The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
Execute Him
6-27-2002

I'm in a lush hotel room with a few other people. I have the lingering sense that I've been here before (never in another dream, though...you'll see...), but I don't think about it much as I follow everyone into the elevator. At the 10th floor, the elevator ends, and we have to enter another one to take us the rest of the way down, except it's not really down, for the bottom elevator goes sideways like a tram. An underground tram.

We get all the way to the lobby when I realize I don't have any bags with me. Surely I at least packed some clothes before I came to this hotel. I go into another hotel room on the ground floor, where the leader of my group had supposedly been staying. I see some slacks hanging on a chair that look just like mine, and then a shirt, and then another pair of slacks. I start to pick them up when the guy comes out of the bathroom. "What are you doing with my clothes?" he asks. "I was looking for my clothes," I try to explain. "Those are mine," he says. Then I look at the clothes more carefully and notice they aren't mine after all. The slacks have a different stitch, for instance, and the shirt has a subtle, gay pattern on it. I leave to find someone who can get me back into my room.

I see the hotel owner, a big fat, but clean man, dressed rather Shakespearian. I ask, "Excuse me, Sir, but I left some stuff in my room. Can someone please let me back in so I can get it?" He responds, "Sure, just go on up. It's open." Apparently, the system at this hotel was that every free room was unlocked, and to get the key to it, you had to register.

I start for the elevator, but then remember that I don't know which room I'd stayed in. I turn the corner again to ask the owner, who had been talking to someone else this entier time. "Sir?" He turns around. "Excuse me, but...what was your name?" The man he's talking to tells me, but it's long and complicated. I couldn't remember it or pronounce it then, no less now in memory. I ignore the response and continue, "Which floor was I on?" I know that if I had the right floor, I'd remember the room. The owner says, "Well, you can only stay on the 1st, 2nd, 10th, 12th, and 23rd floors, and the 12th is for maintenance personnel only." I must have been on the 23rd floor then.

I get in the elevator and take it to the 10th floor, where I change elevators again. Before the door closes, however, a skinny black guy sticks his foot in it to keep the door open. I figure he just wanted to catch the elevator, but he doesn't enter. I'm almost relieved, cuz I don't feel like talking to anyone, but then he sticks his foot in again. This time he enters. As the door's closing, I stick my foot in it and ask, "Are you waiting for anyone else?" Suddenly, he's a poor white farmer-lookin' kid, and he says he's not. He has overalls and a baseball cap on. I'm a little frightened of him, because he looks like the sort of imbecile who'd hurt you and not know any better, and we have a long trip to the 23rd floor"I wanted to ask you something," the white kid says. Great, I think, he's going to mug me and be nice about it, but instead he says, "I've been seeing this girl, and I don't know what to do for..." and so on. I don't really remember, but he was having relationship problems. Rather, not really problems, but he just wanted to be a good boyfriend. I don't remember my advice, either, but it was very half-assed and non-committal, since I didn't care.

He follows me to the 23rd floor. Other people are in my room already, including this kid. I still don't see any baggage of mine. In fact, I don't have any possessions on my person at all, which is very odd. I try to remember what I'm even doing there, and I can't think of why or how I got to that hotel in the first place. I have to go to the bathroom, so I go inside it and try to sort things out while I relieve myself.

I have amnesia. There's no other explanation. I can't remember a single thing about my life. It seems so strange, not remembering anything, but there's nothing before the hotel. Nothing. It's as if my life just began. I wonder what could have possibly happened here to make me forget it all. It seems far-fetched, being that I'm not even injured (to my knowledge). While I can't remember any events, I do remember some of my beliefs and attitudes, and I start to wonder whether I did this to myself, somehow...somehow fullfilled that silly romantic fantasy of mine to have amnesia...the fantasy of rediscovering yourself. If that's the case, then I must have prepared for it. I must have thought of a way to communicate with my future self, to help him/me out. I pull up my sock, and a key falls out of it. Aha! I must have put this here to tell me something, but what? Surely I was more prepared than this, but for now I can only trust my intuition.

I out into the main room, where the people are chatting it away. I sit down with them and make conversation. I don't remember any of it, for I was busy thinking about my condition. Then it suddenly hits me that I'm effectively a new person. My heart begins to race as the full implications of my condition fill my mind. A sort of panic, but mostly excitement.

I find myself in a college computer lab. It's empty except for a girl at a computer, playing Return to Wolfenstein multi-player. She must work here. She's guarding, so to speak, a long glass hallway entrance to an amusement park. I'm carrying a backpack, and some sort of hat is sort of clouding my eyes. I approach her from behind, but she senses my presence, asking me if I needed assistance. "Yeah, but I'm waiting for my friend, so there's no rush. I want to see you play, anyway." "Well I'm not playing right now, this is just the warmup period." I go, "Yeah." I notice she's in a 64-player game. I comment, "I stopped playing the huge games...I mostly play with only 18 or so people now." She says, "This isn't a huge game. I'm just screwing around." I figure she doesn't really know what she's talking about.

