Redshirts: A Novel Part 34

"Maybe," you said. The Jenna Situation, as you recalled it now, had been fraught with fraughtiness.

"Anyway," Sandra said. "Even if she or your dad didn't tell me, they could have told Naren. He's one of your best friends. Or Kel. Or Gwen. And once we did find out, they wouldn't let any of us see you. They said they didn't want us to see you like that."

"They actually said that to you?" you asked.

Sandra was quiet for a moment. "They didn't say it out loud, but there was subtext there," she said. "They didn't want us to see you in that condition. They didn't want us to have a memory of you like that. Naren was the one who pushed them the most about it, you know. He was ready to come back from Princeton and camp out on your doorstep until they let him see you. And then you got better."

You smiled, remembering the blubbery conversation the two of you had when you called him to let you know you were okay. And then you stopped smiling. "It doesn't make any sense," you said.

"What specifically?" asked Sandra.

"My dad told me that I'd been recovered and awake for days before I got my memory back," you said. "That I was acting like myself during that time."

"Okay," Sandra said.

"So why didn't I call you?" you said. "We talk or see each other pretty much every week when I'm in town. Why didn't I call Naren? I talk to him every other day. Why didn't I update Facebook or send any texts? Why didn't I tell anyone I was okay? It's just about the first thing I did when I did regain my memory."

Sandra opened her mouth to respond, but then closed it, considering. "You're right, it doesn't make sense," she said. "You would have called or texted, if for no other reason than that any one of us would have killed you if you didn't."

"Exactly," you said.

"So you do think your parents are lying to you," Sandra said.

"Maybe," you said.

"And you think that somehow this is related to your medical information, which shows something weird," Sandra said.

"Maybe," you said again.

"What do you think the connection is?" Sandra asked.

"I have no idea," you admitted.

"You know that by law you're allowed to look at your own medical records," Sandra said. "If you think this is something medical, that's the obvious place to start."

"How long will that take?" you asked.

"If you go to the hospital and request them? They'll make you file a request form and then send it to a back room where it's pecked at by chickens for several days before giving you a precis of your record," Sandra said. "Which may or may not be helpful in any meaningful sense."

"You're smiling, so I a.s.sume there's an Option B," you said to Sandra.

Sandra, who was indeed smiling, picked up her phone and made a call, and talked in a bright and enthusiastic voice to whoever was on the other end of the line, pa.s.sing along your name and pausing only to get the name of the hospital from you. After another minute she hung up.

"Who was that?" you asked.

"Sometimes the firm I'm interning for needs to get information more quickly than the legal process will allow," Sandra said. "That's the guy we use to get it. He's got moles in every hospital from Escondido to Santa Cruz. You'll have your report by dinnertime."

"How do you know about this guy?" you asked.

"What, you think a partner is going to get caught with this guy's number in his contact list?" Sandra said. "It's always the intern's job to take care of this sort of thing. That way, if the firm gets caught, it's plausible deniability. Blame it on the stupid, superambitious law student. It's brilliant."

"Except for you, if your guy gets caught," you noted.

Sandra shrugged. "I'd survive," she said. You're reminded that her father sold his software company to Microsoft in the late 1990s for $3.6 billion and cashed out before the Internet bubble burst. In a sense, law school was an affectation for her.

Sandra noted the strange look on your face. "What?" she asked, smiling.

"Nothing," you said. "Just thinking about the lifestyles of the undeservingly rich and pampered."

"You'd better be including yourself in that thought, Mr. I-changed-my-major-eight-times-in-college-and-still-don't-know-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life-sad-b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Sandra said. "I'm not so happy to see you alive that I won't kill you."

"I do," you promised.

"You've been the worst of us," Sandra pointed out. "I only changed my major four times."

"And then took a couple of years off farting around before starting law school," you said.

"I founded a start-up," Sandra said. "Dad was very proud of me."

You said nothing, smiling.

"All right, fine, I founded a start-up with angel investing from my dad and his friends, and then proclaimed myself 'spokesperson' while others did all the real work," Sandra said. "I hope you're happy now."

