a.k.a.

1 - Waking Up

HE WOKE UP AND KNEW right away that he was in a hospital room. The sun was pushing its way through the window, the only light in the room. Bits of dust floated in front of the glass, swirling so that they almost looked alive, full of intentions. There shouldn’t be so much dust in a hospital, he thought.

The boy peeled a thin sheet off of himself and raised his head to glance down towards his body. He was wearing everyday clothes – a pair of jeans that were a bit muddied around the knees and a grey, long-sleeve t-shirt.

He sat up slowly, paying attention to how his body felt. He didn’t feel sick or wounded, didn’t notice any pain. He wasn’t connected to any hospital machines.

An older woman was sleeping in the bed closer to the window, her bedsheet slowly rising then crumpling down again with each simple breath. The sun made a patch of her hair look like silver and caught beautifully in the shallow wrinkles on her cheeks. The boy did not know her.

His eyes wandered up to the ceiling where four long, fluorescent tubes were firmly hanging. They weren’t giving off any light or humming the faint monotone song of electricity. There was no noise at all except a hint of a whistle from the old lady’s breathing.

The boy wondered where the doctors and nurses were. He imagined they would show up soon, as they always do in hospitals, and that it was probably best to stay where he was. So he rolled onto his side, facing the window to watch the dust dance in the sunlight.

He began to think about how he had arrived in the hospital. He couldn’t seem to remember. Something must have happened to me.

He began exploring with his hands, feeling his chest, then his head, probing and searching for bumps or bruises. Nothing.

He took a long breath and tried to remember what he had been doing earlier today. Nothing.

He tried to remember his own name, his home, his family. Nothing.

Except he did remember a voice. It had sounded kind, but frightened – a man’s voice. The voice had said to him, Son, the world is falling apart.

And that was the only thing he could remember from more than five minutes ago.

With each failed attempt at remembering, the boy became more aware of the sound of his own heart beating and of his breaths, coming faster and deeper. Though he was lying perfectly still and comfortable, an ocean of panic overcame him. He felt like he was beginning to drown. He forced himself to lie still, then let the fear spill over him for a few moments until he could breathe normally again.

Who am I? What am I doing here?

He tried to hold on to the sound of that voice in his head, the one clue he had to help him find his way back to something familiar, himself, his home. But the more he tried to remember it, the more he wondered if his mind was changing the tone of the voice, the inflection, the accent, the slight tremor with which it said, Son, the world is falling apart.



The boy’s mind was racing, but he was determined not to lose his calm. He lay still for a few more moments, then rose slowly from the bed. The dust particles responded with a wild flourish, as if they couldn’t stop themselves from panicking.

A pair of blue running shoes was by the bedside. He tried them on and they fit like Cinderella’s slippers. Must be mine.

He poked his head into the hallway. It was darker there, the sunlight only coming in checkered patterns through the open doorways along his side of the hall. He walked slowly down the hall, glancing in each room as he passed by, sensing no movement and hearing no noise.

At the end of the hall he found two elevators and hit the down button. The light didn’t come on. No power.

He walked around the corner, looking for a stairwell. He saw a sign for a bathroom instead, and decided that would make for a useful stop.

Despite the quiet in the hospital, he felt uneasy about leaving the bathroom door open. So he took a look at where the toilet was and tried to burn its location into his memory, as if his eyes were getting ready to hold their breath. He closed the door, strode across the small room in the dark and took a seat. When he was done he felt his way along the wall, back towards the door, turned the handle and began leave.

Then he wondered, Does the sink work? Or has it been turned off like the lights?

He looked back into the bathroom doorway to find the sink, and this time he saw himself in the mirror in the half-light. He was a boy he did not remember ever having seen before.

He was about 11 or 12 years old. He had short brown messy hair and light olive-colored skin.

He was completely unfamiliar with this boy in the mirror.

The faucet worked. Water poured out, cool and clear.

The boy washed his hands, then cupped them and drank a few gulps.

He left, taking one more quick glance at the stranger reflected in the mirror, and tried not to let the feeling that he was drowning overwhelm him again.



The boy found the stairwell and went down to the floor marked ‘M.’ There was no one else on the main floor and the lights were off here as well. He passed a reception desk, from where he could see a bank of doors that led outside. He walked up to the doors, expecting them to slide open. They didn’t move.

On the far left was a different sort of door, the kind you push. He gave it a shove and it opened more easily than he’d expected. Before he walked through it, he thought, What if it won’t open again from the outside? He returned to the reception desk, grabbed a piece of paper from a notepad, and folded it a few times until it made a thick wedge. Then he went through the door again, leaving the paper carefully in the place where the door would latch to prevent it from closing all the way.

There were quite a few cars in the parking lot. Clearly not everyone had driven away from the hospital when they had left. Where have they all gone, and why?

He walked through the parking lot towards what looked like a major street beyond it, with something gnawing at his mind. Something is not right here. But what?

As he approached the street, he realized what it was. There’s no traffic, no one around.

The whole world seemed to be like the hospital, inexplicably deserted. There were a few cars parked right in the middle of the formerly busy street as if they had been on their way to the grocery store and had simply stopped running, right there in their tracks.

A ways down the street he saw a jackrabbit sniffing at a car tire. Nothing else moved. The boy stood in the middle of the street, turning slowly around to look at this strange, abandoned world.

There was a sudden noise that came from the direction of another street off to his left,. The sound was harsh, alien, out of place. It took him a moment to recognize it as the sound of a car, driving quickly. He could see it now, a few blocks away, weaving in and out of the other vehicles that were parked along the road.

A few seconds later he saw two figures on bicycles, boys not much older than himself, pedalling madly after the car and shouting. He imagined that they were imploring the car’s driver to come back, though they were far enough away that he couldn’t make out the words.

He decided he didn’t want to be seen, so he ducked over to the nearest parked car and knelt down behind it, looking out over the bumper. He waited until the boys on bicycles followed the car another block or so away from him and he couldn’t see or hear them any longer.

He sat down on the asphalt and leaned his head against the car’s bumper. He scanned all around him and saw no other signs of life except two magpies swooping awkwardly from a cedar tree to a nearby fence. They flew as if their wings were too heavy for their bodies. He felt unbearably alone.

After a few minutes the boy noticed that the shadows were getting longer. He decided to return to the hospital and was glad to see his paper wedge still keeping the door from latching. By the time he was inside it was difficult to see by just the window-light. Without thinking about where he was going, he went carefully back up the stairs to the second floor, down the hall and into the room in which he had woken up. The old woman looked the same as before, only less silver, more golden in the fading light.

He kicked off his shoes, laid back down on his bed, and pulled the sheet over himself. He wondered for a moment if he would be able to sleep since he had just woken up an hour earlier.

In his mind, he replayed the moments since he had woken up, and tried again to reach back in his memories to a time before today. His thoughts went back again to that tremulous voice: Son, the world is falling apart.

His mind was racing when he lay down, but it only took a moment to be sweetly swallowed up by exhaustion. The boy slept.



He woke up hungry. There was scarcely any light in the room, and what little there was came through the doorway instead of the window. He slipped on his shoes and walked over towards the old woman. She looked different again in this light, frailer, her skin no longer shining. But she was still breathing and sleeping just as she had been the day before.

He noticed a cell phone on the table beside her bed and wondered how he hadn’t seen it the day before. Finally, something that will tell me who she is, or maybe who I am! The boy picked the phone up and swiped at the screen, but nothing happened. He tried the on button and a small green light flashed promisingly in the corner. He waited a few seconds as it warmed up.

The home screen on the phone came up almost immediately. No password. It was funny to him how he couldn’t remember his own