HE WOKE UP in a place that he did not recognize.
The sunlight, entering through a large curtainless window, illuminated the room entirely. The whiteness of the walls further increased the intensity of the sunbeams; everything was immaculate, an almost sterile environment, even the carpet had a clean and pearly nuance to it. The furniture gave the same felling of cleanliness: there was a bed with its white sheets, not so far away from the window, a big wardrobe that matched the carpet on the other side of the room, a desk, white just like everything else, and in front of it a light-grey chair. Various stacks of papers and documents were scattered on the desk and on the left corner there were two black folders.
He felt the faintest sound within in his head, almost like a buzzing noise. He didn’t know why that was; in fact there were many things he did not know. Why was he in that room? Where was that room for that matter? Such an impersonal place, so clean, so aseptic…if that was a clinic, why was he there? What had happened? So many questions but yet he was unable to focus; it was difficult to concentrate on his thoughts or on his memories. Under his bed were a pair of slippers; he rose and put them on. There was no physical effort standing up and no pain in any part of his body. Maybe it was not a health issue, he thought looking at his hands; they were wrinkled and covered in brown spots. He was an elderly person, that much seemed obvious, but how old exactly?
Why couldn’t he…?
On the desk he saw the sheets and folders but decided he would look at them later; for now, the first thing was to understand what had happened. He approached the door, white like the rest of the room, and pushed on the handle. The entrance led to a long and bare hallway plastered with beige and light-blue tiles. Neon lights sternly illuminated the few people that were there; white coats and blue garments. Now he was certain: that could only be a clinic.
As soon as he tried to leave the room, a nurse approached and said:
-Good morning Mister Wright! How are you feeling today?
Mister Wright, yes, it had a familiar sound to it, a suiting one. The amiable smile on the nurse’s face denoted a kind personality. He tried in turn to fake a smile before answering:
-Truth be told, I am feeling a light buzz in my head.
-But of course, not to worry, it is understandable in the morning – especially considering that you woke up earlier than usual.
-Oh, I usually don’t sleep very well – he answered almost automatically without even noticing it – but it seems that you know me. Could you please tell me where we are; I am finding it rather difficult to concentrate.
-Don’t worry Mister Wright, that is exactly why you are here with us. Please, if you would be so kind as to follow me back to your room, I will tell you what you need to know.
They left the hallway within its constant yet soft background noise to re-enter the room. The nurse opened the wardrobe and said:
-Here are your clothes, take your time changing and if you are hungry let me know. I will be back shortly with a cup of tea, Earl Grey, just as you like it.
He felt as if the nurse did not want to answer his question. That did not bothered him however so he merely asked a second time:
-Very kind of you, but could you first tell me why am I here? And, for that matter, where is ‘here’ exactly?
There was a moment of hesitation in his inquiry in which he wanted to also ask who he was but he perceived that dialogue as being somewhat of a cliché; it just didn’t sound right in his head. The young nurse smiled and said:
-Mister Wright, you are at the Sacred Heart clinic, but maybe we should proceed step by step. Lately you have been experiencing some memory issues, but it is better if you speak with Doctor Fleming about it since he is the one treating you. I can assure you that you are in good hands and can call me if you need anything, but that is as much as I can tell you for now. Based on your agreement with Doctor Fleming, everything you need to know is on that desk and in those folders. Don’t worry, the doctor will come by later to speak with you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go and make your tea.
Memory problems. A specialized clinic. He was not supposed to worry.
Those were certainly not things that were easy to hear, but he realized that he was of a calm temperament and did not mind. Furthermore, the nurse had said that those documents had been specially prepared, so there must have been a good reason for it. At the very least, he understood about himself that he did not feel anguish or frustration as easily as others might have. He didn’t ask further questions and after a brief moment said:
-I understand, thank you.
-I will be back shortly with your tea. If you want to take a shower in the meantime, the bathroom is over there.
