The fluorescent lights above his cubicle flicker just before his personal phone rings again. This time he decides to answer. He leaves his workstation and looks for some privacy by the water cooler. On his way, he nods to coworkers, whose names he can’t quite remember, with polite acknowledgment.
“Hello? Who’s this?” he says to the phone.
Some hesitation on the other end followed by a soft clearing of the throat. A woman’s voice. “You, you know me,” she says in a faltering tone. “We met one week ago, at the conference.”
“Hm. What’s your name?”
“We… we spent some time together. We… got to know each other.”
“I don’t think so. Are you sure you got the right number? I don’t remember you. Not at all,” he says. But there’s a lack of conviction in his voice that betrays him.
“You know me. I know you know me. You know my voice.”
“I said I don’t.”
She doesn’t reply to that.
“What do you want?” he says.
“We need to meet. After hours.”
“Whatever for?”
“We need to talk. Well, I need to talk to you.”
“Okay. Talk.”
“In person.”
“This is absurd. I don’t know you and you won’t tell me what you want to talk about.”
“I’ll tell you about last weekend. You can’t remember, can you? Just hear me out. You know my voice. You do know me. Believe me. You really know me.”
Under normal circumstances he’d reply that there’s no such thing as ‘knowing’ somebody, but he holds his tongue. His instinct tells him that he does know her. The same way he’s supposed to know all these people surrounding him at the office. Only, he doesn’t. Not really. It’s all guesswork and awkwardness.
“Fine. Where do you want to meet?”
“Right by your office. Behind the parking structure. There’s a park. Let’s meet at the gate. In half an hour.”
On his way out, his boss, Midwest through-and-through, asks him again for his claim adjudication report in her usual misleadingly jovial way. He offers a non-committal assurance that will buy him only a few hours. For the last two weeks he’s had to relearn his job and the intricacies of its workflows. He’s managed to get by, his initial fears of early-onset Alzheimer’s, more or less assuaged. He hasn’t had to start from scratch, proceeding in fits and starts feels close to it. Some memories are jumbled. Some intact. Others scrapped.
As he walks through the parking structure a name pops into his head… Lorraine. And the tune that goes with it. An association with that voice. Her name isn’t Lorraine, but starts with an L in any case. Lilah. Lisa. Laura.
Out on the street, it’s a bit chilly and already dark, a thin drizzle under the street-lamps. A siren wails in the distance, its echo bouncing off the tall buildings that shield the banking district.
He thinks of Lorraine again. The tune percolates through his mind as he feels the drizzle sticking to the back of his neck, burrowing.
A tall woman at the park’s gate, wrapped in a vibrant shawl, looking his way. Her eyes, radiant. Hair, maroon. Face, rosy-cheeked. She sizes him up, as if trying to ascertain some flaw in him, or some deep-rooted ill intent.
He smiles and nods as if he had no use for words. He knows her. His nagging instinct tells him he knows her well, or at least well enough.
“Do you recognize me now?” she says clutching the shawl with her hands.
“No, not quite. But you… feel familiar.” A stream of memories rushes through his mind, in rapid-fire succession. A shower hiss, her rosy cheeks against his, the shape of her body under starched sheets, the heat of her body, beads of water racing down a shower stall. No particular order or logic to the memories, just a conflagration of vibrant images and sense memory.
“What’s your name?”
“Linda.”
“Linda,” he repeats. “Yes, we’ve talked before. You talked to me about… about… your boyfriend.”
“Husband.”
His mind tries to make sense of new and old information. Beginnings, middles, and ends. The need to find the right peg for the right hole. But all at lightning quick speeds. It’s like trying to solve a puzzle game while horseback riding. Why does he remember and misremember at the same time? Is this an acid dream trapped in a glitchy loop?
“We met at the insurance conference, we were both bored out of our minds. We compared notes. I told you my sorrows, you told me yours. We hit it off and spent the weekend together.”
“At the hotel?”
She nods.
He points towards the park. “Let’s walk.” No one’s around, other than some pigeons on the ground flapping their wings with disdain, annoyed by their presence. “We work together?”
“Nope. Same company. Different branches.”
“What happened?”
“I won’t give you a play-by-play. The gist of it is that after our escapade, on our way to the airport, you started complaining of chest pain. So, I took you to the ER.”
“Hospital?”
“County hospital. Don’t you remember it?”
He considers sitting on a bench, but he notices it gleams with moisture.
“I’m not sure. Long hallways… squeaky footsteps… color stripes on the walls… green, red, blue, orange. Not much else. What happened then?”
She grabs her arm as they walk closely together in the lonesome park. “Well, then, as we were waiting for the doctor to arrive, everything made a turn for the worst. Nothing seemed to work. You stopped breathing. They pulled me away, but I could see them trying CPR on you. Again and again. It didn’t work.”
“What do you mean it didn’t work?”
“It just didn’t. They tried and tried. You just… weren’t coming to.”
“And then?”
“Well. Then… nothing. The doctor shook his head and said you didn’t make it.”
“Right. Of course, except I don’t feel quite dead, yet.”
