The Double

by Ann Gosslin

  ‘Caverns of the mind?’ Vidor raised his eyebrows. ‘How poetic. Though I can only assume you’re referring to the hippocampus and the amygdala.’

  Gessen chose to ignore this. He had no desire to go head to head with Vidor on the anatomy of the brain. He was less concerned about the ‘where’ of trauma than the ‘why’. ‘Tell me more about the toy soldier you were forced to leave behind when your family fled Budapest.’

  ‘I was a child.’ He exhaled noisily. ‘The toy was important to me. I don’t see how that has any bearing on my life today. Do you think I’ve been pining after that ridiculous toy soldier for the past fifty years? As I grew older and understood the gravity of our situation, I was grateful we’d all got out alive.’

  Silence filled the room.

  Gessen waited for Vidor to puncture the dead air with a pithy utterance, but he wasn’t one to chat. They might sit like this for days and Vidor wouldn’t blink. In the hearth, a burning log collapsed into coals, sending up a shower of sparks. Every hour with Vidor, Gessen mused, was like trying to scale a tower of glass. With no way to get a purchase, he kept sliding to the ground. At this rate, with Vidor stonewalling at every turn, it could take years to make a breakthrough. Neither of them had that kind of time.

  It wasn’t in Gessen’s nature to go rogue and do something unethical, but the previous afternoon, after mentioning his frustration to Ursula, she had floated an interesting idea. It skirted the edge of what he could live with in good conscience, but her suggestion was an excellent one. Brilliant, in fact, and he’d promised her he would give it some thought.

  Vidor stood and approached the hearth, where he picked up the iron poker and prodded the coals. ‘Are we done here? I’d like to go back to my room.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about a time your father disappointed you.’

  Vidor stared into the flames. ‘He never disappointed me. My father was peerless.’

  ‘All young children revere their fathers.’ Gessen considered his next words, well aware of their portent. ‘When we’re small, our fathers are indeed gods. All knowing, all powerful. After about the age of nine or ten, however,’ Gessen said, lacing his fingers together, ‘that belief begins to fade, until it is replaced with a more realistic view. The father loses his godlike power and is seen for what he is: human, and thus fallible. A hard truth to learn as a child, but an important one.’

  ‘My father was a god to me,’ Vidor countered, turning to face him, ‘right up until the day he died.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  Vidor focused on a spot behind Gessen’s left shoulder. ‘In nineteen… I was twenty-six, so, it would have been 1976. No, 1977, rather.’ He scratched the side of his neck. ‘I’d been living in England for several years at the time but made frequent trips across the Channel. We were always close, my father and I, with none of the rivalry you often find between fathers and sons.’

  ‘What do you mean by rivalry?’ Gessen waited, alert to every twitch and flicker. Vidor tightened his jaw. If he grew angry enough, something of substance might finally burst forth.

  ‘Competition, of course,’ Vidor said, relaxing his shoulders. ‘The son coming up from behind. The father sensing his power diminish with age. It’s all over the Greek myths. Surely you’ve heard of Oedipus?’

  Gessen acknowledged the joke with a smile. ‘I might have come across the name.’ He sipped from a glass of water and studied the chessboard before making a move. ‘It sounds very cosy, your family life. I can picture you at home with your mother and sisters. Your father at his work, out in the world. Comfortably settled into your new life, after the terrible trauma you’d suffered.’

  The sound of cowbells, very faint, came through the window, opened a crack to freshen the air. Vidor returned to his chair and frowned at the chessboard, as if he had forgotten their game and only now realised that he was in peril. Having taken Vidor’s queen and in a position to topple his king, Gessen leaned over the board until their faces were close, so close that Gessen could smell the peppermint on Vidor’s breath from the tea he’d drunk.

  ‘That’s a very charming story.’ Gessen moved his knight into position and tapped Vidor’s king. ‘But I don’t believe a single word you’ve said.’ He held his opponent’s gaze. ‘Checkmate.’

