by Ronald Malfi
“Not very,” I say, and this seems to be the end of our small talk.
He takes x-rays of my skull and we wait in his office for the x-rays to download to his laptop computer. There are baseball trophies on the wall. A lot of them. I wonder what type of doctor keeps baseball trophies in the office.
When the x-rays download, he brings them up, nearly life-size, on his monitor. I do not need him to tell me what I am looking it. It is pretty obvious.
“Metal plate,” he says anyway. “That whole white square there. Looks about six by six inches, if I had to guess.”
“Jesus,” says Olivia, her voice small.
“This comes as a surprise?” James Lucy asks, his thick eyebrows rising above the frames of his glasses. He looks straight at me. “That there is a metal plate in your head?”
“Surprise,” I say, staring at the monitor.
“Didn’t you know?” Lucy says, incredulous.
“Do you think we can x-ray my leg, too?” I roll up my pant leg to reveal a second scar.
“Jeez,” says Lucy. He tries out a sad little laugh, but I can tell he’s already too uncomfortable. Maybe he thinks we’re pulling one over on him. Maybe Olivia thinks so, too, because she’s looking at me now like I’ve just dropped out of the sky.
The x-ray of my leg shows a second metal plate, narrower than the one in my head, affixed to the bone with steel screws.
“Well, I guess that mystery’s solved,” I say.
“I’m—wait, I’m confused.” Lucy’s eyes, magnified to dinner plates behind the lenses of his glasses, volley between me and Olivia. “You didn’t know about this? You didn’t know that stuff was in you?”
Pulling on my coat, I say, “Nope. And in fact, I’m sort of relieved.”
Lucy frowns. He will be forever trapped in disbelief. He says, “Relieved? Why?”
“Because until now,” I tell him, “I thought the government had a tracking device implanted in my brain.”
Olivia and I go to the door.
“I should probably draw blood, too,” he says. “You look like shit. You might be coming down with something.”
“No thanks,” I tell him.
“I’ll call you, Liv,” Lucy promises as we leave, but Olivia doesn’t answer.
Christmas draws nearer. Beneath a darkening sky, an orange sodium glow radiates behind the buildings on the horizon. Again, I find myself wandering up and down the streets, passing bus stop after bus stop. I am practically a regular now. Even the bums recognize me.
I am freezing, too, and my feet have gone numb. Here, the streets are brightly lit against the night. Couples, bundled against the cold, hurry up and down the avenue, their heads tilted slightly down, contrails of vapor flagging out to the sides of their heads.
The buses have stopped running at this late hour, but I locate the final stop nonetheless. The final stop. The first stop. Depending on the time of day; depending on your destination. I lean against the bus stop sign, wiggling my toes in hopes of working the feeling back into them, the illumination of a post office directly at my back. While I stand there, the post office lights wink off just as a Thai restaurant glows brightly across the street. I smell coffee and various ethnic foods and am aware—above all else, I am aware—of the way pedestrians are glaring at me now as they walk by. Somehow, in the passage of hours, of days, I have gone from being an invisible ghost to a visible derelict. My gaping collar and sallow, heavily-cheekboned face frightens them. The Auschwitz Jew leers at me from every reflective surface. My twin from an alternate universe stares up at me from every foul-smelling puddle in the street. The way I lean against the bus stop sign screams danger-danger-danger. I am like a beacon out at sea; it is suddenly impossible to not see me.
Yet the girl walks right into me.
“Oh!” She is flustered, high strung, shocked at her own carelessness. “I’m—oh—”
“It’s okay.”
She has just come from the post office. Her uniform still on, the office’s keys still clenched in one small, white fist, she executes a single step backward, still staring up at me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”
“It comes and goes,” I say, grinning, but my hideous face probably only frightens her.
She isn’t moving. Frozen, staring at me, I keep waiting for her to say something more. Or at least for her jaw to drop open. Or for her to run screaming down the street. But nothing happens. She just stands there gazing up at me. Suddenly, I am a comet streaking across the night sky, the time-elapsed blossoming of a wild orchid. I am the crystallization of ice. Judging from her stare, I am that beautiful to watch.
“Take care,” I say, and turn my back to her.
I get about a half-dozen paces down the street until I hear her say, “Wait.” She says, “Stop.”
I turn, surprised to see her closing the distance between us. Now it is my turn to stare, speechless and dumbfounded.
She stops directly in front of me. Hers is a small, white, narrow face. She has large, beseeching eyes, very dark, and a mouth so small it is a mere pink notch beneath her pointy little nose. My memory loss has rendered me unable to differentiate between beauty and ugliness—I have no memory of association, nothing to compare the two—but I am aware of a nonspecific helplessness in her that touches some animal emotion deep within me.
I flinch when she brings up one hand. She pauses momentarily…then gently grazes the side of my face with two fingers.
“You,” she says. The impossibility of this encounter is evident in her tone. “It’s you. You’re alive.”
