Passenger(37)

“If it’s any consolation,” I tell her, “I don’t know if I liked it or not.”

She says she wants to take me to see her friend Lucy. She says Lucy works for a doctor, a radiologist, and Lucy can help figure out why I’ve got the deep divot at the base of my skull, and the scar that winds halfway up the back of my head.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no medical insurance.”

She tells me it doesn’t matter.

“I don’t know,” I say again. “It’s just going to be another dead end.”

“No.” I watch her eyes. They are poignant, history-filled eyes. “You’re just afraid to learn who you are.”

So there.

And Lucy, as it turns out, is a man. His name is James Lucy. What the history is between this man and Olivia I do not know, but while they are polite with each other, I sense an underlying mutual discomfort. James Lucy, who is a tall, gawky fellow with sagebrush hair, glasses, a voice like a warm overcoat, and a black goatee, sets me up in a chair in a darkened room and covers my chest and lap with a lead vest. Olivia waits outside the room, watching through a panel of glass.

“Liv wasn’t clear on the phone. You’re having pains in your head?” James Lucy asks as he prepares the equipment in the dark room.

“Some, yes.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“How’d you get this scar, is what I meant.”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here.”

James Lucy looks uncomfortable and unsure of himself. “So,” he says after a lengthy pause, “you’re a close friend of Olivia’s?” He tries to sound casual but I can tell he is curious just how close a friend I am. The whole mystery of my head injury is suddenly less interesting than my relationship with Olivia.

“Not very,” I say, and this seems to be the end of our small talk.

He takes x-rays of my skull and we wait in his office for the x-rays to download to his laptop computer. There are baseball trophies on the wall. A lot of them. I wonder what type of doctor keeps baseball trophies in the office.

When the x-rays download, he brings them up, nearly life-size, on his monitor. I do not need him to tell me what I am looking it. It is pretty obvious.

“Metal plate,” he says anyway. “That whole white square there. Looks about six by six inches, if I had to guess.”

“Jesus,” says Olivia, her voice small.

“This comes as a surprise?” James Lucy asks, his thick eyebrows rising above the frames of his glasses. He looks straight at me. “That there is a metal plate in your head?”

“Surprise,” I say, staring at the monitor.

“Didn’t you know?” Lucy says, incredulous.

“Do you think we can x-ray my leg, too?” I roll up my pant leg to reveal a second scar.

“Jeez,” says Lucy. He tries out a sad little laugh, but I can tell he’s already too uncomfortable. Maybe he thinks we’re pulling one over on him. Maybe Olivia thinks so, too, because she’s looking at me now like I’ve just dropped out of the sky.

The x-ray of my leg shows a second metal plate, narrower than the one in my head, affixed to the bone with steel screws.

“Well, I guess that mystery’s solved,” I say.

“I’m—wait, I’m confused.” Lucy’s eyes, magnified to dinner plates behind the lenses of his glasses, volley between me and Olivia. “You didn’t know about this? You didn’t know that stuff was in you?”

Pulling on my coat, I say, “Nope. And in fact, I’m sort of relieved.”

Lucy frowns. He will be forever trapped in disbelief. He says, “Relieved? Why?”

“Because until now,” I tell him, “I thought the government had a tracking device implanted in my brain.”

Olivia and I go to the door.

“I should probably draw blood, too,” he says. “You look like shit. You might be coming down with something.”

“No thanks,” I tell him.

“I’ll call you, Liv,” Lucy promises as we leave, but Olivia doesn’t answer.

Christmas draws nearer. Beneath a darkening sky, an orange sodium glow radiates behind the buildings on the horizon. Again, I find myself wandering up and down the streets, passing bus stop after bus stop. I am practically a regular now. Even the bums recognize me.

I am freezing, too, and my feet have gone numb. Here, the streets are brightly lit against the night. Couples, bundled against the cold, hurry up and down the avenue, their heads tilted slightly down, contrails of vapor flagging out to the sides of their heads.

The buses have stopped running at this late hour, but I locate the final stop nonetheless. The final stop. The first stop. Depending on the time of day; depending on your destination. I lean against the bus stop sign, wiggling my toes in hopes of working the feeling back into them, the illumination of a post office directly at my back. While I stand there, the post office lights wink off just as a Thai restaurant glows brightly across the street. I smell coffee and various ethnic foods and am aware—above all else, I am aware—of the way pedestrians are glaring at me now as they walk by. Somehow, in the passage of hours, of days, I have gone from being an invisible ghost to a visible derelict. My gaping collar and sallow, heavily-cheekboned face frightens them. The Auschwitz Jew leers at me from every reflective surface. My twin from an alternate universe stares up at me from every foul-smelling puddle in the street. The way I lean against the bus stop sign screams danger-danger-danger. I am like a beacon out at sea; it is suddenly impossible to not see me.