Ted Carson was certain he was going insane.
His father was dead. He remembered the funeral. Yet here was Dad, big as life and not dead from a heart attack at forty-nine. Ted felt his stomach knot with fright whenever he stared him in the face.
“You all right, Ted? Have a beer.”
“No, I’m not all right,” he said.
He and the man who looked like his dad sat side by side in the living room Ted didn’t remember, watching a TV he didn’t recall, in a chair he’d never sat in before. His “dad” placed a meaty hand on Ted’s thigh. He forced himself not to flinch.
“It’s an effect of the amnesia, the doctors said. A fugue, they called it.”
“Yeah, whatever, but you were dead,” Ted said. “And I live somewhere else.” That wasn’t amnesia. He had memories that didn’t actually seem to have happened. Amnesia was when you didn’t have memories.
He didn’t want the beer, but his mom, ten kilograms lighter than he remembered, brought one in an iced mug anyway.
He sat back in the recliner and held the mug against his head.
None of this was right.
He’d been getting high in his basement apartment on Winslow. There’d been a knock on the door and some guy was there with a taser. After that Ted didn’t remember much, just the claustrophobia from being hog-tied in a coffin. He’d been certain it was those punk dealers who wanted their cash. If only they had given him a chance to pay, to explain! The next thing he remembered was being pulled out of the trunk by Casey Nicholson and led into the police station. Ted’s pants had been wet. He’d vomited on the cops’ floor. They’d taken him to the hospital, and the newspaperman showed up.
And then Ted’s parents, and he’d screamed in terror. The nurses had had to drag his dad out of the room before Ted calmed down.
There’d been tests and questions, and Ted had answered what he could. He remembered the last two months clearly. He had a job at Lawson’s. He worked nights. He had a car. He knew his address. The doctors had written down notes and nodded.
Then they’d taken him to the corner of Hodge and Staley where the Lawson’s should have been. It had been a used-car place. Then they’d taken him to his apartment, but some Mexican family lived there and it looked like they always had. No car, no apartment, no job. But his dad was back. After ten years.
Ted wasn’t sure if it was a fair trade, because he seemed to have traded in his sanity with all the rest of that stuff.
“The doctor’s been through all that, Ted,” his dad said. “It may not come back to you for a while, or it never will. But you’re safe and home now.”
“Yeah.”
“And all this nonsense is behind us.”
“All this nonsense” included Ted appearing in front of a judge and stating his full name for the record. He’d had no driver’s license, no Social Security card, so he’d had to affirm he was Ted Carson, and his dad and mom had affirmed too, and when that was all done there was Casey Nicholson hugging that guy who had tasered him. Only now he was standing with three lawyers and was dressed in a suit.
He’d met Ted’s eye and smiled, as if he’d just gotten away with something.
But for the life of him, Ted couldn’t figure out how his life had been stolen.
“Fuck it,” he whispered, and downed his beer in one gulp.