As ridiculous as this might seem, I tried to smile, but I doubt if he even saw. My attempt didn’t last that long.
The pain came. The kind of pain for which there is no analogy; the kind of pain that allows for no other thought. The epicenter was concentrated in the area above my left eye, but it barely mattered; the waves through the rest of my head were almost worse. My brain felt too large for my skull. I felt like I needed to throw up, but I didn’t.
Without my having to tell him, James asked, “Could someone please give her some drugs?”
An EMT shone a light in my eyes. “Not until she’s seen a doctor, maybe even had a CT scan. But it’s terrific news that she’s already up. Just five more minutes, okay, Naomi?”
“Just five more minutes until what?” I asked, trying to sound patient. Until Christmas? Until my head exploded?
“Sorry. Until we’re at the hospital,” said the EMT.
At this point, the pain in my head was so strong that I wanted to weep. I probably would have, too, but it occurred to me that crying might actually make me feel worse.
“Are you positive she can’t have any drugs?” James yelled.
“Distract her. Tell her a joke or something. We’re almost there,” was the EMT’s annoying, unhelpful reply.
“I don’t think that’s gonna do it,” James retorted.
“Laughter’s the best medicine,” said the EMT. I believe this may have been his idea of a joke, but it did nothing for my headache.
“Complete and utter…” James leaned in closer to me. He smelled like smoke and laundered sheets left to dry in the sun. “…bullshit, but would you like a joke anyway?” he asked.
I nodded. I really would have preferred drugs.
“Well, I can only think of one, and it’s not that good. Certainly not analgesic good. So…okay, this man goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘My wife’s insane. She thinks she’s a chicken.’ And the doctor goes, ‘Well, why don’t you just commit her?’ And the man says—”
Just as he was about to reveal the punch line, a particularly impressive wave of pain pulsed through my head. My nails dug into James’s palm, piercing his skin, making him bleed. I couldn’t speak, so I tried to telegraph my apology with a look.
“No worries,” James said, “I can take it.” He winked at me.
In the emergency room, a doctor with eyes so bloodshot they made me tired just looking at them asked James how long I had been passed out, and he replied twenty-one minutes, he knew exactly. He’d seen it happen. “At Tom Purdue, there’re these steps out front. One second, she’s walking down them and the next, she’s flying headfirst toward me, like a meteor.”
“Is it strange that I don’t remember that?” I asked.
“Nope,” said the doctor. “Perfectly ordinary to forget incident-associated narrative for a time.” She shined a light in my eyes, and I flinched.
At some point, another doctor and a nurse had joined the party, though I couldn’t have told you when with any confidence. Nor can I recall much about them as individuals. They were an indistinct blur of pastel and white uniforms, like chalk doodles on a sidewalk in the rain.
The second doctor said that she had to ask me a couple of questions, general ones, not about the accident.
“Your full name?”
“Naomi Paige Porter.”
“Where do you live?”
“Tarrytown, New York.”
“Good, Naomi, good. What year is it?”
“Two thousand and…2000, maybe?”
Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t right. Because if it was 2000, I would have been twelve, and I knew for sure I wasn’t twelve. I didn’t feel twelve. I felt…I couldn’t say the exact number, but I just knew I felt older. Seventeen. Eighteen. My body didn’t feel twelve. My mind didn’t feel twelve either. And there was James, James proper—James looked at least seventeen, maybe older—and I felt the same age as him, the same as him. I looked from doctor to doctor to nurse: poker faces, every one.
One of the doctors said, “Okay, that’s fine for now. Try not to worry.” This made me worry, of course.
I decided that the best thing for me to do would be to go home and sleep it off. I tried to sit up in the gurney, which made my head throb even more intensely than it had been.
“Whoa, Naomi, where you going?” the nurse said. He and James gently pushed me back into a horizontal position.
The doctor repeated, “Try not to worry.”
The other doctor paraphrased, “Really, you shouldn’t worry.”
As they walked across the ER to some other patient, I heard the doctors muttering to each other all sorts of worrisome phrases: “mild traumatic brain injury” and “specialist” and “CT scan” and “possible retrograde amnesia.” I have a tendency to deal with things by not dealing with them at all, so instead of demanding that someone immediately tell me what was wrong, I just listened until I couldn’t hear them anymore and then decided to concentrate on matters more tangible.
James always said how ugly he was, but I think he must have known that he wasn’t. The only bad thing anyone could have said about him was that he was too skinny, but never mind that. Maybe because I couldn’t seem to remember anything else, I felt like I needed to memorize every single thing about him. His fraying white dress shirt was open, so I could see that he was wearing a really old concert T-shirt—it was faded to the point that I couldn’t even tell what the band was. His boxers were sticking out over his jeans, and I could make out they were a dark green plaid. His fingers were long and thin like the rest of him, and a few of them were smudged with black ink. His hair was damp with sweat, which made it even darker than usual. Around his neck was a single leather rope with a silver ring on it, and I wondered if the ring was mine. His collar had gotten half turned up. I noticed blood on his lapels.
“There’s blood on your collar,” I said.
“Um…it’s yours.” He laughed.
I laughed, too, even though it made my brain beat like a heart. “In the ambulance…” For whatever reason, the phrase in the ambulance embarrassed me, and I had to rephrase. “In the van, you said you were my boyfriend?”
“Hmm, I hadn’t known you were listening to that.” He had this funny smile on his face and he shook his head a couple of times, as if in conversation with himself. He let go of my hand and laid it on the gurney. “No,” he said, “I just said you were my girlfriend so they would let me ride with you. I didn’t want you to be alone.”
This was disappointing news, to say the least.
There’s a joke about amnesiacs, which always reminds me of meeting James. It’s not exactly a joke, but more a “funny” slogan you’d wear on a T-shirt if you were a) an amnesiac, and b) extremely corny, and c) probably had issues in addition to amnesia, like low self-esteem or the need to give “too much information” or just plain bad taste in clothes. Okay, picture a really cheap, fifty-percent-polyester jersey with a white front and red sleeves. Now add the words “Hi, I’m an amnesiac. Have we met before?”
“You know something funny?” I said. “The first thing I thought about you was what an honest voice you had, and it turns out you were lying to me.”
“No. Not to you. Only to some jerk in a uniform,” he corrected. “If I’d been thinking at all, I would have said you were my sister. No one would have even questioned that.”
“Except me. I don’t have any siblings.” I tried to make a joke of it. If given the choice, I preferred being his imaginary girlfriend to being his imaginary sister. “Are we friends, at least?”
“No, Naomi,” James said with the same little smile, “can’t say that we are.”