The Memory Thief (2 page)

I am somewhere. Where, I am not sure. It doesn't seem to matter. A big white room, maybe, or a dark tunnel. Sometimes there are flashes of light, explosions of bright color that I watch with interest. Then they go away again, and there is nothingness, like when you stare up at the ceiling of a room at night with the lights turned off. None of this bothers me. It is quiet where I am, for the most part, and peaceful.

I'm unaware that my body has been gone until it starts coming back, in sharp, alarming gusts of pain that fade as quickly as they come on. My legs, my chest, most especially my head. I try to figure out why this should be, but come up with nothing. Then there are voices, and a needle, and the pain retreats again. Back I go to the big white room. I lie there, waiting to see what will happen next. It occurs to me that maybe I should panic, but what would be the point? Besides, I don't seem to have the energy, what with the flashes of light and the pain and everything. So I lie still, there inside my head in the big white room. And possibly, I fall asleep, assuming that I was awake to begin with. The reason I think this is that I am suddenly cold, and instead of seeing the big white room or the dark tunnel around me, I see the side of a mountain, which I am climbing. I can feel my body again, and it doesn't hurt. In fact, it feels pretty damn good, and I am—happy.

I climb and climb and watch the sun rise. Even through my glacier glasses, it burns my retinas, but I refuse to look away. They are opposing elements, fire and ice, and I am caught in the middle. The light is pitiless, shining from the sun, reflecting off the snow. It washes me clean, lays me bare.

For a moment I am frozen. There is no
before,
there is no
after.
There is only me, strapped to this hunk of rock, something the earth coughed up when it was having an off day. I am reminded of a bumper sticker—
Be Here Now
—but instead of serenity, I am filled with dread. The mountain's staggering beauty seems sinister, a vindictive mistress. Apprehension washes over me, threaded through my muscles, coiling in the pit of my belly.

I need to keep moving, to put this misplaced unease behind me. Sinking my ice axe, I step up, onto a glacial expanse. I brace myself to slip, but that doesn't happen. Instead my boots hold steady and grip, metal squeaking in protest as it bites into the ice.

Looking for a place to anchor in, I take a few steps onto the glacier's surface. I am high enough that I can look down on the clouds. In the distance, I can see huge plumes of snow blow off the peak above in the growing light of the sun—a sight that gives me pause, no matter how many times I've taken it in. I breathe to center myself, though it's a futile effort up here, where the air is so thin. Still, alone on the uneven, snow-laden crust of the glacier, the ice wall looming jagged below me, I am filled with an incredible sense of connection and fulfillment. I feel like giving the finger to whatever caused my earlier sense of foreboding:
I am here,
so there.

“Slack,” I yell down the mountain. It's been windy for most of the trip and we've had to communicate with rope signals, but today it's clear and my voice carries just fine. A couple of seconds later the rope loosens, and I pull on it once, then again.

That's when I hear it, an earth-rending roar that can only mean one thing. For an interminable second I look up, turning my face into the warmth of the sun—but it, too, is gone. In its place is a wall of white, hurtling down the mountain.

Avalanche. When you look death in the face, your life is supposed to unspool before your eyes, but I see none of mine. If only I had, perhaps everything would have been different—a thin chalk tracing between here and there, connecting
before
to
after.
Instead I see flashes: a small, blond boy in the middle of a playground, tracing the dirt with a stick; a brown-haired woman with her head thrown back, laughing, her throat a sleek marble line; a dark-eyed, smiling man sitting cross-legged by a campfire, guitar in his lap and tattoos on his upper arms, leaning forward like he's listening to someone.

I have an instant to wonder if I am seeing a future that might have been.

The avalanche hits me, like nothing I have ever known. It takes me down, and I am flying. Somehow I still have my axe, and I twist, trying desperately to jam it into something, anything, even though I can't tell which way is up. For a moment there is air, and I take my chance: a deep breath, the most I have in me. Then everything stops. I slam into something, then again. Pain splinters through my legs, encircles my ribs like an overzealous lover. I cup my hands around my face, carving out an air pocket, just before the snow settles around me, immovable as concrete. Normally this gesture connotes surprise, horror, fear—but for me, in this instant, it represents something else, something I thought I left behind a long time ago. In my cupped hands, I hold the last of my hope.

