Trial by Jonathan Taylor
Notes by Mr Keith McNamara
FAO Prof. Christopher Sollertinsky, St. B*** Hospital
Day 1
Today I was my husband’s dead mother.
Day 2
Today I was the milkman – or the milkman was impersonating me. Or something like that. I mean, we don’t even have a milkman.
Day 4
Today I was my husband’s dead mother again. I tell you, Doc: Freud would have a field day in this house.
Day 8
Today, Doc, I was his mother again. Yawn: it’s getting boring now. A tale told by an idiot.
I said to him: it’s me, Keith, your husband. I held his face between my hands, made him look straight at me. He said: no it’s not. It’s not you. It’s not Keith. It’s mother, pretending to be you. He shook his head and shouted: I don’t know why she – why you would do this. I don’t know why you’ve come back. I don’t understand. I never bloody well understood you when you were alive.
Then he backed off down the hallway, kept glancing from side to side, terrified. When he was a kid, all those decades ago, his mother used to lock him in the downstairs toilet – shove him in, turn the key on the outside – every time he told her he wanted to be an actor, not a doctor or teacher or accountant. She didn’t care about him being gay, just his earning potential. This afternoon, he thought I was going to do that to him – he thought I was going to lock him in the toilet.
What’s happening to him, to us, Doc? Where’s all this leading? At this rate, we’re all going to end up trapped in a downstairs toilet, scrabbling around in the dark, like some never-ending Beckett play. Waiting for the real me to reappear.
Day 10
Today – well, today, Doc, I couldn’t work out who I was supposed to be.
Look, I’m doing what you asked. You asked me to keep a record of what happens, who he thinks I am, day to day. You asked me to write everything down during ‘the trial’ – so you can chart if his delusions are improving or getting worse. But sometimes it’s difficult to know what’s happening. Sometimes it’s hard to put things into words. And sometimes I think I’m not anyone in particular to him, just some generalised baddie, a body-snatcher, an alien, a crap copy. A photocopy of someone’s bottom, as it were. And sometimes I seem to be lots of people at once, my face ever-changing: Jekyll stuck forever in the transformation scene.
Day 11
When this trial began, Doc, you told me I’d have to be patient. Wait and see what happens, you said. It might take some time, you said. You said he’s got some kind of “Delusional Misidentification Syndrome,” which makes recognising faces difficult; I memorised all the names you used, Doc, like a script, so I could look them up on google afterwards. I’ve never found it hard to learn lines, reciting them sotto voce wherever I am: Capgras, Fregoli, Intermetamorphosis, Capgras, Fegoli, Intermetamorphosis, Capgras ...
You said my husband’s condition seems to mingle symptoms from all three syndromes, so it’s hard to reach a “definitive diagnosis.” You said, Doc, he was a unique case, and you’d like to write a research paper for The Lancet about him, his condition, and “possible pharmacological treatments.” You said he gets faces mixed up, and he recognises me and doesn’t recognise me at the same time. Thinks I’m not me. Thinks someone is impersonating me, or I’m impersonating someone else, or someone’s impersonating me impersonating someone else. Who the hell knows?
You said, Doc, it’s all because of a damaged “dorsal pathway” to the facial processor. You said the damage might be caused by Lewybodies, the L-Dopa he takes, or it might even be the ECT he had as a boy. You said these things move, so to speak, in mysterious ways – more things in heaven and earth, et cetera et cetera. You showed me the MRI scan, and I said I didn’t understand.
Then you said, Doc, that we should trial an “antipsychotic called risperidone” and a “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor” called citalopram – and that I should write everything down. Keep a record of what happens. You told me I should try and write it down factually, objectively, because it would help you with your research paper. That’s what you said, Doc, and I’m trying my best. But, well, my dear fellow, you’ve got to expect a bit of elaboration and melodrama from two ageing luvvies, after all.
And speaking of melodrama, Doc, I don’t feel the trial’s working.
Day 12
Today I was no-one else, just not-me. He said I looked like me, had the same jawline, complexion, greying nasal hair, but he could tell I wasn’t the real me underneath the skin.
When we met last time, Doc, you told me that this Delusional Misidentification thingymajig is due to a “disconnection between facial identification and emotional response” – between the “temporal lobe and the limbic system,” or something like that. My husband, he knows logically who I am, but doesn’t feel anything – and so he assumes I can’t be the genuine article, the bona fide me. To him, I am merely skin, surface, Shakespearean disguise: he can see I look like me on the outside, but feels nothing towards the person on the inside. That’s your explanation, anyway.
But why doesn’t he feel anything, Doc? Why, when we have loved each other so intensely, when we are all each other has? When I have never locked him anywhere but in my arms? Has everything between us been acting, impersonation, a sham, hamminess?
