At the moment, I can’t offer a thorough introduction. The mirror shows that I’m a white male, late thirties, fairly good-looking in an unremarkable way, nice cheekbones, hair light brown, eyes grey, face that improves considerably if I smile, which I’m finding it hard to do just now. I’m living in a brownstone in Manhattan, where I go by the name Joe, innocuous enough. Most of my housemates call me Dad or Daddy. The name Joe Marzino was found in my wallet, which was found in the back pocket of my shorts. My wallet? So I’m told, but it’s not inconceivable that it’s someone else’s wallet placed in my pocket for an unknown and not benign reason, while I lay unconscious on the sidewalk a block away from New York’s Central Park.
That is the story I’ve been told.
I don’t remember seeing this house before the afternoon when I was brought here by the woman claiming to be my wife, with whom I now share a bed. She assures me I’m the father of three children, our children, presentable, unobjectionable children, I thought when I first saw them. They make a pleasant family for someone in need of one. Now after a couple of weeks of getting to know them, I’ve grown quite fond of them, mine or not. I love them, without remembering all the years when they came to be who they are. I miss those. But I should feel lucky—it could have been worse had some other woman come to the hospital to claim me—or no woman at all—after what I’m told was an accident involving a bicycle that knocked me to the ground and obliterated my memory, which might or might not return, all or part of it.
The first thing I remember of my present life is lying flat on my back with a woman leaning over me repeating, “Name? Name? Tell me your name, please?”
I couldn’t. I had no name, I had nothing except the clothes on my back and a throbbing pain in my left ankle.
“Name?” she urged.
Her face hovered over me, dark, young, tense. Maybe a trifle impatient. She wore large purplish glasses in which I could see my face. An anxious face, baffled, streaked with sweat and dirt…
She said, “I’m an EMT, and you’re in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. I have your wallet right here. If you have no objections, I’ll find some ID in there. Do I have your permission?”
I nodded.
“Your name is Joe Marzino,” she said. “So, Joe, how do you feel? Does it hurt anywhere?”
I sent my mind wandering along my body and rubbed my eyes as if that would help. “My ankle. The left.”
“Yes, there’s a bad bruise there. We’ll have it x-rayed. Anywhere else? No? You were knocked down by a bicycle on Columbus Avenue. Maybe you were jogging, you’ve got on sneakers and shorts, and you’re kind of sweaty. Are you a jogger? Can you remember what happened?” I recognized the lilting accent. Jamaica.
I shook my head.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
I thought for a while. “Nothing.” I felt stupid, embarrassed, like a child in school who’s called on and can’t answer the teacher’s question. How come I recognize a Jamaican accent when I didn’t recognize my own name?
“Okay, don’t worry. You’ll be fine soon. Are you married? We’d like to call your wife or your next of kin.”
I shrugged.
“I have your phone here, and there’s a number for home. We’ll try that.”
A scrim of drowsiness fell on the scene. When I woke, I was being wheeled through beige-colored corridors, lots of doors, large ugly abstract paintings on the walls. Clearly a hospital. Knowing something, anything at all, was a relief. I was wheeled into a small room where a cluster of men and women in grape-green outfits with name tags was leaning over me, poking and prodding. Name tags are a good idea, maybe we should all wear them, in case of situations like mine. A looming monitor displayed green lines wiggling about on a black background. Someone attached an IV to the back of my hand. I knew what an IV was. They asked many questions, but I didn’t know the answers to most of them, not my address or what I did for a living. I did know the name of the president—Obama—but not the year. They asked my address, but I couldn’t answer. They read out an address they claimed was mine, but it meant nothing to me.
“Do you know Central Park? You were found a block from the park. Do you go jogging there?”
After they got no answers, I was wheeled into an elevator and then to a double room. It must have been a high floor—out the window, way down below, was the park, its twining paths suggesting a child’s board game. A nurse, not the one from the ambulance, blonde, older, with a careworn face, asked me what I saw, and I said Central Park: rowboats on a lake, a few horses and carriages for the tourists. She seemed pleased—this time I was a clever lad who had answered correctly.
“I’m going to tell you a few facts about yourself, and I’ll come back in a little while and see what you remember, okay?” she said. “Your name is Joe Marzino, you’re thirty-seven years old, you live on West 84th Street, you work on West 57th Street, from the photos on your phone it looks like you have children … two? Three?” she asked. “You’re not an organ donor, you have a driver’s license, a library card and several credit cards, you’re in the Road Runners club and in Actors’ Equity …”
“How do you know so much about me?”
