September 1965
The cellar was colder now. The summer heat had broken, and the stone floor no longer remembered warmth. The air was thick with mildew and dust, and the barrel of wine I'd once spoken to had begun to leak—slow, sticky tears that dried before they could reach the cracks in the floor.
I hadn't spoken aloud in weeks.
Not to the bottles.
Not to the shadows.
Not even to the deer in my mind.
But this morning—if it was morning; I no longer trusted the light slanting through the slit in the ceiling—I woke to the sound of a voice I knew intimately.
Mine
"You've been avoiding me," it said.
I didn't startle, I didn't even look toward the sound. I simply remained where I sat, legs folded beneath me, arms loose at my sides, as if I were in meditation. My back ached from too many days pressed to the same patch of stone.
"You know that's not productive," the voice added gently.
I laughed—or something like it. A dry exhale that scraped across my tongue like gravel. "And what would you like me to say?"
There was a long pause. But not silence.
I could hear the sound of paper being flipped, as if the voice were seated across from me, clipboard balanced on one knee. The pages were heavy and thick in the air, pages I'd once used in sessions—handwritten case notes, diagnostic codes, the clinical frameworks I used to corral other people's chaos into something intelligible.
The sound alone made my chest hurt.
"I think we should talk," the voice said.
"So talk."
I looked up, and the cellar had shifted.
Across from me sat a man.
He was dressed as I remembered dressing: charcoal slacks, buttoned shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway, collar slightly askew. His hair was neatly combed, though slightly too long around the ears. He looked tired, pale, but lucid.
Me. A reflection—not in a mirror, but in form.
He tapped the pen against the clipboard.
"Sylvain Noirel," he said. "Age: unknown. Cause for concern: psychogenic amnesia, persistent hallucinations, possible dissociative identity crisis."
"Diagnosis from memory fragments?" I asked dryly.
"Not fragments," he said. "Echoes."
A flicker of something shifted behind him—bookshelves, but they weren't real. I didn't have shelves in the cellar. Yet now they stood behind his chair like ghosts of my old office, half-conjured, half-remembered. A copy of La Nausée by Sartre rested atop a cracked psychology volume. One of the shelves leaned, like it had always done back in the clinic.
The hallucination—or whatever it was—was detailed.
Too detailed.
I swallowed. "What do you want from me?"
"I want you to stop hiding inside yourself."
The response struck too directly, too soon. Like something I might've said to a patient caught in the cyclical fog of trauma. But I wasn't the one giving advice anymore.
I shook my head. "I'm surviving."
"No," the other-me replied. "You're starving, you're fading into the walls. You talk to ghosts and pretend it's memory. You feel pain and pretend it's penance."
"I deserve pain," I muttered.
A pause.
"You deserve help."
I scoffed. "From who? You?"
He didn't answer. Instead, he placed the clipboard down beside him and leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees. His voice gentled.
"Do you remember your first teenage patient?"
The question sank sharp and fast, I did.
A teenage boy—Adrien, maybe? Anxious, withdrawn. Fidgeted with the strings on his hoodie and wouldn't meet my eyes. His father never came to appointments, and his mother was always too loud, trying to fill the silence with excuses.
He'd told me he wanted to disappear.
I'd said: "Sometimes disappearing is how we cope. But if you tell me where you're hiding, I'll come find you."
And he'd smiled, just once.
"Why bring that up now?" I asked quietly.
"Because you didn't give up on him," said the ghost-me. "But you've given up on yourself."
The words filled the cellar like a pressure change. Heavy, close.
"I'm not human anymore," I said, voice trembling. "You saw what happened. In the orchard. In the mirror. I nearly killed a child. I almost drank her blood."
"And yet you didn't."
"It wasn't restraint. I ran."
"Running is still a choice," he said.
I turned my face away, ashamed. "It's not enough."
"Then what would be enough, Sylvain?"
Silence again, except for the steady drip from the wine barrel. My hands had curled into fists in my lap, and I unclenched them slowly, one finger at a time.
I looked back up, and—
He was gone.
No clipboard, no office, and no bookshelves.
Just the wall, mottled with old wine stains and dust.
Had I imagined it?
Had I, in my desperation, split myself again—one voice to speak, one to listen?
Or worse… had it been something else?
An echo?
A memory made flesh?
Or illusion.
But that word still wouldn't fit right in my mouth.
---
I stood, and the motion sent pain down through my back and knees. I braced myself against the wall and walked slowly toward the crate I'd turned into a table months ago. A shattered bottle lay beside it, I hadn't cleaned it up. The glass winked at me in the dim.
I sat.
I pressed my palms to my thighs and took a breath. The air tasted stale and sharp, like stone and wine and dust.
"I don't know what's real," I said aloud.
My voice was hoarse, it echoed slightly in the vaulted ceiling.
"Maybe I am mad. Maybe I'm already dead."
Silence.
Then, very softly—
A voice. Not mine.
"Then why are you still trying?"
---
I turned my head sharply, scanning the shadows.
No one.
No shape, no flicker.
Only stillness.
And yet… the words remained. Lodged in my chest like a shard.
Why was I still trying?
I had no answer.
But I wasn't ready to stop, not yet.
So I lay down on the floor again. Curled in on myself, arms around my ribs.
And whispered into the silence:
"Tell me more."