Where It Began by Ann Redisch Stampler
part one
I
THIS IS HOW IT STARTS: SOME HAPLESS GIRL IN A skanky little tank top lying on her back in the wet grass somewhere in Hidden Hills. She is gazing at the stars through the leaves of a eucalyptus tree. The trunk of the eucalyptus tree is wrapped in Billy Nash’s blue BMW. Midnight-blue. The girl is trying to figure out what’s going on, beyond the more obvious facts: a mouth lined with a sick combination of beer and stale vodka, a crunched-up car with black smoke pouring out of it, a night sky filled with glassy constellations and a big white moon.
There are certain unavoidable conclusions.
Even so, the girl is trying to remember the particulars. The keg, maybe. The crash. She is trying to remember who she is and what happened to whoever that person might be.
She is trying to remember she is me.
When I wake up, I am wired to machines. Everything looks somewhat gray. I check to see if my toes can wiggle and I start counting my fingers, which proves to be more challenging than you’d expect. I’m pretty sure they’re all there, but I keep having to start over around finger number six.
Someone speaks, but it doesn’t make sense, pieces of words and random syllables. It occurs to me that I might be on some fairly serious drugs. Then I go back to counting my six fingers.
Just after this, or maybe way later, it is hard to tell, someone else says, “Good morning, Sunshine.”
I start to say, “Good morning,” but I end up throwing up instead. Which is evidently a good thing. I am surrounded by happy, blurry, celebrating people in scrubs.
Someone grabs my hand and yells “Good morning!” again, enunciating all the consonants in case I’m deaf or speak Serbo-Croatian. My name remains a mystery of life, but I do remember this horrible story about a gray-haired old lady discovered locked up in a mental hospital in Chicago or someplace, where she’d been stuck since she was sixteen years old when a policeman found her wandering the streets speaking Serbo-Croatian. Only nobody knew it was Serbo-Croatian so they decided that she must be crazy and locked her up basically forever.
Whoever I am, I’m pretty sure that I’m not her.
Then it occurs to me that all these greenish-gray, blurry-looking figures I’ve been thinking of as people might actually be space aliens doing a bad job of pretending to be human. I try to go back to counting the fingers, but this is hard with the big happy alien clutching my hand as if she is afraid that I might make a break for it and cut out of the mother ship if she let go.
I try to get my hand back, which is cause for further celebration.
The hand-grabbing alien is wearing a V-neck scrub shirt with bunnies all over it. “Can you tell us your naaaaame?” she yells over and over.
I am still trying to reclaim the hand.
I hear myself saying, “Bunnies.”
They all echo me and someone writes it down, or writes down something. I can hear the ballpoint scratch against the paper, harsh and loud.
“That’s very goooooood!” someone else says. I have made the space clones ecstatic. “You’ve been in a car accident, Bunny,” she shouts cheerfully.
The car. I sort of remember the car.
“You probably feel a little sick, but you’re going to be fine. Dear? We need to know your last name too. What’s your last name, Bunny?”
By now I am overwhelmed by the mystery of the situation. Although, I am in command of several key facts:
1. My name is not Bunny.
2. I have ten fingers, or at least I have six, and none of them actually seems to be missing.
3. I might or might not be in a hospital somewhere.
Ideas float through my head like big, goofy cartoons. Elephants and bunny shirts and bags.
“My ID,” I say.
“Heidi!” they say. “That’s great! Are you Heidi?”
“ID,” I say. “Look in my bag. Give me my wallet.”
All right, so I have no idea who I am, but at least I’m not stupid. This is something of a relief.
“I’m afraid the paramedics didn’t find it, honey,” Bunny Shirt says. “Let’s see if you can tell me what day it is today.”
This seems like an exceptionally stupid, random question under the circumstances.
“Calendar,” I say.
They seem to be missing a lot of important items around here, such as calendars, and where is my bag? I remember my bag. It is the small, black fabric Prada bag, the kind with the leather strap and not the woven cloth one. The kind you can buy somewhat cheaply on the Internet and look somewhat richer than you really are. Unlike Louis Vuitton bags, which are always fake on the Internet and everyone can tell you bought some cheap, fake bag and you just look like a poseur.
There: car accident, toes and fingers, no name, no ID, and an encyclopedic knowledge of bags. I try to think about bags. What else do I know about them? I know I want mine back. Did they leave it in the car?
“Look in the car,” I say.
The aliens chirp and huddle, letting go of the hand. I think about escaping, but I don’t seem to be able to move. Also, there are tubes coming out of the back of my hand and the crook of my elbow. There are wires glued to my chest.
“Okay, Heidi,” Bunny Shirt says, turning back with a great big toothy smile that makes her look like she might want to suck blood out of my neck. “The car you were driving is registered to Agnes and William B. Nash. Could you be Agnes?”