The first thing I can recall clearly was sitting in a hospital room in the dark.
I knew something was wrong — that there was something wrong with me — and yet, I couldn’t tell exactly what. I realized the left side of my face was numb. Hanging on the wall in front of me was a television, but there was something wrong with it too. A ghostly copy was superimposed over the standard set; it was rotated at roughly a 15-degree angle and faded away into the burnt cream walls. Is the TV the problem, or is it me?
My mother and a nurse wearing scrubs entered from the left, a disorienting place outside of my field of vision.
“That’s our girl,” my mom said, approaching my bed. “How are you doing today?”
Why was she so nonchalant? Why wasn’t she worried? Considering the haphazard inventory I had just taken, I probably should have demanded answers or cursed a bit. Raised some hell. Instead, I replied with an uncertain “… good,” slightly alarmed that she, too, possessed a ghostly, tilted imprint. When I was young, my mother always went on, at length, about the difficulties of raising my prone-to-tantrums, bang-his-head-on-the-concrete-when-angry older brother. Then, turning to me, she’d say, “But you, you’re so easy. And calm. And you never complain.” I guess that hadn’t changed. I wanted to ask her what was happening — and where I was. Instead, I swept my arm in front of me and, trying to find out what would happen next, said, “And now?”
Before she answered, another character entered from the hallway, but this one I couldn’t place. Fairly young — my age, by the look of him — his youth was accentuated by a clean-shaven chin under full, feminine lips and a baseball cap perched precariously on his head, above his boyish face. He had the look of a perpetually surprised toddler, lips slightly parted in wonder and curiosity.
“Now you have physical therapy,” he commented.
The physical therapist, a blonde woman with chin-length hair, stepped in from stage right, clipboard in hand and a laminated badge dangling from a lanyard around her neck. When she entered, the nurse left, not wanting to crowd the room.
The physical therapist pushed a rolling walker to the edge of my bed and beckoned me to rise. My initial movements were the stop-motion stutter of a crude animation. I reached for one of the walker’s handles. And missed. The double image layered on top of what I thought was the actual walker jutted out awkwardly in a direction that led me to believe it couldn’t be the real one — was I wrong? I tried again. Yeah, I was wrong.
“Are you OK? Ready to stand?” the physical therapist asked.
Planting my feet shoulder-width apart, clinging to my walker, I clambered to a standing position — I’m generous when I use that phrase. Between my shaking limbs, bent knees and outstretched arms, I must’ve looked more like a member of a seniors’ Pilates class than the 25-year-old woman I presumed myself to still be. Everything, including myself, felt familiar yet foreign, an already-read book revisited accidentally. An eerie sense of déjà vu — my own personal uncanny valley, so familiar but not the same.
“OK, Brooke.” The physical therapist then addressed my mother and her companion. “We’ll be back in 45 minutes.”
The therapist led me down a long hallway lined with other rooms and other patients. Every few feet, the therapist paused and waited for me to inch toward her, patiently watching with a fixed smile for the stop-motion hermit crab to scuttle closer.
“Now just a little farther to the elevator,” the therapist said, pulling me back to the task at hand. I had just discovered I was having issues multitasking: Whenever I started thinking too much, I couldn’t walk.
My god, I thought, I am exhausted and we’re not even where we’re going yet.
When we finally reached the elevator, I stepped inside, at the therapist’s behest.
“I feel like I know you,” my voice hissed out of my mouth like a barely audible stream of gas. A death rattle that made syllables and managed to form words.
At first, I wasn’t sure she had heard whatever had escaped my throat. Her back, still facing me, seemed crystallized in position. Finally, she turned and looked at me for a long moment. When the elevator doors dinged close, she took a deep breath and sighed.
“I’m Linda.”
“My grandpa’s girlfriend has your name.”
Linda’s mouth tightened, but her eyes softened.
“I know. I’ve introduced myself to you nearly every day for the past two weeks.”
Luckily, my memories started to stick after that disconcerting moment with the TV. Unluckily, weeks had already elapsed since I had been admitted to the hospital, some of which time I’d been comatose. I started receiving various stories about what had happened. Some true, some, I would eventually come to realize, fiction.
One day, shortly after I’d started to remember Linda the therapist, the boy with the childlike face and childlike hat — I’ll call him Stanley here — slipped into the hospital bed with me. Alarmed, but oddly complacent, I said nothing, even as he leaned close to me and whispered into my ear, “I’ve been telling everyone that I’m your boyfriend.”
