DEATH REHEARSAL NUMBER 1 (COTARD’S DELUSION WITH A DASH OF TIBETAN BUDDHISM)
Serjoža would have escorted Polina to the sofa group and offered her something to smoke. These stories were the kinds of stories you couldn’t listen to (let alone tell) without cognac and cherry cigars. Serjoža was happy to tell his friends stories about his clients (which is why people liked him). All of his patients, regardless of sex, were named Pyotr, and the most unbelievable things always happened to them. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been Serjoža’s clients.
This specific Pyotr suffered from a very rare disease named Cotard’s Delusion. The name came from French neurologist Jules Cotard, who began his career under Professor Jean-Martin Charcot at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. In the 1870s, Cotard moved to a small city near Paris, Vanves, which nowadays is one of the most densely populated places in Europe, where he died fifteen years later from diphtheria acquired from his daughter.
Cotard’s Delusion, which the neurologist described as a new form of melancholia comprising restlessness and agitation, saw the light of day in 1880. Its typical symptoms include “the delirium of negation” (délire des négations): depression accompanied by delusions related to one’s own body. Anxiety and guilt afflict some who suffer from the syndrome, along with hypochondria, auditory hallucinations, and, paradoxically enough, delusions of immortality.
Serjoža’s Pyotr was a unique case in many regards. He had read a Russian translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead immediately prior to falling ill—this topic, death, had gripped him long before the appearance of his actual delusions. When he was brought to Serjoža’s clinic, he was convinced that his mother had failed miserably in her most important duty: she hadn’t known how to assist his consciousness to launch out of his body in the instant before his breathing stopped.
Pyotr had a photographic memory of the situation in which he believed he died. Yes, a photographic memory: as if death hadn’t been enough, to top it all off he had separated from his body. He had watched events unfold from the ceiling, and now he gave Serjoža a voluminous account of what he had seen. So he lay lifeless in his bed. Before that he had pushed himself up on his elbows and shouted to his mother in terror as he felt his spirit leaving. He had hoped his mother would come in time to help him, that his mother would have a chance to read aloud certain important lines from a book that was on his nightstand. But when his mother arrived, it was too late. Pyotr had already managed to move, or rather had been dragged, up to the ceiling.
The arrival at his lifeless body of his father and little sister, who had run in spurred by his mother’s cries, did not change the situation at all. And because his father’s bald head was right below him, so Pyotr had related to Serjoža, he thought he could take the grandfather clock weight from high atop the cabinet, where it had been placed to await the clocksmith, and drop it on his father’s head. He wanted to see his father’s skull break. He was convinced his father had slipped thallium into the water he had been drinking. Pyotr claimed that his father had long been looking for an opportunity to take his son’s life. That was why, for months, Pyotr had been buying his food and drink exclusively in cheap restaurants and refusing any family dinners, despite his mother’s beseeching and tears.
But now his father had won. He had found the rucksack Pyotr had hidden under his bed and the unopened bottle of spring water in it. As he slept, his father had opened the top and crumbled a full gram of thallium powder into the water. And then Pyotr had unsuspectingly drunk the water in the morning. And now he had died, and all of his precautions had gone to waste.
Serjoža didn’t ask whether Pyotr had experienced sudden stomach pains, diarrhea, and vomiting, which were the first symptoms of thallium poisoning. Instead he let Pyotr continue, and Pyotr pressed on, telling him that the clock weight hadn’t budged no matter how he tried to tug on it as he floated, stretched out horizontally. His father had disappeared from beneath him, leaving the room with a concerned sigh—faking, of course, Pyotr added—to call the doctor. His little sister had burst into tears, and all his mother could do was stroke poor Pyotr’s forehead as it cooled.
Serjoža listened to his patient in all seriousness, not allowing even the hint of a smile to reach his lips. And he wouldn’t laugh when he passed the case on later. That was part of his professional ethic: seriousness no matter how insane the story might be, and no matter how his listeners might double over in laughter, holding their stomachs and drying tears of mirth.
But there was one feature in Pyotr’s story that to his knowledge had received no mention in the literature on Cotard’s Delusion, and from which Serjoža might derive a marvelous peer-reviewed article which could receive hundreds if not thousands of citations in the future. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The question of how a written work can influence the onset of delusions in a mind susceptible to delusions. Pyotr would be Serjoža’s key to international success!
Pyotr sat slumped before Serjoža, overcome with grief. He hadn’t managed to tell his mother, whom he trusted implicitly and loved boundlessly, that at the moment when he felt his spirit leaving, she should have quickly picked up the book next to his bed on the nightstand, opened it at the bookmark to page fifty-six, and read:
O child
