Anterograde

by Kallysten

  A sharp intake of breath, a quiet, “Excuse me,” hurried steps out of the room. A sigh.

  “When did you figure it out?” Eli asks softly.

  “My brain is fine,” Calden says, keeping his eyes shut tight. “I’m fine.”

  Soft fingers curl around his hand and squeeze gently.

  “Of course you are. You and your ridiculous brain are gonna be just fine. It’ll be okay, Calden.”

  Calden takes in a shaky breath and nods.

  *

  Calden wakes up in a hospital bed.

  He’s alone.

  He has no idea why he’s here and no recollection of being taken to the hospital. He vaguely remembers a headache, the pounding in his skull suddenly debilitating after days of being nothing more than an annoyance. He takes stock of his body. No pain or injury as far as he can tell. An illness, then. But what kind?

  The answer is on the chart hanging at the foot of his bed. He flips through it, frowning more and more deeply as he takes in the information. Encephalitis, with neurological complications. Anterograde amnesia suspected, then confirmed. No progress or improvement in the past week, which, a note says, hints that the condition is irreversible.

  At the end, the four digits make Calden glad he’s sitting, because he’s not sure he could stand right now.

  06/20

  Today’s date.

  Eighteen days. He’s spent eighteen days in the hospital, almost three weeks, and doesn’t recall a single second of it.

  He’s still staring at the chart when a man walks in. Calden looks up. It’s a nurse. Simons, Calden thinks his name is. The dark look he gives Calden before schooling his features hints that he still doesn’t like Calden much. Calden couldn’t care less.

  Eighteen days. Over four-hundred hours. And nothing, nothing left of it all.

  “You’re not supposed to look at that,” Simons says, tugging the chart out of Calden’s hands and returning it to the foot of the bed. “And you should be lying down. You’re not going to be discharged until this afternoon, and until then you need to rest.”

  As he speaks, he helps Calden recline, his words and expression allowing no protest. Calden is still too numb to object.

  “Discharged?” he manages to say. “I’m going home?”

  “This afternoon,” the nurse repeats. “Your mother said the car would be there at three. Now stay in bed. Your lunch is on the way.”

  With that, he leaves. Calden scrunches his eyes tightly closed and tries with everything he has in him, with every last bit of the growing despair that fills him, to remember something, anything at all from the past eighteen days.

  His very last memory, so tenuous it’s hard to grasp it, is of Eli laying a cool hand on Calden’s feverish forehead. Eli, who was a little concerned.

  Eli who isn’t here.

  But why would he be? He has a life outside of Calden. A job, a home, friends. A husband.

  Why would he come and take Calden home? Lana will—or her people, at least. Where will that car take Calden? His house? No, Lana wouldn’t let Calden live alone if his condition is truly irreversible. To her house, maybe? God, that’d be hell for both of them.

  To a convalescent home, then. A place with nurses, locked doors, and patients who don’t have their entire mental faculties. A place where he’ll wake up day after day with no idea of who the people around him are or why he’s there.

  Calden’s stomach twists until he’s certain he’s going to be sick.

  Taking deep gulps of air, he pushes himself out of bed. Clothes and a pair of shoes wait on a chair, no doubt for his upcoming discharge. He gets dressed quickly and is still tugging his jacket on when he steps out of the room. Catching a glimpse of Simons a few doors away, he turns the other way and strides confidently through the hallway as though he’s a visitor rather than patient. He pickpockets an actual visitor just before reaching the wide doors that open onto the emergency staircase. He doesn’t think and goes left and up. He has one of the stolen cigarettes between his lips long before he reaches the roof. He lights it with the cheap lighter that was crammed into the half-empty pack and takes a deep drag, holding it until his lungs start burning and exhaling with his head thrown back, the smoke drifting up into the warm June air.

