Familiar Strangers

“Have we met before?”

Tom kept asking this question. Over, and over. He was at a party, and everyone seemed familiar, but not, and when he asked this question, the answer was unchangeably ‘no.’ Every single time. Yet Tom was becoming certain he’d seen these people before. But where?

He tried to think. Maybe on the streets? He brought up visions of all the times in his close memory he’d been walking down the street, but he couldn’t remember any of these faces. After all, the man who’d invited Tom had said explicitly that most of the guests were from out of town.

So Tom recalled memories of grocery stores and the Home Depot, of everywhere he had gone in the last few weeks. He gazed around but still could not see anything. None of the faces at this party showed up.

He decided that maybe he’d seen them in a dream, so he tried to call them back, but he could not remember any of his dreams, and so he sighed and went back to the party and continued to ask every familiar stranger “Do I know you?” or “I could swear I’ve seen you around before…” and continued to receive replies of “No, I don’t think we have met” or “No, I don’t live near here at all.”

So Tom left at around nine o-clock in the evening and wandered home, still trying to think. Where had he seen all those faces before? Where? He could not understand how he had forgotten where. But he kept on asking and asking himself, scouring his memories.

The next day, Tom continued onwards in his quest. He tracked down everyone he could who had been at the party, asking question after question.

“Were you at the Walmart last Tuesday?”

“Was that your red corvette parked outside?”

“You wouldn’t have happened to have been at the baseball game three days ago, would you have?”

The answer was ‘no’ invariably.

But Tom was becoming feverishly obsessed, he would stop at absolutely nothing to get what he wanted; the answer to his questions. WHERE? WHEN? HOW? That was all Tom wanted to know, and needed to know. But no matter how many different questions he tried, no matter how much he interrogated and ran around town and ordered drinks for people, no one would give him the answers he wanted.

Not only that, but everybody else in town seemed to become less and less familiar, less and less known to Tom, until finally, for the first time in his life, he could not remember the name of the cashier at his favorite restaurant, and it occurred to him that something strange must be happening. Something must be going on that was forcing him to do these things. Maybe he had never seen these people.

So Tom gave up on asking where he’d seen these people before and confined himself to his house. He began learning to use a lawnmower for himself, instead of paying 20 bucks for it to be done. He learned how to cook all his favorite foods homemade; mac & cheese, bacon and eggs, chicken tenders, rice, steak. By the day he became more and more reclusive.

But he was also learning. Owning no video-games and a barely-working TV meant he spent most of his time reading books. Tom was becoming smarter by the minute.

However, after five weeks of this trend, the only time he would ever be seen in public, or in fact, with any company whatsoever, was when he needed to buy things. No-one even knew how he was making money. Tom himself wasn’t able to remember where the money on his debit card had even come from.

It was one of these trips to Walmart when it happened. He looked around and realized, he now recognized none of the faces around him, but all of them were strangely familiar. He paid in a rush and sped home in his car.

He did not know who had filled up his gasoline tank, only that it now read as full, and that it had been nearly empty when he’d gotten out to shop.

When Tom arrived back home, he made some soup and hid with it, gazing around wildly. The pictures on the walls, even now, were becoming blurrier. Like they were familiar, but not…

Tom ran through the house, tearing down every single painting and picture he could, and throwing them out of the front door.

“I’m just imagining it,” he mumbled, though he knew absolutely that this was a lie. He was not imagining it. His memory for people was dying, but his memory for cuisine and science and basically everything else got better by the day.

The next time he went out, he had to ask the cashier, who knew Tom and was a personal friend, if they’d met before. The cashier was hurt, but replied ‘yes, we have.’ Tom apologized, left a tip and ran for the hills.

When he arrived back home, the door was unlocked. He was certain that he’d locked it. Certain that he and he alone knew where his spare keys were. He snuck around the house carefully, looking behind every curtain and within every closet and below every piece of furniture. No one was inside.

He even resolved to check in the backyard. All that was there was a ginger stray kitten sitting on a rusted bucket watching a bird in the tree. No person, though, and no raccoons either. Nothing that could have unlocked the door.

He looked to the houses beside his and to the streets on either side of his house, but they were deserted.

Then, a hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him onto a chair. The lights went completely out. He could still hear the kitten mewling for food outside. But Tom could not see anything. He tried to get up, but a firm grip threw him back onto the chair.

The lights turned on. A strange man stood there, and asked, ‘How’s it going, Tom?’ with a cold sneer, and Tom, who thought the man looked sort-of but at the same time not-at-all familiar, asked one simple question.

“Have we met before?”