FIFTEEN
I open my mouth to speak but nothing happens. The girl—the woman—does not try to speak, either. Not at first. Instead, she touches my shoulder, sort of prodding it. As if to make certain I’m not made of vapor.
“I’m real,” I assure her while second-guessing myself at the same time. “I’m not a ghost.”
Embarrassed, she withdraws her hand as if she’s been burned. “I’m sorry.”
“Do I know you? Or…do you know me?”
“I’m Nicole Quinland. I work over there.” And she moves a hand in the direction of the darkened post office. “I saw…I mean—I’m sorry…” Flustered, she laughs. She is like a little bird. “This is strange for me. I apologize. It’s just, I’ve dreamt about you.”
“I think we should talk,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, almost too quickly. “I’m just across the street…”
I follow her to the shell of an old four-story tenement on Madison. In silence, we enter the building, the air stagnant and musty, and climb the risers to the fourth floor.
Her apartment consists of two rooms—a main living area where the windows overlook the Baltimore School for the Arts and a bedroom that, what with its unpainted walls and empty shelves, looks hardly lived in. The silence between us is a comfortable one. I get the sense that we are both exhausted. There is no pressure to maintain dialogue. Not here, not now. It is like walking through a dream.
“Go ahead,” she says, her first words to me since coming in off the street. “You can sit down.”
I shrug out of my coat and spill onto a poorly upholstered sofa by the windows.
“You want coffee?” she calls to me from the kitchen nook. “I’ll brew some.”
“Sounds good.”
I watch as she fills the coffee filter and pours water into the percolator. There are framed pictures of different cats on an end table. Watercolor landscapes hang on the walls in simple frames.
When she’s done prepping the coffee, she turns and stares at me from across the room with both her arms down at her sides.
“What’s your name?” she says.
“Don’t you know who I am?”
“Sort of. But I don’t know your name.”
“Neither do I.”
She watches me intently. Perhaps she is regretting her decision to invite me in. Finally, after the sound of my own heartbeat becomes too loud, she says,
“You look different. I didn’t recognize you at first. You’re thinner, much thinner. And your hair…”
“How do you know me?”
“I was there when you had the accident. I was working in the post office that day.” She shuffles from one foot to the other. In her little postal uniform and flat chest she looks like a cardboard cutout of a woman. “You probably don’t remember me.”
“You have no idea,” I say. “What accident?”
“The one with the bus,” she says. Then her eyes light up. “Wait,” she says quickly. “I have something to show you.”
Before I can answer, she darts into the empty little bedroom—I can see the blank walls and a conga-line of saddle shoes at the foot of the bed through the open door—and I can hear her rummaging through her belongings.
Across the room the coffee machine steams and gurgles.
When she returns she is holding a dark green album in her arms. As if reluctant to get too close to me, she approaches and balances the album over one arm of the sofa. I pick up the album, set it in my lap, and stare at it as if it just fell from the sky.
“Go ahead,” she says. “Open it.”
I open it to find a single newspaper clipping pasted to the first page. There is no picture, just a few lines of text. The headline reads, simple enough, baltimore man struck by city bus and refers to me as an “unidentified Baltimore man” throughout the article. As in, unidentified man was rushed to University of Maryland for immediate medical attention. As in, unidentified man sustained multiple injuries.
“I saw it happen,” she says.
“I don’t believe this.” My voice is hardly a whisper. Already I am thinking of the metal plate in my head, in my leg…
“You don’t remember?”
“Nicole, I don’t remember anything at all. Please,” I say, “help me. Please.”
The coffee machine farts and Nicole Quinland turns to look at it. “Oh,” she utters, and retrieves two mugs. She fills them and carries them across the room, setting them down on the wooden chest in front of the sofa. Awkwardly, she remains standing. I fight off the urge to yell at her, to beg her to tell me what the hell happened.
“I don’t typically bring strange men to my apartment,” she says. “I just thought you should know that.”
“Tell me about the accident.”
“It’s just what it says there in the article. You were hit by a bus.”
“When?” The article is clipped from a larger page. There is no date on it.
“A while ago. Sometime late last year. I don’t remember, exactly.”
I am touching the scar at the back of my head. I remember nothing about an accident. “I was—I mean, I was hit by a bus?” It is impossible to fathom.
“It happened just outside the post office. I remember you because you came in to deliver a package. I helped you with the paperwork and rang you up at the register. Then you left. You stood outside waiting for the bus. I saw you out there when I came out—I was just locking up the store, just like tonight—and the next thing I know I hear the bus tires squeal and people started shouting. You…you don’t remember any of this?”
“No. Please…what else?”
“The bus hit you. It threw you like twenty feet.” Her eyes widen with the retelling. “I’m sorry,” she says, pausing. “I’ve dreamt about seeing it over and over. It took a long time for me to forget about it.”
“Then what happened to me?”
“An ambulance eventually showed up. Cops, too. Some people gave statements. I didn’t. I stood against the building and just watched everything happen, but I couldn’t give a statement.” She is concentrating hard now, thinking back. “You were moving, too, when the ambulance picked you up. Like, spastic, I guess. I didn’t know if you were dead or alive.” She takes a breath. “You were thrown out of your shoes, too. It all looked so real that it all looked so fake.”
