Robert Lubrican - For Want of a Memory

He stewed for five minutes, until a man came on the phone.

"Detective… ?" said the man.

"Officer Mitch Connel," said Mitch, his voice tight. "Pembroke, Connecticut Police Department, badge number twenty-six."

"It seems as though someone threw the wrong switch," said the man. "The admin number was routed to the emergency operations center. The number you dialed is the right number, but there’s nobody there in the middle of the night."

"Surely you guys have a detective on duty, or on call or SOMETHING!" said Mitch.

"I’ll transfer you. Please don’t yell at my people again, Detective Connel. They work hard, under harrowing conditions, and don’t deserve verbal abuse, particularly from someone in law enforcement."

"I’ll try to remember that," said Mitch. "Could you connect me, please?"

"Sure," said the man, his voice bright. "No problem."

It didn’t get any better.

"Detective division," said a gruff voice.

"Yeah," sighed Mitch. "This is Mitch Connel, up in Pembroke, Connecticut. I’ve got a mystery up here who came from your neck of the woods. A passerby found him in the middle of the road, unconscious. He may have been shot and his driver’s license says he lives at an address on Chester Street. I need to know if you have any missing persons reports on the guy … wants and warrants … that kind of stuff."

"We don’t do missing persons," said the voice on the phone. "We have a separate division that does that."

"Oh," said Mitch. "Can you transfer me to them?"

"They don’t work nights," said the man. "You can call them back in the morning."

"Oh," said Mitch again. "Well, OK, I guess, can you give me that number?"

There was silence on the line. Then a dial tone confirmed that the man had hung up on him.

Jessica Dauphine looked at her patient. He was in bad shape. She lifted the gown, in preparation for giving him a sponge bath. His care in the ER had involved cleaning him up only in those areas where they needed to put in stitches or treat a wound in some other way. Now that he was in her care, she had determined to finish the job.

She wasn’t shocked at what she saw when his body was bare. She’d seen it all before. There were contusions everywhere, making him look like some odd creature with a unique style of camouflage, though where the mixture of blue, black, purple and tanned skin would blend in was a mystery.

She was glad he was unconscious as she started swabbing his skin with the sponge. He’d be wincing and complaining if he were awake. His battered body would have been crying out at her touch. This was better, because she could use broad firm strokes and clean him well, without worrying about causing him discomfort.

He was in very good shape for a man his age. He looked much closer to someone in his late twenties, than the forty-seven that his driver’s license said he was. She knew Mitch was curious as to whether the driver’s license went with the man, and she wondered too if he was really Kristoff Farmingham, or some other man who had Kristoff’s identification for some reason. She liked a mystery, and her mind wandered as she cleaned his skin.

Was he some underworld denizen, who had been left to die for some transgression against his organization? Maybe he was an undercover cop, who had been found out and "killed" in a way that would make it look like an accident. Her mind was filled with images from books she had read. Indiana Jones came to mind, for some reason. She smiled as she thought of this man with a fedora and a coiled whip at his waist.

Her reverie was broken when she got to his groin. She’d been told, in nursing school, that she’d get used to seeing intimate parts of her patients … that it would become routine and boring. That had never happened. Each man she got to see like this was unique in some way or another. Her own vivid imagination made each foray into exploring another human being’s body something new and exciting. Even the old men she looked at conjured up visions of what they might have been like when they were younger … stronger … more virile.

She looked at Kristoff’s penis, lying limply on his testicles. It was neither huge, nor tiny. Based on her limited experience with men, he looked quite normal. The skin on his penis was darker than the rest of him-a dusky brown, with purple undertones, and an overcast of gray that she knew was the result of his loss of blood. As his body made new blood, that gray would fade and the purple would probably become more prominent.

She retracted his foreskin, telling herself that there might be smegma under it-a fertile breeding ground for bacteria that would cause itching and eventually pain if it were left to fester. His glans was clean, though. She looked over her shoulder, to make sure no one was watching her take a little too long to clean his genitals. She was always curious about a man’s equipment. She didn’t have all that much experience with penises. That wasn’t from lack of trying. She was just the wrong woman in the wrong place right now.

Jessica had accepted the first offer she’d gotten from the placement office of the school’s nursing program, worried that she might not be able to find a job. She now knew that was silly. Nurses were in short supply, and a good nurse could get a job almost anywhere she wanted to. But the first year had flown by, and she’d made a few friends, and it was hard to think about leaving, even if it might get her someplace where she could find a man.

The problem was that the residents of Pembroke … Nassequa county, for that matter … were typically white, and had been for generations, while Jessica Dauphine was not.

She wasn’t the blue-black of Nigerian ancestry. Rather, her bloodline appeared to have come from a mixture of races. Her fertile imagination had supplied that scenario as well. She imagined a slave holder, who looked a little like Rhett Butler, on some plantation, looking over a new shipment of slaves one day. His eye would have fallen on her great great grandmother, who was, no doubt, a tall, thin, well muscled woman from the Massai, used to walking or running long distances. She would have had the high, conical breasts that Jessica had, with thick, black nipples that reflected light, making them look shiny.

Her maternal ancestor would have been much darker than Jessica’s cocoa colored skin and, while Jessica had a mixture of Negroid and Caucasian facial features, her great great grandmother would have had a flatter nose and thicker lips. Still, at over six feet in height, she would have stood out from the others. Even after being captured and stuffed in the hold of a slave ship, she would have been proud … obstinate.

Her owner would have been smitten by her, unable to resist taking her to his bed. She would have been a virgin, of course, more woman than any tribal man could have tamed. Only her status as a slave would have let the despicable … but handsome … white man claim her body. Their coupling would have been violent, as she resisted, initially, until his softer side would convince her that he had fallen in love with her. She would have borne him several children, who would have been his favorites.

Jessica jerked. She’d been daydreaming again. She knew it was a stupid dream. It hadn’t been like that at all. But somewhere along the line, some white man had taken a black woman and gotten her with child. Jessica’s features proved that.

She realized that she was holding something completely different in her hand than she had been a few moments ago. She stared at the erection she had created, unconsciously on both of their parts, and let go of it, jerking her hand back and looking around guiltily. When she saw no one was watching, she darted a glance at his face. The one eye that wasn’t covered by bandages was still closed, so she relaxed.