Nicotine Read online

  Erickson’s words, or rather what I imagine them to be, open up intermediate spaces, they briefly make the floor tremble beneath my feet. Everything seems to swim within them. Erickson is the person that I would have liked to have met if any such wish had ever been offered to me. If I told M. about these conversations with myself she would call me insane, I think. Maybe she’d even leave me – but I know that’s not true. It’s only a thought reflex, a worry about nothing that has more to do with myself, the way I perceive myself, than with M. She understands my explorations. She knows what path I’m taking.

  I don’t step closer to the table. I don’t lean forward, I don’t reach for the cigarettes. I look at them. Rather than regarding them, I regard myself in this situation. What I have in my sights is my relation to the invented pack of Salem, I consider the unbridgeable distance, the power relation between me and the object. I feel an impact, an almost physical pull. It’s as if the cigarettes are drawing me towards them. The object wants to claim my full attention, nothing else should interest me. I call into memory that I have freely suspended this power. I must not give in. I have called up the spirits, but I know the incantation that will dispel them.

  What should I do now? There is nothing left but to either remain in this charged relationship or to break off the attempt. At no point have I succeeded in ignoring the object or the power it emits. On exhaling I feel, presumably from the exertion, a faint resistance, a brink that I didn’t want to exceed. From that point onwards I breathe shallower than before, change the course of the air earlier than I would have liked. It’s difficult to manage this discrepancy in my breathing. Relax, and let my voice lead you. Luckily I’ve done exercises to control my breathing since earliest childhood. I know I have to start with my pulse. Once I’ve slowed the frequency of my pulse I’ll also be able to get my breathing under control.

  I have allowed the full effect of this power. I haven’t hidden from it. For a moment I toyed with the idea of comparing this impasse between myself and the object of desire with a game of tug of war where nothing seems to happen. Both teams hold their positions, no side gives up even a centimetre. The nevertheless enormous strength can only be seen in the contorted faces of the opponents, the heels of their shoes pressed into the mud. But this comparison is flawed. I’m not, I now notice, exerting myself. Not that much. And I also know that right from the start I haven’t had to exert myself, not in the sense that my power threatened to diminish at any point. The power, this other power, that came completely from within and is apparently inexhaustible, worked all by itself. That I reacted physically, that my breathing went a little haywire, was perhaps only down to a habitual way of thinking in accordance with a pattern of behaviour that I activated. I saw myself as part of a field of tension and believed that the pulling and tugging could bring me to the edge of exhaustion.

  That’s enough. I breathe in, I breathe out. I count to ten. M. will be back soon. I turn and leave the room as if nothing had happened. I actually feel refreshed. I didn’t reach for the cigarettes, that’s an objective fact. A fact has validity if the thought game from which it comes has been overcome. The memory of the object has not expired, but it seems as if the tension that it generated never existed. I didn’t forgo anything, I didn’t deny and I didn’t compromise. I listened to myself and made a decision.

  During the years of the economic miracle my father, a technical expert, built up a modest but profitable business that exclusively examined fire and explosion damage in industry and middle-sized businesses. The smaller of these incidents, mostly office and workshop fires, were predominantly caused by cigarette ends, but also by advent candles, Christmas trees and fireworks, which gave the business a seasonal character. At least most of the time. The elephant in the room was, of course, arson.

  He smoked up to two packs of Ernte 23 a day. In each of these hinged jumbo packs were forty cigarettes lying beneath silver paper evocative of a freshly ironed bedspread. This meant that my father smoked constantly whenever he was in his home office, which was often, or when he drove to inspections. Shortly after I’d taken my first drag that New Year’s Eve when I was five or six, my father went from smoking one day to stopping the next. He didn’t, as far as I know, announce this resolution, though he later enjoyed narrating what had happened immediately prior to the decision: he was standing at his desk and had lit up a cigarette while on the phone even though the previous one was still burning in the ashtray, a tin dish with three soldiered rivets that looked like finger nails. He apologized and hung up and he understood that he no longer had his cigarette consumption in hand, control had slipped away from him. That was it. That was the whole story. And every time he told the story he pointed out with undisguised pride how without preparation, without a word of advice, without aids and strategies, he had quit smoking. He had followed none of the typical methods recommended in self-help books. The short story, which soon became formulaic from all the retellings, was laid out solely as proof of the enormous willpower of its heroic storyteller. It’s true, he seemed to say, that most people don’t manage it because it’s actually a perilous addiction. But I can do it. It’s damn hard, but if you have a strong will like mine it’s actually no problem at all. If you can’t do it with the power of your own will you are simply a weak person.

