Chapter One
"I think you're as ready as you're ever going to be."
"There has to be some mistake," I pleaded, "I'm not ready. I mean, there's a lot of things I am, but ready - ready is definitely not one of them." I felt borderline desperate.
"We've worked with you for over two years." Dr. Needleman replied. The name didn't fit her. I didn't know her first name. You'd think after two years I'd have heard it somewhere or asked for it, but I didn't. I guess I was too busy trying to remember my own name to ask for hers.
"But I'm not ready."
"There's nothing more we can do for you here, Ben," she said, employing the name I'd picked to go by until I remembered my real name. I'd been forced to finally select one from a baby name book because being called John Doe had finally become a non-option. "It's time for you to get back into the real world, learn more about yourself. Eventually, through experiences, your memories will come back. We'll still be doing check ups."
"You're seriously about to send me back out there without having any idea what my real name is or anything?" I asked. Panic rose in my throat. "How can you possibly expect me to make it? I don't have a job or a place to live or --"
"You'll be under our care, just independent," she explained, "At least until you've successfully grounded yourself and gotten a job and residence and the like." Dr. Needleman smiled sweetly at me.
The next thing I'd knew - despite my protests - I'd found myself standing in the center of a sparcely furnished apartment building, hugging my arms as the door closed behind the guys that had helped bring what little I had from the hospital over. I looked around. Everything was, once again, unfamiliar. But you'd think I'd be used to that... considering.
The first thing I changed in the apartment was I took down the sliding mirror doors of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and pushed them far into the back of the under-the-sink storage unit, behind the U-bend pipe. I pushed a small cardboard box filled with towels the Center had given me in front of it.
Mirrors are frustrating things when you know you're supposed to recognize the person in their reflections and yet you don't at all. Granted, even in full mind I wouldn't have, they said, because I'd been given these splendid scars that scratched across my face, keeping one eye from opening fully and a plastic surgeon had tried to reconstruct my nose after the bone shattered, but since we had no real idea who I was, he had no real idea what my nose looked like before, so I could've been all different. A professional once tried to sketch my before face, judging by the bones that formed my features, and he'd rendered an okay looking guy. But looking at it, I felt no real connection to it, no real feeling like yup, that's me. Which could've been because he was crappy at his job, but also could've been because of the amnesia. Because he had a degree and I had amnesia, we blamed the amnesia.
My stuff didn't come anywhere near to making the place feel like it belonged to me. It felt more the way I imagine people's stuff must feel when it's put into a storage unit. The things I had were very few, and only one thing had been mine from the time before and I couldn't explain it or what it meant.
It was a CD. A blank CD. It had been damaged by water and no longer played, but it had been clutched in my hand when they found me and they were pretty certain that it was important to me, though what it had on it they didn't know and never would know. The only clue that it gave to its purpose was a hand-scrawled label, written in black marker ink, that read, "Hold On".
I'd kept it, put it in a frame, and hung it up on my wall for safe keeping.
So once my sparsely furnished apartment was sparsely decorated, I sat down on the couch and looked around. I wondered what my before self would've thought of my after self's new digs. I wondered what before self would've done now that he was unpacked. Personally, I lay down on the couch and took a nap.
It took time - and lots of it - for me to adjust to my new life. I did things that I thought I might like and when I was done from all of that, I landed in a chair in the corner of a coffee shop across the street from the apartment building I lived in and held onto that stupid white paper cup like my life depended on it. I stared at my sneakers and waited for something that I'd seen that day to sink in, to penetrate the wall in my mind that separated my memories from my recollection. I sipped coffee - the only thing that had come easily for me to remember was that liked coffee with cream and sugar - and waited but nothing ever came, and eventually I'd wander home and fall asleep on the couch, still waiting.
After all, it's hard work... remembering yourself.
After a fw weeks of searching for answers and coming up empty, drinking coffee and taking naps on the couch, I finally decided it was time to Move On and forget my Before Self and become my After Self and assume that I, who had been named by Dr. Needleman as Ben Spencer, was who I was and that was not going to change.
I frequently wondered what would happen if I made that choice, immersed myself into my life as Ben Spencer, and then one day awoke and remembered I was really someone else with a whole other life how I would feel as Ben Spencer. Robbed of my new life the way I now felt robbed of my old life?
But no matter, I was now going to do the unthinkable and become myself, whoever that may be, and do what I had to do.
The first step was getting a job. The Center had given me paperwork allowing me to work, including a new social security number and references. I left the apartment and walked into the coffee shop across the street, walked up to the counter, and the waitress there smiled. "The usual?" she asked, reaching for a cup even as she asked.
"To go today, please," I replied, "And also a job application."
"A job application?" she smiled as she put back the glass cup and pulled a white paper one out of the sleeve of them on the side of the register. She turned to the big gold perculator that forever made their coffee better than the coffee I could produce in my kitchen with Mr. Coffee. She started putting in the sugar and cream and nutmeg into the bottom of the cup - a secret of the coffee gods, I guess. "You're getting a job?"
"I'm gonna try," I replied. "I need to make money."
"And you wanna work here?" she teased.
"I'd save on the commute," I replied, thumbing toward the view of my apartment building in the store front window.
She laughed. "True," she answered. The coffee jet streamed into the cup and she stirred it with the longest spoon known to man, popped a lid on it and pushed it across the counter to me. I pulled out my wallet as she bent down and got an application from under the register. She slid that across the counter, too, shook her head, winked and said, "They're on the house. Happy job hunting Mystery Man."
I thanked her, and returned to the street, sliding the application into an empty folder I'd tucked under my arm. My idea was to collect as many applications as possible, then go home and try to fill them out to my best ability. Then tomorrow, I'd walk around returning them all. It seemed far more effective than stopping at each place to fill them out.
I imagined myself as all sorts of different types of people that day and stopped at all kinds of different places. I could literally be anything that I wanted to be, I realized, as I made my way past produce towards customer service to get an application at a grocery store, having already tucked away one from a library, a computer-tech store, and a tattoo parlor.
"Actually, I could use a stock boy," the manager of the grocery store said when I asked for an application. He was standing behind the service desk, having just come out of an office behind it. The actual service associate reached into a pigeon hole on the side of the desk and pulled out an application. She pushed it across the counter to me, much like -- damn, I didn't know the waitress' name at the coffee shop. But I'm bad at names, given I don't even known my own and all. "Do you have any experience?" the manager asked.
"I could," I replied. "Stock boy. Basically I'd unpack stuff from crates and put them on shelves, right? I could do that. I have experience doing that." I thought about all the unpacking I'd done when I first moved into the apartment.
"Good, good. Fill out the application for formality..." he said, "But I like you, there's something about you I like." With that, he turned and disappeared back into the office, closing the door.
The service desk girl smiled. "He doesn't say that to many people."
"Thanks," I waved the application and walked away. Outside, I sat down on a bench and looked at the application. It looked the same as all the others except it had the grocery store's name on it - The Little Red Hen - and this goofy drawing of a chicken. Well I guess it was a hen.
I pulled a pen out of my shirt pocket and started filling it out. Since it was just a formality and everything I figured I should go ahead and break my own filling-it-out-at-home strategy. After all, I needed a job not a stack of paperwork applying for one. I got to the line about whether you'd ever been known as any other names in the past, if your name had been legally changed. I checked the box and wrote in I don't know who I was, though.
I imagined the manager suddenly deciding he didn't like me as much.
But I figured if he said so I'd just remind him that he doesn't really know me. After all, nobody does. Including me.
After Self by Pengi
