ONE: My eyes opened.
My back ached. I was on ground. What
felt like shifting my weight led to no movement whatsoever. The earth was
pulling at me, and I was falling into it, against my will and with nothing to
hold onto.
My
legs tingled in response to a peculiar sensation. It was sand, I reasoned, blowing
against them, caught up in a hasty breeze. My mouth tasted like metal, my
tongue felt foreign. My skin burned. The sun was shrouding me, making it difficult
to open my eyes and survey my surrounding. Sun burned against my eyelids,
suppressing a desire to open them. I was blind and mute, and I felt weak, but my
ears could hear the ocean and my hands could find my chest. I tried to sit up
but my body would not allow it. Minutes passed, or hours, before I tried again.
With care I propped my back on bent elbows and with caution, I opened my eyes. I
saw it--the sea stretching out before me like the great plains—and I realized I
had never seen it before, this ocean that was constituting the entirety of my
reality. I had never seen any ocean before, either. I knew what it was, I could
spell the word out… O-C-E-A… I recalled that oceans made up the majority of
earth’s surface, which made the term “earth” a misnomer. The human body was
also mostly water, but even as I felt like I was seeping away, the presence of
thin skin and jagged bone proved enough to keep me together. I found my
knowledge of facts very interesting, but odd, since I did not know any of these
things as if they were pertinent to me. I only knew what they were—the ocean,
the earth—which, I realized as my heart sped up to keep pace with my thoughts,
as my hands clenched at my shirt, and as I lost consciousness again, was more
than I could say about myself.
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I started
shivering. That’s what brought me
up out of sleep—or whatever my
stumble out of reality could be called. This time, the second time, discomfort
sustained my consciousness, so that it did not crumble when I noted my global amnesia
had not lifted. My lungs felt like they were ripping apart, like someone was
manipulating my innards and attempting to cause me as much pain as possible
without killing me. I took a deep breath—because
shivering had elicited chest spasms and I was suffocating, not because I
thought it would alleviate pain—it
didn’t—and I started coughing. Despite a stifling
reluctance to do anything that would address my current situation—death seemed an attractive proposition—I opened my eyes, and was shocked, but not
surprised, that it was night. The sun, in all its oppressive glory, had
disappeared beyond the horizon, and it had been replaced by a calmer, comforting
night.
There was a quiet ticking emanating from nearby. My
intent on detecting its source was shocking. I did not immediately realize what
I was doing, but every time I closed my eyes I searched out the sound.
Memorized it beating. But it was not an even rhythm. Its regular irregularity
suggested an insect of some sort. It was an animal, not a watch.
The moon was less than full. Venus had been hung
right beneath it. I thought perhaps Mars was also nearby, but I was not an
astronomer and all the stars were dazzling more than usual. They seemed closer
than they should have been, although, remembering that I could not remember my
past life—if I had had one—I noted that my comparisons to what I “knew” meant nothing. My
observations on my observations, also, were of little value.
I thought about my mental status as I practiced
blinking and rubbed my hands over as much of my arms and legs as I could touch,
trying to catch fire: I had a headache and my vision seemed to be a bit shaky—stars were still flaring all around my head,
thousands of light years away, pulsating with my broken perceptions. Perhaps my
eyes were being jostled by my breathing that was quick and tight and brief as
it cycled. But my overall body—all
my limbs, all my extraneous muscles—felt
fine. I was not hungry. I wanted a glass of fresh water—maybe sand had gotten into my mouth but I was not
salivating, and my tongue was sticky with saliva content in its mission to dry
out. Shivering, however, was what I kept focusing on. Uncontrollable shaking
bouts were terrifying, and my constant jittering seemed to antagonize me and my
goal to look around. Figure out where I was. And what the hell that ticking was
all about.
Thank god for that one strong annoyance, the cold
seeping into my bones and frenching my neck. I would have been content to lie
on the beach and die there, looking to all the world as a man who knew when it
was time to give up, but I was not going to die cold and alone. Alone? Okay. Fine.
But not cold. Screw that. I pushed myself upward and forward, trying to get to
my feet but falling onto my knees. The ocean was still calling for me with its
incessant wave action. The tumbling surf kept repeating a similar, throbbing
beat, as if trying to seduce me through an expert and complex rhythm corp. Each
consequential wave caught a bit of moonlight as it peaked before falling back
into a mass of its fellows. I turned my head to see how much land was behind
me. There was a lot, and annoyed, I turned my entire body to face it, and sat,
legs curled into my chest, eyes panning across the landscape at the slowest
pace I could manage, picking up what I presumed was every detail, trying to
hold it to memory. If I could hold anything to memory. What were the specifics
of this amnesia? Did I care? No. I didn’t. Not right now, at least. And I didn’t
want to think about it either. So I just kept analyzing the hills and the bay
and the mountain. Two, actually. There were two peaks it looked like, although
in the day time maybe more would be revealed under the powerful and obnoxious gaze
of the sun. Maybe I was not on an island. Maybe I was on a peninsula of some
sort. When I got about half way through my scan, I started whistling something.
I immediately stopped. I did not know if it was a song that I knew or if it was
a song that I spontaneously thought up. I wanted to know. I needed a drink.
