Chapter

28

“Love your dress, Tamra,” Sobel said as she passed one of the computer station operators.

“Thank you, Ms. Sobel.”

She was leading me now, thank God, because I had no idea which door we should be going through. She walked a couple of steps ahead as we came to an outer office entrance which led into a private secretary area and beyond that, the infamous rosewood doors leading into her office Mathews had told me about. “No calls,” is all she said as she passed her secretary.

She entered her office. I followed. She shut the door behind me.  A bank of computers and droning print-out machines also housed in rosewood held my attention as I waited for her to come around in front, but she came up behind me with, “I thought you’d never come back. I hoped Randall would relay my thoughts... “

Her arms were around me, her head pressed against my back. I turned around. We were face to face. Her eyes studied mine. I was obviously giving her nothing back. The hurt in her face was my fault. All I could do was be gentle. I took her by the shoulders and moved her to the couch and sat. She was still looking for some response. “Lauren...I’m not who you think I am...I don’t believe. I’ve had a loss of memory...amnesia… don’t have any memories before five and a half months ago. You and others think I’m Charlie Stevens. I’ve had some people tell me I look like him, but I’ve also learned a lot about him and I...this person standing here, doesn’t feel like that man at all. He’s not me, Lauren. I can’t explain it any other way. I have reasons inside me to believe I’m Charles Randall, the real Charles Randall. The man you met before is my psychiatrist, Dr. Mathews.”

She was ashen white, suspended in a shock I felt only she could ever understand.  “There’s a lot more,” I said. “Would you like to pour yourself a drink?”

She stared at me another few moments, then the color flowed back into her face. A slight smile appeared, and she passed the ball I didn’t want to have to handle right back into my lap, “You are the best, Charlie. You are truly incredible. But, darling, enough’s enough.” She leaned across and kissed me passionately...a kiss that my lack of response obviously left her with more hurt. “Okay,” she muttered. She rose and walked to her desk, lifting a tissue from the top drawer and stepping to the window overlooking the East River. “You obviously have something important to say to me. Why didn’t you just do it from Mexico, California, wherever? Why didn’t you just phone it in, or…” she gestured to the printing machines… “e-mail me.”

She was holding back honest emotion. I didn’t understand it.

It took me about thirty minutes to give her my experiences of the past five months. She sat at the desk and listened with her head bowed. A gold pen idly held between her fingers made small nervous punctuation on a note pad, creating a nebulous series of dots. She had anchored herself well.

When I had finished, I got up and went to her still bowed head. I knelt down for her to see my eyes as I said, “Lauren, don’t you see, I can’t be Charlie. I’m just as confused as you that I look something like him. I did see the picture you gave Mathews. But, can’t you see...I’m slighter in build, my hair is different, you have to have heard my voice is different, and most important...I don’t feel...”  I took her hand and placed it in mine, “...I don’t feel like Charlie. I don’t have any...this is not meant to hurt you, but...I don’t have any special feelings toward you.”

“Who is she?” came her curt reply.

I tried to get past what she was pursuing. “Lauren? This isn’t Charlie with another woman somewhere.  Look at me. I’m Charles Randal.  Plain. I’m ordinary inside. I don’t understand the lifestyle I’ve found myself in. What your thinking is me is not me.”

She looked up. A mixture of anger, rejection and hurt formed her response. “They did a miracle on you. Hair, weight, voice. I bet you even had them fix the scar.”

“Scar?” I said.

She asked the next question as if she were respecting the lie she believed I needed to tell her. “May I?” She lifted my T-shirt and looked at my stomach. Her eyes could no longer contain the hurt. The overflow was real pain. I knew at that moment, her emotion was a pain of loss...loss that even a man with only six months existence could understand. “They did a beautiful job, Charlie. Not a mark left.” Her fingers continued caressing a spot just under my ribs as tears fell from her cheeks. “I don’t believe you. I believe you’ve kicked cancer, and now you’ve gone to elaborate means to kick me for reasons I don’t understand. But...”  She wiped her eyes and continued, “...I’ve tried. You are holding firm...a trait you learned from me, God damn it...”  She turned away. “Please leave now, please. Please...now.”

My leaving wasn’t easy.  I didn’t like this feeling I’d really hurt her.  But, as I left, I told her secretary where I was staying if Sobel wanted to contact me. I felt like honesty had betrayed me and destroyed someone else. That’s not what I expected. I didn’t feel right anymore. I didn’t feel right at all. I didn’t even feel like Charles. I had somehow lost even that thread of reality.

It was a long walk to the hotel. What if she was right?  What if this was a conspiracy I had created to drop her for some reason? Was this an elaborate means of establishing an alias? If so, what had I done to feel I needed all this? If I did have myself altered in Mexico, why didn’t I have my face changed as well? If the scar was true, they, whoever they were, certainly knew not only how to remove things, but how to change my face as well.

The one thing I knew for sure, even if all the above were true, was that I honestly had no memory of it. I consoled myself that I had truly lost my memory, whoever I was.

I went by way of the benches along the East River, crossed over through Central Park, over to The Hudson River and all the benches in between. Homelessness… homelessness took on a different meaning that day.