Act Three. The Answer to the Riddle is Me.
We close our show today with this true story from David MacLean.
On
October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad, India
with no passport and no idea who I was or why I was in India.
I lost my memory. I lost it along with Fred Flintstone, Marge Simpson, Jack Bauer's wife in the first season of 24, Saleem Sinai in the late middle sections of Midnight's Children, Guy Pearce in Memento, Geena Davis in A Long Kiss Goodnight, Jason Bourne, and scores of sitcom characters who were bonked on the head, only to regain everything with another sizeable bonk.
I went to India as a Fulbright scholar. I worked out of university of Hyderabad. I had a small rooftop flat right next to the elevator engine. At first I thought it was a hell of a score, but these apartments are all over the city, and they're illegal, not included in the original building plan. It was incredibly hot, and the elevator engine squeaked and screamed as it lugged people up and down the building. But I did have the entire roof to myself, and could sit out there and watch kids all over the neighborhood flying kites from other rooftops.
I was settling down to do my work. I became a member of a library. It had a friend named Veda, a local grad student, and we had dinner together nearly every night. I was taking my anti-malarial drug, Lariam, every Thursday, just like my doctors told me.
One weekend in early October, I got really sick. Veda brought a doctor over to my flat. The doctor took my temperature, my blood pressure, palpated my stomach, gave me three injections. I asked the doctor what was in the injections, and he said, "medicine." I spent the next two days thrashing in my damp bed in fever dreams.
Veda called me in the morning of October 12. He had nicknamed me hero. "Hello, Hero. Are you up for some dinner or something?" I had no idea who he was. He spent the next five minutes trying to draw my memory, but as far as I knew, he was a stranger. I explained to him that he had the wrong number, and then hung up.
On October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad with no passport and no idea who I was. When I say that I woke up, I don't mean I was on a bench passed out and woozily came to. I mean all of a sudden, I was aware of my surroundings.
I was standing on the train platform staring at a monitor. People were pushing past me. Train announcements in another language were coming out of static-filled speakers. There were crowds of women in burkas standing near a stall where a man was making omelets. Massive trains would sound their massive horns before they trundled out of the station. And I suddenly was in the midst of all of this.
At that moment, staring at the monitors, I was a blank sheet that had just been rolled in the typewriter. No backstory, no motivation, no distinguishing characteristics, no real idea what I even looked like.
A man came up to me. He was wearing a uniform. He had a peaked cap and carried a long stick. He wanted to know if anything was wrong. I panned down from the monitor to his face. He was a little older than I was, but not much. His moustache was new and seemed uncertain if it would stay. Mostly, though, his face was kind.
I said to him, I have no idea who I am. Some chamber of emotion was unlocked in me and I started to cry. Blubber, really.
The policeman pulled a little away from me. He spent a moment considering his strategy, and finally decided on "There, there. Please calm down. I'm used to this situation. You foreigners come here to my country and do your drugs. I've seen this before many times." He pointed to a patch on his shoulder. "I'm here for you. I'm a tourist officer. Now, do you have a passport?"
I shook my sobbing head. "I think I slept in a room with monkeys last night."
"OK. Now do you have in your possession a wallet?"
I reached to my back pocket and pulled out a leather wallet stamped with an image of a cowboy with guns drawn. I was delirious with happiness. I open the wallet and there was my New Mexico driver's license. "That's me!" I shrieked as I shoved my finger on the square inch picture.
The officer took my wallet and put it in his pocket. "OK," he said. "Let's get you somewhere else."
I don't remember what happened next. My memory of that day and the next is a string of Christmas lights where only a few are lit. There's no sense to be made of which lights are lit, and you can flick at the dead bulbs as long as you want. They're not coming back on.
The officer told me his name was Rajesh, but I could call him Josh. He explained that it would be easier for me, since I was an American, to call him that. I thanked him.
We went through my wallet and found an internet cafe membership card. We went into a cafe that had the same logo. We got into my Hotmail account. By what means I was able to remember my internet address and password, I can't answer. All I know is that I send an email to my parents that contained the following information.
