Authors: Ken Goddard
“Good. Now that we’ve got your name settled, let’s just sit you up a bit … get a little more blood pumping through that brain and body … see if that helps your voice issues any,” she said, moving in closer to the bed and holding his forehead with one of her strong, soft hands, enveloping him in the scent of her perfume … and her. As she did so, the muted alarms in the back of his head instantly amped up into deeper bass tones.
Knock it off
, he growled silently.
She’s safe, remember … and besides, I want to hear her talk
.
He felt the head of the bed start to rise up slowly until he was propped up at what felt like a thirty-degree angle. She slowly released his forehead and stepped back away from the bed, taking the flow of her scent with her. The amped alarms immediately fell back to their muted state.
“How’s that?” she inquired.
“That feels … better, I think,” he responded weakly, not really sure how he felt now that he was semi-horizontal. Light-headed, certainly. “You sure this gets more blood up into my brain?” he asked. “Seems like it’s having the opposite effect.”
“It’ll get your heart working more efficiently for a change; get you ready for standing up and walking around … all positive effects.”
“I … think I’d like that,” he said hesitantly.
“Good, it’s nice to see you awake. We’ve all been waiting,” the nurse said, the inflections in her voice sounding happy and truthful as she reached over to his headboard and pressed a button. He heard a faint buzzing sound from somewhere outside his room.
“We?”
The exterior door opened and a white coated figure walked in. He was taller than the nurse by at least six inches, with a solid muscular build, wide shoulders, thick arms, short-cropped grayish-brown hair, a matching goatee and mustache, both neatly trimmed, dark Mediterranean skin coloring, piercing dark eyes … and a jagged, long-since-healed scar across his left cheek that seemed to erupt out of the goatee like a bolt of lightning.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Antonio Vargas.”
Cellars decided that Dr. Vargas looked formidable and accustomed to giving orders. He also decided that he didn’t like the man, although he really didn’t know why.
“Let them know he’s regained consciousness,” the white-coated man said to the nurse.
“Yes, sir,” she replied with a distinctive edge to her voice that Cellars picked up on instantly.
She’s pissed
, he thought.
I wonder why?
Vargas waited until the nurse disappeared out the door before turning back to Cellars — who furrowed his eyebrows in confusion when his interior alarms suddenly ceased the moment the door closed shut behind the nurse.
What the hell…?
“You’ve been in an unconscious state for five days,” Vargas said after consulting the chart he removed from the foot of Cellar’s bed.
Cellars blinked. He had no sense of the lost days or…
“Time is it?” he rasped.
Vargas glanced at his watch. “It’s approximately nineteen-twenty hours,” he replied … and then, when Cellars didn’t respond: “approximately seven-twenty in the evening.”
Cellars remained silent.
Another pause while Vargas scribbled something onto the chart, then looked up and asked:
“Do you know where you are?”
Cellars looked around at the pleasantly decorated ward room for a moment, and then shook his head. “Some kind of hospital room, apparently; but I have no idea where … or why.”
“And, I gather, you have no idea
who
you are either?”
“I’ve already gone over this with Dr. Grayson,” Cellars said with an edge to his voice. “The bracelet on my wrist says I’m Colin Cellars. I have no reason to believe that’s not the case, and I’m perfectly willing to answer to his name; but I really don’t know anything about the fellow.”
Vargas nodded and made another notation on the chart.
“Do you remember anything
at all
about who you are, or what might have happened to you?”
Cellars started to respond with a sarcastic and irritated comment, but then hesitated.
“Yes?” Vargas prodded.
“It’s not something that I actually remember, but something I think I’m starting to know about myself,” Cellars said, choosing his words carefully. “I get the impression that I’ve got some kind of problem being in the presence of beautiful women.”
Vargas cocked his head curiously, and then smiled.
“You think you have a problem being around Lisa?”
“Is that the nurse who was just here?”
“Yes, Lisa Marcini, your floor nurse.”
“Then no, I don’t think I have a problem with her, specifically,” Cellars replied, shaking his head firmly. “I think she’s stunning and enticing; someone that any sane male would run off to an island resort with in a heartbeat, if he could talk her into the idea. But I don’t remember ever seeing her before an hour ago, when I woke up in the MRI lab.”
“So you think the problem is something in your past, something to do with other women?”
“I guess it must be,” Cellars agreed uneasily, not sure where this conversation was going, much less what it meant.
“What else do you remember ... about anything?”
Cellars thought for a long moment.
“Nothing concrete … nothing definable. I seem to remember fragments of a very scary event — or maybe a dream, I can’t tell — that drifts in and out, back and forth … but really doesn’t make any sense in either direction.
“One
continuous
event or dream?”
“I think so … it seems to play out that way. But everything else is blank — completely blank — as if all of my personal memories have been completely erased. But that doesn’t make any sense because —”
“Yes?” Vargas encouraged.
“I seem to have a functional vocabulary. I understand the concepts of erased memories, erasable data, vocabularies, computers, MRIs, technicians, gorgeous and sensuous women like nurse Marcini. I … seem to understand a lot of things,” Cellars said as he pulled the thin blanket and sheet away from his lower torso and legs, slowly levered himself into a fully upright position.
Then he looked down, and realized that he was wearing what looked like a set of green military undershorts instead of a traditional open-backed hospital gown.
That’s weird
, he decided, without having any real sense of why.
Then he looked over at his bare right ankle, expecting to see some massive bruising, at the very least; but it looked exactly like his left ankle: perfectly normal.
Okay, that’s weird, too
, he thought, remembering the searing bolts of pain.
Definitely not right. Can’t be
.
“Is it okay if I try to stand up?” he asked.
