On the Existence of Authors

I had long suspected my thoughts were not my own, nor my actions, and I had pondered deeply on the nature of life and the possible existence of someone or something beyond. It was like I was not wholly myself anymore, and that no matter how I tried to nail down some aspect of myself that was truly me, I could not find that essence of self at my core. And try as I may, I could not pinpoint exactly how I felt. It was like being too many selves in one body, with too many conflicting desires and emotions. Too many people I wanted to be and some that I truly did not wish to be at all. 

Numerous times in recent months, I had felt something pulling at me, tugging me away from my home to walk by the river. That is where it would happen. I would walk a familiar route along the east bank where it curves around in a broad S shape among the tall reeds, and suddenly I would feel a blackness in my soul. An implosion. Like my soul was being crushed into a ball and everything that was me was discarded. I cannot say how it would happen, but I would be roused in my home, or in a tavern, or sometimes on the lavatory with no memory of how I had gotten there. Sometimes I had a vague recollection of myself before the turn, other times not. Sometimes I could swear that I had been in my twenties and then come to in my thirties. Had I lost a decade passed out beside the river? Was it a delusion? Sometimes I was a seamstress. Sometimes I was a homemaker. Sometimes a prostitute. The only constant was that I was always a mother. And every time though the memories were vague, they were somehow lodged in the back of my mind, and I knew that something was wrong with me. 

Then one day it all changed. I heard his voice saying my name. I cannot say from where he spoke, but I was at the river when I heard his voice. Was I hearing the voice of God or the angels of heaven, or were these the tormenting cries of a demon intent on punishing me for some wickedness committed in my past? The voice – always the same voice – seemed only to speak to me at the river initially. 

The auditory hallucinations coincided with my jaunts to the river, and as much as I tried to avoid going something always compelled me to walk out of my home the half mile out of town. I sought calmatives to soothe my nerves in the hope that they might silence the voices but to no avail. Laudanum dulled the senses but the call to the river was strong, and the voice permeated the silent veil the drugs could not keep out. I would drown myself in alcohol and medicinal tinctures and still find myself in a stupor wandering the banks of that blasted river before waking up somewhere different as someone else. Always, the questions from the voice. The same questions each time. 

“Who are you?”

“What do you want?”

“How can I finish this?”

Followed, as always, by the dooming crunch of the implosion and the crushing weight of everything bearing down on my soul as it vanished into the blackness.  

I waited until I was called to the river again and I tried to speak to the voice. I was an elementary school teacher now in the local village. The last I could remember I was a service person in the local corner store. I had strapped my son, Joseph, to my chest and walked to the river intent on finding out for once and for all what was going on. Though I was hesitant to appear to be hysterical, I was desperate for answers. I shouted and pleaded to the skies, desperate to hear his voice. Joseph awoke and screamed, howling just as I howled at the heavens. The voice of the one I had come to know as ‘the author’ had become my every waking thought, and one that not even sleep provided solitude from, for he was in my dreams and nightmares. I could not escape him. And yet now he would not speak. I stood at the river’s edge and I pondered jumping in. The rains over recent months had swollen the waters such that they were now a raging maelstrom of foam and debris that thundered down the valley. I could end it all right now with one step. Let the author stop me.

Then it happened. The sky imploded and my soul crushed into a single point of oblivion. I was suspended in darkness, hanging alone in the void. 

I awoke strapped to a leather bed. My name. My name was different. I was now Alice O’Flaherty. Had I always been? I could not say. Drool had pooled in the bottom right side of my mouth and begun to drip onto the cold linoleum floor. I stared blankly at the cracked and flaking cream-coloured paint on the walls that reminded me of the skin of a drowned man I’d seen once in the river. It was pasty and mottled with the purple and blue, and while the walls were devoid of colour or life, they had a similar quality. Like a rotten potato whose skin looks fine, even if a little grey and wrinkled, but which is full of black rot on the insides. I also felt different. Corrupted. Vague memories of my life before kept flickering through my mind but I could not settle on a single impression for long enough to gather an impression of who I was before. 

“Mrs O’Flaherty,” a cold voice spoke as though it was echoing through a barrel, “welcome back.” 

I couldn’t move my head, but I rolled my eyes around to find someone standing in the corner of the room. Through blurred vision I could make out a man standing in white with a clipboard. He was wearing a name tag. Indiscernible through my foggy eyes and obscured mind.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“You are in Kenmore Asylum. My name is Dr John Evers.” 

He paused as though to weigh up how much to tell me. 

“You were pulled from the river. Some passers by saw you yelling at the sky before jumping in.” 

Recollection of my life rushed in as though the door had suddenly opened. Joseph. My sweet boy. 

“My son, he…” I paused and swallowed, afraid to ask. “Was he with me?” 

His face dropped as he took a deep breath and steadied himself. 

“I’m sorry, Mrs O’Flaherty, but he was found downstream. He drowned.”

He continued. 

“The witnesses to the events said they heard you shouting to the heavens. Tell me, Mrs O’Flaherty. Who is ‘the author’?”  

I was shocked with the sudden recall of what had happened. I had gone to the river with the intention of speaking to the author to work out who I was and why I was having this mental breakdown. My nervous condition had truly taken the better of me and I wanted answers. I had walked to the river’s edge with Joseph because I had no one else to leave him with. But when the voice would not speak to me, I thought of another plan. I stood at the edge of the river, willing myself to jump in. I longed to be soothed into that long dreamless sleep of death. I wanted to be myself again. Then it occurred to me that the author, if he was truly in control of my life, would surely not allow me to drown not just myself but also my son. Surely the author could not listen to my screams and those of my child and let us dive in. I jumped, and as the world imploded around me and I became nothing again, I swear I heard the voice say, “it is done.” 

A single tear rolled down my cheek.

“I know this is hard, Mrs O’Flaherty,” Dr Evers said, “but the police wish to press charges, and we need to know what happened. If someone – this ‘author’ – was abusing you, we need to know.” 

I hesitated, allowing myself to search through the memories of all that I had been, but each drew a blank and ended with the vision of black that had clouded my being. The pull to the river had ceased and the voice had gone.       

“I no longer believe in ‘the author’, Dr Evers.” The electric lamp above my bed buzzed and shut off briefly, drowning the room in darkness before flickering back to life. “If there was an author my baby would still be alive. No decent being could allow such unspeakable evil."