The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

silent, men gone. He lifted the glass, drank the milk. Just a shimmer. All right! These gloves were working. The trick was to be quick about every gesture.
    And also to get out of here! But they wouldn’t let him. “I don’t want a brain scan,” he said. “My brain is fine. It’s my hands that are driving me crazy.”
    But they were trying to help—Dr. Morris, the chief resident, and his friends, and his Aunt Vivian who stayed at his side by the hour. At his behest, Dr. Morris had contacted the ambulance men, and the Coast Guard, the Emergency Room people, the skipper of the boat who had revived him before the Coast Guard had been able to find her—anybody who might have remembered his saying something important. After all, a single word might unlock his memory.
    But there were no words. Michael had mumbled something when he opened his eyes, the skipper had said, but she hadn’t been able to make out a specific word. It began with an L, she thought, a name, maybe. But that was all. The Coast Guard took him up after that. In the ambulance he’d thrown a punch. Had to be subdued.
    Still, he wished he could talk to all those people, especially the woman who’d brought him around. He told the press that when they came to question him.
    Jimmy and Stacy remained with him late each night. His Aunt Vivian was there each morning. Therese finally came, timid, frightened. She didn’t like hospitals. She couldn’t be around sick people.
    He laughed. Wasn’t that California for you, he thought. Imagine saying something like that. And then he did the impulsive thing. He ripped off the glove and grabbed her hand.
    Scared, don’t like you, you’re the center of attention, knock it off all this, I don’t believe you drowned out there, ridiculous, I want to get out of here, I, you should have called me.
    “Go on home, honey,” he said.
    Sometime during the silent hours, one of the nurses slipped a silver pen into his hand. He’d been sound asleep. The gloves were on the table.
    “Tell me her name,” she said.
    “I don’t get her name. I see a desk.”
    “Try harder.”
    “A beautiful mahogany desk with a green blotter on it.”
    “But the woman who used the pen?”
    “Allison.”
    “Yes. Where is she?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Try again.”
    “I tell you I don’t know. She gave it to you, and you put it in your purse, and this morning, you took it out. It’s just images, pictures, I don’t know where she is. You’re in a cafe, and you’re drawing on the napkin with the pen. You’re thinking about showing it to me.”
    “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
    “I don’t know, I told you. I don’t see it. Allison, that’s all I see. She wrote a grocery list with it, for Chrissakes, you want me to tell you what was on the list?”
    “You have to see more than that.”
    “Well, I don’t!” He put back on the gloves. Nothing was going to make him take them off again.
    He left the hospital the following day.
    The next three weeks were an agony. A couple of Coast Guard men called him, so did one of the ambulance drivers, but they had nothing really to tell him that would help. As for the rescue boat, the woman wanted to remain out of it. And Dr. Morris had promised her that she would. Meantime, the Coast Guard admitted to the press that they had failed to record the name of the craft or its registry. One of the newspapers referred to it as an ocean-going cruiser. Maybe it was on the other side of the world.
    Michael realized by this time that he had told his story to too many people. Every popular magazine in the country wanted to talk to him. He could not go out at all without a reporter blocking his path and some perfect stranger placing a wallet or photograph in his hand, and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Mail piled up at the door, and though he kept packing his suitcase to leave, he could not bring himself to do it. Instead he drank—ice-cold beer all day long, then bourbon when the beer did not make