Amnesia by G. H. Ephron

would be there for me by the time I got home. Curiosity and interest were nestled in the anxiety lodged like a hairball in the pit of my stomach. Like many times over the last four days, I was actually thinking about something other than my patients or the past, and it felt good.
    I ran into our intern on my way to the common area to find Mr. O’Flanagan. Suzanne had been evaluating him, so I invited her to join me. We found him sitting placidly, staring off into space. I stooped and brought my face close to his. I could just make out a dark smudge under his bruised eye.
    â€œMr. O‘Flanagan, I heard you had a little problem last night.” O’Flanagan frowned. “Do you remember what happened?”
    â€œHappened?” He shook his head. “Nothing happened.”
    â€œDon’t you remember how you got this bruise under your eye?”
    â€œOh, that,” he said with a shrug. “It’s nothing. You know, you have to watch out for walking into doors around here.”
    Just then, Mr. Kootz got up from a sofa on the opposite wall. He was a short, solid man, built like a human fire hydrant. He
had a baseball cap jammed on his head. O’Flanagan flinched and cowered as Kootz, mumbling animatedly to himself and punching the air with a clenched fist, stomped out of the room, untied sneaker laces flapping.
    â€œYou know, that’s a very bad man,” O’Flanagan said.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œHe’s just a bad man. I don’t like him.”
    â€œWhy don’t you like him?” I pressed.
    â€œHe’s just a bad man,” O’Flanagan repeated, rubbing distractedly at his bruised eye.
    â€œWell, I guess you should avoid bad men if you can. Anything I can get for you? Do you need anything?”
    He shook his head.
    Down the hall, I asked Suzanne, “What did you notice?”
    â€œThe way he got so upset when Mr. Kootz walked by — at some level, he does remember.”
    â€œGood.” I nodded. “You’re right. It’s an example of how there are different kinds of memory. We remember facts one way, but we remember emotions another way. It’s the facts that O’Flanagan has lost. He genuinely has no memory of the fight, but he does have an emotional recall of the pain. And so he knows something happened, something that he associates with Mr. Kootz.”
    â€œI get that. But why does he say he walked into a door?”
    â€œHe’s confabulating — backfilling. When you can’t remember something, it leaves a hole in your past, and such holes are intolerable. We tend to want to plug them up. So we fill in with something that happened some other time. Or we make something up. Mr. O’Flanagan isn’t lying. He isn’t aware that he’s doing it. And with his alcoholic past, no doubt he’s walked into plenty of doors.”

6
    I GOT home after six to find Annie at my front door. The weather had become clear, crisp, and fall-like. She turned as I pulled the car into the driveway and watched me approach the house. “For you,” she said, holding aloft a fat brown envelope. It was already getting dark and Annie’s curly hair shone like a halo in the glow of the porch light behind her.
    As she handed me the envelope, her fingers brushed mine, causing a loud snap of static electricity. Annie laughed. “That was a test to see if you’re alive or just faking it.”
    I knew this was banter but the observation hit home. “And?”
    â€œYou’re alive. Definitely alive. Good thing, too, because otherwise I’d have to report you to the authorities.”
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œFor dishonest living.”
    That’s just what I’d been doing. Living under false pretenses. As I came alongside, Annie turned and her face moved from shadow to light. I hadn’t noticed before the light sprinkling of freckles on her nose. “Dishonest living, eh? Could I