The Best Book in the World (10 page)

Titus nods cautiously. He is of course curious as to what Doctor Rolf has to say. At the same time, he has a feeling that one shouldn’t
stimulate him too much with one’s interest. Doctor Rolf rolls all the time between apathy and frenzy. One moment, he looks as if he is falling asleep. The next, there is lightning in his eyes.

‘Adding chemicals from outside can create more imbalances. Multi-therapy sees it all from the other side. We ensure that the body starts to produce the chemicals it needs. Since everything you experience depends on the chemistry in your brain, all your life is in a sense imagined. It follows from this that your illnesses and problems are imagined too. They are quite simply figments of your imagination concocted by the chemistry in your brain!’

‘So you mean that paranoid schizophrenia, for example, is purely a figment of someone’s imagination?’

‘Exactly!’ shouts Doctor Rolf. ‘That is indeed the case! Split personality is an
idée fixe
and there are some excellent therapies to deal with that. It is simply a question of tailoring a therapy that works specially for you. That is multi-therapy in a nutshell. If there is a problem – there is a therapy!’

‘It sounds extremely simple…’

‘Simple! On the contrary, it can be incredibly difficult to find the right therapy. Imaginary illnesses are often very deeply embedded in people’s brains. You might have to test hundreds of placebo therapies before one works.’

‘Placebo therapies!’ says Titus, who is having a hard time keeping up.

‘Like sugar-coated pills! The patient thinks that the medicine works and is healed because of that. Even though the only active ingredient is sugar. That is exactly how it is with
multi-therapy.
As long as you think you are being healed, it will work. When you finally realise that your have an imaginary illness, you will search high and low for an imaginary therapy that works. You will stop seeing yourself as a victim of unfortunate circumstances, genes, childhood environment, or whatever it is you blame. When you get your willpower back, you will blow the whistle and the factory starts working again. Your brain and body will suddenly start producing the chemicals that are needed for you to function properly again. Thus: when you
want
to be cured – you
will
be
cured. That’s how it is! Now I think you have twigged how it all works, yes?’

‘What I regard as my life, you can actually govern with this placebo therapy?’

‘Ha! You are clever!’

‘Umm, I wonder if I believe this,’ says Titus doubtfully. ‘Can you give me some examples? What can you cure?’

‘Everything! I can cure anything at all. Everything,
everything,
everything! Paranoia, schizophrenia, agoraphobia, snake phobias, fear of flying. You name it! The whole caboodle! From Münchausen by proxy to Tourette’s syndrome.’

Then something clicks inside Titus’ head. He thinks about Lenny.

‘What, can you cure Tourette’s?’

‘Yes indeed! Yep. Tourette’s is straightforward imagination. A malicious trick of the brain, pure and simple. There is no good reason why people should go around twitching and saying stupid things. No, they do it purely because their brains think they must. For imaginary illness there is only one remedy. And that is…’ puffs Doctor Rolf and moves his hand in a circle so that Titus finishes for him.

‘…imaginary therapy.’

‘Bravo, Titus! Imaginary therapy, placebo therapy,
multi-therapy.
We have many names for what we love.’

‘But how do you go about it, then? I mean, how can you cure somebody with Tourette’s, for example?’

‘Hard to generalise. But it is almost always a matter of going to extremes. Of going beyond every possible boundary. And then taking one more step, over the precipice. It is about putting people in a context that is so ridiculously exaggerated that they realise their own behaviour is trivial and of no consequence in a larger context. Then one continues to reduce and reduce their problems until they disappear completely. For a Tourette’s patient, for example, it might involve forcing the person to be extremely spasmodic and shout out dirty words for hours at a time during each therapy session. Perhaps dressed up as a clown, or
something
similar. It can be extremely tough going for all involved.
My theory is that Tourette’s cases have a certain number of spasms inside them. If they try to curb their excesses, the effect is simply that they keep the larder well stocked with terrible things. In the worst cases, the larder will keep them supplied all their lives. No, it is better to hunt down the Tourette’s like mad dogs, and force all the shit out of them in a short period. Ride them in like wild horses at a rodeo. In the end, they tire of all the nonsense. We quite simply empty them of their spasms and expletives. But it can take three months. Years in the worst cases.’

‘Oh, stop it. That sounds sick. Don’t you think it is an extremely degrading approach?’

‘So it might seem. And that is why it takes place within sealed rooms at an authorised multi-therapist’s. We have signed an oath of confidentiality,’ says Doctor Rolf, and smothers a yawn.

How can he be tired now, wonders Titus. He was going on overdrive just thirty seconds ago, when he described Tourette’s sufferers as mad dogs.

‘If it’s as good as you say, then how come multi-therapy isn’t better known?’ snorts Titus.

