Dying to Remember

by Glen Apseloff

  He touched the normal skin of his neck, then the smooth connective tissue that had formed the scar. It was pink but well healed, probably a couple of weeks old. What on earth had happened to him?

  He read the note on the mirror:

  Don’t panic. Your ability to form new memories has been impaired (but not completely ablated) since you ate contaminated mussels in Toronto on November 22. Don’t expect to remember anything from yesterday, and don’t expect to retain new information for more than a few minutes. Today is December 16, your second day back home. Elizabeth was murdered on 11/26—shot in the foyer—and you’re going to figure out who did it.

  He stopped reading. Elizabeth had been murdered! He pictured her lying in a pool of blood, and he imagined the police taking photographs, then stuffing her into a body bag to be carted off to the morgue—alone, without him. He hadn’t even gone to her funeral. Instead he’d spent days, maybe weeks, lying in a hospital bed, probably comatose, certainly brain damaged. And now he was going to solve her murder? He read on:

  Last night you had dinner with Shirley, Elizabeth’s friend. She got rid of her annoying boyfriend. You agreed to call her sometime today, maybe for dinner again. You also spoke to Claire, Elizabeth’s attorney friend. Consider meeting her at the cemetery when you visit Elizabeth.

  The cemetery? He didn’t even know where Elizabeth had been buried. He would have to call Claire or Shirley to find out.

  He read the remainder of the note:

  At 2:00 you have an appointment with Dr. Parks, a psychiatrist in the clinic building.

  Yesterday the police questioned you regarding Elizabeth’s death, and they told you she was pregnant. On the refrigerator you have notes about this and details of the murder. Elizabeth had an affair shortly before she died. Don’t get too worked up about it because you cheated on her, too. You moved out (to the Ritz) almost a week before the conference.

  In the front right pocket of your pants is a list of things to do today. Keep this with you at all times.

  You slept with your watch on last night, and you need to do this every night so you don’t misplace it. You must not lose your watch because it reminds you to look at the list in your pocket.

  When you’ve finished reading this letter, leave it on the bathroom mirror. This evening write another note to replace it.

  Have a good day.

  “Have a good day?” What kind of mood had he been in to write that? Elizabeth was dead. She’d cheated on him. He’d cheated on her. And he had brain damage that could condemn him to spend the rest of his life trapped in the present, living moment to moment with no link to the recent past.

  He remembered as a child in first grade walking through an autumn fog on his way to school early one morning. He was shivering, not just from the cold. What had always been so familiar, now seemed alien. Trees and houses receded into the mist, dissolving into a gray shroud. As the fog grew thicker, the sidewalk behind him disappeared after only a few steps, and nearby objects faded only moments after they appeared.

  Now his memory was like that, events fading into a mist. And once they entered the mist, they wouldn’t come back. His notes could serve as a surrogate memory, but they couldn’t help him remember, only retrieve information. Retrieve only to forget again. A never-ending cycle.

  “Je ne le comprend pas,” he said, speaking French to assure himself that at least his intellect remained intact. He repeated the sentence in English. “I don’t understand it.” Yet he did understand, all too clearly. Elizabeth had been dead for weeks, and he would have to rely on his notes to relearn this every day and to try to figure out who’d killed her. The notes would have to be brief, only the essentials, like details of Elizabeth’s murder in a condensed format so he could see the whole picture at once. He would need to be organized, and he would need to make an effort not to dwell on the same things day after day.

  Having resolved to move forward this way, he got ready to take a shower. He placed his clothes on a chair beside the bathroom door, where they’d be in plain sight afterward, and laid his watch conspicuously on top. Forgetting to put that on after his shower would mean losing the link to his list of things to do, and only the list stood between him and chaos.

  He closed the bathroom door and stepped into the shower. The hot spray pelted his face and head, drumming in his ears and running in rivulets over his shoulders and down his back. As it streamed off him and into the drain, he hoped his anxieties would follow, washed away like silt, and with them, thoughts of Elizabeth dying, alone in a pool of blood.

