John Scalzi - Redshirts

“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 précis of your record,” Sandra said. “Which may or may not be helpful in any meaningful sense.”

“You’re smiling, so I assume 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, passing 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-bastard,” 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 scraped 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.