Susan smiled and played along with him. “I see. How could I have been so gauche?”
“You look nice and fresh, Susan.”
“Why, thank you, Dr. McGee.”
“That’s much better.”
She had “washed” her hair with talcum powder, had lightly applied some makeup, and had put on lipstick. Thanks to a few drops of Murine, her eyes were no longer bloodshot, though a yellowish tint of sickness colored the whites of them. She had also changed from her hospital gown into a pair of blue silk pajamas that had been in her luggage. She knew she looked far less than her best; however, she looked at least a little better, and looking a little better made her feel a
lot
better, just as Mrs. Baker had said it would.
While they ate lunch, they talked about the blank spots in Susan’s memory, trying to fill in the holes, which had been numerous and huge only yesterday, but which were fewer and far smaller today. Upon waking this morning, she had found that she could remember most things without effort.
She had been born and raised in suburban Philadelphia, in a pleasant, white, two-story house on a maple-lined street of similar houses. Green lawns. Porch swings. A block party every Fourth of July. Carolers at Christmas. An Ozzie and Harriet neighborhood.
“Sounds like an ideal childhood,” McGee said.
Susan swallowed a bit of lime Jell-O, then said, “It was an ideal
setting
for an ideal childhood, but unfortunately it didn’t turn out that way. I was a very lonely kid.”
“When you were first admitted here,” McGee said, “we tried to contact your family, but we couldn’t find anyone to contact.”
She told him about her parents, partly because she wanted to be absolutely sure that there were no holes in those memories, and partly because McGee was easy to talk to, and partly because she felt a strong need to talk after twenty-two days of silence and darkness. Her mother, Regina, had been killed in a traffic accident when Susan was only seven years old. The driver of a beer delivery truck had suffered a heart attack at the wheel, and the truck had run a red light, and Regina’s Chevy had been in the middle of the intersection. Susan couldn’t remember a great deal about her mother, but that lapse had nothing whatsoever to do with her own recent accident and amnesia. After all, she had known her mother for only seven years, and twenty-five years had passed since the beer truck had flattened the Chevy; sadly but inevitably, Regina had faded from Susan’s memory in much the same way that an image fades from an old photograph that has been left too long in bright sunlight. However, she could remember her father clearly. Frank Thorton had been a tall, somewhat portly man who had owned a moderately successful men’s clothing store, and Susan had loved him. She always knew that he loved her, too, even though he never told her that he did. He was quiet, soft-spoken, rather shy, a completely self-contained man who was happiest when he was alone in his den with just a good book and his pipe. Perhaps he would have been more forthcoming with a son than he had been with his daughter. He always was more at ease with men than with women, and raising a girl was undoubtedly an awkward proposition for him. He died of cancer ten years after Regina’s passing, the summer after Susan graduated from high school. And so she had entered adulthood even more alone than she had been before.
Dr. McGee finished his chicken-salad sandwich, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and said, “No aunts, no uncles?”
“One aunt, one uncle. But both of them were strangers to me. No living grandparents. But you know something—having such a lonely childhood wasn’t entirely a bad thing. I learned to be very self-reliant, and that’s paid off over the years.”
As McGee ate his apple pie, and as Susan nibbled at her canned peaches, they talked about her university years. She had done her undergraduate work at Briarstead College in Pennsylvania, then had gone to California and had earned both her master’s and doctorate at UCLA. She recalled those years with perfect clarity, although she actually would have preferred to forget some of what had happened during her sophomore year at Briarstead.
“Is something wrong?” McGee asked, putting down a forkful of apple pie that had been halfway to his mouth.
She blinked. “Huh?”
“Your expression...” He frowned. “For a moment there, you looked as if you’d seen a ghost.”
“Yeah. In a way I did.” Suddenly she was not hungry any more. She put down her spoon and pushed the bed table aside.
“Want to talk about it?”
“It was just a bad memory,” she said. “Something I wish to God I
could
forget.”
McGee put his own tray aside, leaving the pie unfinished. “Tell me about it.”
“Oh, it’s nothing I should burden you with.”
“Burden me.”
“It’s a dreary story.”
“If it’s bothering you, tell me about it. Now and then, I like a good, dreary story.”
She didn’t smile. Not even McGee could make the House of Thunder amusing. “Well... in my sophomore year at Briarstead, I was dating a guy named Jerry Stein. He was sweet. I liked him. I liked him a lot. In fact, we were even beginning to talk about getting married after we graduated. Then he was killed.”
“I’m sorry,” McGee said. “How did it happen?”
“He was pledging a fraternity.”
“Oh, Christ!” McGee said, anticipating her.
“The hazing... got out of hand.”
“That’s such a rotten, stupid way to die.”
“Jerry had so much potential,” she said softly. “He was bright, sensitive, a hard worker...”
“One night, when I was an intern on emergency-room duty, they brought in a kid who’d been severely burned in a college hazing ritual. They told us it was a test by fire, some macho thing like that, some
childish
damned thing like that, and it got out of hand. He was burned over eighty percent of his body. He died two days later.”
“It wasn’t fire that killed Jerry Stein,” Susan said. “It was hate.”
She shuddered, remembering.
“Hate?” McGee asked. “What do you mean?”
