I have been a prisoner in this place a full seven days.

I still can find no memory of my time before I came here, and I have no strong indications that I might be improving. However, there is an accumulation of a week’s worth of experiences I can reflect upon. This has caused, I suppose, a rudimentary sense of self to arise. I see it in how I react in various situations.

This feels so wrong: passively watching as a new personality emerges.

Is this the most I can hope for? Building a new identity from the ground up?

What happens when I’m finally chosen and marched through one of those doors? Nothingness? Another clean slate I have to begin filling again?

Of course, I hope to have escaped before that happens.

Sometimes my imagination takes flight and I entertain certain fantasies. Maybe I’m some experiment in cloning—an assemblage of cell cultures grown in that little white room. Or perhaps I’m a robot. Recently built, switched on, programed with facts but no past.

The factual stuff filling my brain is as strong as ever. I know things. Everything, it seems. Well, that’s not true. But suffice to say, I am a warehouse of information.

Today I sit in the lounge on a sofa leafing through a nature magazine. In front of me, two woman play ping pong. I barely pay attention to them, but, if I like, I can play back in my mind the running tabulation of scores from the three games they’ve played since I sat down. The odd manner in which the game of table tennis is scored makes perfect sense to me.

As do so many things I encounter.

I look down at the magazine in my lap and analyze a photograph of an elderly woman with a beaded headdress. She sits on the ground of an open-air market and displays a woven basket filled with spiders. I know that the woman is Cambodian from her manner of dress. Also, I know that the contents of the basket—fried spiders—are a local delicacy. The spiders are specifically Haplopelma albostriatum. I don’t need to read the article to check this fact. It is already in my brain.

I am also aware that eidetic memory—known to most people as photographic memory—is rare.

I’m curious. Have I had it all my life? Unfortunately, I can’t figure access that part of my mind. The part which holds my personal memories.

Of course it’s no work at all to call up those impersonal memories. I know the Arabic names of each star in the constellation Cassiopeia. I know pi to the fortieth decimal. I can rattle off all the birthdates of the rulers of the Ming dynasty. I know how to field dress an elk.

But I can’t remember my mother’s name or the color of my first car—if, indeed, I ever did own a car.

“Do you mind if I sit with you?”

I look up from my magazine. It’s Rose.

When I nod, she sits beside me and opens a container of yogurt.

I close the magazine, not wanting her appetite ruined by the image of edible spiders.

“Who’s winning?” she asks, nodding to the two women.

I explain that Darlene and Helen are playing as representatives of Door Number One and Door Number Two, respectively.

“And Helen is winning,” I add.

“A tournament?” she asks.

“They have used that word.”

“I’m torn,” Rose says with a laugh. “Who should I cheer for?”

Rose strikes me as the type who roots for the underdog.

“Maybe the one who needs it the most,” I say.

“Than Darlene it is.”

“But just because someone is losing, does that make her an underdog? I would think that Door Number Two is always the underdog.”

Rose makes no attempt to disagree with me.

After a few minutes of slamming the little ball back and forth, the two women change sides.

“They’re just so adorable,” Rose says. “Ready for anything we throw their way.”

“Embracing the inevitable?”

“Well, that’s one way to put it.” She frowns. Then her expression softens. “But, it’s one of the reasons I like coming down here to the lounge. You guys are all so, well, serene.”

“We are given drugs to help keep us docile. They call them vitamins, but that’s just a convenient figure of speech.”

“Are you sure?”

Her confused answer pushes me off balance. She seems genuine in her ignorance.

“I thought you could read minds?” I say, closely watching her face to learn what I can.

“Well, I’m just a beginner.”

Again, there is no hint of dissemblance. Does she really think she has the power of telepathy?

“So, you believe in paranormal abilities, but you doubt that the people kept on this floor are given sedatives?” I ask.

She puts her spoon and yogurt down on the table and thinks for a moment. Then she shifts in her seat and looks at me.

“Last week was a first for both of us,” she says. “I was promoted and you arrived here as a guest.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Her career advancement hardly seems equivalent to my unexplained appearance in that tiny white room, not to mention my memory problem, but I let her talk.

“I’ve learned things about this place, this show.” She turns to watch the ping pong ball bounce back and forth. “Over the years I’ve come to accept so many impossible things…you know, out there.” She waves her hand in the air to indicate, I guess, the world beyond. “And now, it seems, I have no choice but to embrace the reality of mind-reading, too.”

I wonder how I would react if I wasn’t being fed the sedatives. Because even with this chemically induced equanimity, my stomach twists at her confession.

If this young woman who seems rational and competent believes in something so fantastical and wrong, where can I begin to place any sense of hope? It suddenly seems likely that everyone—my fellow “guests” and those “caring” for us—are all utterly insane.

She slips her shoes off and tucks a foot under her thigh. She rests her hands in her lap a moment and then looks at me. But she doesn’t say anything about drugs, telepathic talents, or hints about what’s so impossible out there. No. She asks about me.

“Any luck with the memory?”

I shake my head.

“Not even impressions?” she asks softly. “From before they opened that door on you? How about emotions. Were you calm? Frightened? Do you know how you came to us?”

Doesn’t she?

Why is she asking me this? This isn’t just idle curiosity. She wants something specific. But this isn’t fair. She has to give me something as well. Answering my questions would be a good start.

But I know she’ll say what everyone else says. I should take such talk to Dr. Hetzel. And that woman’s no help.

I furrow my brow in deep concentration, as if I’m trying to remember. And then, a bit of playacting, I groan as if a terrible shadow has drifted across my mind.

“Maybe later,” I say as I stand up. “It’s a lot to confront. I think I’ll rest in my room before tonight’s show.”

Even if I have something to give her, she has nothing for me. Just a mind filled with foolish fantasy.

