Excerpt

“What’s your phone number?”

I couldn’t see the woman asking, I could only hear her voice. I was staring up into the night sky, flooded with yellow light from the street lamp.

I recited it. “What are your parents’ names?” I spelled them out as I told her. Why is she asking me this? She must be checking to see if I’m cognizant, if I can remember things. I need to remember. I need to remember everything. I need to remember it all right now. I spelled my name. I told her my birthday. Could I remember my street address? Yes. What about my school’s? I knew it. 3000 Los Rios. What about the school’s phone number, where my mom worked? I remembered that. I reached into the corners of my brain for any random piece of information I could cling to, to prove I knew it. I had to prove I wasn’t brain damaged.

If I could be brain damaged, I could also be paralyzed, I thought. I started moving each finger and each toe. I realized a shoe was missing. This was extremely concerning. 

I didn’t realize she had stopped listening to my recitations of addresses, teacher names, and classes. Men started asking me more questions. I couldn’t see them, either. I started asking questions of my own. I repeated them over and over. “What happened? Why aren’t you telling me?” One man, near my head, said, “She’s repeating it,” to the man near my feet. 

“I KNOW!” I shouted. “You’re not answering me!” They didn’t say anything to me. They continued talking to one another. I kept asking about my shoe.

One placed his gloved hands on my head. My skull was touching the pavement. He poked inside to see if it was still intact. I felt him touch my skull. To this day I can feel it. “There’s no excess brain matter on the ground. The brain appears intact,” he told his partner. 

I gave him a thumbs-up. “That’s good.”

By now I knew I was in the road and an accident had happened. I’d forget again soon. It was as if I’d awoken on a beach at low tide. A wave of awareness would come in, crash around me, and the cool water and salty air would remind of where I was, but it receded quickly. The waves started to come in faster intervals, lingering. By the time I was in the hospital, it was high tide, but even then, but remembering is like peering through a thick fog, and reaching landmarks in the wrong order. 

They put a neck brace around me and slid me onto a backboard, secured my head, and strapped me down. Even as they put me in the back of the ambulance, I still wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

It was Danielle’s seventeenth birthday party. We celebrated at her house, and left to go hear a jazz band at our favorite coffee shop in the car her parents gave her that day. It was a steel grey Volvo sedan, a 1986 model 240 DL. It was probably as old as she was, and older than me. We left the show to drop Wendy off and cruise around town. Wendy still had a 10:00 curfew, but the rest of us had been allowed to stay out until midnight. Danielle needed to turn left into a neighborhood. 

At once, I was at home, going upstairs to my bedroom, and falling asleep. I dreamed I was sleeping on a floor. A hard, cold, concrete floor. 

My mind was fighting what happened, trying to shield me. I started to realize I was on the freezing cold ground, but I didn’t know why. I was so cold my shivering looked like convulsing. Someone asked if I was having a seizure. Paramedics put a heated, paper-thin blanket over me. The ambulance was bright and there were at least three paramedics helping me. My shoe was placed on the stretcher. I asked one his name. Brian. I realized I couldn’t speak very well. One picked up my right arm to put in an IV; I turned my wrist to see my hand, and it was black with blood. 

Another, at my feet, placed a mask on my face, grimaced, and pulled it away. It was ringed with black. “What’s wrong with my face?” I asked. He just stared at me.