And more than anything I keep wondering: is Juliet wrong when she asks “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet”? Is she lying, Doc? He calls me other names, and then no longer seems to love me.
Day 16
Today, I was his dead mother again. Or, rather, I was a rival actor playing his dead mother – cruelly pretending she was still alive. He tried to hit me, Doctor. Tried to lock me in the downstairs toilet.
The wheel is come full circle; I am here.
Day 19
This afternoon, I was a girl called Sandy. I’d never even heard of Sandy. He never told me about her, Doc. He’s never spoken to me about exes, let alone hetero exes. He put his hand on my knee while we were watching an old King Lear of his on VHS – while Gloucester was getting his eye gouged out. It wasn’t very erotic. He kissed me and said we should go upstairs. I said okay, but that I wasn’t Sandy.
Upstairs, I thought he might get a bit of a shock when I took my trousers off. But he didn’t seem surprised at all – as if the lower part of my body has nothing to do with the upper part, if you see what I mean. As if Cesario and Viola might both be real.
He took a selfie of us in bed afterwards, cuddling and smoking. This evening, I found he’d posted it on Facebook, tagging a woman called Sandy in place of me. I didn’t know he was friends with her, or any of his exes.
To be honest, I’m scared, Doc. I’m finding things out about his past I never knew. I have no idea what I’ll find out next. I thought an illness like his would cover things up, not let them out. It’s an undiscover’d country from whose bourn I am scared neither I nor he will never return.
Day 20
Some days, Doctor, I feel blurry round the edges.
Day 23
Today, I’m apparently a bad imitation – who he can see right through – of Mel Gibson playing Hamlet. I’m someone playing someone playing someone. Badly.
Day 24
Today, for a little while, I was me again. Perhaps you’re right after all, Doc, and the risperidone stuff is finally working out. We even had a laugh about his delusions. He called me Keith. He called me Keith, for goodness sake. Then he said sorry for everything, and I said: it’s not your fault.
We were sitting outside, on the deckchairs in our “unweeded garden,” even though it was cold. We drank lots of gin (I know you won’t approve), and he said now he’ll never get to play the Dane. I asked him why not, and he said to me: “How can I, when the faces of Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, might all get mixed up on stage? Or I might get the actors mixed up with who they’re playing – or I might stab one of the audience members by mistake, thinking he or she is Claudius. Who knows?”
I said I wondered if Hamlet himself had a touch of Capgras: after all, he stabs Polonius by mistake, is ghastly to Ophelia, and almost rapes his own mother. Hamlet, I said, can’t even recognise clouds, for Christ’s sake.
We both laughed for the first time in weeks, Doc, and looked up at the sky, drunkenly, from our deckchairs. Then we slurred our way through the cloud scene – he as Hamlet, me as Polonius. His memory for lines never fails him. Whilst everything else crumbles away, other people’s words come back to him whole:
HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale?
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
HAMLET: Then I will come to my mother by and by. They fool me to the top of my bent.
Afterwards, we held hands, as if we might get up for a final curtain call, and bow to our audience of weeds and flowers.
Day 25
Sic transit Gloria mundi: yesterday, I thought the medicine might be working. Today, I was back to being no-one – back to square one, to Go, sans £200. He didn’t seem to know me at all, Doc. Shut the door in my face. Asked me why I was in his house. I was a blank to him, a walking silhouette. Polonius behind the arras.
Day 26
He looked in the mirror this morning, Doc, and didn’t even know himself.
Day 30
Today, Doc, I was a cat called Fire. His childhood pet.
Day 35
This afternoon, Doc, I was long-dead – a great-grandfather he can’t ever have known. I felt like a ghost, and he was my medium. He’d summoned me from beyond the veil, and I had nothing to say, no-one to demand vengeance on. Nothing except: “Do you want a slice of lemon with your G&T?”
Day 37
Today, I don’t know who I am. I have to be honest, Doc: I don’t know if I can go on with the trial.
Day 39?
Today, Doc, I was no-one and everyone – his father, his mother, Sandy, the milkman, Fire the Cat, Mel Gibson, a great-grandfather, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Horatio. I looked at myself in the cabinet mirror in our downstairs toilet, Doc, and tried to see what he sees, tried to imagine it. I saw faces passing across my own like clouds across sky.
Day – oh, I don’t know, I’ve lost count …
Today, Doc, I was tears, nothing else. They all reflected me, in pieces.
Day – tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
This morning, he locked me in the downstairs toilet for an hour. After a while, I gave up calling for help, and studied my reflection again. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, couldn’t make any sense of it.
I smashed the mirror, Doc, with my face still in it.
………………..
Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His books include the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015), the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
Twitter @crystalclearjt