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barefoot in the seventies. A lot of what Groddeck says is utter bollocks but this idea of the mysterious It is a useful one, I think.’
    ‘What’re you leading up to, and should we burn some incense?’
    ‘I’m leading up to asking you if you’ve been friends with your It.’
    ‘I’ve been friends with my head, or I thought I was.’
    ‘All right – forget about Groddeck for now; do you think of your inner voice as coming from you or is there another entity that speaks those words?’
    ‘There’s nobody in my head but me, and the me in my head has gone silent.’
    DeVere found nothing to say for a few moments while he rubbed the back of his skull as if to stimulate that part of his brain. Presently a light bulb appeared over his head.
    ‘What?’ said Klein.
    ‘If you were now to visualise a speaker in your head other than yourself, who or what would it be?’
    Now it was Klein’s turn to rub his head. After a time he said, ‘I’ve just been looking at Oannes. Do you remember Number 14 in Redon’s lithographic series.
Tentation de Sainte-Antoine?
The god who’s half fish and half human: “I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.” He’s hovering half-seen in a sea of black, wearing a pharaonic headdress, observingus from the dimness. I think he’s the one I’d like to hear from.’
    ‘Oannes was the Babylonian god of wisdom.’
    ‘That’s what it says in the mythology books – science, writing, the arts, all that sort of thing, but Redon’s Oannes, the one that I visualise, is deeper and darker than wisdom – he’s nothing safe, nothing explicable.’
    ‘Is it possible that you’ve already heard from him?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Can you remember anything your inner voice said in the time shortly before it said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’
    ‘OK, the afternoon before that morning I was walking down the Fulham Road and a good-looking young woman passed me walking a lot faster than I was: statuesque, classy walk, black suit, short skirt, great ass, wonderful legs, black stockings, shiny black high heels. I say stockings rather than tights because I imagined a suspender belt. I tried to keep her in good viewing distance but she kept pulling farther away and I was getting angina; so I had to stop and do some glyceryl trinitrate and rest a little while she got smaller and smaller and finally turned a corner and disappeared. And I said to myself or it said or he said, “One day you’ll drop dead while something like that walks away from you and out of sight.”’
    ‘What do you mean by “something like that”?’
    ‘I mean everything that I can’t have. I’m an old man but I want what I wanted when I was young and I want it maybe more than when I was young. And there’s not a lot I can do about it.’
    ‘Did the inner voice say anything more after that first observation?’
    ‘It said, “Well, that’s life, innit.”’
    Dr DeVere scratched his head, massaged his face, cleared his throat. ‘Might that have been a more Oannes sort of utterance?’
    ‘Maybe; I don’t know. I hadn’t really been thinking about an Oannes voice until you asked me about a speaker in my head.’
    ‘Things change, you know. The fact that you visualised Oannes makes me think there might be an Oannes element in you that wants to be heard, an aspect of you that you haven’t been in good touch with. Maybe you’re going to have to meet it halfway. What do you think?’
    ‘I think,’ said Klein, ‘that if I hang out with you too long I could get more confused than I am now. Just tell me, do you think I’ll ever have an inner voice again?’
    ‘I doubt very much that the shutdown will be permanent. You can borrow Groddeck if you like.’
    ‘Thanks, but I’ll stay on standby for Oannes.’
    ‘That’ll have to be it for today. Good luck, mind how you go and watch your mouth.’ He made a note in Klein’s