Redshirts

CODA II: Second Person

You’ve heard it said that people who have been in horrific accidents usually don’t remember the accident—the accident knocks their short-term memory right out of them—but you remember your accident well enough. You remember the rain making the roads slick, and you reining yourself in because of it. You remember the BMW running the red and seeing the driver on his cell phone, yelling, and you knew he wasn’t yelling because of you because he never looked in your direction and didn’t see your motorcycle until it crushed itself into his front fender.

You remember taking to the air and for the briefest of seconds enjoying it—the surprising sensation of flight!—until your brain had just enough time to process what had happened and douse you in an ice-cold bath of fear before you hit the pavement helmet first. You felt your body twist in ways human bodies weren’t supposed to twist and heard things inside your body pop and snap in ways you did not imagine they were meant to pop and snap. You felt the visor of your helmet fly off and the pavement skip and scrape off the fiberglass or carbon fiber or whatever it was that your helmet was made of, an inch from your face.

Twist pop snap scrape and then stop, and then your whole world was the little you could see out of the ruined helmet, mostly facing down into the pavement. You had two thoughts at that moment: one, the observation that you must be in shock, because you couldn’t feel any pain; two, that given the crick of your neck, you had a sneaking suspicion that your body had landed in such a way that your legs were bunched up underneath you and your ass was pointing straight up into the sky. The fact that your brain was more concerned about the position of your ass than the overall ability to feel anything only served to confirm your shock theory.

Then you heard a voice screaming at you; it was the driver of the BMW, outraged at the condition of his fender. You tried to glance over at him, but without being able to move your head, you were only able to get a look at his shoes. They were of the sort of striving, status-conscious black leather that told you that the guy had to work in the entertainment industry. Although truth be told it wasn’t just the shoes that told you that; there was also the thing about the asshole blowing through a red light in his BMW because he was bellowing into his phone and being gasket-blowing mad at you because you had the gall to hurt his car.

You wondered briefly if the jerk might know your dad before your injuries finally got the best of you and everything went out of focus, the screaming agent or entertainment lawyer or whoever he was softening out to a buzzy murmur that became more relaxing and gentle as you went along.

So that was your accident, which you remember in what you now consider absolutely terrifying detail. It’s as clear in your head as a back episode of one of your father’s television shows, preserved in high definition on a Blu-ray Disc. At this point you’ve even added a commentary track to it, making asides to yourself as you review it in your head, about your motorcycle, the BMW, the driver (who as it turns out was an entertainment lawyer, and who was sentenced to two weeks in county jail and three hundred hours of community service for his third violation of California law banning driving while holding a cell phone) and your brief, arcing flight from bike to pavement. You couldn’t remember it more clearly.

What you can’t remember is what came after, and how you woke up, lying on your bed, fully clothed, without a scratch on you, a few weeks later.

It’s beginning to bother you.

“You have amnesia,” your father said, when you first spoke to him about it. “It’s not that unusual after an accident. When I was seven I was in a car accident. I don’t remember anything about it. One minute I was in the car going to see your great-grandmother and the next I was in a hospital bed with a cast and my mother standing over me with a gallon of ice cream.”

“You woke up the next day,” you said to your father. “I had the accident weeks ago. But I only woke up a few days ago.”

“That’s not true,” your father said. “You were awake before that. Awake and talking and having conversations. You just don’t remember that you did it.”

“That’s my point,” you said. “This isn’t like blacking out after an accident. This is losing memory several weeks after the fact.”

“You did land on your head,” your father said. “You landed on your head after sailing through the air at forty-five miles an hour. Even in the best-case scenario, like yours was, that’s going to leave some lingering trauma, Matthew. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve lost some memories.”

“Not some, Dad,” you said. “All of them. Everything from the accident until when I woke up with you and Mom and Candace and Rennie standing over me.”

“I told you, you fainted,” your dad said. “We were concerned.”

“So I faint and then wake up without a single memory of the last few weeks,” you said. “You understand why I might be concerned about this.”

“Do you want me to schedule you for an MRI?” your dad asked. “I can do that. Have the doctors look around for any additional signs of brain trauma.”

