The Second Patient File
The truth about yourself is the last truth you find, and the most necessary.
Nora || Identity || Truth || Memory
The answer to the question she had been not-quite-asking came from Irene Marsh, as she had somehow known it would — had known that if any answer existed, it would come from the one person in the building who could not be made to forget. She went to see Irene six weeks after the road cleared, in the residential facility outside the city that Haas had arranged and that Irene was, by all accounts, navigating with the composed adaptability of a woman who has been in a very confined space for a long time and is now discovering that larger spaces do not frighten her but do require a certain amount of methodical relearning. Irene was in the facility’s garden when she arrived, sitting in a winter chair with a blanket and a cup of tea and the expression of someone who is deliberately experiencing their current surroundings rather than the multiple simultaneous experiences that her condition normally imposed. She had learned, over the six weeks, a technique of deliberate present-focus — not suppression of the other memories but the conscious selection of the current moment as the primary one. It was imperfect. It was, she told Nora, considerably better than nothing. They sat together in the garden, cold and clear, and Nora asked her directly: “In 1959, when I was at Coldmoor. What happened to me?” Irene held her tea cup. “You were there for six weeks,” she said. “You were brought in under a different name — I didn’t know who you were until you arrived in December and your face matched the face I remembered from 1959. You were studying.” Nora looked at her. “Studying?” “Investigating,” Irene corrected. “Someone had sent you. Someone on the outside who knew about the Institute and had been trying to build a case but needed someone inside. Someone young enough, and good enough at reading people, and brave enough.” She paused. “You found out more than anyone had found out before. You found the door. You found the inner room.” She was quiet for a moment. “And then Voss found you. And they took your memory of those six weeks. Specifically and precisely — just those six weeks, and whatever associations connected them, so that you would have no reason to believe you had ever been there.” Nora absorbed this. “And the person who sent me,” she said carefully. “Who wrote on the file not to let me return.” “A woman named Alcott,” Irene said. “The daughter of the director who left in 1948. She had been trying to expose the Institute for years. She sent you. When you were taken she wrote the instruction on your file herself — she still had a contact inside who told her when the discharge was processed.” She looked at Nora. “She died in 1961. She never knew it would need to be done again.” Nora sat with this for a long time. With the woman named Alcott, who had tried. With her own twenty-two-year-old self, walking into Coldmoor to expose something she knew was wrong and being instead exposed — to the inner room, to the thing at the end of it, to six weeks of an experience that had then been taken from her. With the fact that she had come back anyway. With the fact that she had not known she was coming back and had come back anyway, had found the file with her name and continued anyway, had gone to Room Seven and continued anyway. “She named me,” Nora said slowly. “In her recommendation. The anonymous recommendation that brought me here — it was Alcott, arranged before she died, through someone she trusted.” “Yes,” Irene said. “She was very thorough.” Nora looked at the garden, at the cold winter afternoon, at the sky above the facility’s low wall. “She was right to send me,” she said. Not pride. Just the recognition of a fact: the right person had been sent, eventually. It had taken twenty-two years and two attempts. It had worked. “Yes,” said Irene Marsh. “She was.”