A Prologue . . .

“He’s been making good progress since the crash, his eyes now track from left to right and from up to down as they should; no sign of prolonged trauma and there were no serious bodily injuries save for the broken arm and foot. However, Mrs Watson, I would advise caution and patience with Sam at present. His head suffered quite a bang as I’m sure you’d imagine and still hasn’t yet fully recovered his ability to communicate. You may notice his slow response to questions, his lack of emotion and generally lackadaisical outlook.”

“How long will that last?” A concerned, high voice drifted down the white corridor.

“I’m afraid you can’t ever be too sure with cases like this, Mrs Watson.”

“Julia, please.” She was obviously tense.

“Very well, Julia,” the doctor replied empathetically, “the problem is not so much Sam’s brain at a biological level but more at a psychological level. The shock has left him, frightened, quite shaken up, if you will, and as a defence mechanism, his mind is pushing his ‘Self’ into a cocoon, a personal space in his own head where he can find peace. We see such phenomenon in certain personality disorders and Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, an emotion-numbing exercise of sorts.”

“Does he have Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome?” She asked.

“We don’t believe so, he hasn’t seen any kind of impairment in emotional functioning as a result of debilitating flashbacks and a constant fear since one month ago when the crash happened: No, we think this is a classic case of straightforward Amnesia, his head injury causing him to forget the whole ordeal. Though if his expression problems persist, then there may be cause to think that the likelihood of Post-Traumatic Stress is more prudent.”

“Oh God, will he ever be the same again?” She sounded like she was on the verge of tears.

“Oh, yes, yes, we think he will. This is just the first stage after his accident, so we’ve no intention of ruling anything out. Our best advice at present is to keep sending him home with you, let him ask you questions, talk to him about fond memories, about your life together before his crash and in some cases, if you hit the right memory, it all comes flooding back. Keep up with what you’ve been doing so far Julia, because we tend to find it does patients like your husband a world of good.”

“I hope so.”

“I do also Julia. Come, let’s see how he’s doing.” The doctor said cheerfully.

Sam’s door creaked open, the white light flooding into the room, nearly invisible against the hash light on the ceiling. His physical injuries had cleared up quickly over the last month he thought and he could still recall those concrete facts of life and general knowledge as clear as day, like he was grabbing the pebbles of wisdom from the great stream of knowing, but why, he asked himself, could he not remember those he knew, the facts of his life? He reached out for the memories often, knowing that something was missing, something queer in his head, but when he looked it was just gone, snatched away and disappearing, laughing, into the untrimmed forest of his thoughts. The woman was here again, Julia, she called herself, who was -according to her unabridged memory- his wife of the last ten years. And that doctor was with her too, a nice enough guy he thought, and the first person he saw when he came round a month ago. He’d been staying and leaving the hospital over the last few weeks, reporting back, going home and reporting back and going home again with Julia to talk about the elusive past and those memories that he’d lost. It felt like a mirror had shattered, that when he’d hit his head, the glass just broke into thousands of shards to never be seen again, just vanishing like they never existed, like he’d never existed. Julia smiled and he saw that look in her eyes again; he didn’t respond, still wondering what their connection meant; obviously she was his wife, they were married and marriage was the apex of the social hierarchy of proving ones love to a fellow human, but there was something within that stopped him smiling back, instead putting on the face of a scared dog, fearing something that he didn’t see but knew was there. He feared that look in her eye, that look of happiness that came because her husband was alive and well, yet oddly fearful because it looked… forced, for lack of a better word, he thought.

“How are you Sam?” The doc smiled, teeth bright like those you’d find in a toothpaste advertisement.

“I’m fine.” The words rolled out of Sam’s mouth slow and dull.

“Are you alright Sam?” Julia asked, her smile small and red-lipped, the colour matching her hair. Sam flicked his eyes to her, but he sensed that his facial expression had betrayed him as a look of concern flashed across her face, but then it was gone in an instant:

“Yes, yes of course I’m fine, Julia. I’ve never been better.” He smiled back, whispering his final sentence to himself as his eyes sunk to the floor. A small fire burned within him as he eyed the ground below his feet, a fear of something. But what? He asked the question over and over in his mind as the doctor and his wife struck up another conversation. He caught bits of it like “…recovery time…” and “…flattened affect…”  but the rest of it was a whisper to him. By the time they’d finished he was long gone for a while, to a flowery fissure filled with roses and daffodils and the greenest grass; a place, he asked himself, had he visited before, in the real world somewhere; but he didn’t respond to himself, only distracted himself from the boredom of existence. Whatever life was, his was here.