The Memory Thief (4 page)

I lie still under the starched white sheets, concentrating on slowing my heartbeat. Adrenaline whips through me, settling in my stomach like a cornered animal biding its time. I breathe in and out, fixing my gaze on a bad reproduction of Monet's
Water Lilies
that some sadistic interior designer's hung on the wall facing my bed. Bit by bit, I force the panic to retreat.

“Nicholas,” the nurse says. I make myself focus on her, on the name tag that's pinned to her uniform: Tanya, it reads. It is crooked.

“Yes?” I answer.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital?” I hazard, glancing around. My voice is hoarse, but it betrays no anxiety. Point for me.

Her broad face creases with a smile. “Good guess. How do you feel?”

I take a moment to figure that out. Oddly enough, I feel nowhere as bad as I would expect to, given what happened. I try to wiggle my toes, and they comply. My legs aren't broken after all, then. How is that possible? I felt them bend the wrong way, felt them snap. I run my hands over the sheets covering my legs, and sure enough, they're not encased in casts. My ribs do ache, and my head … I raise one hand to my face and feel a bandage on my cheek, another one on my forehead. Yes, my head definitely hurts. But here I am, among the living.

“Not too bad,” I tell Tanya, “considering.”

“That was quite an accident you had,” she says. “You're a little banged up, still.”

Still? “How long was I out?” I ask.

“About twelve hours. Your girlfriend here was getting pretty worried about you.” She gestures toward Ms. Red Hair and Green Eyes.

My girlfriend, huh? Something is not adding up. I shake my head a little bit, trying to clear it, which is a big mistake. Pain stabs behind my eyes. “Ow,” I say.

Tanya laughs. “Maybe not the best idea,” she says.

I do my best to ignore my alleged girlfriend, who has a tight grip on my hand—in fact, her nails are digging into my palm. “What else is wrong with me?” I say to Tanya.

“A couple of broken ribs, some bruising, a mildly sprained ankle, a few deep cuts on your face, and then of course you hit your head, which got the worst of it. Oh, and some serious road rash.” She rolls her eyes.

Road rash? I try hard to figure out how road rash has anything to do with falling off a mountain and getting trapped under a ton of snow, and come up with nothing. “I don't get it,” I say. “How did I get road rash, exactly?”

“From the accident. You were on your motorcycle, and the car wasn't going that fast, but it threw you quite a ways. You hit the asphalt before you rolled into the grass. You must have had your hands up to cover your face—your arms got scraped, but better that than the other, right?”

Steady, I tell myself. “I was hit by a car?”

“A red Nissan Altima, to be exact,” the woman who's supposedly my girlfriend says. I swivel my head to look at her. “You don't remember, Nick?” she says, squeezing my already-battered hand.

I shake my head. “I remember a mountain—and falling—and …” My voice trails off as I see the complete bewilderment on both of their faces, the lack of recognition. “I guess it was a dream,” I conclude. It didn't feel like a dream to me, but right now I seem to have bigger problems than figuring out how I wound up in this hospital bed. I look from one of my attendants' faces to the other and see worry plastered all over their features, though Tanya is mostly managing to conceal it under layers of professionalism. “Never mind,” I say to both of them.

“What's the last thing you remember?” Tanya asks me.

I think back, but come up against the same brick wall I encountered earlier. Actually, more than a brick wall: It resembles a void. When I try to picture anything before I swam to consciousness in the hospital, there's just—nothing.

I say as much to Tanya, who tells me, “That's not so much to worry about,” in her best Reassuring Nurse tone. “A lot of times, after a trauma to the head, it's not unusual to forget the events leading up to it. Your body's way of protecting itself.”

I grit my teeth, swallow hard. “No,” I say. “When I say nothing, I mean—nothing. I don't remember the accident, I don't remember anything before the accident. I don't know who you are”—I gesture in the direction of the redhead—”or where I live or what I do for a living. Everything is—well, it's just blank.”

Silence falls.

“That's not normal, is it?” I say to Tanya. “I mean, this doesn't usually happen, right?”

