For Want of a Memory

by Robert Lubrican

  Mitch checked the book and then looked at the number on the display of the phone for "Last Dialed". They were the same. There weren't any nines or ones in the number at all. He dialed it again.

  "Nine one one, what is your emergency, please?" came a different voice.

  "This is the Pembroke, Connecticut Police Department," said Mitch, as officially as he could. "I dialed the number for the detective division that's in the L.E.O. directory and got you instead. Transfer me to the detective division, please."

  "This is nine one one," said the woman.

  "Look," said Mitch patiently. "I've got a Long Island resident in the hospital, whose been shot and might die. I need to talk to a detective down there, okay? Is attempted murder enough of an emergency for you?"

  "I can't dispatch anybody to Connecticut," said the woman, sounding upset.

  "I don't want you to dispatch anybody to Connecticut," said Mitch, his voice rising. "I just want to talk to a detective, okay?"

  "You don't have to yell, sir," came the woman's voice. "I don't have to take that. I'm in the union. You should call the administrative number. This is nine one one."

  "I did call the administrative number!" yelled Mitch. "And I got you idiots twice! I dialed 516-555-7000!"

  "Hold please," said the woman.

  He stewed for five minutes, until a man came on the phone.

  "Detective ... ?" said the man.

  "Officer Mitch Connel," said Mitch, his voice tight. "Pembroke, Connecticut Police Department, badge number twenty-six."

  "It seems as though someone threw the wrong switch," said the man. "The admin number was routed to the emergency operations center. The number you dialed is the right number, but there's nobody there in the middle of the night."

  "Surely you guys have a detective on duty, or on call or something!" said Mitch.

  "I'll transfer you. Please don't yell at my people again, Detective Connel. They work hard, under harrowing conditions, and don't deserve verbal abuse, particularly from someone in law enforcement."

  "I'll try to remember that," said Mitch. "Could you connect me, please?"

  "Sure," said the man, his voice bright. "No problem."

  * * *

  It didn't get any better.

  "Detective division," said a gruff voice.

  "Yeah," sighed Mitch. "This is Mitch Connel, up in Pembroke, Connecticut. I've got a mystery up here who came from your neck of the woods. A passerby found him in the middle of the road, unconscious. He may have been shot and his driver's license says he lives at an address on Chester Street. I need to know if you have any missing persons reports on the guy ... wants and warrants ... that kind of stuff."

  "We don't do missing persons," said the voice on the phone. "We have a separate division that does that."

  "Oh," said Mitch. "Can you transfer me to them?"

  "They don't work nights," said the man. "You can call them back in the morning."

  "Oh," said Mitch again. "Well, okay, I guess, can you give me that number?"

  There was silence on the line. Then a dial tone confirmed that the man had hung up on him.

  * * *

  Jessica Dauphine looked at her patient. He was in bad shape. She lifted the gown, in preparation for giving him a sponge bath. His care in the ER had involved cleaning him up only in those areas where they needed to put in stitches or treat a wound in some other way. Now that he was in her care, she had determined to finish the job.

  She wasn't shocked at what she saw when his body was bare. She'd seen it all before. There were contusions everywhere, making him look like some odd creature with a unique style of camouflage, though where the mixture of blue, black, purple and tanned skin would blend in was a mystery.

  She was glad he was unconscious as she started swabbing his skin with the sponge. He'd be wincing and complaining if he were awake. His battered body would have been crying out at her touch. This was better, because she could use broad firm strokes and clean him well, without worrying about causing him discomfort.

  He was in very good shape for a man his age. He looked much closer to someone in his late twenties, than the forty-seven that his driver's license said he was. She knew Mitch was curious as to whether the driver's license went with the man, and she wondered too if he was really Kristoff Farmingham, or some other man who had Kristoff's identification for some reason. She liked a mystery, and her mind wandered as she cleaned his skin.

  Was he some underworld denizen, who had been left to die for some transgression against his organization? Maybe he was an undercover cop, who had been found out and "killed" in a way that would make it look like an accident. Her mind was filled with images from books she had read. Indiana Jones came to mind, for some reason. She smiled as she thought of this man with a fedora and a coiled whip at his waist.

  Her reverie was broken when she got to his groin. She'd been told, in nursing school, that she'd get used to seeing intimate parts of her patients ... that it would become routine and boring. That had never happened. Each man she got to see like this was unique in some way or another. Her own vivid imagination made each foray into exploring another human being's body something new and exciting. Even the old men she looked at conjured up visions of what they might have been like when they were younger ... stronger ... more virile.

  She looked at Kristoff's penis, lying limply on his testicles. It was neither huge, nor tiny. Based on her limited experience with men, he looked quite normal. The skin on his penis was darker than the rest of him-a dusky brown, with purple undertones, and an overcast of gray that she knew was the result of his loss of blood. As his body made new blood, that gray would fade and the purple would probably become more prominent.

