Narrators

"...there is often a struggle, and sometimes even more, even more interestingly, a collusion, between the powers of pathology and creation."

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks












Content Warning:
Strong language, neurological disability theme

Transcript

Narrators

Five o’clock was rapidly approaching. Already it was dark outside and the solid blue-black of the sky showed through the large common room windows. Elvis was sitting at his laptop, looking over a treatment he was to imminently submit. He was joined by a friend of his, a recently made acquaintance, Bruce. Bruce was seated opposite Elvis in an avocado-toned chair. They had been in the department common room for about ten minutes when Hilary came in and sat at a vacant desk. 

Bruce didn’t react when Hilary entered. But Elvis did: the corridor lighting, in the passage just outside the common room, was on a motion-timer, and the corridor lit suddenly up with Hilary’s approach. A new blast of light streamed in. In answer, there came a little chuckle of reaction and a shy fanfare of whistles, like the sounds of coots and moorhens in reeds, bullrushes. 

Hilary connected his laptop to the convenient power socket and opened a new word document. On the screen, in the top left corner of that page of portrait-orientated white, the cursor blinked like a clock, a tease. Hilary sat very still. The room was lit low, and quiet. Quiet, but for that general, sotto-voce muttering, those strange whistles and murmurs. Listen carefully to those murmurs, and you’d be able to make out bizarre words and word combinations. Polyester pastas. Clog-monsters. Yellow mother’s meetings. Crap-sticks. Hilary turned his head and shot a look of disapproval in Elvis’ direction. For Elvis was the one producing these sounds.

Elvis was used to this. On this occasion, the look of disapproval he received was so intense it was almost hatred. For the most part, he kept his eyes fixed ahead of him, on the screen of his laptop, but he was able to steal one or two cursory glances at the look in Hilary’s eyes, he was able to feel and be affected by the energy radiating from him 

Elvis was struggling with his treatment. He struggled to contain the frenzy of his imagination, to confine the treatment to the lucid, dispassionate register that he knew was demanded of him. A brief contorting spasm manifested. The spasm clapped his two hands together before freeing him; the vocal ticks continued all the while in a steady stream. 

Elvis watched out of the corner of his eye, as Hilary (unknown by name and face to both Elvis and Bruce) relaxed with realisation. It was a standard script. People’s first impression of Elvis was always that he was hyperactive and irritating. It took Hilary the usual few moments to realise that Elvis was in fact suffering from a neurological condition. Elvis wasn’t sure why his ticks didn’t register as Tourette’s syndrome as quickly as those of other Tourette’s sufferers he knew. Perhaps it was the way he wore his vocalisations with a kind of practiced candour that made it difficult to immediately identify. The majority of his ticks were vocal rather than physical, and very few of these took place at outrageous volume. In general, they sounded at a volume not much louder than a mutter. So, on the periphery of your hearing, they didn’t sound dissimilar to the general vocalisations and tuts and clicks that neurotypical people naturally utter, when scrolling down a long page, down a long list of emails for example, especially if they are looking for something particular among all the multitudes. But, fairly quickly, in the strangeness of the spasmodic wordings, and the badgering persistence of the little whistles and yelps, Elvis’ condition told, and Hilary sighed the usual sigh, and nodded the usual nod, of recognition, in a relief that meant something like Oh, thank goodness! He has Tourette’s Syndrome. I though he was just an arsehole. 

Hilary didn’t look at Elvis much. But Elvis could tell how aware Hilary was of him. It was a stern, hard awareness that didn’t seem very much like curiosity to Elvis but must have been. Fuck-clucking, Elvis spasmed. A profanity. Contrary to popular portrayals and perceptions, Elvis’ Tourette’s almost never involved profanity. He used profanity in his intentional speech far more than the voice of his Tourette’s. When he was younger, he had given what he perceived as the “entity” within him a name. Gordon. Whenever “Gordon” swore, which was very rarely, he was required to note it down in a little journal, both the word or phrase used, and the circumstances of occurrence: he and his therapist would mull over the possible triggers in their next session in an effort to better understand his condition, and better equip him to deal with it. 

Recently, Elvis had made the decision to abandon the “Gordon” conceptualisation, the “entity” notion in its entirety. He was beginning to find it unhelpful and alienating to think of his condition in this way. And yet it remained, he couldn’t deny, persuasive. To a very slight degree, but persuasive none the less. Or if not persuasive then at least unignorable. Unignorable as though this “Gordon” in fact existed, as though he were real and facial, and bodied, and parasitic, groaning and protesting from deep within the fierce cavern of Elvis’ being: Please. Don’t abandon me. Don’t stop thinking of me.     

