The house keys are hanging from a nail on the banister at the bottom of the stairs. Don’t forget them.
With regret and also hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
I read through the letter a couple more times. The First Eric Sanderson. What did that make me?
I took the jacket from the stand and picked up the map. The door keys were hanging just where the letter said they’d be. I called the number.
“Randle,” a voice said.
“Dr Randle?” I pushed the car keys into my pocket. “This is Eric Sanderson.”
Dr Randle came back into the conservatory with more tea and biscuits and a box of tissues on a tray. The brown dog under the cheese plant lifted its head, sniffed in a sleepy, going-through-the-motions sort of a way, then closed its eyes again.
“Dissociative disorders,” Randle descended slowly into her creaking wicker chair, “are quite uncommon. They sometimes occur in response to severe psychological trauma, blocking out memories which are too painful or difficult for the mind to deal with. A circuit breaker for the brain, you could say.”
“But I don’t feel like I’ve forgotten anything,” I said, fumbling around again inside my head. “It’s just, there’s nothing there. I mean, I don’t think I feel anything about that girl. I don’t even–” I put my palms out in a gesture of emptiness and scale.
The Randle nebula shifted, strobed, stretched and rolled in on itself until a big meaty hand with a tissue in it was patting my knee.
“The first few hours are always difficult for you, Eric.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, as I said, your condition, I don’t like to use the term unique, but it’s quite distinctive in several–”
“How many times have we done this, Doctor?”
She didn’t even stop to think about it.
“This will be your eleventh recurrence,” she said.
“In the majority of cases, dissociative amnesias occur and resolve relatively quickly. Generally speaking, it’s the trigger event, the traumatic incident causing the condition, which is forgotten. Sometimes, the memory loss can be–” Dr Randle made a vague circle with her hand “–more general, but not often. A single recurrence of any kind is very, very unusual.”
“And eleven is off the charts.”
“Yes. These things are rarely black and white, Eric, but even so, I have to tell you–” she cast around for the right words, and then gave up.
“I see,” I said, scrunching the tissue.
Randle seemed to be thinking. The heaviness lifted for a few seconds as she turned her thoughts inwards. When she looked back over at me, her forehead knotted up.
“You haven’t had any urge to pack up and leave, have you?”
“Leave?” I said. “And go where?”
“Anywhere. There’s a very rare condition which we call fugue–”
“What?”
“It means ‘flight’. People suffering from it do just that; they take off, run away. From their lives, from their identities, from everything.” She made a vanished-in-a-puff-of-smoke gesture. “They just go. Before we go on, are you sure you haven’t felt a desire to do anything like that?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, trying the idea for size. “No. I don’t think I want to go anywhere.”
“Good. Can you give me a line from Casablanca?”
“Sorry?”
“A line from Casablanca.”
I was in danger of being seriously left behind but I did what I was told.
“‘Of all the gin joints in all the world, she has to walk into mine.’”
“Good,” Randle nodded. “And who says that?”
“Bogart. Rick. The character or the actor?”
“It doesn’t matter. Can you picture him saying it?”
“Yes.”
“Is the film in colour or black and white?”
“It’s black and white. He’s sitting with a drink at–”
“And when was the last time you saw Casablanca?”
My mouth opened and an almost-sound happened in the back of my throat. But I didn’t have an answer.
“You see? All that seems to be missing, Eric, is you. And that’s a typically fugue-like state of affairs, I’m afraid.” Randle thought for a minute. “The truth is, I’m reluctant to pin this down with a final diagnosis. So much about your case is unusual. For instance, your amnesia didn’t even begin on the night of the accident. You appear to have shown no symptoms at all for almost twelve months.”
“And how unusual is that?”
Dr Randle lifted her eyebrows.
“Right.”
“When it finally happened, your memory loss related only to a single night–the night of the accident in Greece. You received three months of regular treatment for amnesia and you were even making some progress, but then you suffered your first recurrence.”
“Which means?”
“You suddenly lost more memories.” She left a break for me to take this in. “All the memories of your holiday in Greece had become patchy and there were little holes in memories from other parts of your life too, some of them quite unrelated.”
Little holes. Little bits missing. Things nibbled away here and there.
“And the holes kept getting bigger?”
“I’m afraid so. With each recurrence, you remembered less.”
I could feel the empty space inside me, in my skull, in my guts.
“And now here I am with nothing.”
“I know it doesn’t feel like it at the moment, Eric, but you have to keep focused on the fact that none of your memories are really lost. What you are suffering from–whatever the peculiarities of your case–is a purely psychological condition. It’s a type of memory suppression, not actual damage. Everything is still in your head somewhere and, one way or another, it will start to come back from wherever you’ve hidden it. The trick will be in working out what’s triggering the recurrences and finding a way to defuse it.”
I nodded blankly.
“I think that’s enough for today,” Randle said. “It’s a lot for you to take in all at once, isn’t it? Perhaps you should go home now, try to get some rest. Shall we meet up again tomorrow evening?”
