Community Read online

  He said, in his thick but reassuring voice, ‘This is the Trinity-Shasta Clinic, near Mount Shasta, and I am Doctor Hamid. You have been involved in a serious accident, my dear sir, and it is something of a miracle that you are still with us.’

  ‘An accident? What kind of an accident?’

  ‘A traffic accident, on the interstate. Your car overturned and you were almost killed.’

  Michael tried for a third time to lift his head, but the doctor pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead. ‘Please to lie very still. Your neck was dislocated. We had to operate on you to fuse together two of the vertebrae in order to achieve realignment of your spinal column. We have every hope that you will recover completely, but I have to warn you that this usually takes some months.’

  ‘I feel like somebody’s been beating up on me, and then kicking me while I was down.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said Doctor Hamid, smoothly. ‘One of the common symptoms of a serious neck injury such as yours is chronic pain in many different locations all over your body. But we have been giving you intravenous analgesics to ease your discomfort, and we will continue to do so for as long as you need them.’

  Michael frowned, and said, ‘Where did you say this was?’

  ‘Trinity-Shasta Clinic, near Mount Shasta.’

  ‘Mount Shasta? What the hell am I doing way up here?’

  The red-haired woman drew up a chair close to his bed and sat down. ‘This is the nearest trauma clinic to the location where you had your accident,’ she said. ‘You were lucky. Well – you weren’t lucky to have your accident, I’m not saying that. But Trinity-Shasta has one of the most advanced spinal units in the country. If you’d been taken in to some small-town emergency room, you could well have died, or been paralysed from the neck down for the rest of your life.’

  ‘I’m still trying to think what I’m doing near Mount Shasta. The last thing I remember I was …’

  He stopped. What was the last thing that he could remember? Talking to somebody about something in some bar. He could remember the stained-glass window over the door, and the raucous sound of people laughing, but he couldn’t think where it was, or who he had been talking to, or what they had been talking about.

  The red-haired woman said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s not important. It will all come back to you. Are you thirsty? Maybe you’d like some water or some cranberry juice.’

  Michael said, ‘We were talking about … something to do with light. That was it. The speed of light. Why were we talking about that?’

  ‘Who were you talking to?’ the red-haired woman asked him.

  Michael squeezed his eyes tight shut and tried to visualize the stained-glass window and the face of the man who was sitting underneath it, talking to him. But all he could see was a featureless blur, and all he could hear was a muffled blurting sound.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s no good. I just can’t remember.’

  ‘My name’s Catherine, by the way,’ the red-haired woman told him. ‘Catherine Connor. Doctor Catherine Connor.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Michael. He was beginning to think that she was quite attractive, in a gingery way, even though she must be four or five years older than him. ‘Doctor of what, exactly?’

  ‘Post-traumatic therapy, both physical and psychological. I help people to get over traumatic events in their lives, like severe shocks or brain damage or spinal injuries, which is why I’m here talking to you.’

  ‘Nothing personal, Doctor, but you sound expensive. How am I going to pay for all of this?’

  Dr Connor smiled and shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t be charged. The Trinity-Shasta Clinic is a non-profit research foundation, privately funded. You may not believe it, but we’ll be getting a whole lot more out of you than you’ll be getting out of us.’

  ‘How long do I have to stay strapped down like this? I feel like Frankenstein’s monster.’

  ‘That depends on Doctor Hamid. When your vertebrae were dislocated, that injury also tore your neck muscles, your blood vessels, your ligaments, your nerves and your esophagus. But of course we’ll be taking regular CT scans, and as soon as we’re confident that you can move without causing yourself any further injury, we’ll get you up on your feet. I personally believe that patients should start movement therapy as soon as possible.’

  ‘OK. Thanks,’ he coughed. ‘Maybe I could have that drink now. What do I call you – Doctor Connor? Or Catherine?’

