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