In the minutes before the pain swallows me, before the lack of oxygen drags me under, my mind is strangely blank—like staring at a movie screen before the projector is turned on. Then I hear a buzzing sound, an echo. And on the blank screen a loop of images begin to appear: A small boy kneeling in the dust. A woman laughing. A man, cross-legged and attentive. I will the boy to raise his head and look at me, but he never does. His shoulder blades push against the thin cotton of his T-shirt, insistent. He is so young.

The echo is gone now. It is just me, trapped and trembling. And though the silence around me is absolute—I might as well be floating in the airless, high-pressure vacuum of outer space—I hear a fragment of poetry, as clearly as if the speaker is sitting beside me. It is a man's voice, low and husky, urgent. It is no one I know.

Andrew Marvell, I think, before the air in my hands is replaced with carbon dioxide and my throat closes. Grief floods me, and then everything narrows to a sharp point: another needle, sinking deep into my thigh. Down I go again.

Suspended, I float. Into the silence comes a worried female voice: “Nicholas, can you hear me?” Someone squeezes my hand, and I imagine they must be talking to me, though I have no immediate sense of recognition. I try to squeeze back, but my body is gone. This should bother me, but it doesn't. Oh well, I think, floating away.

The voice continues, directed toward someone else this time: “Shouldn't he have woken up by now? You said in a few hours …”

Footsteps cross the floor, pause beside wherever I am. “Be patient. We had to give him some extra sedatives, since he was thrashing around so much. He'll wake up soon. Why don't you go home and get some rest?” Fingers touch the inside of my wrist, then encircle my jaw, turning my head from left to right.

The hand tightens around mine, nails digging in. “No thank you,” the voice says, polite but cool. “I think I'll just stay here.”

“Suit yourself,” says the other voice. It's also female, but the tone is less personal, somehow. I hear the footsteps retreat.

I am asleep, then, or unconscious. Am I in the hospital? What has happened to me? I try to figure it out, but come up blank until I remember my dream: the mountain, the falling, the lack of oxygen. Aha. No wonder I am hurt. In fact, it feels like a miracle I am alive at all. I remember the choking, suffocating feeling, my pointless fight for air, and shudder. It must be the brown-haired woman who is with me, then. I am happy that I get to see her again, assuming that I can indeed see. I try to open my eyes, prepared for my body to resist, but to my surprise they open easily. I see … nothing. The world is dark. Perhaps the lights are out in this room, wherever I am?

I turn to ask my companion, eager to see her face, even the outline of it in this darkness, but her hand is no longer tight around mine. Instead, I am gripping something—a handle? My back is weighted with a heavy pack and metal clinks around my waist. I raise my arm experimentally and whatever I am holding comes with it. There is a focused, localized light and in it I see that I am gripping some kind of axe. Without warning my arm swings high, and the axe bites. I step up, expecting to slide, but my feet grip the ice and hold. Again I swing the axe and step. Other than the noises my efforts produce, all is silent. I swing and step, swing and step in the silence. Panic grips my heart.

I am on the mountain again.

With the eerie inevitability of déjà vu, the sun rises, a full round orb set against a backdrop of vivid oranges, reds, purples, and yellows, so true that they could be the standards against which all other colors are measured. The sun regards me like an accusing, omniscient eye as I place the ice screw, hoist myself up onto the glacier, pull up the slack in the rope. Above me the monster lets loose its ancient roar and down I go, down and down and down. My body tumbles, slams, jerks. I swing my axe, trying to arrest my descent, but it is as pointless as the first time. Something is having its way with me and it isn't going to stop until it's done. I feel my ribs crack, my legs twist in ways legs were never meant to bend. My head ricochets off a rock-hard surface and, despite my helmet, liquid courses down my face, warm and wet. Then the noise stops as abruptly as it's begun and my body is still, hands cupped around my face. I see her face and I long for home with all I have. There is air. Then there is not.

