I Am Not

My very first memory is also my last. Its vague in places but vivid in others.

We sat on a sandy beach—he and I—watching the spread of paint the rising sun had streaked across the sky. Hues of gold and pink, orange, the shade of candlelight.

I still smell the salt of the ocean on the wind and the quiet scent of perfume in the crook of his neck.

We sat and played and cried and laughed till the sky cloaked itself in black and stars brightened into being above us.

I can’t remember his name. I can’t recall his face. Only that he was important to me, and that he loved philosophical quotes but found them nonsensical and pretentious.

‘I think; therefore, I am.’ That was his favourite.

It’s a reassuring sentiment. Only it isn’t. Not to me.

My head is without thoughts. Empty. Silent.

Is this it? I think. Are these thoughts? These half formed things that stab through my mind and leave before I can notice them? If they are, then I am. If they aren’t…

I wander into the police precinct with a sense that I am invisible, intangible, unseen. There’s a bustling horde, people thronging in masses that looked to me like spasming, pained beasts. For a moment, the chaos overwhelms me—the smell of poorly scented bodies and the stench of stale sweat; of the echoing march of deliberate steps on concrete. These things seem to twist their way into me. I calm myself. Nobody could hurt what did not truly exist.

Moving through the crowd is easy. Everyone avoids me with conscious intent. My clothes are tattered rags of blue and white, and atop my head is a wild mane of dirt and unclean blonde hair.

I sit at a desk across from a man in a cubicle and wait for him to acknowledge my presence. Absently, I note the man is handsome in a prim-and-proper sort of way.

“Hello,” I say to catch his attention.

“Name?” He doesn’t look up and instead scribbles into his ledger.

“Sally.”

“Business?”

“Oh, I can’t recall, but I’m quite sure someone’s been murdered.”

The man looks up at me and I glimpse his pretty, green eyes for a moment before I look away. He shifts in his chair and purses his lips. I can see he’s debating the merits of taking me seriously.

“Who did you say you were again?”

“Sally—Sally Pickett. What’s your name?”

“Reggie. Where’re you from?”

“I can’t remember.”

“What can you remember?”

I incline my head and pause for a moment. My mouth opens before I can think. “I remember a house. Someone—someone died in there.”

“And where is this house?”

“I can’t recall the address, but I think I know where it is.”

“Right,” he says. “Of course you do. Wait here.”

He leaves to talk to a suited man sitting in an empty office. I tap my finger against the varnished wood of his desk. The taps sound light, muffled, as if from a distance. The pencils beside the ledger rattle subtly. I make the beats come harder and the pencils stop moving.

By the time the man comes back, I’m almost pounding my fist against his desk to make the pencils move.

“What’re you doing?” he asks.

I turn around and I wonder if the man in my memories was as handsome as this one. “Oh, nothing,” I say. “Are we going?”

“Yeah. Let’s get going.”

He tries to take me to a police car. Something about that makes me uncomfortable and I refuse. Instead, we walk. The house isn’t that far anyway, and the trek there helps me search for the thoughts I know is somewhere inside.

We come into the forest by dusk.

The trees are stripped bare by the freight of autumn wind, and the floor is littered with dying leaves.

My feet pound against the soft mud of the earth, squelching uncomfortably in the wet soil until we reach the top of a hill overlooking a fast-moving stream that feeds into a small lake. I stop and look.

“There’s nothing here.” The man comes up behind me and shakes his head. “This was a waste of time.”

“There is something. You’re just not looking properly.”

I take his chin in my hand and point his head in the right direction. “It’s over there.”

The house seems to materialize out of thin air. Hidden at the foot of the hill inside a little valley and covered by a labyrinth of green shrubs and bushes, it would be hard to notice if you weren’t paying attention. The house is squat, decrepit and rundown, made of holes and stone and nothing else.

It looks more likely to be demolished by the slightest wind than to be something inhabited. I can’t believe I live here.

Or maybe it isn’t my house. I can’t remember.

The first room is dark inside and an icy chill hangs in the air. Most of the others are hardly rooms at all, roofs caved in, walls crumbling.

I lead the man into one with a red door. This room is empty, and terribly cold, but there’s something here. I’m sure of it. I spin in place to find what’s missing.

It comes to me as instinct, I bend to reach for the rope inside the wedge in the concrete floor. It’s hidden by dust and lodged in by bits of black, grimy cloth, but there’s a section where it isn’t that my fingers grasp with ease.

The rope leads to an iron latch atop a trapdoor. I can’t be sure how I knew it was there, covered in dust and rubble as it was. I pull and the door comes open with minimal effort.

Inside is another chamber, but this one is lit by waxing firelight on candlesticks.

There’s a small oak bed at a corner of the cramped room, a pile of rotting food and unclean wooden bowls at another corner and newspapers strewn on the floor. It looks like a hiding place.

The man shuffles in beside me and gasps.

I can almost see the thoughts tangle in his head and the gears shift in realization.

There’s a woman on the bed, skin pale gray and throat glistening where it had been slashed open. A spiderweb of spittle and blood writhe down her gaping lip. She’s wearing tattered rags, shredded white and sky blue clothes. Her hair is a mess of tangles and dirty blonde locks. Between her legs is a child—a dead child, cord still connected to its mother. The woman is familiar. I realise why in the fracture of a moment.

Her eyes, still wide open and unseeing, are the same as mine. Her face the same as mine, body same as mine.

I smile when the man peers at me, confusion clear in his eyes. “Who is—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. And it doesn’t. Not anymore.

I leave him there and drift outside. It is night now. The evening crispness has set in and the forest is alive with the buzz of nocturnal sentience.

I think; therefore, I am. What happens when I am not? I tell myself it doesn’t matter. I will find out soon.

Just before my half-formed thoughts fade to nothing and my head truly empties, I glance at the lake, consider the way its surface glints in the moonlight. I see the reflection of the gibbous moon on its face and I think: It is beautiful.