“I think that might be a smart thing to do, don’t you?” you said. “Look, Dad, I don’t want to come across as overly paranoid about this, but losing weeks of my life bothers me. I want to be sure I’m not going to lose any more of it. It’s not a comfortable feeling to wake up and have a big hole in your memory.”

“No, Matt, I get it,” your dad said. “I’ll get Brenda to schedule it as quickly as she can. Fair enough?”

“Okay,” you said.

“But in the meantime I don’t want you to worry about it too much,” your father said. “The doctors told us you would probably have at least a couple of episodes like this. So this is normal.”

“‘Normal’ isn’t what I would call it,” you said.

“Normal in the context of a motorcycle accident,” your dad said. “Normal such as it is.”

“I don’t like this new ‘normal,’” you said.

“I can think of worse ones,” your father said, and did that thing he’s been doing the last couple of days, where he looks like he’s about to lose it and start weeping all over you.

While you’re waiting for your MRI, you go over the script you’ve been given for an episode of The Chronicles of the Intrepid. The good news for you is that your character plays a central role in the events. The bad news is that you don’t have any lines, and you spend the entire episode lying on a gurney pretending to be unconscious.

“That’s not true,” Nick Weinstein said, after you pointed out these facts to him. He had stopped by the house with revisions, which was a service you suspected other extras did not get from the head writer of the series. “Look”—he flipped to the final pages of the script—“you’re conscious here.”

“‘Crewman Hester opens his eyes, looks around,’” you said, reading the script direction.

“That’s consciousness,” Weinstein said.

“If you say so,” you said.

“I know it’s not a lot,” Weinstein said. “But I didn’t want to overtax you on your first episode back.”

You achieved that, you said to yourself, flipping through the script in the MRI waiting room and rereading the scenes where you don’t do much but lie there. The episode is action-packed—Lieutenant Kerensky in particular gets a lot of screen time piloting shuttles and running through exploding corridors while redshirts get impaled by falling scenery all around him—but it’s even less coherent than usual for Intrepid, which is really saying something. Weinstein isn’t bad with dialogue and keeping things moving, but neither him nor anyone on his writing staff seems overly invested in plotting. You strongly suspected that if you knew more about the science fiction television genre, you could probably call out all the scenes Weinstein and pals lifted from other shows.

Hey, it paid for college, some part of your brain said. Not to mention this MRI.

Fair enough, you thought. But it’s not unreasonable to want the family business to be making something other than brainlessly extruded entertainment product, indistinguishable from any other sort of brainlessly extruded entertainment product. If that’s all you’re doing, then your family might as well be making plastic coat hangers.

“Matthew Paulson?” the MRI technician said. You looked up. “We’re ready for you.”

You enter the room the MRI machine is in, and the technician shows you where you can slip into a hospital gown and store your clothes and personal belongings. Nothing metal’s supposed to be in the room with the machine. You get undressed, get into your gown and then step into the room, while the technician looks at your information.

“All right, you’ve been here before, so you know the drill, right?” the technician asked.

“Actually, I don’t remember being here before,” you said. “It’s kind of why I’m here now.”

The technician scanned the information again and got slightly red. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not usually this much of an idiot.”

“When was the last time I was here?” you asked.

“A little over a week ago,” the technician said, and then frowned, reading the information again. “Well, maybe,” he said after a minute. “I think your information may have gotten mixed up with someone else’s.”

“Why do you think that?” you asked.

The technician looked up at you. “Let me hold off on answering that for a bit,” he said. “If it is a mix-up, which I’m pretty sure it is, then I don’t want to be on the hook for sharing another patient’s information.”

“Okay,” you said. “But if it is my information, you’ll let me know.”

“Of course,” the technician said. “It’s your information. Let’s concentrate on this session for now, though.” And with that he motioned for you to get on the table and slide your head and body into a claustrophobic tube.

“So what do you think that technician was looking at?” Sandra asked you, as the two of you ate lunch at P.F. Chang’s. It wasn’t your favorite place, but she always had a weakness for it, for reasons passing understanding, and you still have a weakness for her. You met her outside the restaurant, the first time you had seen her since the accident, and she cried on your shoulder, hugging you, before she pulled back and jokingly slapped you across the face for not calling her before this. Then you went inside for upscale chain fusion food.