He thinks the whole thing sounds like a joke. It is too simple. Genuine traumas must be deeper than simply dressing like an idiot and exaggerating your problems to make them disappear. It would be like trying to lose weight by binge eating.

‘Better known?’ Doctor Rolf continues to rant. ‘It comes with the territory. Who wants to be an ambassador for us multi-
therapists
, do you think? A person with paranoia that we have forced to go around spying on people 24/7, wearing a trench coat and sunglasses? A schizophrenic who is forced to live in dozens of identities, although he only feels at home in two? Some poor guy who is afraid of pigeons and who has to spend the entire summer in the Piazza San Marco in Venice? The thing is, once they have been cured we never see a trace of them again. By then, we have completely tired them out. When they think about what we have put them through, they feel ashamed like cats that have had a drenching. In a way, I can understand them. Granted, these
treatments
can be really hard going, but that is roughly as far as the
science of placebo treatment has come. Anyway, who complains about brutal chemotherapy as long as it knocks out the cancer? The main point is that the treatment saves lives. And there are a lot of people out there who have us multi-therapists to thank for their being able to function in society, I promise you. Or, as we like to say: wherever in the world you may go, you will see lots of friends of placebo!’

‘Oh, right…’

‘Besides, it’s an extremely tough profession being a multi-therapist. It wears you down.’

‘Oh, yes…?’

‘Yes, you see. We must test all therapies before we try them out clinically on people. That is one of our ethical rules. There are a lot of therapies. Just as many as there are people, or so sometimes feels.’

‘Oh, right…’

‘Take somnambulism, for example. That has affected my life fundamentally. I have cured hundreds of patients who have walked in their sleep and not been able to distinguish between dreams and being awake. A sleepwalker can fall asleep anywhere. When they dream, they think that what is happening in the dream is taking place in reality. They have no idea what is a dream and what is for real. You might think that sounds unbelievably ridiculous and silly, but in fact it is very difficult to cure. For them, an effective placebo therapy is like the sleep-and-food alarm clock that the absent-minded professor has to have in the children’s cartoon story. I am convinced that the professor is actually a somnambulist and that he has found a method of setting limits for himself. His sleep-and-food clock tells him when he should eat, when he should go to bed, when he should wake up. Damn it, it tells him when he should shit and piss too. So I give all my waking-dream patients a little bell. Every time they are going to do something, they must give the bell a ding-a-ling and say aloud what they are going to do. The slightest thing, and they must give a ding-a-ling. ‘Now I must yawn, ding-a-ling.’ ‘Now I want to talk, ding-a-ling.’ Everything they do must be preceded by a ding-a-ling of the bell.
Everything, every single thing. And they can only go ding-a-ling when they are awake, can’t they? The sound becomes a conditioned reflex. Ding-a-ling means that they are awake. Silence means reward and sleep. Eventually, they can take the bell away and just pretend to go Ding-a-ling. They keep track of themselves. The Ding-a-ling becomes a cognitive brake in their life.’

‘Does it really work?’

‘Oh yes, indeed it does! Look at this!’

Doctor Rolf stretches across the desk and digs out a little bell from among his papers.

‘Somnambulist, indeed! Now I want to sleep!’

He goes ding-a-ling with the bell. Then he flops down with a crash in a heap over his desk. He isn’t a doctor any longer. How he just looks like a big heavy sack of flour. He is, however, still breathing, deeply and slowly. Doctor Rolf sleeps like a newly felled fir tree in the forest. A tiny sliver of saliva-like resin runs out of the corner of his mouth and down onto the sticky computer keyboard.

Titus leans over Doctor Rolf and gives him a little careful shake. He tries a ‘Hello?’ and a ‘Doctor Rolf?’ but the only answer is a deep wheeze.

Jesus, that was one hell of a chemistry set, Titus thinks, and sneaks out of Doctor Rolf’s consulting room, never to return.

Research can be a pain. The more you dig, the bigger the hole. And how should you judge your discoveries?

What is stupid today can be gospel tomorrow.

W
hen Titus leaves Doctor Rolf’s building, the air is still. He realises that there is no longer a promising early summer feeling that meets him. It is the middle of July and the very height of the summer. He feels a bit out of sorts and needs to clear his head after the strange visit to Doctor Rolf. He decides to walk all the way from this northern edge of the city down to Söder.

He walks via the Observatory Park up behind the City Library so that he can follow Drottninggatan from its beginning right down to the Old Town. The trees in the lower reaches of Observatory Park groan under the merciless rays of the sun and fight with the grassy banks for the last drops of water in ground. You can almost hear the sucking and slurping. The green of the grass is sometimes broken by brownish patches. The leaves in the park droop humbly in a prayer for a little rain.