  It’s been two years since he was up here. Looking to his far left, he can see the spot where he almost died, where he was lying, curled into a ball, when he called Eli and, slurring, his mind halfway gone from the drugs, asked for his help. He didn’t want to die, two years ago. He had too many things to do still. Too many unanswered questions, some of which are still unanswered.

  And they’ll always be unanswered, won’t they?

  One of the last things he remembers deciding is that he would tell Eli and at least get this one answer, whatever it might be, even if it meant putting an end to their friendship.

  One symptom of encephalitis is altered decision-making.

  He remembers that and a dozen other things about encephalitis and amnesia, but all of it is textbook knowledge. None of it is something he actually experienced.

  He doesn’t remember whether he told Eli. He can’t have. He felt too wretched that day. He wouldn’t have started the most important conversation he was ever going to have with Eli when his head felt like it was splitting open.

  Would he?

  He paces back and forth, smokes two more cigarettes, and finally sits down on the ground with his back to the safety wall that circles the roof, all the while trying to force his brain to remember something recent.

  Nothing.

  When he deletes something in his memory palace or when he simply forgets something unimportant, he can always tell something was there and is now gone. He doesn’t even have that awareness now. Those eighteen days might as well never have existed as far as he’s concerned. And today will disappear into the same black hole. And tomorrow. And the day after that. Like an unending loop.

  What’s the point of going on?

  Forgetting from day to day, he won’t be able to practice medicine anymore, not when he won’t remember his patients. The image in the mirror will grow older, but he won’t understand why. He’ll go out thinking it’s early June and find himself in the middle of winter, the city blanketed by snow. And he’ll never learn anything new about Eli, will never catalogue another kind of smile, or another tidbit of his past, revealed in passing. He won’t be able to tell whether the state of Eli’s marriage continues to deteriorate, won’t know to offer whatever comfort he’s capable of, won’t be able to add up clues until the balance tips again to ‘tell him’ or ‘keep it to yourself’, this time without a burgeoning illness altering his thought process.

  Is it living when there is no progress, no change, just eternal stagnation? It would be no better than being in a vegetative state, and Calden long ago told Lana what to do if—

  “I can’t believe it.”

  The exasperated words break Calden’s train of thought, but it’s the voice, that voice he knows so well, that causes him to start and hit the back of his head against the wall behind him. Blinking owlishly, he watches Eli come closer and can’t find anything to say other than a quiet, “Eli.”

  “Ten minutes,” Eli says, shaking his head as he stops in front of Calden. “I leave you alone for ten minutes to find something actually edible, and you disappear right under everyone’s nose, climb on this damn roof and try to poison yourself. Ten fucking minutes, Calden.”

  He holds his hand out. Calden looks at it, then at Eli again before he grinds what’s left of his cigarette against the wall and takes Eli’s hand. Eli helps him back to his feet. His palm is damp; he was afraid.

  “How did you find me?”

  Eli snorts quietly. “I asked myself what’s the last place where I’d like you to be and tried that first.”

  “I didn’t know,” Calden says, his throat so tight that the words are little more than a whisper. “I woke up, and I was alone. I didn’t know you were there.”

&nbs
p; Eli’s features soften a little. “You fell asleep?” he says with a quiet sigh. “So you don’t know why you’re here?”

  “I read my chart. The nurse said I’m being discharged today.”

  Eli nods. “Bonneville wanted to see you one last time before we go home.”

  Three words. That’s all it takes for the knot in Calden’s chest to loosen.

  We go home.

  There are still a hundred, a thousand things he doesn’t know, but it’s okay. Eli will tell him.

  Eli will be there.

  Isn’t he always?

  (next chronological chapter)

  November 15th

  It would always be the joy in Calden’s eyes that undid Eli.

  Whenever Calden heard those words, those three ridiculous little words that he himself had so much trouble saying, his eyes seemed a little clearer, a little brighter. He always looked at the same time like he couldn’t believe Eli and wanted nothing more than to believe him.