Hilary began to write. His fingers began to clack, and make a hail on the keyboard. As the minutes wore on, this precipitation increased in intensity. But even while writing, though his eyes were intent upon the page before him, his mental focus seemed elsewhere. It seemed to Elvis that Hilary was hearing everything he said, every syllable that leapt out of him. It seemed as though Hilary were carefully collecting, in some reservoir of aural memory, every bit of the playful, cheerful nonsense that had caused Elvis so much suffering and mortification and ridicule in his life. But Elvis wasn’t too bothered. He had faith that Hilary would forget all he heard. He’d be briefly engrossed, deeply invested in the nutritious verbiage of the ticks for a fascinating five minutes, and then he’d forget all about it forever. Such was his privilege while Elvis suffered the full-time affliction that is Tourette’s.      

Though he enjoyed great streams of his own, his own embarrassing, unruly flame, like a fierce geyser of creativity, Elvis began to feel jealous of the fluent, literate stream pouring out of Hilary. Hilary seemed to be writing, second upon second, with ever greater speed, filling the document with the silent bustle of his words, as though they were pouring from his fingers, from the very tips of his fingers, as though a powerful little mind hummed busily in each one, furiously stamping out and setting down that swelling forest of words. It was as though each component of their great swarm were desperate to settle upon the page and be resident there. Hilary’s fingers were moving so fast that the motion was a blur. In his envy of this flow which he could not imitate, alliteration-prone Elvis sharply spluttered the phrase Dusty Dostoyevsky. 

He returned to his treatment, the stilted paragraph on which his progress had become stymied. He wished he could write like he ticked, wished he could word sentences in the way “Gordon” barked, impolite with his unhesitating bravado. Elvis had been detailing a dream. At the point he had reached in the film treatment, the main character, a Tourette’s-sufferer, found himself sitting in a chair, in the middle of the floor of a derelict warehouse, a tiger slowly circling him. He wondered if this was right. Could he do better? He had the idea that the tiger could produce the sound of static electricity instead of a roar. Too much detail too soon. Elvis realised that he was getting ahead of himself, jumping the gun (that delicious Tourette’s-friendly phrase!) and deleted the paragraph.

“I’m just going for a piss,” Elvis said. Bruce flashed him a thumbs-up; he was scrolling through social media, one of the image-based platforms; he laughed at something. Elvis kept away from social media. Not untypical of the condition, his Tourette’s sometimes manifested itself in other compulsions, more elaborate, more consequential, beyond the usual ticks and spasms. He feared the idea that he might post things he didn’t consciously intend; that he might take an intimate photograph of himself and post it on snap-chat, or tweet something with racist-language in it on twitter. He had read about Tourette’s sufferers who had found themselves unable to refrain from touching scalding hot surfaces, or electric blades, who had lost fingers, some who had even died from electrocution by sticking their fingers in sockets. Why should such strong impulses towards risk not spill over into the virtual world, Elvis surmised. Very few of these more extreme behaviours had cropped up in his own life, but he did, when he was a teenager, have an issue with touching discarded gum, reaching forward a keen, addictive finger whenever he spotted it and pressing it like a button in its grubby place of discard. Hilary’s head barely turned as Elvis went out. The corridor lighting flicked on. Its being extinguished had gone unnoticed. Jesus crackers. Cake-stand cockups…Elvis ticked as he walked away. 

Elvis entered the men’s bathroom and went straight for the cubicle. He never used the urinals if it could be avoided. There was always the possibility that he’d react unpredictably to the feel of his penis in his hand. In the cubicle he felt cocooned, concealed: he appreciated the anonymity and felt that he enjoyed a degree of disassociation from the voice of his Tourette’s while he was in there. In private, everyone has Tourette’s; especially where their genitals are concerned, Elvis once had written. It was a line of dialogue (in a short film screenplay) of which he was especially proud. 

But then again, his being hidden from view made, in some ways, the audible expulsions funnier, whatever they might be. The random shouts of, for example, Crap crabs or Turd-purple leaping out of the cubicle and all the way up to the ceiling, were easier to laugh at when the soul shouting them was obscured. It was bad enough knowing or even suspecting that people were inwardly laughing at his pain, his comedic cross. Sometimes, on busy occasions, Elvis heard sniggers from the row of men at the urinals. Stifled as the giggles were, their amusement still cut him. He’d been cut by such a blade so many times that it didn’t even hurt him really, the blade just settled into the home of its groove, the groove of lifelong injury. It wasn’t a new laceration he felt, it was the old, familiar groove. That was far more painful. More painful was the fact that he understood their amusement, he even shared in it. On very rare occasions, his ticks would provoke loud, unapologetic, drunken laughter. 