One. I was sorry for being a drug addict and for being such a terrible son.
Two. I was in trouble, but I should be OK soon, since the police were helping me.
Three. I would be home soon, and would work really hard to be a better person and earn their respect back.
Josh took me to a guesthouse which the police use as a safehouse for troubled foreigners. A Chinese woman ran the place, and she was known for being good with lost sheep tourists. The three of us sat down in our living room. White marble tile, creaking wooden furniture, and a shrine in the corner with a young man's picture on it. She gave me a glass of flat Sprite and she told me her story.
Her son had been traveling in Singapore when some bad men had injected him with drugs. He overdosed. She never got to see his body. They sent his ashes to her in a cardboard box. She wept as she told me this. "You do not understand what you are doing to your mother when you put these drugs into your body." She grabbed my hands and squeezed hard. I cried right back at her.
I was a drug addict, and I was breaking my mother's heart. I swallowed the narratives that they had given me. My brain was empty and famished. I'd taken anything.
Josh, the woman and I sat down and tried to remember my parents' phone number, which hasn't changed since 1977. It took six hours for me to remember the first phone number I'd never learned.
The woman dialed and handed me the phone when it was ringing. My mother answered. I started crying at the sound of her voice. I recognized it. I couldn't picture her, but that voice I knew. "I'm so sorry, mom. I didn't mean to do this to you."
"David, you didn't do anything. We got your email. Are you safe?"
"I'm in a guesthouse. Josh and this woman are helping me. I don't have my passport, but I'm going to get to Delhi and come home. Can I come home?"
"Of course you can come home. You said there's a woman helping you? Let me talk to her."
"I'm so sorry I've been out of touch for so long. I've been a terrible person, an awful son."
"David, we talked last Tuesday. What's the woman's name?"
"She wants to know your name."
"Mrs. Lee," the woman said. "Is that your mother? Let me speak with her."
Mom worked at a software company in Marion, Ohio, and one of her coworkers was married to a woman from Hyderabad. Mom told Mrs. Lee that she was going to get the phone number for this coworker's family and have them come over to help.
I was put to bed before the sun set. I didn't sleep. The room begin to twist. It didn't behave. One corner of the ceiling would be too close. Another would be miles away. The blankets itched. I was afraid to drink the Sprite. Birds flew onto the balcony and looked at me dismissively.
I knew suddenly that if I left the room, I would walk into a wide, pink kitchen, and there were crackers on the cupboard, and if I went into that kitchen and pulled the crackers down from the cupboard and said something, said something specific, a sentence, something that was totally, feignlessly me, then I'd be all right.
I knew that as soon as I said it, all of my loved ones would flood up from the basement and the other rooms where they'd been hiding. They would grab me and celebrate me and hold me in their arms.
I stood at the door of the small room in this guesthouse in Secunderabad and was ready to enter into the arms of all of those people who loved me and knew me. I just needed to remember what I was supposed to say. It was right on the tip of my tongue.
I stood at the doorway for over an hour trying to remember. I would open the door a crack and peer out, looking for where all my loved ones were hidden, then bang the door closed. I did this enough times for Mrs. Lee to get freaked out and call my mom's coworker's family.
I lay back down and tried to remember. The room was getting worse. There were voices. I flipped the mattress over to find where they were coming from. They alternated between giving me hints as to the phrase I was supposed to say and mocking me for not knowing it already. "Isn't that just like you?" they'd scold.
I was sweating. I'd wet myself. Two men walked into my room. I'd never seen them before. They were both in their early 60s. One man had a silver beard and a Pompadour. The other had a thick mustache and jet black hair and an overgrown Beatles mop top. They both had dark South Indian complexions.
"I'm Mr. Desappa and this is Mr. Sampson. Your mother summoned us here to help you."
I looked at the two men looming over me. "This isn't going well at all," I said.
Sampson helped me up while Desappa flipped the mattress back over. They laid me down and knelt on the floor beside me. "You'll be OK. Jesus loves you." They began to pray.
