“Do you think the military know who you really are, Matthew?” I ask.
He shakes his head thoughtfully. “No,” he says. There’s a finality to it that makes my heart sink. “They know I’m not him, the missing soldier, and that seemed to be enough. We just look similar. I think they have nagging doubts, but I’m not what they’re looking for. Every now and then, forgetting things has its upside.” He smiles ruefully. “I didn’t know the answers to any of their questions. I genuinely didn’t recognize the soldier’s name when they said it. It’s strange how quick people are to make up their minds when faced with simple incomprehension. I’d rather not have what I have, but sometimes, it seems, it does take care of me.”
He fooled them. Well, not fooled exactly…but they certainly didn’t find out the truth. The military don’t know, the police don’t know, and I’m guessing realistically Peter doesn’t know. They’ll work it out at some point, but will that be soon enough? Right now no one knows what he’s capable of, which means no one is coming for me. It’s just Matthew and me until this ends however it ends. I try to calm my panicked thoughts. As long as I am his doctor and he is my patient, as long as I keep this symbiotic relationship active, then I am safe.
“You said you’d rather not have what you have? What does that mean, Matthew? What do you think you have?” I ask. This is why he needs me and this might be my trump card.
“I don’t know but this isn’t the first time all of this has happened to me, I know that. The memory loss. A reset in my brain. It’s always been like this. I don’t think my condition has ever been an exact science, even to me.”
“Your condition? The fugue has happened before?” I blurt out in spite of myself.
He nods. “It’s happened periodically throughout my life. I never know when. No warning. Sometimes I get years uninterrupted, sometimes only months. I used to have no control over it. One moment I’m living my life and the next I wake up with nothing. I’ll come to in an alley, or a park, or a beach somewhere, it doesn’t matter where. I’ll have nothing, and I’ll have been robbed or attacked, or whatever it is that time around, and I’ll have no memory of how I got there or what came before. My mind’s a blank, then it resets, and slowly, day by day, piece by piece, it comes back. Tiny triggered memories bring things crashing back. A face, a word, a sound, a feeling. And all the things I’ve learned about myself, jumbled and cryptic. The facts, memories in no order. A mess of information, and I try to piece it together. Where my own memories and the lives of others collide, it becomes confusing. And then, of course, there are some memories that never come back.”
“Like what?” I ask, my interest piqued in spite of everything.
“You asked who I am. I don’t know. I don’t know who I was to begin with. I don’t think I ever know, in any cycle of this—I don’t think that ever comes back. But I can control the condition to a degree these days. Living like this, it’s hard, but over time I’ve developed coping mechanisms to deal with the resets—to some extent, I have strategies. A few years ago I realized I could bring them on myself. I worked out I could leave myself memory prompts, small things, messages. That’s what helps me these days. I found messages this time around. I have to leave a trail between cycles, like breadcrumbs, or it all goes. And I can’t have that. I can’t start from nothing all over again. I just can’t. You can’t imagine what that is like. No piece of grit to form yourself around.” He holds my gaze with a steely intensity, all his usual warmth gone.
I feel a shiver of dread fizz through me at what he’s describing, tinged at its edges with excitement. Because the symptoms he’s outlining are a psychiatrist’s dream. Somehow, I’ve accidentally wandered into treating the most fascinating and dangerous patient of my career. Perhaps this is what I wanted? If I was a Jungian analyst, that’d certainly be my takeaway from all this. If I wasn’t so completely crippled by fear, I’d pull out my phone and record this.
His symptoms: recurrent fugue, full dissociation from violent behavior, coupled with remorse, shame, fear. It sounds like dissociative personality disorder. Dissociative personality disorder used to be called multiple personality disorder, or MPD. They renamed it in the nineties because there was this common misconception, even in the medical community, that MPD meant a patient had more than one personality. It doesn’t mean that, it means that the patient has less than one personality. It is a fragmenting or a splintering of identity. Shards of an independent self.
“When did this start, Matthew?” I ask carefully. “Do you remember how it started?” I encourage him.
