Mothers covered children’s eyes.
An old woman crossed herself as she crossed the road to avoid him.
Ordinary tasks became inexplicably difficult.
Talking for one.
Even buying cigarettes now involved complexity.
“Card or cash?” asked the girl in Żabka.
The insect froze. Where voice once worked, a clicking sound appeared from around his knees.
Smoking the damn things became virtually impossible.
It was then he realised his story had already been written by someone else.
Even his nervous breakdown fantasy self was turning out to be derivative.
Still, originality is overrated, particularly in the insect community.
So, the insect continued attempting normal life.
But generally he survived the way insects do: by moving very little and pretending to be dead.
The insect in this instance was me.
Well, not entirely.
And it was with that realisation that I decided it might finally be time to seek professional help.
So, every Thursday at eleven I clambered four flights of stairs to the office of Dr K in Warsaw’s Saska Kępa district.
He was a psychoanalyst probably about half my age, late twenties. Trimmed beard. Probably an SUV parked outside, I thought.
His face was one of those granite jobs. Show no emotion, it screamed. I didn’t know if this was his Lacanian work face, the one he used at home, or just his Polish enigmatic indifference face. Probably all three.
I liked him immediately.
His office contained two chairs, a couch, three overwatered plants, a framed picture of Józef Piłsudski on a horse and, occasionally, a cat called Vicky, who treated us both with quiet contempt. When I became especially self-dramatising she would open one eye, yawn, and turn away.
“You may begin,” said Dr K.
“I think I’m turning into an insect,” I said.
“That’s, um, unexpected,” Dr K said.
“Maybe tell me, slowly, in your own time, when this unusual occurrence occurred.”
He flipped a page in his notebook. Though it was hard to tell upside down, Dr K seemed to have hastily scribbled what appeared to be ‘Kafka delusions.’
A common complaint in this part of Warsaw. Thankfully, treatable if detected early.
“I don’t know when,” I said.
“Then begin where you always begin.”
“With love?”
“No,” he said. “With The Woman.”
He sighed.
“That is what your email suggested anyway.”
“Right,” I said. “Yes, there was, is, a woman. Or two, or, wait, maybe three.”
M1, O, and M2, I said.
“Indeed,” Dr K sighed again.
“Can I go into some graphic details?”
“I expect no less,” he said.
A smile almost appeared around his lips but thought better of it. One smile an hour for first-timers. Union rules.
I looked down at my shoes.
“You’re fuckable,” she told me once, I said.
Another sigh. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ Dr K’s face spoke volumes. Or appeared to. Or didn’t. He tapped his notepad with a pen that appeared to have been sourced from a local bookmaker.
I recalled not being sure whether to hear her words as an insult, a compliment or simply a fact. The fuckability part, that is. Not the sigh. That was real enough.
She had been taking photographs of me and, I suspected, texted one to a friend or a sister asking if I was.
The answer, one surmises, was that I was.
Later, softer, she said: “My beautiful Harper. You are mine. I crave you. You chose me when you could have any woman.”
Could I? I remember thinking. Christ, if so, what am I doing here? Isn’t Claudia Schiffer available tonight?
But by then she had moved from description to possession.
I was hers.
“You make me complete,” she said later that evening. “My Harper.”
She slept in my T-shirt that night.
And then nothing.
For days. Then weeks. Then in fact months.
“And thus it began,” I said.
“What began?” said Dr K.
“The loop.”
Vicky the cat opened one eye.
“I was in the fucking loop again. The fuckability loop.”
Dr K asked why I called it the loop.
“It’s like, um, the thing you can’t get out of, the thing you keep doing over and over again. As if you need it, but it’s not good for you. And you know that and do it anyway. A bit like alcohol, or I guess heroin. I was inside the loop,” I explained.
Dr K was unmoved. Still. At least facially.
“Ok, so think of it like this. You remember what Donald Rumsfeld once said about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns,” I said.
“No, not really. I was ten when Awe and Thunder, or whatever it was called, happened. My father worked in Baghdad actually,” Dr K said, his mind off on a brief Babylonian sojourn.
That in itself should have registered at the very least a polite “how interesting” response, but I continued on my track. The loop is an even more relentless beast when hungry.
“The loop is not about unknown unknowns. It is about known knowns.”
The granite remained granite.
“You know, like Mike Tyson when he said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. The punch in the face and the standing up to be punched in the face again is the loop.”
