Passenger(40)

“Who did I mail it to?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Is there—do you have—would there be some record of it at your office?” I ask, hopeful. “Some sort of inventory list?”

“No,” she says, dejected. “Sorry.”

“And that was it? That was the one and only time you saw me?”

“Yes.”

“Some memory,” I say.

She looks sad. “What about your memory? Have you been this way since the accident? Because that sounds impossible. Horrible, even…”

“I’m not sure,” I say, and tell her about waking up on the city bus earlier this month. I tell her about the address written on my hand and even show it to her now. It is still there. I feel it is important to rewrite the address every morning I wake up and after every shower. “Because you never know,” I tell her.

“How sad.”

“Is it?”

“What if you have a family out there worrying about you, looking for you? And here you are and you don’t even know it.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Really? What have you been thinking of all this time?”

“Mostly about myself.” It sounds pathetic now, speaking it aloud. “I have a feeling it’s cyclical, too—that it keeps happening over and over again.”

“The forgetting?”

I explain about Sister Eleanor at the church and how I’d apparently visited her over the past year, giving her different names. And how I can’t remember any of it. Also, I tell her about the old woman at the apartment office and how she accused me—or someone like me—of coming into the office a month earlier requesting similar information.

“Sounds like you’re following the same footsteps over and over,” Nicole says. Something in her tone tells me she is uncomfortable with all this. “Sounds like you keep trying to find the answers, but keep forgetting it all over again in the process.”

“But why?”

She bites her lower lip and raises her eyebrows. “I guess that’s the question.”

“Yeah…”

“Maybe it starts over once you figure everything out.”

Her words astound me, render me silent. Finally, after what seems like a decade, I say, “Like once I find out who I am, I forget all over again?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just timed, you know? A medical condition. Like you’ve got a month or whatever until your mind wipes itself clean. And you start all over from scratch.”

“God,” I utter, “I don’t know if I can deal with that…”

“You won’t know it. Each time would be like the first time, I would think.”

“It’s scary,” I marvel, “to think how many times I may have done this already. Like I’m wasting my life.”

“But you don’t know it.”

“Now I do.”

“Then,” she says, “maybe you’ll start forgetting again.”

The thought makes me weak. I am exhausted just at the concept. I cannot do this much longer. And she watches me as if preparing to witness the vanishing of my memories all over again.

My voice paper-thin, I say, “What if I wake up tomorrow and I don’t remember any of this? What if I have to start from scratch again?” I am busy thinking of that first night, and how I collapsed on the landing of my apartment building. “I can’t do it…”

“But you won’t know it,” she says again. “You can do it because you won’t know it. It could be ten times or a hundred. Or just twice. It won’t matter.”

“Damn it,” I say. “I didn’t think of something.”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t think to write this all down, to get a notebook and write everything down.”

“It’s not too late,” she says simply. “I mean, we can do that here. Tonight. If you want.”

Before I can respond, she is up and rooting around back in her bedroom. She returns with a spiral-bound notebook and clutching a handful of pens.

“There’s so much,” I say.

“Begin at the beginning,” Nicole suggests. “What’s the first thing you remember?”

I think about it. “The sound of the brakes. On the bus. The bus was coming to the last stop. Then,” I continue after a pause, “opening my eyes.”

“Good,” she says. “Write that. I’ll put on more coffee.”

So I begin to scribble everything down. I write until my hand hurts. And when I cannot write any longer, Nicole offers to take over. She writes as I dictate. She sits in one corner of the sofa, her feet pulled up under her, the spiral-bound notebook over one small thigh, and scribbles intently as I walk her through my brief, brief life.

When we finish, she sets the notebook down on the table and yawns.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m keeping you awake. I’ll go.”

“Wait,” she says. “Do you want to stay?” Realizing what this must sound like, she quickly backpedals: “I mean here, on the couch, just for the night. Just in case you wake up in the morning and have no memory.” She continues chewing on her lower lip. “I can be here to fill in the details.”