“When I was young. A kid. As far back as that. I don’t remember my family, if that’s where you’re going with this. I don’t know how it started. My best guess is, I must have lost my family after one of the early resets. You can’t go home if you don’t remember where home is. So, I lost them. Or perhaps they lost me.” He smiles sadly, and without thinking, I find myself smiling back in sympathy. Because whoever this man is, he has Matthew’s face, he has Matthew’s smile.
“Either way,” he continues, “I don’t remember who they were.” He shakes his head. “It’s strange. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever told another person these things.”
He’s trying to elicit another personal response from me. He’s testing the boundaries of our relationship. I weigh my options carefully before responding. “And how does that make you feel, Matthew?”
He grins at my evasion, aware of my dilemma. Of our dilemma. The doctor-patient contract is a simple one but so easy to unbalance. He gives a nod of acknowledgment before answering my question. “It makes me feel good, Emma. So, thank you for listening.”
Our boundaries successfully reinforced, I shift position in my chair and reorient the conversation. “Do you remember who you were before you woke up on the beach, Matthew?”
“I have flashes of him. I have flashes of being lots of different people, living lots of different lives. I don’t know exactly who I was before I was Stephen.”
“You weren’t actually Stephen, though, were you? You took Stephen’s identity.”
He sobers at my correction. “Yes.”
“And you are certain you killed him? You remember that? There isn’t the possibility you just stole his identity?” I say the words as neutrally as I can. I need to be his ally.
He hesitates; the thought seems to be a new one for him. “I can’t remember the physical act of killing him, no, but I must have because here I am, being Stephen. And that’s how I’ve always done it in the past.”
“How you’ve always done it? How many others have there been, Matthew?”
He studies me, his handsome face open and artless. “Quite a few, Emma,” he says simply. “I remember some of them in detail and yet it’s like remembering a dream or a nightmare. What I’m doing seems to make sense at the time but it doesn’t in the remembering. Do you see? At the time, it seems like the only choice. Like a necessity. Do you understand? To get away or because I needed an identity. If I just stole an identity without killing the person, then I would just be waiting for the day the real person claimed it back. It happened in the early days. I needed an identity to live, to rent a car, to book a flight, to get a job, to live a life. I needed a face, a name. And I didn’t have one.”
My thoughts go to my phone buried deep in my pocket, so close but so incredibly far. I think of Rhoda sending Chris to a beach I’m no longer on and I want to cry. Matthew has been trying to get me on my own for so long, he’s thought of everything. And now I have no way out.
“How did you know my name when we met, Matthew? Why am I here?” I ask, the words coming out almost involuntarily. I notice the slight tremble in my voice.
He hears it too and finally seems to realize that I am terrified to my bones, terrified of the things he has said, terrified of this situation.
“Oh God, Emma. I’m so sorry. Please don’t be scared. You
must know that I would never hurt you. I promise you. You can’t understand how—” He stops and looks down; I notice his hands are trembling too. “You can’t possibly understand what you mean to me. You are all I have. All of this is for you. Everything I’ve done is to find you. To get close to you.” His brown eyes, warm once more, dart over my face, searching for understanding.
All of this is for me? What does that mean, why did he need to find me? I don’t know him. Do I? Or have I just forgotten? I think about who there has been in my life who might try as hard as Matthew to find me. An old patient? Someone from my childhood? I know this can’t have anything to do with my father, but I suddenly hear myself blurt out the question before I can stop myself. The question that’s been on my mind ever since we met.
“Did someone send you to find me, Matthew?” I don’t care how crazy it sounds, we’re well past crazy at this stage.
He looks confused for a moment, so I continue. “How did you know the things you knew about me, Matthew? My burnt fingers. The pilot light. Why did you say sorry for what you did that first night we spoke? You pretended to be my father; I don’t understand why you would do that. Was it all a trick?” The questions fire from me, questions I’ve kept stifled at the back of my mind for too long. I hear the bite in my voice but I don’t care anymore. “And if it was all a trick, then I’m dying to know to what end!”
