In Memory - a Short Story

In Memory

  Glenn Blackshear

  Copyright 2013 Glenn Blackshear

  Other works by Glenn Blackshear

  Single Guy, Lonely Grill

  Acknowledgments

  A life is a terrible thing to waste, so we must fulfill what we can while there is time. I sincerely thank my wife, Lorie, for her patience and understanding of all of the time I spend at the computer instead of with her.

  Cover graphic by Accalia Designs.

  Justin glanced around the room as he walked into the bar. He noticed the bouncer’s short brown hair and mustache, black jeans and dark blue western shirt, and the seventeen single-pedestal wooden tables. He observed that the waiter, who looked like Matthew McConaughey with a crew cut, was missing the second button on his red shirt, and that there were four people playing Texas Hold ‘Em at the back of the room. In an instant, his mind captured every detail of what he saw.

  Justin stepped up to the bar. “Long Island Iced Tea, please.”

  “Comin’ right up,” the bartender said.

  While he waited, Justin mentally rehearsed his presentation for the conference, every slide right down to the final punctuation. When the bartender returned, Justin pulled out an over-stuffed money clip and removed a $10 bill from among twelve $50s, seven $20s, four $10s, three $5s and eight $1s. He knew the serial number on each of them, so he looked at it to see which bill he grabbed before handing it to the bartender, showing off to himself and anyone else who cared to notice.

  “Keep it,” Justin said and crossed the room to an open table—half a table-for-two was all he needed anymore. He was only there for a sleep aid; he never slept well in hotels, alone and quiet. For past conferences he had brought his wife along, but last year he had lost that luxury. He was on his own now.

  When Justin developed his herbal formulation for memory enhancement, he never dreamed that he would become famous as a result. He had just wanted to help out his Alzheimer’s patients—to give them back their memories and their lives, not cook up some big to-do. But he turned out to be a much better cook than he expected. Control was amazing; he could make a conscious decision when to take an enhanced memory and when not. If he only had as much control over memory recall as he had over memory creation, the formula would be perfect.

  That was three years and multiple clinical studies ago. If he had his way, he’d still have his simple general practice with herbal remedies—Dr. Justin Case, Naturopathic Physician—but his winning hand was stacked against him. Fate had forced him into a memory specialty and left him sitting alone in a bar.

  With his regular memory, Justin watched the card game from across the room and thought of what his father had told him the first time he got to play in the Friday-night poker party. “Life doesn’t let you pick your cards…” his father said. “…You’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt, even if it’s all jokers.” Justin didn’t know what it meant at the time, but it was starting to make sense now.

  It had been nice to have a normal memory, drawn from a deep pool of simple and uncomplicated life—not the three-dimensional high-definition maximum-color-depth memories he had to deal with now. Even if he chose never to take another enhanced memory, he couldn’t get rid of anything that was already in his head.

  His popularity was a nice ego booster, at first, but quickly grew out of control. After his wife died, he had to hire someone to screen his mail. His abundance of testimonials consumed too much time, and was rivaled only by the massive quantities of junk mail from people wanting a piece of his assets, and hate mail from health-care competitors his practice negatively affected.

  Justin took a long drink of tea, closed his eyes and thought of his wife, April.

  His stomach heaved with stomach acid, sour kraut and corned beef as a holographic imprint etched in his mind consumed his thoughts—every drop of spattered blood, shard of shattered bone, and ounce of precious life dripping from the interior of April’s car. Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead and neck. He swallowed hard and took another drink to wash down the vile taste. The Reuben had tasted much better at lunch.

  “Once a memory, always a memory,” he said to himself and once again yearned for control of his recall.

  When April and their four-year-old daughter, Julia, were killed, the police had ruled it an accident—careless driving. How does someone get hit by a train so close to home? And stopped between the gates—she crossed those tracks every day and was a better driver than that. Tears welled up in the corners of his eyes, and he reached up under his glasses to wipe them. His formula had helped a lot of people. It had also made him a lot of enemies. In his own conscience, he was as guilty as if he’d put April’s car on the tracks, himself.

  He had spoken at several conferences, but this time he had been recruited as the keynote. Four thousand people would be crowding into the convention center to hear him in the morning. He had almost turned down this keynote opportunity because the conference date conflicted with a Taekwondo competition, but the choice of paying to show off his physical prowess versus getting paid to speak was a non-issue.

  He kept the media’s attention on what his formula did for his patients—Alzheimer’s, amnesia, brain trauma. He never mentioned, and no one asked, what effect the formula might have on a healthy brain. Six months after he developed the formula, after the first clinical trial completed, he had that very thought and couldn’t leave the question unanswered.

  Out of professional necessity, he kept his self experimentation to himself. Over time, he found that a dose would last a little longer each time. He only took more when the effects waned, but he hadn’t had to take any in eighteen months. The formula’s effects on him seemed permanent.

  Three months ago, he scanned a 240-page book onto his computer and ran it as a high-speed slide show; the pages whizzed by at 30 frames per second, invisible to un-enhanced observation. He could still recite the book verbatim, cover to cover.

