When I emerge from a reverie, it is to the noise of traffic and the smell of diesel. On a wrought iron coffee table in front of me are two newspapers and a half empty teacup. It is either mid- morning or late afternoon, I can’t tell if I am facing east or west. I have no idea where I am. A shiver runs through me, from the nape of my neck through the sphincter of my anus and down my leg. My foot taps uncontrollably. I close my eyes and wish for what, I’m not sure, but when I open them again, nothing has changed. I look into the teacup and inhale carefully – masala chai. One of the newspapers is The Daily Star. The other is the Dainik Manabzamin. It is in Bengali, but I don’t know how I know this.
A young man in a white knitted skullcap comes over to me.
“Garam cha?” he says. I look at him trying to figure out what he is saying, until he repeats it pointing to my cup. “Garam cha?”
I swallow hard and say hesitantly “Aami bangla jaani na. (I don’t speak Bengali)”. My tongue feels like it is too big for my mouth. The waiter looks at me oddly.
“Oh sorry sir,” he says in accented English, “You order from me in Bengali before.”
“I don’t remember,” I say. He turns to leave and I grab his wrist. “Please, where am I?” He looks down at my hand and I let go.
“You are at Mina’s Tea House, sir,” he says rubbing his arm.
“Where’s that?”
“On No. 12 Road, near the University of Bangladesh,” he frowns. “In Dhaka,” he adds when I keep staring. He scurries away into the kitchen. I put my head in my hands and my elbows on my knees. I feel the saliva gathering in my mouth and I know I will throw up. A rotund man with a long beard comes out with my waiter behind him.
“Jonab?” he taps me on the shoulder. “Sir? Are you alright? Do you need a doctor?”
I shake my head. I don’t know what’s going on. How did I get here? I’m shaking uncontrollably now as if I have a fever. The older man says something to the young waiter, who runs out of the cafe and disappears into the throng of people passing by. A small crowd has begun to gather at the shop front where my table faces out into the street. They look on curiously as the old man puts his arm around my shoulder and tries to shoo them away. The waiter returns with a man in a khaki uniform and a white beret. There is a whistle around his neck. He speaks to the owner, then turns to me. His brown eyes are soft, and he has a neat moustache.
“Excuse me, sir, do you need medical assistance?” I shake my head. “What is your name, sir,” he says, looking into my eyes.
“I, I don’t know,” I say. The realization is like a kick to my stomach, and I throw up onto the floor. The crowd gasps and the owner shouts something to the waiter who runs back into the kitchen and rushes back with a bucket and a mop. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I try to say, but my body is racked with dry heaves. “Calm down, sir, don’t worry” says the man in the beret. “We can fix this. Do you have a passport?” I search all my pockets, but it takes a while because I can’t stop shaking. No passport, but I have a wallet. I have never been so glad to see something. My hands are trembling too hard to open it and I hand it to the policeman. It has a few taka and some credit cards. He takes out something from the back and shows it to me. It is a Wisconsin driver’s license. I don’t recognize the picture.
“This is you…Mr. Daniel Bristow.”
“Daniel Bristow,” I repeat, but it sounds strange when I say it. I shake my head. I don’t know that name. “But this is you, look this is your picture.” He holds it up to me, but I don’t recognize the face. I shake my head again. I don’t know who that is. He looks at me and then at the picture and back again.
“Come with me,” he says, not unkindly, “we’ll sort this out at the station.”
“Are you a policeman?”
“No,” he says, “Policemen have blue shirts and black berets. I am a tourism officer “he says, tapping a little badge on his chest. “My name is Salim. Don’t worry; I’ve seen this many times. You foreigners come to Bangladesh for the drugs and sometimes you overdo it.”
I want to protest, no I didn’t do drugs, but I don’t know if it was true. Maybe I did. He sees the doubt in my eyes.
“Or maybe a bad man slipped you something,” he says, smiling, “you need to be careful in Dhaka.”