She was silent for a moment, her thoughts turning back thirteen years. Although the hospital room was comfortably warm, Susan felt cold, as bitterly cold as she had been in the House of Thunder.
McGee waited patiently, leaning forward slightly in his chair.
At last she shook her head and said, “I don’t feel like going into the details. It’s just too depressing.”
“There were an unusual number of deaths in your life before you were even twenty-one.”
“Yeah. At times it seemed as if I were cursed or something. Everyone I really cared about died on me.”
“Your mother, your father, then your fiancé.”
“Well, he wasn’t actually my fiancé. Not quite.”
“But he was the next thing to it.”
“Everything but the ring,” Susan said.
“All right. So maybe you need to talk about his death in order to finally get it out of your system.”
“No,” she said.
“Don’t dismiss it so quickly. I mean, if he’s still haunting you thirteen years later—”
She interrupted him. “But you see, no matter how much I talk about it, I’ll
never
get it out of my system. It was just too awful to be forgotten. Besides, you told me that a positive mental attitude will speed up the healing process. Remember?”
He smiled. “I remember.”
“So I shouldn’t talk about things that just depress me.”
He stared at her for a long moment. His eyes were incredibly blue, and they were so expressive that she had no doubt about the depth of his concern for her well-being.
He sighed and said, “Okay. Let’s get back to the matter at hand—your amnesia. It seems like you remember nearly everything. What holes haven’t filled in yet?”
Before she answered him, she reached for the bed controls and raised the upper end of the mattress a bit more, forcing herself to sit straighter than she had been sitting. Her back ached dully, not from an injury but from being immobilized in bed for more than three weeks. When she felt more comfortable, she put down the controls and said, “I still can’t recall the accident. I remember driving along a twisty section of two-lane blacktop. I was about two miles south of the turnoff to the Viewtop Inn. I was looking forward to getting there and having dinner. Then, well, it’s as if somebody just turned the lights out.”
“It wouldn’t be unusual if you
never
regained any memory of the accident itself,” McGee assured her. “In cases like this, even when the patient eventually recalls all the other details of his life, he seldom remembers the incident or the impact that was the cause of the amnesia. That’s the one blank spot that often remains.”
“I suspected as much,” she said. “And I’m not really upset about that. But there’s one other thing I can’t recall, and
that’s
driving me nuts. My job. Dammit, I can’t remember even the most minor thing about it, not even one little detail. I mean, I know I’m a physicist. I remember getting the degrees at UCLA, and all that sophisticated, specialized knowledge is still intact. I could start to work today without having to take a refresher course. But
who
was I working for? And what was I doing—
exactly?
Who was my boss? Who were my co-workers? Did I have an office? a laboratory? I must have worked in a lab, don’t you think? But I can’t remember what it looked like, how it was equipped, or where on earth it was!”
“You’re employed by the Milestone Corporation in Newport Beach, California,” McGee said.
“That’s what Dr. Viteski told me. But the name doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
“All the rest of it has come back to you. This will, too. Just give it time.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “This is different somehow. The other blank spots were like mists... like banks of heavy fog. Even when I couldn’t remember something, I could at least sense that there
were
memories stirring in the mist. And eventually the mist evaporated; everything cleared up. But when I try to recall what my job was, it’s not like those misty blank spots. Instead, it’s dark... very dark... black, just a perfectly black and empty hole that goes down and down and down forever. There’s something... frightening about it.”
McGee slid forward, sitting on the edge of his chair. His brow was knitted. “You were carrying a Milestone ID card in your wallet when you were brought into the emergency room,” he said. “Maybe that’ll refresh your memory.”
“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “I’d sure like to see it.”
Her wallet was in the bottom drawer of the nightstand. He got it for her.
She opened the wallet and found the card. It was laminated and bore a small photograph of her. At the top of the card, in blue letters against a white background, were three words: THE MILESTONE CORPORATION. Under that heading, her name was printed in bold black letters, and below her name was a physical description of her, including information about her age, height, weight, hair color, and eye color. At the bottom of the card, an employee identification number was printed in red ink. Nothing else.
Dr. McGee stood beside the bed, looking down at her as she examined the card. “Does it help?”
“No,” she said.
“Not just a little bit?”
“I can’t remember seeing this before.”
She turned the card over and over in her hands, straining to make a connection, trying hard to switch on the current of memory. She couldn’t possibly have been more amazed by the card if it had been an artifact from a nonhuman civilization and had just that very minute been brought back from the planet Mars; it could not have been more
alien.
“It’s all so weird,” she said. “I’ve tried to remember back to when I last went to work, the day before I started my vacation. I can recall some of it. Parts of the day are crystal clear. I remember getting up that morning, having breakfast, glancing at the newspaper. That’s all as fresh in my mind as the memory of the lunch I just ate. I recall going into the garage that morning, getting in the car, starting the engine...” She let her voice trail off as she stared down at the card. She fingered that small rectangle as if she were a clairvoyant feeling for some sort of psychic residue on the plastic. “I remember backing the car out of my driveway that morning... and the next thing I remember is ... coming home again at the end of the day. In between, there’s nothing but blackness, emptiness. And that’s the way it is with
all
my memories of work, not just that day but
every
day. No matter how I try to sneak up on them, they elude me. They aren’t there in the mist. Those memories simply don’t exist any more.”