“Not usually, no,” Tanya says, her good cheer lost.

“You don't remember me?” the redhead says. She sounds shocked, which I guess makes sense. I have a moment of irritation—isn't it more significant that I don't remember
myself
? Then again, maybe I've known her for a long time. I force myself to be polite.

“Sorry,” I answer. The silence endures. She drops my hand.

After a bit I say, “This sounds like a weird request, but can I have a mirror?”

The redhead turns away and fishes in her purse. She hands me a compact and I flip it open, peer into it. There I am: tousled shock of jet-black hair with serious bedhead, startled blue eyes, truculent set to my jaw, which is covered in dark stubble. There's a gauze bandage on one of my cheeks, and another one on my forehead. It's creepy, but nothing resonates. This could be anyone's face. It doesn't feel like mine.

I close the compact and hand it back to the redhead. “What's your name?”

“Grace,” she says. Nope. Nothing.

“Nicholas, do you know what year it is?” Tanya asks.

I flail about in the empty room that is my mind. A date appears and I grab at it, tell her. Apparently I am right, because she smiles.

“Very good. How about the date?”

I think hard, but only the month comes to me. “June something?”

“June eighth.

What's your full name?”

Just like that, the small measure of self-confidence I've accumulated is gone. I try to think beyond “Nicholas” and come up blank, yet again. In the hoarse croak that is my voice for the moment, I say: “I don't know.”

“Sullivan,” Grace says. Her long hair brushes my arm as she leans over me. “Nicholas Sullivan.”

“Nice name,” I say, trying to hold the panic at bay with a small attempt at humor. “Am I Greek, or Irish, or what?”

“Both,” says Grace.

“Ah.” The silence stretches out for a bit, and I think of a thousand questions I want to ask. It's hard to tell which one is the most pressing. Finally, I settle on an immediate need. “Could I have a glass of water, please?”

“Sure,” Grace says. “I'll get it.” And off she goes.

I look down at my hands. One of them has a needle in the back of it—an IV, I assume, since I've been out of it and not eating, and for the pain meds, too. “Can this come out?” I ask Tanya.

“Let me just clear it with your doctor. But I don't see why not, now that you're awake.”

“How long?” I ask, gesturing toward my head.

“I'm sure that Dr. Perry will request a psych consult. They'll be able to tell you more,” she says. “Global amnesia like this isn't anything I have experience with. I wish there was more I could say. I know you must be very scared.”

“I'm not,” I say. “What I am is … confused.”

“Of course you are.” She pats the hand that doesn't have the IV. “Let me page your doctor now, and we'll see what we can find out.”

Dr. Perry arrives ten minutes later. She is a statuesque black woman, with skin the color of burnished mahogany, a complex braided hairdo, and a businesslike manner. “You're awake,” she says in an accent that I identify as West Indian—Jamaican, maybe. Apparently my geographic knowledge hasn't taken a hike along with my sense of self, which is an interesting tidbit to consider. “How do you feel?”

“A little achy, but okay,” I tell her. “The thing is, I can't remember anything. I don't remember the accident, for sure, or my name, or anything about me, or”—I gesture at Grace, who has just made her way back into the room with a bottle of Dasani—”her, either.”

“Sometimes this happens, after a blow to the head. It's called post-traumatic amnesia, and it usually doesn't last that long.” She smiles at me, in an attempt to be comforting. “Give yourself some time.”

“How much time?” My voice cracks. “Am I supposed to wander around like Rip Van Winkle, just waiting to figure out who I am?”

“Rip Van Winkle, huh?” The smile is still pasted on. “I see you remember something.”

“He knew the year,” Tanya volunteers. “And who was president.”

“Hmmm. Nicholas, Tanya may have asked you some of these questions before, but I'm going to do it again, in a more formal fashion. It's called the Galveston Orientation and Amnesia Test. Are you ready?”

“Sure,” I say. “Shoot.”

