King of Zombie Heath

Day 8 - Henry, King of the Heath

Doctor Jung (well, if you add some hair, trim the tash, take off the John Lennon jam-jars and fifty pounds from the waistline, there's more than a passing similarity. I suspect they share the same wardrobe. Tatty tweeds and bow ties) came to see me today. Quite a surprise. He was wearing a surgical mask, the kind Japanese people use on the Tokyo underground when there's a Sarin scare. I asked if he was well and he said yes, it was just a precaution. For what, I wondered. There's a bug going round, he said. In here? No, out there. Phew, that's alright then.

His visit was an unexpected pleasure. We usually meet in his office, although it's been a while. I've missed our chats. They help me put my thoughts in order. Which I need to do, to get out of here. And I do want to get out of here. I hesitate to use the term get better, because there isn't really anything wrong with me. Nothing serious, anyway. I admit, I can be easily influenced, and sometimes end up doing stuff other people would rather I didn't. But nobody's perfect. Everyone has their vices. Doc's got a drawer full of Penthouse and goes off on far too many GlaxoSmithKline funded orgies. And I'm sure Walt the ClinDir has a taste for prescription drugs and Chippendales. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that he's always so serious and, according to Doc's pet theory, keeping stuff like that bottled up can be toxic. Maybe he should keep a journal too. 

We chatted, about this and that, and Doc said he was pleased with my progress. I gave him my butter-wouldn't-melt look and and swore on my dead granny's grave how willing I was to collaborate with anything he thought might help me. He squinted at me over his jam-jars as though he suspected it was me that put granny in her grave (it wasn't, though I reserve the right to remain silent about grandaddy's fall, God rest his black soul) and asked if I was still hearing voices. I listened hard, and said that no, I didn't believe I was. Except for Nurse Ratched (as she's affectionately known) giving someone a telling off for pissing in a plant pot. He smiled, and asked who my confidants were these days.

I'm never sure if these are trick questions. I have to be careful with my answers, but I always know when I'm on the right track because it sets of his tick (nod nod, yes yes, scratch chin, scribble scribble) in much the same way jingling bells got Pavlov's dogs drooling. For a brief moment, he comes alive, like a zombie smelling fresh meat.

To answer (carefully) his question, I said I didn't feel comfortable discussing personal matters with deranged killers, psychos and weirdos, so I didn't really have any. Well, do you have any friends at all? Of course I do. There's Dick and Nimby. Nimby's not all there, bit of a fishy character, so Dick mostly, though he's strung like a guitar string four octaves to high and spends most of his time on a Thorazine drip. And Eddie. Eddie scares me sometimes. He can get pushy (tyrannical) and has a... dark I guess is the word, outlook on life. But we get on OK. We have to. We share a room. Doc nodded. Yes, yes, he mumbled, scratching his chin and scribbling madly on his yellow pad with his chubby Montblanc fountain pen.

He finished the chapter in his novel, then asked how the journal was going now. I said fine, I was having some trouble because I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to write. He made some (rather idiotic imho) suggestions.

1) My thoughts. Right... since I'm hoping to get out of here someday, I think I'll keep most of those to myself.

2) My feelings. My what? Doc and I have talked a lot about this, but I still can't get my head around the idea. Feelings? This chair's hard? My neck's aching? It's hot in here?

3) Interesting things that happen to me. Like today's surprise visit.

4) The food. (?) We had fish fingers and smash today. Now, it's funny he suggested this because I've noticed we're getting a lot of frozen and processed stuff recently. I know inflation's gone through the roof this winter, but that's no reason to skimp. The tax payer's paying, not us.

5) Current affairs. Illogical, considering - according to him - anything that reminds me of the outside world is toxic to my well-being. I kind of agree with him on that one. Every time I hear the news it seems the world's falling apart. Death, disease and destruction. I find the news depressing and am not ashamed to admit that I do get rather agitated thinking of all the things I could be doing out there when I'm cooped up in here.

6) The weather. (Another "?") The weather is unseasonably cold. Un-englishly cold. Beyond brass monkeys cold. Dick tells me the Emperor Penguins in London Zoo are dying of exposure. I'm not sure whether to believe him on that one (I think he read it in The Sunday Sport) but I did see in the paper that legions of old fogies are freezing to death in front of Eastenders and Coronation Street. Entertainment before warmth. They should get themselves locked up in here where it's nice and toasty. Dead penguins or not, I opened my window the other day and was blasted by winds from Siberia cold enough to freeze my eyeballs before I could blink. There was also so much snow I could dive head first into the drift under my second floor window (figuratively, cos I can't squeeze between the bars yet, but I will be able to if the food doesn't improve) and then just walk over the other drift piled up against the fifteen foot razor-wired wall going round this place. Assuming, of course, I survived the trek across the wilderness between here and the wall. And it's been like this since November. First White Bonfire Night since the Ice Age. So cold the gardener tells me the goldfish are hibernating. Frozen solid in a pond-shaped block of ice.

7) Then, slipped in after these banalities, like a trivial afterthought, my health? He may think I'm crazy, but I'm not a fool. I can tell this is what he's most interested in just by the way he pretended it wasn't. Now, the million dollar question, he's a shrink not a GP, so why's he interested in my health all of a sudden?

I asked around, and it seems everyone's keeping one. Maybe it's the latest fad at psychiatry conventions. Or maybe they swap extracts, who's got the nuttiest patient. Eddie told me not to write anything, that what went on in our heads was our business, not Doc's. Dick's filling his religiously. He let me read it. Copious notes about conspiracies, End of Days, societal meltdown, alien invasions and the Sixth Extinction ending, of course, with the demise of the human race. He's decided that we're being used as guinea pigs. I asked why. Because we're society's unrecyclable trash. Useless. Disposable.

It all makes perfect sense. Until you remember he's insane.