He loves the Strindberg quotes that have been inserted into the centre line of Drottninggatan after the bottom of the hill. The street is still picturesque with cosy cafés and middling restaurants. The buildings are low enough to allow the sun to reach the pavement tables. This part of the street crawls with hip teenagers trying to break a record in drinking lattes as slowly as possible. Then, closer to the Old Town, the street is transformed into a bustling shopping Mecca for all the usual high street brands: H&M, Intersport, Stadium, Zara, Clas Ohlson, McDonalds and so on. Families with children dominate here. They rush between the escalators and swing doors with dripping ice creams at the ready and enormous plastic carrier bags under their arms. Woe betide you if you don’t look happy. Damn you if you don’t look rich. After Sergels Torg and the House of Culture, Drottninggatan dissolves into an icy cold corridor in the shadow of government
departments in tall and ugly buildings. The only people to be seen are the odd middle-aged civil servant and occasional flocks of tourists that have probably gone astray. Weird shops sell elk motifs on T-shirts and Dala horses of every possible size. Who buys Dala horses? wonders Titus. What can you do with them? Perhaps there are bus trips directly to the souvenir shops, because they seem to be crammed with short and happy Japanese tourists. They compete to grab at the Dala horses. They obviously know something that others don’t know. Dala horses are good for potency. You crush them and mix the result with saké. A clunk of that and you get a magnificent swaying mid-summer pole from the Swedish Dalecarlia.

Stockholm in summer is like nowhere else, Titus thinks. If you ignore the completely re-built area around Klara and the southern part of Drottninggatan, Stockholm is objectively the most beautiful summer city in the world, of any kind. No doubt about that; it must be considered as proven.

The sound of the city is different in the summer, too. Birdsong that is almost painful in May and early June sounds like normal and pleasant interval music now. The cars are not in such a hurry between end-of-term celebrations, overtime work and suburban shopping. Instead, they roll slowly along the streets in a sort of proud parade to manifest what every genuine Stockholmer feels: Stockholm is best in the summer. That’s when the hundreds of thousands of ‘newer’ Stockholmers travel home to their provincial roots and are seen as rich and successful ‘homecomers’ for a few weeks. While there, they can subject their old cottages to an extreme makeover, they can push up the prices at local knick-knack auctions, grill Flintstone pork steaks and piss in the water at public bathing beaches to their hearts’ content. And the permanent local residents can moan and grumble about the people from the capital. Indeed, country folk need their images of the ‘Stockholmers’. That they are in actual fact mirror images of each other is of lesser importance.

When Titus reaches the Old Town, he decides that he deserves a cup of coffee. He needs to think. He walks up to Stortorget and
goes into the café in the Grillska building. With a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun on his tray, Titus sits at a window table and looks out onto the square and the old Stock Exchange.

The last few weeks have been eventful. For starters, he has written a copious amount. Most of it has been top-notch stuff. He knows that when he reads through the material in a week or two, it will be easy to decide what is up to standard. He has absolute pitch. When it comes to text, he can trust himself 100 per cent.

The Best Book in the World
is beginning to acquire a structure that he really likes. The variation of a thriller with elements of fact works better than he could have imagined. The bits with Håkan Rink’s hunt for Serial Salvador are snappy and hard-boiled. They always end with an exciting cliffhanger. The sections with facts occupy at most one or two pages each time, and serve as comfortable resting places in the midst of the action. He has already managed to incorporate the most common subjects that the bestselling
non-fiction
and reference works usually deal with: from crash slimming to self-help. The language is almost impertinent in its accessibility. Sometimes he wonders if it really can be so lucid and easy to read when the theme is so intellectual. You can’t help but go on reading and reading, to keep finding out what happens next. Titus is pleased with himself: this is exactly what he wants to achieve. Language is communication, not an art form in itself. The work of art is that which remains inside the reader’s head. A unique picture that only exists in a single copy.

But best of all is nevertheless that Astra forced him to sober up. He feels bright and energetic. The poison has left his body. In a purely chemical sense, I have conquered the abuse, he thinks. His body no longer screams for poisons. What remains are figments of his imagination: he can still find himself looking in the fridge for a beer or feeling in his pocket for a fag. The force of habit is powerful, but these remnants are no worse than he can brush aside with the help of another figment of his imagination: the reward image where he is lying there enjoying life on a warm young female body. Better to be obsessed than dependent.

He feels the calm returning to his body. It has been quite a while
since he has been away from his computer for such a long time. It doesn’t feel totally wrong to be out on the city streets again. Cafés. People-watching. Relaxing.

That unpleasant Doctor-Rolf feeling is losing its grip. What an idiot. What a pathetic life. What a repulsive attitude towards people. At the same time, it was quite interesting to hear what he had said about Tourette’s syndrome being just an imaginary illness.

What if he was right? What would that mean in Lenny’s case?