Chapter 39
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Gabriel
You wake up in a hospital bed and there’s a beautiful girl standing over you with tears swimming in her eyes. She’s a stranger to you. A stranger who is holding your hand. “I love you so much.”
You’ll just have to take her word for it. You have no idea who she is. Your wife , you’re told by the people who claim they’re your friends. You don’t know them either.
When they release you from the hospital, you see that you are, in fact, dead. There are photos of you covered in a sheet, being wheeled into an ambulance.
According to the headlines, you had an inoperable brain tumor. Gone too soon . You envision yourself crashing one of the candlelight vigils they’re holding in your honor. Imagine the surprise on everyone’s faces when they see your ghost.
You think it’s funny.
Your wife is livid. She buys up every tabloid and stuffs them into a garbage can.
But maybe the headlines were right. Maybe you really are dead.
You lie in bed staring at the ceiling with your head pounding and she plays nurse. Cooking your food and plumping your pillows and fussing over you like you’re a newborn. She reads to you—poetry and novels and love letters that feel too intimate to share between two strangers.
“You wrote these letters,” she tells you, trying to hide her tears when you tell her you have no interest in hearing the words another man wrote.
“Whoever this person was, it has absolutely no connection to me.”
“This person is you ,” she insists.
Every day she plays your music on the stereo. You hear it seeping through the closed door and the walls and you just want it to stop.
You have no memory of writing or recording it. You don’t know how to play the guitar even though everyone insists you can, and that you were pretty damn good at it.
You don’t remember what music you like (you have no interest in music anyway), which foods are your favorites, or any of the cities you’ve visited.
You have no childhood memories, no recollection of anything that happened before you woke up in a hospital bed at the age of twenty-eight when the doctor informed you that your name is Gabriel Francis.
You look in the mirror to shave and ask yourself , Who the fuck are you?
You hold the CD case next to your face to compare and you can see that you do bear some resemblance to the photo on the cover. But you’re not so impressed with your shaved head or the thick, jagged scar that slices your skull just above your left ear.
So you stop shaving. Showers are a chore too. You just want to sit in front of the TV and watch cartoons and game shows and sitcoms where the audience laughs on cue.
“But you hate watching TV,” she tells you.
This is news to you but now you know. You hate watching TV. But you keep watching anyway.
The TV is across from the sofa and the sofa is your new bed.
You think about checking into a hotel but it’s too much effort to get off the fucking sofa, so you fall asleep watching the news.
None of it is good. The world is falling apart, the politicians are all corrupt, and there are rapists and murderers roaming the streets. It’s carnage out there.
Your doctors (you have a lot of doctors and your wife insists that you never miss an appointment) all tell you the same thing. You might never get your memories back but hey, good news, you can still create new ones!
Well, Halle-fucking-lujah for that. Let’s throw a ticker-tape parade and march down Memory Lane.
What is a man without his memories?
What is a relationship without memories and shared experiences to anchor it?
You are a man unmoored living in a foreign land without a map.
You need some air and some space so you walk all the way uptown then all the way back downtown and you keep your head down because everyone is a stranger and half of those strangers know your fucking name.
“Hey, I saw you on MTV!”
“Hey, you look just like that singer. Pretty sure I saw you on SNL. You sure that’s not you?”
“Oh my god, I’m such a huge fan,” a girl shrieks. “I was at your show at Roseland when you were just starting out and it was ahmaaazing. Like chills, for real. Can I have your autograph?”
She shoves a pen in your hand and asks you to sign a flyer she rips off a telephone pole, but you can’t even remember what your signature looked like, and you don’t know why anyone would want it anyway. You’re a nobody.
You end up in a dark bar for a quiet drink, but some guy moves onto the stool next to yours and starts jabbering. You drink too much tequila and smoke a pack of cigarettes and you ask the guy if he has a car. “Sure. Where do you wanna go?”
You end up back at his place doing lines of coke off the back of a CD case with your face on it, and his girlfriend makes scrambled eggs and says she’ll take you anywhere you wanna go.
You tell her you want to see the ocean. You want to dive into the waves, snort saltwater into your lungs and let the current carry you home.
She says, “You’re cute. I thought you were dead. That’s why I bought your CDs.”
“Guess they’re not worth as much now,” you say.
Turns out she finds another way to turn a profit. Once again, your face is plastered all over the tabloids with an exclusive story. You can’t trust anyone. They’ve spilled the beans that you are, in fact, still alive but apparently, you’re also a drug addict and you stole their car.
A police officer escorts you home three…
four?...days later and your living room is filled with strangers.
Your wife breaks down crying and takes your face in her hands, searching for something that isn’t there, and when everyone leaves, she kicks your shin and tells you that’s for making her sick with worry.
“A whole search party was out looking for you. I thought you were dead.”
You say, “You’re not the only one.”
Then she says, “I miss you so much. I miss us.”
You can’t bear to look in her eyes. You can’t take one more minute of knowing that you broke her heart and that every day you stay, you’re going to break it a little bit more.
You feel burdened by all this love. You feel like you are a burden.
Her name is Cleo. It’s easy to see why you fell in love with her in your previous life.
She has the greenest eyes and the lushest lips.
She has a spray of freckles on her left cheekbone, like a constellation, and when she holds you so tenderly and kisses you so sweetly, like she’s afraid you’re made of glass and you might shatter in her hands, you wish like hell that you could feel something other than this vast emptiness.
You’re an emotional wasteland; whereas, she burns so bright. But you can see that this is killing her, and you don’t want to hurt her any more than you already have. You don’t want to keep taking more than you can give.
You don’t want to be here at all.