“I don’t know,” you said. “I wanted to get a look at it, but after the scan, he told me to get dressed and they’d call with the results. He was gone before I put my pants on.”

“But whatever it was, it wasn’t good,” Sandra said.

“Whatever it was, I don’t think it matched up with me walking and talking,” you said. “Especially not a week ago.”

“Medical record errors happen,” Sandra said. “My firm makes a pretty good living with them.” She was a first year at UCLA School of Law and interning at the moment at one of those firms that specialized in medical class-action suits.

“Maybe,” you said.

“What is it?” Sandra said, after a minute of watching your face. “You don’t think your parents are lying to you, do you?”

“Can you remember anything about it?” you asked. “About me after the accident.”

“Your parents wouldn’t let any of us see you,” Sandra said, and her face got tight, the way it did when she was keeping herself from saying something she would regret later. “They didn’t even call us,” she said after a second. “I found out about it because Khamal forwarded me the L.A. Times story on Facebook.”

“There was a story about it?” you said, surprised.

“Yeah,” Sandra said. “It wasn’t really about you. It was about the asshole who ran that light. He’s a partner at Wickcomb Lassen Jenkins and Bing. Outside counsel for half the studios.”

“I need to find that article,” you said.

“I’ll send it to you,” Sandra said.

“Thanks,” you said.

“I resent having to find out you were in a life-threatening accident through the Los Angeles Times,” Sandra said. “I think I rate better than that.”

“My mom never liked you as much after you broke my heart,” you said.

“We were sophomores in high school,” Sandra said. “And you got over it. Pretty quickly, too, since you were all over Jenna a week later.”

“Maybe,” you said. The Jenna Situation, as you recalled it now, had been fraught with fraughtiness.

“Anyway,” Sandra said. “Even if she or your dad didn’t tell me, they could have told Naren. He’s one of your best friends. Or Kel. Or Gwen. And once we did find out, they wouldn’t let any of us see you. They said they didn’t want us to see you like that.”

“They actually said that to you?” you asked.

Sandra was quiet for a moment. “They didn’t say it out loud, but there was subtext there,” she said. “They didn’t want us to see you in that condition. They didn’t want us to have a memory of you like that. Naren was the one who pushed them the most about it, you know. He was ready to come back from Princeton and camp out on your doorstep until they let him see you. And then you got better.”

You smiled, remembering the blubbery conversation the two of you had when you called him to let you know you were okay. And then you stopped smiling. “It doesn’t make any sense,” you said.

“What specifically?” asked Sandra.

“My dad told me that I’d been recovered and awake for days before I got my memory back,” you said. “That I was acting like myself during that time.”

“Okay,” Sandra said.

“So why didn’t I call you?” you said. “We talk or see each other pretty much every week when I’m in town. Why didn’t I call Naren? I talk to him every other day. Why didn’t I update Facebook or send any texts? Why didn’t I tell anyone I was okay? It’s just about the first thing I did when I did regain my memory.”

Sandra opened her mouth to respond, but then closed it, considering. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “You would have called or texted, if for no other reason than that any one of us would have killed you if you didn’t.”

“Exactly,” you said.

“So you do think your parents are lying to you,” Sandra said.

“Maybe,” you said.

“And you think that somehow this is related to your medical information, which shows something weird,” Sandra said.

“Maybe,” you said again.

“What do you think the connection is?” Sandra asked.

“I have no idea,” you admitted.

“You know that by law you’re allowed to look at your own medical records,” Sandra said. “If you think this is something medical, that’s the obvious place to start.”

“How long will that take?” you asked.

“If you go to the hospital and request them? They’ll make you file a request form and then send it to a back room where it’s pecked at by chickens for several days before giving you a précis of your record,” Sandra said. “Which may or may not be helpful in any meaningful sense.”

“You’re smiling, so I assume there’s an Option B,” you said to Sandra.

Sandra, who was indeed smiling, picked up her phone and made a call, and talked in a bright and enthusiastic voice to whoever was on the other end of the line, passing along your name and pausing only to get the name of the hospital from you. After another minute she hung up.

