabriel?'

  'Yes, Gabriel. You were aware that I taught her at Finchwood, I assume?'

  Armaita weighed this information but didn't speak. He nodded very slightly.

  'You are then also aware that I was fired based on a series of complaints she made against me, the latest of which including what she termed as threatening behaviour?'

  'I was not aware that she was in your class until very recently. Our relationship is somewhat estranged,' said Armaita defensively.

  'Nevertheless, do you not think that you being my psychiatrist is very unprofessional?'

  Armaita hands were now joined only by the thumb, and they shook a little, so they appeared as a butterfly perched on a blade of grass. Joe had to concentrate hard to keep them situated on his wrists, and not flapping about the room randomly.

  'Perhaps it was a little inappropriate, but I was unaware of this until three days ago, and now that you are no longer a teacher at that institution there is no longer a conflict of interest.'

  Joe snorted.

  'I attacked your daughter. At least that's what she's claiming. Why are you so keen to keep me here? Why don't you just refer me to somebody else?'

  'Because I believe we've made real progress here and I think it would be a shame to waste that when I am perfectly capable of compartmentalising the different aspects of my life.'

  Joe sat up very suddenly, and held up a hand to silence Armaita.

  'Wait.'

  He sniffed, long and deep.

  'What is that?' he said.

  Armaita looked at Joe, then around the room. He took a tentative sniff himself.

  'I don't smell anything.'

  'No, it's definitely there. It smells like, yes, I think it is. It smells like complete and utter bullshit. Tell me why you're keeping me on. Are you writing a paper on me?'

  Armaita shook his head.

  'No I'm not. Not at all.'

  'So what is it then?'

  He had replaced his hands into their steeple formation, and he tapped them against his chin, the fingers making a scraping sound on his beard as he did so. He finally placed his hands flat on the table as Joe had noticed him do several times before. It was as though the man knew a very convoluted form of sign language, but all he could use it to say was "I'm smarter than you". Finally he spoke.

  'It's a book. You're one of the chapters in a book I'm writing. Don't worry, the names are all changed so nobody would be able to identify you.'

  Joe smiled, and then laughed out loud.

  'Hell, use my name if you like. Put my picture in as well if you want. Print my address, I don't really care. I just wanted to know.'

  Joe did care. In fact he was absolutely furious, but there was no reason to let a psychiatrist, of all people, become aware of that.

  'Listen, Joe, I shouldn't have said anything at all. It's quite unprofessional. I don't even have a publisher yet and besides that I'm not very comfortable talking about this.'

  'Fine. Let's get back to talking about things that I'm uncomfortable with. What do you want to know?'

  'Well, we mentioned in one of our earlier sessions that dreams can be a very revealing window into the psyche. Patients with brain trauma, or tumours, often have very vivid dreams.'

  Joe looked around the room, at the dreary watercolour, at the desk, and at Armaita himself. Currently, at the height of concentration, all of those things were fairly tangible. The li
ght coming in through the window hit the floor and cast shadows just as it should have. The leather of the chair beneath him felt real enough, and his hands clasping the wood of the armrests was definitely and undeniably there. He let himself relax for a second, ignoring Armaita's discomfort at his behaviour, and allowed it to slip. Sure enough, the armrests began to meld slightly with his hands, and the light from the window intensified and started to fill the room. The desk began to grow larger and larger, until it appeared that the figure at the far end of it was a hundred metres away or more. The world became vague and dreamlike. It was such a contrast to his actual dreams. They had a reality that was so much more real, and so much more true than anything he had experienced that it was hard to believe they were all in his head. After several minutes of contemplation, during which Armaita prompted him several more times from his great distance away, Joe finally made a decision. He snapped the world back into focus and proceeded to tell the doctor about his dreams. Right from the start, and omitting no details. His memories of the events in his dreams were clearer than the memories of what he had done that morning, so he didn't find it difficult. Armaita listened intently, sometimes taking notes in his scrawling handwriting, and sometimes just listening. When Joe had finished, Armaita sat back and put his hands on his head.

  'So you felt no need to tell me any of this before?' he said finally.

  'Not really. I don't see that you're in a better position to gauge their meaning than I am.'

  'But I am, Joe. I'm a trained professional.'

  Joe sat forward and put his elbows on his knees, steepling his hands in a mirror pose.

  'Well let's see then,' said Joe. 'I assume you're going to tell me that all of these characters are simply representations of my own personality. Grey is the tumour, right? A faceless grey mass that terrifies me and yet seems to control every aspect of the world, whereas I am completely ineffectual. I assume that Ada is my caring nurturing side, Evan is my cynical angry side and Lucy is my desire to be a little girl again...'

  'Actually I'm far more interested in the fact that the dreams are episodic in nature. You haven't had the same dream twice?'

  Joe shook his head.

  'And you said that Lucy is the only one of them that will talk to you?'

  'Her and Grey, I suppose.'

  'How real would you say these dreams feel? They're lucid, but are they vivid?'

  'They feel as real as you and me sitting here right now but far less condescending.'

  Armaita wrote down something else in his notebook, and Joe leaned forward across the desk when he was distracted. Just as Armaita looked up again, Joe snatched the book out of his grasp. The doctor looked stunned for a second but then stood up and rushed around the table to retrieve it. It was too late, Joe had already read what he wanted to and he threw it back on the desk with a scornful look.