Curling up into a ball was warmer than laying flat
on the ground, but I was still cold after pulling my long legs into my chest so
I stood up. There were no problems with this. My legs were steady. But they
were also very thin. Diseased looking, actually. As I started walking I
realized that this was not an actual, physical problem of mine, but rather a
design flaw in my pants. I reached down to grab my right calf, just to be sure.
There was muscle, non-atrophied muscle. I stretched my arms out in front of me,
and pulled my sleeves up. My forearms also looked unremarkable. That provided
immeasurable relief.
The beach was fairly wide, but the sand was firm so
the walk to the edge of the forest—where
the undulating waves of sand dissipated into ever larger trunks of various tree
species—was not exhausting. The constant wave sound that
had been filling my ears for—I did not even
want to attempt a guess—was being replaced
by the growing loudness of insects, with the occasional addition of an aberrant
bird call. Every step I took put the ocean—and
the still unexplained ticking—further
and further behind me. If this was land land, any number of carnivores would be
trampling around in the forest, waiting for me. If this was an island, however… it was large enough that I would not be surprised
to find larger than mice-sized mammals scurrying around. I stopped when a foot
of mine fell on top of a decaying tree branch. I was standing next to a small
trunk, about as wide as a bear hug. It was the underneath section of a dense and
haphazard umbrella foliage of the forest’s first tree. It was not a palm tree,
although there were, what appeared to be, many of them within eye sight down
the beach to my right. I did not want to walk much further into the forest. The
thought of being eaten? Displeasing. I had satisfied my curiosity for what was
around me, and I was beginning to understand that I, as a person, was easily
satisfied.
I reached out to touch the tree trunk that had
presented itself so close to me. It demanded attention, and I was more than
willing to let it take mine. My hand alighted on a warm and coarse texture.
Odd. Not the coarseness, which was congruent with the tree being an oak of some
sort, although how I knew this I had no idea—but its warmth seemed to be too intense to be achievable by a plant. I
took a few steps past the tree and into the forest, my eyes scanning the ground
diligently. I soon found what I needed: fronds shed from large trees to make a
bed.
Random fact: Insulation—the simple act of elevating oneself off of the
ground—was key for surviving the night. Another random
fact: the fact that I knew a fact was a good sign that only my declarative
explicit memory was damaged. Final random fact: my frontal lobe was probably
also fine because I was creating a plan and following through on it.
All this information was as satisfying as it was
terrifying. What did it mean that I knew enough to keep me thinking I was safe,
but not enough to know who I was?
I began walking into the forest, feeling what could
have been described as excitement every time I saw a collection of leaves. I
picked each one up and layered it on top of the others until I was clutching an
awkward stack of dying leaves to my chest. I had assumed that I had not walked
very far away from where I had first entered the forest, but when I turned
around I panicked. I could not see the first tree. The unusual tree. The warm
tree. I started pacing in the assumed direction of my initial entrance, but to
no avail. I could hear the ocean. I quieted myself down so that I could hear in
which direction waves were crashing onto the sands that had birthed me from
near non-existence. I had to calm down so I could hear anything over my own
thoughts, loudly damning me for losing the tree. My tree. I closed my eyes to
darken the darkness. The phrase “thirty-five degrees to my left” popped into my
head, and I briefly wondered if that was a memory or if it was just a random
assortment of words. But I picked my head up and turned slightly to my left,
and I could see the tree.
It was painfully nearby. I felt embarrassed, than
realized how unnecessary embarrassment was in the absence of other people.
I dropped the fronds into a large pile at the base
of the tree, my tree. I reached out to touch it again. Still warm. Mine. Only
mine.
Selfishness. Greed. Other possible characteristics
of a past personality occurred to me, and with rapid disgust I examined each of
them. None of the ideas that I could easily grasp were real, or if they were,
they did not seem familiar to me. Was I a cutthroat? Or did I care about other
people? Anything was possible as I knew nothing.
I arranged my collection of plant debris in such a
way to minimize any heterogeneity in thickness of the impromptu bedding mat. I
saved the largest continuous piece as a poor blanket to cover me. Laying down,
I placed my head against the base of the tree, cuddled by a root. It was soft,
but it was still digging into my head too much. I needed a pillow. I only had a
hand. I had an undershirt, which I thought about using as a comfort enhancer,
but the idea of removing a layer of warmth to give oneself additional comfort
struck me as weak. Embarrassingly so. How I could feel such guilt about my
current behavior was impressive. The tree was not going to judge me. Rationally,
I knew this. But my rationality was not very convincing.
Breakfast foods filled my mind as soon as I closed
my eyes, and I tried to think of what I would most like to eat in the morning.
Cinnamon rolls. I could smell them but I could not see anyone baking them for
me, or what kind of kitchen from my past they may have appeared in. Cinnamon
rolls? I fixated on their smell for as long as possible but I saw nothing. No
faces. No eyes. No smiles. Nothing. Only vague, stock photo-like ideas about
what a face would look like, what a caring mom might sing upstairs to call her son out of bed and into the
kitchen for Sunday morning breakfast.
Soon I lost the smell, and I found myself breathing
in time with the waves as if there was nothing else in the entire world except
for me, a tree, and an entire ocean.
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