an empty box
The Sony Indicator
I'm having a nervous breakdown, but don't know it.
Standing in the doorway of a Regency block of flats in Brighton I smoke and watch the cars passing up and down the street. The evening looks strange, and I'm under the extraordinary impression that time has stopped and is now running in reverse. It feels like reality itself has ground to a halt like an enormous engine, the sound of which I swear I can hear. Everything is going to go backwards from now on.
I am psychotic, but don't know it.
At my feet is an empty plastic crate. It contains an elongated, empty box that is too big for it. To the normal mind there's something strange about this: there's no purpose to it. No function. It looks like a piece of rubbish, with bits of paper stuck onto its sides and no sign of the Sony stereo it once packaged. But for the last 24 hours it's been my work, a constructive outlet for my illness, and I hold the door to the building with my shoulder, trying to figure out, without a temporal sense, how to get it across town to my new flat.
A taxi turns into the top of the street, and I run down the steps and flag the driver down. As he winds down the window I show him a tenancy agreement with my new address. He nods and I pick up the crate and climb into the back of the cab carefully. My prized possession goes on the seat beside me. The journey takes a few minutes and there's no conversation, although he eyes the back seat cautiously. Reaching the flat, I pay him with a few coins, unsure as to why he hurries me off. I am also unsure why he doesn't ask me about my Sony Indicator.
My new landlord lets me into the flat and gives me the keys. He too seems anxious to be somewhere and disappears down the stairs. I look out of the window onto the small balcony and watch the sea in the distance. I have the sense that my life is about to change and that my Sony Indicator is something to do with it.
While building it, I ransacked my personal possessions for material for this 'information sculpture', an empty box standing on the table in the evening gloom. To me it indicated what had gone wrong with my life, and the society around me.
I ripped a cheque from my chequebook and stuck it onto one side. I wrote 'bollocks' against the Pay instruction, because I didn't want to pay anymore for my own mistakes, and others' mistakes. Generalising the theme to wider society, I took the Sony guarantee form for the missing stereo, stuck it on, and wrote, simply, Robert, consumer societ-. The letter 'y' falling off the end seemed terribly significant, but really it was just the English language falling apart in my head. I ripped apart matchboxes, cut into the covers of books, folded building society account forms into pleats, all the time divorcing these everyday objects from their everyday function.
For a final gesture, I cut the word 'Rotten' from the autobiography of Sex Pistol John Lydon, to confirm what I thought of the system. Or what I thought about my life.
I can't escape the impression now that the economy on which we depend is in meltdown, and that the innocent shop-fronts and adverts along Western Road are losing their coherence as, to my disintegrating mind, the big corporations are crumbling.
It's my Sony Indicator, and I'm going to tell everybody.
My head is full of acronyms, the most ironic being MAD. This stands for 'Massive Actuality Directive'. It means what I should do with my life next.
Standing in my new flat, I take all my plastic cards out of my purse and lay them along the mantelpiece to show that plastic is the future of money. I look around the bare room. That I will never spend even a single night there I don't suspect, unaware that it's my actual state that is determining my immediate future, not an empty box.
I leave the room as it is and begin walking back across town for a last night at my old flat. The red traffic lights I see seem to order an end to the way of life I've been leading. An end to society as it stands. I forget they are there to stop the traffic. . .
I take a £5 note from my purse and peer at it in puzzlement: the Queen's head and lettering look strange and meaningless, like pictures and patterns on a piece of paper. I'm losing touch with the value of money. . .
I have an enormous amount of physical energy and listen to 'Incesticide' by Nirvana over and over again. I mark out the accelerated pace of the music with my left arm as I walk along and hear meanings in the music that aren't there. It sounds odd to me, like it's being played in a vacuum. . .
In phone calls up and down the country, a rescue attempt is being planned by friends and family. I don't register the number of calls I've been making from public phone boxes, telling them what I've done. Telling them about the Sony Indicator.
The next day I make my way in a delusional world to the train station. From a phone box, I'm still lucid enough to speak to two friends, Robert and Rikke, who are planning to visit from London. I put down the phone and walk onto the concourse to wait for them. But with my grip on time loostening, the hands of the large clock on the noticeboard go round and round superficially, and I get down on the floor and lie flat in exhaustion. I look strange there. Now seeing myself in a quasi-religious light I interpret the gestures of passers-by in my direction as confirmation that yes I am. I am who I think I've become.
At some time between 2 and 3 o clock I almost hear an enormous sense of losing touch with reality completely. I look at my watch. I don't feel any contact with what I see. Time has stopped and I begin perceiving the future as déjà vu. I walk back to the trains and can't understand why Robert and Rikke don't appear immediately. I wander down the platforms, but because I've no sense of time, I've no sense of distance either. Where is London to me at this moment? I ring Robert, and get a message that they're on their way to me, now.
At some point they appear among the crowds and, seeing my state, walk me to a nearby pub and buy me a Coke. I tell them about the learning curve I've traced in my life since the age of 6 but Rikke takes out an address book and goes out for a minute. My speech is very pressured, emphatic, and people in the pub are looking. Robert puts his arm around me.
Back out on the street they hold me, one on each arm, and ask me where my flat is. I think of my new one, where the Sony Indicator is, but can't direct us. With no sense of time, I can't sense distance, and we resort to walking to each set of traffic lights, where they both shout for me to tell them which way. We get to the flat, where I sit with Robert. He is subdued and almost sad, and I can't understand why.
They ask me where my grandparents live, Brighton residents all my life. I can't tell them. I know Queen's Park, but where is Queen's Park? It is somewhere 'a time away'. But time has stopped. They are therefore nowhere in space. We walk to each set of traffic lights again, reaching their flat as daylight begins to fade.
Once inside, the coincidences are bewildering. My grandad asks Robert where he lives in London, then the phone rings. Shortly afterwards, my mum appears through the door. I sit as the focus of the group and think what a breakthrough my Sony Indicator will be. The empty box stands in the dark in my new flat. I look around at my mother and she is crying, and I don't understand why.
A late night doctor prescribes Largactil. I later pop it into my mouth exclaiming, 'designer reality', noticing my mum hold her head in her hands for a minute. My grandad is talking about local taxi firms. I have no idea I'm not fit to travel on public transport.
The next day I'm led to a taxi to begin the journey up to my childhood home in North Wales. I look out of the back window of the car at my grandparents waving goodbye from a first floor window, and so strong is my sense of living in a post-apocalyptic world that I wonder if I'll ever see them again. I am drugged up for the journey. At a service station off the M1 my mum goes to get me a sandwich and I hear a programme on the car radio. I swear it's being played backwards.
At the hospital in North Wales I'm brought into an office down a corridor and admitted. The female registrar doctor, striking with red hair, asks me several general knowledge questions. I get them all right, except one. When asked the date I give it as being about a week earlier, when I first began my dangerous experiment with symbolism and pieces of paper and cardboard.
She turns to my mum, compassionately.
'Mrs Brighton', she says, 'what do you think it is?'
My mum swallows.
'Manic depression?'
