Steven Watson - Before I Go to Sleep

Adam.

They hung in front of me, in and out of focus. I could not connect them. Did not know what they meant. They whirled in my mind, echoing, a mantra, and then the dream came back to me, the dream that must have woken me up.

I was in a room, in a bed. In my arms was a body, a man. He lay on top of me, heavy, his back broad. I felt peculiar, odd, my head too light, my body too heavy; the room rocked beneath me, and when I opened my eyes, its ceiling would not swim into focus.

I could not tell who the man was—his head was too close to mine for me to see his face—but I could feel everything, even the hairs on his chest, rough against my naked breasts. There was a taste on my tongue, furry, sweet. He was kissing me. He was too rough; I wanted him to stop, but said nothing. “I love you,” he said, murmuring, his words lost in my hair, the side of my neck. I knew I wanted to speak—though I did not know what I wanted to say—but I could not understand how to do so. My mouth did not seem connected to my brain, and so I lay there as he kissed me and spoke into my hair. I remembered how I had both wanted him and wanted him to stop, how I had told myself, as he began to kiss me, that we would not have sex, but his hand had moved down the curve of my back to my buttocks and I had let it. And again, as he had lifted my blouse and put his hand beneath it, I thought, This, this is as far as I will let you go. I will not stop you, not now, because I am enjoying this. Because your hand feels warm on my breast, because my body is responding with tiny shudders of pleasure. Because, for the first time, I feel like a woman. But I will not have sex with you. Not tonight. This is as far as we will go, this far and no further. And then he had taken off my blouse and unhooked my bra, and it was not his hand on my breast but his mouth, and still I thought I would stop him, soon. The word “no” had even begun to form, cemented itself in my mind, but by the time I had spoken it, he was pushing me back toward the bed and sliding down my underwear, and it had turned into something else, into a moan of something that I dimly recognized as pleasure.

I felt something between my knees. It was hard. “I love you,” he said again, and I realized it was his knee, that he was forcing my legs apart with one of his own. I did not want to let him, but at the same time knew that somehow I ought to, that I had left it too late, watched my chances to say something, to stop this, disappear one by one. And now I had no choice. I had wanted it then, as he unzipped his trousers and stepped clumsily out of his underwear, and so I must still want it now, now that I am beneath his body.

I tried to relax. He arched up and moaned—a low, startling noise that started deep within him—and I saw his face. I didn’t recognize it, not in my dream, but now I knew it. Ben. “I love you,” he said, and I knew that I should say something, that he was my husband, even though I felt I had met him for the first time just that morning. I could stop him. I could trust him to stop himself.

“Ben, I—”

He silenced me with his wet mouth, and I felt him tear into me. Pain, or pleasure. I could not tell where one ended and the other began. I clung to his back, moist with sweat, and tried to open myself to him, tried first to enjoy what was happening, and then, when I found I could not, tried to ignore it. I asked for this, I thought, at the same time as I never asked for this . Is it possible to both want and not want something at the same time? For desire to ride with fear?

I closed my eyes. I saw a face. A stranger, with dark hair, a beard. A scar down his cheek. He looked familiar, yet I had no idea from where. As I watched him, his smile disappeared, and that was when I cried out, in my dream. That was the moment I woke up to find myself in a still, quiet bed, with Ben lying next to me and no idea where I was.

I got out of bed. To use the bathroom? To escape? I did not know where I was going, what I would do. If I had somehow known of its existence, I would have opened the closet door, as quietly as I could, and lifted out the shoebox that contained my journal, but I did not. And so, I went downstairs. The front door was locked, the moonlight blue through the frosted glass. I realized I was naked.

I sat on the bottom of the stairs. The sun rose, the hall turned from blue to burned orange. Nothing made sense; the dream least of all. It felt too real, and I had woken in the same bedroom I had dreamed myself in, next to a man I was not expecting to see.

And now, now I have read my journal after Dr. Nash called me, a thought forms. Might it have been a memory? A memory I had retained from the previous night?

I do not know. If so, then it is a sign of progress, I suppose. But also it means Ben forced himself on me and, worse, as he did so, I saw an image of a bearded stranger, a scar running down his face. Of all possible memories, this seems a cruel one to retain.

But perhaps it means nothing. It was just a dream. Just a nightmare. Ben loves me and the bearded stranger does not exist.

But how can I ever know for sure?

Later, I saw Dr. Nash. We were sitting at a traffic light, Dr. Nash tapping his fingers on the rim of the steering wheel, not quite in time to the music that played from the stereo—pop that I neither recognized nor enjoyed—while I stared ahead. I’d called him this morning, almost as soon as I had finished reading my journal, finished writing about the dream that might have been a memory. I had to speak to someone—the news that I was a mother had felt like a tiny rip in my life, which now threatened to snag, tearing it apart—and he’d suggested we move our next meeting to today. He asked me to bring my journal. I hadn’t told him what was wrong, intending to wait until we were in his offices, but now didn’t know whether I could.

The light changed. He stopped tapping and we jerked back into motion. “Why doesn’t Ben tell me about Adam?” I heard myself say. “I don’t understand. Why?”

He glanced at me but said nothing. We drove a little farther. A plastic dog sat in the back window of the car in front of us, its head bobbing comically, and beyond it I could see the blond hair of a toddler. I thought of Alfie.

Dr. Nash coughed. “Tell me what happened.”

It was true, then. Part of me was hoping he would ask me what I was talking about, but as soon as I had said “Adam,” I had realized how futile that hope had been, how misguided. Adam feels real. He exists, within me, within my consciousness, taking up space in a way that no one else does. Not Ben, or Dr. Nash. Not even myself.

I felt angry. He had known all along.

“And you,” I said. “You gave me my novel. So why didn’t you tell me about Adam?”

“Christine,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

I stared out of the front window. “I had a memory,” I said.

He glanced across at me. “Really?” I didn’t say anything. “Christine,” he said. “I’m trying to help.”

I told him. “It was the other day,” I said. “After you’d given me my novel. I looked at the photograph that you’d put with it and, suddenly, I remembered the day it was taken. I can’t say why. It just came to me. And I remembered that I’d been pregnant.”

He said nothing.

“You knew about him?” I said. “About Adam?”

He spoke slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I did. It’s in your file. He was a couple of years old when you lost your memory.” He paused. “Plus, we’ve spoken about him before.”

I felt myself go cold. I shivered, despite the warmth in the car. I knew it was possible, even probable, that I had remembered Adam before, but this bare truth—that I had gone through all this before and would therefore go through it all again—shook me.