Chapter 1: Awake
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I knew I was in trouble the moment I woke up.
It felt like I had been sleeping for years without any dreams, but when I woke up it was like an explosion of senses. I opened my eyes and all I could see was bright lights above my head and a crowd of people around me, none of them familiar. All of them were speaking, though, so I couldn’t understand any of it.
I could feel at least two tubes hooked up to each of my arms and several wires attached to my chest along with a tube running down my throat, which kept me from breathing.
Somebody in a white coat, most likely a doctor, told me he was going to pull the tube out and gave me some instructions, but I don’t remember it all too well.
I did as he said and soon he had the tube pulled out so that I could breathe, which I did right away, taking deep breaths. The room smelled very clean.
Once my breathing returned to normal I started paying attention to the people around me.
“Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked me.
“Probably a hospital,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said, writing something on a clipboard.
“William, are you okay?” a woman who appeared to be in her late 40’s asked me. At least I thought she was talking to me, because I had a major problem.
I didn’t even know my own name.
“Who…who are you?” I whispered to them all. None of them even looked slightly familiar.
“Do you know what your name is?” the doctor asked me.
I thought back to the name that the woman used. “Um…William?” I guessed.
Tears started to glisten in the woman’s eyes. “You don’t remember any of us?” she gasped.
“Sorry, but no,” I replied.
“What is the last thing you remember before today?” the doctor asked me.
“Um…” I racked my mind and tried to figure out if I remembered anything. When I had an answer to the question, I started to panic. “I don’t know,” I told him.
“Your name is William Murphy,” he said. “You were in a major car crash and had to have major surgery. After the surgery you ended up in a coma that has lasted for a month.”
I did my best to remember it all so that I could figure out more about myself.
“Who are all these people, though?” I asked him quietly, throat still a bit sore from a month of not being used.
The woman started crying openly at that point.
“Could everyone but the parents please leave?” the doctor asked the group.
All of them left except for the crying woman and a tall, silent man who had never stopped looking at me.
“These are your parents,” the doctor told me. “Your mother’s name is Abigail Murphy, and your father’s is Benjamin Murphy. You also had a brother.”
“Had?” I asked him. Even in such a confused state I could notice the past tense.
“He was driving the car when the crash happened,” my father, Benjamin, said. “The two of you were coming back from a movie. It was dark out and the car hit a large patch of black ice on a corner. You went over the side of the road and rolled down a hill for twenty feet before coming to a rest at another road. A police officer saw what happened and called it in.”
“What was his name?” I asked them.
“Michael,” my mother said. “Michael Benjamin Murphy.”
That was another piece to the puzzle of who I was.
“Who are the other people?” I asked them.
“Your family,” my dad said. My mother ran to the door and called a few people inside.
Over the next hour I met all of the others except for one, so I had added about seven more identities to my memory: aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.
“Who’s that?” I asked my dad, pointing to a silhouette outside the room.
He opened the door and a police officer walked in. “Hello,” he said, smile appearing on his face. “I hope you are doing better.”
“Very confused and trying to process everything,” I said. “Are you the officer that called in the accident?”
“Yes, I was,” he replied. “My name is Carl Johnson, but you can just call me ‘Carl’.”
“Nice to meet you, Carl,” I said, shaking his outstretched hand. I tried to sit up, but all of them told me not to until I gave up and pressed a button to move the bed so that I was sitting up.
“So…how long do I have to stay here?” I asked the doctor.
“Still have your old personality, I see,” my mom told me, smiling slightly.
“We need to check if your memory loss is temporary or permanent,” the doctor told me. “It shouldn’t be more than a week, though.”
“What’ll I have to do during that time?” I asked them.
“We’ll run some psychological tests to determine if there is anything to get your memory back, and we’ll have to run some tests to make sure that you’re recovering well enough,” he explained. “This is one of the best hospitals in the country. If you need something, you need only ask.”
“Thank you,” I replied.
They all told me how it was good to see me awake again before being ushered out by a nurse so that I could have silence. When they were gone, only my parents were left, sitting next to me and staring at me. It felt kinda awkward with all the silence.
