[Insert Name Here]

The room is dark. Black almost. Like a black box theater. Why do you remember what that’s called?

It’s shaped like a Rubix cube and you’re inside it. There’s even thin white lines on the black, somewhat glassy walls that separates each wall into a three-by-three grid. Trouble is, you can’t solve this one. 

You remembered you used to be good at solving puzzles. When you were young (you don’t remember how young) you remember a faint voice over your shoulder. It could’ve been your mom, your dad, your brother, your sister, whatever. Who they are doesn’t matter—well, it does, but the thing is, you know you’ll never know, so there’s no point in thinking about it. Anyways, the voice told you: “You’re good. Look, you’ve got a skill, [insert name here].” Of course, you don’t remember your name. Why should you? It’s just something that, even if you remember, will be taken away when They come in. 

Who’s they?

The door in the back of the room creaks open and you close your eyes, willing yourself to listen. To most people it’s soundless, but to you, that sound is the world. You can sense the opening of that door in your body, you can feel the padded door gliding across the slick marble in your blood. It’s your pulse. 

Not only that but you can hear it. Whether or not that sound’s in your head is another story. But to you it’s loud—as loud as a gong rung in the dead of morning, when the world has ground to a standstill and your breath is an avalanche of noise.

A Presence steps in the room—a being other than yourself. You know the being is real because the air changes. The air doesn’t change when it’s just you and your head—your brain can’t fake that. By their softfalls, you can tell they tread lightly on things—they try not to make waves, push boundaries. Their slow measured breathing shows that they are very intentional, purposeful, strict with themselves.Their lips purse together. By the way there’s a slight pause before the lips unstick you can tell they’re wearing lipstick. So they’re a girl, you think. You kind of already knew from the footballs, but you didn’t want to assume. Of course, you haven’t seen her. Your eyes are closed and you’re sitting on the bed facing away from the door in the wall behind you—the door that opens only from the other side. She’s gone three paces toward you, then she pauses. You can’t help it anymore—you open your eyes. 

You see her features through the reflection in the mirror, the only other feature in the room besides the steel toilet and sink on the other side of the room. The mirror stands four feet tall, straight up from the ground, only an inch thick. It’s a perfectly rectangular, simple, unassuming mirror that juts out of the black swirling marble like a jagged tooth. 

The floor (a menace!) always bites your bare feet with its unrelenting iciness. It is so polished that it too shows your reflection, like the mirror and that you can’t bear. 

If you stare too long into the eyes of your mirror-self, there’s something about their eyes that make you remember things, of who you once were. You would begin to lose control—your body vibrates as if you were sitting on a massage chair; words and strong guttural noises start pouring out of your mouth that you can’t stop until you’re stabbed in the arm and it all goes away.

When you look in the mirror, you stare at the spot where the woman’s face is, willing yourself to not look yourself in your face. You concentrate on her features. Medium build, curled chocolate hair that falls to her shoulders. Flat, almost blank brown eyes. Skin pale and freckled. She’s about her mid-30s. She wears a pink blouse and beige slacks. Her tall black heels click on the floor. You can’t see if they’re black or not, but it feels right.

She has, in one hand, a tray with a roll of bread on it and a tin of water in the other, a towel that holds something in its folds. You can’t tell what. But, maybe…Not—

She sets the tray on the ground with a little too much force. The bread silently falls to its side. She mumbles an apology. Her voice is a little higher than you’d like to be, soft and silky, yet somehow whiny. You brace yourself. You always hate it when you get those kinds of voices stuck in your head. 

“[insert name here], do you remember me?” 

You have a vague idea that this is how it always starts. Before they give the—wait—!

“No! Get away from me!” The words feel foreign in your mouth. When’s the last time you spoke? It feels like months, but of course, you have no concept of time here, where sound is foreign, where movement is infrequent, where no clock ticks. 