  ‘We’re going to be seeing a whole lot of each other, so Catherine is fine.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t shake your hand, Catherine. I’m …’

  He stopped. He felt as if a black shutter had slammed down inside of his head. He simply couldn’t think what his name was. Not only that, he couldn’t think of any names, so that he could run through them and try to remember which one was his.

  He stared at Doctor Connor in complete bewilderment, blinking. How could he not remember his own name? But there was nothing.

  Doctor Connor reached out and stroked his fringe again. ‘Your name is – what?’ she coaxed him, very softly. ‘Don’t try too hard to remember it. Think of your mother instead, calling you. Think of what your friends used to sing, when it was your birthday.’

  She paused, and then she sang, ‘Happy birthday, dear la-la-la! Happy birthday to you. Can you remember the cake, and the candles? Can you hear them singing, inside your head?’

  Michael listened and listened, but there was nothing inside his head, only blankness and silence. He couldn’t remember his mother. He couldn’t remember the sound of her voice. He couldn’t even remember what she looked like.

  After a while, he gasped like a swimmer coming up for air. ‘I don’t know, Catherine! I just can’t think of it!’

  ‘Don’t get upset,’ she told him. ‘It’s not at all unusual for people to suffer from amnesia, after an accident. There are ways of rebuilding your memories, and that’s one of the things that you and I will be doing together, little by little.’

  ‘But how the hell can I not even know my own name?’

  ‘It’s really not uncommon. I worked with young marines who came back from Iraq, suffering from just the same problem. Your brain has suffered from such a shock that it has simply shut down, like somebody hiding under the bedcovers and refusing to come out.’

  ‘Tell me some names.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me some names and maybe I’ll be able to tell if one of them is mine.’

  ‘That won’t work. You may pick a name simply because it rings a bell. It might not be your name at all, and that will only confuse you even more.’

  Michael lay there staring at the ceiling. Then he glanced sideways at Doctor Connor. The sun was shining in her hair so that she looked almost like an angel. He had only just met her and yet he felt desperately dependent on her. How else was he going to find out who he was and what he was doing here, up near Mount Shasta?

  The strange thing was that even though he couldn’t think of his name, he knew that he didn’t belong around here, and that he lived someplace far to the south. It was where that bar was – that noisy bar with the stained-glass window, where he had been talking about the speed of light.

  ‘My accident,’ he said. ‘Do you know what happened?’

  ‘Not in any detail, no. The paramedics said that your SUV crossed over on to the wrong side of the interstate, and got hit by a truck coming the other way.’

  Michael closed his eyes again, and tried to imagine it, but he couldn’t. The black shutter remained firmly shut. How can you get hit by a truck and not remember it?

  But then he suddenly thought: Surely I must have had some ID on me, when the paramedics brought me in here? A wallet, with credit cards and a driver’s license? A cellphone? And what about my license plate? The police would have been able to check my identity with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  ‘Catherine,’ he said.

  She had been jotting not
es on a yellow legal pad, but now she looked up, and he could tell by her expression that she knew what he was going to say.

  ‘You know my name already,’ he said.

  Catherine nodded. ‘I do, yes. But encouraging you to remember it yourself – that’s an important part of your cognitive therapy.’

  ‘Tell me what it is.’

  ‘It won’t help.’

  ‘I don’t care if it helps or not, Catherine. Please. I have to know what my name is. Not just that – who am I? Where do I live? Do my family know what’s happened to me? Are any of them coming to visit?’

  Doctor Connor flicked back a few pages in her legal pad.

  ‘I shouldn’t really be telling you this. It’s much against my better judgment. I should really be giving you an AMI – that’s an Autobiographical Memory Interview. By doing that, I can test how severe your retrograde amnesia really is, and treat it accordingly.’

