They should find out who they are.
“Simple,” he says aloud, and he marvels at the sound. He rumbles when he speaks. “Simple. I find out who I am.”
His heartbeat slows. His breath evens out.
It’s good. He’s good.
A wallet. He should be carrying a wallet. That would tell him who he is.
Except he doesn’t have one. He checks his back pockets. And the front. Nothing. He looks down at the ground, thinking maybe he dropped it.
There’s nothing there, either.
Okay. He doesn’t have wallet. That’s okay.
It’s fine.
He doesn’t know what to do.
He looks down the road one way. He thinks it’s east because the sun is coming from that direction and it feels like morning, like it has to be morning. The road stretches for as long as he can see, and there’s nothing but trees and asphalt and those birds calling out.
He looks west and it’s more of the same, except it’s not, because there is something in him, something that’s telling him yes yes yes, that west is the way to go, that he should beat feet, should put the pedal to the metal, make like a banana and split.
“Go west, young man,” he says, “and grow up with the country.”
He doesn’t know what that means.
He looks east again. That feeling fades. His headache intensifies. A curl of nausea flits through him.
The sun is bright. He brings his right hand up to shield his eyes and—
He stops.
There’s something on his wrist.
It’s written on his—no. Not written.
Tattooed. There’s a tattoo on his wrist that he doesn’t remember ever getting.
He doesn’t understand what it means.
It reads 4221552082 in black ink.
He runs his thumb over the numbers. Too long for a date of birth, not that he’d know what his was to begin with.
Too long for a social security number, not that he’d remember it anyway. He tries to break it down, to split it up, and it’s 422 and 15, but that means nothing to him. It’s 52 and 082, but there isn’t anything there. He could be reading the combination of numbers wrong. It could be 422 and 155 and 2082 for all he knows, because it’s useless. It means nothing to him, no matter how hard or how long he stares at it.
He doesn’t have any other tattoos, at least that he can see. He supposes there could be others underneath his clothes, but he doesn’t think trying to find them now is a good idea. Someone might come along, and he doesn’t want to be naked when that happens. They might not help him then.
He thinks about walking east, but there’s no question that he won’t.
East makes his head hurt.
It’s probably because the sun is so bright.
He’ll go west.
“It’ll be fine,” he mutters to himself and takes the first step.