It is there that memory fails me again. Though I remember looking at his face, I cannot remember what I saw. It is featureless, a blank. As if unable to cope with this vacuum, my mind cycles through faces I know, through absurd impossibilities. I see Dr. Nash. Dr. Wilson. The receptionist at Fisher Ward. My father. Ben. I even see my own face, laughing as I raise a fist to strike.
Please, I cry, please don’t. But my many-faced attacker hits anyway, and I taste blood. He drags me along the floor, and then I am in the bathroom, on the cold tiles, black and white. The floor is damp with condensation, the room smells of orange blossom, and I remember how I had been looking forward to bathing, to making myself beautiful, thinking that maybe I would still be in the bath when he arrived, and then he could join me, and we would make love, making waves in the soapy water, soaking the floor, our clothes, everything. Because finally, after all these months of doubt, it has become clear to me. I love this man. Finally, I know it. I love him.
My head slams into the floor. Once, twice, a third time. My vision blurs and doubles, then returns. A buzzing in my ears, and he shouts something, but I can’t hear what. It echoes, as if there are two of him, both holding me, both twisting my arm, both grabbing handfuls of my hair as they kneel on my back. I beg him to leave me alone, and there are two of me, too. I swallow. Blood.
My head jerks back. Panic. I am on my knees. I see water, bubbles, already thinning. I try to speak but cannot. His hand is around my throat, and I cannot breathe. I am pitched forward, down, down, so quick that I think I will never stop, and then my head is in the water. Orange blossom in my throat.
I heard a voice. “Christine!” it said. “Christine! Stop!” I opened my eyes. Somehow, I was out of the car. I was running. Across the park, as fast as I could, and running after me was Dr. Nash.
We sat on a bench. It was concrete, crossed with wooden slats. One was missing, and the remainder sagged beneath us. I felt the sun against the back of my neck, saw its long shadows on the ground. The boys were still playing soccer, though the game must be finishing now; some were drifting off, others talked, one of the piles of jackets had been removed, leaving the goal unmarked. Dr. Nash had asked me what had happened.
“I remembered something,” I said.
“About the night you were attacked?”
“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”
“You were screaming,” he said. “You kept saying, ‘Get off me,’ over and over.”
“It was like I was there,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Please, don’t apologize. Do you want to tell me what you saw?”
The truth was I did not. I felt as if some ancient instinct was telling me that this was a memory best kept to myself. But I needed his help, knew I could trust him. I told him everything.
When I had finished, he was silent for a moment, then said, “Anything else?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t remember what he looked like? The man who attacked you?”
“No. I can’t see that at all.”
“Or his name?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing.” I hesitated. “Do you think it might help to know who did this to me? To see him? Remember him?”
“Christine, there’s no real evidence to suggest that remembering the attack would help.”
“But it might?”
“It seems to be one of your most deeply repressed memories—”
“So it might?”
He was silent, then said, “I’ve suggested it before, but it might help to go back there…”
“No,” I said. “No. Don’t even say it.”
“We can go together. You’d be fine. I promise. If you were there again… Back in Brighton—”
“No.”
“—you might remember then—”
“No! Please?”
“—it might help?”
I looked down at my hands folded in my lap.
“I can’t go back there,” I said. “I just can’t.”
He sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe we’ll talk about it again?”
“No,” I whispered. “I can’t.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
He smiled but seemed disappointed. I felt eager to give him something, to have him not give up on me. “Dr. Nash?” I said.
“Yes?”
“The other day I wrote that something had come to me. Perhaps it’s relevant. I don’t know.”
He turned to face me.
“Go on.” Our knees touched. Neither of us drew away.
“When I woke,” I said, “I kind of knew that I was in bed with a man. I remembered a name. But it wasn’t Ben’s name. I wondered if it was the name of the person I’d been having the affair with. The one who attacked me.”
“It’s possible,” he said. “It might have been the beginning of the repressed memory emerging. What was the name?”
Suddenly I did not want to tell him, to say it out loud. I felt that by doing so I would be making it real, conjuring my attacker back into existence. I closed my eyes.
“Ed,” I whispered. “I imagined waking up with someone called Ed.”
Silence. A heartbeat that seemed to last forever.
“Christine,” he said. “That’s my name. I’m Ed. Ed Nash.”
My mind raced for a moment. My first thought was that he had attacked me. “What?” I said, panicking.
“That’s my name. I’ve told you that before. Maybe you’ve never written it down. My name is Edmund. Ed.”
I realized it could not have been him. He would barely have been born.
“But—”
“You’re possibly confabulating,” he said. “Like Dr. Wilson explained?”
“Yes,” I said. “I—”
“Or maybe you were attacked by someone with the same name?”
He smiled awkwardly as he said it, making light of the situation, but in doing so revealed he had already worked out what only later—after he had driven me home, in fact—occurred to me. I had woken that morning happy. Happy to be in bed with someone called Ed. But it was not a memory. It was a fantasy. Waking with this man called Ed was not something I had done in the past but—even though my conscious, waking mind did not know who he was—something I wanted to do in the future. I want to sleep with Dr. Nash.
And now, accidentally, inadvertently, I have told him. I have revealed the way I must feel about him. He was professional, of course. We both pretended to attach no significance to what had happened, and so revealed just how much significance there was. We walked back to the car and he drove me home. We chatted about trivialities. The weather. Ben. There are few things we can talk about; there are whole arenas of experience from which I am utterly excluded. At one point, he said, “We’re going to the theater tonight,” and I noted his careful use of the plural. Don’t worry, I wanted to say. I know my place. But I said nothing. I did not want him to think of me as bitter.