  ‘Please – just tell me what my name is!’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and read from her notes. ‘Your name is Gregory John Merrick. You live at ten forty-four Pine Street, San Francisco. You share an apartment with a work colleague, Kenneth Geary. You are a marine engineer working for Moffatt and Nichol. Your sister Sue lives in Oakland with her husband Jimmy and their two children. Your father died two years ago. Your mother now lives in Baywood Apartments close to your sister. Your sister brought her up here to see you soon after your accident and they regularly call to check on your progress.’

  She turned over two pages and said, ‘As a matter of fact, your sister called only yesterday afternoon, and spoke to Nurse Sheringham.’

  After she had finished, Michael said nothing.

  ‘Does any of that help?’ asked Doctor Connor, after a while.

  Michael was unable to shake his head, because of his high plastic collar, but tears slid out of the side of each eye.

  ‘I still can’t remember,’ he told her. ‘I still don’t know who I am.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s the way your brain works. It can re-route your memory paths, so that they bypass the shocked or damaged areas, but it needs you to initiate it.’

  She stood up, and tugged a Kleenex out of the box beside the bed, and dabbed his eyes for him, and helped him to blow his nose.

  ‘How long was I asleep for?’ he asked her.

  ‘Well, let’s put it this way, you’ve been quite the Rip Van Winkle.’

  ‘How long, Catherine?’

  She looked at him steadily, and this time she didn’t smile. ‘Your accident happened on November eleventh. Today is February sixth. That makes it two months, three weeks, and four days.’

  THREE

  The first day that Catherine took him outside, it was bright but bitingly cold. The sky was almost completely clear, except for a few wispy mares’ tails over Mount Shasta.

  Michael was surprised to see how close the mountain was. He guessed that it couldn’t have been more than five or six miles away.

  ‘Did you ever climb it?’ he asked Catherine.

  ‘Once, yes, two summers ago. We got together a party from the clinic. Everything they say about that mountain is true. What can I say? It’s very serene up there. You feel closer to God, or Buddha, or whoever you believe in.’

  ‘It’s the fifth highest peak in the Cascade Range,’ said Michael.

  He did an exaggerated double-take, and then he twisted around in his wheelchair and said, ‘How the hell did I know that?’

  But then he held up his hand and said, ‘Wait … I also happen to know that it’s four thousand three hundred twenty-two meters high, and that it has an estimated volume of eight hundred fifty cubic kilometers.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Catherine. ‘Little bits and pieces are starting to come back to you. You’re an engineer, aren’t you, so it’s not surprising you’re good on statistics.’

  She pushed him along the red-brick path to the far end of the clinic’s rose garden. The rose beds were lumpy with snow, and the roses themselves looked like nothing more than frozen sticks. Michael was wearing a padded navy-blue jacket with a hood, and insulated boots, and he had a thick plaid blanket tucked around him. Catherine was wearing a brindled fox-fur coat and a bobbly white knitted hat.

  They stopped, and Catherine sat down on a bench. Their breath was smoking in the cold, so that it looked from a distance as if they were taking a cigarette break.

  ‘Did you talk to Doctor Hamid this morning?’ asked Michael. ‘Does he have any idea how much longer I’ll have to stay here?’

  Catherine shook her head. ‘It’s really hard to say. Physically you’re doing pretty well, although Doctor Hamid is still concerned about the shock sustained by your spine. That can take months to heal completely. It’s your amnesia that worries us the most. We can’t send you home yet because you simply can’t remember where you live or where you work or even what it is that you do.

  ‘Your sister Sue has offered to look after you, but you need highly specialized amnesia therapy, which you can only get here. You could hardly commute from Oakland every day.’

  ‘So you simply don’t know how long it’s going to take?’

  ‘Based on previous patients, Gregory, I’d say three to four months. I can’t be more precise than that. It may be that your neural pathways suddenly open up, and you start to remember everything in a flood. To be honest with you, though, I’ve only known that to happen very rarely.’

  Michael sat back in his wheelchair, which creaked under his weight. He still felt chronically tired, and he ached all over, especially his shoulders and his back, and when he tried to stand up his knees gave him such jabs of pain that he had to bite his lower lip to stop himself from shouting out loud.

