As the afternoon wore on, I got turned around trying to find my way back out of the neighborhood. I kept finding myself turning down the same streets over and over, going in circles. I got it into my head that it was like this everywhere, that all of civilization had fallen. I started to think about the supplies I would need to gather to stay alive, and I started to think about the things I would need to get to defend those supplies from the other desperate people who might be out there wandering the ruined landscape. I wondered where I could go to be safe from them all, where I could live in peace. And then, having lost track of the world, I started to lose track of myself. I completely forgot my name and who I was. I just stood there in the middle of the street devoid of any past or memories, my mind empty of everything except for the humming of the cicadas in the summer heat.
The hours rolled by as I stood there in a stupor, rooted to the spot, lacking any motivation to move and unable to gather enough of my wits together to head off to somewhere else. I just stood there broiling in the sun until I heard the sound of voices coming from somewhere far off. I looked up and saw a few people in white scrubs appear from around the side of a house down on the corner of the street. They shouted and pointed me out to one another and they hustled down the street in my direction. I decided that these were some of the desperate people I had been worried about, and I turned and tried to casually saunter off in the other direction, breaking into a full sprint after only taking a few short steps.
But another group of people in white scrubs emerged from around a brick building down at the corner at the other end of the street, and then even more of them poured out from behind the houses all around me, and they all converged on me and gathered around me until they had me tightly surrounded and there was nowhere for me to run. One of them grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and they herded me across town to where a white van was sitting in the back of a deserted parking lot under the shade of a tree. They loaded me into the back of the van and piled in after me and slid the door closed behind them.
They took me to a home for other strays like me who had been out wandering around and had forgotten who they were. We passed through a common area where a few of the residents sat staring out the windows, flies landing on their hanging lips and heavy eyelids, while others held puzzle pieces poised in their trembling hands, having no idea of where to put them and having lost all track of why they were even holding them. They just kept furrowing their brows and flipping the little jagged pieces of cardboard round and round between their fingers.
I was taken to the office of some head administrator where she asked me a long series of questions which I could only answer with slow, bewildered shakes of my head. Then they took me to the office of the entertainment director, a small little white-haired old man who worked out of what appeared to be a dim supply closet filled with endless racks of film cannisters. The old man explained that he was in charge of picking movies for the residents to watch on movie nights, and he warned me that he refused to show any movies with anything bad in them. "Movies about space really seem to be the best for our residents," he explained. "Good wholesome movies about space." I just nodded and continued to let them process me. I was really in no position to complain.
I was sitting in my room when a nurse came in, saying that I had visitors. A handful of people piled in behind her and she explained that these people were my family. They had a photo album with them, hoping that it would help me regain my memories. I flipped through the pages. I saw my daughter when she was a toddler, smiling big into the camera. I saw my aunt blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. But the pictures were all ugly, the faces grotesque, menacing. I began to regret that I hadn't been more careful documenting my life, that I hadn't taken better photographs, used better cameras, or at least put better film in the cameras. These grainy pictures with their drab colors and their glaring flashbulbs popping in dark windowless places were hard to look at, things long gone, grey and neglected, fragments of the past in their loneliest and most dismal manifestations.
But just as I was about to shove the photo album off of my lap and throw a fit and yell at everyone to leave the room and let me be, a set of photos on the last few pages of the album caught my eye. They were pictures of a snowy night, sparkling and clear. Looking closer, I saw that these pictures had been taken in the abandoned neighborhood. They were pictures of a garage with a bunch of junked cars piled up in the lot in front of it. Each picture seemed to advance closer to the cars and the garage, and in each picture the snow had gathered deeper on the hoods and windows of the cars. It started to make me uneasy, the way these pictures kept getting closer, like something was being stalked by the camera.
And as I got down to the last few photographs, a memory came back to me of a leather satchel that I had stashed in the back corner of this garage. I remembered the grip of the handle and the way the leather had always given off a strong scent of oil and stale soap. The satchel was filled with important papers and old mementos, bank statements, birth certificates, awards I'd won in school, letters from old friends, all sorts of irreplaceable things. My hand shook as I held it over the page. I was terrified that someone would find the satchel and take it, but at the same time I couldn't bear the thought of ever going back to that dark place again to retrieve it. I just slammed the photo album shut and pressed my hand against the cover to steady it.
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