At first, the noise was a loose catgut string vibrating in slow motion in the back of her mind. Then, little by little, the vibrations sped up and the pitch grew higher so that the sound perforated her awareness. Eventually her dreaming self could not dampen the noise or sleep around it any longer, and her eyes opened.
She was aware of the light, brilliant and blinding. She felt the grip of invisible fingers compressing her skull. Then sights and sensations emerged from the black hole of her mind. They were like jump cuts in a movie, too quick to process. Black tires circling gleaming hubcaps. The needle pricks of falling snowflakes on skin. The snap of burning logs in a fireplace. Her limp legs and arms falling into soft sheets. The hard cracking sound of flesh slapping flesh. Hot, lacerating pain. Suffocation. Terrible pressure.
She shut her eyes to seal out the images, but they persisted on the insides of her lids. Over and over, the same flashes, surreal, indecipherable. She hugged the pillow. The fabric felt familiar. This was her pillow, she thought, which meant that this must be her bed. She squeezed her forearm to make sure that she was real. She ran her hand up and over her shoulder to her neck. She felt her naked stomach and legs. But who was she? What was her name? She squeezed her eyes together and tried to grasp the answer through a thick mental sludge. And then it came to her. Baiba Lielkaja. My name is Baiba Lielkaja. And this most basic fact became a tenuous bridge to others. I come from Latvia. My mother lives in Riga. My father is dead. I have a sister. I live in New York City.
This reconstruction of her basic identity exhausted her. She curled on her side and brought her knees up to her breasts. The insistent noise continued to assault her eardrums. Was she only imagining it? She pulled the covers over her naked body. Her mouth was so dry. Her chin and cheeks felt chapped and raw against the pillowcase. Her neck was stiff, and it was hard to swallow. When her knees brushed against her breasts, the nipples felt sore. She lowered her knees, straightening her legs between the sheets, and realized that her thighs and abdomen ached.
The awareness of pain made her more alert. The offensive noise, she finally realized, was the ringing of an alarm clock, her alarm clock, and she reached out to turn it off. In the subsequent silence, her confusion turned to terror. She was afraid to move, to take further inventory of her body. She did not want to think. She did not want to know what had happened in the dark emptiness of her amnesia, and yet she knew without remembering. She knew it all in a sudden upsurge of awareness that made her curl into an even tighter ball, like a primitive pill bug reacting to danger. Now what do I do? she asked herself, and the answer tracing the circumference of her consciousness was, Nothing. Block it out. Forget it before you remember.