The men stayed all night, praying and laying their hands on me as they prayed. I'm not sure when they called the ambulance.
The next day I came to again. Bruises on my wrists from the restraints. I was in the mental institution, Greenlands Mental Facility. Dirty walls, small table, glass of water, drawn cloth curtain.
A doctor with a receding hair line sat at the edge of my bed making notes in a file with a pen that wasn't cooperating. He kept scribbling in the margins to get the ink to flow.
The doctors put me on Haloperidol, an anti-psychotic, so my hallucinations slowed, and I quieted enough to be unstrapped. I was doped up on enough Valium that I was able to have visitors.
Veda rounded up every American he knew, figuring I'd be more comfortable surrounded by them. These visitors acted like they knew me. They called me Dave, so I played along. They brought me newspapers and cigarettes. I had never smoked a day in my life, but I started chain smoking in the mental institution.
The the only thing I would consume other than cigarettes was curd rice. The nurses brought it to me in heaping platefuls. The Valium and Haloperidol made me affable. The nurses claimed I was the most entertaining psychotic they'd ever had.
At this point, you know more about me than I did at that moment. Those days where I was fed heavy meds through an IV, people treated me a certain way, and I became the kind of person who is treated like that. All I had to go on for my identity was the reactions of the people around me. I assembled a working self out of the behavior of others.
The truth, or at least what my family, the State Department, the Fulbright Organization, and I have determined as the truth is that the psychotic break, the hallucinations, the amnesia-- it all was an extreme side effect of the Larium, the anti-malarial drug that was a prescription of choice in those days. It's got a reputation for doing things like what happened to me, as well as much worse.
I started taking the drug a month before leaving, as prescribed. My mother says that she could tell I wasn't acting normally before I left, but she chalked it up to the stress of preparing for a year in India
When my parents walked into my room in the asylum, a motor spun inside my brain. I recognized them, and through them, I recognized myself. I wasn't sure of the details of my life, but my parents defined the broad particulars. We hugged, the three of us making a tent over the bed with our bodies.
I told my mom that I was sorry. She told me that she was sorry. My dad pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. My sister Betsy had put together a box for me. In it were two dozen cookies and an array of pictures of me from different times of my life. Me in a kilt, me at the beach, me with a dog, me standing on a station wagon smoking a cigar, me with my sisters, me with my arms around different women. Whoever I was, I couldn't keep a straight face for a photograph.
My parents told me where they were saying. They said it was too nice for them, but the restaurant was good and didn't serve them anything too spicy for breakfast. They said I needed to stay for another night at Greenlands, and then I'd go home with them to their hotel, and then we'd get on a plane for the U.S. They said that Sally was excited to see me and that Ann was planning on coming to Ohio for a visit.
These names mean as much to you as they did to me. My parents said them like they were people I knew and loved, so I nodded and said I was excited to see them.
They checked me out the next day. My dad hailed a rickshaw and the three of us piled into the backseat, me in between the two of them.
In Ohio I met Sally, who was my dog. I talked to Ann, my girlfriend, on the phone. I recognized the dog, but not Ann's voice. We hadn't been dating for very long, and my parents didn't have any pictures of her. I had no idea what she looked like. She seemed nice. She seemed like she cared about me.
Those days spent in my parents' house, I mostly stared at pictures, trying to recapture anything of who I was. I developed a system. I would look at the picture and imagine this character of me. Then I would place this character I had developed into these settings. I would imagine the jokes that were told. I would imagine how the character of me would feel. I was gathering information on this character of me all the time.
Ann came out on Halloween weekend, and even when I picked her up at the airport, even when she kissed me, I wasn't sure I had the right woman. We spent the weekend hiking with my parents. We had sex that first night of her visit, and she was still a stranger. I could not remember her or any details of our relationship. It was wiped clear.
She was in love with me. I tried the memory trick of placing the character of me in a relationship with her, and it didn't fit. I couldn't conceive of myself loving her. Sometimes I think that forgetting her with the cruelest thing I've ever done to a person.
I called her a week later and broke up with her. Ann isn't her real name, by the way. She asked me to change it for this story.
