ELIGIBLE PAST

Thursday, 28^th September 2006

11:45 PM

Dear diary,

I have always been a startled awakener. Be it any situation I go to bed to, I always find myself waking up covered with sweat, my pillows thrown about the room and my bed sheet in disarray, which seemed odd considering I never recall having any nightmares. Ever. Which again, considering was odd enough as everyone had to have had nightmares at least once in their lives.

But all things said and done, this fact did not bother me today, as it never did on any other day, when I awoke with a start. I looked about the room. Pillows on the floor. Check. Bedsheets on the table. Not odd. Windows open. Normal. Blood on the door. Right, that was different.

I had never seen blood on the door before and this gave me quite a shock. I got up and frantically looked about the room to find signs of any other abnormalities. Finding no other changes, I carefully opened the door and tiptoed out into the hall, my head hurting bad. So far so good. But then a sound from the kitchen stopped me dead on my tracks. It seemed to be of the grinder whirring and this seemed stranger to me for I never recalled having any electrical item in the kitchen. No fridge, or a stove lest alone a grinder.

I walked into the kitchen with a rolled newspaper raised above my head and found myself staring at a woman, in her thirty’s, dressed in a nighty, phone in hand with earphones plugged in standing next to a stove. Stove!! I never HAD a stove. What’s going on here? Who is she? What is she doing in my kitchen? Why am I not able to mouth my thoughts? And after what seemed like an eternity, when I finally did find my voice, I whimpered out a few syllables which caught her attention.

“Oh babe, you are up. Morning”. She smiled at me, immediately returning to her phone.

Babe! Morning!! Who was she and what was that blood and what was happening here? My mind screamed these thoughts as my knees gave way and I slumped to the floor.

Concerned, she put her phone down and shimmied towards me.

“Babe, are you alright. What’s wrong? Why do you look so pale? Let me get you a glass of water”. Saying this she hurried to get me a tumbler. I looked at her, not knowing what to do or say and when I did finally find the courage, managed to ask-

“Who are you? And what are you doing in my house?”.

“What!”. She screamed. “What is wrong with you David?”.

“Answer my question. Who are you? What are you doing in my house and why is there blood in my bedroom and what are these things in my kitchen?” I repeated.

“Are you drunk in the morning?”. She shouted with tears forming in her eyes.

“Who are you? Don’t. Don’t come near me. Stop right there. Stop.” and as I screamed at her, my eyes fell on the photo frames hung on the wall next to me. There I was, hugging her in one photo nearby some pool and there I was holding her as she was laughing and trying to get away.

This made no sense to me. Was I married? I would remember being married and I would so obviously remember visiting all these places with her. And then something struck my mind which made me squeal in fear.

I didn’t remember her or being married to her. But I didn’t remember anything else categorically either. What was I doing yesterday? What was my job? Hell what place was this and why did I earlier only remember an empty kitchen. As I mulled over frantically at these thoughts in my head I saw the woman crying silently near the fridge(which I did not remember having). She had fear written all over her face and this made me feel guilty. Troubled that I was, I had scared this woman-my wife, if I had to go by the pictures and I realized I had to win her confidence if I had any chance at figuring what was going on.

“I don’t remember anything about myself or my life. Help me please.” I looked at her pleadingly.

--------------------------------------

After Julie had made me comfortable on the sofa and filled in the memory lapses that I seemed to have about my identity, I accepted the fact to myself that I was way better off in not knowing any of those details, for they just seemed to make matters worse. I was a salesman at a car showroom, married for three years, parents dead, no siblings and recently shifted to Chennai from Bengaluru. And I had no memory of anything whatsoever. I felt as if I were listening to the story of another person, for these experiences- my past life sounded so alien to me. Julie meanwhile couldn’t stop crying and I made no efforts to console her because for a moment, I felt flashes of memories sweeping into my brain. I saw a little girl swinging in the park, dressed up in pretty pink and laughing gaily looking at me. Papa, she screamed in delight every time she went higher.

Lydia!

