“I don’t know why I’m here,” the man had admitted.
“All right,” the lawyer said. “That’s just what this is going to help us figure out,” he said, tapping the notebook. “Write. And don’t show it to anybody but me.”
The doctor has told him that it is common for individuals with head trauma not to remember what happened to cause it, nor even to remember the days surrounding the trauma. But then sometimes something suddenly just clicks and it comes flooding back. Maybe not everything, maybe not even most of it, but some of it, anyway. It would be nice if he could remember at least some of it.
From what he knows about the rest of his life, he doesn’t see how he could have done anything wrong. If he did, he’s sure it must have been by accident.
He has said this over and over to whoever will listen. They just nod as if they want to believe him, but don’t. Sometimes they even seem a little afraid of him. When he said this to the lawyer, the lawyer didn’t even bother to nod. He can’t tell what the lawyer thinks. “Don’t tell me. Just write it all down,” the lawyer insisted. “Whatever you can remember.”
And what if he really did do something wrong? Does he really want to know?
He thinks so. Even if he did something very wrong indeed, like, say, murder. Even then, he thinks he would rather know than not know. Right now, the man doesn’t even know who he is. They tell him who they think he is, they pronounce a name, but it doesn’t sound right to him. It is as if they’ve written a name on his forehead that doesn’t belong, and they can see it and he can’t. His life was apparently going along like normal, then suddenly there came a black patch. After the black patch everything seemed wrong, as if he was leading someone else’s life. As if he was possessed. Or maybe had taken possession of someone else.
The doctor also warned him that sometimes things never click. Sometimes you never know what really happened. He tried to feel something about that, some worry or anxiety, but he was still medicated enough to make it hard to feel things when they were happening. He only starts to feel things later, once it’s too late.
II.
When he first woke up, he didn’t even know where he was. His eyes had a hard time focusing. His jaw hurt and his throat was sore. He tried to swallow a few times, gagging before he realized there was a tube running down his throat and he couldn’t swallow, not really. He remembered—if he is remembering correctly now and not making just a little of it up—that he was staring up into a round, blurred light that slowly went from a bright white to a pale orange red, like a dying filament.
Then he blinked and his vision cleared, more or less. There was a ring of faces all around him, but the bottom halves of these faces were gone—all he could see were their eyes. A whole circle of eyes, intense, intent, all staring at him.
Maybe, someone prompted later, these were doctors, and their faces were just covered by surgical masks?
Who suggested that? he wonders now. And why did they want me to believe it? In any case, at the time he didn’t think of them as doctors. At the time, he thought of them as men who were missing the bottom halves of their faces.
This terrified him.
And then these half-faced men started to make sounds. Which terrified him even more.
He fainted.
…
The next time he awoke, it was a little better. There were not so many half-faced men, not so many eyes. No eyes, in fact, none at least that he could see. He was alone.
He was lying on a bed of some kind, but it was not his own bed. There was a curtain on a fixed track around the bed, but it was mostly pulled open. He could see things: white walls and a metal tray and a shiny floor. It was as if there was a whole world around him again. Not just a half world full of half-faced men.
He closed his eyes. Probably he slept. When he opened them again he saw, past the end of the bed, a guard near the door. He seemed to have a whole face. He was sitting in a chair, his arms folded across his chest. Half asleep but still stiff as cardboard.
The man tried to speak, but no words came out, only strange, half-choked sounds. The tube, he only then realized, was still down his throat, his cheeks stiff where they had taped the thing to his face to hold it in place.
The guard was awake now and staring at him and speaking into his shoulder radio.
Everything started to blur.
The last things that happened before the man’s eyes rolled back into his head were that the guard’s radio crackled, and the bottom half of his face started to fade away, and then, mercifully, the man passed out.
Probably between those times, between when he awoke a first time and when he awoke a second time and then when he awoke a third time, there were dreams.
But if there were dreams, he doesn’t remember them now. Not a one. But he’s sure that if he could remember them, they would be nightmares.
A little later, someone was touching him softly. Then, very gently, they began shaking him.
“Honey,” said a woman’s voice. “Honey, wake up.”
It was his mother’s voice. For a moment he thought he was back in his bed at home, asleep, and she was waking him up for school. That was how she always used to wake him up. A gentle touch at first and then gently shaking him awake. But why wasn’t she calling him by his name? And what was his name again?
“Honey,” she said again, more insistently, and he opened his eyes.
Only he was not at home. He was in the hospital room, and it was not his mother. It wasn’t even a woman. In fact, there was no one there at all.
He lay there, head wrapped in gauze, almost anonymous, afraid.
If he squinted his memory enough, he seemed to remember the chief of police standing beside the bed and reading charges to him. Murder, was it? Several counts? Four, say? He was not sure when that had been exactly, where it fit with everything else that had happened. But he remembered it. He was almost certain he did, anyway. Unless it had been something he had seen on TV.
