by Ann Gosslin
‘What they found in the boy’s body is called a foetus in fetu,’ Gessen said, taking a sip of his tea. ‘A parasitic twin, in common parlance. It’s exceedingly rare. Worldwide, there have been fewer than two hundred recorded cases. The medical staff at the hospital were buzzing with excitement, as if an alien creature was growing inside the boy, though the reality was more prosaic.’ He waited to see if Vidor would jump in with an explanation of his own. ‘As it turned out, the boy’s mother had been pregnant with twins, one of whom failed to develop. As the surviving twin grew, it enveloped the vestigial twin, which couldn’t survive on its own without a functioning brain. But it continued to thrive, as a type of parasite, by attaching itself to the blood supply of the living twin.
‘The boy, who was otherwise perfectly fit, complained often of disturbed sleep due to regularly occurring dreams in which he and another boy were trying to solve a complex puzzle. The boy knew that his companion in the dream was his twin. He even asked his mother if she’d given birth to two boys, and if one of them had died, because he could sense the spirit of this ghost twin inside him. She reassured him there had only been one child. But the boy was haunted by the sensation, both mental and physical, that he wasn’t alone. That someone – or something – shared his thoughts. A psychiatrist diagnosed the boy as schizophrenic. But medication didn’t help, and he continued to feel dogged by this other presence.’
A log in the fireplace collapsed into coals. The room had grown overly warm and Gessen considered opening a window. Vidor absently studied the skin on his palm. A picture of boredom.
‘As a former student of philosophy,’ Gessen said, ‘I was just as fascinated by the metaphorical aspect of a parasitic twin as by the medical side.’ He stood and poked the fire. ‘What I’m trying to say is that it’s not unusual to feel there’s another being inside you, or a presence dogging your steps, even when you’re alone.’
As Vidor turned to gaze at the fire, a ripple of life crossed his features.
‘That’s what I would like to explore with you today,’ Gessen said, pressing on. ‘The feeling that you’re accompanied by another. It might help to explore who this being is, and what he might want from you.’
Gessen paused, afraid of spooking his skittish patient. They’d make no progress if the door was slammed shut.
‘I have felt, at times, another presence,’ Vidor said, shifting his gaze to the window. ‘As you say, it’s not uncommon, and a well-known neurological phenomenon. Probably a disturbance in the temporal lobe.’
Gessen bit into an almond biscuit and brushed the crumbs from his lap. ‘Tell me about this other person. Does he talk to you, or leave you a message of some kind?’
‘You mean like a note?’
Gessen suppressed a smile. If Vidor was playing this for laughs, he wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his joke.
‘Not necessarily. I was thinking more in the vein of strange disturbances. Like a ghostly figure at your side in times of distress, or finding things rearranged in your home, such as your books or papers.’
A spark flickered in Vidor’s eyes. ‘The tins,’ he murmured. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’ He shook his head and smiled. ‘I do the weekly shopping myself – don’t look so surprised, and when I get home, I put the tins in a precise order, usually by type, with the labels facing front. But on a few occasions, I’ve opened the cupboards to find them all mixed up. I just assumed it was my housekeeper doing a bit of rearranging.’ He fiddled with a button on his shirt. ‘Obsessive compulsions. Or temporary amnesia. Is that what I have?’
‘What do you think?’
Perspiration shone on Vidor’s brow. Gessen cautioned himself to tread carefully. He nodded at the chessboard. ‘Shall we have a game? You can be white.’
After Vidor made his opening salvo, Gessen picked up his bishop and made a move that was sure to be fatal, but it was important to let Vidor win this one.
They played in silence for several minutes, with Vidor keenly focused on the board. Gessen waited until Vidor had put his king into check before he leaned forward and tossed out the question he’d been waiting to ask for days.
‘Tell me something,’ he said, catching Vidor’s eye. ‘Does the name Malik Sayid mean anything to you?’