She waved the wallet at me. “It’s all in here, Joe, this is your life. You have fifty-six dollars in your wallet. All of that and your keys will be returned to you when you’re discharged.”
Keys. To what? “When will I be discharged?” When can I go home, is what I wanted to ask, but the word “home” didn’t suggest anything specific.
“Whenever the doctors say you’re ready. We’ll be doing x-rays to see if you need surgery on that ankle. And an MRI pretty soon. Try to be patient. By the way, you look familiar. Were you in the emergency room a couple of weeks ago with a teen-aged boy?”
“I don’t know. What was wrong with him?”
“It wasn’t serious. He slipped playing soccer at school and hit his head, but he only needed a few staples. No internal bleeding.”
“Staples?”
“Yes, we use them often now instead of stitches.”
*
Any doctor will tell you that the incidence of amnesia in books and movies is far greater than it is in actual life. Rarely do people get hit on the head or fall off a ladder and get back on their feet muttering, Who am I? Where am I? This, the medical profession maintains, is the stuff of fiction. “Real, diagnosable amnesia,” the novelist Jonathan Lethem writes in an anthology of stories on the subject, “people getting knocked on the head and forgetting their names—is mostly just a rumor in the world. It’s a rare condition, and usually a brief one. In books and movies, though, versions of amnesia lurk everywhere … Amnesiacs might not much exist, but amnesiac characters stumble everywhere through comic books, movies, and our dreams. We’ve all met them and been them.” In my case, his final words can be taken literally.
There are many kinds of amnesia, as anyone can find through a quick Google search, but the Who am I? Where am I? kind that I have, retrograde amnesia, doesn’t prevent you from doing Google searches, or driving a car, or remembering how to mix a Martini (or in my case, as I would soon find out, memorizing a new script). Yet medical websites agree that “although TV shows and movies portray people with amnesia losing their entire identities, that only happens in rare psychiatric conditions … Fortunately, amnesia usually isn’t that severe in real life.” How fortunate I am, the following will reveal.
Why is amnesia such a favorite theme? For one thing, it offers a character who is a blank slate, although amnesiacs are said to keep their customary “personalities.” (An oddness in itself, but more on that later.) We, the reader or movie-goer, ideally in the patient, accepting state of “negative capability” (I remember the phrase but not the source) wonder along with the afflicted character, what will be written on this slate? Is he or she a hero, a saint, an ordinary person? Not likely. Something has happened to bring on the condition—which will be revealed to us in good time—and the condition itself will generate more events. Mistakes, misfortunes, even tragedy, toxic secrets from the past—anything can happen, or may have happened.
In my case, I’ve been absorbed into a life. And there’s ample proof that it is indeed my life, though I sometimes have trouble believing it. It’s not so bad to be taken into a life. In an old movie starring Jim Carrey, the hero is washed up on the shore of a California town not knowing who he is, and is mistaken for a long-lost survivor of the war in Vietnam. He finds a loving father, a fiancée who had lost all hope of his return, and a ready-made business opportunity running the family movie theater. It all comes crashing down, of course, when he remembers his true identity—he is not as lucky as I, but that’s beside the point. All ends well. (Yes, I do remember books and movies, and the multiplication tables and the conjugations of French verbs, just nothing I could call personal, my past.)
I’ve spent some time this last week or so watching old films about amnesia—research, I call it. In another film with a less happy outcome, the woman who claims to be the amnesiac’s wife is an impostor who ends up torturing him. I turned it off at that point; I’ve never cared for horror movies, or I should say that right now I don’t. I can’t vouch for my past tastes. In any case I doubt I’ll be mistreated here—so far my wife seems well-intentioned, even affectionate.
What would I have done had my “wife” not appeared? Most likely I would have gone to the address in the wallet, or been taken there, and found her and “our” children, so it would have turned out the same. On the other hand, if a stranger’s wallet was substituted for my own for reasons that demand investigation, I might have been in danger. I don’t know why anyone would have done that: I don’t know if I am wealthy or involved in criminal activity or a secret agent. So I am fortunate, given the circumstances. If no other clues or memories turn up, it’s best to assume that my “wife” is my wife and “our” children are our children—healthy, well brought up children; I’m grateful for my comfortable situation. It might have been far worse. It might have been a pallet and blanket under a viaduct. (These days when broken-down men or women ask me for money on the street, I always give.) Best to assume that whatever my past, in this case the world has treated me kindly. I do my best to play the role that has been thrust on me.
*
The nurse turned at the sound of footsteps outside the curtain around my bed. “It looks like you have a visitor.”
A tall woman with reddish hair piled messily but attractively on her head peeked through the curtain then rushed to my bed, bent down and hugged me.
