Mr. Nobody(93)
“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 what you did 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. “I didn’t mean to trick you, but, if I’m honest, I think that’s why he chose to come here. He wanted 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 is he, 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.”