You begin to remember—this is how it always goes. They bring someone here, someone who says they know you, into this cold black box of unwanted reflections that stare at you from all sides. The Someone tries to make small talk and if you don’t show a sign of recognition, they approach you with the covered towel and uncover it to reveal a syringe. When they stab you with it, you can clearly remember every interaction you’ve ever had with them, every word you’ve uttered to their face, over the phone, about them—a dam breaks in your mind and memories cascade over one another, uprooting sanity like a hurricane tears up trees. A deafening screech embedded in the stale, heavy air of the room bores its way into your ears and reverberates through your skull. You clutch your head, wishing the piercing cry would evaporate from the air. 

Often, while you clutch your head and cry out in pain, out of the corner of your eye, you see fury written on the eyes of the Someone as they tower above you. Sometimes, they react, and they’re on top of you, howling at you, How could you take them from me? or choking the life out of you until they’re bludgeoned in the head by someone in a white coat. But sometimes they walk away, resentment stiffening their gait. That’s almost worse. There is no physical pain to distract from your suffering. 

After the action, after the flood of memory, a sudden drought. Everything—everything would slip away. You would feel an insatiable ache for something, anything, as the world folds in on itself, as you crumple to the floor that’s so cold it could kill you. You’re inside the Rubix cube that is this room—They’re turning it round and round trying to solve it and you’re trapped between the cracks, falling on your face, rotated around, squeezed, compressed.

You’ve only (though most of the time you forget this fact) remembered (before they stabbed you with the needle) three times. Once a woman with white hair that called herself your mother plodded towards you, brandished words that flew at you like the spit from your mouth, cut you like daggers. When she blamed you for the death of your father, it hurt more than the others. You recognized her, just for a moment, and said—“Mom?” The shot didn’t come—the syringe remained wrapped in her trembling fingers and pieces of your life together fell into place. Unlike the satisfaction that follows the completion of a puzzle, however, the picture formed by the fragments of your existence horrified you. You force her form to fade from your mind as quickly as it had come as if to pretend—to pretend that picture isn’t of you. 

Before she left, she’d called out, “[Insert name here] you’ve made a name for yourself! Don’t you forget that you’re still responsible for everything you’ve done! You can’t forget who you are and go on pretending you didn’t do everything you did—to me….” Though the steel door slammed in silence, you felt its force, so great that the walls seemed to tremble, vibrating as if they would topple around you, burying you in their weight. In the moment, you thought there was something familiar about what she was saying but—nope. Shove it down in the deep dark places of yourself and never touch it again. You don’t have a name, you don’t have a name, you don’t have a name. You never did. 

* 

“What is this? You converted a nuthouse into a theater, that it?” 

“No, Jack. This is part of a case study we’re doing on [insert name here].” 

“What’s it about?”

“You remember when [insert name here] went on that rampage?”

“Go on.”

“Yeah, they really did a number on people. People were scared to go outside their homes on account of how many were killed—”

“Don't wanna interrupt you but—I know this story. Wasn’t [insert name here] taken into custody, like, what, 20 years ago? What does this have to do with anything?”

“Hang on Jack, I was getting there. Now as I was saying, [insert name here] killed a total of 18 people.”

“Jesus.” 

“So when they took [insert name here] into custody, [insert name here] wasn’t behaving normally—didn’t even respond when called. We were doing a study on people with dementia and other forms of memory loss when we heard about this and so my boss got permission to do a series of tests on ‘em to find out why this was happening. Turns out, [insert name here] willfully dissociated with their identity and memory by forgetting their own name, thereby dismissing themselves from the consequences of their actions. We’ve been trying to get [insert name here] to remember their past by bringing in the relatives of their victims, in the hopes that we can apply this to our memory-loss patients.” 

“Well, how’s it been workin’?”

“We’ve had success immediately after administering the drug, but the effects wear off quickly—[insert name here] simply refuses to remember.” 

“Well, best of luck to you, but I best be heading out. I’m technically still on duty. See you.”

“Officer.” 

His footsteps receded down the white hall as Tom continued to stare at the glowing monitor as the face of [insert name here] as they turned somberly to their self the mirror. The other lady had since left; the drugs hadn’t been given. As [insert name here] tried to look, a whimper escaped their lips. Then the sobbing and the wailing began. But Tom had timed it. Three seconds longer before the breakdown than last time. 

Progress.