“Joe, oh Joe. I was frantic when they called. Even though … I dashed here from work.
Luckily Vince was able to pick up Luz. Joe, baby, what happened? How are you?”
She was a beautiful woman, even without make-up and dressed in an old tee shirt and jeans. There was a name for that kind of hair … an unusual color, auburn, yes, and looked natural—how did I know that? Was I a hairdresser? She had olive skin and extraordinary blue-green eyes with long lashes. Full lips and flushed cheeks. I stared. She looked like a woman who knew exactly who she was. Nothing vague or erased by memory here. If she were truly my wife, she would recall my every misstep.
“Joe, what’s the matter?” She drew back.
“Your wife has come to see you, Mr. Marzino,” the nurse said. She took the woman out past the curtain, where I heard them whispering. When they returned the nurse said, “I’ll be back in a few moments to ask you some questions about what I told you, remember?”
“Joe,” the beautiful woman said. “Joe, don’t you know me? What’s wrong? She said you hit your head. I thought it was just your ankle.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s good of you to come. But I … I can’t remember anything. I don’t even know your name. I’m awfully sorry.” How could I be sure she was my wife? But I didn’t want to be rude, in case she was telling the truth.
“Norah,” she said and started to cry. “We’ve been married over fifteen years. Don’t you remember?”
I shook my head, and she cried some more.
“Have a seat.” I motioned to the bed and handed her some tissues from the box on the bedside table. “I’m sorry. Are you really my wife?”
“Why would I pretend? Don’t you remember the children?”
When I shook my head again she bent her head and wept.
“We have three children. Vincent is almost sixteen. Kevin is nine. And Luz is just four and a half. Does that remind you?”
“No.”
She began giving me details—our kids, our house. With every detail I struggled to remember, but nothing came. Just a dark screen, as when a movie is over. Not even the credits. Nothing except my ankle, which was throbbing painfully. Her recitation of facts was more than I could cope with, so I closed my eyes and wished I could close my ears as well.
When she saw I was no longer listening, she simply sat on the bed holding my hand. “I think I’ve been here before,” I said, to ease her suffering in some small way. “Did I
take a boy here with a head injury?”
“Oh, great!” she cried. “So you do remember something! I bet it will all come back soon. That was Vince; he hit his head playing soccer, and you raced to the hospital to be with him—I was at work. It was nothing much, thank goodness. He’s fine now.”
“I don’t remember,” I said. “The nurse told me. She remembered me.” It was too bad to squash her relief, but I shouldn’t offer false hope. Still, this was evidence that I was who she said I was, her husband and this soccer player’s father. Unless another boy was injured, a boy with a father who resembled me. Or is that too crazy? Did I have a twin? A cousin? Or could this be part of the plot the nurse was in on?
The nurse returned with a pitcher of water and plastic cups and questioned me about the facts she gave me a while ago. I had to assume they were facts, unless I was trapped in a spy story. I remembered everything she’d said, my name, my age, the three children (well, Norah had just told me that), the Road Runners Club, everything. I didn’t get the address exactly right but close enough to satisfy her. The Actors’ Equity membership puzzled me.
“That’s excellent,” said the nurse. “A very good sign. So you’re able to form new memories post-accident. You don’t have anterograde amnesia.” And she launched into some technical jargon about various types of amnesia; apparently mine wasn’t the worst. The other kind meant I wouldn’t be able to remember anything that happened after the accident. So you might lose your past or lose your future. A throw of the dice. I might recover my past in time or might not. There are more types of amnesia and more causes than I’d ever imagined, not that I had ever devoted much imagination to the subject, at least as far as I could recall. But of course I could recall nothing. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve learned a great deal, all of which I recall more clearly than I might wish. Not to mention the films and books based on the subject. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the hospital, I was suspicious of everything around me. I can’t say whether I’m suspicious by nature or whether this was a result of my situation, or the accident. I might have been taken prisoner as part of some sinister plot and given a drug that erased my past. Maybe I’d watched too many crime stories on TV. How could I be sure that the woman, Norah, wasn’t part of the plot? In movies people were drugged and hypnotized and made to carry out nefarious deeds they would never ordinarily do. The Manchurian Candidate. Strange to say, I remembered that well. Both versions, the old and the new. There might be other surprise memories of that nature. Well, in any event I wasn’t about to obey any orders. I’d get my throbbing ankle taken care of and then get out of here.
But where could I go? Wherever the woman took me. To the address the nurse had read on the card in my wallet, most likely.
__________________________________
From A Stranger Comes to Town by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Used with permission of the publisher, EastOver Press. Copyright © 2025 by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