We walk to a building on the other side of the bazaar.
“Is this the police station?”
“No, I told you, I’m not a policeman. This is an information center. For tourists, you know?” He takes me into a small office with green walls. “Please sit down,” he says, taking out a writing pad and an orange Bic pen. “Now, Mr. Bristow, let’s start with what you do remember.”
I look down at the desk. “I woke up in the tea shop and I didn’t know who I was or how I got there.” “You mean you were asleep and then you woke up there?”
“No, no, I wasn’t asleep. I just, I just became aware of my surroundings. As if I had walked through a door and suddenly appeared in another place. Like Alice, down a rabbit hole.”
“Who is Alice,” he says leaning forward, “does she know you?”
“No, I’m sorry, Alice is…never mind, I don’t know who Alice is.” I take a deep breath and try to steady my hands. My mind is wrapped in a fog with flashes of light and knowledge that disappear as soon as I turn to look for them.
“Well Mr. Bristow, it looks like you are an American, so we can try the Embassy tomorrow. Unfortunately, it is after hours now, so nobody will be there. Do you remember where you are staying,” he says hopefully.
I shake my head and the emptiness begins to overwhelm me again. “Sorry,” I say, my voice quavering. “There, there,” he says. “I’ll take you to a place to stay for the night. Mrs. Lim runs a guest house; she’s helped us out many times before with tourists who get lost and that sort of thing. Come with me, it’s not too far,” he says, standing up.
“I don’t know if I have enough money,” I say.
He looks into my wallet. “You should have enough,” he says and hands it back to me. “But don’t worry; Mrs. Lim has an arrangement with the tourist board. I’ll call ahead.”
We walk out into the night. The streets are full of people. There are rickshaws and mopeds all over the place and Salim holds me by the elbow guiding me through the stream of humanity. The smell is overwhelming— spices, and diesel, and human waste. We arrive at a four storey apartment building and climb up the stairs to the top floor. Salim knocks on the door and after a few minutes silence we hear the slap slap of slippers on the wooden floor. Mrs. Lim is a short Chinese woman with grey hair pulled back in a bun. She smiles when she sees Salim.
“Yup lai” she says, beckoning us in.
“I can’t stay Mrs. Lim,” Salim says, “my wife is waiting for me.” He turns to me. “Goodnight Mr. Bristow, I’ll see you in the morning.” And then he is gone. Mrs. Lim looks me up and down.
“You poor mother,” she says. “Ai Yaa, you children don’t know how much we mothers suffer.”
I stare at her blankly.
“Please stop taking drugs,” she says, “it kill you and then it kill you mother.”
I nod, deeply ashamed somehow. I have been a terrible son. She sighs then shows me to my room. It has nothing in it but a mattress and a blanket.
“You eat?”
I shake my head. Not since afternoon.
“Okay, I make. You come, “she says and shuffles off to the kitchen.
I go to the bathroom and stare at the mirror. I bring out the drivers license and put it on the little shelf. The face is the same, dirty blond hair, blue eyes, faded acne scars, a little thin, but it is the face of a stranger. I run my fingers through my hair and am surprised to see the mirror image reciprocate. I am disappointed that I am not better looking.
A half hour later, we are sitting at the little kitchen table on plastic stools. Mrs. Lim has made steamed rice with a fried egg on top and soy sauce. We eat in silence. She pours us both some oolong tea, dark, fragrant and bitter and then she tells me about her son who came to Dhaka with her when he was four. When his father died, he fell in with a rough crowd and started taking drugs. One day he went missing and after a month they found his body in the Buriganga River, floating in raw sewage and industrial effluent. He was seventeen. She takes my hands with both of hers. They are rough and calloused and gnarled as an old tree.
“Drugs bad,” she says, looking right into me and shaking her head. “My son, so young.” She weeps at the recollection, and I can see where tears have left deep channels in her face, and I cry along with her. We sit there for a long time, holding hands. I wonder if my parents cry when they think about me.