  'You shouldn't have done that.'

  'I just wanted to know what you really thought. Do you honestly believe that I have possible psychosis and that my dreams may be indicative of some deep-seated childhood trauma?'

  'Those are merely possible...'

  'Because I can tell you, I don't think my childhood is of any significance at all. It's nothing but a series of happy little postcards, sent to me long ago and only recently arrived. I mean, is it really just as simple as saying that Evan and Ada are just a reflection of my own dissatisfaction with my marriage, and that Gavrilo is the tumour trying to kill me? Or Evan, who represents me? What is Lucy then, in your opinion?'

  'Lucy? She might be the child...'

  'Oh right, the child we never had. Of course, I should have worked that one out for myself.'

  Armaita sat back in his chair and shrugged.

  'You know, Joe. It might not mean anything. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'

  Joe sat back in his chair and shrugged as well, as it seemed to be what was in fashion.

  'Well true. But sometimes it means you secretly want to suck a great big cock. It's a bit convenient to pick and choose the bits you want to make significant and say the rest is all random. You brought up this pseudo-scientific quackery. Why?'

  Armaita seemed reluctant to answer, and he used his long-winded sign language to tell Joe before finally deciding to use words.

  'I'm reluctant to answer that.'

  'I'm reluctant to die but we don't always get to do what we want. Why?'

  'Your wife mentioned to me that she's noticed your sleep has been very disturbed. That you talk, or sometimes scream in your sleep and that you rarely appear rested when you wake up. She said sometimes it seemed like you were having another seizure.'

  'Well that's true enough,' admitted Joe.

  'She also said that you mentioned to her in a restaurant that you didn't want to go through with the surgery because you thought you could get to the tumour another way. While you were sleeping. She said you mentioned this Mr Grey.'

  Joe was silent for a moment. He'd forgotten that he'd mentioned that to Mary. It was one of those moments of madness that seemed to creep up on him so often recently and leave little trace in his memory. Like the confrontation with Gabriel. They were things he knew of, but they somehow forced themselves away towards the back of his mind. The back of his mind where a tumour was steadily growing.

  'I just don't want you to make your decisions based upon... delusions. However real these dreams may feel to you, they are nothing but dreams. They may reflect anxieties, but they are not real. You're inventing this as a way of avoiding surgery. Your mind simply doesn't want to face facts and so you've come up with an alternative. But Joe, it's not real, and however much you would like to believe that you can think your way around this problem, it is a physical problem in the real world, and it's something you have to face.'

  Joe was still quiet. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that his life was slipping out of his control. It seemed that everybody around him was conspiring to make his decisions for him. Mary and Harry, Armaita and Pontius, they all knew more about what was going on than he did. It shocked him that he had become so detached as not to notice the mechanisms of deceit that were grinding him down day after day.

  'I'm not getting the surgery,' he whispered.

  Armaita grimaced and wrote something down in his pad, holding it close to his chest because he was afraid that Joe might again try and snatch it from him. He looked like a man in a prison cafeteria.

  'You are aware that I can judge you mentally incapable of making that decision.'

  'Yes, I'm sure. And you don't want to do that, right? You want to help me and make me see that it's the right choice?'

  'More or less.'

  Joe stood up and turned to leave the room. Armaita did not stand up, but he did call out to him. Joe didn't stop and went out into reception, where the younger receptionist, Diana, was looking at him strangely. The intercom was on, and Joe could hear Armaita's voice coming through it. It was wheezy and faint through the tinny speaker. It was little more than static reluctantly forming itself into words.

  'Joe. Where are you going?'

  Diana obliged and held down the button for Joe to speak.

  'The way I figure it, the more I talk to you, the more reason you have for finding me mentally incompetent. I'm cutting my losses.'

  The speaker wheezed as Diana removed her finger from the button, her eyes never straying from Joe's face.

  'It doesn't work like that. You need to come back in here and sit down. If I chose to, I could sign the papers right now and it would be accepted. We need to work together on this. I am not an adversary.'

  Joe nodded for Diana to press the button again.

  'And I am not just some character in a book.'

  'You said that you didn't care about that...'

  He walked out of the room without waiting for Armaita to finish. From the hallway he could here the tinny sounds of the intercom but then he heard Diana's voice, indifferently saying that the patient was gone. Joe took out his mobile phone and called Har
ry, but there was no response. He still had an appointment to see Dr Pontius immediately after his session, but that was half an hour away. He already knew what it would involve. An urging to get the surgery now, and veiled threats of being forced to if he didn't comply. He called Harry's office phone instead but got no response except for the annoying automated message service.

  'This is Harry Tudor, Faculty Head of European Literature for Finchwood Academy. I'm afraid I'm having sex with Joe's wife at the moment but if you'd like to leave a message after the beep I'll get right back to you.'

  'What did you say?' Joe said incredulously after the beep. 'Harry! I know you're there! Stop talking to my psychiatrist. It's none of your business if I die!'

  Joe threw his phone onto the ground and was about to stamp on it in a fury of righteous anger, but then he realised it was actually a fairly useful gadget to have, and not exactly cheap, so he picked it up and made sure that it was still working after its short trip to the floor. It was, although the signal was weaker than American beer, so he slipped it into his pocket and ran down the hallway towards the lifts. Pontius would have to wait.

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