Rob Thurman: Blackout

As I did, a small bubble of panic began to rise. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember a goddamn thing about myself. I didn’t remember putting those weapons in my jacket, although I knew exactly what they were for. Knives and guns and monsters; they were the things I was certain of, but when it came to me, I was certain of absolutely nothing.

Shit. Shit . Okay, I obviously knew how to stay alive; those monsters on the beach didn’t just kill themselves. People who knew how to stay alive also knew not to panic and I was not panicking. By God, I wasn’t. I was sucking it up and moving on. I was surviving. With or without my memory, at least I seemed to be good at that. Calvin the survivor; watch me in action. I was alive to mock my fake names, and I planned on staying that way.

Turning on the shower, I waited until the water was lukewarm and I stood on top of the clothes. There were two small bottles of shampoo and an equally small bar of soap. I used them all, letting the lather run off me onto the cotton and leather around and under my feet.

I learned something about myself while scrubbing up. I killed monsters, and they tried to kill me back with a great deal of enthusiasm, but not just them. I had a scar from a bullet on my chest, another from what was probably a knife on my abdomen, and a fist-sized doozy on the other side of my chest. It looked as if something had taken a bite out of me and had been motivated when doing it. Man and monster; apparently they both disliked me or I them—could be a mutual feeling. It was just one more thing I didn’t know. I moved on to something I did know. Besides the scars, I was a little pale, but that could be from near hypothermia or I could be anemic. Maybe iron supplements were the answer to all my questions—iron and bigger, badder guns.

I had a tattoo around my upper arm, a band of black and red with something written in Latin woven in it. Funny how I knew it was Latin, but I didn’t know what it said. Yeah, funny, I thought, despite the lurch of loss in my stomach. There was my sense of humor again.

The rest of me was standard issue. I wasn’t a porn star, too bad, but I had proof of a Y chromosome. That was all a guy needed. That and some memories. Were a dick and a mind too much to ask for? That was something every guy had to ask himself at some point, even if I couldn’t remember the first time I’d asked it. This time the question bounced back and forth inside my skull, hitting nothing on its way. I guessed that proved it was too much … at least for now.

My head still hurt and trying to remember made it worse. I gave up, closed my eyes, and scrubbed at my hair. I shook from the lingering cold of the ocean, but the warm water helped. It didn’t do the same for my damn hair, though. It had been in a ponytail, shoulder length. I’d pulled the tie free, but there was something in it … sticky and stubborn as gum or tar. It could be the blood of one of those supernatural spider monkeys from Hell. It could actually be gum. Maybe I fought bubble-gum-smacking preteens from Hell too. I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. You didn’t have to know the question to be the solution.

The answer ended up being one of those knives I’d taken out of the jacket. The shit wouldn’t come out of my hair for love or money, and I finally stood naked in front of the cloudy bathroom mirror, took a handful of my hair, and sawed through it. I let the clump, matted together with a green-gray crap, fall into the sink. The remaining wet hair fell raggedly about two inches past my jaw. I didn’t try to even it up with the blade, slender and sharp as it was. I could have, some at least, but …

I turned away from the mirror.

Looking at my picture was okay; not recognizing myself less okay; studying myself in the mirror, not okay at all. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t. A quick glance was fine, a long look was a trip someplace and, from the acid sloshing around my stomach, that place wasn’t Wonderland. I had guns and knives, scars, and dead things; maybe I wasn’t a nice guy. If I didn’t like looking in the mirror, it could be I didn’t like what I saw. Pictures were only echoes. The guy in the mirror was real.

But it didn’t matter why I didn’t like it, because I didn’t have to look. Problem solved. I spent the next fifteen minutes drying off and doing my best to hand-wash the funk out of my clothes before draping them over the shower rod to dry. By then I was weaving, had the next best thing to double-vision, and a wet towel in my hand that I used to cover up the bureau mirror. I didn’t ask myself why. I was only half conscious and barely made it to the bed anyway. So to hell with whys. I pulled the stale, musty-smelling covers over me with one hand and slapped the lamp off the table to crash to the floor. I was too clumsy with exhaustion to switch it off. This worked the same. The bulb shattered with a pop and it was lights-out.

I didn’t think about it then, but the next day I did, when I had more than pain and drowsiness rolling around in my head. I’d woken up with monsters. I was alone, and I was lost. I didn’t know where I was; I didn’t know who I was. It doesn’t get more lost than that. Wouldn’t you leave a light on? Knowing what I knew and not knowing anything else at all, why would I want the darkness where monsters hide?

Because killers hide there too.

Phone.

That was my first thought when I woke up. The second was that I was glad I was in a bed and not sleeping, too damn literally, with the fishes. The third, nope, still no clue who I was. Fourth … Fourth was a situation a lot of guys faced in the morning. I dealt with it, which, considering I couldn’t remember the faces or details of any woman I knew personally from my past, was pretty noteworthy. Unless I was on speaking terms with Angelina Jolie and then that was more than noteworthy. Either way, I worked with what I had.

Nothing keeps a good man down, but you can get him down for a while if you work at it.

Afterward I stared at the ceiling, as yellowed and cracked as the tub, and went back to my first thought. Where was my phone? I had ID, even if it was fake. I had money. I should’ve had a phone. Hell, three-year-olds had cell phones these days—whatever days these were. There was a bright spot. I was a little fuzzy on the year, absolutely blank on me, but everything else appeared to be in place in my gray matter. Sun in the sky, bacon in the skillet, and a cell phone for everyone past the first stage of mitosis.

So … where the hell was my phone? That could tell me a whole damn sight more than fake licenses. The names were fake, the address was fake … common sense. You didn’t put a real address on a falsified ID. But a phone would have the numbers of people I’d called. Or, on the other hand, it might just have numbers of AA, Guns-R-Us, and a dating service, because where do you find the time to meet women when you’re gutting the spawn of evil for profit or simply as one rocking hobby?

I needed that damn phone.

Rolling out of bed, I padded into the bathroom, hoping I’d overlooked it when I’d been stripping my clothes of six knives, two guns, and something that resembled brass knuckles without finger holes but with spikes—a Tekko. It was Japanese and old, but it worked just fine despite its age. My own name I didn’t know, but that I knew. There were extra clips of ammunition and all six knives were different types with different names and functions. I knew those too. Good old Calvin F. Krueger knew that, but fuck all about himself.

Frustrating.

I poked through the clothes, now dry except for the jacket. The lining was still damp, but they all smelled like soap and not dead squid. Score one for amnesia boy. But nowhere in the clothes or the pile of weapons was there a phone. Take one away from amnesia boy. I must’ve lost it at the beach and, just as the tide had taken the spider creatures, it had no doubt taken the phone as well. Nature, what a bitch.