“Would you like the television on?” my father asked me.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
He grabbed a remote from a table and pressed a red button on it. Immediately the television turned on. I don’t know how I could understand this, though. I didn’t know anything about my past or who I am, but I know how to talk, do math, and what different words mean.
“Is there anything else I need to know about myself?” I asked them.
“Your father and I…” my mother told me.
“Our family is very wealthy,” my father finished. “We live in a large castle-like mansion out by Lake Tahoe, which isn’t very far away. You do not go to school, but instead are tutored at home.”
“You loved cars,” my mother told me. “You have several shelves covered with models of different cars.”
“Did I have any friends?” I asked.
“Well…” my dad started. “That’s one of the disadvantages of being home-schooled. You didn’t have any friends, but used to prefer the solitude so that you could work on your projects in peace.”
They spent the next couple hours explaining it all to me before the doctor came back and insisted that I get some sleep.
They left the room to pick up some things from the house, leaving me in silence.
I laid there in the bed for about thirty minutes or so before I started to feel drowsy, the thought of sleep as welcoming as a warm blanket.
When I finally fell asleep, I actually dreamt of something. I dreamt that I was walking down hallways, turning left and right but never seeing a doorway or exit.
After what felt like ten minutes of walking I came to a door, so I opened it and walked through into a large laboratory, where there was a large computer monitor with a bunch of words and symbols that were as unfamiliar to me as Cantonese.
I stood in front of the screen for what seemed to be hours, pondering over the possible meanings of the symbols before I woke up at a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I grumbled, straightening up.
“I’m sorry, but I need to run your first test,” another doctor said as she walked in. She introduced herself as a psychiatrist.
“Were you just sleeping?” she asked me.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Did you have any dreams?”
“Yes.”
She asked me to describe it so I did. She wrote down the entire description before something appeared to me as odd. “Shouldn’t my parents be here for this?” I asked her.
“It’s not necessary,” she said. “If I push too much or you want to stop at any time, just let me know.”
“Okay,” I said.
She asked me a series of questions and put me through several tests, writing down the answers and results of each one on her clipboard.
“Thank you,” she said at the end of it. “I hope you feel better.”
“Me, too,” I replied. She nodded and walked out, leaving me there.
I tried and failed several more times to fall back asleep, but each time I would just be lying there, staring at the white ceiling.
I looked around the room after twenty minutes to actually check out the room when I saw a door that made me realize something.
The bathroom.
I sat up and tried to reposition the wires so that I could get up and go to it, but ended up setting off an alarm. Within seconds of it going off a nurse was at the door.
“What do you need?” she asked me, looking for the emergency.
“I need to get to the bathroom,” I said, “but all this stuff is getting in the way.”
She helped me get out of bed, but she had to make sure I was able to walk before letting me walk, not very well, to the bathroom.
“I’ll be out here when you’re done,” she told me. I nodded and closed the door as fast as I could.
When I was done doing what I needed I washed my hands and looked at myself for the first time in the mirror.
In the mirror, I appeared to be about six feet tall, have long and shaggy dark brown hair, gray eyes and was so pale I looked like a ghost. I stepped back from the mirror and saw that a month in a coma had its toll on me.
I looked like, at one time, I wasn’t that thin, but at that current time, I looked like I had lost quite a bit of muscle mass. My arms looked like sticks.
I was wearing a hospital gown with blue polka dots, the kind of gown that ties at the back.
“Are you okay in there?” the nurse asked me.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said as I made my way back out.
She helped get comfortable in the bed before leaving again.
I looked at the table closest to me and grabbed the television remote off of it, pressing a button to turn it on.
“Whoa,” I said to myself as it blazed into life.
“You shouldn’t flip through the channels that fast,” a nurse said as she came in to check that I was doing alright a few minutes later.
“I’m looking for something that interests me,” I said. After a few more seconds I settled at a news channel and ended up falling asleep during it, woken up an hour later by my parents returning.
