Then he realized it. He couldn't remember the purpose! He couldn't remember what he'd seen while he was dead! The whole thing, all of it--the people, the places, all he'd been told--he couldn't remember any of it. No, this couldn't be. It had been wondrously clear. And they were depending on him. They'd said, Michael, you know you do not have to return, you can refuse, and he'd said that he would, that he ... that he what? It was going to come back in a flash, like a dream you forget and then completely remember!
He had sat up, brushing one of the needles out of his arms and asked for a pen and paper.
"You have to lie still."
"Not now. I have to write it down." But there was nothing to write! He remembered standing on the rock, thinking of that long-ago summer in Florida, of the warm waters ... Then the wet soaked cold aching thing that he was, on the stretcher.
All of it gone.
He had shut his eyes, trying to ignore the strange warmth in his hands, and the nurse pushing him back against the pillows. Somebody was asking Jimmy to go out of the room. Jimmy didn't want to go. Why was he seeing all these strange irrelevant things--flashes of orderlies again, and the nurse's husband, and these names, why did he know all these names?
"Don't touch me like that," he said. It was the experience out there, over the ocean, that's what mattered!
Suddenly he reached for the pen. "If you'll be very quiet ... "
Yes, an image when he touched the pen, of the nurse getting it out of the drawer at the hallway station. And the paper, image of a man putting the tablet in a metal locker. And the bedside table? Image of the woman who'd last wiped it clean, with a rag full of germs from another room. And some flash of a man with a radio. Somebody doing something with a radio.
And the bed? The last patient in it, Mrs. Ona Patrick, died at eleven A.M. yesterday, before he'd even decided to go to Ocean Beach. No. Turn it off! Flash of her body in the hospital morgue. "I can't stand this!"
"What's wrong, Michael?" said Dr. Morris. "Talk to me." Jimmy was arguing in the hall. He could hear Stacy's voice, Stacy and Jimmy were his best friends.
He was trembling. "Yeah, sure," he whispered to the doctor. "I'll talk to you. Just so long as you don't touch me."
In desperation he had put his hands to his own head, run his fingers through his own hair, and mercifully he felt nothing. He was drifting into sleep again, thinking, well, it will come as it did before, she'll be there and I'll understand. But even as he nodded off, he realized he didn't know who this she was.
But he had to go home, yes, home after all these years, these long years in which home had become some sort of fantasy ...
"Back to where I was born," he whispered. So hard now to talk. So sleepy. "If you give me any more drugs, I swear I'll kill you."
It was his friend, Jimmy, who brought the leather gloves the next day. Michael hadn't thought it would work. But it was worth a try. He was in a state of agitation bordering on madness. And he had been talking too much, to everybody.
When reporters rang the room direct, he told them in a great rush "what was going on." When they pushed their way into the room, he talked on and on, recounting it again and again, repeating "I can't remember!" They gave him things to touch; he told them what he saw. "It doesn't mean anything."
The cameras went off with their myriad shuffling electronic sounds. The hospital staff threw the reporters out. Michael was scared to touch even a fork or a knife. He wouldn't eat. Staff members came from all over the hospital to place objects in his hands.
In the shower, he touched the wall. He saw that woman, that dead woman again. She'd been in this room three weeks. "I don't want to take a shower," she'd said. "I'm sick, don't you understand?" Her daughter-in-law had made her stand there. He had to get out of the stall. He fell down exhausted in the bed, shoving his hands under the pillow.
There had been a few flashes as he first smoothed the tight leather gloves over his fingers. Then he rubbed his hands together slowly, so that everything was a blur, image piling upon image until nothing was distinct, and all the various names tumbling through his mind made a noise--then quiet.
Slowly he reached for the knife on the supper tray. He was seeing something but it was pale, silent, men gone. He lifted the glass, drank the milk. Just a shimmer. All right! These gloves were working. The trick was to be quick about every gesture.
And also to get out of here! But they wouldn't let him. "I don't want a brain scan," he said. "My brain is fine. It's my hands that are driving me crazy."
But they were trying to help--Dr. Morris, the chief resident, and his friends, and his Aunt Vivian who stayed at his side by the hour. At his behest, Dr. Morris had contacted the ambulance men, and the Coast Guard, the Emergency Room people, the skipper of the boat who had revived him before the Coast Guard had been able to find her--anybody who might have remembered his saying something important. After all, a single word might unlock his memory.
But there were no words. Michael had mumbled something when he opened his eyes, the skipper had said, but she hadn't been able to make out a specific word. It began with an L, she thought, a name, maybe. But that was all. The Coast Guard took him up after that. In the ambulance he'd thrown a punch. Had to be subdued.
Still, he wished he could talk to all those people, especially the woman who'd brought him around. He told the press that when they came to question him.
Jimmy and Stacy remained with him late each night. His Aunt Vivian was there each morning. Therese finally came, timid, frightened. She didn't like hospitals. She couldn't be around sick people.
He laughed. Wasn't that California for you, he thought. Imagine saying something like that. And then he did the impulsive thing. He ripped off the glove and grabbed her hand.
Scared, don't like you, you're the center of attention, knock it off all this, I don't believe you drowned out there, ridiculous, I want to get out of here, I, you should have called me.
"Go on home, honey," he said.
Sometime during the silent hours, one of the nurses slipped a silver pen into his hand. He'd been sound asleep. The gloves were on the table.
"Tell me her name," she said.
"I don't get her name. I see a desk."
"Try harder."
"A beautiful mahogany desk with a green blotter on it."
"But the woman who used the pen?"
"Allison."
"Yes. Where is she?"
"I don't know."
"Try again."
"I tell you I don't know. She gave it to you, and you put it in your purse, and this morning, you took it out. It's just images, pictures, I don't know where she is. You're in a cafe, and you're drawing on the napkin with the pen. You're thinking about showing it to me."
"She's dead, isn't she?"
"I don't know, I told you. I don't see it. Allison, that's all I see. She wrote a grocery list with it, for Chrissakes, you want me to tell you what was on the list?"