I’m a nephew of Mr Gubler, I said. I’ve come to see my uncle.

She looked astonished.

Goodness, she said, you didn’t say you were his nephew the last time you were here, Mr Coyle!

Didn’t I?

Perhaps I wasn’t thinking straight.

Remind me when it was that I last dropped by?

There is a picture in the Kepler file of Horst Gubler.

It shows a man in his early sixties, sitting with his back to the window. He has two chins: the first sharp, pointed, the second longer, lower, sagging towards the base of his neck. His hair is salt-white, straight, cut short, his eyes grey; his nose is hooked and, on lesser men, might seem oversized but fits his features well. He looks away from the camera, half-turned towards some unseen stranger, wears hospital blue and seems surprised to have been caught there, framed by the setting sun. In another life he might have been a genial uncle, a teddy-bear Santa, or perhaps, had circumstances permitted, a trusted Congressman and abuser of women. Yet here, now, he was all that he was–a man of no wealth, friends or even citizenship, for he accused himself of many crimes, burned his US passport when he entered Slovakia, gave away his assets, dismissed his friends, and acted, indeed as he proclaimed when entering the mental home, as a man possessed.

I was led through halls smelling of disinfectant and boiled onions. Behind heavy metal doors that buzzed when opened the abandoned of the nation sat in silence, watching daytime TV. A recent donation from an unknown benefactor had bought an art studio, a small room with wide windows looking north, whose door stood locked–for the funding, while generous, could not support a teacher and the paints as well.

“We like the patients to be expressive,” explained the matron as she led me through the halls. “It helps them find themselves.”

I smiled and said nothing.

“I don’t approve,” said an old man, sitting in a chair alone, a knitted cardigan too small about his tiny shoulders, his lower lip thrusting forward until it nearly stuck out beyond the tip of his nose. “They don’t know. When they find out–that’s the day. Then they’ll come back just like I said.”

Of course they won’t, Matron smiled. You’re talking nonsense again.

A corridor up some stairs, a locked security gate. More doors of thin wood, most standing open. Outside each a rack for paperwork–records of appointments, blood pressure, medication, and a few scant photos for those who wanted to remember, of families who’d long since walked away, children who never came to visit, a home that the patient would never see again.

Horst Gubler’s door had no photos.

It stood ajar, and when Matron knocked, she didn’t wait for an answer before opening it.

A single bed, chair, desk, sink. A PVC mirror, carefully laminated and glued to the wall. A window with a grille over it, which looked west towards red-leaved trees growing bare with the coming cold.

“Horst,” said Matron, and then, in heavy English, “Look who’s back.”

Horst Gubler rose from his single chair, put down his book–a much-thumbed swashbuckler of minimal merit, and looked at me. He held out a clammy hand and stammered, “P-p-pleased to meet you.”

“You remember Mr Coyle,” chided matron. “He came to see you not five weeks ago.”

“Yes. Yes. He did.” He must have, for Matron said he did and so it must be. “I h-hoped,” his tongue tangled on the word, but he scrunched his eyes up tight and then forced himself on, “you were from the embassy.”

“Horst–” a sad shake of the matron’s head was enough to bow Gubler’s eyes to the ground “–we’ve talked about this.”

“Yes, Matron.”

“Mr Gubler doesn’t remember things clearly, does he?”

“No, Matron.”

She turned to me, her voice ringing out for every ear. “It’s common among patients suffering psychotic episodes to seem lucid during the event but amnesiac following it. Mr Gubler’s psychosis–a belief in possession–is a fairly typical mechanism, thankfully less common among Western societies than it has been.” She beamed, a little chuckle swelling up from within her bosom as she added, for the ease of all concerned, “Things keep getting better, that’s what we say!”

I laughed because she laughed, and my eyes flickered to Gubler, who stood mute and still, head bowed, hands folded in front of him, and said not a word.

He sat on the edge of his bed, fingers clinging to it as if he might drop.

I closed the door as the matron walked out, then sat in the chair opposite him, studying his face.

I barely knew it. For weeks I had regarded it in the mirror, let it grow a shabby beard that blurred rather than enhanced its features. Yet even when searching for means to punish that face, striving with all my might to rip Horst Gubler to shreds, there had been a pride in the eyes, a crinkle in the lips which I could not erase. So long had I stared at that reflection that I had come to loathe it, for no matter how sad I waxed my features, how deeply I scrunched my eyes or wrinkled my nose, the glowing defiance of the man who got away with it always burst through.

No more.

I had done everything I could do to destroy this face, but only at the very end, when I stood before a stranger in a strange land and told a single truth–“I am possessed”–had I achieved my aims.

The face was broken now, my work concluded.

I said, “Hello, Mr Gubler.”

“H-hello,” he stumbled, not raising his head to look at me.

“Do you remember me?”

“Yes, Mr Coyle. My memory is better now. You came here with your p-partner.”

“Ah yes, my partner. Forgive me, I have several partners–can you remind me which partner I came with?”

His eyes flashed up, for this was a test, surely, a test of his mind, and he would not fail. “Alice. Her name was Alice.”

I smiled and shuffled a little closer to him on the edge of my chair. He flinched, head twisting away to one side.

“Do you remember what we talked about, Mr Gubler? The last time I came to see you?”

A dull, single nod.

“Can you tell me what it was?”

“You wanted to know about my h-history. It was a psychotic break,” he added, voice rising in case he had made a mistake. “I was not possessed; I had an episode arising from marital and work-related stress.”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “I remember you telling me about it. How did you say it began? A woman touched you. She had dark skin, a blue dress; she shook your hand and the next thing you knew…”

“Here.” His voice was a bare whisper. “I was… here.”

“Yes, you were.” I leaned forward, threading my fingers together between my knees. “And what else did you tell us? About being possessed?”

“Not possessed, not possessed.”

“There was something else, wasn’t there,” I murmured. “When you woke up here, your hand was in a doctor’s hand and you looked up at him, and what did he do next?”

“Not possessed,” he repeated sharply, knuckles white where they gripped the edge of the bed, spine curved, jaw slack. “Not possessed.”

“Did you tell me and Alice about the doctor? Did you tell them how he smiled at you?”

“Smiled, glad to see me, he smiled, taking care of me.”

“Did you tell us the doctor’s name?”

I was a few inches from Gubler now, my knees bumping his, fingers almost close enough to brush his, and as my hands swayed, he jerked back, springing off the edge of the bed and pushing himself against the wall. “Don’t touch me!” he screamed. “Bastard shit! Don’t fucking touch me!”

I recoiled, raising my hands, placating, palms out. “It’s OK,” I breathed. “I’m not going to touch you. No one’s going to touch you.”

Tears balanced on the rim of his reddened eyes, waiting to fall, his breath fast, body twisted into the wall away from me. “Doctor forgot,” he whispered, and his speech was fast, clear, and completely sane. “He forgot that he touched me. How’d they explain that? How’d they make sense of it?” His eyes rolled back to me, and there it was, just for a moment, the hardness that had haunted me in the mirror, cutting through the drugs. “You understood, sat there, she held the camera and you said you understood. You believed me. Did you lie to me? Did you fucking lie?”