There were strange dreams that I don't remember. I only know that I regained consciousness winded and unspecifically frightened.
"How do you feel?" a disembodied voice asked.
I was lying on my side in a thin-mattressed hospital gurney facing the windows. An IV sprouted from my arm. I was not entirely convinced that I wasn't dead.
"There is a poem by Charles Simic," I heard myself saying, though I never quote poetry. "It begins, I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It is almost 200 years later and I am still retreating from Moscow." I sighed. "I feel like that."
It came to me that I was no longer wearing my own clothes, but instead two hospital gowns--one on front-ways, the other backwards. Outside it was daylight.
"What happened?" I asked of the voice without a body while I watched the courtyard's fountain, and strained--through the glass--to hear the sound its water made.
"Do you recall anything about last night?"
I struggled to push past the haze in my mind, and latched on to the first memory. "Vecchio," I said. "You're Vecchio. You brought me here to get your car." I rubbed at my eyes. "It was stolen."
"Try again," the voice prodded gently, reminding me, "I'm Benton Fraser."
"Ben?" I rolled over as I asked, seeing once again the outline of a body under a sheet, as I had last night.
"Yes?" It spoke.
"I was singing. You asked me to sing and I sang to you."
"Can you remember anything else after that?"
"No."
"Well," he began, and it was obvious there was an entire story to catch me up on. "I think you must have fallen asleep. It was hard to tell from down here, but you were very quiet, and then Ray--Detective Vecchio--came back with Detective Huey to take you to the station and get your car out of impound."
I found the emerald bear was a nice focal point to concentrate on as he spoke.
"They had trouble waking you, and left to find a nurse. It was late by that time, and the nurses were stretched rather thin--there had been a code called somewhere on the floor only moments before Detectives Vecchio and Huey had arrived for you. Soon after they left the room you did wake up. I heard you stand, and start to go after them. Almost immediately you fell back into the chair. I think you must have blacked out."
A very nagging memory began to unzip from a distant corner of my mind. The memory of a voice like the one speaking to me now, shouting my name, and the sounds of a man immobilized from a bullet in the spine struggling against his restraints in an effort to get to me.
"Moments later, before anyone could answer my repeated calls, you came around and stood again. I asked you to sit back down, asked you what was wrong, but you didn't answer--maybe you couldn't hear me. Then you ordered whiskey, neat."
"Huh?"
"You ordered a whiskey, neat." He said it as though it was no more unusual that any other aspect of the night before.
"Oh, goodness," I said. That was a new one.
"Directly after that, you took four steps in the direction of the doorway, stubbed your right toe on the leg of the bed and collapsed head-first onto the floor."
The memory I had summoned was a real one then, of his shouting to me, a frantic, urgent voice belonging to someone who could tell what had happened, but do nothing to assist. Another memory came to me, this of a one-eyed view of the bed's wheeled leg and the surprisingly clean tile floor. How long had I lain there, staring at it, him begging for me to answer, shouting for help?
"Was it long?" I asked.
He ignored the question, pausing instead of answering.
"When the nurses did arrive, they took you away for some tests. I asked them to bring you back here. I thought it might distress you further to wake in an unfamiliar room, without anyone to explain what had happened. I hope I did the right thing?"
"I'm sorry I didn't answer when you called me," I apologized. "I could hear you. Only you sounded very far away."
"I'm sure it's nothing you need to worry about now," he said.
"So what's wrong with me?" I asked, as though he were my doctor.
"Sub-dural hematoma. I would have noticed it myself, no doubt, had the room not been so dark when we met."
"What does that mean?"
"Well, when a person has certain head trauma, the pupils tend to--"
"No."
"Oh," he moved on. "I'm sorry. Sub-dural hematoma? Well, it's a mass of clotted blood, like a bruise that--"