If you feel compelled to write it, write it. “Murder?” the man had said when the police chief finished. His voice didn’t sound like his voice anymore, still hoarse from the tube they had snaked down his throat. “Are you sure you have the right person?”
The chief just nodded grimly, his lips a thin line. The man heard his mother start to cry. His dad awkwardly put his arm around her shoulder, tried to comfort her.
Of course that last part was all in his head, since his parents both had been dead for years now. But he was almost certain the rest of it could have been real.
Murder? he thought. No, it didn’t sound right. Even now it still doesn’t. But what else does he have to cling to?
Another early memory. A man parted the curtain and came close to the head of the bed, pulling up a chair so close that it was almost as if he was in the bed too.
“Who the hell are you?” the man in the bed asked.
“Language,” the other said. “Make a good impression. Every little bit counts. I’m your lawyer,” he said. “Your parents hired me.”
“My parents are dead,” the man said.
The lawyer ignored this. “I will be representing you,” he insisted.
“What’s this all about?” the man asked. “Is this the way it’s usually done?”
“Not usually,” the lawyer said. “But you’re a special case.”
“What’s this about murder?”
“A murder? Why don’t you tell me?” the lawyer said.
But he couldn’t tell the lawyer anything. Which is why he now has the mechanical pencil and the notebook and is trying to write, trying to make things click.
There is a guard. Sometimes he can see the guard and sometimes he can’t. He doesn’t know if the guard is here to protect him, or to keep him from escaping.
When the guard is here, he sits in a chair just outside the curtain. Sometimes he reads or talks into his shoulder radio or cleans his gun. Mostly he just sits and waits or sleeps. Sometimes, if the curtain is open, the guard
glances over at the man.
“What’s this about murder?” the man said.
“A murder? Why don’t you tell me?” the lawyer said.
But he didn’t remember anything about it. Nothing at all. He just looked at his lawyer helplessly.
“All right,” said the lawyer after a while, low enough that the guard couldn’t hear. “Maybe you don’t—”
No, wait a moment, the guard wasn’t there when that conversation was going on. That was before the guard was there. He is getting confused again. He and his lawyer were alone. The lawyer must have just said it in a normal voice.
“Maybe you really don’t remember,” the lawyer said, in a normal voice. “You’re accused of killing four people. Who do you think they were?”
He was too stunned to say anything at all.
“How old do you think they were?” the lawyer asked.
“Wait a minute,” the man said. “Four people? Me?”
The lawyer didn’t answer. “How old do you think they were?” he asked again, as if he were following a script.
“How do I know?” the man said. “Normal age?”
“What’s normal age?”
“These are weird questions,” the man said. “Why are you asking me them?”
“Do you know how you allegedly killed them?” the lawyer asked. “Gun? Knife? Poison? Bare hands?”
“I don’t even know that I did kill anyone,” the man said.
The lawyer nodded. “That’s good. Keep that for when they question you,” he said.
“Don’t you believe me?”
The lawyer looked at him again with those flat, unblinking eyes, as if he neither disbelieved nor believed. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Why not?” the man said, confused.
The lawyer gave him a grim smile. “Why do you think?”
And that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it? He hasn’t the faintest idea.
“At least tell me how I did it,” he said.
“With a gun,” the lawyer said. “You allegedly shot four people and then tried to commit suicide by shooting yourself.” He gestured to the side of the man’s head, to the bandages there. “You apparently didn’t succeed in the latter,” he said. “Do you think you were trying hard enough?”
The man took a deep breath. His mouth was dry. I am finally getting somewhere, he thought. “Who,” he asked, “did I kill?”
“With a knife,” the lawyer said. “You allegedly stabbed four people and then tried to slit your own throat.” He gestured to the man’s neck, which was, the man realized, also wrapped in gauze.
“Wait,” he said. “You said it was a gun.”
The lawyer smiled. “With your bare hands,” he said. “You beat four people to death and then tried to commit suicide by striking your head repeatedly against a cement wall.” He gestured again to the side of the man’s head.
“Wait,” the man said. “I thought you were here to help me. Why are you trying to confuse me?”
“With poison,” the lawyer said. “You allegedly poisoned four people, one after another, and then tried to commit suicide by swallowing poison yourself.” He gestured to the man’s throat again. “It hurts to swallow, doesn’t it?”
“Stop it!” the man said, closing his eyes. “Stop!”
When he opened them again, he was alone.
III.
Sometimes the lawyer does help. The lawyer, for instance, warned him that the doctor would be coming to see him. If the man passed an examination, he would be moved. Where? the man wondered. “Are you sure you’re ready to be moved?” the lawyer asked. But anywhere, the man had to believe, was better than here. “Just remember not to go along with everything they suggest to you,” the lawyer said. “Resist. No might haves. No could haves. Stick to what you remember, and if you don’t remember just say you don’t.”
“But I don’t remember anything,” the man said.
“All the better,” the lawyer said. Then he held his hand out for the notebook.