  One day while we were on a skiing holiday my father’s office caught fire. This lead to countless jokes and ironically twisted remarks within his business circles, which my father would recount over dinner. The following year he sent a hundred and twenty Gloria brand fire extinguishers as Christmas gifts. The boxes were already piled up in the corridor in November and in the staff engineer’s office next to my father’s. All I knew about the engineer was that he’d fled the GDR and that he also used to smoke. His flight over the inner-German border and his abandonment of cigarettes years ago were always connected in my mind, for a while I even held them to be two parts of one, courageous act of will. Every now and again I actually imagined the young engineer with the brown suit and brown briefcase (that’s the only way I knew him) jumping over a low fence, flinging the burning cigarette mid-jump before landing on our side. He was now a free man. My father didn’t know anything about my daydreams, however he hinted at his own correlation: he considered him, not least because of his GDR past, to be tight with money. This, he suspected, was the only reason he managed to quit smoking. It was made clear to us children that there ultimately had to be some reason or other. We quickly learned that there was only one person who had the ability to succeed without any reason or help, practically without a cause.

  Since my father had to buy a set quantity of the Gloria fire extinguishers to get a discount there were more than a few left over after the Christmas holidays that had to be distributed among every room in the house. Even in my tiny bedroom a bright red fire extinguisher hung on a bracket next to the door. The safety pin exercised a power over me that I could only resist with a great deal of effort. Almost every evening before the light was switched off I considered the miraculous instrument and felt the urge to release the safety pin, a titillation, a tense and blissful feeling that I never once gave in to. I was a good boy.

  The secretary, the only other person apart from my father and the engineer to work at the inspectors’ office on the ground floor, was to blame for the fire. She had forgotten to put out the candles on her advent wreath before driving home. Through her carelessness she’d initiated a smouldering fire, my father explained, always one to keep up linguistic and terminological accuracy, which he considered the sole domain of German engineering. Hydrogen chloride, a caustic, acidic vapour, which I now know can irritate the mucous membrane and cause an inflammation of the bronchia and lungs, had formed when the desk’s PVC lamination had burned up. I learned what a smouldering fire was in the earliest years of my youth. From Aunt Anna living in Delmenhorst in Bremen, I actually had a quite exact image of what a peat fire was, how it smelled and how it can spread beneath the earth without being noticed. I al
so knew that a fire, even if completely put out, can reignite spontaneously, as there could always be residual embers. I have never in my whole life put a cigarette out near the edge of a rubbish bin for example, and I have always waited a few minutes before emptying out an ashtray.

  There are no longer coal ovens in the nicer suburbs of Cologne so I naturally assumed that the inscription ‘No hot ashes’ that first appeared as orange stickers on rubbish bins and that was later embossed directly onto their lids referred to cigarette ash. I knew that even if ashes had no visible spark within them they could still conceal danger. It wasn’t until my parents had an open fireplace built in our living room and my father gave us a solemn safety briefing right before the equally solemn first fire, and after we were allowed to help clean the fireplace the morning after the fire had completely gone out behind the steel net guard, that the penny dropped and I understood what the inscription meant. Incidentally, I discovered these bins with their stamped lid in German – Keine heiße Asche einfüllen – while taking a walk through Berkeley, California in 1990. The city of Berkeley, known for its unorthodox administration, had obviously inherited a job lot from Germany.

  When I was about eight years old my parents bought the summer house in Flanders a few kilometres from the Western Scheldt and the open sea. This small, typical Dutch mansard house was heated by a compact black oven that stood in the living room and would be ad-impleated with briquettes. (The German correlate of ‘adimpleate’ is a technical term used in coking plants, blast furnaces and waste burning facilities that my father uses to this day when talking about his espresso machine. He has other verbs in his vocabulary that can be flexibly employed in heavy industry and high-tech pensioner households.) The egg coals glowed white behind a vertically arranged row of elongated glass elements, a kind of transparent picket fence. The narrow panes were so hot that when I was a bit older and home alone or when friends came to visit I’d light cigarettes simply by making contact with the glass. There was so much ember after this first touch that I never had to rush to bring the cigarette to my mouth to take the redemptive first drag. Anyone that’s ever tried to light a cigarette on an electric stove-top knows what I’m talking about. The stove gets so hot you can’t put your face near it. You light the cigarette without having to take a drag. Most of the time it’s no more than a spark, a tiny glow that lasts for a second on the edge of the paper that gets ignited to such a point through multiple short, hectic drags that it virtually starts feeding itself. Sometimes, surprisingly seldom actually, the spark spreads itself across one side of the cigarette instead of taking hold of the whole of the tip. The experienced smoker knows that they must calmly keep smoking, without forcing it to do anything, until the problem vanishes into thin air, so to speak.