  He closed his eyes and pictured her on their honeymoon, in the hotel on the island of Maui. Moments after arriving at their suite, she came up to him while he was starting to unpack. She took his face in her hands and kissed him softly on the lips, once, twice, then longer and harder, with a passion that took his breath away. The intensity in her eyes fueled it, a look of omniscience and desire that said, “I can have anything, but I want only you.” And he wanted only her—emotionally, intellectually, physically. Only her.

  As thoughts of his honeymoon came back to him, so, too, did memories of other shared moments, streaming through his consciousness, first in a trickle, then in a torrent.

  With them came sadness. And regret.

  Chapter 28

  After his shower, Barnes read through his notes again. They looked vaguely familiar, like something he’d written a long time ago. Since his last reading, the only fact that had stayed with him was Elizabeth’s murder.

  According to his notes, Shirley was being a much-needed friend, and she’d gotten rid of her intolerable boyfriend who had ruined their evening at the Union Oyster House. He would call her later. Right now all he could think about was Elizabeth. Why would anyone want to kill her? And then he thought about another possibility. Maybe that hadn’t been the plan. Maybe he’d been targeted but something had gone wrong, and Elizabeth had died because of it. This would mean that someone would need a motive for killing him. Plenty of people disliked him, but wanting him dead was another matter.

  What could be a possible motive? His research with Denny? The two of them had been working on preventing recurrences of atherosclerosis following coronary-artery bypass surgery. Many patients spend sixty or seventy years building up plaque in their coronary arteries until the constricted vessels have to be surgically replaced, but after the procedure, the grafted vessels become blocked in only five years. For decades researchers had been trying to figure out why the new grafts clog so quickly, and Barnes had joined Denny in the race for an answer. Admittedly it was a slow race—the eligibility criteria for the study were so restrictive that enrolling patients was taking more than twice as long as they had originally projected—but could somebody now be trying to keep them from completing that clinical trial?

  It seemed an unlikely motive for murder. Common sense dictated that Elizabeth’s death more likely had something to do with her research with Shirley on the GBF-complex-coated screws. But if someone had wanted to stop that research, they should have killed Shirley, too, and they shouldn’t have waited so long. The screws would almost certainly be approved by the Food and Drug Administration within the next month. Killing one of the researchers after the project had already been completed made no sense, and it wouldn’t alter the flow of money, except that Elizabeth’s share of the profits would now go to him.

  Given that his own research was a work in progress, the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that his atherosclerosis study could be a possible target. But if someone had wanted to kill him, why hadn’t they also tried to get rid of Denny? After all, either one of them could do the research without the other.

  Still wondering about that, Barnes left home to drive to work. After being away for the better part of a month, he knew he wouldn’t have any patients to see or even charts to review. No doubt Denny had taken care of everything, including collecting the fees. Barnes didn’t care. At least the patients had been treated by a skilled surgeon.
Now he just wanted to get to the hospital and see how everything was going, see whether it still felt like a second home. He missed the coffee in the surgeons’ lounge and the nurses in the ORs, but most of all he missed the exhilaration of surgery—holding a beating heart in his hands and literally giving new life to patients. He couldn’t wait to do that again.

  The sun still hadn’t risen as Barnes drove through the city streets on his way to the hospital. He took Storrow Drive along the winding Charles River, past the Harvard Bridge and then the Longfellow Bridge. Traffic was light at this hour. Setting his cruise control, he looked to the left at the placid water separating Cambridge from Boston. Robert F. Kennedy once said that when you fall into the Charles River, you don’t drown; you dissolve. With continued cleanup efforts, the Charles might someday be safe for swimming, but Barnes would always think of it as it was now, just as he would think of everything, frozen in time.