“You’re not. You came back. Five minutes later you came back to life. I was walking down the hallway, a bit disoriented. It was all so sudden and unexpected. The nurses called me back in. You were moving, your pulse was fine. All systems go. As if nothing had happened. Only, you didn’t know who you were or where and didn’t recognize me at all. So, they called your wife and I left the scene discreetly. Didn’t your wife tell you? Didn’t she want to know what’d happened?”
“Yes. She still asks me about it, now and then. I just blamed it all on an out of control shindig. She says I blackout if I drink too much. She never told me I died.”
“Maybe she wasn’t told, nobody wants odd information in their reports, or maybe she didn’t believe it.”
He hears the echo of distant sirens again. Their wailing muffled but persistent.
“Do you hear that?”
“What.”
“Sirens. Far away.”
“Hm. Sure.”
“I thought I was imagining it.”
Sweet Lorraine plays on his mind again. Nat King Cole’s voice reverberating.
“Sweet Lorraine,” he says.
“What?”
“The song. I remember that song playing somewhere.”
“Oh. Maybe in the car, the rental. I don’t know if it was playing, but a jazz station was on.”
“I’m as happy as…” he says.
“You are?”
“No. That’s from the lyrics, I think. Trying to remember them. Can’t get it out of my mind now.”
She nods. Under the poor lighting in the park her hair has lost its luster, but her eyes still spark. She catches his eye. And he leans towards her ear and croons, “sweet Lorr—“
She breaks away from his arm as if she had been holding a snake.
“So tell me,” he says. “Why the trouble of coming all the way on a chilly evening to tell me all this. I appreciate it, but… you know—”
“I… wanted to see how you were.”
“Sure, thanks. And then?”
“Nothing. I was afraid, I suppose.”
“Of me?”
“Afraid you’d suddenly remember… you know, us… the hotel room… and maybe, I don’t know, misinterpret it.”
“Misinterpret?”
“Our weekend. The you and I part of it.”
“Oh. I see. You want to move on. Set me free. You want clarity. Get to an understanding.”
She halts her stride, searching for words. “It didn’t mean a thing. Well, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I suppose I do. You don’t want me to go on calling you if and when my memory makes a comeback, right?”
She nodded with a faint smile.
“Don’t you worry. I’m not the clingy type.”
They walk back to the gate in the company of their silence. After they say their farewells she looks at him. “You know. You look different,” she says.
“Different? How?”
“I mean, after your… episode. Don’t know how to describe it. You seem different. Like something had changed in you.”
“A different person.”
“I don’t know. Just different. That’s all.”
She offers her hand as a renewed goodbye, as if they’d just finished a productive business meeting. He laughs it off and turns away, back into the solace of the night.
He falls asleep on his recliner watching on TV the desolation in far away places and listening to the narrative about the unspeakable misery yet to arrive.
He wakes up in the wee hours, the TV still on but muted. His wife must’ve turned the mute on, reluctant to engage in more tepid conversation. Hitler is addressing his frantically adoring crowds.
The living room’s French doors are dripping with condensation, the house engulfed in pea-soup fog. There’s an eerie silence only disturbed by his footsteps as he wanders around the house.
In the bathroom he examines his reflection. Linda was right, he looks as himself but something’s off, something’s different. Who was he before? Who is he now?
In the medicine cabinet he finds an ADHD bottle with his wife’s baby sister’s name. She sometimes stays over when on break from college. He checks the instructions… take one tablet by mouth before meals.
It’s not a happy pill. It’s a whatever pill. It’s a shock to the system pill. He swallows one, then another one. Kitchen sink stuff.
He checks his face on the mirror again. Submitted for your approval, the case of one Duncan Crane, who briefly died and now can’t remember who he was or who he is.
He checks basic information about the pill on his phone. 30 minutes onset.
He draws open the bedroom curtains and lies down on the bed next to his asleep wife. Right now, he still remembers little of her, of them, and many of those memories have been reconstructed from his phone’s photo stream. He wonders how long she’ll stick to this construct of a relationship. What happens when you’re dead but also alive? Do you have your own guardian ghost?
A soft diffused light reflects back inside from the street through the thick fog. He can see minute specks floating in the thickened air with no particular pattern. His eyes feel heavy and likely to close any time now. Isn’t amphetamine supposed to keep you alert and wired?
When he comes to and opens his eyes again, he can glimpse something moving outside, in the fog. Those floating specks he saw earlier are more defined now and seem to join together and form shapes, what seems to be the recognizable figures of a man and a woman. Just like Linda and himself, hooking arms. Then, they walk towards him through the glass, entering the room, approaching the bed. Their ethereal shapes sit on his bed, they embrace each other and then lie down, slowly, peacefully, nirvana-like, their essence fading away and dissipating into nothingness. He doesn’t know what to make of it. Mind over matter? But he doesn’t know what to make of himself either.
A distant siren wails.
Only a version of reality remains. The one featuring Duncan Crane, lying beside his wife, Lottie, close to each other but, in a way, many miles apart. Strangers now. Lovers once. Perhaps, not unlike the rest of the world. Eight billion ships that pass in the night.