The Song Remains the Same Read Free Page B

refusing to relent to the pain for now. Part of me is exhausted, but the other part of me is grateful for his easy company, that he’s not hovering, close to a breakdown at any moment like my mother or my husband.
    “Fractured some vertebrae,” he says. “Any worse, and I’d have been in this thing for life.” His arms flop around the wheelchair.
    “So, technically, we’re lucky.”
    “Technically,” he says. “Though rehab for the foreseeable future may be construed as less than that. I was supposed to be on a set, but now, it’s Des Moines until fall.”
    “A set?” The wires connect from the news report. The moments of short-term cognitive clarity are unpredictable, coming and going at random. “Ah, yes. That’s right—you’re an actor?”
    “I am,” he says.
    “Like, big-time actor or a guy who says he’s an actor and actually waits tables?”
    He laughs. “I was the worst waiter you’d ever seen, but yeah, I bussed my fair share for a few years. But now”—he clears his throat, suddenly ever-so-slightly self-conscious—“I guess I’ve earned mykeep. Successfully retired my tip jar.” He shrugs. “A big TV show, some film stuff.” He smiles with his perfect teeth, and I can see it then: the movie star.
    “Did I recognize you on the plane?”
    “Maybe.” He shrugs. “We didn’t talk about it, and then, you know, I passed out.” I try to imagine it: the sour-faced me from that People cover chatting him up in first class. I can’t conjure it up, so I replace it with the fabulous me chatting him up in first class. Yes, that seems better .
    I sigh. “I suppose I’ll be here for a while, too,” I say, “though I don’t think I have anywhere as glamorous as a movie set to be.”
    “Don’t sell yourself short—you were on your way to meet with some new hot artist.” He shakes his head. “Again, can’t remember her name: Harmony, Faith something, maybe? Something hippie like that.”
    My mother had hinted at something similar—the art gallery. I rattle it around in my brain: it seems reasonable enough. Not repellent, not a terrible fit, not something that the fabulous me couldn’t be doing to take the world on by storm.
    “I promised you I’d come in and buy something the next time I was in New York,” Anderson says.
    “A genuine promise or a promise by way of flirting?” I ask, and he bows his head faux bashfully and smiles. He’s an easy read already. I smile in return. “I’m married.”
    He shrugs. “It sounded complicated.”
    Complicated? I’m sorry, I don’t remember!
    “Besides,” I say, “aren’t you, like, twenty-two?”
    “Twenty-eight. I play young.” He exhales. “Listen, you look tired. Let me get out of your hair. I just wanted to come by and thank you as soon as I could.”
    My eyes do feel heavy, so I let him go with the promise that he’ll come back tomorrow. The nurse returns to wheel him back to his own recovery, but not before he places the People magazine next to me, next to the photo album filled with disparate faces of strangers, and I’m left to wonder, just before I slip into slumber, how my life can be so well documented when I can’t recall one single second, one tiny sliver of an iota of the life that came before.
    By my fourth day of consciousness and a week and a half since my plane split in two, I have submitted myself to every test possible—the MRI, the CAT scan, the interviews with the hospital shrink, an oxygen test, an I’m-not-sure-what-the-hell-that-was-for test, the how-many-presidents-can-you-name test (zero, but Peter kindly reminded the psychologist that I’d never been one for history), and we are no closer to assessing the cause behind my memory loss.
    Physically, I am also an anomaly, an equation with no solution. The neck brace came off today, and my left wrist is fractured and splinted, and a few of my upper ribs are bruised, such that a sharp jolt of pain greets me when I try to shift too quickly, but for