  What tired him more than anything, though, was not being able to remember who he was. He felt as if he were banging his head against a wall, again and again, as if he were autistic. By the end of the day, he was mentally exhausted, and his brain ached as well as his body.

  Even though it was partially screened by the leafless trees that surrounded the rose garden, he could clearly see the dazzling white peaks of Mount Shasta. For a split second, the sight of them brought back a flash of feeling. Not a fully formed memory, but a flicker of light and shade, a snatch of somebody’s voice, and – most evocative of all – the briefest hint of some light, flowery perfume.

  ‘Are you all right, Gregory?’ Catherine asked him. ‘You look … I don’t know. You look puzzled.’

  He gave her a quick, dismissive shake of his head. ‘I’m OK. Just kind of disoriented, I guess. Remember, this is the first time I’ve been outside in over three months, even if I was asleep for most of them.’

  ‘Well, I want to show you something,’ said Catherine. ‘In fact, this is the whole reason I brought you out here.’

  She stood up and continued to push him along the bumpy red-brick path. If he had been a small child, he would have said errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, so that his voice wobbled. He wondered if that were a memory from his childhood, his mother pushing him in a baby buggy, and in his mind’s eye he tried to turn around to see his mother’s face, but he couldn’t.

  Catherine pushed him through the brick archway at the end of the rose garden, and down a small wet concrete slope. Now they were outside the white concrete walls of the clinic, in a curving street of neat single-story houses, some of them pastel pink and some of them pastel yellow, with snow-covered roofs, all set well back from the road behind their own snow-covered front lawns. All of them had cars and SUVs parked in their driveways, but all of these were covered in snow, too, and there were no tire-tracks across the sidewalks, so it looked to Michael as if none of the residents had been out today.

  The road itself had been gritted and cleared of snow, so Catherine pushed Michael along the middle. The street was sunny and almost completely silent, except for the very faint sound of a television show from one of the houses, with occasional bursts of studio laughter.

  There were trees
on either side, but all of these were bare. Michael thought of the words ‘Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree’ but he couldn’t remember why he knew them or where they came from.

  ‘This is Trinity,’ said Catherine. She stopped, and took a tissue out of her pocket, and dabbed her nose. ‘This is our local community.’

  ‘Looks pretty quiet,’ said Michael. ‘In fact, I’d say “sleepy”.’

  ‘That’s why people come to live here,’ said Catherine, resuming her wheelchair-pushing. ‘They want peace, and fresh air, and good neighbors. And more peace.’

  ‘So where do they work? Where’s the nearest town to here?’

  ‘Some of them are retired, but most of them work from home. One or two of them have businesses in Redding or Yreka. I think one of them is a personal injury lawyer. But of course nobody’s at work today because it’s Saturday.’

  She kept on pushing him along the street, around the curve, until they came to a wide-open area like a playing-field, with houses all around it. A young girl in a red duffel coat was walking a shaggy white sheepdog around the edge of the field, while another young girl in a pink windbreaker was circling around and around her on a bicycle.

  The girl on the bicycle pedaled up to Michael and Catherine and began to circle around Michael’s wheelchair. She had frizzy brown hair fastened with wooden beads into bunches. Her face was very pale and she had a livid pink lightning-flash scar on her left temple. It almost looked as if somebody had hit her with a machete.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked Michael. ‘I never saw you before. Are you a cripple?’

  Catherine said, ‘His name’s Gregory, Jemima, and he was hurt in a car crash. But he’s getting better and soon he’ll be walking again, so you’d better watch what you say to him or else he’s going to come after you when he can walk and give you a pasting.’

  Jemima kept on circling around and around. ‘He’d better not try! I’ll tell my mom, else.’

  The girl with the sheepdog called out, ‘Come on, Jem! We’re going to be late!’