It’s a strange and scary sensation to suddenly forget your own name, but when you aren’t the you you were a few moments before then a sense of dislocation is understandable. I stared, but whoever was looking back at me in the mirror, it certainly wasn’t me. Not remembering my name is one thing, forgetting I’m a man is on a different order of magnitude.
The restroom door banged open and a raucous cacophony from the restaurant beyond
Three men tumbled into the room, scrabbling to get out of the main room. The noise of a shot cracked in the air and instinctively I reached for my gun, which wasn’t there. The panic of that over-rode the confusion of reaching for it with the wrong hand. Another shot, this from a different gun, and more people streamed through the door, some of them women this time, seeking shelter from the shooting.
The body may not be me, but the mind was, and it was coming back together, reflexive actions honed over long years taking over even as the body struggled with not having the muscle-memory, and being oriented for a right handed-person.
Fighting against the tide I made it to the door and looked into the dining area. Conflicting memories of where I’d come from fought against each other. One was a window table, the other a more private booth against a wall. From the first the memory a woman was sat opposite and came with a warm feeling, from the second, two men and tenseness. I turned to look at the booths. There I sat, the real me, slumped across the table, blood pooled and dripping to the floor. Beside me one of the men was collapsed backwards agains the booth wall, a bullet wound in his chest. The other man was crouched down behind the table, blocked in by my body to the right, the other body on the left. As I watched he fired towards the door, no shot’s came in return.
Diners continued to scurry away, fleeing to the kitchen and rear fire exit. Easing round the back wall of the restaurant I snagged an almost full wine bottle from a table, light footed it around the side of the booths until I was in the one behind the shooter. Easing up I raised the bottle shoulder high, and leaned over to strike.
A faint shadow crossed the table and the shooter swung to look up, gun swinging round as well. I struck. The bottle took him full in the face and whatever disadvantage there was in being wrong handed for my brain was more than compensated by the extra strength in the arm of a healthy man over six foot. His head snapped back and the disjointed way he slumped told me he was unconscious.
‘PUT THE BOTTLE DOWN AND PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD.’
In the time it had taken my target to collapse the police he’d been exchanging shots with swarmed into the restaurant. The one shouting at me was my partner, Frank. He was trying to not look at my body, and failing. Six years we’d worked together.
There was a frenzy of folks moving about, police officers and EMT’s. Someone took the bottle from my hand and led me out of the booth to sit on a chair pulled from nearby table. Frank was pale. He’d holstered his gun and was looking at me, at my body.
‘Frank,’ I said. The first time I’d spoken in this new body and a shock to hear a mid-western twang and not my So-Cal drawl. ‘Frank.’
He looked up. ‘Don’t tell me your a Fed. Late to the party pal. If you’d been early maybe my partner would still be alive. Hell, if we’d known the Fed’s were on to this you could have taken this and SHE WOULDN”T HAVE BEEN HERE!’ The last was bellowed in my direction and his face was red with anger and pain.
‘Frank, I’m not a Fed, it’s me, Bennie.’
‘What?’
‘It’s me, Bennie. I took the shot.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Oh yes.
‘Prove your Bennie, prove it.’
‘How, tell you your wife and kid’s names? My husband’s name, and the name of the mistress he doesn’t think I now about? What about the answer to your favourite joke? Which is ‘Peeing with’.’
‘It is you. What happened?’ He looked at my body, then back at me. ‘I still don’t really believe it. It’s a crazy theory.’
It was our theory. Someone had developed a dug which allowed you to switch body. A billionaire had used it to escape a slam dunk murder charge. Both were ridiculous notions, but we’d followed the leads that were more tenuous than wisps of smoke in a breeze.
They’d led to tonight, to someone who could provide proof.
‘Didn’t the mic work?’ I asked.
‘They must have been using countermeasures. It dropped by the time you were three steps into the restaurant. What do you remember?’
Frustration welled. ‘I remember staring into the mirror and wondering why I’m a man, and forward from that to now. Before, it’s clear before yesterday morning, then it gets patchier and patchier until it just fades to nothing about mid-afternoon.’
‘Nothing? Not why he shot you?’
‘I’m not even sure which one did shoot me.’
‘Maybe the cctv will tell us, unless they were affected by the jammer, or they’ve paid the restaurant to turn them off.’
EMT’s laid my body on a gurney, covered it, and took me out. I watched myself go tried to work out how I felt. ‘I need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘Frank, get me somewhere safe until we work out what happened, and how I’m going to move forward. We need to find out who’s body I’m in, and where he’s gone.’
’Sure. We’ll take you to the recuperation house up the valley. The doctor’s there might be able to work things out.’
We went outside, bright lights glared and reporters shouted questions, uniformed officers enforced a cordon. Wind swirled rain through the air and it flitted through the glaring lights like a million tiny diamonds.
‘Mark.’ The call came from my left and it wasn’t me who turned towards it, but him, Mark, the man whose body I was in. ‘Mark?’ The woman in the memory of the table.
A welter of conflicting thoughts, conflicting memories, rose and something told me Mark was reclaiming his mind. The wind swirled around me and the world went black.
words by stuartcturnbull picture by ElisaRiva