I go to bed tired but I cannot sleep, tossing and turning, with memories taunting me from beyond an opaque wall, tantalizingly close, but unreachable. The room won’t keep still. It expands then contracts. One moment I am too big for the bed, the next I shrink to a speck on the floor. I feel that my friends and family are hiding behind the door, or under the floorboards. It feels so real that I get up to look for them. I know that if I can just say the magic words, they will appear and love me and hold me and celebrate my return and my life will be given back to me. I hear voices coming from the walls and under the mattress, alternately whispering encouragement, then mocking me for not knowing the phrase that will unlock the puzzle.
I wake up again, this time on a wet mattress in Mrs. Lim’s guest house. There is a man in a white coat bending over me. My wrists feel chafed and raw.
“Hello Mr. Bristow,” the man says. “My name is Doctor Chatterjee. Mrs. Lim summoned me here late last night because you were wandering around and not making sense. I’m sorry, but we had to restrain you.” He points to the marks on my arm. “You were hallucinating and wouldn’t keep still. I gave you a dose of Haloperidol, an anti-psychotic, and Valium and that seems to have calmed you down. I would recommend seeing your own doctor as soon as possible.”
Mrs. Lim is hovering nearby, nodding as the doctor speaks. I drift off to sleep. I don’t dream. I stay at Mrs. Lim for another two days and the doctor comes by everyday to check in on me. Salim arrives just before noon on the third day. I hear him chatting with Mrs. Lim in the kitchen.
“Ah, good morning Mr. Bristow,” he says when he sees me. “It looks like you had a rough few days. Are you okay now?”
I nod but I’m not sure.
“Would you like some tea before we go?”
“No thanks,” I say. I am anxious to get to the embassy to find out who I am. Mrs. Lim stops me at the door.
“You call you mother, you say you sorry, hear.”
I nod. “I will. Thank you, Mrs. Lim.”
Salim and I take a taxi because the embassy is on the other side of town. I have just enough money to pay for the ride. The American embassy is in the modern part of Dhaka and we ride up the elevator in a modern office building in silence. It feels like a world away from chaotic bustle of the marketplace. Salim has called ahead, and a consular officer is waiting to meet with me. Salim offers to wait outside for me, but I ask him to come in with me. The officer is a friendly woman with grey eyes, not much older than me.
“Mr. Bristow? May I call you Daniel?”
I nod.
“My name is Mary Travis.” She asks me some questions, the same that Salim asked of me and I give her the same answers. Yes, I have lost my memory. No, I have not suffered physical trauma. I had no preceding fever or other illness, except for the episode that first night at Mrs. Lim, but I cannot remember anything before that day. Mary Travis tells me I am in Dhaka on a grant from the Grameen Bank, to study economics in rural areas of Bangladesh and set up organizations to fund microloans. I nod, but the words mean nothing to me. She has an address for me in Dhaka, where I have been staying for the past six months. I have roommate called Gunther Meier, whom I have named as an emergency contact in Bangladesh. He reported me missing two days ago. My parents have been informed that I have been found and are anxious to speak to me. Mary Travis arranges for me to use a phone in a private office and tells me that a doctor will see me afterwards.
I dial the number they have given me and it only rings once before someone picks it up.
“Danny? Oh Danny. We were so worried. Are you alright?” I recognize the voice and I am so relieved I almost start crying, but I cannot put a face to the voice.
My mother tells me they have booked a flight out to Dhaka and are coming to bring me home.
“Mom, I’m sorry for being such a bad son. I’m sorry I haven’t been in contact for so long. I promise to be good son from now on. Please let me come home.”
“What are you talking about Danny? We spoke last Tuesday. Everything seemed fine then. You’re a good boy, Danny. Go see the doctor and get some rest, we’ll see you soon. I love you.”
“I love you too,” I say, even though it feels uncomfortable, like I am learning the lines of a play.
