Stay calm

You wake up and everything is wrong; you can't understand it but everything is wrong. The shock of it propels you into an upright position, like the horrible last second of a nightmare, and you look around the room. Surely you're simply muggy with sleep? Isn't the tail end of a dream wrapped round you still, twirling the sense of the world into a spiral every time you turn your head? Well?

Stare towards the window opposite the headboard and the pillows. The net curtains are drawn across it, and each casts a half-shadow with a brilliant gap in between. The light coming through the netting is too pale, and the thin block of glowing floor that echoes the gap is bright white, like moonlight. Or... fluorescent light. Artificial. Now look down. The duvet feels lumpy, and the cover looks different. The pillows in their cases are brand new and crisp under your skin, and plumped up as if you've only just dropped your head onto them.

You swing your legs out of the bed that, you now realise, isn't yours, isn't the one you bedded down in. Your feet both pad onto a carpet you don't own. The pattern: how is it different? It is, isn't it, but how? There's something wrong with the print. Perhaps it's slightly deregistered, like a newspaper where one primary ink has slipped by a millimetre. You can't be sure because it isn't that obvious. But the designs and florets still swim before your eyes. What has actually changed about it?

What's going on?

Half-straighten yourself into a half-crouch and gangle gollumlike over to the wardrobe. You're not scared yet, or at any rate not petrified, but you've been made wary. Yet even the wardrobe is... wrong: you can tell before you have a chance to click open the double doors. The mirror set into one door has been changed, the silvering no longer corroded as much as it was. As you looked closer even the plywood frame is a different mix, paler wood, less tightly packed. Pull on the handle—the unexpected waxiness of it makes your stomach twitch and your face seize into a cringe, and the catch sounds weak and plastic)—and the door squeaks open.

There, confronting you, is a row of someone else's clothes, someone who dresses almost the same as you. They sway mutely, patiently. They make you think of carcasses in a cool-room, waiting for whatever happens after physical death. Closer to the floor the fabrics blend into an obscene tangle of partly distinguishable items, layered with the straps of smelly sports bags and studded with sweaty shoes: someone else's smell; someone else's sweat. In an orgy of fabrics the arms of jumpers cling to the legs of trousers, which wrap themselves around the necks and hoods of sweaters. A boot you don't recognise sticks out of a mass of blood-red wools. Its tongue and eyes leer at your incomprehension. Finally fearful, you back away until your shins touch the bed, and the shock sits you down too quickly onto the sheeted mattress, hard and clammy on your skin.

How? What has happened? Have all these little swaps been made over a long time, and only now the scales fallen from your eyes? Or have you spent the night doped up, as maleficient armies, devils and Rumplestiltskins, trooped through the room? You feel dozy and headachy, and wonder. Can you remember the last few hours of last night? No? Perhaps that was what had happened. Who has done this to you—

What time is it? Shouldn't you be at work? Quick: plough through the strange bedclothes, fighting the waves of nausea, to reach the alarm clock. A present from your grandfather, a clacky old thing that kept you awake when you were only five or six, but has sent you right off to sleep every night since. Yet, as your hand closes on the clock you want to burst into tears: it isn't the one you checked and wound last night.

Seven seventeen, the face says. So you're early for work. But, you wonder, what day is it? If you've been drugged, then for how long?

Once again you look round, this time frantically. Your head swishes from side to side and you feel as if the walls are closing in and you try exhaling at the same time as inhaling and it doesn't work properly and it's only by chance that you see a piece of paper on the bedside table, under the alarm clock, a note in your own scrawly handwriting. It reads:

"Zitupafralam - expect weirdness! Dr says mild cognition probs may occur. STAY CALM. Me."

Read it. No, no, no, a voice is telling you. No. This note is as wrong as the rest of the room, it says, all wrong, one big mistake, and—but scan through it again. And a third time. Take a breath, in, out, and re-read. Each repetition leaves you more relaxed, like some meditation manouevre. This note: it is you then, telling you now, not to worry.

You feel the last vestiges of sleep evaporate, and dimly, déjà vu, you remember writing the note. You even remember the consultation at the doctor's; or, at any rate, a scene in his office presents itself, scented with antiseptic. It must. It must have been. It was. It was. Yesterday. Yesterday morning. Not that long ago. But you had taken the day off like so many days recently. This one, though, wasn't spent lying in bed and calling in sick (sick in your soul); instead, after the doctor wrote a prescription, you took it straight to the chemist. It was worth it. Anything was worth not waking up again so very, very unhappy. This was a better option than some you'd thought of, in darker moments.

You took the first dose last night, early on. You felt fine, absolutely fine; only, sleepily, you sloped to bed soon afterwards. And, this morning, you were happy for that first half a second. Weren't you? Before this side-effect manifested itself, and that's all it is, a side-effect. Nothing more. So ssh, you say to yourself. Ssh. All those anti-depressants are the same, really: loose cannons rolling around inside the head, and along with defending your sanity they can blow holes in its side. Some squeeze the personality into a dumbell-shape, two ridiculous, heavy poles linked by a delicate joist; some make you chew like a rabbit. The zitupafralam is responsible, must be responsible for this —you wrote so yourself, remember?—weirdness.

Your heartbeat slows and subsides in your ears. The novelty of waking up, for the first time in two years, without depression crushing your first few thoughts of the day begins to dawn on you. At last! and it has worked astonishingly well, considering, and so quickly: overnight. In a different frame of mind you see that sunlight redden, becoming a joyful morning orange that zings off the net curtains and the tiny strip of floor. Now scan the room again. See? Each object divests itself of your distrust, sheds and sloughs all its sinister trappings. And you can feel your heart lifting further. Once again, here is your home, surrounding you and keeping you safe.

Finally, in a spirit of exorcism, look at the alarm clock. Your grandfather's poor, maligned alarm clock. Someone else's indeed! It is your clock and always has been. With each tick this machine has marched its way into the deepest forests of your consciousness, setting up camp and dependably marking time. Can you not hear it, and remember hearing it ten years ago, and in your mind's eye see yourself sitting up in bed listening to it then as you do now?

If anything in this room is real then this, your oldest possession, has to be.... There are markings on its base. Scratches? You could never have noticed them before: only from this angle are they visible. They can't be scratches, as they look too regular. A hallmark? A logo? Turn the clock fully upside down. Two words, in a typeface eighty years younger than the clock ought to be.

"REPLICA CLOCK".