“Who was that?” you asked.

“Sometimes the firm I’m interning for needs to get information more quickly than the legal process will allow,” Sandra said. “That’s the guy we use to get it. He’s got moles in every hospital from Escondido to Santa Cruz. You’ll have your report by dinnertime.”

“How do you know about this guy?” you asked.

“What, you think a partner is going to get caught with this guy’s number in his contact list?” Sandra said. “It’s always the intern’s job to take care of this sort of thing. That way, if the firm gets caught, it’s plausible deniability. Blame it on the stupid, superambitious law student. It’s brilliant.”

“Except for you, if your guy gets caught,” you noted.

Sandra shrugged. “I’d survive,” she said. You’re reminded that her father sold his software company to Microsoft in the late 1990s for $3.6 billion and cashed out before the Internet bubble burst. In a sense, law school was an affectation for her.

Sandra noted the strange look on your face. “What?” she asked, smiling.

“Nothing,” you said. “Just thinking about the lifestyles of the undeservingly rich and pampered.”

“You’d better be including yourself in that thought, Mr. I-changed-my-major-eight-times-in-college-and-still-don’t-know-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life-sad-bastard,” Sandra said. “I’m not so happy to see you alive that I won’t kill you.”

“I do,” you promised.

“You’ve been the worst of us,” Sandra pointed out. “I only changed my major four times.”

“And then took a couple of years off farting around before starting law school,” you said.

“I founded a start-up,” Sandra said. “Dad was very proud of me.”

You said nothing, smiling.

“All right, fine, I founded a start-up with angel investing from my dad and his friends, and then proclaimed myself ‘spokesperson’ while others did all the real work,” Sandra said. “I hope you’re happy now.”

“I am,” you said.

“But it was still something,” Sandra said. “And I’m doing something now. Drifting through grad school hasn’t done you any favors. Just because you’ll never have to do anything with your life doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything with your life. We both know people like that. It’s not pretty.”

“True,” you agreed.

“Do you know what you want to do with your life now?” Sandra asked.

“The first thing I want to do is figure out what’s happening to me right now,” you said. “Until I do, it doesn’t feel like I have my life back. It doesn’t even feel like it’s really my life.”

You stood in front of your mirror, naked, not because you are a narcissist but because you are freaking out. On your iPad are the medical records Sandra’s guy acquired for you, including the records from your car crash. The records include pictures of you, in the hospital, as you were being prepped for the surgery, and the pictures they took of your brain after they stabilized you.

The list of things that were broken, punctured or torn in your body reads like a high school anatomy test. The pictures of your body look like the mannequins your father’s effects crews would strew across the ground in the cheapo horror films he used to produce when you were a kid. There is no way, given the way in which you almost died and what they had to do to keep you alive, that your body should, right now, be anything less than a patchwork of scars and bruises and scabs parked in a bed with tubes and/or catheters in every possible orifice.

You stood in front of your mirror, naked, and there was not a scratch on you.

Oh, there are a few things. There’s the scar on the back of your left hand, commemorating the moment when you were thirteen that you went over your handlebars. There’s the small, almost unnoticeable burn mark below your lower lip from when you were sixteen and you leaned over to kiss Jenna Fischmann at the exact moment she was raising a cigarette to her mouth. There’s the tiny incision mark from the laparoscopic appendectomy you had eighteen months ago; you have to bend over and part your pubic hair to see it. Every small record of the relatively minimal damage you’ve inflicted on your body prior to the accident is there for you to note and mark.

There’s nothing relating to the accident at all.

The abrasions that scraped the skin off much of your right arm: gone. The scar that would mark where your tibia tore through to the surface of your left leg: missing. The bruises up and down your abdomen where your ribs popped and snapped and shredded muscle and blood vessels inside of you: not a hint they ever existed.

You spent most of an hour in front of the mirror, glancing at your medical records for specific incidents of trauma and then looking back into the glass for the evidence of what’s written there. There isn’t any. You are in the sort of unblemished health that only someone in their early twenties can be. It’s like the accident never happened, or at the very least, never happened to you.

