The interview room was a square of bleached quiet; all hum and fluorescence with the subtle smell of sticky clean. Dr. Finch sat opposite him with a recorder the size of a deck of cards and a black fountain pen she liked because it made her notes feel like decisions, not guesses. Today, the pen scratched like a cheap violin and then stopped, starved line, no ink.
She tapped the feed, coaxed, shook, the nib skated a dry figure eight. “Apologies” she said, “we’ll just…”
“May I?” he asked.
Before she could refuse, he’d taken the pen, gently, as if accepting a bird. His fingers were still hospital-pale, but sure. He twisted off the barrel, held the feed up to the light, breathed on it like you would on frosted glass. “Your slit is misaligned” he murmured. “The ebonite swells if you rinse with hot water, everyone thinks hotter is cleaner, it isn’t, cold water, a hair’s width to the left.”
He pinched the nib and feed with his thumbnails, a delicate pressure. The pen came back together with a click, like a small vertebra popping into place. He drew a line across the top page of her clipboard. Ink flowed, soft, wet, obedient. Dr. Finch watched it fill itself. “How did you?”
He didn’t look up. “I remember the smell of the hard rubber when we cut the channel, a sour sweetness. I remember the salesman who cried when the contract bled out on his cuff because the pen blotted and the deal went with it. I remember telling myself: a capillary needs a throat, not a mouth.” His mouth twitched, humour, grief, it was hard to tell.
He offered the pen back with both hands, a ceremonial return, she took it as if it had become heavier.
“For the record,” she said, steadying her breath against the edge of professionalism, “please state your name.”
“Martin Moir.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“A hospital, your windows face south, the light is wrong for morning.”
She clicked the recorder. “You went into cardiac arrest at 14:37. You were without a pulse for five minutes, with return of spontaneous circulation at 14:42. We’re conducting a routine cognitive and psychological assessment. Do you remember… anything from the time you were unresponsive?”
He had been quiet since returning her pen, his eyes lowered as if listening for a footstep in the corridor of his skull. At her question he flinched, a small outage across his face.
“Dark,” he said, “but not empty, the opposite.”
“You said that before” she prompted, “The opposite of life, help me understand.”
“No sight, no sound, but not silent, and not for a lack in the ability to hear, as the silence was deafening, hollow even, like a blackhole. The darkness too, burrowed within you, almost painful at first, but you won’t understand, there was no capacity for content, and so words won’t stick. Darkness has shades, and emptiness is the state of containing nothing, this was uncontainable, this was absolute.”
“But…” she paused, like calibrating her sensitivity, “you said it was not empty?”
I was not alone, everyone, every life that ever was, with every thought ever thought, all pressed into your head at once. No space to separate them. Just… raw, unfiltered, unorganised, chaos. Everyone, eventually, you join them, you stop being you. Like the signals of your brain become cables tangled behind the TV cabinet. You are you, but you is us.
The fluorescent light above them flickered, a single lazy strobe. She fought the impulse to look up. “Can you… remember any thought in particular?”
He exhaled, a slow crackle. “Like tar under nails, I can remember them all.”
Her phone vibrated once in her coat pocket: a calendar reminder she didn’t remember setting. The sound startled her out of the moment, she reached to turn down the recorder’s input; the lavalier cable slid off the edge of the table and tried to tangle itself around the leg like clingfilm.
“Here” he said softly. He gathered the cable, made two quick loops, reversed the second, like muscle memory moving faster than thought, and the wire sat meekly in a neat figure that wouldn’t cinch or kink.
She frowned. “Useful party trick?”
“On a tile floor that smelled of carbolic. We kept drapes from slipping that way when our gloves were still talc and our masks were cloth. We thought we were so clean.” His eyes clouded, no, filled. “We tied vessels with catgut and stubborn hope. We stopped bleeding with our thumbs when the knot wouldn’t hold. He used to say, reverse the throw, boy, let the knot argue with itself. We were children in grown men’s aprons, stitching rivers”. A beat, “I can feel his patience in my hands”.
“Whose?” It came out too quickly.
He blinked, as if he’d stepped from a bright room into a dark one. “I don’t… I don’t know if saying the name helps. They all had names, now there are no names left.”
“Tell me about a specific memory that isn’t yours” she said, the words careful as stepping stones across a flood. “Something with verifiable detail.”
He stared at the recorder for three beats, and then his face turned, no, it shifted, like an old photograph in a tray, the image darkening into relief. When he spoke again his voice wore a different weather.
“I’m in a city that dies loudly” he said. “The street is a slope, and the air tastes wrong, eggs and iron. You don’t think of smell as a shape until the air thickens. Ash falls like new snow that refuses to melt. We keep wet rags over our mouths because somebody told us it helps and because doing anything helps. A man is trying to move his mother and cannot. I tell him to leave the chest, to take the child, but he clings to the chest as if it were a door to a room that isn’t burning. A dog is howling and then it is not. There is a moment when the sunlight goes out as if a giant has put his hand over the world.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were crowded, too many reflections in too small a lens.