46
From his lookout in the turret, Gessen trained his binoculars on Vidor and Libby, bundled into identical grey parkas and red knitted caps, as they walked in the direction of the sculpture garden. Gessen required the patients to wear the red wool cap outside at all times in winter. Some resisted or complained, but it was easier to spot anyone who fell into a snowbank or got confused and wandered off.
Libby had her hands stuffed into the pockets of her coat and appeared to be deep in conversation with Vidor. Yesterday, when Gessen had asked him who Malik Sayid was, the response was abrupt, even surly. Not a clue. Was it Gessen’s imagination that Vidor had become disoriented for several seconds before shaking it off? These signs, though vague, could point to something. But if this were truly a case of multiple personality, rather than an assumed identity, Gessen would have to force the second, less dominant personality, Vidor’s alter, to show his face. Awakening olfactory memories with evocative scents was one strategy. The almond biscuits had seemed to elicit a minor change in Vidor’s manner, and brought forth rambling memories of a desert city.
When Libby and Vidor reached the sculpture garden, they stopped in front of a bronze statue of a swan, where Libby flung her hands in the air and twirled in a circle. Her face was pink with the cold, her smile broad. She led Vidor to a smooth patch of snow and raised her arms over her head. In a single fluid motion she fell backwards onto the ground. Though the windows were nearly soundproof, Gessen could imagine the sound of her laughter. Come on, give it a go.
After a moment’s hesitation, Vidor got down beside her and copied her movements, sweeping his arms in a wide arc and scissoring his legs. Snow angels. Libby was certainly an interesting girl to have come up with something like this. Vidor was such a tough nut to crack. A man who lived almost entirely in his head, seemingly oblivious to the body’s capacity to hold onto pain. The Movement & Meditation classes had done little to help Vidor feel more grounded in his body, or to loosen the iron grip on his thoughts. But a fresh snowfall and a girl with a warm heart had done the trick. Gessen opened the window a crack to hear their laughter. Flat on the snow, moving their limbs in unison, they giggled like children. As their laughter rang out through the crystalline air, Vidor’s face shone with joy.
After standing up to examine their creations, they clapped the snow off each other’s backs. It was the first time Gessen had seen Vidor look relaxed and happy, and he couldn’t help but wonder if this might be his first instance of spontaneous laughter in years. As he watched them head off in separate directions, Libby turned and waved at the turret. Did she guess he’d been spying on them? She couldn’t possibly know he was up here. Cheeky girl.
Back in his office, Gessen plotted his next move. To prove his suspicions of a dissociative disorder, he would have to call the alter forth. In the case of an acquired – and repressed – identity, he would need to puzzle out when the one had become the other. According to Vidor’s sister, their lodger Malik had moved out of the Sovàny home in April 1969, never to be seen or heard from again. Had he returned to where he came from, or moved to another city in France? He could easily have disappeared into the immigrant communities of a teeming city like Marseille. Perhaps with a new name. Impossible to trace.
If Vidor’s true identity was indeed Malik Sayid, when had he become Vidor Kiraly? According to Katerina Chabon, by the time her brother vanished, and was later presumed dead, Malik had been gone from their lives for several weeks. With the anguish about the fate of their beloved brother and son, the family’s one-time lodger would be a distant memory. Who would have given him a thought? Had Malik, after learning of Vidor’s disappearance, devised a way to reinvent himself as a Hungarian? After which he sli
pped across the English Channel to begin a new life? But why bother to change his name and identity? Why not remain Malik Sayid?
The potential number of permutations made his head ache. He turned to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass. The falling snow, having started again, would soon erase Vidor’s and Libby’s snow angels.
Age regression therapy might provide some answers. If Malik was lurking in Vidor’s psyche, a certain amount of poking around might ferret him out.
* * *
He tested the water with his toe before wading into the pool, blissfully alone. Vidor hadn’t learned to swim until late in life, and not very well. As a child, he remembered splashing in the baths with his mother at the Gellert in Budapest, that glorious Art Deco confection that had lately become a mecca for tourists. Poor swimmer that he was, he still enjoyed feeling weightless when he floated on his back, and the delicious sensation of water sluicing over his arms and legs.