You picked up your iPad and turned it off, making a special effort not to pull up the images of your latest MRI, complete with the MRI technician’s handwritten notation of, “Seriously, WTF?” because the disconnect between what the previous set of MRIs said about your brain and what the new ones said is like the disconnect between the shores of Spain and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The previous MRI indicated that your future would be best spent as an organ donor. The current MRI showed a perfectly healthy brain in a perfectly healthy body.

There’s a word for such a thing.

“Impossible.” You said it to yourself, looking at yourself in the mirror, because you doubted that at this point anyone else would say it to you. “Just fucking impossible.”

You looked around your room, trying to see it like a stranger. It’s larger than most people’s first apartments and is strewn with the memorabilia of the last few years of your life and the various course corrections you’ve made, trying to figure out what it was you were supposed to be doing with yourself. On the desk, your laptop, bought to write screenplays but used primarily to read Facebook updates from your far-flung friends. On the bookshelves, a stack of anthropology texts that stand testament to a degree that you knew you would never use even as you were getting it; a delaying tactic to avoid facing the fact you didn’t know what the hell you were doing.

On the bedside table is the Nikon DSLR your mother gave you as a gift when you said you were giving some thought to photography; you used it for about a week and then put it on the shelf and didn’t use it again. Next to it, the script from The Chronicles of the Intrepid, evidence of your latest thing, dipping your toe into the world of acting to see if it might be for you.

Like the screenwriting and anthropology and photography, it’s not; you already know it. As with everything else, though, there’d be the period between when you discovered the fact and when you could exit gracefully from the field. With anthropology, it was when you received the degree. With the screenwriting, it was a desultory meeting with an agent who was giving you twenty minutes as a favor to your father. With acting, it will be doing this episode of the show and then bowing out, and then returning to this room to figure out what the next thing will be.

You turned back to the mirror and looked at yourself one more time, naked, unblemished, and wondered if you would have been more useful to the world as an organ donor than you are right now: perfectly healthy, perfectly comfortable and perfectly useless.

You lay on your stretcher on the set of The Chronicles of the Intrepid, waiting for the crew to move around to get another shot and becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Part of that was your makeup, which was designed to make you look pallid and sweaty and bruised, requiring constant application of a glycerin substance that made you feel as if you were being periodically coated in personal lubricant. Part of it was that two of the other actors were spending all their time staring at you.

One of them was an extra like you, a guy named Brian Abnett, and you mostly ignored him because you knew it was common knowledge on the set that you’re the son of the show’s producer, and you knew that there was a certain type of low-achieving actor who would love to become chummy with you on the idea that it would advance their own status, a sort of work-through-entourage thing. You knew what he’s about and it’s not anything you wanted to deal with.

The other, though, was Marc Corey, who was one of the stars of the show. He was already in perfectly well with your father, so he didn’t need you to advance his career, and what you knew of him from Gawker, TMZ and the occasional comment from your father suggested that he’s not the sort of person who would be wasting any of his precious, precious time with you. So the fact he couldn’t really keep his eyes off of you is disconcerting.

You spent several hours acting like a coma patient while Corey and a cast of extras hovered over your stretcher during a simulated shuttle attack, ran with it down various hallway sets, and swung it into the medical bay set, where another set of extras, in medical staff costumes, pretend to jab you with space needles and waved fake gizmos over you like they were trying to diagnose your condition. Every now and again you cracked open an eye to see if Abnett or Corey was still gawking at you. One or the other usually was. Your one scene of actual acting had you opening your eyes as if you were coming out of a bout of unconsciousness. This time they were both staring at you. They were supposed to be doing that in the script. You still wondered if either or both of them were thinking of hitting on you after the show wraps for the day.

Eventually the day was done, and you scraped off the KY and bruise makeup, formally ending your acting career forever. On your way out, you saw Abnett and Corey talking to each other. For a reason you couldn’t entirely explain to yourself, you changed your course and walked right up to the both of them.

“Matt,” Marc said to you as you walked up.

“What’s going on?” you asked, in a tone that made it clear that the phrase was not a casual greeting but an actual interrogative.

“What do you mean?” Marc said.

“The two of you have been staring at me all day,” you said.