“Centuries ago” he said, almost apologetically. “The memory is both near and not. I can still feel the grit on my teeth when I breathe. People think tragedy is a word, but it’s a temperature, the city runs like wax.”
Finch found her own pen hand shaking. She set the fountain pen down because she did not trust her fingers not to drop it. “Martin” she said, carefully, “do you understand that the events you’re describing may be… confabulations”
“No” he said, not loud, but with the flat certainty of a door closing. “Confabulation has air between the pieces, this doesn’t, there’s no join to see.”
The recorder’s little red light stared at them like a single irritated eye. Somewhere in the ward a monitor chirped. The sound came through the wall thin as a bad thought.
“Another” she said, surprised by her own insistence. “A memory you shouldn’t have.”
He nodded like someone agreeing to have a thorn pulled. “A little room above a shop with a window that insists on sticking. I can hear the horses in the street below because the city hasn’t learned to be loud yet. I’m carving a channel into a piece of hard rubber and thinking I’m clever enough to domesticate capillarity. My hands smell like the back of an old cupboard. The first time it works, the ink draws itself, as if the line wants to be written. I laugh, not because it’s funny, but because something agreed to become simple for once.”
Finch didn’t realize she’d reached for the pen until she felt it, warm from his hands.
“We’re going to continue” she said, because the structure of procedure was the only bridge she had over this quicksand. “If at any point you feel overwhelmed.”
“Doctor” he said, and this time the way he said it made her look up. “There is no point at which I do not feel overwhelmed. I am a tin roof under a hailstorm.”
The light flickered again, the room didn’t change, but it felt as if something outside it had.
“I remember standing on a deck slick with salt, the wind tasting of iron and rot, watching a black shape cut the waves until the sea itself screamed apart. I remember the tea in the trench was brown mud in a dented tin, sipped fast because the shells fell slower when you were drinking. The mud clung to your teeth, but it was warm, and warmth was mercy. I remember a boy in a field chasing smoke, not knowing it was gas, and the rasp in my throat when I screamed for him but my lungs were already shards.”
His knuckles whitened on the table.
“The smell of pitch in the air, and a city burning not because of fire but because men said it had to. The sky wasn’t black, it was red, Doctor, red as butcher’s cloth.”
He looked down at his hands as though expecting them to drip.
“Bread so stale it cracked my tooth, but it was bread, and it meant I’d lived through the night. The man who gave it to me had already died, though he didn’t know it yet.”
He sat back, paused, “I shouldn’t know the orbit of a planet discovered long after the man who first dreamt it died. But I can write its path in the dust on your floor. I can tell you the number of steps from the Hagia Sophia to the Golden Gate, though the gate isn’t there anymore. I know how to ask for bread in a language no one speaks, not anymore, except me.”
His eyes twitched, unfocused, then caught hers with sudden sharpness.
“The roots of words, they claw through me. Greek, Latin, tongues split and sown into others. I can taste them when I speak, feel the age of them grinding in my teeth. Equations too, Doctor, I see them when I close my eyes. Not numbers, not symbols, shapes, the way gravity bows space, the way light curls like smoke when it leaves a star. I shouldn’t know this, I shouldn’t know any of it.”
He gripped his head, fingers digging into his temples.
“I am a library that never asked to be built, and the shelves are breaking. For I don’t just carry facts, Doctor, I carry contradictions. I remember holding the knife, and I remember feeling it go in, I remember the fear in his eyes as he died, and I remember being the man who put it there. For every moment of love, I hold the echo of cruelty. For every birth I’ve cradled, I’ve also been the hand that took breath away.”
“And what about death?” she asked, “Just so we have it, clearly. You said ‘the opposite of life.’ When I write that down, what am I writing?”
He leaned forward until the table took his weight. Up close, his eyes were not windows but mirrors; you could not see through them, only yourself, multiplied.
“The world, this world, is a million thoughts scattered, unconnected, and separated by sound, light, matter. You are writing that there is no sky, no sound, no colour,” he said. “Only contact, only the feeling of everyone pressing in. Not love, not hate, – them concepts don’t follow you. Proximity. Imagine a million hands on your face, not touching, not touching, not ever touching, but you feel them. You are a brain without bone. Every thought you ever had dissolves until you is a word that refuses to mean anything, and then you come back, and the first breath you take is theft, and the first thing you know is that you did not return alone.”
Finch’s training lined up to be useful and failed to volunteer. Behind it, something else stirred, a recognition she did not want. As a thin second wrapped itself around an eternity of time, it seemed she could hear it too, the faintest murmur just under her own thoughts, like whispers screaming in the static of the air, she could scarcely breathe, like drowning on air, clawing walls she couldn’t feel as layers and layers of whispers slowly choked her, like a sealed room slowly snuffing out a candle. When abruptly, the sharp crash of dropping her pen to the table sounded indecently loud.
“Err… thank you, Martin,” she said, her voice breaking, “we’ll pause here.”
He nodded, “Doctor?” he added, as she reached to stop the recorder.
“Yes?”
“Don’t rinse that pen in hot water again.”
She stared at him, then, absurdly, smiled, “cold” she said.
“Cold” he echoed, “always cold”.
Top comments (0)