My roommate comes by, but announces he has to go to the bathroom before we move on. The girl gets up and leaves, too. I decide I had to go anyway, so I go in. It's just one big white room with two stalls and an uplifted urinal. The urinal is so high that there's about 6 steps up to it, and it overlooks the stalls. I feel rather exposed as I relieve myself in it. While I'm doing so, someone walks by and closes the bathroom door. Whoops. Finished, I put myself back in my pants.

Outside, back at the girl's computer desk, are suddenly many people. Some girl introduces me to some Chinese girl, who's only going to school off-time, whatever that means. Leaning at the main desk, some other girl starts talking to me, too, but I didn't care. I didn't care about any of these people. I just wanted to get on with things. She then says, "That blond girl over there has been checking you out." I glance through the crowd and immediately know who she's talking about, except she's not blond, she's red. It's RO of all people. She wasn't checking me out, she just knows me, and we haven't seen each other in a long time.

I walk over to her, but she gets lost in the crowd. Maybe there WAS a blond girl she was talking about, because RO doesn't seem to know I'm there. I finally make it to her, and she turns around and sees me. She's a lot shorter than I remember, but otherwise unchanged. I give her a big hug, and she hugs me back. She asks, "How have you been?" Millions of images from the past couple years scan through my mind, and in spite of all the stuff I've been through lately, and perhaps because of where my life's at right now, I say, "Great. You?" She doesn't answer. I wonder how much of my answer has to do with CJ.

We hug for a long time, and people start to filter out of the area. Every time I try to ease the tension in my muscles to let her go, she clings to me, though I don't mind giving comfort to an old friend. She doesn't respond to anything I say, either, as if she doesn't have the strength to respond. I say, "It's been what, 4, 5 years?" (In reality, it's been over 8 years.) "So what are you up to?" "What brings you here?" Nothing elicits anything further from her. I get the feeling she's been through a lot of pain since I last saw her, and I'm some sort of refuge.

I start to feel a little embarrassed, because I know people are watching. I move my feet around, carrying her with me, as if we're dancing, but then feel even more silly. I see her parents sitting in rockers, watching us. Her mom cautiously approaches us. From behind me, she lightly embraces both of us, then asks RO, "Under whom was this boy born?" RO makes an upward motion with her eyes. "God?" her mom asks. I nod.

Her mom starts talking about marriage, and escorts us to sit with them. RO and I give one another confused glances, and her dad says that if we got married, she'd have to mine. "But I've never mined!" she wails. Apprently mining is the family business (not, not really). She suddenly seems defeated by it, and her dad says, "But not on the Ish-something (river)...but on the Alta Moreno!" which I figured was another river somewhere (the Ish-place, I somehow knew, was in Oregon). He gets out a map of the Alta Moreno, which is in another country, and traces the river path with his hand. I think to myself that I wouldn't be a good miner because I didn't grow up with it...that you're only the best at things you grow up doing.

Suddenly we're all there, walking in the river bed. It's all dried up during this season. I'm walking with RO and her mom, and her dad's way behind. Then, from his perspective, I see water crashing down the river. He shouts a warning, and we all run. We can't climb out, because it's very deep, but we can climb up enough, perhaps. We find a nook where we put our bags and such. RO and her little sister get onto a shelf, and I squeeze in. Her dad gets the edge of the ledge, hanging onto me, as if it's my responsibility to keep him from getting washed away.

The water comes, and goes up to our ankles. Boats go by, but each one turns into kindling. Finally, a larger wooden boat comes by. It had been sinking the other boats with a kind of lubricant. We exchange harsh words, and try to kick them off, but it won't happen. It looks like a fight will happen, but then the water goes away, everyone gets a strange look on their face, and they all just walk off-set, off-dream, whatever. As it were all a movie. Only me and RO are still there.

We get up and walk to a small iron table in the outdoor seating of a nice restaurant. I say something, but I don't remember; I'm too busy thinking about CJ, feeling bad that I wasn't able to tell her where I was going, that she's probably worried about me.

We've been living in a complex when one day four men in blue uniforms show up, demanding asylum. They remind me of the guys from the boat. They have weapons, so RO's dad lets them in. I find a gun (the imaginary one in my index finger) and kill all but three of them, however. I chase the fourth one down. Someone else in the complex tries to stop me from killing him. He's one of their recruits, I guess. I quickly explain that the're all bad and mostly dead. He watches as I put my finger to the guy's forehead, pull my thumb trigger, and execute him.


posted by Phlegm at 11/26/2003