Splinter

48

Synopsis of SPLINTER

Marc Lucas, a lawyer-turned-social worker who deals with problem children, loses his pregnant wife in a car crash for which he is personally responsible. A few weeks after her death he sees a newspaper advertisement for a psychiatric clinic. The programme ‘Learn to forget’ is looking for people who have undergone experiences of a highly traumatic nature – people who want to erase the memory of them permanently and are therefore willing to participate in a memory experiment: the deliberate actuation of total amnesia. Lucas sends an email to the director of the clinic, and…

‘No!’

Marc groaned and bit the ball of his thumb. He felt so dizzy he had to lean on the desktop. His eyes roamed aimlessly across the page. Having already read the first paragraph twice, he began all over again in the hope that the letters would rearrange themselves into different words. But they didn’t. The truth remained as terrible as it was inexplicable.

This is my story. Sandra used my life as a…

His hands were trembling, his fingertips so numb that he turned over three pages at once. He read on, but it only got worse:

Marc’s mobile phone stops working and his credit cards have been invalidated. His life appears to have been usurped by someone else.

Returning to the clinic, he finds himself staring into a hole in the ground – a construction site. The building has disappeared.

Once again, Marc couldn’t bring himself to read the whole page; once again, he turned over impatiently, ever faster, ever more mystified by what he was reading. He knew it all at first hand – he himself had lived through it a few hours ago! Before long he was reading only snatches, only the lines that hit him in the eye.

…goes to the police…

…but this time the key fits…

…his wife never was in the flat…

…his father-in-law has also disappeared…

The more he read the less he understood. How could this be? How could Sandra have known all this? Worse still, how could she have foreseen the future?

He put the script down and stared at the title page, clasping the back of his neck.

SPLINTER

A screenplay by Sandra Senner

The numbness in his fingertips was slowly spreading up his arms, which now hung limply, wearily, at his sides. He felt an urge to turn and run, screaming, from the cellar. Nothing made sense any more. His life was a lie fabricated by a person he used to trust implicitly – someone who had risen from the grave and was trying to drive him insane.

But do lunatics reflect on their condition? Isn’t denial the very essence of a psychosis?

His mouth opened and closed. Not that he was aware of it, he was talking to himself, uttering his thoughts aloud. Tears ran down his cheeks and landed on the cover of the script.

Is this happening to me? Is it all real?

A tear smudged the big, curved ‘S’ of ‘SPLINTER’ and left a black dot above it, transforming the character into the Spanish version of a question mark. He sniffed, fingering the plaster on his neck again. And then, in the midst of an avalanche of incoherent thoughts, he came to an entirely logical conclusion.

This script must have an ending!

He picked it up again.

Why is all this happening? And how does it end?

He turned to the last page.