His memories have been torn into sharp-edged confetti. Bits of his life flutter through his consciousness. Most of it makes no sense, but some he tries to save before it drifts away. A Dodgers game in 1938. The smell of his mother's Sunday roast. The taste of blood in his mouth from fighting a bully who had been picking on a younger boy. Driving his first car. The sun slanting through his bedroom window in October, looking like gold. Molly, his first kiss, under the school bleachers when he was thirteen. Lena, his first everything else, when he was seventeen. The neighbors' dog. Bells on Christmas morning. The scent of oranges.
And Steve. Always Steve.
He wants to remember these things. They're important, and they make him who he is. Submerging into the darkness, his mind reaches out to them, wishing he could make them stay, but he falls backward into the pull of nothing, falling into an abyss of black snow.
For weeks, months, sometimes years, he sleeps. What the controllers don't realize is he also dreams, and inside his mind, even in the erasure of sense and sanity, there still exists a corner of him that has not been touched. Not yet. It totters dangerously above the chemical claws that would rend it asunder, but for now, it survives. It's there that those treasured bits of home, of him, of reason and heart shiver in the cold, yet they remain. The faceless men can't quite take everything away.
Sometimes, as the ice makes his heart slow down until it barely remembers to beat, he remembers a quiet night on the pier at Coney Island with Steve. They had both been twenty, celebrating Steve's birthday, and the sun was starting to set. The multicolored lights on the Ferris wheel were beginning to glow, and the wind off the water was so strong that he was afraid it might blow away the scrawny boy next to him. But it didn't. Instead, it etched an image into his mind of that face, fragile, surrounded by hair fluttering in the wind, needing his protection from so many things. He had felt a strange yearning to kiss him in that moment, and it had shocked him, made him pull away. Those kinds of things just weren't done, and he was pierced by guilt. Steve had only smiled at him, oblivious to what had happened. Guilt be damned, he still felt that desire so strongly that his thumbs ached to trace the corners of Steve's mouth. He had shoved his fists into his coat pockets, willing himself to think of other things, but in his dreams…
He can still remember Steve's name.
He can't remember his own.
