The sound that escapes my lips when I open my eyes is one of pain mixed with confusion and disgust. It's an odd sound, the base of pain clearly distinguishable from the other two notes, and I am struggling to make sense of why I'm making such a noise. I should be at home in my own bed, waking with a head jumbled with questions and musings from the previous night, and not a body that protests at every move I try to make. Instead of the familiar, my eyes take in a sparse room with a table and two chairs in the middle and a large mirror on one wall. I am lying on a cot on the wall opposite the mirror.
"What the fuck," I whisper to myself as my brain tries to catch up to where I've found myself, my voice is barely audible as my cracked throat scratches when I speak. I try to remember the night before, but the last thing I can recall is saying goodnight to the doctor whose office is across the hall from mine. After that, there is nothing. Not even a memory of sleep. It's as if I blinked my eyes and was transported to this strange room.
I push myself up, moving through all the protests in my joints and bones, and lean against the wall when my head begins to spin. I think I'm going to be sick and look quickly for a garbage can to vomit in. There is none (of course, just my luck) and instead of retching on the floor I close my eyes to the spinning and pain and breathe through it. When I feel myself steadying again, I open my eyes and start to take stock of myself. I run my hands over my face and back through my hair down to where my fingers clasp each other behind my neck. But there is something strange on the right side of my neck. A tiny bump that presses up against the palm of my right hand, a small protrusion that was not there before.
When I finger the bump, my confusion escalates. The bump feels like a small injection site, and when I press against it a sharp, stinging pain follows. Well, this is certainly interesting. Whatever it was, an injection would explain my lost time and the suddenness of the change in scenery. But it brings me back to the crux of my current problem: Where the hell am I?
Before I can go too far down the rabbit hole of guessing at my location, a door to the room opens and a man and woman walk in. They both look at me slumped in my corner on the cot, and the man glances at the woman who nods back at him before he takes a few steps in my direction. He's tall, blonde, and built like a tank. He's clean-cut, dressed in jeans, a white shirt, and a close fitting sweater that accentuates every muscle in his upper body. I think that in my weakened state he could easily crush me if he had the mind to. But something in his face calms me, an innocence and gentle way, the same kind of deep kindness that comes from a person's soul. He's like a human labrador retriever and I know he won't hurt me.
The woman on the other hand is a different story. She positions herself in the corner and while the man's face is open and earnest looking, her expression is a blank slate. Her red hair is pulled back and her eyes never leave me. She leans against the wall and crosses her arms, a clear signal to me that she is relaxed but in control of the situation. She looks like she walked in from a seminar on how to look like a complete badass in boots, well-fitted jeans, and a leather jacket over a red shirt. I'm not afraid of the man, but I instinctually know to be wary of this woman.
The man kneels next to my cot and stares deep into me. I stare back.
"Hello, Alina," he says, "My name is Steve, and that's Natasha," he gestures to the woman who only nods her head slightly in acknowledgement. His use of my name snaps all my attention to him and I feel electrified from this small form of recognition.
"We're here to ask you some questions. Are you feeling up to it?"
I nod in agreement but I don't think I have a choice. I'm not even sure I can speak, let alone muster up the strength it will take to get to the table. Steve extends a hand to me though and when I take it he pulls me easily to my feet where I sway again before he grabs hold of my elbow.
"Easy does it," he says. "The effects of the drugs will wear off in time. Sorry we had to do that, but it was necessary."
Drugs. I was right, there was an injection, and whatever it was they shot into me was certainly having it's way with my body. I quietly resolve to find out what had been done to me, though a nagging in my mind told me I would soon know.
Steve helps me to the table where I sink into one of the chairs and rest my arms on the table, leaning hard into them in an effort to hold myself up. He walked around the other side and sat opposite me. Natasha stays silent in her corner. There's a file on the table that I couldn't see from my place on the cot, and there's what looks to me like Russian written across the front of it. While I don't speak much of the language, it doesn't take much to guess at what the block of red letters stamped across the front mean.
