The Broken Jigsaw

T

he Broken Jigsaw, the ninth tale from The Monkey In The Tunnel: 10 Stories About Active Addiction, is where the story ramps up towards it’s climax and concerns the ‘coming together’ of the previous eight stories. Primarily the novel is about the ‘life work’ of Doctor Filippa, an experimental psychiatrist who specialises in  observing and treating addicts and those with extreme compulsiveness-related behavioural problems.

Ultimately the Doctor herself suffers from a very serious work addiction which provides her with a large degree of identification with her subjects.

In the Broken Jigsaw the character of Axel The Cokehead sits in the jigsaw room of his parental home contemplating beginning and attempting to complete a jigsaw to distract his mind from using.

As it happens the jigsaw is of the witch, Storm’s cottage called ‘Muggy Stuga’ in the story and he considers that, as the jigsaw has 1000 pieces unlike some jigsaws with ‘multiples of thousands’, the ‘[jigsaw itself] was not a particularly challenging jigsaw but not one for a typical child-form either.

It was like life itself he figured’.

As the narrative progresses Axel notices that the jigsaw has ‘four raised pieces’ which give it a different appearance when viewed from eye-level, whilst the puzzle looks perfectly fine from above.

Although there is ‘more to it’ concerning ‘The Fourth Parallel’ - which, in the book is Doctor Filippa’s own term for this ‘apparent state’ - Axel has started to consider the  different perspectives concerning the picture itself serve as a ‘perhaps metaphor; for addiction , and even more particularly ‘recovery from addiction’ itself.

He also thinks, when viewing the jigsaw from a bird’s eye perspective that his knowledge of the raised pieces, which have become this way through ‘moisture and time’ in the jigsaw room’s own environment, that having knowledge of the raised state of the pieces does not alter the view.

The scene appears smooth and perfected no matter what the reality may be or, actually, is.

He then thinks that – Is this how I look to people when I get almost clean?

 Again the character of Doctor Matteo appears when Axel goes to visit him for his therapy session. He earlier helps Longsleeper Luna in Story 6: The Sleeping Whale Pod.

The rather cynical Doctor Matteo, himself openly an addict of crystal meth, tells Axel that all of the pieces in the room would be affected by humidity and begins to pick apart and ridicule his observational qualities concerning the vision he has seen and interpreted.

A further layer to the story is that Doctor Matteo himself is in competition with Doctor Filippa ‘next door’ and is rather sceptical about the continual and relentless seeming-obsession with the ‘Number Four’ and the various ideas and iterations of the supposed ‘formula and hypothesis for addiction’ contained in the Fourth Parallel notion.

However, over the course of the session, Matteo relents and adopts an open-minded view of what Axel, who is, apart from his addictive ways, otherwise successful in Wet City and beyond as a ‘Business Man’.

Despite the cynicism and critical remarks from Doctor Matteo Axel openly tells The Doctor that he very much appreciates his views and there is a strong sense that, because Matteo is openly an addict himself, in fact a rather extreme addict to say the least, that Axel finds him highly ‘relatable’ and accepts his views.

This blending of medical practice and group therapy is perhaps artistic licence in that a medical professional would be highly unlikely to share their own addiction battle but then the novel itself is a surreal imagining of a parallel world with no specific mention of Earth itself at any time.

In fact this is partly why the novel and the entire series of Tales From The Fabrik Zone is set in an otherworldly environment.

Without the somewhat detached sense of professional versus personal and other such surrealist elements the processes of how the story develops would incur a degree of scepticism in the reader itself in my own thinking,as the writer of the work.

The interactions between Matteo and Luna from earlier in the story again ‘crop up’ when Matteo brings politics into the session since Luna has now been elected as a ‘Kontroller’ who is influential in the direct workings and dealings which go on in The Wetlands.

With their various addictions and compulsions - Axel’s to ‘yellow-white powder’, The Doctor’s to his ‘meth pipe’ and Luna’s to ‘plastic food’, the ‘certainty’ in The Fabrik Zone is that each character is imbued with some type of compulsion and ‘sticky attachment’ (at the very least) to ‘something or other’.

In this way the story aims to negate the barrier, perhaps between  understanding why there may be no separation between addicts and non-addict.

The labels themselves almost seek to separate individuals into ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ entities which may not be helpful to the over all journey of recovery from addiction and the successful management of sober-living.

In this sense the world of The Wetlands could be considered an anti-drugs message but then, if it is, it would also be akin to a Marxist refusal to engage with capitalism as the ‘enemy within’ might of course then be assumed to be ‘indulgence and consumerism itself’.

As the author I can reveal that this is, in fact the underlying message of the entire Tales From The Fabrik Zone series.

As a, hopefully at least ‘creative force’, my own feeling is that one must adopt some type of standpoint in order to be able to adopt a ‘voice’ in the first place.

There is, of course an degree of utter hypocrisy contained in the view. I want to sell books and artworks so why am I any different?

In fact the reality of drugs and all types of indulgence is addressed in the story despite the sceptical view I have purposefully adopted about the requirement for us, as human animals, to at all feel we ‘have to’ go with the prevailing narrative that such false pleasures’ are necessary at all.

And this ‘plays out’ as the full acknowledgement that these activities are a pleasure.

Simply because something is a ‘false pleasure’ or unnecessary does not mean that it is not pleasurable.

It may even be subjective to attempt to determine what is an isn’t a ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy pleasure.

Of course ‘relaxation’ is a benefit to humans, in the short or long-term.

However The Doctor himself begins to muse about the ‘give and take’ nature of drugs mid-session and the story becomes a casual, or slightly intense perhaps, exploration of the role such ‘escapism’ and ‘distraction from the mundane’ drugs and also compulsive behaviours play when it comes to our actual lives themselves.

With the main underlying theme of The Monkey In The Tunnel being ‘getting to the bottom of things’, perhaps even ‘all things’ it becomes the case that Doctor Matteo comes to self-reflect that he is no better than his patient whilst retaining some of his own dignity concerning his professional qualifications.

He tells Axel upon being complimented by his own patient for abstaining from crystal meth for a lengthy period that, ‘Oh Axel. That sounds a little reductive. A little condescending for someone like you to say that to someone like me. Even though I’m no better than you Axel and I know it.’

However he has previously been discussing how Axel’s company that makes hairpieces has helped him personally to ‘pick-up ladies’.

Again the concept of ‘First Sight’ and ‘First Awareness’ crops up which Fabius, The Tiger from Story 3: The Man Who Swam Out The Harbour discusses with Nor, The Swimmer.

Many addicts and those who judge addicts simply see what is presented as do people in general in our complex societies.

Much of The Monkey In The Tunnel reflects on short-term versus long-term health and the interplay of judgement based upon what is ‘presented’ and what actually ‘is’.

A ‘Mayoral Candidate’ say or a ‘Finance Expert’ could be ‘very high on cocaine a lot of the time and yet perform exceptionally well in professional settings. Some people can maintain this role indefinitely whilst a fully sober, ‘Recoverer’ from alcohol say may, many years later, still be trapped in a position of being judged due to their own lack of health caused by their previous behaviour.

Without revealing any more here about the story of The Broken Jigsaw this is the type of concept the tale delves into and what the parallels themselves come to represent in the Fabrik Zone and in our society in general as we live it.