  She retracted his foreskin, telling herself that there might be smegma under it - a fertile breeding ground for bacteria that would cause itching and eventually pain if it were left to fester. His glans was clean, though. She looked over her shoulder, to make sure no one was watching her take a little too long to clean his genitals. She was always curious about a man's equipment. She didn't have all that much experience with penises. That wasn't from lack of trying. She was just the wrong woman in the wrong place right now.

  Worried that she might not find a job, Jessica had accepted the first offer she'd gotten from the placement office of the school's nursing program. She now knew that was silly. Nurses were in short supply, and a good nurse could get a job almost anywhere she wanted to. But the first year had flown by, and she'd made a few friends, and it was hard to think about leaving, even if it might get her someplace where she could find a man.

  The problem was that the residents of Pembroke ... Nassequa county, for that matter ... were typically white, and had been for generations, while Jessica Dauphine was not.

  She wasn't the blue-black of Nigerian ancestry. Rather, her bloodline appeared to have come from a mixture of races. Her fertile imagination had supplied that scenario as well. She imagined a slave holder, who looked a little like Rhett Butler, on some plantation, looking over a new shipment of slaves one day. His eye would have fallen on her great great grandmother, who was, no doubt, a tall, thin, well muscled woman from the Massai, used to walking or running long distances. She would have had the high, conical breasts that Jessica had, with thick, black nipples that reflected light, making them look shiny.

  Her maternal ancestor would have been much darker than Jessica's cocoa colored skin and, while Jessica had a mixture of Negroid and Caucasian facial features, her great great grandmother would have had a flatter nose and thicker lips. Still, at over six feet in height, she would have stood out from the others. Even after being captured and stuffed in the hold of a slave ship, she would have been proud ... obstinate.

  Her owner would have been smitten by her, unable to resist taking her to his bed. She would have been a virgin, of course, more woman than any tribal man could have tamed. Only her status as a slave would have let the despicable ... but handsome ... white man claim her body. Their cou
pling would have been violent, as she resisted, initially, until his softer side would convince her that he had fallen in love with her. She would have borne him several children, who would have been his favorites.

  Jessica jerked. She'd been daydreaming again. She knew it was a stupid dream. It hadn't been like that at all. But somewhere along the line, some white man had taken a black woman and gotten her with child. Jessica's features proved that.

  She realized that she was holding something completely different in her hand than she had been a few moments ago. She stared at the erection she had created, unconsciously on both of their parts, and let go of it, jerking her hand back and looking around guiltily. When she saw no one was watching, she darted a glance at his face. The one eye that wasn't covered by bandages was still closed, so she relaxed.

  She finished her job, moving down the man's legs. Her eyes went back several times to that now impressive manhood. It was wilting, for lack of attention. She sighed.

  At six feet, one and three quarters inches, she was taller than most in town. She was in excellent condition, because she ran and did calisthenics religiously. Her firm, proud breasts rode high on her chest and were separated by a hand span of space that made it all but impossible for her to display cleavage, even when she tried to. She had the same thick purple-black nipples as her imagined ancestor and the rich brown skin tones that proclaimed her to be "black." Her Caucasoid ancestry had given her straight hair, though, both on her head and her mons, where the hair lay flat and smooth, short enough, naturally, that it did nothing to hide the thick lips that were her labia majora, which hid smaller lips inside that were the same color as her nipples.

  Many people in town looked at her and thought of Tyra Banks, though their features were completely different to an educated observer.

  She was a beautiful woman, by anyone's standards. But her skin was a little too dark. It wasn't overt discrimination, really. There weren't any diehard racists in town. She had been welcomed and still felt welcome. But she was just different enough that men shied away from her, drifting toward the more familiar.

  At least in terms of serious relationships, anyway. Men flirted with her, and their eyes consumed her like ice cream on a summer day, trying to lick it all up before it melted. She flirted back, sometimes, but it didn't lead to anything serious.

  She knew why no man in town pursued her seriously, but there was nothing she could do about it. At twenty-four, though, she was in no particular hurry. Her biological clock wasn't screaming at her. Still, in a fit of pique, one day, she had purchased a sex toy to help her try to manage the normal urges she faced. Her pique had driven her to choose a thick, coal black dildo, obviously supposed to be an exaggerated representation of a black man's penis. If the white men in town wouldn't pursue the prize, then they would lose out, both literally and figuratively.

  She'd only shown it to one other person. Lulu, her best friend, had goggled at the huge thing, when she'd shown it to her, and then laughed out loud.

  "You'll kill yourself with that thing!" Lulu had laughed.