"Dr. Alina Horowitz," Steve says when he's settled himself in his chair. He slides the file towards himself and places his palms down on it when he speaks to me. "NYU Langone Medical Center neurology department, specialist in degenerative diseases and brain injuries."
"Yes," I say quietly, acknowledging his addressing me again by my full name and his recitation of my current place of employment. I'm also testing my voice and finding it will come stronger than I had anticipated. Steve smiles.
"We need you to look at something, and tell us what you think," he says. He moves to open the file but before he can, I interject.
"Why," I don't say it like a question on purpose. He looks up at me again, this time more serious.
"Your patients and your research work, they all share a theme," he says. "You focus on memory loss and trauma. You help people recover memories they've lost because of accidents."
"Yes," I say. "But why am I here?"
"Take a look at this and tell me what you think." He ignores my question and pulls two pages from the file and slides them across the table to me. I recognize them immediately, two CT scans of a brain, the same brain if I had to put money on it. One is saggital as if I'm looking down at the brain, and the other frontal as if I'm looking straight at it. Something in them catches my eye immediately and I have to resist the urge to scoop them up for a closer look.
"What about them,?" I try to keep my voice casual.
"What do you make of them?" Steve says, his voice is relaxed, like he could wait all day for me to start playing his game. Eventually I give in and pick up the frontal scan. My eyes go straight to two black holes, mirror images of each other near the center of the brain.
"This," I say and point to the area. "This is unusual."
"How?" Steve asks and the spot of skin between his eyebrows furrows as he waits for me to answer.
"The limbic structures, they're greatly reduced, so much so as to be invisible in this cut of the frontal plane scan. I've never seen this before. It's like they've shriveled up or something." Even though it hurts to speak, I am determined to get it all out. I place the photos down on the table and slide them back towards Steve who is watching my movements carefully. His body seems relaxed but his eyes betray a sense of urgency that I feel like I can take advantage of.
"These scans," I continue, "I can only tell so much from them. Whoever this is, and I'd bet this is the same person, needs an MRI to confirm the damage."
"That's impossible to do," Steve says.
"Do you know this person?" I press him. "Because if you do then you might want to tell them that they're in some real trouble. That is if they can remember who you are." This seems to hit him and I see my chance.
"Now, I want to know what's going on and why you've brought me to wherever this place is. I'm pretty sure you guys aren't the cops because I don't have so much as a parking ticket to my name. So what's going on."
Steve looks over his shoulder at Natasha who shrugs at him, as if to say 'I told you so'. I can feel the answers are coming. He sighs and turns back to me.
"Is there anything that can be done about those?" he asks pointing at the scans, and there's sadness in his voice and his eyes.
"Maybe, maybe not," I answer with my stock reply to these situations. "There's really no way to know for sure. There are a lot of other factors that need to be taken account of before it can be determined how to procede with treating a case like this, and whether any recovery is possible."
"All right," he says and opens the file again. This time he pulls out an aged picture of a man and places it on the table so I can see. I have a feeling this is the owner of the brain in question.
"You're here because of this man. We were tracking him and discovered that he was seeking you out and so we set up surveillance on you in order to intercept him. Fortunately, we were able to intervene, but we had to take you in the process. But we figured that it would work out for his situation if we made use of your skills."
"But why me," I try to emphasize. "There's hundreds of neurologists in the city, there are plenty of people who can help, I don't understand why it has to be me."
"We don't know the answer," Steve admits, and at this Natasha shifts in her corner. They have an entire non-verbal conversation in just a few glances. "But we want to find out."
"We have an offer for you," Natasha says, finally speaking. It takes me off guard. "We need you to stay and see if you can do anything to help him."
"And if I don't?" I ask.
"If you don't," she continues. "Then it could be a situation where you find life getting very difficult for you. We have our ways of being very persuasive."
"So, I don't have a choice." They both look at me and I throw my hands up before settling back in my chair.
"Let's take a walk," Steve says. When he stands, I do the same, and it takes everything I have to walk with him out of this room and into a complete unknown.
But like I said, I didn't think I had a choice.