I flew back to India on November 20, a little more than a month after the incident. I wasn't entirely stable yet, but I was terrified that the Fulbright Organization would pull my funding if I gave them too much time to mull my psychological condition. I figured the best way back to health was to act like I was healthy. I put on a placid professional exterior while inside I was a full martini glass placed on a rubber ball.
It wasn't until I was on the connecting flight into Hyderabad that I realized I had no idea of where I lived. I panicked as we were touching down. I figured I'd get a cab. I just had no idea where to tell the driver to go.
Instead, Veda was waiting for me at the airport. I didn't recognize him, but by that time, I recognized the look of someone recognizing me. It was a skill I had developed in Ohio. I'd forgotten that I had emailed him my flight details.
He clapped me on my back and said, "The hero returns!" He gave me a bag full of toothpaste, ramen, and milk. "Enough to last you for a day," he said.
We drove through the city. It was 4 AM and silent. We made turn after turn until we ended up in front of a tall building that looked like all of the other apartment complexes. Veda took me up the elevator and then up a short flight of stairs. He handed me a keyring. "OK then, hero. I will be off. I can get some sleep before the kids start causing terror."
"You have kids?" "I will call you on your mobile, and we can go for some dinner at your favorite place."
I grabbed him, and I learned that Veda didn't like to be hugged.
I opened the door. Nothing. The road, the building, and now my apartment. Nothing was jogged, jostled, or loosened in my memory. I was alone, and lonelier than I thought it could be in a room filled with things that I'd selected.
There were books. I opened them and found my handwriting in the margins. Still nothing. I had read these books. Now I had to read them again. But why bother? If I lost my memory again, all that work would be futile.
The city started to wake up, and the sounds of bicycles, car horns, and newspaper wallahs rose up to me on the roof. I lit up a cigarette to fight the tension building in my chest. If it was going to happen again, I would throw myself off the roof.
I stubbed out the cigarette and opened the door to an apartment furnished with the possessions of a stranger.
David
MacLean fully recovered all his memory, except for the year proceeding
his illness. The story is an excerpt from a book of essays that he's
writing about losing his memory and memory loss. He's looking for a
publisher.I lost my memory. I lost it along with Fred Flintstone, Marge Simpson, Jack Bauer's wife in the first season of 24, Saleem Sinai in the late middle sections of Midnight's Children, Guy Pearce in Memento, Geena Davis in A Long Kiss Goodnight, Jason Bourne, and scores of sitcom characters who were bonked on the head, only to regain everything with another sizeable bonk.
I went to India as a Fulbright scholar. I worked out of university of Hyderabad. I had a small rooftop flat right next to the elevator engine. At first I thought it was a hell of a score, but these apartments are all over the city, and they're illegal, not included in the original building plan. It was incredibly hot, and the elevator engine squeaked and screamed as it lugged people up and down the building. But I did have the entire roof to myself, and could sit out there and watch kids all over the neighborhood flying kites from other rooftops.
I was settling down to do my work. I became a member of a library. It had a friend named Veda, a local grad student, and we had dinner together nearly every night. I was taking my anti-malarial drug, Lariam, every Thursday, just like my doctors told me.
One weekend in early October, I got really sick. Veda brought a doctor over to my flat. The doctor took my temperature, my blood pressure, palpated my stomach, gave me three injections. I asked the doctor what was in the injections, and he said, "medicine." I spent the next two days thrashing in my damp bed in fever dreams.
Veda called me in the morning of October 12. He had nicknamed me hero. "Hello, Hero. Are you up for some dinner or something?" I had no idea who he was. He spent the next five minutes trying to draw my memory, but as far as I knew, he was a stranger. I explained to him that he had the wrong number, and then hung up.
On October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad with no passport and no idea who I was. When I say that I woke up, I don't mean I was on a bench passed out and woozily came to. I mean all of a sudden, I was aware of my surroundings.
