So what do I remember?
I decide to work on that. The halls are quiet and I am alone in my room; my lunch tray is gone. I crank up my bed, lean back, pull the blankets up to my chin and close my eyes tight.
I was an honor student in school, I’ve been told. So I’m not a moron, or at least I wasn’t. A little effort, and I should be able to get my brain to cooperate. Deep breaths. I listen to my breathing, trying to block out the sounds of squeaking nurses’ shoes and carts in the hallway. You can do this, I tell myself. You can find yourself again.
I start by going over the few moments I remember in the first days after waking up from my Big Sleep.
Sitting up, head pounding and room spinning. A glass of water. Chugging it down so fast I nearly choke, my head as heavy as concrete. “Wow,” a soft voice says. “Call her parents.”
A nurse with a gap between her front teeth offering me a huge blue pill in her outstretched palm. “Come on now,” she says. “Don’t fight me on this one.”
The Woman—my mother—leaning forward in the armchair to rest her head on the edge of my bed, a shudder going though her body.
The Girl in the Mirror, staring back at me with scared eyes. I stick my tongue out at her, and she does it back.
I flip onto my side, open my eyes and stare at the beige wall. These memories are not what I am after. They don’t matter. It’s the ones before I came to this place, the ones before Ramses decided my skull was a toy for his amusement, that I need to get to somehow. I bury my face deeper into the pillow and pull the blankets over my head. I imagine the white of the sheet as a movie screen, waiting for my mind to project its images. The warmth of my breath bounces back at me, and my eyes grow heavy, but I keep them half open and let the fragments slip into my mind.
A loud siren, and a rumbling feeling under my back. Someone squeezes my hand and tells me to hang on. “I’m sorry,” I try to say, but something covers my mouth and no one hears me.
On my back again, a feeling like I am floating. Distorted voices come from above, and a force pulls at me, tugging me down deeper. I try to scream, to tell the voices I am here, to save me, but it is stronger than I am. I let it take me.
“Please don’t leave us,” the voice says. “You’ve got to fight, Jessica.” A warm hand caresses my cheek.
I hold my gaze on the sheet, barely blinking, and will more memories to come. But it’s no use. That’s it, that’s all, folks. A headache builds in my temples. I turn onto my back, lower the blankets and glare at the ceiling tiles.
Why did this happen? Why did a supposedly domesticated bison bull decide, on one spring day like any other, to go after me in a two-thousand-pound rage? Am I such a total loser that God or the universe or whoever decides such things considered my life so useless it should be erased in one fell swoop?
Panic—or maybe terror—grips me so suddenly that I sit up, clutching at the sheets. I bite my tongue hard to keep myself from screaming, but I can’t fight the energy surging through my arms and legs. I punch at the bed, rip the sheets, kick the bedside table. A mug the Woman must have left after her afternoon tea smashes to the floor. My body is shaking, and the feeling isn’t gone yet, so I spring out of bed and stomp on the pieces of mug. I feel pain through my fuzzy socks, but the crunching sound is soothing somehow. I jump harder. A shard of porcelain jabs into my heel, and I yelp but can’t seem to stop. I am about to pounce again when I hear a voice at the doorway.
“Jessica.” I ignore the voice, leap anyway, but it interrupts my fun again. “Jessica!”
I swing around and see a nurse standing there, a tiny lady with a tight ponytail. Her hands are firmly on her hips, and I laugh the loud and obnoxious guffaw of a madwoman. And just how are you going to stop me? I’m thinking, but then through the door steps another nurse, about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the first. They move toward me in unison, and I let out a scream that sounds like it comes from an animal.
I can’t remember, and I can’t love. But I am very good at getting pissed off.