I lie still, reminding myself that I am dreaming. This is the past, I tell myself. I am not on the mountain anymore, I am somewhere else—in the hospital, most likely. I inhale and sure enough, my lungs fill obediently. My chest hurts, but I can breathe. Air has never seemed so miraculous. I breathe in and out several times, partly just because I can and partly to slow my racing heart. As my heartbeat slows I become aware of an irritating noise close by, a shrill repetitive beeping. It sounds like an alarm. Maybe this whole experience was a dream in its entirety—not just the mountain, but the needles and the voices, too.

I sample that idea for a moment until I hear her call my name over and over, worry plain in her tone: “Nicholas? Nicholas?” She has a pretty voice, lilting, but right now it is strained with concern. “What's wrong with him?” she demands, and someone answers, “It's just the heart monitor. He must be waking up.”

So I am in the hospital. That figures. No more climbing for me, I decide. The annoying beeping stops and I try hard to hang on to semiconsciousness. I could do without reliving that whole avalanche experience. Bad enough to go through it twice. Besides, whoever it is that's here with me seems to really want me to wake up. Maybe I could give it a shot.

As clarity begins to return, it strikes me as odd that I don't know her name. I can see her face as plainly as if my eyes were open—large, sleepy-looking brown eyes fringed with thick dark lashes, wavy chestnut hair framing a pale heart-shaped face, mobile mouth with a lower lip that's fuller than the upper. I know how she looks when she laughs, that she throws her head back and gives it all she has, that her teeth are white and straight, except for a crooked one on the bottom that she always tries to hide when she smiles. I know the hollow where the sweep of her neck meets her shoulder and the temperature of her skin. I know how she makes me feel, protective and cared for all at once, possessive, lucky, and what she looks like when I am inside her, eyes staring deep into mine. I even know her smell: homey and wild at the same time, like roasting marshmallows around a campfire on a cool late summer night.

But her name? I have no idea.

I try hard to think of it, casting my mind outward like a net, but when I haul the net back in, it is empty.

This can't be normal. For the first time in my half-awake state, I feel fear grip me. Sure, I was afraid on the mountain, but that was different. That is behind me. This is now, and it is not good. I should know her name. Surely that is not too much to ask.

I try again, picturing her face, then concentrating as hard as I can, but nothing comes. And gradually I become aware that that is not the only thing that is a blank.

For instance, I know that my first name is Nicholas, because I have heard her say it. But would I have known that otherwise? I can't say with certainty that I would. And my last name doesn't seem to be forthcoming. Nor do I know any other pertinent details about myself, other than the fact that I like to climb mountains, and apparently I took a nasty fall off one of them. I cannot think of where I live, or what I do other than climb, or if I have any brothers or sisters, or what football team I root for. It is as if I were born right at this moment. I try again to open my eyes, but nothing happens except that the alarm starts shrieking again.

Her hand is warm on my face, warmer than I remember. “Nick. Honey. Wake up, please. Please wake up, sweetheart.”

I want to tell her that I am trying, but my mouth won't cooperate. Around me there are other voices now, doctors or nurses, I imagine from the content of the conversation. “Look at his BP,” one says—male, and fairly young, judging by the sound of it. “It's really spiking. Do you think we ought to get Dr. Perry?”

“Give him a moment,” says someone else, the female voice I heard earlier. “Let's see if it keeps up. I hate to give him any more morphine. He's had a lot already.” There are footsteps, and then a hand on my arm, rougher than hers. “Nicholas, can you hear me? If you can hear me, wiggle your fingers.”

I'm about to give this up as a lost cause when I land back in my body with what seems like ought to be an audible thud. No more floating, no more tunnel, no more big white room—I am in a bed, for sure, and I can feel a light sheet drawn over me, draping my chest and torso and my legs, which I am sure must be badly broken, given my memory of the fall. I can feel my limbs now, feel my chest rise and sink. This has to be a good thing.

I channel all of my energy into my right arm, the one she is touching. I can do this, I tell myself. And then I wiggle my fingers.