I was standing on the train platform staring at a monitor. People were pushing past me. Train announcements in another language were coming out of static-filled speakers. There were crowds of women in burkas standing near a stall where a man was making omelets. Massive trains would sound their massive horns before they trundled out of the station. And I suddenly was in the midst of all of this.
At that moment, staring at the monitors, I was a blank sheet that had just been rolled in the typewriter. No backstory, no motivation, no distinguishing characteristics, no real idea what I even looked like.
A man came up to me. He was wearing a uniform. He had a peaked cap and carried a long stick. He wanted to know if anything was wrong. I panned down from the monitor to his face. He was a little older than I was, but not much. His moustache was new and seemed uncertain if it would stay. Mostly, though, his face was kind.
I said to him, I have no idea who I am. Some chamber of emotion was unlocked in me and I started to cry. Blubber, really.
The policeman pulled a little away from me. He spent a moment considering his strategy, and finally decided on "There, there. Please calm down. I'm used to this situation. You foreigners come here to my country and do your drugs. I've seen this before many times." He pointed to a patch on his shoulder. "I'm here for you. I'm a tourist officer. Now, do you have a passport?"
I shook my sobbing head. "I think I slept in a room with monkeys last night."
"OK. Now do you have in your possession a wallet?"
I reached to my back pocket and pulled out a leather wallet stamped with an image of a cowboy with guns drawn. I was delirious with happiness. I open the wallet and there was my New Mexico driver's license. "That's me!" I shrieked as I shoved my finger on the square inch picture.
The officer took my wallet and put it in his pocket. "OK," he said. "Let's get you somewhere else."
I don't remember what happened next. My memory of that day and the next is a string of Christmas lights where only a few are lit. There's no sense to be made of which lights are lit, and you can flick at the dead bulbs as long as you want. They're not coming back on.
The officer told me his name was Rajesh, but I could call him Josh. He explained that it would be easier for me, since I was an American, to call him that. I thanked him.
We went through my wallet and found an internet cafe membership card. We went into a cafe that had the same logo. We got into my Hotmail account. By what means I was able to remember my internet address and password, I can't answer. All I know is that I send an email to my parents that contained the following information.
One. I was sorry for being a drug addict and for being such a terrible son.
Two. I was in trouble, but I should be OK soon, since the police were helping me.
Three. I would be home soon, and would work really hard to be a better person and earn their respect back.
Josh took me to a guesthouse which the police use as a safehouse for troubled foreigners. A Chinese woman ran the place, and she was known for being good with lost sheep tourists. The three of us sat down in our living room. White marble tile, creaking wooden furniture, and a shrine in the corner with a young man's picture on it. She gave me a glass of flat Sprite and she told me her story.
Her son had been traveling in Singapore when some bad men had injected him with drugs. He overdosed. She never got to see his body. They sent his ashes to her in a cardboard box. She wept as she told me this. "You do not understand what you are doing to your mother when you put these drugs into your body." She grabbed my hands and squeezed hard. I cried right back at her.
I was a drug addict, and I was breaking my mother's heart. I swallowed the narratives that they had given me. My brain was empty and famished. I'd taken anything.
Josh, the woman and I sat down and tried to remember my parents' phone number, which hasn't changed since 1977. It took six hours for me to remember the first phone number I'd never learned.
The woman dialed and handed me the phone when it was ringing. My mother answered. I started crying at the sound of her voice. I recognized it. I couldn't picture her, but that voice I knew. "I'm so sorry, mom. I didn't mean to do this to you."
"David, you didn't do anything. We got your email. Are you safe?"
"I'm in a guesthouse. Josh and this woman are helping me. I don't have my passport, but I'm going to get to Delhi and come home. Can I come home?"
"Of course you can come home. You said there's a woman helping you? Let me talk to her."
"I'm so sorry I've been out of touch for so long. I've been a terrible person, an awful son."
"David, we talked last Tuesday. What's the woman's name?"
"She wants to know your name."
"Mrs. Lee," the woman said. "Is that your mother? Let me speak with her."
Mom worked at a software company in Marion, Ohio, and one of her coworkers was married to a woman from Hyderabad. Mom told Mrs. Lee that she was going to get the phone number for this coworker's family and have them come over to help.