  10

  As Vidor rounded a corner of the path through the Zen garden, he came upon a girl he’d never seen before, occupying his bench by the fountain. It wasn’t his personal bench, of course, but ever since his arrival he’d considered it his own. Each day, after breakfast, he would sit in this particular spot in a secluded corner of the garden, notebook in hand, to jot down ideas for an article he planned to write on the neural circuitry of grapheme-colour synaesthesia.

  The girl’s hair, the colour of summer wheat, framed her thin face. Her arms were clasped across her abdomen, and her shoulders hunched, as if trying to take up as little space as possible. She must be new. Unless she was visiting one of the patients here, though it was his understanding that visitors were discouraged, if not outright forbidden.

  She dabbed her nose with a tissue and dashed the tears from her eyes. Should he slip away? He always felt crippled in the presence of a crying female. So many ways it could go wrong. Once, he’d made the mistake of patting a young student on the shoulder when she came to his office in floods of tears over a failed exam, but the glare she gave him made it clear his paternal overture might be construed as assault.

  If he sat next to her, chances were high he would scare her away. In her place, he certainly wouldn’t want some stranger – a malodorous creep, for all she knew – disturbing his solitude. Poor thing. She was clearly suffering.

  Still, it was his bench, and he planted himself on the far end, half turned away from the girl to give her privacy. Far below, the valley, at the height of autumnal splendour, glowed in the morning sun. The trees, half stripped of their golden foliage, swayed in the breeze. A throng of brown cows, enjoying the last mild days before the winter set in, dotted the hillsides. A slice of pastoral simplicity, frozen in time. Not the view one would expect from a psychiatric hospital, but perhaps that was the charm of a madhouse set amongst remote mountain peaks. He had hoped to be gone by now, but Gessen was proving to be a formidable adversary, impervious to deflection or charm.

  At the flicker of movement to his right, he risked a sideways glance. The girl, tearing at the skin on her thumb, winced when she drew blood. He coughed discreetly. ‘Are you visiting someone?’

  She turned her face, blotchy and red-eyed, in his direction.

  ‘What?’ She blinked. ‘Oh, I didn’t see you there.’ She waved her hand above her head. ‘Away with the fairies, as my gran says.’ She sniffled and blew her nose. ‘And I’m not crying, either, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s just hay fever.’

  An English girl. The sound of her accent – London, if he wasn’t mistaken – triggered a rush of homesickness. How he longed to go back. His snug house, just a short stroll to the college. The book-lined study he kept neat as a pin. His tidy garden. He wondered, with a pang, how his students were getting on without him. Or what his housekeeper thought about his disappearance. Two days ago, he’d posted a letter to Magda to let her know he was fine, and to carry on with her regular duties while he was away.

  ‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ he said, as she shifted on the bench, ‘I was just admiring the view.’

  She examined him with the penetrating gaze of the young, though her eyes had gone misty again. Medicated to the gills like the rest of them, he supposed. He’d balked at swallowing the prescribed tablets himself, having never taken anything stronger than an aspirin before. One blue and white pill was for depression, the other two for anxiety. Anxious he might be, considering the circumstances, but he wasn’t depressed. He had a right to refuse the tablets, but the dispensary nurse, whose manner was kind, strongly urged him to follow doctor’s orders.

  The girl sighed and studied her nails, bitten to the quick li
ke a child’s. How terrible to be so young and so sad. Perhaps he could jolly her out of her mood. ‘Which part of England are you from?’

  ‘London.’ She tugged the sleeves of her cardigan over her wrists. ‘But I’m at university now.’

  ‘Not Cambridge by any chance?’

  ‘Oxford.’ She pushed a loose strand of hair from her forehead. ‘Pembroke College.’

  Clever girl. He should have guessed. ‘And what are you studying at Oxford?’

  ‘Philosophy and French.’

  An interesting combination. Though he couldn’t help wondering what she planned to do with her degree. There wasn’t much call for philosophers these days.