“Yeah, OK.”
Hadn’t this happened before? Him divulging he was my boyfriend … it felt familiar. How many times had this happened?
“OK,” he parroted and turned to Naked and Afraid on the TV.
“My face is numb.”
“Yeah, you’ve been saying that.”
“That screen is double.”
“Yeah, you’ve been saying that too.”
“What happened?”
Stanley cocked his head to the side like a confused dog and considered my question — or at least, I figured he was considering it. Maybe he was worried about me. Maybe my well-being concerned him.
“What do you remember?” he asked me.
“You moved your stuff into my room.” I knew this had happened, even though I hadn’t realized it a moment before. But I remembered that detail and I knew I knew him. In what capacity? His claim to be my boyfriend didn’t feel right — it couldn’t have been romantic. Wasn’t I just doing him a favor?
His already round, wide eyes widened further. He pursed his lips and diverted his gaze.
“You allowed me to move into your apartment temporarily.” Stanley paused. “That’s the last thing you remember? And you don’t remember what you had been doing that day?”
“What day?”
Stanley let out a huff of air in exasperation. He shook his head in exaggerated impatience, rolling his eyes.
“The day you and Cassie climbed a redwood near the trailer park and you fell 25 feet out of it.”
According to my mother, in the early days of my hospitalization, every time Stanley entered my hospital room and announced himself to the doctors and nurses as my boyfriend, I threw out an arm in a warped imitation of Vanna White and exclaimed, “I guess I have a boyfriend now.” Cue Pat Sajak chortling good-naturedly.
It came back to me early on, distinctly, that he had never wanted to be my boyfriend before this.
But whenever I broached the subject, Stanley told me he hadn’t known what he wanted before, but uncertain of whether I would live or die, he became aware of how he felt. My skepticism remained even as my memory wavered.
Yet, he showed up each day, and I began to believe him when he said his feelings had changed. Trapped in my bed and visited by therapists I only partially knew and family members I only vaguely recognized, it was nice to have someone else come see me and do word puzzles in bed with me, even if I didn’t always remember who he was right away.
Other friends of mine who came to see me in the hospital were wary of Stanley, but his insistence on his right to be there and his role in my life stifled any objections that even my best friend, Sam, thought to make. My mother and I had always communicated infrequently about my romantic endeavors. Coping as best she could, she remained intoxicated most of the time I was in the hospital and didn’t question Stanley’s version of events. Later, she said I seemed like I wanted him there.
When I was released from the hospital, I couldn’t walk without an arm crutch, and my memory was still far from intact. Santa Clara Medical Center insisted I leave in a wheelchair, and I was wheeled out to Stanley’s car. He said we’d decided together that he’d move to San Diego with me. With no memory of the original conversation, I believed him, but I felt overwhelmed.
Following the seven-hour drive to North County San Diego, I told my mom I didn’t want to live with him. And although Stanley repeatedly hinted he should stay at my parents’ home, my mom put her foot down and said Stanley couldn’t live with us.
So he got a recruiting job and a room nearby. On weekdays after getting off work, he’d walk through the side gate without announcing he was coming. On one particular day in late fall, two months after my hospital stay, he came into the backyard while I skimmed messages on Facebook that I’d received as an inpatient.
I had been talking to our mutual friend, Cassie (I’ve changed her name here, as well as Stanley’s), from college. We’d been exchanging messages on Facebook, and while looking at our conversation, I saw an older message she’d sent me, while I was in the hospital, which I had no memory of.
“Cassie messaged me while I was in Santa Clara,” I mentioned to Stanley, my eye still fixed on the screen. “I said you joked around, saying you hoped my memory stayed impaired, and she replied, ‘Is there something he doesn’t want you to remember?’”
I laughed. Stanley didn’t.
“Why do you think that’s funny?” he demanded, pulling the laptop toward him. He didn’t sit down. “Why would you tell her that?” He shoved the laptop away and placed his hands on either side of his head. “Why would you say that to her?”
“Hey, relax,” I grunted while using both the table and chair to pull myself to a standing position. Once facing him, I added, “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“You don’t — you don’t — ” Livid, Stanley couldn’t seem to express himself through his rage.
Instead of walking away or going inside, I just stood and watched him stutter as his face flushed until he