I was put to bed before the sun set. I didn't sleep. The room begin to twist. It didn't behave. One corner of the ceiling would be too close. Another would be miles away. The blankets itched. I was afraid to drink the Sprite. Birds flew onto the balcony and looked at me dismissively.
I knew suddenly that if I left the room, I would walk into a wide, pink kitchen, and there were crackers on the cupboard, and if I went into that kitchen and pulled the crackers down from the cupboard and said something, said something specific, a sentence, something that was totally, feignlessly me, then I'd be all right.
I knew that as soon as I said it, all of my loved ones would flood up from the basement and the other rooms where they'd been hiding. They would grab me and celebrate me and hold me in their arms.
I stood at the door of the small room in this guesthouse in Secunderabad and was ready to enter into the arms of all of those people who loved me and knew me. I just needed to remember what I was supposed to say. It was right on the tip of my tongue.
I stood at the doorway for over an hour trying to remember. I would open the door a crack and peer out, looking for where all my loved ones were hidden, then bang the door closed. I did this enough times for Mrs. Lee to get freaked out and call my mom's coworker's family.
I lay back down and tried to remember. The room was getting worse. There were voices. I flipped the mattress over to find where they were coming from. They alternated between giving me hints as to the phrase I was supposed to say and mocking me for not knowing it already. "Isn't that just like you?" they'd scold.
I was sweating. I'd wet myself. Two men walked into my room. I'd never seen them before. They were both in their early 60s. One man had a silver beard and a Pompadour. The other had a thick mustache and jet black hair and an overgrown Beatles mop top. They both had dark South Indian complexions.
"I'm Mr. Desappa and this is Mr. Sampson. Your mother summoned us here to help you."
I looked at the two men looming over me. "This isn't going well at all," I said.
Sampson helped me up while Desappa flipped the mattress back over. They laid me down and knelt on the floor beside me. "You'll be OK. Jesus loves you." They began to pray.
The men stayed all night, praying and laying their hands on me as they prayed. I'm not sure when they called the ambulance.
The next day I came to again. Bruises on my wrists from the restraints. I was in the mental institution, Greenlands Mental Facility. Dirty walls, small table, glass of water, drawn cloth curtain.
A doctor with a receding hair line sat at the edge of my bed making notes in a file with a pen that wasn't cooperating. He kept scribbling in the margins to get the ink to flow.
The doctors put me on Haloperidol, an anti-psychotic, so my hallucinations slowed, and I quieted enough to be unstrapped. I was doped up on enough Valium that I was able to have visitors.
Veda rounded up every American he knew, figuring I'd be more comfortable surrounded by them. These visitors acted like they knew me. They called me Dave, so I played along. They brought me newspapers and cigarettes. I had never smoked a day in my life, but I started chain smoking in the mental institution.
The the only thing I would consume other than cigarettes was curd rice. The nurses brought it to me in heaping platefuls. The Valium and Haloperidol made me affable. The nurses claimed I was the most entertaining psychotic they'd ever had.
At this point, you know more about me than I did at that moment. Those days where I was fed heavy meds through an IV, people treated me a certain way, and I became the kind of person who is treated like that. All I had to go on for my identity was the reactions of the people around me. I assembled a working self out of the behavior of others.
The truth, or at least what my family, the State Department, the Fulbright Organization, and I have determined as the truth is that the psychotic break, the hallucinations, the amnesia-- it all was an extreme side effect of the Larium, the anti-malarial drug that was a prescription of choice in those days. It's got a reputation for doing things like what happened to me, as well as much worse.
I started taking the drug a month before leaving, as prescribed. My mother says that she could tell I wasn't acting normally before I left, but she chalked it up to the stress of preparing for a year in India
When my parents walked into my room in the asylum, a motor spun inside my brain. I recognized them, and through them, I recognized myself. I wasn't sure of the details of my life, but my parents defined the broad particulars. We hugged, the three of us making a tent over the bed with our bodies.