It struck me like lightning but things that were hazy in my mind started looking clearer to me now. I had a daughter, my precious little baby. I remembered dropping her, teary eyed at the school on her first day. I remembered going to the mall on Sundays, her smile widening every time she saw an ice cream parlor. I remembered my wife and I being interrupted by her every single time we were about to kiss. She loved doing that, Lydia. It was more like a game to her where she had to protect her mother from the advancing dangers that was her father. And boy how proud she was every time she managed to save her mum. She danced her happiness out and then when tired, went to bed. My little angel.

I remembered taking her to the hospital to visit her mother when she was ill.

I remembered she trying to squeeze her way into her mother’s arms on the tiny hospital bed and sneak in a kiss on her cheek every now and then. I remembered how upset she was when they had to put on ventilator support for her mum and how she couldn’t kiss her any more because mum was apparently very very lazy and slept a lot. Bad mum, she had cried to me that morning.

I remembered taking her, dressed in black, all pretty to the church for her mother’s funeral. I remembered her later coming into my room and hugging my neck tightly when she found I was in tears. I remembered all those days when we father and daughter used to visit my wife’s grave.

She had always been a calm, composed woman. Always in control of her life, making everything look so elegant and effortless. She never complained much, and now that I could remember, she had always been fun loving. Hell, she made me look interesting. She never complained when she found out we had an unexpected pregnancy. She never complained when she had to leave her job to take care of her child and home. She never in fact complained when she got diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had always been braver than me, till the day she left us.

Looking over to the crying woman besides me I realized that none of those memories I had involved Julie in them. She wasn’t the woman I had married, had had a child with or seen die. Hatred arose in me at this deception. I felt violated. Angered, at being lied to. Who was this woman and what was she doing here? What happened to me and where was Lydia? This thought scared me as I realized I hadn’t seen my daughter since morning. I jumped out of the sofa and looked at the surprised face which followed my movements.

“Where is my daughter?”. I asked, my teeth clenched in anger. I had never felt this disgusted with anyone before.

“What daughter!” she wailed.

“I am calling the police...I am calling the police you freak. Where is SHE!”, I shouted back.

“Oh god, help please. Someone help me. He has gone mad.....”.

And as I screamed at her and she screamed for help, I felt the curtain closing on my eyes and my knees trembling and the last thing I saw before I blacked out was the door flying open and a few neighbors pouring into the living room.

-------------------------------------------------

I awoke with a start. This time it was different. There were handcuffs tying me to the bed. Bed. This was not my bed. I looked about and realized this was not my room either. Where was I? It looked more like a hospital room but there were no equipment inside. There was no heart monitor and those breathing machines and the other fancy medical stuffs.

Julie. I remembered seeing that woman last. Anger filled in me slowly as I growled, desperately trying my way out of the handcuffs. The door then flew open, my ordeal perhaps being the reason.

Julie entered along with a doctor. Ugh, a doctor, I thought to myself. I hated those white coated arrogant jerks ever since they couldn’t save my wife. Two people I loathed at that moment stood there watching me and all I could do was grunt in response.

“What you have been going through is painful to put it mildly. But I don’t think I will be able to understand unless you tell me everything.” the doctor said to me whilst removing the handcuffs.

“She is not my wife.” I said. “And I think I will be leaving from here. Thank you.”

“Fair enough. You are welcome back anytime”, the doctor said extending his hand for a handshake. The smugness in him.

I looked hard at Julie who was still teary eyed. Giving her a hateful stare I exited the hospital room and walked towards the exit.

The next hour went in a haze as I struggled to find a ride home, went into a wrong house, found a phone in my pocket with my address in it and finally managed to reach my home. Things were not making sense to me any more now. Reality seemed to converge with fiction as I grappled with all that had happened today.

I went into my room and foraged through my drawer. There were a bunch of notebooks full of market prices of various cars and their accessories. Julie said I was a car salesman and this realization hit me hard. I sat on the floor and clutched my head, trying to find any other memories which were there within me, hidden deep. Think! I screamed inside my head and then it struck me. I remembered going to the mall with Lydia, and I remembered going to the church for the funeral and I also remembered going to the graveyard. My answers, if any, would be there, I thought to myself as I hurried out of my apartment.

