I Remember

Patrick wakes up on the floor of a white room smelling faintly of sulfur. The room is illuminated by a white light but he cannot see from where. A few feet away a blonde-haired woman in her mid-twenties traces the perimeter of the room with her back to him. Her hands never break contact with the walls while she moves. She takes small, timid steps, inching along and touching like a thief touches a large safe. Patrick lifts himself from the floor slowly, wobbling. The girl stops. "Who's there," she asks without moving. She looks like a mannequin; slender, tall, clean. Her hands, trembling and facing inward, leap toward her mouth and rest just beneath her nose. The girl reminds him of a frightened child woken from a nightmare; hiding under blankets, clinging to the absurd delusion that motionlessness affords her immunity from what lurks in the dark.

"Hey, relax. Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," Patrick says.

"What's the last thing you remember," she asks, still not turning to face him.

"What?" Patrick asks.

"What is the last thing you remember before right now?" she asks frustratedly.

"I, uh," he says looking around confusedly, "I'm not sure."

"Think!" she yells.

"God dammit," he says shouting, "what's the matter with you, lady?"

"I think I know where we are," she says as she lets her hands fall to her sides.

"Yea, me too," Patrick says smugly, "we're in a little white room."

"With no door," she adds.

Until she'd mentioned it, Patrick hadn't noticed there weren't any doors or windows in the room. He looks around again and walks nearer to her, to see if she's found anything in the spot she's covering.

"Stop," she yells into the wall, "first tell me the last thing you remember. It's really important."

He pauses and takes a moment to think. Thoughts struggle to surface. Synapses refuse to fire. His memories have acquired a sense of numbness, like his brain had been bathed in novocain. Somewhere a memory twitches out from under a pile of pins and needles. He pursues it, chasing it down the empty hollows of his mind and, catching it, his eyes widen once he realizes what he's found. His hand slowly raises to his head and he runs his finger across a scarred indentation at his left temple. "I was, I was shot," he says. "But, how could I..."

"How could we be here, right?" she asks. "I'll tell you how. We're dead. This is hell." She turns to reveal a pair of mangled eyes that resemble poorly peeled hardboiled eggs. Her blue, running-yolk irises, now almost entirely faded, seep across the whites of her eyes. It looks like someone took a pencil eraser to her pupils.

Patrick staggers backward in shock as he says, "Jesus Christ! Your eyes. What happened to your eyes?"

"I was kidnapped and raped," she said. "He'd blindfolded me so that I couldn't see his face but, during, my blindfold had come loose. He finished, held me down and poured bleach into my eyes. Then he raped me again. After he was done he told me he'd changed his mind, that since I saw him he'd have to kill me. So he strangled me." She sinks down, her back sliding against the wall, and she cries. Her sobs shake her whole body. "I still can't see anything," she says. Patrick crouches down and puts his hand on her shoulder.

"What's your name," he asks.

"Allie," she says sniffling, "what's yours?"

"I, I'm not sure," Patrick says. "I can't remember. When I try to remember anything it feels like a saw cuts through my skull. Give me a second." Patrick closes his eyes and massages his temples, trying hard to remember something, anything. He remembers moving a pair of television antenna around as a child; how the channels would bleed through the static once they were positioned correctly. I remember something. He gets up and paces the room, presses his hands to the wall opposite Allie and closes his eyes. He remembers shouting, and the sound of something banging. It wasn't gunfire though, it was something hitting hard against wood. Patrick Bates, we have a warrant for your arrest; come out with your hands up. He winces as searing pain thrashes through his head and he hunches over the wall.

"Hey, are you okay," Allie asks, sensing something is wrong.

"Yea, give me a second," he says. He wipes the sweat from his brow and breathes. Was I a cop? He pushes both arms up against the wall and leans on them, performing a kind of upright pushup. As his shirt rides up, he sees a tattoo on the inside of his left bicep, of a snake. A deep flashing pain shoots through his temple and he sees the tattoo again, in a mirror. He's holding a gun to his head. He's shirtless and his beard is ripped out in patches. Fresh scratches and cuts decorate his neck and chest. An overturned bottle of bleach sits in the bathroom sink.

He gasps and then slowly spins around to face Allie. "I remember," he says, smiling.