"I am," you said.

"But it was still something," Sandra said. "And I'm doing something now. Drifting through grad school hasn't done you any favors. Just because you'll never have to do anything with your life doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything with your life. We both know people like that. It's not pretty."

"True," you agreed.

"Do you know what you want to do with your life now?" Sandra asked.

"The first thing I want to do is figure out what's happening to me right now," you said. "Until I do, it doesn't feel like I have my life back. It doesn't even feel like it's really my life."

You stood in front of your mirror, naked, not because you are a narcissist but because you are freaking out. On your iPad are the medical records Sandra's guy acquired for you, including the records from your car crash. The records include pictures of you, in the hospital, as you were being prepped for the surgery, and the pictures they took of your brain after they stabilized you.

The list of things that were broken, punctured or torn in your body reads like a high school anatomy test. The pictures of your body look like the mannequins your father's effects crews would strew across the ground in the cheapo horror films he used to produce when you were a kid. There is no way, given the way in which you almost died and what they had to do to keep you alive, that your body should, right now, be anything less than a patchwork of scars and bruises and scabs parked in a bed with tubes and/or catheters in every possible orifice.

You stood in front of your mirror, naked, and there was not a scratch on you.

Oh, there are a few things. There's the scar on the back of your left hand, commemorating the moment when you were thirteen that you went over your handlebars. There's the small, almost unnoticeable burn mark below your lower lip from when you were sixteen and you leaned over to kiss Jenna Fischmann at the exact moment she was raising a cigarette to her mouth. There's the tiny incision mark from the laparoscopic appendectomy you had eighteen months ago; you have to bend over and part your pubic hair to see it. Every small record of the relatively minimal damage you've inflicted on your body prior to the accident is there for you to note and mark.

There's nothing relating to the accident at all.

The abrasions that sc.r.a.ped the skin off much of your right arm: gone. The scar that would mark where your tibia tore through to the surface of your left leg: missing. The bruises up and down your abdomen where your ribs popped and snapped and shredded muscle and blood vessels inside of you: not a hint they ever existed.

You spent most of an hour in front of the mirror, glancing at your medical records for specific incidents of trauma and then looking back into the gla.s.s for the evidence of what's written there. There isn't any. You are in the sort of unblemished health that only someone in their early twenties can be. It's like the accident never happened, or at the very least, never happened to you.

You picked up your iPad and turned it off, making a special effort not to pull up the images of your latest MRI, complete with the MRI technician's handwritten notation of, "Seriously, WTF?" because the disconnect between what the previous set of MRIs said about your brain and what the new ones said is like the disconnect between the sh.o.r.es of Spain and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The previous MRI indicated that your future would be best spent as an organ donor. The current MRI showed a perfectly healthy brain in a perfectly healthy body.

There's a word for such a thing.

"Impossible." You said it to yourself, looking at yourself in the mirror, because you doubted that at this point anyone else would say it to you. "Just f.u.c.king impossible."

You looked around your room, trying to see it like a stranger. It's larger than most people's first apartments and is strewn with the memorabilia of the last few years of your life and the various course corrections you've made, trying to figure out what it was you were supposed to be doing with yourself. On the desk, your laptop, bought to write screenplays but used primarily to read Facebook updates from your far-flung friends. On the bookshelves, a stack of anthropology texts that stand testament to a degree that you knew you would never use even as you were getting it; a delaying tactic to avoid facing the fact you didn't know what the h.e.l.l you were doing.

On the bedside table is the Nikon DSLR your mother gave you as a gift when you said you were giving some thought to photography; you used it for about a week and then put it on the shelf and didn't use it again. Next to it, the script from The Chronicles of the Intrepid, evidence of your latest thing, dipping your toe into the world of acting to see if it might be for you.

Like the screenwriting and anthropology and photography, it's not; you already know it. As with everything else, though, there'd be the period between when you discovered the fact and when you could exit gracefully from the field. With anthropology, it was when you received the degree. With the screenwriting, it was a desultory meeting with an agent who was giving you twenty minutes as a favor to your father. With acting, it will be doing this episode of the show and then bowing out, and then returning to this room to figure out what the next thing will be.

