As he tried to focus on the man across from him, it struck Vidor, for the first time, how much he and Gessen looked alike. Dark hair streaked with grey at the temples, eyes on the same spectrum of mossy green. If they stood side by side in front of a mirror, it would not surprise him to see they were of equal height and build. How odd to discover that he and his tormenter occupied two sides of the same, though slightly tarnished, coin.

He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it. Tried again. What was the point of anything? When he finally managed to form the words, his voice came out as a croak. ‘It’s the end of the line, isn’t it? My life is over.’ His tongue felt strange in his mouth, and his face and hands not wholly his own.

‘Why would you say that?’ Gessen sounded genuinely upset. ‘If you’re suffering from a dissociative disorder, and I have every reason to believe you are, there are therapies that can help you.’

For a moment, Vidor considered going along with the good doctor’s diagnosis, relieved at the thought of taking an easier path. But Gessen would catch on to him eventually, and they would end up right back where they were now.

‘I don’t have dissociative identity disorder.’ He sat up straight and met Gessen’s eyes. ‘Though I’ve only just become aware of my particular affliction, if you wish to put a name to it, I suppose you could call it a case of severely repressed identity or perhaps dissociative amnesia.’ He pushed away the empty glass. ‘My flash of awareness occurred a few days ago, after waking suddenly in the night. It felt as though a glass bubble had shattered in my skull. Apparently, completely unknown to me, a different aspect of myself, the better part it would seem, has been locked away in the darkest and most primitive area of my brain.’

Gessen had grown still, his eyes fixed on Vidor’s own.

‘While some small part of myself, though very faint, like the signal from a long-extinguished star, has always known who I am – or who I was – I’d never thought to examine it properly. Nebulous signs would appear on occasion, spread out thinly over the years. Strange blackouts, bouts of lost time. Evidence of sleepwalking or eating foods I don’t like. That other person, or persona, I suppose you would call it, had been killed off long ago, and once he ceased to exist, I never gave him a moment’s thought. For nearly forty years, until the glass bubble broke, I had successfully erased, even to my own conscious mind, the person I once was.’