Is it pity I feel?

Maybe. But there’s something else. Hopelessness.

I have only myself to rely on. And if I’m to find a way to escape from this madhouse, it will have to be on my own.

I leave her sitting there, pensive, thoughtful.

Good timing on my part, as I see that unpleasant associate of hers, Michael, approach us.

###

When I return to my room, I realize what I had told Rose is not wrong. I am tired. A nap has great appeal.

As I reach inside my locker for an extra pillow, I snag the back of my hand on a burl of metal. I react to the sharp pain by pulling away and mange to give myself a cut about three inches long. I turn to the sink and run water over the bleeding wound. The odor of blood hangs there in the room. Fetid, metallic. Beguilingly aromatic.

A rumbling and ragged drone—originating far in the distance—rushes close with an increase in volume until everything vibrates in sympathy. An intense orange light pulses, slow like a heartbeat. It then speeds up until the frantic strobing reaches such a high frequency that it becomes a smooth warm glow all around. This body of mine drops away—but, no, it is all my senses that are ripped away and pulled aloft, crammed up against the ceiling, so as to observe the man—me—standing below. Then, the consciousness, above, and the physical, below, fall together again, and lock into clean alignment.

What just happened?

I steadied myself against the sink and slowly inhaled until my lungs were filled.

That rush of vertigo, which had come and gone, left behind a wonderful gift. A pristine and sharp focus on everything that concerned me. The totality of August Mathers was accessible. Warmth welled up inside my chest, an exhilarating electrical charge ran all over my flesh. I felt whole, again—so grateful to have myself back, that I wept.

I was born in 1966. Lived my entire life in Denver, Colorado. My mother was named Florence. She told me I had no gumption. And, as she was an excessively religious woman, she saw sin in everything I did.

My hand was still under the running water. I tore a strip off a white undershirt and made a crude bandage. It was strange to have all this information available in one sudden chunk. Not just those previous free-floating facts, but memories and experiences.

It was like finding yourself holding a globe of an alien planet, with a geography and history unknown to you, but as you moved it around, looking at it this way and that, you realized that, yes, you did know it. You knew the name of every city; which country invaded the other, and when; how cold was that mountain range in winter; how deep that sea. And that globe, it was my entire life.

A heady swirl of impressions and sensations. Tastes. Sounds. Odors. Like blood. Especially the smell of blood. So many wonderful and vibrant memories!

All the stuff of a life lived.

And there were no surprises when I now looked unflinchingly at my life. I found myself almost gasping at how sharp and exciting were so many of the moments. How natural it all seemed in its full summation. Even my final moments were just so…fitting. The whole of it packed together like asparagus spears in a can. No wasted space.

Everything including my death in the prison hospital had a sense of proper placement. I had only been in my early fifties. Taken down—completely by surprise—by pancreatic cancer. Strange to have found myself in prison for tax evasion. Not for those bodies in the backyard of my mother’s house, or those I buried, later, in the field out beyond the suburbs. To the world at large, I died a dull and mildly unsavory middle-class, middle-aged white-collar criminal.

But I knew better.

And now! Alive…again? Looking in the mirror was so odd. I had become younger. How miraculous!

Was I here to be judged for my past actions?

The man I faced in the mirror—until moments ago his life had been simple. He had been an innocent with no memory. A fuzzy, tentative, soft fool.

Is that how I would be with no memory?

What would that baffled man of only a moment ago have made of the real August Mathers? A man with so many dark secrets.

That innocent me who walked into this bathroom—what would have been his ethical boundaries if truly tested? If he had met a remorseless killer, would he have been repulsed, or intrigued? An interesting experiment. One I could not do. It was too late. That innocuous man was gone—a sort of death.

But what was death?

I had died. If I could trust my memory—and I felt it was the only thing I could trust. In my memory, I had died. Yet, here I was. And what of that ludicrous gameshow? It must indeed be how my past behavior would be judged. Could it really be that the mind-reading nonsense was real? At this moment, it hardly seemed any more improbable than the fact that I had died and then been brought back. To, apparently, witness my final judgement.

I didn’t have to scrutinize my past behavior to know I wouldn’t appear pure of heart, not to the likes of these people.

But scrutinize, I did. Because I could. My personal experiences were as easy to recall, now, as was the scientific name of those edible spiders. If I were the sort of man to use such language, I’d call my prodigious memory a blessing. The wild talent to revisit those sweet interludes of my life. And the end of that life of mine? I peered back to those final moments. How long ago had then been? It seemed like just yesterday. Perhaps it was. Or maybe it had been centuries in the past. I had no idea how the rebirth business worked.

I had been lying on a thin and uncomfortable mattress—my death bed, in fact—raised up so I could see the nurse doing her crossword puzzle. Tubes and cables snaked around me. There was one monitoring my vitals. Another delivered drugs. One of which was morphine, though I wasn’t in pain. The radio on a shelf overhead had been tuned to an oldies station. Doris Day was singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”

The nurse was asking help on 16 down. I knew the answer. It was Damascus. But my voice wouldn’t work. And that’s when I drifted away.

They talk about a beautiful and beckoning from light down a tunnel. Angelic music. A calm sense of comfort.

There was nothing of the sort.

Somehow, I ended up here, in a place as sterile and tedious as that prison hospital. A dormitory beneath a TV studio.

I voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Oh, my goodness! What happened?”

I looked up.

It was Valerie. She grabbed my hand and pulled back the impromptu bandage to inspect the cut.

“Oh, it doesn’t look too bad,” she said, smiling to encourage me. “Let’s see what we have in here.” She pulled a small first aid kit from the back of the locker. She brought her cheerful, giddy face close to mine. “Don’t forget. We’re here to take care of you and keep you safe.”