She asks me my name (which I only know because they told me what it was), where I was born, where I live, where I am now, how I got to the hospital, the last thing I remember, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The only information I can come up with is nonpersonal in nature—the month and the year. “Everything else is just blank,” I tell her. “Like it's been erased.”

“All right,” she says. “Don't worry. Give yourself some time.”

“You said that already,” I tell her.

She smiles. “I see your short-term memory is working just fine.”

I shift my focus to a problem I can solve. “Could you please disconnect me from all of this stuff?” I point to the heart monitor, the IV, with my free hand. “I feel like the Bionic Man.”

“I don't see why not,” she says after a quick check of my vital signs. She gives the A-OK to Tanya, who sets about freeing me. “Would you like to get up and walk around?” she asks after I've been liberated.

“That would be great,” I tell her. “Can I?”

“Sure. Just take it easy. You were out for a while, there.” She stands next to the bed while I sit up gingerly and swing my legs over the side. “Sit there for a minute,” she says. “Let your blood pressure adjust.”

So I sit until she tells me I can get up. Grace hovers as I get to my feet. I want to tell her to leave me alone, but I catch myself: She is my girlfriend, after all. It's natural that she'd want to make sure I'm okay. It's not her fault I'm so irritable. I give her a smile as I boost myself to my feet, where I stand for a moment, take one step, then another. I'm shaky, and my head and ribs throb, but otherwise I'm fine. “How far can I go?” I ask Dr. Perry. “And when can I get out of here?”

“You can walk as far as you feel like. And as for when you can leave the hospital, I'd like to keep you one more night, for observation. Tomorrow morning, if you feel fine physically, you can go home.”

“What about this?” I gesture toward my head.

“I'm going to call in a psych consult to have a look at you, make sure there isn't anything else going on. If the consult doesn't turn anything up, then we'll just have to wait and see. Try not to worry too much.”

“Easy for you to say,” I mutter. But off I trot like a good boy, Grace tagging along.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Like a stranger in a strange land,” I say. Now she's looking at me funny, so I elaborate: “You know, Robert Heinlein. Or maybe Iron Maiden, depending on your point of view.”

She's staring at me like I just produced a rabbit from a hat. “How can you remember that stuff, but not your own name?”

“You're asking the wrong person,” I tell her wearily.

We make a few circuits of the hospital floor before Nurse Tanya flags me down to let me know that the psych consult is ready for me. So off I go for more tests, which I fail with flying colors.

“God, I wish I had a cigarette,” I say after the psychiatrist leaves, mostly to myself but partially to Grace, who is sitting in the chair next to my bed.

She gives me a perplexed look. “You don't smoke,” she says. “You never have.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.” I'm not sure what to make of this bit of information, so I blow it off. “Maybe I should start,” I tell her, and she laughs.

“Probably not,” she says.

“Tell me about me,” I ask her.

“Hmmm. This is strange. Okay. Like you already know, your name is Nicholas Sullivan. You live here, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and you teach social studies at New Hanover High. But it's summer now, so you're on vacation.”

“How old am I?”

“Thirty-three,” she says.

“And how long have you and I been together?”

“Two years,” she says. “Two years last month.”

“Wow. Pretty serious, huh?”

I mean it as a joke, but she lowers her head, staring down at the floor as if I've hurt her feelings. Just when I'm about to apologize—it must feel shitty to have your significant other act completely clueless about what you mean to them—she lifts her head and looks me in the eyes. “We're planning to get married, actually,” she says.

“Married?” My voice cracks in surprise. I look at her left hand, which is resting on the bed next to me. “You're not wearing a ring.”

“We haven't gotten around to making it official. It was—well, it just happened, really.”

“Wow,” I say. “Okay. Can we take this slow? Start at the beginning. How did we meet?”

“I'm a violinist,” she says. “I play in a rock band. You came to one of my concerts.”

“Is that what you do for a living?”

“I wish. No, I'm a graphic designer. I work for a small company.”

I file that away for future reference. “You said I teach social studies, right?”

“Yes.”

“So my degree is in … what?”

“Political science, from Chapel Hill. And then you have a master's in education from UNC Washington.”