Splinter

39

B – Q 1371.

There was only one person he knew who could identify the owner of a car without access to a police computer. Marc felt sure that person wouldn’t be inclined to be helpful, for understandable reasons, and certainly not at this hour, but he had no alternative. He could hardly pay a second visit to the police, least of all armed with a request that would only reinforce their suspicion that he was suffering from a progressive mental disorder.

‘Hello?’

He slowly made his way towards the light issuing into the narrow passage from the bathroom door, which was ajar. Every step intensified his sense of déjà vu, leaving no room for any thought of the real reason he was there.

It had been just the same on his last, unheralded visit. He had walked along the same passage and, a few seconds later, discovered his brother’s motionless form in the bathtub. Except that the front door hadn’t been wide open the way it was now.

‘Benny?’ he heard himself call, and was relieved to detect a sign of life. A shadowy figure loomed up behind the frosted-glass door. It grew bigger, and a moment later it opened.

Marc felt as if an unseen hand had turned over the brittle page of an old photo album. The face he saw seemed simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar, like a long-forgotten photograph that bears only a vestigial resemblance to one’s transfigured memory of the past. He had managed to avoid meeting his younger brother when he had testified to the board of examiners. Now, for the first time in years, he was face to face with him.

‘Hello, kid,’ Marc said in a voice he didn’t recognize, hesitant and nervous but striving to sound confident. Rather than replying, Benny stared at him in consternation like the woman who had refused to let him into his own flat a few hours earlier. The woman he still thought was Sandra.

Benny reached blindly behind him and, without taking his eyes off Marc, pulled the bathroom door shut. He didn’t raise a hand in greeting, didn’t even brush aside the dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. The hair Marc had envied even as a boy.

Instead, Benny thrust his fists into the pockets of his metallic-green bomber jacket and stared at Marc with an inscrutable expression.

Despair? Concern? Anger?

Marc was suddenly struck by a horrible thought. It seared his innermost self like a stinging nettle on bare skin.

What if he doesn’t recognize me? Like Sandra?

What if none of this is real? What if it’s all in my imagination: my brother, the passage, the bathroom behind him?

He was involuntarily reminded of a short article in a psychology magazine he’d started to read in his dentist’s waiting room. It was about a patient who consulted a psychiatrist, whom he took to be a product of his own diseased imagination because he firmly believed himself to be the sole survivor of a viral pandemic; the last man on earth, who had taken refuge in an illusory world so as not to die of loneliness. This confronted the psychiatrist with an utterly insoluble problem. How did you convince a patient that he wasn’t suffering from hallucinations – that all he could see and feel actually existed, not only in his self-made imaginary world but in reality?

Marc’s name had been called before he could finish the article. He had never regretted not knowing how a story ended as much as he did at this moment.

‘Do you know who I am?’ That was what he really wanted to ask, but Benny got in first.

‘This is a bad time, Marc.’

The use of his name, the familiar tone of voice reserved for people one doesn’t have to make an effort for, and the twitch of the eyebrows – a mannerism with which they’d always greeted each other in the past – all these helped to banish Marc’s direst fears. He wasn’t an anonymous stranger after all.

‘You know who I am,’ he blurted out in relief, heedless of how absurd this must sound. Benny seemed even more exhausted than Marc himself, although he looked to be in better shape physically. He had filled out, like an athlete whose training has improved his posture. But for all that, he was looking drained – wrapped in an air of melancholy fatigue that had nothing in common with the warm, dreamy look of someone roused from sleep in the middle of the night. His shoulders seemed bowed beneath an invisible burden that rendered it impossible for him to take a step towards his brother.

‘I need your help,’ said Marc.

‘I can’t.’

Although he’d anticipated this reply, it surprised him nonetheless. On the one hand, it was curt and dismissive. On the other, Benny’s tone was far milder than he’d expected. Marc was responsible for his enforced confinement in a psychiatric hospital, after all, yet there was nothing hostile about his younger brother’s manner – indeed, he seemed in urgent need of help himself.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go…’ Benny stopped short. Somewhere on the stairs, a board had creaked as loudly as if someone had crushed a nutshell underfoot.

Benny froze.

Marc was about to explain that he hadn’t come alone, but Benny motioned him to be silent. There was another creak, and although it sounded this time like the creak of a decrepit beam in an old building, Marc sensed that his brother was becoming more nervous still.

‘Were you followed?’ Benny asked in a whisper.

‘Not exactly.’

At that moment the front door swung open and Benny whipped something out of his jacket pocket – something Marc had never seen him holding before: a cocked automatic pistol.