  His mouth curved into a smile against Eli’s lips, and he started to push a little harder into the kiss, his hand resting tentatively on Eli’s knee. Eli let it last a second longer before he pulled back, shaking his head ruefully.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said with a slight smile. “I fell for that last night, but now I can actually think straight.”

  Calden’s eyebrows arched up, the corners of his mouth twitching upward. “Straight? Are you sure about that?”

  Eli snorted. He dropped his hand from Calden’s face and covered the fingers rubbing lightly against his bare knee. “Very funny. But I’m not joking. You’re going back to bed. And alone.”

  Calden’s almost-smile turned into a pout. “I’m not—”

  “Tired,” Eli cut in, softening the interruption by squeezing Calden’s hand. “Of course you’re not. You never are. But three hours of sleep after being awake for four days? That’s nowhere near enough.”

  It wasn’t that Calden’s mulish expression was a surprise, really. By now, Eli knew quite well that Calden regarded sleep as a waste of time. In fact, that wasn’t even anything new; he’d thought so even before June. But Eli knew what argument was rising to Calden’s lips—and knew how convincing he could be, too, if Eli let himself falter even for a second.

  “Calden, please,” he said preemptively. “Don’t you trust me?”

  It was a low blow, and he knew it. Calden did trust him—after all, it was Eli he’d called when he overdosed; not his mother, not 911, but Eli. Still, how else could Eli impress on him that this was, in the end, a matter of life and death? Sleep deprivation weakened the body; as doctors, both of them knew that quite well, even if Calden liked to think these rules, like all others, didn’t apply to him. As for Eli, he only justified to himself allowing Calden several days without sleep with the knowledge that, for Calden, that was what had always passed as ‘normal,’ and not a change brought by his illness. Normal pattern or not, though, he needed to play catch up on his sleep every few days.

  “But if I go to sleep now,” Calden protested right on cue, “I’ll forget this.” His hand turned under Eli’s so that they were palm to palm, their fingers entwining easily. “Everything I read. Everything you just told me. I’ll have to learn it all over again.”

  Eli’s throat was threatening to tighten, but he refused to let it. Every word was true, of course, but it was also true that Calden was much too good at manipulating him.

  “And you find it difficult to learn things?” he teased. “Since when?”

  Calden’s expression turned intense, the way it usually did right before he entered an operating room when he was mentally preparing for what he needed to do, or whenever he tried to commit something to memory. What could be so important on Eli’s face that he wanted to remember it, Eli had no idea, though it did send a shiver down his spine. Being the object of such attention was always thrilling. As such, he didn’t have it in him to resist when Calden pushed forward, his forehead nudging Eli’s shoulder until Eli let himself fall back, his head coming to lie against the armrest of the sofa.

  Calden followed the movement, cautiously draping himself over Eli’s body, his cheek resting on Eli’s chest but his body tense like he expected to be bucked off. Eli wrapped his arms around Calden’s shoulders and felt Calden relax against him. This was nice, he thought as he carded his fingers through Calden’s hair. Not the kind of rest Calden needed, but for a little while it would be all right. No longer than a little while, though.

  “You’ll have to explain it all again,” Calden said after a moment. “Isn’t that… taxing?”

  He’d never worried about that before they’d become a couple. Or at least, he’d never mentioned it. Had he worried but without saying anything? Too late to ask now.

  “It’s okay,” Eli said softly. “I got used to it. I would even say I’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

  Calden’s answer was a quiet, “Hmm.”

  A rather skeptical ‘Hmm’, too.

  “What?” Eli asked, frowning down at Calden.

  “Nothing.” A pause, and Calden added, “You’re not very good at it actually.”

  Eli snorted and pulled lightly on a curl of hair. “Are you upset right now? No, you’re not. You woke up a couple of hours ago and you had your world turned upside down, but you’re calm and relaxed. But you used to be upset when this all started, before I helped you figure out how to make it easier on you. So yeah, I am pretty good at it. Thank you very much.”