I told my mom that I was sorry. She told me that she was sorry. My dad pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. My sister Betsy had put together a box for me. In it were two dozen cookies and an array of pictures of me from different times of my life. Me in a kilt, me at the beach, me with a dog, me standing on a station wagon smoking a cigar, me with my sisters, me with my arms around different women. Whoever I was, I couldn't keep a straight face for a photograph.
My parents told me where they were saying. They said it was too nice for them, but the restaurant was good and didn't serve them anything too spicy for breakfast. They said I needed to stay for another night at Greenlands, and then I'd go home with them to their hotel, and then we'd get on a plane for the U.S. They said that Sally was excited to see me and that Ann was planning on coming to Ohio for a visit.
These names mean as much to you as they did to me. My parents said them like they were people I knew and loved, so I nodded and said I was excited to see them.
They checked me out the next day. My dad hailed a rickshaw and the three of us piled into the backseat, me in between the two of them.
In Ohio I met Sally, who was my dog. I talked to Ann, my girlfriend, on the phone. I recognized the dog, but not Ann's voice. We hadn't been dating for very long, and my parents didn't have any pictures of her. I had no idea what she looked like. She seemed nice. She seemed like she cared about me.
Those days spent in my parents' house, I mostly stared at pictures, trying to recapture anything of who I was. I developed a system. I would look at the picture and imagine this character of me. Then I would place this character I had developed into these settings. I would imagine the jokes that were told. I would imagine how the character of me would feel. I was gathering information on this character of me all the time.
Ann came out on Halloween weekend, and even when I picked her up at the airport, even when she kissed me, I wasn't sure I had the right woman. We spent the weekend hiking with my parents. We had sex that first night of her visit, and she was still a stranger. I could not remember her or any details of our relationship. It was wiped clear.
She was in love with me. I tried the memory trick of placing the character of me in a relationship with her, and it didn't fit. I couldn't conceive of myself loving her. Sometimes I think that forgetting her with the cruelest thing I've ever done to a person.
I called her a week later and broke up with her. Ann isn't her real name, by the way. She asked me to change it for this story.
I flew back to India on November 20, a little more than a month after the incident. I wasn't entirely stable yet, but I was terrified that the Fulbright Organization would pull my funding if I gave them too much time to mull my psychological condition. I figured the best way back to health was to act like I was healthy. I put on a placid professional exterior while inside I was a full martini glass placed on a rubber ball.
It wasn't until I was on the connecting flight into Hyderabad that I realized I had no idea of where I lived. I panicked as we were touching down. I figured I'd get a cab. I just had no idea where to tell the driver to go.
Instead, Veda was waiting for me at the airport. I didn't recognize him, but by that time, I recognized the look of someone recognizing me. It was a skill I had developed in Ohio. I'd forgotten that I had emailed him my flight details.
He clapped me on my back and said, "The hero returns!" He gave me a bag full of toothpaste, ramen, and milk. "Enough to last you for a day," he said.
We drove through the city. It was 4 AM and silent. We made turn after turn until we ended up in front of a tall building that looked like all of the other apartment complexes. Veda took me up the elevator and then up a short flight of stairs. He handed me a keyring. "OK then, hero. I will be off. I can get some sleep before the kids start causing terror."
"You have kids?" "I will call you on your mobile, and we can go for some dinner at your favorite place."
I grabbed him, and I learned that Veda didn't like to be hugged.
I opened the door. Nothing. The road, the building, and now my apartment. Nothing was jogged, jostled, or loosened in my memory. I was alone, and lonelier than I thought it could be in a room filled with things that I'd selected.
There were books. I opened them and found my handwriting in the margins. Still nothing. I had read these books. Now I had to read them again. But why bother? If I lost my memory again, all that work would be futile.
The city started to wake up, and the sounds of bicycles, car horns, and newspaper wallahs rose up to me on the roof. I lit up a cigarette to fight the tension building in my chest. If it was going to happen again, I would throw myself off the roof.
I stubbed out the cigarette and opened the door to an apartment furnished with the possessions of a stranger.
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