Dr K made a note.
“Do you have a drink problem?” he asked.
“Do you?” I spat back.
“Yes, sorry. I think so. I stopped drinking in December and have more or less stopped since then.”
“More or less?”
“More,” I replied. “Sometimes less.”
“You are a journalist?” Dr K asked.
“How do you know that?”
“Your email, again, Joe,” he said, any hint of a smile now retreated firmly back into the cave where it seemed to belong.
“Yes, I am. Kind of. It’s a bit of an in-and-out thing with me.”
“So you are in the loop, but also out of it, professionally.”
He paused and stroked his Saska Kępa beard.
“That is interesting. I have seen the film. In the Loop. Malcolm Tucker is my favourite.”
Dr K seemed briefly distracted by thoughts of the sweary Scotsman.
“Great,” I said, wondering why he had spelt my name with an e at the end, before realising, oddly, that hearing him saying my name didn’t necessarily correspond to how it was spelled. It was just a sound. I could be a Xio, perhaps, in China. Maybe President Xio. Yes, I liked that.
Vicky stared at me with a look that seethed disdain. And yawned.
Chin stroked, Dr K spoke again.
“Repetition,” he said. “Please go on.”
I realised then I would have to use my time wisely. Three hundred zlotys for fifty minutes. I would have to talk fast to get it all in.
I had fallen in love and would spend the next six months trying not to be, I said. The love felt real. Not ironic. Not analytical. Not a symptom, or a displacement, or one more way of avoiding myself. I fell in love with M.
M. Why her? Again.
I thought about her constantly. I smiled at my phone. I felt that quiet warmth in my chest and the butterflies in my stomach.
I am a stupid cunt, I thought. “This is going to hurt again,” I told Dr K.
The league topping curse word in the English language arrived unexpectedly easily in my fragile mind, functioning at this stage as a manageable but largely internal transgression. For now at least.
Dr K said nothing. He had probably met a lot of cunts in his time, I thought.
This nothing, I later realised, was his method. He let me splurge until the splurge revealed its shape. Or didn’t.
After a while he said: “You are not speaking about love. You are speaking about occupation. A seizure.”
“Fine,” I said. “A seizure then.”
I didn’t know of what or by whom. I thought of epilepsy and dybbuks. Of Nazis in black boots marching down Krakowskie Przedmieście. I think he meant that something or someone had somehow taken me over. A hijack perhaps.
Dr K spoke English in a way that made nuance, idiom or obfuscation difficult to use as shield. Or sword. Things were simply what they were. Germanic, I decided. I wondered privately if the talking cure could actually cure if the people talking talked different languages.
By then I had already started splitting things, I said, including hairs, a play on words that fell on deaf ears in Dr K’s office. Vicky stared me straight in the face. “I’ll split your hairs,” she seemed to be saying, though no translation was immediately available.
I had done this not because it was clever, I went on. But because it seemed difficult to avoid the inner conflict much longer.
I broke down my Dramatis Personæ for Dr K.
The Man in this split believes that if something can be named clearly enough, it can be endured, and perhaps altered.
“The ego,” Dr K said, but without conviction, as if offering me something I had already decided to buy.
He writes it down anyway. Union rules is union rules.
The Boy does not explain. He experiences directly – through sensation, waiting, proximity, withdrawal.
“The id,” he said, again writing, though now the pen slows slightly, as if the word itself were resisting him.
The Editor selects, shapes, orders. He wants coherence, even at the price of distortion.
“The superego.” A third note.
I watch him.
“You don’t believe this,” I say.
Dr K looks up, mildly bored.
He taps the page.
“You are not three people,” he says, helpfully.
“That’s good,” I jumped in. “Not sure I can afford 900 zlotys an hour.”
Yes, that is amusing, but shut up and listen for a change. Granite spoke in volumes again.
“You are divided. And the division does not resolve itself by naming the parts.”
“And the fourth?” I ask. “The Night Manager.”
Dr K strokes his chin at that.
“Ah,” he says.
He does not write this one down.
“He keeps the whole thing going.”
Dr K leans back.
“In Lacanian terms, you might say he – or perhaps she – is attached to the fantasy. Not the content – not the woman, not the actual story – but the structure that ensures you continue to desire.”
“So what does he – or she – do?” I ask.