  Calden made that annoying little noise again. “You left out more than you explained.”

  “I told you,” Eli said with a sigh. “You ask questions; I answer.”

  Calden pushed himself up, kneeling over Eli’s legs. “All right. When did I get the third line tattooed? And why? It’s different from the other two. Second person rather than first, more recent, and the answering line on your chest is only marker.”

  Although Eli’s chest was covered, Calden’s gaze drifted to it; without thinking, Eli touched the spot where the words hid behind terrycloth, a gesture he’d picked up from watching Calden unconsciously do the same.

  “And it’s not going to be anything more than marker for me,” he said dryly, “because that line isn’t going to stay on your chest. You agreed to have something else tattooed over it to cover it up.”

  Calden frowned at that. “I did? Why?”

  “Because you promised you’d only get tattoos of important things and this is not even true. I’m not going to leave.”

  Of all the things Eli had to repeat so often, this one might have been the most ‘taxing,’ as Calden put it, for the simple fact that it was the one Calden seemed to doubt the most. Even now, he continued to frown, unconvinced.

  “So why did I think it was necessary to get this written on myself?” he asked.

  Eli rolled his eyes and sat up, dislodging Calden from his legs. “Because you’re an idiot, that’s why.”

  Calden didn’t say a word, but he was clearly still waiting for an answer. Eli swallowed a sigh.

  “We argued,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t anything important, but I went out. I needed to clear my mind. And you decided that meant I’d leave you.”

  “What did we argue about?” Calden asked, like Eli had known he would.

  “Like I said, it wasn’t important.”

  “It must have felt important enough to me if I decided to get a tattoo because of it.” Calden sounded on edge all of a sudden. Not upset, not yet, but definitely unsettled. “Your definition of ‘important’ and mine are clearly not the same. Maybe—”

  Pressing a finger to Calden’s lips, Eli leaned in close. “First line,” he said quietly. “Your chest or mine, doesn’t matter. That’s the important thing. I’m not going anywhere. Not because of your illness, and not because you’re trying to be ‘better,’ whatever that means. I’m not going anywhere because I love you. Because I almost lost you twice before, and I don’t want to go through that again. Okay?”

  When
Calden nodded, Eli slid his hand to the back of Calden’s head and drew him forward. Calden came easily, licking his lips just a second before they touched Eli’s. The kiss was as sweet as the one from moments before and just as brief.

  “You do need to get some sleep,” Eli reminded Calden—and himself.

  “But there’s so much I don’t know,” Calden said, his pleading tone jarring, “so much I forgot, and you’re not giving me all the answers. You don’t even have all of them.”

  Now that was something new. “What do you mean?” Eli asked.

  “I mean, if you don’t allow me to write about us, how can I remember…” Calden waved his hands. “I don’t know. The way you look when I say those words to you.”

  Eli opened his mouth to reply, but couldn’t find words immediately, struck both by what Calden had just said and the look in his eyes, an odd mix of shyness and defiance, as though he were daring Eli to tease him about it.

  Clearing his throat, Eli said very low, “Well, you could just say it again.”

  Calden shook his head, although Eli doubted it was about what he’d just said.

  “What about that promise you say I made about the tattoos?” he asked, his words coming out faster again as his agitation returned. “What about the reason I got that third line? I’m missing half of the story. I want to know everything. I need to know everything.”

  As he finished, he turned his head to the coffee table. Eli followed his gaze toward the diary.

  “You want to write it in there,” he said warily.

  It had been one of the few requests he had made of Calden that they remove whatever Calden had already written about him, and even now, even after hearing Calden’s new arguments, he didn’t think he’d been wrong.

  “The diary seems like a good way for me to preserve information,” Calden insisted.

  “What if you put things in there as wrong as this?” Eli asked, brushing a fingertip to the third line peeking under Calden’s half-open dressing gown. “That’s not worth preserving.”