He seems taken aback, as if he assumed I knew the answers to these questions already. Though how I could have I do not know. “I see. I’m sorry, Emma, I haven’t explained this well. It must be confusing. Let me go back to the beginning. When I woke up on the beach I had a name on my hand. Marn. The ‘i’ in ‘Marni’ must have washed away. Not that it mattered. A memory came back to me. I knew I had to find a woman, but I didn’t know who. I guessed the name would be important. She wasn’t at the hospital and I didn’t know how I’d find her, until you arrived. When I finally saw you I knew it was you. I had these feelings”—his gaze shoots straight into me—“these feelings for you, such incredibly strong feelings. I still have them now. I knew that I needed you to understand something, and that there was a chance you might not. But I couldn’t remember what it was I was supposed to tell you. I knew that I had done something terrible, I had this guilt, but I didn’t know what it was I had done. I saw you that first day. I tried so hard to remember what I needed to say, and you ran to me, and all I could do was call you by your name. When I woke up later, you had gone but I remembered. I remembered who you were, what had happened to you, to Marni, all those years ago. The memories of that night were so fresh in my mind. Your fingers burnt, somehow, on a firework, I think? I don’t know. They were bandaged. I remembered your house, full of gas, poison in the air. And a body, blood everywhere. What was done to you. I felt certain that it must have been me who had done those things to you. I couldn’t bear that I’d hurt you. I didn’t do it to trick you, Emma, I promise, I would never trick you. I thought I did what your father did—but now I see I only remembered the details of that night because I tried so hard to find you. Because I care so much about you.” He pauses, unsure if he should say what he was planning to say next. “I didn’t mean to trick you, but, if I’m honest, I think that’s why he chose to come here. He wanted to use your father as a way in.”
“He?” I ask, leaning forward quickly in my chair.
“Yes. All of this to get me to you—”
“Who is he, Matthew?”
He pauses, a frown crinkling his brow, that then gives way to a look of genuine surprise. “Oh. Oh, no. I’m so sorry, Emma. It was, I didn’t mean to—there is no one else. It was a turn of phrase. He, me, Stephen. Whoever I was before the beach.” He watches as the sense of what he’s saying sinks in and I lean back defeated. Now it is his turn to ask me a question. “You thought I meant your father, didn’t you?” I feel the rush of blood to my face, to my head. Shame. He knows my shame, he knows how stupid I am. Matthew continues but I’m barely listening.
“I’m sorry. I think he wanted you off center, that’s why he brought you back here. And it seems like it worked. Easier if he separated you from the people you trust, from your everyday life. Easier for me to get close. But I promise you, Emma, when I said those things in the hospital, I thought they were real, I wasn’t trying to trick you. I truly thought I had been the one who hurt you and I was beyond sorry.”
I feel exposed, raw and unprotected. How was it so easy to break me down, to strip me back? After all the years of therapy since it happened. After all my training. I try to make sense of the man before me, my persecutor and my savior. “But how did you know those things about me, Matthew? They were private. Who told them to you? There must have been someone else. How did you know things about Rhoda?”
“I didn’t know how I knew those things, at the time. About Rhoda, about you. I just saw people’s faces in the hospital and memories would come. Information about them. Rhoda in the park, your house, blood on the floorboards, your burnt fingers. Later I remembered I’d left something in the hospital garden, a phone. The phone sent me here, to Lillian’s house. I found I knew where to find the key. I found research here. Notes explaining everything.” He points back toward the shadows of the bedroom doorway. “There’s months’ worth of information: On you, your past, your job in London, your life, your flat. On Rhoda and everyone I might have come into contact with at that hospital. Facts on everyone I might need to form some kind of relationship with. So when I first saw Rhoda, I knew what she’d been through, what she needed. And I waited for you to arrive. And then when I came here three nights ago, I realized why I needed you.”
He leans forward in his seat excitedly.