The door swung open with a bang, and a dark shape lumbered in. In the steamy air, Vidor couldn’t make out who it was, but as the shape moved closer his heart sank. It was that wretched German woman. The one terrified of draughts, and whose eyes had a way of goggling at you like a flounder.
As she removed her robe, he turned his head away and doggy paddled to the far side of the pool. He could sense her staring at his awkwardness. But it wasn’t his fault he’d never mastered the correct technique. Though his childhood city was full of thermal baths, and his mother fond of the water, the few times she’d tried to teach him he’d resisted. From the safety of the shallow end, he would watch her cleave the water in an effortless breaststroke, while he could barely stay afloat. The moment he stopped moving, he would sink straight to the bottom.
At the pool’s shallow end, he hauled himself onto the green-tiled ledge and wrapped himself in a fluffy white robe with the clinic’s name embroidered on the pocket. Tucked into an alcove off the pool area was a relaxation room with comfortable lounge chairs, potted palms, and a selection of lifestyle magazines. No news of the world, of course. Nothing to upset their fragile sensibilities. For all he knew, the world outside their little corner of Switzerland had been obliterated by a nuclear catastrophe, while their hardy band of six, now five, remained blissfully unaware of the carnage.
He lay back, arms over his chest, breathing in and out, as he listened to the slap of water against the sides of the pool. At the sound of vigorous splashing and the smack of bare feet on the tiles, he kept his eyes firmly shut as the chair next to him was scraped back. She snapped open a magazine and ruffled the pages with a noisy sigh. He tightened the belt on his robe and prepared to make his escape.
‘Not disturbing you, am I?’ Her smoker’s voice grated on his ears.
‘Not at all, I was just leaving.’
‘Don’t rush off on my account. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.’
He closed his eyes and tried to run through his newly developed mathematical model for the signal transduction of neurotrophic factor in the brain. But her incessant sighs and annoying tsks jabbed at him like a raft of hot needles.
‘Don’t you hate these stupid ads? Look at this.’ She leaned across and poked his arm. ‘All these beautiful young people, posing as a happy family. It’s so fake. They’re just models, yet we’re supposed to believe this is some love-struck couple cavorting in an Alpine meadow with their perfectly behaved children. Crazy, yeah? It’s these stupid ads that make reproducing seem like a good thing.’ She leaned closer. ‘Look, here’s another one. A diamond is forever. Ha! Tell that to my ex. Can you believe he asked for my engagement ring back, after our divorce? Such an ass.’
Vidor’s mouth puckered in horror. Every muscle strained to flee, but an unyielding force kept him pinned to the chair, as if they were two passengers trapped together on an aeroplane, with no possibility of escape.
She hauled herself from the chair. ‘Look at this bruise on my leg,’ she said, lifting her robe to reveal a well-larded thigh. High up near her hip bloomed a nasty patch of purple and green. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s cancer. Leukaemia probably. Bruises like this are a symptom, you know.’ She pulled open her robe to reveal more flesh spilling from a too-small red bikini and pointed at the surgical scars criss-crossing the doughy flesh of her abdomen. Vidor flinched and looked away. What next? Was she going to pull out a breast and ask him to examine that as well?
‘Look at these scars. Do you know how many surgeries I’ve had? And the idiot doctors say they can’t find anything wrong with me. How can I have so much pain if nothing is wrong?’ She flopped back into the chair. ‘And they think I’m the one who’s crazy.’
As his mind sought an escape route, it struck him that her accent wasn’t German at all. If anything, it sounded American. In one of the Movement & Meditation sessions, hadn’t she told some long-winded story of being forced to move out of her flat in Berlin?
‘So what are you in here for?’ She fanned her face with a chubby hand.
‘I don’t believe we’re supposed to ask each other that,’ he said in a chilly voice.
‘Come on, I won’t tell.’ She winked and slapped his arm. Her mouth resembled a sucked lemon. Why not yank her chain and have some fun?
‘I tried to kill my father and brother.’ He said this with a straight face and solemn tone.