  ‘You can’t study the great philosophers in translation,’ she said, as if guessing his thoughts, ‘and I already know German.’ She plucked at a thread on her sleeve. ‘My dad says I should study something more practical. He’s always banging on about job prospects. He works in the City and thinks philosophy is a ridiculous waste of time. It doesn’t help that he’s American. Always focused on the money angle.’

  A Yank father in finance. He could imagine how that might be a challenge to a sensitive girl, and he couldn’t help but wonder how she’d ended up in a place like this. Perhaps a boyfriend had broken her heart, and she’d done something stupid. An overdose of pills? No scars on her wrists that he could see, but he’d witnessed enough romantic angst amongst the shifting sea of undergraduates at St Catharine’s to know that a dramatic gesture could take any number of forms. Or perhaps love had nothing to do with it. An overdose of philosophy could just as easily be at the root of her sorrow. Kierkegaard, that gloomy Dane, and certainly not his favourite philosopher as he’d professed in Copenhagen, would drive anyone to despair.

  ‘I was looking at the fish in that pond over there,’ she said, pointing at the shallow, rock-filled pool a few metres away. ‘One of them looks different than yesterday. Do you think they can change colour, like chameleons?’

  Vidor considered this. He’d never taken much interest in the fishpond. ‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘though I’m not a specialist in fish. It’s probably your eyes playing tricks on you.’

  ‘Tricks?’ She showed a spark of life. ‘Why would they do that?’

  He plucked a dried blossom from a nearby bush and crumpled it in his hand. ‘It’s not our eyes that see, but our brain. What we take to be reality, or a true representation of the world,’ he said, gesturing at the valley below, ‘is nothing but a construction of the visual cortex.’

  She gave him an odd look. ‘That can’t be right. When I close my eyes, I see nothing, when I open them, the world appears. What I see…’ she pointed at the bronze fountain, ‘you see too, right?’

  Rather than reply, he tore a blank page from his notebook and drew two small circles a few inches apart. He held it up to her. ‘How many circles do you see?’

  ‘Two, of course. How many do you see?’

  He smiled. ‘Hold the paper in front of you and cover your left eye. How many circles do you see now?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Now, focus on the left circle with your right eye, and slowly bring the paper closer to your face. How many circles do you see?’

  ‘One.’ She wrinkled her brow. ‘How does that work?’

  A sense of triumph flushed his cheeks. Was that all it took to cheer her up, a silly optical illusion? He was surprised she’d never come across it before.

  ‘Our eyes have a blind spot,’ he said, making a rapid sketch of the human eye. ‘At the point on the retina where the optic nerve enters, there are no photoreceptors. So the brain fills in the blank space with its best guess, using information from the surrounding image. When the circle on the right entered the blind spot of your right eye, your brain filled it in with the white of the paper. Everything we see,’ he said, shifting into full lecture mode, ‘is a construction of the brain. It creates an image based on the electrical signals it receives from the photoreceptors on the retina. Since there are variants in our photoreceptors based on our DNA, it’s possible that what you see and what I see is not exactly the same. For example, if we were to look at the same red carnation, your perception of “red” might be different to mine.’

  A shadow crossed the girl’s face, and her eyes took on a panicky look. A mood shift, difficult to parse. Had he cast a pall over what was meant to be a moment of wonder?

  ‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream,’ she murmured.

  He gave her a questioning look.

  ‘My grandmother had a thing for Edgar Allan Poe. I’d never understood that line before.’

  Tears welled in her eyes, and he waited for her to say more, but nothing disturbed the silence except the rustle of a Japanese maple, its few remaining leaves, the colour of dried blood, trembling in the breeze. He looked at the girl in alarm and mumbled some excuse before slipping away. What had he done? A place this fraught with fragile minds and delicate sensibilities had no room, apparently, for disturbing facts about the universe, or the byzantine workings of the brain. From now on, he would keep his thoughts to himself.