Mister Wright waited for the nurse to leave and then opened the second door. The bathroom was covered in similar tiles as the ones in the hallway and lit by similar neon lights. He went towards the toilet but halted midway when he saw the reflection to his left. There, above the sink, was a mirror. He had to stop as he did not recognize the person that was on the other side of the glass. A benevolent face was looking directly at him; an elderly person, probably about sixty or seventy years old, small wrinkles on his face and seemingly tired eyes. He moved even closer, not because he could not see well, but because he was in disbelief. He touched his reflection, making his fingertips slip on the tiny brown spots on his skin. The coldness of the mirror made him come back to his senses and see that there was an electric razor near the sink. Still looking at himself, he grabbed it with firmness, almost unconsciously, and shaved the prickly hairs from his cheeks passing it twice from right to left and from the chin downwards; it was like something he had done many times before, almost mechanical. Then he took a shower, changed and left the bathroom to find a steaming cup of tea waiting for him on the desk. He sat down; the chair was comfortable enough and made up for a good reading posture.
The scent of lemon that came from the cup was vaguely familiar.
On top of the pages there was a notepad and on it the words Write something; next to it there was a black fountain pen. When his fingertips touched it, when he picked it up and felt its weight, heavier than he had anticipated but not excessively so, and when he heard the click it made as he opened it, he felt at ease, almost relieved. He had already used that very same pen, he was sure about that. Without even realizing it, a smile caressed his face, which was then followed by an unpleasant feeling; again that light buzzing and that headache that had accompanied him since the beginning of the morning. He massaged his forehead then placed the nib on the paper and wrote just a few words:
He sat down and wrote the first thing that came to mind.
He compared the handwriting with the two words in the sentence above. The curve of the s was identical and the r, a bit too uptight, had the same contracted loop above the base of the two smaller lines. That was his handwriting. Almost mechanically he tore the piece of paper and leaned towards his right to throw it away.
He stopped again.
In the bin there were many other papers just like the one he was about to throw away. He grabbed all of them; pieces of paper, torn from that very same notepad.
Write something.
He sat down and wrote the first thing that came to mind.
The first one. The second. Third and fourth.
Every piece of paper was the same; those two sentences written over and over in an almost identic fashion. From time to time, a t lacked its dash or an m looked more like an n, but every piece of paper was just like the previous one.
How long had he been in that clinic? Why was it so hard to remember?
His surname. A benevolent face and many wrinkles. A fountain pen. Everything was so hazy.
He took the pages that were underneath the notepad and started reading.
A prologue. One page long. It was about a group of very intelligent people that wanted to help humankind as another group tried to ruin it; the theme of duality and the eternal fight between good and evil. It was crude and even contained some spelling mistakes – probably a draft that needed revising. He continued reading. The following page was another prologue; it was a sci-fi story featuring a sharp-tongued captain, her spaceship and a mission to retrieve a rare substance from outer space.
Everything seemed so childish yet somewhat wholesome; a certain literary roughness that was to his liking. When he finally decided to take a sip of the tea that had been left for him, the strong taste of the Earl Grey and the scent of lemon gave him a feeling of cosiness.
As he continued reading, page after page, he didn’t even noticed the passage of time. A short tale about the relationship between a master and his apprentice, some poems written with different styles and then a lengthier story. The last one had grabbed his attention since the writing seemed more refined and the themes more mature; it was a crime novel where the main detective was a certain inspector DeNoir.
Someone knocked at the door.
-Come in – he said lowering the pages.
A man in a white coat entered the room and closed the door behind him. He had scarce short ashen hair, a pair of glasses with thick lenses that enlarged two light blue eyes and a slightly flattened nose.
-Good morning Mister Wright, I am doctor Fleming. How are you feeling today?
-Actually – he said swallowing a bit of saliva – I’m still a bit hazy. I am trying to rearrange my thoughts, but I’m finding it rather hard.
-I understand. Please, could you tell me what is it that you remember?
-Unfortunately, not much. There are things that I feel I know, or that I think I should know, but I am not sure. I saw the notepad: that is my handwriting.
He remained silent for a brief moment and then said exhaling profoundly:
-I imagine I have been here for quite some time.
-You are correct, but let me say right away that you are with us by your own free will. When you first started noticing small memory gaps in your daily life, you came here. After the tests, we arranged together a sort of routine, aimed at making sure that the condition would not deteriorate.
-Doctor, I will stop you right away. For how long?
He noticed the hesitation; probably not telling him was part of the previous arrangements, but he wanted to know. He repeated the question:
-Doctor, I think I am a very composed man, or at least that is how I feel. For how long have I been like this?
-It has been two years since you have been in this condition. You have a particular form of idiopathic anterograde amnesia. It is a very unique case: in simple terms, every day your memory is reset, as if though the neural connections established the day before were null. Unlike other cases, which still present a core set of memories, you do not, and you also do not present other symptoms such as aphasia or mood alterations.
