Page 62 of Mine

“Right,” I said dizzily.

“It’s a disorder I learned about in medical school, during an elective course in neuropsychology. It’s a problem between the thinking part of your brain and the emotional part of your brain.”

I furrowed my brow and listened closely even though I didn’t understand what exactly he was talking about. He looked so upset, his eyes frantic.

“The delusion comes when you look at another person, someone you know. If you have Capgras syndrome, you can recognize someone, but there’s something wrong when you look at them. You feel like they’re an impostor, or a robot. Something that doesn’t have the same emotions as the person you used to know. You recognize their outside, but their inside is gone, disappeared. They’re not themselves.”

“That’s… that’s a thing? A real disease?” I couldn’t believe it.

“One woman claimed that her husband had been replaced by an identical copy of his body in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t sleep with him; she locked him out of the house. Because she couldn’t recognize him as the same person he was before. Another man claimed that everybody in the world was a robot but him.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

Rien seized my head in his hands with a sudden jerk and I gasped. He leaned close so that his face was only inches from mine.

My pulse rate jumped up. He looked deep into me, his anger replaced by sadness.

“What’s wrong with us, Sara? I think I know, but I’m not sure.”

“You have this thing? This… this syndrome?” Was that why sorrow drew his face tight?

I could feel his breath on my lips when he answered. His scent was salty, like the ocean, with only a hint of cologne. My heart raced.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It comes in flashes, not always. Sometimes I can tell when a person is lying. There’s a screen over them, like a mask that only I can see. And sometimes it feels like they don’t even exist, that’s how much they’re pretending. Maybe everybody in the world is really fake.”

Rien tilted his head, looking at me first at one eye, then the other. He peered into me like he was trying to see something. His fingers gripped my hair.

“AmIfake?” I gulped. “Do you think I’m fake?”

“I don’t know, Sara. I don’t know.” His fingers relaxed, and I exhaled slowly. “Sometimes I think you are, and then I look again and I see something so vulnerable that it must be real. Everybody pretends sometimes. It’s the people who think they’re not pretending who are the real liars.”

I waited for a moment, thinking about all the lies I’d told in the past year. If I had to go to confession, it would take hours. I couldn’t judge Rien.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Me?”

I breathed in, biting my lip.

“Are you lying to me?”

He let me go. I rocked back on my knees, trying to catch my breath. His intensity took all of the air out of the room.

“Maybe. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I don’t know what’s looking back. I don’t know who I’m becoming.”

“You mean, you think you’re the impostor?”

“I don’t know,” he said sadly. He turned toward the mirrored wall. His face reflected back in myriad broken pieces, flashed through the glass shards on the floor. “Maybe I’m not real. I look at myself but there’s nothing looking back. Sometimes. I’ve learned to live with it, but…”

He trailed off, his eyes glazing over.

I thought of something. I cleared my throat and he turned back to me.

“You asked me before what made me want to be an actress. What made you want to do this?”

“What made me want to kill? What made me want to murder people?” He looked right at me when he said it.

“Yes.”

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