“He read your article, Emma. I read your article. The one about misdiagnosis. Fugue cases. It was me you wrote about in that paper. You didn’t know then that you were, and you didn’t recognize me when you finally saw me, but your paper was about my case. I read it, and in it, you believed me. You believed my case, that it was real, that I was telling the truth. Everyone else thought I was lying, faking symptoms, and only you believed me, Dr. Lewis. Granted, you wrote your article years after my case, years after that first incident, but you believed me. You said in the article that you would have treated me, my case, differently. Do you remember? Do you remember saying that? You wrote about the Unknown Young Male case. I was hospitalized in Buffalo, New York. I knew, we knew, we had to come and find you. So you could fix us, fix this. I knew you’d be the only one who could.”
Oh my God.
My mind whirs as I try to process what he’s saying. But the Unknown Young Male case was years ago. My eyes flash across his face, his handsome features, his cheeks sprinkled with graying stubble, his tousled hair silvered at its edges. He looks so different from that picture taken two decades ago, older, more muscular, not the skinny young man in that grainy photograph, not like the man I would have imagined he’d grow into. But those eyes. I inhale sharply. I see it now, that same oddly calm gaze, as if he were somehow outside of life looking in. A spectator. It is him. All this time and I had no idea. How could I have missed it?
But there were signs, my God there were signs. I recall the first instinct I had when Peter showed me Matthew’s brain scan, that day in the Wellcome Collection museum, Matthew’s pituitary cyst, the thing that really sparked my interest in the case. The symptom that reminded me of other fugue patients I’d seen. But Matthew’s cyst wasn’t a shared symptom among several fugue patients, it was just his symptom. I had been looking at a scan of the same brain, the same patient twenty years apart.
“That was over twenty years ago,” he continues. “I was in my twenties when I first stumbled into that hospital in New York, two black eyes, a shaved head, and no memory of who I was. Richard Groves was my consulting neuropsychiatrist.”
Of course, it was Groves’s case.
“Wait, Matthew,” I blurt. “Are you saying Dr. Groves knew who you were? H
e sent you to me?” My brain scrambles, desperately trying to piece things together. Could Groves really do something like this to me? I can’t believe he would knowingly endanger me.
Matthew shakes his head. “No. Groves would have ruined everything. That’s the last thing I would have wanted. I needed to make sure Groves wouldn’t come. I knew they’d call him first, so I had to wait until I knew he would be too busy to take this case himself. I did my research, I waited until he was right in the heart of something far more high profile. I know the sort of man Dr. Groves is, trust me. That’s why I chose to come here, to the coast, instead of London. I knew Groves wouldn’t come over here for this. This isn’t a big enough draw, not me, not this nowhere hospital. He’s at MIT right now, I waited until he was right in the thick of it, his AI research project. I knew he’d call you. You’d be his obvious choice. I made sure you would be. I made sure a few of your colleagues were unavailable. I made sure the job fell to you.” He catches my expression, however fleeting I hoped it would be. “They’re fine, don’t worry,” he says. “Well, almost all. Tom Lister—I think he might be—I’m not sure—” He stops short.
Oh God. I feel sick. God knows what he did to get me to the top of Groves’s list.
He planned all of this. Before he’d even met me, he read me better than I read my own patients.
“You planned all of this?” I ask, incredulous. “And you just trusted the plan would work when you woke up? How could you know you’d remember enough? How could you know you’d forget enough for it to work?”
“As I said, there’s not a big margin for error in my life. If I don’t plan ahead, I get caught out. I don’t have the luxury of absentmindedness. I can carry certain memories from one episode to the next. Physical pain helps memories carry better. I can control the resets now too. A bang to the head is usually enough these days. A mild concussion. I almost control it. Almost. I gave myself a message, in the bathroom mirror of this house, before I smashed one of Lillian’s heavy glass ashtrays into the back of my skull. And then I walked out of the house and down to the seashore. I told myself to find you. I told myself it was so very important that I do. I told myself not to fuck it up. When I woke up wet and lost, I had your name written on my hand. A trail of messages led us both here. I left myself a parcel in the garden of the hospital—the phone I’m guessing you found in my room. I knew you’d come and find me. And here we are. I don’t want to be this way anymore, Emma. It’s getting harder every year. I need your help.”
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