Her eyes widened in alarm, just as he’d hoped, and he bit his lip to keep from smiling. ‘During an ill-fated family reunion. Such gatherings are best avoided, in my opinion. Too many people with axes to grind trapped in the same room drinking bad wine.’
He could practically hear her heart patter with excitement. She sat up and hugged her plump knees. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, the usual family scrap,’ he said, breezily. ‘After my dear mother died, my father could barely wait a month to remarry. His second, much younger, wife is a ghastly woman, and the thought of her living in my mother’s house and touching her possessions made me ill. The first thing she did was to toss all my mother’s lovely things into a skip. And with my father’s blessing.’
‘How terrible.’ Babette’s expression was one of horrified glee.
‘Indeed.’ The humid air, suffused with the scent of eucalyptus and pine, was making him drowsy. ‘We’d been estranged for years, my father and I, ever since his marriage to that woman, but then he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, so I travelled to the family home to say goodbye. But the moment I walked in the door, I knew it was a mistake.’ He closed his eyes and pulled the cotton blanket up to his neck, preparing to doze.
‘Don’t leave me hanging.’ She smacked him on the shoulder. ‘What happened?’
He shifted away, regretting now his attempt to rile her up. ‘The first thing I noticed was that there was nothing of my mother’s in the house. The loathsome second wife was out, so I had a chance to look through the rooms. Everything I’d known from my childhood had been stripped away. I shouted at my father that he had effectively murdered my mother. She died from grief, her heart broken by his endless affairs. The last with the woman who became his second wife. My hands moved of their own accord and wrapped themselves around his neck. I can still feel how his windpipe flattened under my thumbs.’ Vidor raised his hands and made a choking gesture.
Her face was alive with excitement. An actual, almost murderer.
‘My brother pulled me off just in time, but I took a swing at him and knocked him against the stone fireplace. I grabbed my things and fled the house, this time for ever, I thought, but when I arrived home, the local police were waiting for me outside my flat.’
She stared at him, wide-eyed. ‘So nobody died.’
Clearly, she was disappointed by his little tale. ‘Nobody died,’ he said, with an air of sorrow.
A sharp line appeared between her eyes. ‘So, you’ve never killed anyone?’
He frowned at her. ‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’
She shifted her gaze to the window. ‘I saw you with that other patient, Ismail, on
the day he went missing. You followed him into that copse of trees near the boundary.’ She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I didn’t say anything to the police, but they might have guessed I was hiding something. So clever at reading people’s faces, aren’t they?
He felt a spasm of shock. What was she implying? Had he gone too far with his fanciful story, and now she took him for a murderer? He stared at her goggle-eyed. She was lying, surely. It was an attention-seeking ploy, nothing more.
A weariness descended upon him like a fog. Inventing this little anecdote for his own amusement had knocked the stuffing out of him. But where did it come from, this silly story of a father with a string of mistresses and a brother who always took his side? His own father, who’d disappeared from his life at the age of six, was presumably dead. He’d only ever had sisters, not an elder brother, though perhaps it had been a childish fantasy to want one. A rambunctious boy, it hadn’t been easy to grow up in a household of women.
‘Gosh,’ she said, dropping her insinuations about Ismail and lying back in the chair. ‘That’s a whole lot worse than what happened to me.’ She turned her head and coughed. A smoker’s cough. He wondered if she’d been able to find a source of contraband cigarettes.
She picked at a scab on her elbow. ‘I tried to kill myself.’
Who hasn’t?
Where did that come from? Vidor had never tried to snuff out his own life. It must be this place. Probably half the patients here had tried to off themselves, including that boy Ismail, and now all of them, including himself, were blending in together.
* * *
Afterwards, when Vidor was safely back in his room, though sporting a mysterious bandage on his head from a tumble he’d supposedly taken by the pool, he tried to make sense of the past few hours. He had no memory of being attended to by a nurse, and he couldn’t shake off the feeling of unease about the Canadian woman. For that’s what she was, apparently, assuming she had told him the truth. Not German at all as he’d assumed.