He blinked, and his vision switched from middle-space staring to locating the source of the person speaking to him.
“Sir, I need you to try and pay attention.” A man stood at his bedside with one hand in his lab coat pocket while the other held a pipe to his lips. A doctor, yes, that’s what he was. Newly settled in his profession, by the look of him, having only just crossed the line from stout youth to the first soft edges of middle age. The doctor’s broad cheek whiskers reminded him of someone, his own father or employer perhaps, but he couldn’t be certain. He couldn’t even recall if he had a father, or a job for that matter, though he knew he must.
“As I said, you’ve had a nasty blow to the head, resulting in a serious subdural hematoma. Indeed, you’ve been unconscious for”—the man in the lab coat checked a giant clock mounted on the wall—“hmm, going on two hours now.”
“A subdural . . .” He tried to mimic the doctor’s words, but his mouth would not cooperate. “Will I be all right?”
“Think of your brain like a wooden crate filled with jelly. You’ve taken a hard smack against the outside of the crate, and all the jelly inside got slammed against the opposite side of the crate from the force. It’s very likely you have a traumatic brain injury, which will require observation.”
“Traumatic . . .”
“Yes, that’s right. And we’ll need to watch for signs of psychosis.” The doctor held up a fountain pen and tracked it in front of his patient’s face. “But you’re showing remarkable and steady progress, I dare say.” The doctor put his pen away.
For a moment, while he’d watched the pen being waved from side to side in front of him, he’d half expected the point of the exercise was to make something materialize out of thin air, which baffled him completely. And yet he had the awareness to know he ought not say so out loud.
“Now, let’s try something else.” The doctor, still new enough in his profession to yet bear some patience for the infirm and indigent, peered through his pipe smoke, squinting as he studied the man before him. “Can you tell me your name?” He awaited the answer to his elementary question with apparent optimism, which eventually soured into disappointment.
There were half a dozen men lying in similar cots beside him in the long room. Vagrants by the look of them. Common sense suggested that every one of them had a name. Some of them had it scrawled on a board at the foot of their bed. He shifted on his cot, trying to remember what he was called but was met with an empty void that yielded nothing. “I dinna think I have a name,” he answered, though he knew that couldn’t be right.
“Of course you have a name. We all have a name. Mine is Dr. Samuel Jones. Head physician on duty.”
When he didn’t respond, the doctor exhaled and put a hand atop his patient’s head, as if feeling for a deviation in the skull. He flinched when the doctor explored too close to the throbbing wound at the back of his head. To his relief, a woman wearing a white apron and pointed white hat approached his bedside to stand next to the doctor. She carried an enamel tray. No, a bedpan. That was the word for it. He clutched his blanket higher, hoping her arrival didn’t mean what he thought it meant, but then she pulled a card out of the pan and handed it to the doctor. A distinct rust-colored stain had spread across the backside of the paper. There was something poetic about the shape it left behind, something that urged him to want to form meaningful words together, but they fizzled in his mind before they could find his mouth.
“This might help. The card was in his coat pocket, sir.”
“Very good.” The doctor held the calling card at arm’s length as he read, squinting through his pipe smoke. “Does the name Henry Elvanfoot mean anything to you?” He turned the card around to display the print—a rather ornate script done in garish green ink with an embossed thistle at the top. A reddish-brown splotch sullied the front of the otherwise professional card as well. “Is that you? Is that your name?”
The name Elvanfoot, once spoken, seemed to fill in some blank spot he’d been oblivious to before. Like a shadowy image coming into focus in his mind. Was he Henry? He must be, and so he said so. And yet nothing else arrived with the name. No memory of home, no relations, no job. These were things he must have, and yet none of it would coagulate in any cohesive history of him he could recall with clarity.
Disappointed, perhaps, that his patient wasn’t the career-making amnesia case he’d hoped for, the doctor tossed the card back in the bedpan and pronounced him a lucky man after coming within a hair’s breadth of permanent damage from his injury. Out of an abundance of caution, though, the doctor ordered him to remain in the hospital for a night of observation, seeing how there were a few coins among the rest of his belongings lining the bottom of the bedpan to cover the cost.