  11

  Vidor blinked at the sight of Dr Lindstrom seated in one of Gessen’s wingback chairs. Had he stumbled into the wrong room? He’d been feeling out of sorts since breakfast, queasy and unsettled as if he’d eaten a plate of bad eggs. It didn’t help his feeling of unease that on his way over to the main building, the weedy man who shared his chalet passed him on the footpath, his head wrapped in a bandage, seeping blood.

  ‘Where is Dr Gessen?’

  ‘He was called away on other business, so you’ll have your session with me today.’ She smiled warmly. ‘I hope that’s all right with you.’

  Dr Lindstrom eyed him over a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that did nothing to hide her pretty features. It might be easier, Vidor mused, to bare his soul to an older woman. One in possession of a greater store of well-honed wisdom than this fresh-faced girl. Not that he had any intention of baring anything, but he doubted this young doctor knew much about the trials of life.

  A tiny red light winked at him from a panel on the wall. ‘Am I being recorded?’

  ‘Dr Gessen asked me to tape our session while he was away.’ She scratched a note on a yellow pad. ‘I was just about to mention it.’

  This was a new development. ‘Don’t you need my permission to do that?’

  ‘Of course we do. Patient rights are paramount here.’ She made another note. ‘You signed a release on admission allowing us to record your sessions as needed. But rest assured,’ she smiled again, ‘all recordings are strictly confidential, to be viewed only by Dr Gessen and myself.’

  As with the other documents, he had no memory of signing a release form. Nothing at all of being admitted. Impossible to accept that such a large swathe of his memory had been erased. Or the events never stored at all. Unless they were lying to him.

  She opened a file with his name, Kiraly, V., clearly labelled at the top, and extracted a single sheet of paper.

  ‘That’s your signature, isn’t it?’ As she passed him the document, he felt a flutter of déjà vu. Hadn’t Gessen recently asked him the same question about another set of forms? Deprived of his normal routines, his presence and personhood had grown warped and hazy. Vidor studied the loops and slashes of the name. The jagged V, the K like a claw. It looked like his signature, but it could easily have been forged.

  ‘I don’t remember signing this.’

  ‘I can assure you that you did. I handled your admission, and you signed this in my presence.’ Her eyes, a disconcerting cobalt blue, were fixed on his. ‘You’re ill, Mr Kiraly,’ she said, her voice softening. ‘But we’re here to help you. If you would only trust us, things could go much more smoothly.’

  Trust? Not something that came easily to him, and he hadn’t a clue what approach might work in this case. A paternal stance, a charm offensive? Her stern expression and buttoned-up manner made it clear she would brook no impertinence.


  ‘For our session today, I’d like to conduct a word association exercise.’ She beckoned for him to follow her into a different adjoining room, not the elegant sitting room as he’d hoped. This room was quite small in size and sparsely furnished with a straight-back chair and a chaise longue, upholstered in black leather. Here, at last, was the infamous couch. Did this mean he’d advanced to a new level, or that he’d gone back a step? As he eyed the set-up with a prickle of anxiety, he imagined the ghost of Freud – or was it Jung? – gazing smugly upon him.

  She waited as he lay down and crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Before we begin, could you tell me which language you prefer? I’ve got assessments in French and Hungarian, as well as English. Usually, we find that the patient’s native tongue is best, but in your case…’

  ‘English, if you please. I’ve spoken almost nothing else for forty years.’

  A whisper of shuffled paper. ‘Here’s how it works: I’m going to read out a series of words, and after each word I say, you tell me the first word that comes to mind. Don’t think about your answer. Just say the first thing that pops into your head. The whole exercise should take about fifteen to twenty minutes.’

  Her skirt rustled as she settled into the chair behind his head. On the wall, an abstract painting in soft pastels hung directly in his line of sight. Perfectly innocuous, exceedingly bland. Something one might find at the dentist or in a mid-class hotel room in Leeds.

  ‘Ready?’ Dr Lindstrom cleared her throat and began. ‘Water.’