You turned back to the mirror and looked at yourself one more time, naked, unblemished, and wondered if you would have been more useful to the world as an organ donor than you are right now: perfectly healthy, perfectly comfortable and perfectly useless.

You lay on your stretcher on the set of The Chronicles of the Intrepid, waiting for the crew to move around to get another shot and becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Part of that was your makeup, which was designed to make you look pallid and sweaty and bruised, requiring constant application of a glycerin substance that made you feel as if you were being periodically coated in personal lubricant. Part of it was that two of the other actors were spending all their time staring at you.

One of them was an extra like you, a guy named Brian Abnett, and you mostly ignored him because you knew it was common knowledge on the set that you're the son of the show's producer, and you knew that there was a certain type of low-achieving actor who would love to become chummy with you on the idea that it would advance their own status, a sort of work-through-entourage thing. You knew what he's about and it's not anything you wanted to deal with.

The other, though, was Marc Corey, who was one of the stars of the show. He was already in perfectly well with your father, so he didn't need you to advance his career, and what you knew of him from Gawker, TMZ and the occasional comment from your father suggested that he's not the sort of person who would be wasting any of his precious, precious time with you. So the fact he couldn't really keep his eyes off of you is disconcerting.

You spent several hours acting like a coma patient while Corey and a cast of extras hovered over your stretcher during a simulated shuttle attack, ran with it down various hallway sets, and swung it into the medical bay set, where another set of extras, in medical staff costumes, pretend to jab you with s.p.a.ce needles and waved fake gizmos over you like they were trying to diagnose your condition. Every now and again you cracked open an eye to see if Abnett or Corey was still gawking at you. One or the other usually was. Your one scene of actual acting had you opening your eyes as if you were coming out of a bout of unconsciousness. This time they were both staring at you. They were supposed to be doing that in the script. You still wondered if either or both of them were thinking of hitting on you after the show wraps for the day.

Eventually the day was done, and you sc.r.a.ped off the KY and bruise makeup, formally ending your acting career forever. On your way out, you saw Abnett and Corey talking to each other. For a reason you couldn't entirely explain to yourself, you changed your course and walked right up to the both of them.

"Matt," Marc said to you as you walked up.

"What's going on?" you asked, in a tone that made it clear that the phrase was not a casual greeting but an actual interrogative.

"What do you mean?" Marc said.

"The two of you have been staring at me all day," you said.

"Well, yes," Brian Abnett said. "You've been playing a character in a coma. We've been carting you around on a stretcher all day. That requires us to look at you."

"Spare me," you said to Abnett. "Tell me what's going on."

Marc opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and turned to Abnett. "I still have to work here after today," he said.

Abnett smiled wryly. "So I get to be the reds.h.i.+rt on this one," he said to Marc.

"It's not like that," Marc said. "But he needs to know."

"No, I agree," Abnett said. He slapped Marc on the shoulder. "I'll take care of this, Marc."

"Thanks," Marc said, and then turned to you. "It's good to see you, Matt. It really is." He walked off quickly.

"I have no idea what that was about," you said to Abnett, after Marc walked off. "Before today I'm pretty sure he never gave me a thought whatsoever."

"How are you feeling, Matt?" Abnett said, not directly answering you.

"What do you mean?" you asked.

"I think you know what I mean," Abnett said. "You feeling good? Healthy? Like a new man?"

You felt a little cold at that last comment. "You know," you said.

"I do," Abnett said. "And now I know that you know, too. Or at least, that you know something."

"I don't think I know as much as you do," you said.

Abnett looked at you. "No, you probably don't. In which case, I think you and I need to get out of here and go somewhere we can get a drink. Maybe several."

You returned to your room late in the evening and stood in the middle of it, searching for something. Searching for the message that had been left for you.