  The snow from the previous day had melted, leaving the road shiny black like the river. At the hospital he eased his Mercedes into his reserved parking space in the main physicians’ lot, appreciating that amenity more than he’d ever anticipated. Thanks to assigned parking, he wouldn’t have to worry about misplacing his car.

  Shaking from the cold, he hurried along the cement walkway to the Whittaker Building, the main entrance of the eight-building complex. A bitter wind pressed his overcoat against his legs and blew his hair into disarray. The sun had finally risen, but it wasn’t showing itself.

  He entered the main lobby, and a blast of warm air enveloped him, carrying with it Christmas Muzak piped in from ceiling speakers. In front of him stood the information desk, staffed by four women and decorated with holly. None of the receptionists greeted him. He’d never paid attention to anyone at the information desk, and now he realized they’d never paid attention to him, either.

  He walked past Christmas decorations and down the hallway to the Braddigan Building, then rode the elevator to the eighth floor, the surgical wing. There, the nurses, technicians, and unit clerks all knew him.

  “Welcome back, Dr. Barnes,” a couple of them chimed. Normally they avoided him. He had a reputation for being brusque and hard to please, mainly because he expected everyone to give his patients the highest priority. And when they did, he seldom thanked them. But why should he? His demands were for the patients; the patients should thank the staff.

  He continued down the hallway and passed through a doorway marked “Restricted Area. Authorized Personnel Only.” Beyond that, he walked down a short corridor. To the right was the entrance to the men’s locker room, the only locker room. Female surgeons were relegated to the nurses’ changing room. They were permitted in the lounge, but most avoided it. The room had the aura of a men’s club, and the women didn’t feel welcome. Even Elizabeth had seldom set foot in there.

  Barnes stuck his head into the locker room. He didn’t know when Denny’s first surgery was scheduled to begin, so he didn’t know where to look for him—the locker room, the lounge, or the OR.

  The locker room was smaller than the one at the gym where Barnes worked out, with only three rows of benches and lockers. He looked down the first row, toward Denny’s locker, but Denny wasn’t there. Barnes recognized other surgeons getting changed, but he turned and left before they noticed him. In the lounge an OR schedule would be posted, and that would tell him where to find his friend.

  He entered the lounge at the far corner, near the coffeemaker. Straight ahead on the opposite wall stood the door leading to the operating rooms and the recovery room. Barnes had walked through that doorway more times than he could count, without ever really thinking about it, but now he eyed the metal door with uncertainty. It was a passage back to his normal way of life; yet somehow it had changed, become more imposing, more of a barrier than an entryway. Now it might be off-limits.

  Even if the hospital administrators allowed him to continue performing surgeries, he wondered whether he could maintain his train of thought throughout an operation. The types of procedures he performed always took hours, and although one step logically followed the next, every operation was different. How would he be able to keep track of all the details, like where every sponge had been placed? The nurses do sponge and needle counts at the end of each operation, but the chief surgeon is responsible for keeping track of them during the surgery. Of course he would always have assistants, but would that be enough?

  He turned his attention to the interior of the lounge. It was a large room with two couches, a conference table and chairs, and two vending machines. One of the couches spanned half a wall, and the other stood near the center of the room, facing a television mounted on the wall. Four surgeons sat in the lounge—two chatting on the couch in the center of the room, a third watching television in a nearby chair, and the fourth reading a newspaper at the conference table. They all wore scrubs and head covers, and the two on the couch also wore paper shoe covers. Surgical masks dangled around their necks.

  Barnes poured himself a cup of coffee, dumped in powdered creamer, and stirred the concoction with a wooden tongue blade. Then he dropped the tongue blade into the wastebasket and headed across the room. The place smelled of cigarette smoke. The smokers, himself included, usually sat in the far corner near an ineffective portable filter, and the other surgeons tolerated them, grudgingly. Now, like those other surgeons, Barnes found the odor unappealing.