  Justin sat with his eyes closed, his chin propped up on his hands, and listened to the background noises in the bar—the low rumble of conversations, the waiter bustling around taking and delivering orders and flirting with the customers, the band doing sound checks, the bumps and clinks of glasses in various shapes, sizes and contents—an orchestral sonata of common sounds. In a welcome respite from his recall of the accident, his mind drifted back to better days, to barefoot walks on the beach with April and Julia, squishing the sand between their toes. In his mind, he took Julia by the arms and flung her around like a carnival ride until he was too dizzy to continue. Behind his closed eyes, he felt the room move in slow rotation around him.

  The band started playing and the booming bass jolted Justin from his vacation. His eyes popped open, and though he hadn’t chosen to, he took an enhanced memory shot.

  The room rotated a little faster.

  “I can’t be drunk . . .” he thought, “. . . not after just one.”

  His mind took another involuntary picture—and another.

  “What’s . . .”

  Accelerating, his mind took picture after picture. It was all he could do to think, much less speak.

  “ . . . ha . . .”

  Like a computer processor pegged with a single monopolizing task, his mental camera took over his mind and wouldn’t allow other cognitive tasks to run.

  “. . . ppeni . . .”

  Within seconds, a torrent of images beset him. Too much color, too much activity, too much everything coming in a blur.

  “. . . ng t . . .”

  Like a high-speed camera stuck in automatic, his mind kept taking pictures, and he couldn’t control it. Closing his eyes didn’t help. Even with the len
s cap on, frame upon frame kept coming.

  “. . .o me?”

  He clinched his eyes and grabbed his head and pressed his temples to keep his head from exploding, or maybe it was better to break it open and release the pressure. He jumped up from his seat, knocked his glass off the table, shattering it, and staggered out on the floor.

  His brain was so overwhelmed that even his autonomic functions struggled to keep up—his heart randomly forgetting to beat, his lungs too distracted to breathe. His eyes clinched as if opening them would unleash a pent up evil from within him.

  Justin pressed his head between his forearms like a vice, then screamed in excruciating pain as his mind switched from explosion to implosion.

  Silence.

  The band had stopped playing, and the room was still.

  Justin lowered his hands from his head and opened his eyes. For an instant, even the dimly lit room seemed bright as his retinas learned, again, that light still existed.

  The camera was off. The barrage of rapid-fire memory was gone, as was the rest of his memory. Not just the images—who he was, where he was, why he was there, April, the conference—everything was gone.

  He stood, panting to catch his breath, and looked around the room at all the people, at everyone looking at him. He saw a few of them start toward him.

  “What do you want?” he thought, his breathing not yet down to a level where he could speak. With each step they took, he back stepped toward the bar.

  They kept coming, faster it seemed.

  Justin flipped his head back and forth, side to side, trying to keep alert to anyone who might attack him. He backed into a woman sitting at the bar and stopped with a start. She pushed him off, and he tumbled to the floor. Everything looked a lot bigger from this child’s-eye view—the towering barstools, the approaching giants. “Get away from me!” Justin said as he spotted the open door to the street and bolted.

  A man who had been sitting at the bar when Justin bought his drink followed him out.

  Justin stumbled in front of an oncoming taxi when he ran out of the bar.

  “Watch it, ya moron!” the driver yelled out his window and flipped Justin off.

  Justin scurried back on the sidewalk. Lights and sounds surrounded him, and he ran into the alley by the bar to escape, the man from the bar right behind him. Justin leaned on the red brick wall and gasped for air.

  “Hey man. You got any money?” the man said.

  Startled, Justin spun around, his back against the wall. “I – I don’t think I have any,” Justin said, not knowing if he did or not.

  “Oh yeah. You got plenty,” the man said and whipped out a switch blade. “Now hand it over.”

  When Justin hesitated, the man pounced at him with the knife, nicking Justin’s arm.

  “Are you nuts?” Justin said and jumped to the side, tripping over a beer bottle lying on the ground. He hustled back to his feet before the man could try again.

  The attacker lunged with the knife, his angle of approach triggering a muscle-memory response in Justin. Twenty-three years of Taekwondo study and practice had honed his skills to a point of automatic retaliation. Even though his cognitive memory was missing in action, his muscle memory was fully intact. He didn’t have to remember which move or counter-move to make—it was simple action-reaction. Justin side stepped, grabbed the man’s wrist, and with a sharp thrust of his forearm, dislocated the man’s elbow.

  The man shrieked and dropped the knife, but bent down reaching for it with his other hand.

  Action-reaction—Justin grabbed the man’s downward-moving head and forced it into his upcoming knee. As if running in forceful slow motion, Justin alternated knee strikes—four times—imploding his attacker’s face.

  The man’s life oozed from his head and dripped from Justin’s knees. With his nasal cartilage shoved into his brain, the man fell to the ground.

  Justin stepped back and looked at the bloody corpse on the ground. “My God, what have I done?” He heard someone coming from around the corner and took off running.

  Down the alley, through the streets, under the interstate, Justin ran as fast as he could manage, given the pant legs sticking to his knees. Twenty minutes into his exodus, he tripped on an unlit curb and left the right side of his face smeared on the sidewalk.