“Yes. Sure.” They ached; my eyes ached. I started to push myself up on the wicker chair arms.
“Oh, before you go–one more thing.”
I stopped.
“Okay,” I said, for the hundred-thousandth time.
“In the past, you’ve written and left letters for yourself to be read after a recurrence. I must ask you–and this is very important now, Eric–under no circumstances write or read anything like this. It could be incredibly destabilising for you, possibly even leading to another–”
Something on my face gave me away. She stopped mid-sentence and chased my reaction.
“Has something like this happened already?”
“No.” It was a knee-jerk, things are complicated enough thing to say, nothing to do with what would be the best or not the best thing to do. Was it even really a lie? I smoothed over the bumps deciding I’d think about it later: “Well,” I said. “There was a note by the front door telling me to phone you and how to get here, just that kind of thing.”
Half true. Less than half true: Good luck and sorry. The First Eric Sanderson.
“Of course,” she said. “You should leave that in place in case you ever need it again. But please–if you should come across anything else, bring it straight to me. Don’t read it. I know what I’m asking you to do is difficult, but if I’m going to be able to help you, this is very, very important. Okay?
“Yes,” I said. “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
2
Kitchen Archaeology and Second Post
In the deep dark, in the thousand-fathom black waters of ancestral memory and instinctive unconscious, where old gods and primitive responses float invisible and gigantic, something moves. The dust debris on the ocean floor,
sediment a million years still, lifts and swirls in its wake
I woke in a jump of panic, flailing around inside my head, but I could still remember. The bedroom carpet, Randle, her wicker chairs, the yellow Jeep, the house. Just one evening of memories, but it was enough to know it hadn’t happened again, I was still the same person I’d been the night before. I was lying on the sofa. I’d fallen asleep almost as soon as I’d got back from Dr Randle’s and the TV was still on, all colourful, cheerful and breezy and not at all worse for wear after such a long shift. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Breakfast television presenters with sculptured hair were talking to an American sitcom actor who’d just done the voice of an animated lion in a new film. I wondered how long a TV would carry on with this sort of thing if left on its own in an empty room and it bothered me that the answer was probably forever.
This wasn’t my house. Being there, having made myself at home, it felt dangerously wrong. I was the tired burglar who’d stopped burgling for a quick forty winks and opened his eyes to see it was morning. I half expected the sound of the front door opening, for someone to walk in with bags of shopping or an overnight case, to stop in the doorway, look at me and scream. Only–it was my house. Eric’s house. Remember it or not, I was home and even if I spent the next hundred years tensed up on the sofa listening for a key in the lock, nobody at all was going to come. I decided the only way to shake these feelings would be to explore, to get to know all the rooms and spaces and things on my own terms. I’d have to break the ice. Breakfast would be a good start. In spite of everything, I was starving.
The fridge was well stocked with all the makings of a full English. I clicked on the grill, found some plates, found the cutlery drawer on the third try. Then it hit me like a little void in the stomach:
I have a condition. A disorder.
What was that going to mean?
Randle said I didn’t need to worry about work and that I had a ‘quite sturdy’ bank account. I’d found what was probably my PIN written on a little piece of paper in my wallet behind a video rental card, so there was no immediate crisis there. She also said I’d broken all contact with my family and friends not long before coming to her for treatment. Whatever the First Eric Sanderson’s reasons for doing this, I made up my mind to undo it. I’d dig out his address book and make contact with my mum or my dad or whoever counted as important in my life.
I have a condition.
I peeled off a couple of rashers and slithered them over the chromy bars of the grill, saying it a couple more times to myself, trying to take it in. I have a condition. I have a psychological disorder. It was too big, too much for one person alone in an empty and unfamiliar house to deal with. I’d find an address book, contact numbers. I’d make contact with my old life by the end of the day. I leant back against the sink and watched the bacon start to cook.
I noticed little lived-in things. The limescale on the kettle, the half-used bottle of washing-up liquid. The couple of pieces of dried pasta in the gap between the fridge and the kitchen units. All the marks of use. Recent habitation. Signs of life. I was searching the cupboards for a tin of baked beans when I came across a packet of Penguin biscuits. There were two missing. I knelt there for a few minutes just looking at the packet sitting on top of tins of spaghetti hoops and chopped tomatoes, looking at the torn flappy plastic end. The me who had eaten those biscuits had been real and alive and here, living in this house. He’d been in this kitchen only yesterday, probably cooking just like I was today. The food he made was still working its way through my body. It all happened here in this room so recently and now he was gone. It’s a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren’t ready to go; that we weren’t smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.
Except.
Except nobody had died here yesterday.
There was no him or me. These were my biscuits that I’d been eating. There was only one Eric Sanderson and I was still standing there, in my house, in my kitchen, with my breakfast sizzling under the grill. I knew this to be the unarguable logic of the situation and I tried to bring myself back to it again and again, but the idea felt hollow and fragile and thinly spun out over a deep black space. I knew nothing about Eric Sanderson. How the hell could I claim to be him?
