The Man Who Turned Into Himself (18 page)

Jo darling,

So there you have it. You've read it — and the obvious question you're asking yourself is, if Hamilton never regained consciousness before he died, how did I get all that stuff? When did he talk to me?

Well, the truth is that he did regain consciousness, in a sort of way. Only I knew, and I couldn't tell anybody because of the sort of way that it was.

You remember that Hamilton was in coma for seventeen days. During that time I visited him frequently because, inevitably, I felt at least partly responsible for what had happened. I had taken a certain risk, albeit in the interest of helping my patient, but it had gone badly. I felt obliged to do everything I could to salvage the situation.

The day I'm talking about was the seventeenth day of his coma, the day he finally died. It was a Monday. I'd been in the hospital for my usual clinic, and afterwards I stopped by Hamilton's room. I sat there talking to him the same way I'd been doing since it happened, playing some of the tapes we'd made in his earlier sessions, going over what we'd talked about, trying to find that line between coma and trance and bring him back. I suppose I didn't expect any more success than usual, because when the time came to go and I heard some kind of movement, I just assumed there must be somebody else in the room with us — somebody who must have been there the whole time, because I hadn't heard them come in.

I felt it was kind of creepy that they'd just been there, listening, saying nothing, not moving all that time. I called out, 'Who's there?' But nobody answered.

I asked again. Still no reply. And then I heard a voice say, 'Emma . . . ?'

It was his voice. Weak, but unmistakably his voice. He was out of the coma.

'Richard?' I said. No reaction. So I tried, 'Rick?'

I heard him chuckle. 'Whichever,' he said.

'How are you feeling?'

'Oh . . . that's a little difficult to describe.' There was something in his voice — I don't know how to put it — as though he was somehow
amused
by the whole situation.

Then he said something very strange. He said, 'It took me a while to figure out how I got that crack on the head.'

That made me think. He hurt his head when he fell, but that happened when he was in deep trance. It was a relatively superficial injury — a consequence of going into coma, not the cause of it.

Suddenly I heard him chuckle again, as though he knew what I was thinking.

'You're wondering', he said, 'how a guy in a coma knows he's got a crack on the head? That's part of what I'm here to tell you, Emma. Have you got that little tape recorder of yours?'

'Yes.'

'You'd better switch it on.'

I felt for the bedside table where I'd put it and pressed record.

'Is it running?' he asked.

I told him it was. And he began. 'Emma, this is for you. It's only fair you should know what happened. That much I owe you . . . '

You have read the rest, right down to: 'Reach out and touch me, Emma. Reach out and touch my face . . . '

I did. I reached out . . . and I felt for the bed . . . and I felt my way up to his face . . . and I touched him.

And I knew right away that he was dead.

I checked his pulse, though I knew there was no point. Later we were able to determine at exactly what time his heart had stopped. He had been dead a full twelve minutes before I entered that room. I had been talking to a dead man.

But that wasn't possible. I had the tape. I could prove what had happened. Other people would hear it.

I rewound it. And listened.

The words were exactly the words I had heard, the words you have read. 'Emma, this is for you. It's only fair you should know what happened.' And so on.

The only thing different was the voice.

It was my voice.

Of course I couldn't believe it, and simply didn't believe it at first. I fast-forwarded, rewound, skimmed the tape back and forth from end to end, persuading myself that I would find his voice somewhere if only I searched hard enough.

But in the end there was no escaping the truth. I had hallucinated. I had heard his voice in my head, but the voice that spoke his words was my own.

I fought my panic. I could feel reality giving way under my feet.

Just suppose, I said, just suppose for the sake of argument that all that stuff about parallel worlds, and about his learning to hop between them, just suppose that was all true. Given that, then getting into my head, as he'd got into Richard's, wouldn't have been all that unlikely.

But even allowing that it was possible, why would he do it?

To show it could be done, yes. But why was he so keen to show
me
? Out of gratitude, like he said? 'That much I owe you'?

Maybe.

Or maybe he was just damned if he would let me
not
believe him. He knew that half of me was rationalising everything he said and writing him off as deluded, while the other half of me was strangely tempted to believe.

It was true. I'd had this feeling from the first time I met him that there was something unnervingly plausible about him. I've known cases of logorrhea fantastica that would convince even the most sophisticated casual listener, but which I would spot in a second for what they were.

Hamilton was different. Don't ask how. Somehow. It was almost as if there was a contest between us. He would win if he could persuade me that he was telling the truth and wasn't just sick. I would win if, in the end, I remained convinced that he was sick.

So how was he going to persuade me? If he'd had somebody else come to me with a message in their head from him, I'd have dismissed them as 'sick', too. I could have rationalised away just about any method he used to contact me. Except this one.

This I could not dismiss. He was betting that my sanity was the most important thing I had. After all, I was a psychiatrist. I worked on other people's minds, made judgments about them. What would happen if I had to make a judgment about my own? Surely I would be able to satisfy myself that I was sane; and then, he must have reasoned, I would believe him.

Do I?

I don't know. I don't know if I know anything any more.

For the first time in my life, I am truly in the dark.

Emma