“How you’vealwaysdone 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 whatyoudid 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. “Ididn’t mean to trick you, but, if I’m honest, I think that’s whyhechose to come here.Hewanted 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 ishe,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? He 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.”
