hold me down, a loose-IV in my arm which occasionally dripped blood or bubbled in its plastic bag; I saw my hair, unwashed and greasy around a ragged beard stained white with the filth I coughed away from my lungs; I saw myself rolling and rocking in my madness, sweating and shivering and opening my mouth to scream as the Mychandra sunk its teeth into my brain. She’d be a fool not; who writes like that? Who talks like that? Who even thinks like that?
The madmen, the ravaged peoples of a generation; the broken creatures howling under railway bridges or walking the wind-bitten streets after dark; the creatures that rattle imaginary chains and proclaim innocence of crimes they were never accused of; the peoples with the holes in their chest, where the heart and the soul should be, and the hole became the heart and the soul and needed to be filled with the kind of mad love that was impossible, just impossible. I wouldn’t know the mad love if it carved my name upon its soul; if my Victoria appeared, screaming from the doorway of the office with mud and shit and blood on her face and torture heavy under her fingernails then, perhaps, I would know what the insane know.
When the door did open, it was to reveal a fairly young woman, with brunette hair that hung in a loose ponytail behind her a fell down to the middle of her spine. She wasn’t dressed in a white doctor’s coat or scrubs, but in a clean black suit with a white blouse beneath it; frilling up and poking out around the lapels of the jacket. She smiled at me, held out her hand and introduced herself.
It was white noise for a moment, and I went through the routine; I shook her hand, firmly, calmly, just like I had learned to. I didn’t smile at her, but I made an obvious joke about the traditional psychiatrist’s couch and she didn’t really laugh, but just smiled again.
When I entered her office, it was pretty much like I had pictured; just a normal NHS office space, with cheap Swedish furniture and uncomfortable chairs and a few pictures of the human anatomy or posters about the latest drug or blood sugar monitor spread along the walls to make it look more practical and less like wasted space. The sunlight cut in through the window and stretched out languorously along the black-flecked white floor; under the light, it looked like marble.
She closed the door behind us and gestured at the felt-padded chair directly in front of the desk. I sat, ran a hand through my hair and opened my bag at my feet.
‘So; I’ve had a couple of chats with Bernard, as you know, but he’s been kind of vague about what you think, is exactly, wrong with you.’ She opened a file on her desk and pulled out a page of printed lines, like bullet points. ‘He’s written the word distance quite a lot, but he hasn’t really expanded on what that means in terms of, well, your mental health. As far as I can work out, you’re experiencing,’ she looked down at the notes, ‘something like an out-of-body experience?’
‘Not really; it’s not so much that I’m leaving my body, but more like I’m trapped in it; if that makes sense.’ She nodded. ‘No; not even just that; it’s like someone else is taking over my body and I’m watching myself do these things, and I know what I mean doing, but nothing seems real, like I’m just talking to a wall and I’m surprised when the wall talks back at me. No; that doesn’t make sense, does it?’
She disagreed; said it made perfect sense; told me to carry on.
‘It’s like being a writer, I guess, knowing that no one’s there to read the stuff you write; or an artist painting on this perfect canvas and the people walking past aren’t blind, they don’t even close their eyes; they just glance and shrug and move on. It’s like I’m the person walking past though, and I’m the author and the artist and the canvas as well; it’s like I’m all there is, all that’s real sometimes, and then this thing in my blood traps me in my brain and rules my body. There’s not really a great way of explaining this, is there? Anything I try to say doesn’t sound like me, not really.’
‘And,’ she interjected, pointing a pen at me like a revolver in some old western movie, ‘what do you sound like?’
‘I dunno,’ I stared at the table for a second and put on a scouse accent, ‘I think I might soun’ somethin’ li’ this?’ She didn’t smile. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe that’s the root of the problem, do you think? You don’t know who you are, so you’re trying to put on these voices in your head, make yourself something you’re not?’ She pinched the bridge of her nose and, for a moment, look very old. ‘Do you really think that there’s something wrong with you? Something physical, or could it be something in your head that’s making you feel disconnected with your body?’