The man almost couldn’t give it up. Even when he managed to hold it out to the lawyer, the lawyer had to pry it out of his hands.
The lawyer began to read. Watching him, it seemed to the man that the lawyer could read quicker than anyone the man had ever met—either that or morphine or some other drug the man had been given was accelerating the world around him. Almost as soon as he had begun, the lawyer had reached the end. When he closed the notebook and looked up, the lawyer’s face was so distorted and angry that it was hard to think of it as a face.
“No! No!” he cried. “Not ‘he’! Call yourself ‘I’!”
“Yes,” the man said. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s wrong with you?” the lawyer said.
“I don’t know what the rules are,” the man said. But something in his head immediately translated it into: He doesn’t know what the rules are.
The lawyer is going to speak when there comes a noise from the hall. The lawyer shakes his head. He hands the notebook back. He presses his finger to his lips and backs slowly out of the room, leaving the man alone.
I need to think about what really happened. I need to try to remember instead of making up situations in his head. My head. I—
No, I doesn’t sound right. I can’t do it: he.
He needs to try to remember instead of making up situations in his head. But it’s hard not to, especially when he’s alone.
Now is the time, he thinks, when the voices should start, when faces and half faces should start to well up. Now is the time for him to see himself, pale and washed out as if in a dream, and either see what he did or see some false version of the same, offered to him by whatever devil or god has brought him here to suffer.
But nothing’s coming. Not a thing.
“Who can say?” he heard the doctor report in the hall. “Head injuries aren’t predictable.” The man couldn’t hear how the person the doctor was saying this to responded.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he heard the doctor say, then “I could stop you, but I won’t.”
A moment later someone who looked like a policeman came in. He placed a tape recorder on the bedside table and turned it on.
“Shall we begin the examination?” he asked.
“Examination?” the man echoed.
“State your full name,” the policeman said.
The man tried to say something, but his mouth wouldn’t move.
“Let the record show the subject has no name,” the policeman said.
But no, the man insisted, it wasn’t that he didn’t have a name, only that he was having difficulty locating it.
The officer smiled, ignored him. “Would you like to confess?” he asked.
“Confess what?”
“We have two witnesses who saw you,” he said. “A man and a woman.”
“Shouldn’t my lawyer be present?” the man asked.
“Your lawyer?” the officer asked. “What good would he do?”
“I just thought—”
“You can’t seriously believe that both witnesses, credible people in their own right, would have cause to lie, can you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they just got it wrong.”
“We’re just talking here,” the officer said. “An informal chat. We’re all friends here. Aren’t we?”
“If you say so,” the man said.
“I do say so,” the officer said. “They saw it happen. They hid under a table, but you found them anyway. Fortunately for them, you found them after the others.”
“I don’t remember any of this,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like me.”
The policeman’s eyes tightened slightly. “What they say,” he said, “was that you made them come out. You looked at your gun and laughed. ‘Only one bullet left,’ you said. ‘How do I choose?’ Ring any bells?”
“No,” he said. “So it was a gun?”
“Eenie, meenie, miney, mo. Still nothing?”
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“It was the male witness who ended up ‘it.’ You pointed the gun at him, and he thought he was a goner. Do people of your generation still say that, goner?”
“I don’t know,” said the man.
“How would that feel? To have a gun pointing at you? Can you imagine how that would feel?”
The man didn’t say anything.
“As it turns out, you can,” the officer said. “Since a moment later, you turned the gun away and pointed it at your own head and pulled the trigger.”
The police officer stayed looking at him, watching his expression. The man held his face slack and still, but inside his brain was spinning.
“Officer, I’d like to speak with my lawyer,” he said.
“Officer?” the officer said and laughed. “Just who do you think I am?”
“The police,” he said.
“The police?” he said, and laughed again. He laughed so hard his lower jaw disappeared, leaving only the upper half of his face. “Ah,” he said hollowly, “you’re killing me.”
Upon which the man fainted.
IV.
The doctor shined a tiny light into his eyes. “How are you feeling?” he asked. “Are you getting plenty of rest?”
“People keep interrupting,” the man said. “They keep waking me up.”
“Oh?” the doctor said. “People? Who, the orderlies? I’ll have a chat with them.”
“Everybody,” the man said. “The police. My lawyer. Everybody.”
“The police? And why would you have a lawyer?”
“Because of what they think I did,” he said.
He knew he’d made a mistake when the doctor stopped shining the light into his eyes and peered at him closely. “And what would you say they think you did?” the doctor asked.
His voice, the man noticed, had changed. Before it had been offhand, ordinary. Now it was casual, but deliberately casual—as if he was trying not to startle the man away while he crept closer.
For a moment the man didn’t say anything. Then he said, “You’re a doctor, right?”
The doctor nodded. “Technically, yes,” he said.
Technically?
“And I’m in a hospital,” he said.
A Collapse of Horses Page 19