“Are you okay, Will?” Mom asked me as they walked in.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.
“We brought a few things from your room that I thought you might like,” Dad told me, holding up a large duffel bag.
He set it on a table that was sitting in the corner and pulled out a very strange-looking coin.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Your lucky token,” he told me. “You used to carry it almost all the time, believing that it would bring you good luck. The last time you carried it, it was the day before the accident.”
“Thanks for bringing it,” I said as he flipped it to me. I caught it and ran my fingers over it. “What’s it made of?” I asked.
“Quite a few different things,” he told me. “You found it online one day a while ago and ordered it. It looked interesting so you carried it around in your pocket, thinking it was lucky. Ever since then you would always carry it.”
“Neat,” I commented. The coin was black, dark red, and many other colors.
As I set it on the bedside table Mom pulled out a scrapbook and set it on my lap. “This book contains pictures of you from your birth to present day,” she told me.
“Thanks,” I replied, opening it to the first page.
The first picture in the book was one of me as a newborn in Mom’s arms. I memorized each and every picture as best as I could, going from birth to first steps in one page, first steps to playing catch with Dad three pages later and even newer ones, including ones of me in a coma that could have only been taken days ago.
“It’s amazing how much you’ve grown in sixteen years,” Mom said, smiling at me. I returned the smile and closed the book. I didn’t know what, but something about the book seemed wrong to me, almost fake. I didn’t say anything, though, afraid of hurting their feelings.
“What was life like back at the house?” I asked them, suddenly curious.
They looked at each other for a second of hesitation before Mom answered.
“You were rarely bored,” she told me. “You loved fiddling around in the garage on various project designs that you would get from various websites. You loved to make random gadgets. At one point you had your room fully automated so that you would only have to press a button to make something happen. You were bored with it, though, so you got rid of it and started on a different project.”
“You had your own little hideout, too,” Dad said.
“Oh, I had forgotten about that,” Mom added. “You had an area directly above your room that you found a few years ago. Your room is circular and we thought that it was the top level of tower at a corner of the house, but one day you found a way to get to a little area above it. You never told us how to get up there, though, so we could never find you.”
“What’s my room like?” I asked.
“Your room, as we told you, is a complete circle. A quarter of the wall space is taken up by bookcases, which are loaded with books and model cars. Your room has walls about fifteen feet high, so it’s a lot of space. In order to reach the top there’s a ladder that rolls along the bookcase so that you can reach the top,” she added.
Seriously? A hidden room above my bedroom, and there’s a ladder leading to the ceiling? It surprised me that they couldn’t find the entrance.
“The rest of the wall is painted light blue,” she continued. “You have a few desks opposite the bookshelves and your bed is about five feet off the ground, which you asked for so that you could turn it into a fort when you were younger, which you did quite a bit.”
They described life at the house for a bit longer before a doctor came in and told us that I had to have more tests done.
“Will he be okay?” Mom asked him.
“He should be fine,” the doctor replied. “William, would you like to ride in a wheelchair or do you think you can walk?”
“Um…I’ll try to walk,” I said. They adjusted the machines I was hooked up to and helped me stand up. They slid slippers onto my feet and tried to get me to walk to the door, but after five steps my legs gave out and I would have collapsed if the doctor hadn’t caught me.
“I’ll go in the wheelchair,” I told him.
“Good idea,” he replied with a ghost of a smile on his lips.
They helped me in a wheelchair and he pushed the chair along, telling my parents to stay at the room.
“How have you been today?” he asked me as we got into an elevator.
“Ugh,” I groaned. “First, I wake up in a hospital room. Then, to make it all worse, I don’t recognize any of the people around me, and, even worse, I don’t even know who I am.”
“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely.
The rest of the time was spent in silence until we reached a new room, when I moved to sitting on a different chair while a nurse checked my height, weight, blood pressure and a few other things before taking me to a couple rooms, where they used an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imagery) to make sure I was okay, did a CAT scan and took a few x-rays.
“I’m sorry if it’s cold down here,” an MRI operator told me as I was wheeled out. It was a bit chilly down there, too, so I was shivering slightly.
