The Last Words

From the journal of Jude Guerrero 12/21/2012

So I woke up this morning like I guess I do every morning; adrenaline pumping through my veins, looking for my gun, realizing I’m not where I think I am and checking my watch, an old habit. And as soon as I look at my watch, I know something’s wrong. The date, it’s off by about three years, like I’m three years into the future.

And then I see the tattoos. The tattoos tell me what happened. And the journal, this journal. Good thing I’m organized, the journal even has notes so I don’t have to read the whole thing every day. Every few entries there is a flagged page, with cliff notes of my life on them. Short, bullet pointed. What happened, what it’s called — anterograde amnesia.

• You have anterograde amnesia. It means you can’t remember anything for very long. Yeah, like that guy in Memento.

• You’re in New York, at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, on Wards Island.

• Tim Tom — Big hairy guy, has aphasia, it means he can’t understand language, written or spoken. It’s because of a head injury. But he can talk, a lot, and sometimes he gets his words a little mixed up. Talk to him if you’re ever in a bad mood, and you will be.

• Dr. Gates — He’s the one what brought you. He’s a pretty big deal, apparently, has written a few books, had you transferred here because of your condition.

• Eric — Ex drug addict, kind of psycho, never really sleeps, kind of a dick.

• Cassie — Blond woman, a little older, cusses up a storm, schizophrenic, thinks “they” are trying to control our minds with TV, internet, radio, etc.

• Marcus — Autistic? Never really talks, but watches movies a lot.

• Adam — Manic depressive.

• Jermaine — The big orderly, even though that’s not what they call them anymore.

There were some others.

Will it be like this the rest of my life or will Dr. Gates find a way to fix me? Because this, this is broken. Since taking shrapnel in Kabul my memory has been damaged to the point that I can’t remember anything, even something traumatic or important, for more than a few hours.

Dr. Gates says it’s rare, and he’s studying me, saying I can help people, help them understand more about the nature of memory and so on and some shit. But it doesn’t change the fact that I am broken, fragmented.

I went out to “meet” everyone again, like I guess I do every day. They all know me, but I don’t know them. Tim Tom, who talks up a storm but has no idea what I’m saying. Cassie, who cusses harder than any of my boys back…my boys, my platoon, they’re all lost. I don’t know why I keep writing this. I should take it out, forget that it happened. I could tell them to lie to me, I would never know the difference. But maybe I deserve to know, to be punished, to mourn them every day, every single day, as if I had just lost them. I’m going back to my room.

OK, enough, I’m out again, I can’t just sit in there and mope. There are some here that do just that, all day, but I suppose that’s why they are here. Because they’re sick, depressed, something. Not me, I’m here because Dr. Gates wanted me here, to study me, along with a few others with rare disabilities like mine. Like Tim Tom. Apparently Dr. Gates is pretty well known, who else would have the pull to get me transferred from the VA clinic in Virginia where I apparently was before to here, The Manhattan Psychiatric Center. It looks nice here. It’s on an island next to Manhattan and I can see the skyline from my room. I’m guessing this room would cost quite a bit if it was a condo. I hope this Dr. is as good as everyone is saying he is, I hope he’s good enough to help me, and Tim. I have to admit I like Tim, even though he keeps calling me Joe, but I don’t know how to tell him my name since his disability keeps him from understanding me.

From the journal of Dr. Montgomery Gates 12/21/2012

Jude is in a slightly better mood today, though I know that it doesn’t really mean anything. His mornings change from day to day. I would love to know why, why some mornings he just lies in bed and others he gets up, exercises, socializes, mourning for his fallen comrades only briefly. He finds out the same news, every morning, like it had just happened, but his emotional responses are all over the place. Just one of the many mysteries of his fractured mind.

The only consistent progress I’ve seen so far is from his performance on the Tower of Hanoi test, every day, just a little better. Proving the findings we had with patient HM, that semantic memory may be intact, even when episodic memory is not. HM was also able to improve on this test on a daily basis, though not as fast as Jude.

The only other constant for him seems to be Timothy. While the others he likes some days and dislikes (quite clearly) other days, due to his “first impression” of them every day, him and Timothy seem to get along like gangbusters, no matter what the first thing Timothy says to him is, and it’s usually quite ridiculous or inappropriate. He never even seems to mind that Timothy continues to call him Joe because he doesn’t know his real name. The other patients have taken to calling him Joe too but his reaction to that varies from patient to patient and day to day.

His journaling is getting more extensive every day, and more personal, even though in his notes he makes it clear that he knows I will be reading the entries, something he seems completely OK with. Where his journal entries were short and to the point at first he now writes elaborate detailed histories of each day. Which makes sense, considering that his journal is now, basically, his only way to remember things. The journal has been such a success with him that I have encouraged it in the other patients, and some of them had even requested a journal before that, having seen Jude wandering about constantly writing in his. The other patients, they look up to him, even knowing that he will not remember them. I suppose it is because they know he was a soldier, or maybe just because of his still impressive physical presence.

Something new he wrote in his journal today surprised me. He wondered if he should remove every reference to what happened to his platoon during and after the helicopter crash. I admit I had considered this myself, to keep him from going through the same devastating sense of loss every day. It would also cut the mourning period down so we could do more tests and make more progress. But I don’t know if I could ever bring myself to do it, to lie to him. Surely he would ask me himself what happened to his men if it wasn’t in his journal. Could I really look him in his face and lie to him about that? Every single day?

From the journal of Jude Guerrero 12/21/2012

So this test, the tower of Hanoi, you may already know what it is and I may have already written about it but this is my memory and I’ll probably repeat lots of things so deal with it.

It’s three stacks of poles with rings of different sizes, largest at the bottom going to smallest at the top, on one pole. You have to figure out a way to get all the rings onto another pole in the same order. Dr. Gates say I’m getting better at it every day, even though, of course, I don’t remember ever doing it before. But, he says this is very exciting. He gets excited a lot.

I have to admit, it didn’t seem familiar at all but I was going through it like a breeze, nothing to it. It felt weird as hell, being good at something that I knew should be tough, doing it so easily. Not that I’m dumb, I speak Arabic, Spanish, French, it’s why I was talked into becoming a SEAL, but this should still be a tough puzzle for anyone and it seemed so simple, like it was solving itself and just using my hands.

I got to the last ring, the Doctor had that big ass grin on his face, when there was a commotion in the TV room.