I visited the graveyard first and only then did it hit me that I had no idea what the name of my dead wife was. I stood in the afternoon sun, amidst the graves looking at the tombstone of every dead person there. I figured my wife would carry my last name, Pent, with her and so maybe I could find her that way. After an hour of moving around twice across the entire length of the graveyard, I left the place and started towards the mall. My heart was racing now, all sorts of theories forming inside my head.

Was I mad? Had I really lost it? These thoughts ran continuously as I reached the place where I thought the Express mall was supposed to be. In front of my eyes lay a bare land, very huge, but totally bare, leave alone a few bags of cement being unloaded on a corner of the ground.

This was turning out to be the nightmare I had never experienced, or so I thought. I turned around to return when I noticed a banner nearby a construction shed which read-

EXPRESS MALL- proposed completion of project- March 2008.

I felt my knees go weak for the third time today.

I felt something weird in my throat and I felt my temperature rising. The memories I had, the thoughts I had were all something which had not taken place yet. My past was a shadow which lay forgotten in my mind but the future and the memories I were about to make lay clear. That explained why I could not remember Julie, because she was a part of my past. That explained why there was no tombstone for my apparently dead wife, because I hadn’t met her yet. There was no Lydia in my life. Till now.

Was this a superpower? I asked myself.

Things made so much sense to me as I got back into my car and hurried back to the hospital.

-------------------------------------

Maybe uncertainty is the rule of nature but even that does not justify what had happened to me today. The visit to the hospital was no less, adding to the roller coaster of a journey I had been experiencing.

Paranoid schizophrenia with retrograde amnesia, the doctor had said.

A not so common neurological disorder, he had explained which makes you see things, think of things which aren’t true. Apparently my mind joined stuffs which I saw or thought in my everyday life, to concoct hallucinations and visuals. My mind would then be unable to differentiate between reality and fiction and the retrograde amnesia didn’t help either. Apparently my past thoughts and memories were erased by my brain due to repeated traumas and injuries on my head during violent episodes of schizophrenic attacks in the night, and yesterday night had been the nail in the coffin for my memory and thus the blood. Probably the most violent attack ever. This, he said would explain why I woke up to a disarrayed room every morning. He said the place where my long term memories were supposed to be stored, something called the hippocampus was damaged and thus in the absence of any memories, the visuals and the hallucinations were perceived as memories. He specifically made sure to point out that all the flashes of episodic memories I had were all just hallucinations getting stored in my brain as memories.

The doctor had taken an hour to listen to me and when he did start speaking, he had compassion in his eyes which almost made me feel guilty about loathing him earlier.

“This is probably the rarest of the rare cases David”, he had said. “You probably had thought of naming your daughter Lydia if and when she was born and thus the strong feeling of having a daughter named so. Maybe that is why you could not remember your wife’s name because no one thinks of a name for their wife”. He had then burst out laughing at his own joke.

Doctors are the worst, I had thought to myself.

So coming back to the present, diary dear, I am going to write here everyday. This was one of the suggestions of the doctor. He said whenever I felt the world was crumbling in front of me, when things did not seem real, I had to go back and read what I wrote here today.

“Doctor, but then what about Julie? Did she never find anything suspicious in me all this while I have been with her?” I had asked.

The doctor had taken my hand and had calmly looked into me eyes, saying, “There is no Julie, David. Its a part of your hallucination”.

That had shaken me pretty bad. The woman in her nighty in the kitchen. The teary eyed woman who had called for help. The woman who was at the hospital room earlier in the day, just a hallucination. Its not possible, I had thought.

“Mental trauma due to parents death, low paying job, nil social life and friends are all factors in this David”, he had said. “But don’t worry. The medications I am writing for you should help you a lot”.

So as I was telling diary, I am not really sure what I will see next, what I will hear next or what I will remember next. The past never mattered to me so much as it does now. I am too scared to sleep, but I guess I will eventually have to. For all the odds that are stacked up against me, maybe I will fight it. Maybe, I will accept the people who I meet during the hallucinations. Maybe then, I will have someone to talk to.

Good night diary.

Until tomorrow,

David Pent.