  “Hey, Christopher! Welcome back.” It was the surgeon watching television, Ian Williams. Williams was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, or ENT man. Although only a couple of years younger than Barnes, he had a mop of curly hair and a boyish face that made him look more youthful than some of the residents in training. He also had a reputation for being the best, especially with throats. He and Barnes spoke only infrequently, although Williams was always cordial. The man got along with everyone.

  Barnes nodded to him. “Thanks.”

  The other surgeon sitting alone, Nate Billings, the lone black member of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, put down his newspaper and acknowledged Chris. The two of them rarely spoke. Barnes never felt comfortable with him. He’d always had the impression that Billings wasn’t up to speed; he was too tentative, too reserved. On the surgical highway, the man puttered along in a golf cart.

  Barnes nodded at Billings, then pulled up a chair next to Williams. The other two surgeons on the couch kept talking. Barnes didn’t know either of them, although he’d seen them around.

  “Is Houston here?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” said Williams. “His first case isn’t until eight thirty. How have you been?”

  “All right. Actually shitty, but I don’t want to talk about it. I tell you, it feels great to be back.”

  “Yeah, well, you should have come in ten minutes earlier. One of the guys brought in a dozen doughnuts. They went fast. Billings over there just had the last one.”

  Yet another reason to dislike Billings. “Well, at least he didn’t drink all the coffee.” Barnes took a sip of the scalding brew. “What’s on the tube?”

  “Nothing. I’m just killing time. Got about ten minutes. Then I have to do a T and A.”

  Barnes remembered relatively little about ENT surgery, but he knew that a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy was as routine as getting an oil change. “You ENT guys must be really stressed by all those complicated life-and-death procedures,” he said.

  Williams grinned. “We leave the big organs like hearts for you old-timers who can’t handle the more intricate structures.”

  Just then the door behind them swung open. Barnes felt it more than heard it. Then, “There’s the man!”

  Denny Houston. Dressed in street clothes and with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, he stopped at the coffee pot to pour himself a cup. He took the cigarette from his lips and said, “How goes it?”

  “Good.” Barnes went over to join him. “How about you?”

  “Can’t complain.” He took a drag on his cigarett
e.

  “It’s good to see you, Denny.”

  “Good to see you, too. Can’t talk long, though. Someone else’s patient canceled in OR six, so I’m moving up to eight o’clock. Got an aortic aneurysm to repair on a guy named Castleman. That name ring a bell?”

  “Castleman, Gross, and Meyers?” Barnes guessed.

  “You got it. If this guy croaks, his partners are going to sue the pants off me. But at least there’ll be one less lawyer in the world.”

  “Who’s first assisting?”

  “What’s his name—Willard, the chief resident.”

  Barnes nodded. “You know, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands wet this morning. If you want to tell Willard to stay on the floor, I could scrub with you.”

  “Thanks for the offer, buddy, but we’re all set.” He flicked ashes off his cigarette into the wastebasket.

  “Uh-huh.” Barnes felt his face flush. Houston had just chosen a resident over him. A resident! “Listen, can we step into the hallway for a minute?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Houston snuffed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and dropped the butt into the trash can. Coffee in hand, he headed down the corridor out into the hallway of the main floor.

  Barnes dumped his coffee into the trash and followed.

  “What’s on your mind?” asked Houston.

  They turned away from the nurses’ station. “You just chose a resident over me,” said Barnes. “Are you serious?”

  Denny sipped his coffee. “He’s assigned to the case.”

  “Look, I need to get back into the OR. That’s where I belong.” When Houston didn’t say anything, Barnes added, “If I can team up with somebody like you, I’ll be fine. I just need to get back into a routine. If you take me into your practice, you won’t be losing anything because you’ll get all my patients. I just need someone I trust in the OR with me, for part of the surgery, to make sure I remember everything.”

  Houston cleared his throat. “Chris, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a liability. What happens if you forget what you’re doing halfway through a surgery? What if you do a double instead of a triple bypass? Or a triple instead of a double?”