Mr. Nobody by Catherine Steadman
Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.
—CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “REMEMBER”
Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
When I came home last night at three The man was waiting there for me But when I looked around the hall I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door.
Last night I saw upon the stair A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…
—HUGHES MEARNS, “ANTIGONISH”
If the car crashed at this speed the impact wouldn’t be enough to kill us instantly. Which you might think is a good thing.
But it’s not.
The one thing worse than dying on impact is not quite dying on impact. Trust me, I know, I’m a doctor. And now that I’m thinking about it—I’d be genuinely surprised if this rental car even has airbags.
Sparkling snow-covered fields hurtle by at speed. White-dusted hedgerows, sheep, ruts, and ditches—the background of my childhood, a winter blur of pastoral England. Crisp sunlight high in a rich cobalt sky.
I flash a look to the driver—face locked in concentration—as the brakes squeal and we change down a gear, grinding into another blind corner. All I can do is will us on and hope we make it in time. Before my patient does something terrible.
We accelerate out of the bend, the drag of it pulling us sideways, perilously close to the narrow lane’s now forest-lined edges. I let the imagined consequences of a car crash flash through my mind: I see the fragile sweetmeat of our neocortexes smashing forward at a hundred miles per hour into a quarter of an inch of solid skull bone. I hear the thick packed-meat sound of our heads connecting with the dark matte-gray plastic of the dashboard and then, instantly, whiplashing back into our headrests with blunt force. A double cranial impact. War on two fronts. The reason armies get defeated.
That delicate gray matter that we all take for granted, the part of our bodies that makes us us. All that we are, crashing forward and backward at high velocity into our own skulls. Frontal, parietal, and occipital blunt-force trauma. Massive hemorrhaging, internal bleeding, bruising, and atrophy. Dead tissue. The brain damaged beyond repair. Who we were: gone.
And then a new thought tops those terrifying images: Even if we somehow managed to survive all that, I’m probably the only person who would be able to fix us afterward. I’m the only doctor with relevant clinical experience in a hundred-mile radius. The irony smarts.
We swerve tight around another bend, branches jab into the broken window next to me, and I dodge farther into the car.
I need to focus.
I squeeze my bleeding fist, hard, letting the pain thunder through me. Focus. No more mistakes. This is all my fault. Everything that’s happened. I could have stopped all of this if I’d only done better, looked harder. If I’d picked up on certain things, if I’d seen the signs.
My eyes flick up to the road ahead of us. I see it fast approaching on the horizon: the lay-by, the path that leads directly down to the sea. That wild expanse of water. That’s where he’ll be. If we’re not too late.
There was another time, long ago, when I wasn’t focused either. I missed the signs then too and I let something very bad happen. But not this time. I promise. This time will be different. So different. This time I will stop something awful from happening. I will fix it this time.
And, if I’m brutally honest with myself, perhaps this is exactly what I’ve always wanted it to come to. A chance to fix things this time around.
I mean, no one becomes a psychiatrist by accident.
1
THE MAN
DAY 1
The bright glare of light as the soft skin of two eyelids part.
A body sprawled on the sand.
The fast flutter of eyelashes as awareness blossoms within and, just like that, he’s awake. Consciousness floods through him; he feels the skin of his cheek pressed against the brittle cold of the beach. Confusion.
Sounds of the sea. Waves crash and pull back, the pop and shhh.
It’s early morning in January. A British beach in the depths of winter. Miles of golden-white Norfolk shore with the crisp dawn light throwing everything into high definition.
Wind-borne sand grains blow in architectural ripples across the flats straight into the man’s unprotected face. He squeezes his eyes tight shut against the sting of it.
A hot throb of pain crests sharply inside his skull, and the papery skin around his eyes creases deeper, his forehead puckering, as he flinches from it. The unanticipated pang lengthens, stretching itself inside his head, almost too much to take. A sharp gasp of breath and the pain stabs back, harder. His hot exhale drifting away in the cold sea wind.
He tries to relax into the pain, letting the wave of agony wash through him, over him. And it seems to work; the feeling begins to still within him. He lies there limp on the sand for what seems like an eternity, letting the restless throb slowly quiet.
He hurts everywhere. The ghost of a thought drifts through his mind.