By way of explanation he added, “We’re close to the park.”
“You had worked in the store that morning?”
“Yes.”
He was taken to a new room and made to undress and put on hospital clothes. A man in a white uniform took his own away in a wire basket.
After a while a nurse came in and gave him medicine.
The Patient
There seemed to be things to do in the day room, but its games and pastimes were largely illusory. A cabinet on the west wall held half-a-dozen jigsaw puzzles, all with missing pieces—the basis for predictable jokes whenever someone got a puzzle out. The piano needed tuning; not that anyone in the ward could play more than “Chopsticks” anyway, though occasionally someone tried. The dog-eared cards in the drawer were short the ace, deuce, and four of hearts. The nurses guarded a container of Ping-Pong balls and usually said they were out of them to save trouble.
Or perhaps, he thought, they really were out. Perhaps the container was empty and had been so for years, as dusty within as without.
“Want to play some chess?”
He looked up. The man with the board and box was short and middle-aged, with haystack hair.
“Some of the chessmen are gone,” he said.
“We can use something else.”
He nodded and went over to the table. They used checkers—two black checkers for the missing black pawns, and a red king for the missing white queen.
“White or black?”
He considered. In some vague fashion, the decision seemed enormously important. He studied the white queen and the black, trying to decide which was Lara. The white, of course. White for her complexion, red for her hair. “White.”
His opponent spun the board. “Your move.”
He nodded and pushed a pawn at random. The black queen’s pawn advanced two squares. He moved his bishop. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe we met awhile back,” he said. He added, “Outside,” though that did not seem quite right.
“Maybe,” his opponent said. “I’ve been getting shock, know what I mean? It makes you forget stuff.” He raised both hands to point to the inflamed marks at his temples. “You?”
“Not yet.”
“But you’re going to, huh?”
“I think so.”
“It doesn’t hurt. A lot of guys think it’s going to, but it doesn’t. Say, you’ve got the marks already.”
When the game was over, his opponent sat at the piano and played an old-fashioned song, “Find Your True Love,” singing to the out-of-tune music in a hoarse but not unpleasant voice. It was not until that night, when he lay in his narrow hospital bed with his hands in back of his head, that he placed his opponent as the patient who had sent him to tell Walsh about—someone and someone else. He could not recall the names.
There was a woman with dyed hair and a long face who was deeply concerned about his attitude toward sex. There was an Indian who explained to him why it was so much easier to cure people who believed in demons. There was the tired middle-aged doctor, whose name he could sometimes remember, and there was Dr. Nilson, whose name he sometimes forgot.
Then there was grass to be cut and a garden to be weeded, lawns to be raked, and russet, brown, and deeply golden leaves to be burned. There was snow to be shoveled. They gave him a warm jacket and gloves for that, clothing donated by some kind person who had left empty .22 calibre brass in the pockets of the jacket.
Some nights he wondered what had happened to the hospital to which the van had taken him, and sometimes he felt sure he was back in United. Once he told a smooth Korean about United and Dr. Pille, and the smooth Korean, Dr. Kim, giggled.
There was an attendant who was kind to him but eventually, behind the boiler in the steam plant, wanted him to do something he did not want to do. It was then, while he was walking alone back to the main building, that it came to him that he was there for a memory that was, after all, no more than a dream.
At his next interview, he asked the Indian doctor whether they had ever found out what had happened to him while he was gone.
“Ah, but do not you yourself know?” the Indian inquired. “You can tell us, I think.”
He shook his head and said it was all a blank, and watched with satisfaction as the Indian doctor (also with satisfaction) made a note on his pad.
He had lost his apartment, but the store found him another one that was if anything better. His clothes and furniture had been put in storage, and it was pleasant to see the old things smile as they came out of their boxes and to arrange them in the new places. Because it was summer, he left some winter clothing boxed up. The apartment included storage space in the basement of his new building; he tagged the carton as the building manager instructed him, and together they put it into the storage room and relocked the door.