The doctor checks me over and can find nothing out of the ordinary.
“Well Mr. Bristow,” he says, “you’ve suffered no head trauma, you have no fever and you don’t appear to have had any recent illness. I’ve sent your blood work to the lab, but it’s a little slow in Dhaka. You should have a full physical when you get back home.”
“Am I a drug addict, Doctor?”
“What? No I don’t think so Mr. Bristow. You don’t present with any of the symptoms. No track marks, healthy teeth, your pupils are normal. Of course, you may have ingested a hallucinogen, but the blood and urine samples should give us the answer. I’ll make sure that they are sent to your doctor. You should get yourself checked out by a neurologist as well.”
Salim is waiting for me when I come out of the doctor’s office. I am inordinately happy to see him there, leaning against the wall. In the whirlpool that has become my life, he is like a piece of driftwood, something I can hold on to while everything else is floating by me. He takes me to the apartment I am renting in the central part of the city, near the university, not even one mile away from the tea shop he found me in. A tall young blonde man opens the door to the second floor apartment.
“Danny,” he says, “Jesus, where the hell have you been?” He reaches out to hug me, but I pull away.
“You must be Gunther,” Salim says. Gunther nods.
“I’m Salim. I ‘m helping Danny to find his way. He can’t remember anything. The doctor says it might be amnesia.”
“Jesus, Danny lost his memory? You’re kidding me.” Gunther says. “You mean you don’t know who I am?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I don’t even know who I am.”
He looks at me to make sure I’m not pulling an elaborate stunt, then at Salim.
“Jesus,” he says again. “What can I do?”
“Well,” Salim says, “maybe you can take Danny to his room and see if he remembers anything.” He turns to me. “Danny, I have to go now. I’m sure Gunther can take over. Gunther, Danny’s parents are on their way over. They should be here in a day or so. Danny, if you need anything, just call me on my mobile.” He hands me a scrap of paper with a number on it.
“I don’t even know your last name,” I say.
Salim smiles. “It’s Khan,” he says. “Good Luck, Danny, I hope you get better.” He waves goodbye and I feel a faint panic as I watch him leave.
“Um, Danny,” Gunther says, “wow, I don’t know what to say. Look, your room’s through here. He points to an open doorway. Should I bring some of our friends over here, would that help?”
I’m not sure that it will, but he looks so eager to do something that I say yes.
“Okay then. I’ll be back in a few.” And with that he is out the door and I’m not sure who is more relieved. I pick my way around the room. There is a small desk with an open laptop on it. On one wall there are two long shelves filled with books, sagging in the middle. I feel despondent realizing I will have to read them all again. The bed is unmade with a pile of clothing on it and there is a cup on the floor next to it with coffee rings inside. Oh my god, I’m a slob. There is a bottle of pills on the nightstand – Lariam. What’s that? I’m supposed to take it once a week on Wednesdays. I start straightening out the room and find a half empty pack of Benson and Hedges cigarettes on the window sill along with a plastic lighter. Do I smoke? I put one in my mouth and light it up. I inhale and as the smoke fills my lungs, I feel the tension begin to float away. My head begins to buzz immediately.
I am on my second when Gunther returns with a group of young people. I don’t know any of them.
“Danny we just heard,” a pretty sloe-eyed Indian girl says with a worried look on her face. Do you…do you remember us at all? Do you remember me?”
I shake my head slowly and I can see the hurt in her eyes. They all look worried, but disappointed as well.
“Well, let’s get reacquainted,” Gunther says, into the silence. “This is Priya, he says pointing to the Indian girl, and this is Nick and Ahmed and Yoshi. We’re all working on the microloan project with the NGO’s and…Danny…” He looks at the cigarette in my hand, “Danny you don’t smoke.”
“I don’t?”
He shakes his head. “Julie left those here the last time she visited us.”
“Who’s Julie?”
“She’s one of us, she works at the university.”