  On our hurried return from the winter holiday we established that soot mixed with acid, caused by the smouldering fire in the office, had risen up the staircase into the other floors of the house. The whole house had to be renovated. After that it would always only smell of paint, very rarely of cooking – my mother prepared, if she cooked at all, almost exclusively frozen food – and now and again my mother’s light cigarettes. The heavy cigarette smoke that rose from below and stained the walls yellow, and which I irresolvably connected to the enormous industry and drive summoned up by my father time and time again, was displaced for good. If I remember rightly my mother smoked less in this period, maybe only a couple of cigarettes a day. She must have been doing well at the time, shortly before her best friend, the mother of my playmate Elisabeth, took her own life. (We children were provided with the obviously improvised, somehow child-appropriate explanation that she had fallen off of her bicycle.) Throughout her life, before she succumbed to her own melancholy, the psychic condition of my mother could be read on the one hand from her cigarette consumption and on the other hand through her relationship to literature. In the depressive phases she smoked a lot and read a lot, exclusively biographies and romances, referred to as ‘low literature’ in middle-class circles at the time. When she was doing OK she smoked less and she read less but with more concentration. She would prefer the classics and the modern classics, she read Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, she read Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler and Joseph Roth, and she warned me emphatically against Franz Kafka, considering his brilliance to be liable to corrupt the young – questionable for a woman who gave her youngest son the name Gregor and never gave a satisfactory answer for this choice. I wasn’t yet ten years old and I had to promise her not to read The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and The Hunger Artist before my eighteenth birthday, and I kept this promise, even though she died before I came of age.

  The most insignificant city in the USA can be found in Ohio and it is called Columbus. It has such a bad reputation among the few people who have heard of it that the defiantly defeatist inhabitants have come up with the motto It’s not that bad. Columbus primarily exists for the gigantic university where I’ve held my syntax seminars for years, and is famous for its truly shattering mediocrity. This is where fast food chains try out their products, this is where the figures add up: the proportion of people of colour, rich people, fishermen, vegetarians, coffee drinkers and Buddhists corresponds exactly with the demographic of the American population. Every twelfth inhabitant has diabetes.

  The hobby pilot and Mark Twain researcher Caroline Thomas Harnsberger lived in Columbus. She died in the First Community Village retirement home on Riverside Drive in 1991. On an undated postcard reprinted in the local paper Grandview This Week you can see her photo in an oval cut-out.

  I have an appointment with Dr Jay Perry, MS. I don’t know what MS stands for, Wikipedia suggests Master of Surgery. But this can’t be right, he was recommended to me as a psychologist and hypnotist, as well as – and this is what my trust is founded on – being a member of a regional Milton H. Erickson Society that presides over the legacy of its illustrious founder.

  I took great pains not to prepare too well. Through my work I have access to the largest library association in the world and tend to read everything on a subject before I take my first steps into a new area, no different than M., who already knew the bohemian grandmaster Wilhelm Steinitz and his marvellous opening moves before she sat down in front of a chessboard for the first time (and lost). I rattled my Feldenkrais therapist by telling him about my extensive reading in our first meeting and even freely quoted a couple of lines from Feldenkrais’s early study Adventures in the Jungle of the Brain – The Case of Doris. I won’t make the same mistake again, I think to myself, and mount my new racing bike supplied by a German insurance company. I don’t mention that I know a lot about hypnosis, autosuggestion and meditation, nor that I’ve read practically everything I could on the subject without raising suspicions of being an occultist. I won’t say anything about my extended attempts at hypnotising myself and I certainly won’t say anything about Milton’s voice keeping me company some afternoons. I will sit down, close my eyes and keep my mouth shut.

  I’ve actually put off having hypnosis for too long, I almost feel that I’m keeping an obligatory appointment. What’s making my heart beat faster isn’t the prospect of a healing trance but the new racing bike rolling smoothly and noiselessly northwards along the Olentangy River cycle route. I should have made this appointment sooner, I think to myself, right after I smoked my last cigarette with M. and a Munich friend of ours. Eight months have passed and on the telephone I was already finding it hard to put it into words. After he’d asked me a few questions Jay Perry, Master of Surgery, seemed surprised that it was now, after the worst phase was clearly far behind me, that I wanted to have an appointment for tobacco cessation.

  To embed it on a deeper level, I said, to anchor it, you never know.

  Later, as we sat in his treatment room, I told him about my bike accident and the first cigarette that the Thai girl had lit for me, I told him how greatly I feared relapsing if something like that happened again. I even went a step further, a step that only a really
good, an excellent psychologist (or former addict) would be able to take with me. In secret, I told him, I sometimes wish that I would have another accident. I wish that something comparably dreadful would throw me off track. Because if something bad, something really awful happened, I could start smoking again. No one, least of all myself, could criticise me, no one would condemn me for it.

  Jay Perry had instructed me to bring an audio cassette, an assignment that completely overwhelmed me. In cases like this I always go to Emma, the secretary at the institute where I work. She opened a humble-looking door, more of a hatch, that I’d never noticed before even though I’ve worked there for fifteen years and go in and out the secretary office on a daily basis. She indicated for me to wait, slipped inside and returned a little later with a 60-minute TDK. We’ve still got it all, she said, if you ever need tracing paper, dictation tapes or a coloured ribbon for your typewriter… Why do you need a cassette anyway?

  She grew up in the Taunus region near Frankfurt and also spent a couple of years in Kyoto. I don’t know what brought her to Columbus, which she found in her unwavering way not only bearable, but actually quite wonderful. I mumbled an answer.