‘There’s definitely something wrong with me,’ I insisted, and reached down into my bag to pull out a few pages; a receipt fell out from between them when I dropped them on her desk, ‘there has to be; this can’t be what life is like; there can’t be this disconnect; I’ve picked up some illness, or something’s wrong with my blood or my brain or, just, something; I don’t know. Just, just read a few pages; just read anything and look me in the eye and tell me that I’m normal.’
She stared at me with something like pity in her eyes and reached out for the paper. As she read, I couldn’t look at her face, so I picked up the receipt and glanced at it. It was for the café across the road from the train station; I could see pen lines through the thin paper but I refused to let myself turn it over. As she read, I wrapped the receipt around my finger and ran my thumb across its corner, feeling the flimsy paper occasionally slip beneath my nail. It was nice.
‘Listen; I want you to talk me through your average day. I know you’ve made these notes, and I’m probably going to ask you to leave them with me so I can go through them and see if there’s anything that might indicate your illness; if there is one. So, what time do you get up, when do you eat, where do you go, what do you do?’
‘I don’t really have that much of a set routine these days; I mean, I used to. I used to get up, work for less than minimum wage for some IT company in the town centre; I used to manage their social media, do a little SEO, a little marketing. Nothing special, you know; just another dead end job in this dead end place, going nowhere, being nowhere, just being. Existing, you might say.
These days I’ll mostly get up around nine, ten; I won’t normally get out of bed for a while; it seems like this illness only really starts to attack when I get out of bed, like the rush of blood carries it through me, y’know? When I do I’ll switch on the TV for a bit, check my emails and all that, my socials, and I’ll either make breakfast or head out to one of the cafes.
Then I, you know, I find something to keep me busy; I walk, I stick my head in a few shops, sometimes I’ll read or spend a few hours watching the tele. Mostly, I spend my time waiting for the sickness.’ I looked at her again. ‘I can feel it, you know; it really is like it moves through my blood from the feet up; like I go ice cold and numb beneath it as it moves ever closer to my head – it’s like slowly being submerged in a pool of something thick and cold; some kind of liquid parasite type thing.’ Her pen skittered across a piece of paper, and I waited until she had stopped writing. The sunlight moved half an inch across the floor, left the new shadows behind like forgotten lovers. ’I’ll normally eat out; I’m not that big of a cooker, really, takeaways and cafes and restaurants have always been fine by me.’
‘And your evenings? What about them?’
‘I don’t get much of them; the Mychandra has normally hit my brain by that point, and I feel like screaming but my body’s still walking and talking and trying to smile at pretty women and friendly-looking men.’
‘Okay.’ She made another note, punctuated by a stab of the pen against the paper. ‘But what do you, or does your, what was it, your Mychendere?’
‘Mychandra’.
‘Mychandra, sorry. What does the Mychandra do of an evening?’
‘Honestly, it tends to drink a lot; by that, I mean I tend to drink a lot, even when I don’t really want to. It just seems to, I don’t know, carry me from place to place, does these things that I remember, I remember th
em so vividly it’s like they are happening all the time. Like those moments when I have no control, no matter what I scream at myself in my head, no matter what slight spasm I can make amongst the set features of my disease, are real and everything is meaningless, pointless, has already happened.’
‘You drink a lot in these moods? How much is a lot?’
‘Not enough sometimes. I’ll normally just have a pint or two, maybe a whiskey or something; I don’t know. Not enough so that I’m staggering home drunk every night, not enough to make me throw my lungs up; and it isn’t even like its every night, either. Booze just tastes like, I don’t know, air.’
‘Do you think your drinking is involved? Could you have damaged some part of your brain or, on some level, just be looking for something to justify your drinking to yourself?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t feel addicted to it, you know, and I can pace myself and stop drinking when I’ve had enough and all that; it’s just, well, it’s there isn’t it? It’s an easy access to sensation, I suppose; that’s why I drink it when I’m not the Mychandra anyway.’
‘You keep calling this thing of yours, this mood or illness, the Mychandra, you’ve even mentioned the name in these notes –