Redshirts (33 page)

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.