"Hester left you a message," Abnett had told you, after he explained everything else that had happened, every other absolutely impossible thing. "I don't know where it is because he didn't tell me. He told Kerensky, who told Marc, who told me. Marc says it's somewhere in your room, somewhere you might find it but no one else would look-and someplace you wouldn't look, unless you went looking for it."

"Why would he do it that way?" you had asked Abnett.

"I don't know," Abnett had said. "Maybe he figured there was a chance you wouldn't actually figure it out. And if you didn't figure it out, what would be the point in telling you? You probably wouldn't believe it anyway. I barely believe it, and I met my guy. That was some weirdness, I'll tell you. You never met yours. You could very easily doubt it."

You didn't doubt it. You had the physical evidence of it. You had you.

You went first to your computer and looked through the folders, looking for doc.u.ments that had t.i.tles you didn't remember giving any. When you didn't find any, you rearranged the folders so you could look for files that were created since you had your accident. There were none. You checked your e-mail queue to see if there were any e-mails from yourself. None. Your Facebook page was jammed with messages from friends from high school, college and grad school, who heard you were back from your accident. Nothing from yourself, no new pictures posted into your alb.u.ms. No trace of you leaving a message for you.

You stood up from your desk and turned around, scanning the room. You went to your bookshelves. There you took down the blank journals that you had bought around the time you decided to be a screenwriter, so you could write down your thoughts and use them later for your masterworks. You thumbed through them. They were as blank as they had been before. You placed them back on the shelf and then ran your eyes over to your high school yearbooks. You pulled them down, disturbing the dust on the bookshelf, and opened them, looking for a new inscription among the ones that were already there. There were none. You returned them to the shelf, and as you did so you noticed another place on the bookshelf where the dust had been disturbed, but not in the shape of a book.

You looked at the shape of the disturbance for a minute, and then you turned around, walked to your bed table and picked up your camera. You slid open the slot for the memory card, popped it out, took it to your computer and opened up the pictures folder, arranging it so you could see the picture files by date.

There were three new files made since your accident. One photo and two video files.

The picture file was of someone's legs and shoes. You smiled at this. The first video file consisted of someone panning across the room with the camera, swinging it back and forth as if they were trying to figure out how the thing worked.

The third video was of you. In it, your face appeared, followed by some wild thras.h.i.+ng as you set down the camera and propped it up so you would stay in the frame. You were sitting. The autofocus buzzed back and forth for a second and then settled, framing you sharply.

"Hi, Matthew," you said. "I'm Jasper Hester. I'm you. Sort of. I've spent a couple of days with your family now, talking to them about you, and they tell me you haven't touched this camera in a year, which I figure means it's the perfect place to leave you a message. If you wake up and just go on with your life, then you'll never find it and there's no harm done. But if you do find this, I figure it's because you're looking for it.

"If you are looking for it, then I figure either one of two things have happened. Either you've figured out something's weird and no one will tell you anything about it, or you've been told about it and you don't believe it. If it's the first of these, then no, you're not crazy or had some sort of weird psychotic break with your life. You haven't had a stroke. You did have a ma.s.sive brain injury, but not with the body you're in now. So don't worry about that. Also, you don't have amnesia. You don't have any memory of this because it's not you doing it. I guess that's pretty simple.

"If you've been told what happened and you don't believe it, hopefully this will convince you. And if it doesn't, well, I don't know what to tell you, then. Believe what you want. But in the meantime indulge me for a minute."

In the video Hester who is not you but also is ran his fingers through his hair and looked away, trying to figure what to say next.

"Okay, here's what I want to say. I think I exist because you exist. Somehow, in a way I really couldn't ever try to explain in any way that makes any sense, I believe that the day you asked your dad if you could try acting in his show, on that day something happened. Something happened that meant that in the universe I live in, events twisted and turned and did whatever they do so that I was born and I lived a life that you could be part of, as me, as a fictional character, in your world. I don't know how it works or why, but it does. It just does.

"Our lives are twisted together, because we're sort of the same person, just one universe and a few centuries apart. And because of that, I think I can ask you this next question.