After the first sentence, the buzzing in his head worsened. Two years since he had forgotten who he was. Two years that he had been repeating that routine. Two years of non-living. He didn’t feel despair, but rather a sense of regret. The regret of not being able to remember his identity, the sorrow of not knowing his story, the sadness of not being able to live his present or look towards his future.
-Will it get worse? – he asked with no bitterness in his voice.
-We do not know.
He was grateful for the honesty of that response and then, with the innocence of a child inquiring about the world, asked:
-Doctor, who am I? Or…at this point, maybe I should ask who I was?
-You, Mister G. Wright, are an author – a writer that always cherished and helped others. Through your works, you tried to make the world a better place. The pages on the desk are some of your first writings and some of the things that you yourself considered more important. The black folders contain mementoes of your past, photographs, awards and other things that you thought would be helpful.
-Did I succeed? – he asked abruptly.
-In doing what? – responded the doctor slightly off guard.
-In making the world a better place?
-It was the same thing that I asked you when we first met and I still remember the reply you gave me. You said: I understand the impossibility of the thing I am set out to achieve, but I can also assure you that the world I am leaving behind is better than the one I have encountered, even if it is only in the slightest.
“The world I am leaving behind” he thought. So he had already anticipated that the clinic would be his last stop. He hesitated. His expression seemed relieved, but his tone was sad when he uttered:
-I must have been an interesting person.
-You are, Mister Wright, you are. It was you who left fragments of your past for yourself to rediscover daily. I can guarantee that this is also the reason why your condition has remained stable for the past two years. I came to see how you were doing and to tell you that lunch will be served briefly. You normally take it here, in your room, but I always invite you to come eat with us doctors and nurses in the cafeteria. The decision is obviously yours.
-Thank you, but I think I will stay here. I still have some fragments of myself I would like to appreciate or at least recognise.
-I understand.
Doctor Fleming went to the wardrobe and from one of the higher shelves took out an envelope.
-One last thing: after you finish reading and perusing your past, open this. It is the last thing that you left for yourself.
-It seems I was quite cautious.
The doctor smiled, nodded with his head and then left the room. As the door opened, the silence was disrupted for a brief moment by the background noise of the hallway.
Now he knew who he was, but that did not feel comforting. To be in the memories of someone else is very different from being in one’s own. He had to trust the words of others and for him that was not identity; it felt more like a non-existence. He was calm; something deep inside made him understand that frustration and anger would have been futile, but that did not alleviate a certain bitterness. It was not as much as suffering or a heart-breaking feeling as much as a mere presence. That, combined with the buzzing in his head, formed a type of pain in him; a melancholic pain, one that was felt for a lost identity.
He put back the pages and opened the folders.
A prize for the literary contest Tell a Tale. A photograph: him shaking hands with a man giving him a trophy. A diploma for the fifth edition of another contest. Another photograph. First prize for the Lord Shelley poetry contest. An attendance certificate. Other photos, some of them with the same person and the inscription Thank you, DeYen. First prize for a short story. Honorary member of a literary committee. A journal article on him. A journal article written by him.
Nothing.
The familiar feeling was much vaguer than the one he had felt while holding the fountain pen.
Those signs, those permanent marks he had traced in everlasting time, now meant nothing to him. They denoted a person that had done many things, a person that had kept busy, but he did not perceive it as his own reality anymore.
After putting the mementoes the way he had found them, he opened the second folder. Prologues, ideas, descriptions, poems or scattered verses and short stories. Was that the entirety of his work? The entirety of his existence? Or was it just a fragment of what he had written, a piece of himself that the self that still had memories selected for his future self with no identity? Were they meant to make him remember or perhaps to make him live again? If it was so, then why was he unable to feel anything towards those pages and remembrances?
He continued to read.
His style recurrently employed images. The quantity of prose pieces was superior to that of poetry, but even in his narrative texts images reverberated while reading; there were certain descriptions that he preferred, for example the ones involving a setting or dawning sun, as if through continuous efforts he tried to reach the perfection of that colourful explosion. Fire and flickers of light were other elements that appeared more frequently than others and the use of colours gave vivid life to the emotions the text tried to convey. The themes presented a more personal dimension, but even so, one of his recurring ideas revolved around the concept of grandeur and hope for humankind as a whole; in some parts, this also concealed a more bitter note.