“Oh,” I say, “well it kind of felt right.”
“But you hate cigarettes,” Priya says, “you’re always bugging Julie to quit.” I look at them in a semicircle around me. It feels like a firing squad.
“Okay,” I say, crushing the rest of the cigarette on the outside wall, “what else do I hate?”
We sit cross legged on the carpet and they spend the next few hours trying to remind me what I’ve been doing for the past six months, alternating between work and social activities – the trips to the countryside to document corruption and abuse; the weekends spent searching for the perfect samoosa. Sometimes I feel the tug of memory, but the more eagerly I grasp at it, the quicker it slips away. Each time, I have to say, sorry I don’t remember and each shake of the head takes me farther away from the group until I feel like I’m watching a documentary of someone else’s life. Nick, the Englishman, opens a bottle of vodka.
“Stolichnaya,” he says, “your favorite.”
I take a sip. It tastes like burned rubber and I spit it back into the glass. They all look at me in surprise. “Danny,” Nick says, “you’re pulling my chain, right?”
“No,” I say, “I used to drink this stuff? It’s vile.”
“Oh my God,” Yoshi says, “you used to drink us all under the table.”
Everyone laughs, even me, but after the laughter fades, no one can think of anything to say and they stare at the center of the carpet and the fan rotating slowly above us, anywhere but at me. I stretch and yawn. “Sorry guys, I had a rough day. I think I’m going to bed.”
Oh sure, Danny, everyone says, take it easy tomorrow. And they say their goodbyes and file out quietly into the night. I watch them from my second story window, chatting and hugging, and the emptiness overwhelms me. I yearn to feel the connection that they have and I despair that it is gone forever.
My parents arrive two days later, two strangers at the door. I see a familiar quick pain in my mother’s eyes at the blankness of my stare. God, how many people do I have to disappoint?
“Mom, Dad” I say, trying to sound like the son I am.
“Oh Danny,” my mom says and buries her face in my shoulder as she holds me tight.
“My boy” my dad says and grips my shoulder. He wears glasses, and I think – this is what I will look like when I am older. His eyes are moist, but I feel…nothing. Guilt maybe, that I can’t feel anything.
“We’re going to get you home and find out what’s happened to you,” my mom says. “Shirley and Megan will be at the airport.”
“Oh, great,” I say, hesitating just a little, and then smiling to ease the awkwardness. The pain of others is becoming too much of a burden. It’s easier to fake it to spare them. They have brought a box full of photographs with them, and things from my room. I take them out and look at them one by one. There are pictures of me in various places, doing different things – me playing volleyball on the beach near Lake Mendota, me at a fish fry in Door County, me with a bunch of different people, my sister Elizabeth, ex girlfriends. It looks like I am a bit of a ham. But I feel no connection to the people or places. I return them to the box, stacking them neatly so that they will fit in.
Gunther and Priya come to the airport to see us off.
“You’ll be back, right, Danny?” Gunther asks, “We still have a lot of work to do.”
“Of course,” I reply, “I don’t want to lose the Grameen funding.” But the idea of returning is daunting. The notes on my laptop and the books on my shelf make no sense to me anymore. I don’t even remember why I chose Bangladesh in the first place.
“Goodbye, Danny,” Priya says. In her eyes there is no pain, only sadness. She can see what Gunther cannot. I will not be back.
The flight to Madison is long and roundabout. We have to stop in Dubai, London and Chicago. I can see that my parents want to talk, but I tell them I’m tired and keep my eyes closed and my headphones on the whole trip. There is a small group that meets us at the airport. It turns out Shirley is our dog, a black lab with a lab’s happy go lucky face. When I kneel down, she puts her paws on my shoulders and licks my face and then sniffs at my pockets. Megan is my girlfriend. She runs up to me and hugs me tight before I have a chance to hurt her. She looks wonderful in that healthy corn-fed Midwest way. I wonder how I ever got so lucky. My mom told me on the plane that we had not been going out for very long before I left for Dhaka. But even when I kiss her and taste her minty breath, I feel no connection. I feel sad, and like a bit of a fraud. There are aunts and uncles and cousins and I smile for them until my cheeks ache, but inside the panic grows and it is all I can do not to run away.