I ate my breakfast in front of the still-chattering TV and made a mental list of the things I wanted to find in the house. The list went like this:
Address book to contact family/friends and tell them what had happened.
Photographs/photograph album. I needed to see my past life. I needed to see a picture of me with the girl who died in Greece.
I remembered there had been a locked door upstairs, next to the bedroom I’d woken up in. I’d find the key to the door and see what was so important that it had to be locked away inside the house.
I started off gently in the living room, picking things up, looking at them, trying to form some sort of connection; taking the time to read the title of every book in the bookcase, swapping a few around so the existing random order became my random order; going through the papers in the magazine rack; getting on my knees and looking at the wires coming out of the back of the TV and at the dust and chips on the skirting boards. Trying to get intimate, make the space familiar from every angle. Going through drawers and taking out the objects inside one by one.
After maybe two hours of exploring I still hadn’t found any of the items on my list. No address book, no key, not a single photograph or photograph album. The more time passed and the more rooms I explored–the front room, the bedroom–the more I started to realise there were other things missing: I wasn’t finding any letters or bank statements or bills, not even junk mail. Not a single thing with my name on it lying around or tucked away or lost under the sofa or bed or down the back of the chest of drawers. Nothing. And nothing that could be connected with Clio Aames. The gathering shock of all this, the level of sanitisation and control it implied, hit me pretty hard. I was frightened and I was hurt. What started as a careful, inquisitive, getting-to-know-you search began to derail itself, barrelling out of control into something hot and aggressive–a violent hunt for my own reference material. Soon, I was tipping out drawers, dissecting storage boxes and magazine stacks, raking out cupboards, gutting the wardrobe. I cried, red with tear-wet frustration, scrambling, searching, scattering. And when each anger charge inside me was drained and empty, I’d find myself coming to a stop in the debris I’d created and gulping over the fatter tears of totally adrift despair, or, as more time passed, falling into one of those periods of blank stillness that come from overspending on emotion. Still I didn’t find anything. No photographs. No papers. No letters. Every accessible space in the house lay completely open and there was not a single solid trace of me or my past there at all.
All this only brought me full circle, of course. Now I knew where these things were being kept. I’d realised earlier I think but instead of stopping me, the realisation only drove me into the search harder, wanting to prove the cruelty of it all by laying the rest of the house bare. And when there is absolutely nowhere else these things can be, I’d been telling myself, pulling out boxes and folders and tipping them empty, I will go upstairs and I will kick down that locked fucking door.
But I didn’t. When it came to it, after hours of tipping, sifting and scattering, the rage I had left wasn’t fresh enough or hot enough. Now there was a smoky curl of caution where all that destructive fear and hurt had been. I stood on the landing with my hand palm-flat on the locked door and I let myself sink to my knees, all tired and used-up, my fingertips dragging down in squeals against the white gloss paint.
Empty spaces, barriers, caution and willpower, this was the game I’d been born into. The trick, as Randle sugg
ested, would be in knowing which barriers could be kicked open for progress and which were defensive, structural. Which ones were actually shoring everything else up.
It took the rest of the morning to tidy up the wreckage. By now, the postcrisis stillness had complete control of me and I moved through the house straightening, replacing and aligning at half-speed, eyes unfocused, sliding between the rooms like a ghost on pulleys.
Just after twelve there was a sound in the hallway. I straightened up and stood very still and very quiet. I’d been putting clothes back in the wardrobe when it happened and when I went to investigate I carried two shirts downstairs with me, not really aware of having them in my hands. There was a big A4 envelope sitting on the doormat. My name and address were written across the front in black felt-tip.
I’d ripped it open and got two lines into the letter inside before my brain finally came up to speed and I realised I shouldn’t be reading it, that I’d been asked not to read anything like this. But by then it was too late; my eyes were already being information-dragged, skip-reaching towards the end–
Letter #1
Eric,
Whatever Dr Randle may have told you, I am not coming back. Nothing is coming back. It is all gone forever and I am sorry for that.
This is the first of a series of letters I have created to help you survive your new life. You will get these letters at regular intervals. Sometimes every day and for several months. The process is automated. The key to the second bedroom will be posted to you soon. For your own wellbeing, please don’t try to get into the room before then.
This is what’s next. You have a very important choice to make. Dr Randle has told you what she thinks is happening to you. She has probably asked you not to read any correspondence from me. I arranged for Dr Randle to be your first contact because I knew you would have lots of questions. Questions need a face-to-face dialogue and I cannot do that for you for obvious reasons. However, I must tell you that Dr Randle’s viewpoint concerning your memory loss will prove unproductive at best. She is wrong about what is happening to you, Eric. More important, she can neither help nor protect you. I know this from experience. On the other hand, if you can bring yourself to trust me enough to continue to read these letters, you will learn to negotiate the dangers which–thanks to the stupidness of my own actions–you will soon encounter. I realise I am hardly in a position to convince you of anything at this stage. The decision is yours to make and until your identity starts to establish itself in the wider world, you will be safe to consider your options. I’m afraid your thinking time after that will be limited.