“Well, yes,” Brian Abnett said. “You’ve been playing a character in a coma. We’ve been carting you around on a stretcher all day. That requires us to look at you.”

“Spare me,” you said to Abnett. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Marc opened his mouth to say something, then closed it and turned to Abnett. “I still have to work here after today,” he said.

Abnett smiled wryly. “So I get to be the redshirt on this one,” he said to Marc.

“It’s not like that,” Marc said. “But he needs to know.”

“No, I agree,” Abnett said. He slapped Marc on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of this, Marc.”

“Thanks,” Marc said, and then turned to you. “It’s good to see you, Matt. It really is.” He walked off quickly.

“I have no idea what that was about,” you said to Abnett, after Marc walked off. “Before today I’m pretty sure he never gave me a thought whatsoever.”

“How are you feeling, Matt?” Abnett said, not directly answering you.

“What do you mean?” you asked.

“I think you know what I mean,” Abnett said. “You feeling good? Healthy? Like a new man?”

You felt a little cold at that last comment. “You know,” you said.

“I do,” Abnett said. “And now I know that you know, too. Or at least, that you know something.”

“I don’t think I know as much as you do,” you said.

Abnett looked at you. “No, you probably don’t. In which case, I think you and I need to get out of here and go somewhere we can get a drink. Maybe several.”

You returned to your room late in the evening and stood in the middle of it, searching for something. Searching for the message that had been left for you.

“Hester left you a message,” Abnett had told you, after he explained everything else that had happened, every other absolutely impossible thing. “I don’t know where it is because he didn’t tell me. He told Kerensky, who told Marc, who told me. Marc says it’s somewhere in your room, somewhere you might find it but no one else would look—and someplace you wouldn’t look, unless you went looking for it.”

“Why would he do it that way?” you had asked Abnett.

“I don’t know,” Abnett had said. “Maybe he figured there was a chance you wouldn’t actually figure it out. And if you didn’t figure it out, what would be the point in telling you? You probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. I barely believe it, and I met my guy. That was some weirdness, I’ll tell you. You never met yours. You could very easily doubt it.”

You didn’t doubt it. You had the physical evidence of it. You had you.

You went first to your computer and looked through the folders, looking for documents that had titles you didn’t remember giving any. When you didn’t find any, you rearranged the folders so you could look for files that were created since you had your accident. There were none. You checked your e-mail queue to see if there were any e-mails from yourself. None. Your Facebook page was jammed with messages from friends from high school, college and grad school, who heard you were back from your accident. Nothing from yourself, no new pictures posted into your albums. No trace of you leaving a message for you.

You stood up from your desk and turned around, scanning the room. You went to your bookshelves. There you took down the blank journals that you had bought around the time you decided to be a screenwriter, so you could write down your thoughts and use them later for your masterworks. You thumbed through them. They were as blank as they had been before. You placed them back on the shelf and then ran your eyes over to your high school yearbooks. You pulled them down, disturbing the dust on the bookshelf, and opened them, looking for a new inscription among the ones that were already there. There were none. You returned them to the shelf, and as you did so you noticed another place on the bookshelf where the dust had been disturbed, but not in the shape of a book.

You looked at the shape of the disturbance for a minute, and then you turned around, walked to your bed table and picked up your camera. You slid open the slot for the memory card, popped it out, took it to your computer and opened up the pictures folder, arranging it so you could see the picture files by date.

There were three new files made since your accident. One photo and two video files.

The picture file was of someone’s legs and shoes. You smiled at this. The first video file consisted of someone panning across the room with the camera, swinging it back and forth as if they were trying to figure out how the thing worked.

The third video was of you. In it, your face appeared, followed by some wild thrashing as you set down the camera and propped it up so you would stay in the frame. You were sitting. The autofocus buzzed back and forth for a second and then settled, framing you sharply.

“Hi, Matthew,” you said. “I’m Jasper Hester. I’m you. Sort of. I’ve spent a couple of days with your family now, talking to them about you, and they tell me you haven’t touched this camera in a year, which I figure means it’s the perfect place to leave you a message. If you wake up and just go on with your life, then you’ll never find it and there’s no harm done. But if you do find this, I figure it’s because you’re looking for it.