We drive to our home in Arboretum on the south central side of Madison. I had been living near the university, but I gave up my lease when I made plans to live in Bangladesh. We appear to be well off. My old room has been untouched since I left. Visitors stream in and out bringing food and drink, as if we had a death in the family. Everyone approaches me tentatively, like a newborn baby, or a special needs child. I am a blank slate. People treat me a certain way, and I become the person who is treated like that. I assemble a working self from the behavior of others and piece together the shards of my identity from the reactions of those around me. Dave, my best friend from high school comes over. I don’t recognize him, but I recognize the look of someone recognizing me. We talk quietly in my room, and he tells me about the person I used to be. I have become adept at placing this persona I have created in social situations. This is how Danny would have acted. This is what Danny would have said. It is a less painful path, but it is exhausting and at night I sometimes wake up thrashing in the bed and crying. Some days, I feel like jumping in front of a speeding car or slitting my wrists in a warm bath, like the Romans did. It seems to me that floating away from the burden of memory would be such sweet relief.
The doctors at the hospital decide that my amnesia and the psychotic episode in Dhaka are the result of an extreme reaction to the anti-malarial drug Lariam which I had been taking for a month before I left for Bangladesh and once a week for the entire time I was there. Apparently these are rare but documented side effects. Patients usually recover their memories in time, they tell me. You have to be patient and not try too hard. You have a great support system, they say, we’re optimistic you’ll recover eventually. They rattle off statistics and case studies and part of me wants to believe them, but there is something at my core that is gone; not hidden, not undiscovered, but gone, wiped clean as if my internal computer has been reset.
I decide to reclaim Danny’s memories by living his life. I return to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, his alma mater. They allow me to enter the graduate program in Economics in the spring. My Grameen grant has been suspended, but they have not withdrawn their funding for the Bangladesh project. They tell me that they are willing to wait a while before making a decision. I am grateful, but now that I have committed myself to this life, I must become the facade. I’m not sure that I can pull it off.
For the next few months, I go through the motions of my former life. I build up a new memory bank of faces and names. I try to revive my relationship with Megan. She is beautiful and warm but I cannot make the connection. Even the sex is joyless. I cannot remember her or any details of our relationship. I cannot conceive of loving her. I break up with her after Thanksgiving. She takes it badly.
“You’re not the only one who lost something, Danny.” She is crying. “I loved you and now you’re gone forever, but I still have to see you every day.”
I watch her walk away and I think this must be the cruelest thing I have ever done to another person. To forget someone is to deny their very existence. Inside me, the emptiness grows and the strain of creating the façade is making me desperate. Every day I am surrounded by people who know me and love me and yet I have never felt more alone. I’m never going to be the same.
*********
I wake up on a rooftop. There is a pack of cigarettes in my hand. I turn my back to the breeze. I light one up and take a deep drag. For the first time in months, I know what I am going to do. It only takes me a minute to finish the cigarette and I flick the butt into the gravel. I walk over to the edge of the building. I close my eyes as I step into the emptiness, my arms outstretched.
Flashing lights and people hovering over me. I’m pretty sure I should be feeling pain, but I guess that will come later. I imagine my body crushed and broken, shattered like a light bulb. I can’t move anything and I can only see out of my right eye. The copper taste of blood is on my tongue. Apparently, four floors is not enough to kill you. My mother is by my side. Her eyes are moist but she is smiling, her lips trembling. She kisses two fingers and presses them to my lips. I love you Danny, she says. I blink once, slowly, to tell her – I know.
Notes
This story was inspired by David MacLean’s memoir “The Answer to the Riddle is Me“.