“He manages the deferral,” Dr K says. “He makes sure that satisfaction never quite arrives, but neither does its absence become final.”
Dr K has quietly pronouned me. The invisible ‘e’ tagged again on the end of Jo.
Vicky stares at me as if to say, “Really?!”
“A hotel, then?” I say.
“If you like.”
“Hotel California?”
“Precisely.”
He pauses.
“You can check in,” he adds. “But never leave.”
Dr K looks up at this point. “But I am more curious who you think the Narrator and the Author are in your story?” he asked. “Who is writing your story?”
These mes are not co-authors, I explained, not independent agents. They were my chosen ways of organising experience. They are held together only by a body that, for reasons unclear, somehow didn’t split, as much as it tried to.
The Dr looks at me with a slightly mocking eyebrow shift. That is way too clever, too knowing, one eyebrow said. The other sat motionless. Union rules dictate no more than one eyebrow shift at any one time.
But then the thing became crowded, I went on.
There was M, obviously. But there was also O, my wife, listening, watching, secretly reading my messages to and from M, trying to work out what exactly was happening while already knowing.
There was Jakub, or Kuba as he was called, M’s husband, the one who stayed, the one who occupied the position I never could.
There was M2, later, with her warmth and catastrophe, and my horror when I heard myself saying to her versions of the same evasive things M said to me.
“There are a lot of people in this,” said Dr K.
“Exactly.”
“No,” he said. “I mean structurally.”
That irritated me. Were we building a house? A layer of sedimentary rock crossed my face, as if to say: come on, mate, do us a favour. Six or seven Sussex sisters squinted.
For once, Vicky seemed to agree with me.
What he meant, I later realised, was that none of these stories ever involved only two people. There was always a third, or fourth, or fifth: wife, husband, child, father, reader, fantasy, God, squirrels or a large elephant sat at the back of the room.
“If there are enough people in the room, no one has to see clearly,” Dr K said.
I told him too about the books M had given me, the ones I did not read until later. The ones she said I should have read 40 years earlier.
The Master and Margarita.
By the end of it I realised that perhaps she had been trying to tell me something about herself. Oh God, I’ve gone and gone all meta, I thought. Or she had, which perhaps made my move doubly meta – and therefore obviously far more exciting.
Any road, Margarita enters the world of Woland, a devilish figure.
Woland does not make people wicked, he simply gives them permission to become more fully what they already are.
Margarita accepts the offer because she is divided, dissatisfied, unable to live entirely inside the respectable story offered to her. She becomes free, but the freedom is dangerous. It allows desire, revenge, tenderness, cruelty, love and anger all at once.
Perhaps M was trying to tell me that she was not the woman who would save me, nor the femme fatale who would destroy me. She was the woman who would interrupt the story I was telling myself.
“What M exposed in me was like, you know, Mickey Rourke at the end of Angel Heart, finally realising that he is not merely investigating the murders, but that he is the killer,” I said.
“I am not aware of this film,” Dr K said.
Undeterred by his discrete refusal to enter my metaverse, I moved on.
“Ok, so all through the film he believes he is the wronged man, just a Regular Joe, a private dick working a case,” I said. My use of the US film noire jargon quietly impressed me, myself and also I. All three of us.
Dr K looked at me as if I were in fact mad. A mad nutter living in a nut house. ‘But it’s your time you’re wasting.’ His granite face spoke a universal truth. Volumes of the stuff.
So waste it I did. Two minutes on an irrelevant story that leads us nowhere. My mind sets its own maths test. That’s 10 zlotys, roughly 2 pounds sterling. Well worth it, I agreed. What can you get these days for 2 pounds sterling? The meta meter ticked.
“I digress,” I said.
Dr K looked confused. “You are a tigress?” he asked. “I thought you were an insect.”
I hear not. I have no ears after all, right?
“Anyway, at the end of the movie, the lift descends, the fan turns, Robert De Niro smiles, and Harry Angel understands that Mr Mephistopheles had bought his soul years earlier, and that he was the killer and had wanted to be. In fact he had needed to be, to save his own soul,” I explained.
Dr K looked bored. Or perhaps not. It was hard to tell. Besides, matters meta matter not.
Then, with shock and awe, I said, I suddenly realised that perhaps M had not led me astray. Maybe she had just revealed the part of me that wanted to break my existing life.
“Did you say something about an ashtray?” Dr K asked, perplexed again.