“If you are looking for it, then I figure either one of two things have happened. Either you’ve figured out something’s weird and no one will tell you anything about it, or you’ve been told about it and you don’t believe it. If it’s the first of these, then no, you’re not crazy or had some sort of weird psychotic break with your life. You haven’t had a stroke. You did have a massive brain injury, but not with the body you’re in now. So don’t worry about that. Also, you don’t have amnesia. You don’t have any memory of this because it’s not you doing it. I guess that’s pretty simple.

“If you’ve been told what happened and you don’t believe it, hopefully this will convince you. And if it doesn’t, well, I don’t know what to tell you, then. Believe what you want. But in the meantime indulge me for a minute.”

In the video Hester who is not you but also is ran his fingers through his hair and looked away, trying to figure what to say next.

“Okay, here’s what I want to say. I think I exist because you exist. Somehow, in a way I really couldn’t ever try to explain in any way that makes any sense, I believe that the day you asked your dad if you could try acting in his show, on that day something happened. Something happened that meant that in the universe I live in, events twisted and turned and did whatever they do so that I was born and I lived a life that you could be part of, as me, as a fictional character, in your world. I don’t know how it works or why, but it does. It just does.

“Our lives are twisted together, because we’re sort of the same person, just one universe and a few centuries apart. And because of that, I think I can ask you this next question.

“Honestly, Matthew, what the fuck are we doing with our lives?

“I’ve been talking to your family about you, you know. They love you. They all do. They love you and when you had your accident it was like someone came along and stabbed them in the heart. It’s amazing how much love they have for you. But, and again, I can tell you this because you’re me, I can tell they think you need to get your ass in gear. They talk about how you have so many interests, and how you’re waiting for that one thing that will help you achieve your potential, and what I hear is what they won’t say: You need to grow up.

“I know it because I’m the same way. Of course I’m the same way, I’m you. I’ve been drifting along for years, Matthew. I joined the Universal Union navy not because I was driven but because I didn’t know what to do with myself. And I figured as long as I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself I might as well see the universe, right? But even then I’ve always just done the bare minimum of what I had to do. There wasn’t much point to doing more.

“It wasn’t bad. To be honest I thought I was pretty clever. I was getting away with something in my own way. But then I get here and saw you, brain-dead and with tubes coming out of every part of your body. And I realized I wasn’t getting away with anything. Just like you didn’t get away with anything. You were just born, fucked around for a while, got hit by a car and died, and that’s your whole life story right there. You don’t win by getting through all your life not having done anything.

“Matthew, if you’re looking at this now it’s because one of us finally did something useful with his life. It’s me. I decided to save your life. I swapped bodies with you because I think the way it works means that I’ll survive in my world in your messed-up body, and you’ll survive in mine. If I’m wrong and we both die, or you survive and I die, then I’ll have died trying to save you. And yes, that sucks for me, but my life expectancy because of your dad’s show wasn’t all that great to begin with. And all things considered, it was one of the best ways I could have died.

“But I’m going to let you in on a secret. I think this is going to work. Don’t ask me why—hell, don’t ask me why about any of this situation—I just think it will. If it does, I have only one thing I want from you. That you do something. Stop drifting. Stop trying things until you get bored with them. Stop waiting for that one thing. It’s stupid. You’re wasting time. You almost wasted all of your time. You were lucky I was around, but I get a feeling this isn’t something we’ll get to do twice.

“I’m going to do the same thing. I’m done drifting, Matthew. Our lives are arbitrary and weird, but if I pull this off—if me and all my friends from the Intrepid pull this off—then we get something that everyone else in our universe doesn’t get: a chance to make our own fate. I’m going to take it. I don’t know how yet. But I’m not going to blow it.

“Don’t you blow it either, Matthew. I don’t expect you to know what to do with yourself yet. But I expect you to figure it out. I think that’s a fair request from me, all things considered.

“Welcome to your new life, Matthew. Don’t fuck this one up.”

Hester reached over and turned off the camera.

You clicked out of the video window, closed the laptop and turned around to see your father, standing in the doorway.

“It’s not amnesia,” he said. There were tears on his face.

“I know,” you said.