  "I like it just fine!" said a slightly miffed Jessica. She'd had a fantasy that Lulu would fall in love with the long, amazingly realistic looking thing, and ask to borrow it.

  "Well, don't use it too much," said Lulu, seriously. "Because if you do, and you ever do meet a man, he won't be able to compete in any way ... shape ... or form!" She'd ended laughing hysterically, waving the twelve inch long rubber penis around like it was a floppy sword of some kind.

  Jessica's patient groaned suddenly and she jumped again. She'd been daydreaming again! She moved to the man's head, watching his closed eye carefully. If he was awakening, she'd need to call the doctor in as soon as possible.

  Hurriedly she took time to pull the hospital gown over the man's nakedness and the blanket up over him.

  * * *

  Jessica stood back while the resident on duty looked the man over. His eye was open, but looked glazed, and he wasn't trying to speak. The resident fussed with tubes and looked at the readouts of the monitors. Obviously he didn't have anything in mind to actually do, and was just going through motions. Jessica was constantly amazed at how much art was involved in medicine, which most people thought of as a science. Doctors had only touched the surface, as far as really understanding what went on in a human body. More than half the time, they had no idea what was actually wrong with someone, especially in circumstances like this.

  "Keep an eye on him," said the young man. He left without another word, probably going back to the room with the cot in it, where the residents who had the night shift spent as much time as possible, trying to sleep.

  "Sure thing," said Jessica, trying to suppress the impatience in her voice. What did he think she was going to do ... take a nap-like him?

  She stepped closer to the bed.

  "Hi," she said, leaning over him so his eye could see her without him having to move his head. "How are you feeling?"

  It was a silly question. She knew that. But it was a way to get the patient talking. He mumbled something and licked his lips.

  She checked the chart. Nothing about restricting liquids. She told him she'd be right back and went to get a cup. She put mostly ice in it, and just a little water, and got a straw that would bend at the top. Taking it back, she tilted the cup carefully and put the straw between his lips. His tongue pushed it out and, as if it were a tool of exploration, moved the end of the straw to one side and then back again. His head lifted fractionally and she put the straw back between his lips.

  He gave a tiny suck, and dropped his head back to the pillow. She could see him swishing the water around in his mouth before swallowing. His lips opened again and she gave him the straw once more. Three tiny sips later, he spoke.

  "What happened?"

  "We were hoping you could tell us that," she said softly. "You were in some kind of accident. You're in the hospital now."

  His eye moved around her upper body, and she imagined him thinking, "Well duh ... you're a nurse!" She felt her face get hot.

  "You lost a lot of blood," she said, for lack of anything else to say. "You're kind of banged up." She didn't mention the suspected gunshot wound on his temple. She couldn't have said why she didn't mention it, but she left that part out intentionally.

  "What's your name?" she asked.

  He seemed to think about that for a while.

  * * *

  When he'd first awakened, he knew he was waking up, and he knew he was someplace "different than usual." He could tell that something had happened to him, because he could feel pain in various parts of his body. He'd centered on that, initially. Now he went beyond his body.

  What was his name?

  He realized that his mind was curiously empty. It was a little like knowing you'd gone shopping recently, but opening the pantry door and finding empty shelves. Where was all the stuff that was supposed to be on them?

  He felt mildly frustrated. She had asked such an easy question, and he couldn't answer it. He looked at her. She looked odd ... flat somehow, two dimensional instead of three dimensional. He realized only one of his eyes was working. He brought his hand up and felt a lump with a cloth feel to it covering the eye he couldn't see out of. Bandages. He was in a hospital and he was bandaged up.

  * * *

  "Can you hear me?" asked the nurse.

  "I don't know," he said.

  "You don't know if you can hear me?"

  "I don't know my name."

  "You wait right there," she said. "I'll go get the doctor."

  * * *

  He smiled. Where did she think he was going to go? She sounded cute and he wished he could see her better. He did an inventory of his body, sliding his hands around and moving his legs and toes. Everything seemed to work okay. There was a generalized ache all over his body, and a few sharper pains where his fingers probed. His face hurt, under the bandages, but the covered eye felt all right. He wondered why they'd covered it, if it was okay. He w
ondered what had happened to him. His curiously empty mind was fascinating, and he began to look around the bare shelves, to see what memories were still there.

  Visions of a computer screen, with words appearing on it-letter by letter-were clear in his mind. He couldn't see the fingers on the keyboard, but he knew they were his. He couldn't see the words clearly enough to see what they said, but he knew they were words. His mind continued to watch the blurred words appear. Then there was a carriage return and larger letters formed: Chapter Two.

  "I'm a writer," he said softly.

  There was the rustle of clothing, as a man came into the room, followed by the nurse.