‘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.
CHAPTER 20
The Calm of Stockholm
When 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.