“Are you okay?” Mom asked me when I got back.
“Yeah, fine,” I replied. I got out of the chair and climbed back into the bed.
“What are the results of the tests?” Dad asked the doctor.
“So far, he is in a lot better shape than most people who have been in a coma this long,” the doctor replied. They sighed in relief as I got comfortable again.
“Does this mean I won’t have to be in the hospital as long?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he replied. “There are still the psychological tests to determine if your memory could ever come back. That, and we need to get your physical strength up more.”
I frowned and turned on the television. The staff wasn’t bad, but I just wanted to go home and learn more about myself.
“Isn’t there a way we could have the psychological test done at our house?” Dad asked him. “I’m sure William just wants to go home.” They looked at me and I nodded.
“Do you have a psychologist close enough that can do it?” the doctor asked.
“Yes,” Dad said. “We just need your permission to take him home.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the doctor told him. Dad thanked him and the doctor left.
“What do you guys do for a living?” I asked my parents.
“I’m a scientist at a company not far from home,” Dad said. “It pays very well. I work there as a biochemist.”
“I’m a lawyer,” Mom told me. “I’ve work mainly large cases, so I have a high income. That’s why we can afford the house and the staff there.”
“That’s not all,” Dad corrected her. “I inherited the house from my parents when they died in a plane crash. They were multi-millionaires, so they always kept the house in good shape.”
We talked a while longer before the doctor came back, telling us we could leave the day after next if the rest of the tests came back normally.
“What other tests are there?” I asked him.
“Just a few blood tests, nothing much,” he replied.
“Can’t we just do that today so that we can leave tomorrow?” I asked.
“We don’t want to put your body through too much stress,” he said.
The rest of the night was pretty dismal, the only change being when dinner came by on a tray. I didn’t know what to expect, but I certainly didn’t think that hospitals served five-star meals.
“This is one of the best hospitals,” Mom assured me when my eyes widened at the sight of the meal.
“Just make sure you don’t eat too fast,” Dad said. “We don’t want you getting sick.”
I nodded, but ate as fast as I could, not having realized how hungry I was earlier. Fortunately, I didn’t get sick afterwards.
When the food had been taken away my parents started to look tired.
“You guys should go home,” I told them. “You’ve probably spent more time here than there this past month.”
“We’re okay,” Mom told me.
“No, you need to go home and relax,” I repeated. I would have gotten up and pushed them out if I had to in order to make sure they got some rest.
When I finally managed to get them to leave I walked (not very sturdily) to the table with the bag and brought the bag over to the bed, where I rummaged through it.
Inside the bag were some clothes for me to change into, a pair of shoes, a phone and a small journal with my name on it.
I pulled out the journal and slowly opened the cover, not sure of what I would find. Unfortunately, the book wouldn’t open. It’s like the book was just a solid block.
I looked at the book from several angles when I figured it out.
“I must’ve been one smart guy,” I mumbled as I turned the book so that the spine was facing up instead, and this time the book fell right open with a plop.
Inside it, though, was a hollow space, and inside that hollow space was a USB flash drive with a note on it reading,
ONLY USE IF AMNESIA OCCURS.
“How would this get here?” I asked myself. “I probably never thought I would get amnesia.”
I didn’t ponder on it for very long before closing the book again and putting it back in the bag.
For a few minutes I looked around before checking the time. It was almost 10 o’clock at night!
I pressed a button on the side of the bed and it lowered the upper part so that I as almost lying flat on the bed while I tried to fall asleep. It took me a while, but I finally managed it.
When I fell asleep, though, the dreams almost made me want to wake up again.
The moment I closed my eyes, dreams started flashing by. This wasn’t exactly how you’d expect a dream to be, either. The images didn’t seem like dreams, though.
They seemed like memories.
“What is all this?” I muttered to myself in the dream.
“They’re your memories,” somebody said from behind me. The voice was familiar, and I could actually put a name with it.
“Michael?” I asked, spinning on the spot. “Michael Murphy?”
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