“The watery mirror, rippling with concern,
Gives no indication of the eventful turn”
There were other pages filled with rhymes; some were ideas or plays on words while others were more complex and structured poems. It was almost as if he used those verses to experiment with words.
“Il bigio dei nembi, un piombo di spade,
Squarciato in due dal fuoco del rame,
Lo scarlatto che ora tutto pervade
Con oro bollente come catrame…”
He was about to continue reading, then he stopped.
He returned to the poem he had just read. It was written in Italian. He went back a couple of pages more. Another language. He did not notice at first glance that it was Spanish, but he was capable of reading it effortlessly. That meant he also knew other tongues. Was it even possible? What was his familiarity with those languages, and for that matter, how many of them were there? Questions kept flooding his head.
He felt his cheek wet. He touched it with his fingertips just to notice that he was shedding tears. Not recognizing himself, that was the buzzing sound, that was the melancholic pain. It was the feeling of an insufferable weight that was bearing down on him. He grabbed the pen and gazed at the blank page. He could have described that feeling, but to what end? He looked once again towards the pen hopelessly.
In just a few hours, the sun would fade on the horizon.
Soon, the few things that he had gathered during the day would wither away with the darkness of night. All those things he had gathered during a whole lifetime, chaotically remembered during the span of mere hours, would be lost in the fragment of time called yesterday.
To what end then should he write?
A different nurse came in to bring him dinner. He felt his own smile insipid while saying thank you.
A few more hours.
He decided to open the envelope that Doctor Fleming had given him.
It was another short story.
He started reading.
It was the unfinished story of a writer. A writer that would wake up without remembering his past. A writer that would have to relive his past with every passing day.
It was his story.
For a moment, he felt he could not breathe; he felt trapped in his reality.
He read the story once more and realised something. He couldn’t be sure and didn’t know if it was his idealistic attitude or his writer’s mind, but the story that he himself had left behind lacked an ending. He had established an objective for himself. No. He had imposed it. Even in his condition, he had been able to fix a routine and force an objective on himself. The pain within him would persist, the buzzing in his head would never cease, of that he was convinced; but another certainty took form within him, a more authoritative one. That unfinished story represented his identity, a way through which his self from the past, the one that was complete, was giving a mission to his current fragmented self. That unwritten ending was the bridge between a half too full and a half too devoid.
He grabbed the pen and took a deep breath. The buzzing sound reached its peak but he tightened his grip more firmly. Not yet, it was not yet time. He had to write just a bit more. To persevere, that was the only thing he could do; that was the only thing he truly knew.
When he finished, he went to search for Doctor Fleming, but the doctor had already gone home so he had to settled for a nurse. He gave the nurse the page, telling her to give it to the doctor and to tell him on his behalf that he had placed the envelope back in the wardrobe.
For him, the day was about to end.
He went to bed, fully aware of his situation. It was a strange feeling: he simultaneously knew and did not know what tomorrow would bring. That was his reality, that was his life.
All that remained to do was to close his eyes.
###
-Doctor Fleming, a moment of your time. The patient in room zero-three asked me to give you this and tell you that he put the envelope back in the wardrobe.
The nurse noticed the doctors’ sad smile while he was reading the page. She asked:
-What is he writing?
The doctor looked at the nurse, who was new in that clinic; with time, she too would grow to appreciate Mister Wright. He merely replied:
-The last chapter of his story.
-But, is he still able to write? I thought that in his condition…
She refrained from saying anything else, not wanting to sound insensitive. Doctor Fleming looked at her, then at the page in his hands, that version that each day would relentlessly be given to him or to one of the nurses. He said:
-The brain is an astonishing organ. His last chapter is a story in continual evolution, flexible, capricious from time to time, and yet something remains constant in this page: the ending. The ending is always the same.
The doctor’s plump finger indicated the last paragraph on the sheet. The writing was clear, traced with firmness, not for the eyes of the person who had written it but for those who would have read it. These were the last words:
He had to write just a bit more. To persevere, that was the only thing he could do; that was the only thing he truly knew.
— BOGDAN GROZA
Bogdan Groza, living in Italy, is doing a PhD in Philology and literary criticism at the faculty of Siena. He has published short stories and poems in minor Italian anthologies as well as fiction written in English in online literary magazines. In 2021, he published his first book, Athena, with Edizioni Montag; in 2023, the sequel came out.