“If you feel up to it,” Vargas said as he set the clipboard down on the bed. “Here, I’ll help you.”
Moving cautiously, Cellars shifted his legs over the edge of the mattress, slid forward to place his bare feet on the floor, and then — bracing himself against the doctor’s steadying hands, and noting the scent of what he decided must be expensive cologne — he cautiously stood up … and, in doing so, quickly confirmed nurse Marcini’s diagnosis that the ankle was just fine.
Then he noticed the I.V. tube sticking out of his left arm and leading up to a partially empty plastic bag hanging from a metal rack standing next to the bed.
“Is that dinner?” he asked, gesturing with his head at the bag.
“Yes, I assume so. Is that a problem?”
“I … don’t think I like having needles sticking out of my arm.”
“Do you feel like trying some real food instead?”
Cellars realized for the first time that his stomach felt cramped and empty.
“Yes, definitely.”
“I’ll see to it that we get you something right away.”
“Thank you. I just don’t —”
“Why don’t you sit back down,” Vargas suggested, and then firmly eased Cellars back into a sitting position on the bed.
“Wow, that was interesting,” Cellars whispered out loud, mostly to himself.
“Feeling light-headed?”
“Yeah, a little … but more than that —”
What he felt, Cellars realized, was more tired than weak, and more mentally exhausted than physically.
Like I’ve been studying hard — or writing intently — for hours, or …
“You were saying?” Vargas pressed, picking up the clipboard again.
Cellars blinked, and then looked up to consider the white-lab-coated doctor and his presence in the room.
“I was going to say that I seem to understand a lot of things in considerable detail, but not with any personal context. And that doesn’t make any sense … at least not to me. Does it to you?”
“What you’re describing is certainly not a classic case of amnesia,” Vargas conceded. “You appear to possess a sharp clarity of mind, several relevant data sets of information, and awareness of context … or a lack thereof,” he added with emphasis.
“But nothing personal, nothing that tells me anything about who I am or where we are,” Cellars said, staring down at his bare hands and arms. “That dataset seems to be completely empty. But I seem to be in reasonably good physical condition … suggesting that I exercise or have a job that keeps me fit … and I see that I have a lot of interesting scars on my forearms and hands that I would think I’d remember getting. Do you know anything about them?”
“No, I don’t,” Vargas said as he set the clipboard on the bed, then stepped forward, took Cellars’ right arm and examined it for a long moment. “They appear to be recent in origin, but healing nicely.”
“How recent, would you say?”
Vargas shrugged. “Several days, to be sure. Five or more — we know that with certainty — but perhaps less than ten or twelve.”
“Do I have any head injuries or signs of a concussion? Anything physical that might match up with these scars or explain the amnesia?”
“You have some scars on your head and neck that appear to be at a similar stage of healing, and —”
Vargas consulted the chart again.
“— you were diagnosed as having experienced a concussion, probably as a result of being in the proximity of an explosion, but with no apparent physical brain damage.”
Cellars considered that information for a long moment.
“So you’re not a physician … not a medical doctor?”
Vargas smiled. “Why do you say that?”
“First of all, you seem far more interested in my mental awareness than my physical condition. And secondly, you haven’t made any effort to examine my ankle, or my head, or to remove an I.V. feeding tube that I’m clearly not thrilled about having stuck in my arm.”
“I’ll have nurse Marcini take care of that when she returns.”
“And finally,” Cellars went on, ignoring the response, “it doesn’t seem likely that I would know more about the healing of scar tissue than a hospital physician.”
“Really?”
Cellars nodded his head.
“How many days do you think?”
“Seven days at the most; more likely five or six. The tissue underneath is still a little tender.”
“So you think you received those wounds shortly before you were brought here?” Vargas pressed gently.
“It seems like a logical deduction.” Cellars nodded, staring intently at the doctor’s facial expression.
“But nothing about your wounds triggers any residual memories?”
“No, nothing at all.”
“I see.”
“So you’re a shrink.”
Cellars said it matter-of-factly, but there was a discernable edge to his voice.
“A clinical psychiatrist, actually; does that bother you?”
“I —”
At that moment, the door to the room opened and Lisa Marcini walked in, instantly setting off the muted alarms in the back of Cellar’s head again.
“Mr. Cellars would like his I.V. removed,” Vargas said calmly.
“Yes, doctor,”
Cellars managed to ignore the increasingly amped alarms this time, watching — staring intently at, actually — Lisa Marcini’s facial features as she stepped up close to the side of the bed, took his arm in her warm hands, smoothly slipped the I.V. needle out his arm, and then taped a pad of cotton over the small wound with practiced and efficient movements.
She placed the I.V. tube on a nearby stainless steel tray, and then turned her head to meet Cellars’ gaze — her perfect mouth widening into a dimpled smile.
“Yes?”
“You must be used to your male patients staring at you while you work,” Cellars said calmly.
Unlikely as it seemed, the dimples grew even deeper.
You can’t be real. You just can’t be.
The internal thought jarred at Cellars’ subconscious —
where did that come from?
— but he had no idea at all about the where or the why.
“Some of my patients do get a little flirtatious, every now and then. Some of them even ask for my phone number; but it rarely becomes a serious problem … at least not for me.”
“Really? Why is that?”
“Remember, I’m the one who administers the drugs,” Marcini said with a wink that registered in Cellar’s mind as somewhere between amused and enticing as she gestured with her head at a small stainless steel tray — lying next to the lockable briefcase on the mobile cart. Cellars could see that the tray held a pair of capped vials containing of some kind of clear liquid, and a pair of small and medium syringes. “One cc of Farmington-C keeps everybody mellow and on cruise-control. But change that order to one cc of Farmington-U, and everybody’s off to dreamland … as you may recall?”