  “Got to keep moving . . .” he said, getting up and resuming his flight. His blood ran almost as fast as he did—down his face, his neck, soaking his right side of his shirt. The wind-effect of his running caused the blood in his shirt to meld with the hair on his chest, his every move ripping his right side bare.

  Highway homeless and off-duty pan handlers shouted obscenities.

  “What have I done to deserve this?” he thought.

  He ran the Red-light district. Hookers gasped and stepped out of his way.

  “I killed a man. I deserve everything I get,” he thought. “I killed him.”

  He rounded a corner and plowed into a cop on the sidewalk, sending them rolling together like an enormous tumbleweed.

  “What the –” the cop said and stood back up, securing a hold on Justin’s arm. He looked Justin over, got on his radio and requested an ambulance.

  Justin struggled, but only for a moment. His knees buckled under his body weight as his legs melted. He muttered incoherent and almost inaudible sounds. “I killed him.”

  ~~~

  In the Emergency room, they triaged Justin as low priority for his facial lacerations and contusions. All they could get out of him were mumbled ramblings, but between his driver’s license and his insurance card, they found sufficient information for the paperwork.

  It took three hours for the doctor on duty to make it to the low-priority patients. When he looked at Justin’s chart, he gave a slight snigger at the name: Just in case. “Hello Mr. Case. I’m Dr. Worfolk. Can you tell me what happened to you?”

  “He tried to take my money, and I took his life,” Justin tried to respond.

  The doctor couldn’t make any sense out of the mumblings.

  “What’s your name, Mr. Case?”

  Justin just sat there oblivious to the question.

  Dr. Worfolk tapped his pen on the chart in thought. A marked check box at the top of the form caught his eye: TRIAGE CATEGORY-Low. His eyes bulged in horrified amazement at what seemed to be his staff’s gross incompetence. “Excuse me, Mr. Case. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  ~~~

  “This man has significant facial lacerations and doesn’t seem to know who the hell he is.” He addressed the staff in whispered shouts, waving Justin’s chart in their faces. “Hell-o. That doesn’t sound like head trauma to you?” He scribbled some notes on the chart. “Get me a head CT stat! We’ll talk about your jobs later.”

  Dr. Worfolk stormed off to his office to cool off. He grabbed a trade journal off the table, looking for a distraction, and thumbed through it. As the pages flipped by, he noticed a familiar name and turned back to see the article: Justin Case, “The Non-Medicinal Memory Master.” The picture wasn’t quite the same considering Justin’s current loss of face, but it was him alright.

  “No way!” Worfolk said to himself.

  ~~~

  Justin’s blank, staring eyes watched the undulating white lights in the ceiling as orderlies wheeled the gurney down to radiology. His only available memories replayed in a continuous loop in his mind, and with each iteration he mumbled, as if on cue, until his consciousness faded.

  One of the orderlies realized what Justin had been saying and reported it.

  ~~~

  Justin awoke the next morning conscious and coherent, but could only remember the prior night’s events—nothing before that.

  Ordinarily, the ER doctor on duty simply provided enough care to stabilize the patient. Then the patient would be assigned to another doctor for more definitive care. In this case, however, Dr. Worfolk had taken a personal interest and taken the assign
ment himself.

  “Good morning Mister, or should I say ‘Doctor’ Case.”

  Justin gave Dr. Worfolk a quizzical look. “Excuse me?”

  Worfolk showed the article to Justin. “It seems you’re quite a celebrity, Justin Case.”

  “I don’t know anything about this,” Justin said, gesturing toward the journal. “This is supposed to be me?”

  “Let’s just start with what you do know. What can you tell me about last night?”

  “I killed a man.” Justin said, looking down at the floor.

  “We’ve surmised as much. You kept babbling about it, and one of the staff figured out what you were saying.” Worfolk said. “There’s an officer posted at your door now.”

  They called in the officer, and Justin recounted everything he could recall. As he was explaining, he suddenly stopped with a look of panic on his face. For a brief moment, he saw only mental blackness as one of the closed-eyed images from the bar filled his mind. Over the next twelve hours, memories from the past arbitrarily revealed themselves. He vomited when the accident made its appearance. By the end of the day, everything had been fully restored.

  ~~~

  When the police investigated the crime scene, they found the knife with the dead man’s finger prints and a trace of Justin’s blood on it, just as Justin had described it. Interviews with bar patrons and staff corroborated Justin’s story. When identifying the body, they found that he had a record for armed robbery.

  ~~~

  The two doctors spent the next three days trying to determine what had happened to Justin’s memory. In spite of their professional differences, they each acknowledged the others degree of expertise, developing a mutual respect for their respective fields—medicinal vs. naturopathic. But respect didn’t go quite far enough for Justin to confide his secret.

  “Hey Justin, what do you think of this?” Dr. Worfolk showed him some lab results. “Everything looks perfectly normal, better than normal in fact, except for some traces of petroselinic acid in your blood.”

  “Huh?” Justin paused to consider it. “Of course. How could I have been so stupid? I had a Long Island last night.”

  “I’m not following you.” Worfolk said.