I take this all in. Looking down, I stare at the newspaper article. Two splotches of water drop onto the paper. I realize I am crying.
“I thought maybe you died. But I couldn’t be sure. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it, either. I saved the article.”
“You saved the article…” It is hardly a whisper.
“Oh, I have all sorts of articles.” She says this in such a youthful fashion, I suddenly question her age. She is a little girl showing off her favorite doll collection. “From when the Twin Towers went down all the way back to the Kennedy assassination. I found the Kennedy ones in an old newspaper in the library. I cut it out, stole it. I collect them. Articles.”
And I am turning slowly through the pages of the album. Indeed, this young woman has collected some morbid news articles—of car accidents and pile-ups on the beltway, of house fires and boating accidents, of stabbings and shootings, of the tractor trailer recently turned over in the Harbor Tunnel.
“Bus accident,” I say, and close the album.
“You really don’t remember any of it? Not at all?”
“No.”
“And you don’t know your name?”
“No.”
“But this happened a long time ago.”
“Okay.” Because I can think of nothing else to say, I only repeat myself: “Okay.”
“Well,” Nicole says, “I guess you survived. I always wondered.”
I wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand and say, “In a manner of speaking, yes, I guess I did.”
After a while Nicole becomes more comfortable and sits beside me on the sofa. We drink coffee until the pot is empty, which prompts her to brew a fresh one. There is nothing more she can tell me about the bus accident—or, for that matter, about me in general. Still, it feels good talking to her, like talking to an old friend, and I do not want to leave.
“And you can’t remember the date of the accident?” I press her. “I mean, approximately?”
“No. It was last year sometime, like I said. But I’m guessing.”
“What about the package? What did I mail?”
“I don’t know. It was in a box. A brown box.”
“Who did I mail it to?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Is there—do you have—would there be some record of it at your office?” I ask, hopeful. “Some sort of inventory list?”
“No,” she says, dejected. “Sorry.”
“And that was it? That was the one and only time you saw me?”
“Yes.”
“Some memory,” I say.
She looks sad. “What about your memory? Have you been this way since the accident? Because that sounds impossible. Horrible, even…”
“I’m not sure,” I say, and tell her about waking up on the city bus earlier this month. I tell her about the address written on my hand and even show it to her now. It is still there. I feel it is important to rewrite the address every morning I wake up and after every shower. “Because you never know,” I tell her.
“How sad.”
“Is it?”
“What if you have a family out there worrying about you, looking for you? And here you are and you don’t even know it.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Really? What have you been thinking of all this time?”
“Mostly about myself.” It sounds pathetic now, speaking it aloud. “I have a feeling it’s cyclical, too—that it keeps happening over and over again.”
“The forgetting?”
I explain about Sister Eleanor at the church and how I’d apparently visited her over the past year, giving her different names. And how I can’t remember any of it. Also, I tell her about the old woman at the apartment office and how she accused me—or someone like me—of coming into the office a month earlier requesting similar information.
“Sounds like you’re following the same footsteps over and over,” Nicole says. Something in her tone tells me she is uncomfortable with all this. “Sounds like you keep trying to find the answers, but keep forgetting it all o
ver again in the process.”
“But why?”
She bites her lower lip and raises her eyebrows. “I guess that’s the question.”
“Yeah…”
“Maybe it starts over once you figure everything out.”
Her words astound me, render me silent. Finally, after what seems like a decade, I say, “Like once I find out who I am, I forget all over again?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just timed, you know? A medical condition. Like you’ve got a month or whatever until your mind wipes itself clean. And you start all over from scratch.”
“God,” I utter, “I don’t know if I can deal with that…”
“You won’t know it. Each time would be like the first time, I would think.”
“It’s scary,” I marvel, “to think how many times I may have done this already. Like I’m wasting my life.”
“But you don’t know it.”
“Now I do.”
“Then,” she says, “maybe you’ll start forgetting again.”
The thought makes me weak. I am exhausted just at the concept. I cannot do this much longer. And she watches me as if preparing to witness the vanishing of my memories all over again.
My voice paper-thin, I say, “What if I wake up tomorrow and I don’t remember any of this? What if I have to start from scratch again?” I am busy thinking of that first night, and how I collapsed on the landing of my apartment building. “I can’t do it…”
“But you won’t know it,” she says again. “You can do it because you won’t know it. It could be ten times or a hundred. Or just twice. It won’t matter.”
“Damn it,” I say. “I didn’t think of something.”
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t think to write this all down, to get a notebook and write everything down.”
“It’s not too late,” she says simply. “I mean, we can do that here. Tonight. If you want.”
Before I can respond, she is up and rooting around back in her bedroom. She returns with a spiral-bound notebook and clutching a handful of pens.
“There’s so much,” I say.
“Begin at the beginning,” Nicole suggests. “What’s the first thing you remember?”