Steven Watson - Before I Go to Sleep

8:15 a.m., read the first entry. I have woken up. Ben is here. Directly underneath, I had written, 8:17 a.m. Ignore that last entry. It was written by someone else, and underneath that, 8:20 I am awake NOW. Before I was not. Ben is here.

My eyes flicked further down the page. 9:45 I have just woken up, FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME, and then, a few lines later, 10:07 NOW I am definitely awake. All these entries are a lie. I am awake NOW.

I looked up. “This was really me?” I said.

“Yes. For a long time it seemed that you were in a perpetual state of feeling that you had just woken up from a very long, very deep sleep. Look here.” Dr. Wilson pointed at the page in front of me, and began quoting entries from it. “ I have been asleep forever. It was like being DEAD. I have only just woken up. I can see again, for the first time. They apparently encouraged you to write down what you were feeling, in an effort to get you to remember what had happened before, but I’m afraid you just became convinced that all the preceding entries had been written by someone else. You began to think people here were conducting experiments on you, keeping you against your will.”

I looked at the page again. The whole sheet was filled with almost identical entries, each just a few minutes apart. I felt myself go cold.

“Was I really this bad?” I said. My words seemed to echo in my head.

“For a while, yes,” said Dr. Nash. “Your notes indicate that you retained memory for only a few seconds. Sometimes a minute or two. That time has gradually lengthened over the years.”

I could not believe I had written this. It seemed to be the work of someone whose mind was completely fractured. Exploded. I saw the words again. It was like being DEAD.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t—”

Dr. Wilson took the sheet from me. “I understand, Christine. It’s upsetting. I—”

Panic hit me then. I stood up, but the room began to spin. “I want to leave,” I said. “This isn’t me. It can’t have been me, I—I would never hit people. I would never. I just—”

Dr. Nash stood, too, and then Dr. Wilson. She stepped forward, colliding with her desk, which sent papers flying. A photograph spilled to the floor. “Dear God—” I said, and she looked down, then crouched to cover it with another sheet. But I had seen enough.

“Was that me?” I said, my voice rising to a scream. “Was that me?”

The photograph was of the head of a young woman. Her hair had been pulled back from her face. At first, it looked as though she was wearing a Halloween mask. One eye was open and looked at the camera, the other was closed by a huge, purple bruise, and both lips were swollen, pink, lacerated with cuts. Her cheeks were distended, giving her whole face a grotesque appearance. I thought of pulped fruit. Of plums, rotten and bursting.

“Was that me?” I screamed, even though, despite the swollen, distorted face, I could see that it was.

My memory splits there, fractured in two. Part of me was calm, quiet. Serene. It watched as the other part of me thrashed and screamed and had to be restrained by Dr. Nash and Dr. Wilson. You really ought to behave, it seemed to be saying. This is embarrassing.

But the other part was stronger. It had taken over, become the real me. I shouted out, again and again, and turned and ran for the door. Dr. Nash came after me. I tore it open and ran, though where I could go I did not know. An image of bolted doors. Alarms. A man, chasing me. My son, crying. I have done this before, I thought. I have done all this before.

My memory blanks.

They must have calmed me down somehow, persuaded me to go with Dr. Nash; the next thing I can remember is being in his car, sitting next to him as he drove. The sky was beginning to cloud over, the streets looked gray, somehow flattened out. He was talking, but I could not concentrate. It was as if my mind had tripped, fallen back into something else, and now could not catch up. I looked out of the windows, at the shoppers and the dog-walkers, at the people with their strollers and their bicycles, and I wondered whether this—this search for truth—was really what I wanted. Yes, it might help me to improve, but how much can I hope to gain? I don’t expect that I will ever wake up knowing everything, as normal people do, knowing what I did the day before, what plans I have for the day that follows, what circuitous route has led me to here and now, to the person I am. The best I can hope for is that, one day, looking in the mirror will not be a total shock, that I will remember I married a man called Ben and lost a son called Adam, that I will not have to see a copy of my novel to know that I had written one.

But even that much seems unattainable. I thought of what I had seen in Fisher Ward. Madness and pain. Minds that had been shattered. I am closer to that, I thought, than I am to recovery. Perhaps it would be best if I learned to live with my condition, after all. I could tell Dr. Nash I do not want to see him again and I could burn my journal, burying the truths I have already learned, hiding them as thoroughly as those I do not yet know. I would be running away from my past, but I would have no regrets—in just a few hours, I would not even know that either my journal or my doctor had ever existed—and then I could live simply. One day would follow another, unconnected. Yes, occasionally the memory of Adam would surface. I would have a day of grief and pain, would remember what I miss, but it would not last. Before long, I would sleep and, quietly, forget . How easy that would be, I thought. So much easier than this.

I thought of the picture I’d seen. The image was burned into me. Who did that to me? Why? I remembered the memory I’d had of the hotel room. It was still there, just under the surface, just out of reach. I had read this morning that I had reason to believe I had been having an affair, but now realized that—even if that were true—I didn’t know who it had been with. All I had was a single name, remembered as I woke just a few days ago, with no promise of ever remembering more, even if I wanted to.

Dr. Nash was still talking. I had no idea what about, and interrupted him. “Am I getting better?” I said.

A heartbeat, during which I thought he had no answer, then he said, “Do you think you are?”

Did I? I couldn’t say. “I don’t know. Yes. I suppose so. I can remember things from my past, sometimes. Flashes of memory. They come to me when I read my journal. They feel real. I remember Claire. Adam. My mother. But they’re like threads I can’t keep hold of. Balloons that float into the sky before I can catch them. I can’t remember my wedding. I can’t remember Adam’s first steps, his first word. I can’t remember him starting at school, his graduation. Anything. I don’t even know if I was there. Maybe Ben decided there was no point in taking me.” I took a breath. “I can’t even remember learning he was dead. Or burying him.” I began to cry. “I feel like I’m going crazy. Sometimes I don’t even think that he’s dead. Can you believe that? Sometimes I think that Ben’s lying to me about that, as well as everything else.”

“Everything else?”

“Yes,” I said. “My novel. The attack. The reason I have no memory. Everything.”

“But why do you think he would do that?”

A thought came to me. “Because I was having an affair?” I said. “Because I was unfaithful to him?”

“Christine,” he said. “That’s unlikely, don’t you think?”

I said nothing. He was right, of course. Deep down I did not believe Ben’s lies could really be a protracted revenge for something that had happened years and years ago. The explanation was likely to be something much more mundane.