An editor in a far away London office prepares to start work on the session’s minutes. It could be a long day.
“Perhaps the devil in this story was not M,” I continued. “Perhaps it was the man who invited her in. Into the family home. Into the marriage. Into the fantasy. Into the old scene.”
Like my father had done in 1975.
Only now, without admitting it, I had arranged the same scene myself.
Evil can arrive, Dr K said, not as grand design, but as something random, grubby, absurd, opportunistic. “A stranger simply enters a house and the thing that was already there becomes visible.”
I thought of Dennis Potter. “You know, Brimstone and Treacle,” I said.
I do not know this Potter, only his son, Harry, Dr K said without apparent irony, adding, “but I see you have a propensity to tell one story through another. That is interesting. One Narrator just slips into another without touching the ground. The Narrator runs the show.”
“But that is what desire does sometimes,” Dr K said.
“It does not create us, but it reveals us through fantasy. We are shaped partly by fate, by childhood, by the accidents of timing and chemistry and weakness, but also by our own unrecognised desires: the things we say we do not want and then move steadily towards,” he went on.
This was probably worth 300 zlotys, I thought. I wanted to give Dr K a rapturous standing ovation.
“We hate ourselves for them. We call them fate or weakness. We call them other people. Then we do them anyway,” he went on.
My humour could not contain itself, again. “If that was indeed the message, perhaps a text would have sufficed,” I said, well half-snorted.
The smile finally arrived, a wicked one that revealed shiny white teeth and a mischievous dimple on a left cheek.
It’s odd what we remember.
And then, slowly, something else dawned on me.
I had not only cast M as Margarita. I was perhaps Margarita for her too.
A clap of thunder.
She wanted me not because with me she could glimpse something beneath the surface of her own life. That she too was divided, unloved in the ordinary way that most people are, beneath the story they tell themselves.
Heathcliffe and Kathy make a bolt for the door.
She was not merely the dutiful wife, the mother, the woman who endured, adapted, stayed. She was also someone who wanted. Someone who could refuse. Someone who could desire and be desired.
I was not only the one who looked. I was looked at.
Perhaps she was talking about herself, I told Dr K. About Jakub, her long-suffering husband. About the suburban marriage and the ordinary life. The flat, the child, the routines, the church, the blanket of piety wrapped tightly around the more difficult parts of herself.
Perhaps the fantasies were no longer enough. The little dramas, the flirtations, the danger. Her beauty, her charm, her ability to become different women in different rooms. Perhaps she knew that these things could only carry her so far.
Underneath them was something else.
Her ordinary self.
And perhaps that was what frightened her most.
And perhaps it frightened me too.
“I want you in my life, Harper,” she said, I told Dr K.
But which life? Her husband had by then been returning in fragments of conversations, I told Dr K. Mentioned more often. His awkwardness. The old life slowly being reconstructed around the son.
“So, was I becoming another one who would wait while she travels, attends conferences, disappears into hotels and bars and returns with stories half-told and carefully edited?” I asked.
“In what I give you, I give it all,” she once said, I told Dr K.
I was jealous, I realised. What about all the other times she gives?
Dr K nods. “Of course. She’s married. She owes you nothing. She is betraying her husband, not you.”
He leans forward. “She does not want to lose you,” he says. “But that is not the same as wanting you.”
The sentence arrives with extraordinary force. Tears roll down my face.
“You have done a lot of homework, I see,” Dr K said. “Now let us go through it.”
I told Dr K that my story would probably come out in bits, allusions, illusions, allegories, fairy tales, football, priests, border crossings, old girlfriends, dead fathers, talking cats, panic, ducks, Poland, bunkers, peacocks and jokes that were not funny.
“Is that all right?” I asked.
He looked at me for a while. Then at Vicky, who had clearly seen this sort of thing before. Not her first rodeo. A spikey cat tongue was now ferociously caressing her own more intimate parts.
“For now,” he said, “we will allow the story to proceed as the symptoms do.”
“Is that a yes?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. The dimple had gone.
“Not in order. Not logically. By association, repetition, displacement. You will leave things out and put them back later. You will insist certain things are unimportant and then return to them fifty pages later. You will confuse people, times and motives.”
“That sounds promising.”
“No,” said Dr K. “It is merely unavoidable.”
He picked up his notebook.
“Begin at the point where you think it started,” he said. “Then we will see where you actually begin.”
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