What if this is actually happening?
Is this some CIA shit? Am I in a black clinic in the throes of human experimentation? Have I been kidnapped by these people?
Glorious, warm water shoots out of the ceiling with the force of a fire hose, pummeling the excruciating foam away.
When the water shuts off, heated air roars out of the apertures, blasting my skin like a hot desert wind.
The pain vanishes.
I’m wide-awake.
The door behind me opens and the gurney rolls back out.
Leighton looks down at me. “Wasn’t so bad, right?” He pushes me through the OR into an adjoining patient room and unlocks the restraints around my ankles and wrists.
With a gloved hand, he pulls me up on the gurney, my head swimming, the room spinning for a moment before the world finally rights itself.
He observes me.
“Better?”
I nod.
There’s a bed and a dresser with a change of clothes folded neatly on top. The walls are padded. There are no sharp edges. As I slide to the edge of the stretcher, Leighton takes hold of my arm above the elbow and helps me to stand.
My legs are rubber, worthless.
He leads me over to the bed.
“I’ll leave you to get dressed and come back when your lab work is in. It won’t take long. Are you all right for me to step out for a minute?”
I finally find my voice: “I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t know where I—”
“The disorientation will pass. I’ll be closely monitoring. We’ll get you through this.”
He wheels the gurney to the door but stops in the threshold, glancing back at me through his face shield. “It’s really good to see you again, brother. Feels like Mission Control when Apollo Thirteen returned. We’re all real proud of you.”
The door closes after him.
Three deadbolts fire into their housings like a trio of gunshots.
I rise from the bed and walk over to the dresser, unstable on my feet.
I’m so weak it takes me several minutes to get the clothes on—good slacks, a linen shirt, no belt.
From just above the door, a surveillance camera watches me.
I return to the bed, sit alone in this sterile, silent room, trying to conjure my last concrete memory. The mere attempt feels like drowning ten feet from shore. There are pieces of memory lying on the beach, and I can see them, I can almost touch them, but my lungs are filling up with water. I can’t keep my head above the surface. The more I strain to assemble the pieces, the more energy I expend, the more I flail, the more I panic.
All I have as I sit in this white, padded room is—
Thelonious Monk.
The smell of red wine.
Standing in a kitchen chopping an onion.
A teenager drawing.
Wait.
Not a teenager.
My teenager.
My son.
Not a kitchen.
My kitchen.
My home.
It was family night. We were cooking together. I can see Daniela’s smile. I can hear her voice and the jazz. Smell the onion, the sour sweetness of wine on Daniela’s breath. See the glassiness in her eyes. What a safe and perfect place, our kitchen on family night.
But I didn’t stay. For some reason, I left. Why?
I’m right there, on the brink of recollection….
The deadbolts retract, rapid-fire, and the door to the patient room opens. Leighton has traded the positive pressure suit for a classic lab coat, and he’s standing in the door frame grinning, as if he’s barely keeping a lid on a wellspring of anticipation. I can now see that he’s roughly my age and boarding-school handsome, his face peppered conservatively with five-o’clock shadow.
“Good news,” he says. “All clear.”
“Clear of what?”
“Radiation exposure, biohazards, infectious disease. We’ll have complete results from your blood scan in the morning, but you’re cleared from quarantine. Oh. I have this for you.”
He hands me a Ziploc bag containing a set of keys and a money clip.
“Jason Dessen” has been scrawled in black Sharpie on a piece of masking tape affixed to the plastic.
“Shall we? They’re all waiting for you.”
I pocket what are apparently my personal effects and follow Leighton through the OR.
Back in the corridor, a half-dozen workers are busy pulling the plastic down from the walls.
When they see me, they all begin to applaud.
A woman shouts, “You rock, Dessen!”
Glass doors whisk apart as we approach.
My strength and balance are returning.
He leads me into a stairwell, and we ascend, the metal steps clanging under our footfalls.
“You all right on these?” Leighton asks.
“Yeah. Where are we going?”
“Debrief.”
“But I don’t even—”
“It’s better if you just hold your thoughts for the interview. You know—protocol and shit.”