But this time, he urinated in merciful peace, safe within the cubicle’s narrow four walls and in the knowledge that there wasn’t a soul outside, no-one to hear his zany holler of FORESKIN BANNNNNNDIIIIIIIIT!      

Just as Elvis finished, someone entered the bathroom. Three footsteps went towards the urinals. Then the owner of the footsteps unzipped his trousers and began to urinate. 

Elvis had a little flare-up of ticks: Fuck him. Fuck him; Piss-pots. Another two profanities for the notebook, he thought, making a mental note. The three-part tick left a heavy, mortified silence. Elvis listened for a reaction from the man in the bathroom with him. Nothing. The twinkle of piss was the only sound in the room.

Elvis ventured from the cubicle and stole efficiently over to the sink to wash his hands. He hurried back out into the corridor, not even throwing one brief glance towards the man at the urinals. Had he done so, he would have recognised that it was Hilary.

Polyester pastas and mother’s meetings. Just as the bathroom door slammed shut behind him, he ticked some more, his psyche recycling earlier ticks. He hadn’t expected the bang of the door to be so loud. In the subsiding boom, sonorous and ringing in the corridor, Elvis whistled a few times. There followed several iterations of an unusual sound, a kind of hiccup Elvis had not heard himself make for a long time.

In the common room, Bruce was still intent on his device, but Hilary’s chair was empty. That must have been him in the bathroom, Elvis thought. Curiosity immediately tugged and he found himself standing before the screen of the unattended laptop. It blared, bright white, populated with language like a seed-tray. It was with indescribable consternation and mystification, that Elvis saw what was written there, that he recognised many of the typed phrases, that he recognized that he was, himself, their author. He discovered with strange, delighted horror that he was the subject of the writing, that the first-draught tale on the screen before him, replete with spelling errors and long, unwieldy syntaxes, was about its teller, sitting, as he indeed had been and would soon be again, in a department common room, just a few feet away from a man with Tourette’s called Elvis. And Elvis’s vocal ticks had been recorded, verbatim. He saw his own splutterings and spasms and his own profanities and his own syllables of painfully amusing alliterative nonsense written down, printed in electronic ink as if plucked from the air by an eavesdropping, literary magpie and set down. 

Elvis was re-seated and had returned to work on his treatment by the time Hilary returned, unaware that the surreptitious scheme had been discovered, unaware that the writing’s principal subject had noticed its own bottling, and was sitting just feet away, he and his inner anger perspiring within him, imminent brutality churning, brewing. In his startled rage, Elvis abandoned the treatment, opened a new document, and began to write. He gave as good as he got, returned the favour of invasion, of boundary-transgression to the original culprit as directly and unambiguously as he was able. Elvis wrote, fluently, and he hardly noticed his ticks- though he knew that Hilary noticed them. His purpose in writing was to give Hilary a generous taste of his own medicine. He didn’t know the real name of the man opposite him. He decided to call him Hilary. He decided to call himself Elvis.

Contrary to what I’ve made you think, this story is a homodiegetic first-person story, not a third. I am my own narrator. I’ve narrated my own participation, referring to myself in third person. I’ve been there all the time, hiding under the blanket lie of “he” and “him”, and of “Elvis”. I’ve been there from the very beginning, misleading you, doing the dirty on you, sitting before the page, sitting at the laptop’s compact and flickering altar, writing, worshipping. I called myself Elvis because it’s a heroic name. It’s the name of sex-appeal, iconic hair, of that which is legendary and will not be forgotten. What’s more, there’s a case to be made that The King suffered from Tourette’s. At the very least, he channels something of the affliction; the way his body jerks and spasms and gyrates. I recognise in him my own furnace, its compulsive flagrancy. My name is not Elvis. It's actually Tom. Elvis is better than Tom. Bruce I let remain Bruce. Just a spare part. He was there when what I’ve said happened happened, he was there being typically useless. I don’t know the name of my nemesis. I never asked him. But in this, I decided to call him Hilary after Dr. Hilary, a wanker. Remember him? That smug, smarmy TV doctor who made appearances on Good Morning Britain during lockdown. I hate Dr. Hilary’s kind (Doctors- their dishonesty, their impotence) and he’s the perfect, perfectly detestable poster-boy for his species. I’m going to beat Hilary at his own game. My account is going to be the superior one, more moral, richer. Richer, and wiser, and more moving. I’m the better writer. It’s my identity, my being who I am that gives me the edge. I’ve got the goods.