The man with no memories had been sleeping, dreamlessly.
He woke, and there was a brief moment where he saw and heard nothing. Then his senses came rushing to him, and he felt a smooth coldness pressed against his face. He blinked, found himself resting on a table. His arms were splayed. There was little feeling in them, so he flexed his fingers, experimentally, and then looked up.
He was seated in a diner. It was a seedy, third-rate sort of establishment, with only a few, cramped booths, and muck on every surface. Overhead were fluorescent lights—their sterile whiteness made the man wince. He stared out the window, and his reflection stared back. It was dark out.
The diner was empty apart from the man with no memories and a waitress, who was listlessly sweeping the floor. The man watched her for a moment: young, uniformed, all flab and acne scars. She noticed and stared back, and the man turned away. And then he saw the meal before him: a plate of chips and a half-eaten bacon sandwich. He tried a chip. Cold. Had he ordered this? He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember much of anything.
The man with no memories blinked. He could recall nothing. How he had ended up here; why he had fallen asleep—nothing. Why he had ordered what he had. Where he had come from. Who he was. Nothing.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, God.” He paused, momentarily panicking. Then, to the waitress,
“Miss?”
The waitress turned to him curiously and replied, “Sir?”
“What’s the time, sorry?”
She read from a mobile phone: “One-eighteen.”
“Do you, um, have any idea when I got here?”
“My shift starts at nine-thirty,” she said. “You was here before that. Sound asleep all this time.”
“Is anyone else in? Someone who was here before?”
“They’ve all gone home. The manager is in his office, if you want him. Doubt he could help you,
though. He just stays in there. Does the papers, I think.”
“Thanks.”
The waitress returned to her work. The man with no memories turned to the window, staring thoughtfully at his reflection. It was a plain man who looked back. His hair was vaguely dark, its colour and details distorted by the imperfect mirror of the window. He was not ugly, but not quite handsome: a mixture somewhere in-between was more like it, though he could not decide which way he leant. His eyes he liked. He would have been captivated by their almond shape had they been on anybody else. They weren’t though; they were his, and so, for the sake of modesty, he let his gaze move on. He wore a white dress shirt, wrinkled from sleep and overuse. His top button was done up, and as soon as he noticed, the man with no memories undid it, almost tearing it off in the process.
It now occurred to the man that he had no idea what he was carrying, that he had not yet searched himself. If there was something—anything—that could clue him in on who he was, or what had happened to him, he had to have it. So he rifled through his pockets, and gathered what he had on the food-crusted top of the table. Handkerchief. Earphones. Wallet: there were several fifties and twenties, and some change as well – around two hundred dollars in total. No cards, though: no ID. Chewing gum wrapper. Phone: its clock was in time with what the waitress had said. Phone… Phone!
Heart thumping, he checked his contact list. There were only two entries: one for a Rodney Schofield, and one for a Wilton Fuller. He dialled them in that order. Schofield did not pick up, but when the man dialled for Fuller, he was told that he had tried to call himself. Was he holding somebody else’s phone? Had the entry in the contact list been misnamed? The man wondered, and then cast aside those off-chances and doubts. He was in need of a name, and here was one, waiting. He decided: Wilton Fuller was he.
Wilton Fuller, he repeated, mentally. The fuck sort of name is that? But he glanced sideways at his reflection in the window, and now he wore an almost goofy look. He supposed that had something to do with his new name, and the sense of fulfilment that came with it.
There was still the problem of where he had come from. Of what to do next. Wilton did not even know who he was—truly know; he was vaguely himself, but there was, had to be, more to him. For now, he decided to leave the diner. He went to the men’s room and took a piss, a nice, long, mesmerising stream of it. Washed his hands. Left the restroom. Then, because he had no idea what would come after, Wilton ordered a bottle of Vanilla Coke—the waitress had to leave her broom, and dart behind the counter— and left.
Outside, Wilton couldn’t see much of anything; the starlight was meagre, and the streetlights were sparse. What he could make out through the darkness had him thinking of poverty. Crime. Slums. The first thing he noticed was the decay: everything was crumbling, everywhere rundown. Under the streetlights he could see potholes, and gaping cracks in the footpath. There was graffiti, on the road, on walls.
It all made him uneasy.
He took a swig of Coke to calm his nerves. Then he began walking along the footpath, purposelessly, cutting across empty roads, winding through suburbia made invisible by the darkness.
He came across the girl at daybreak. He had been walking for nearly five hours by the time on his phone; he had long since zoned out. At first he saw the girl out of his peripherals, and thought she was a plant, or a trick of the light; then, as he drew closer, he realised she was human—and watching him.
She was slumped against a low brick wall, cigarette in mouth. She would have been pretty— was pretty—but for the scowl she wore; it chilled Wilton, made him dread things. It certainly did not belong on somebody her age. Wilton did not know by how much, but the girl was younger than him: she looked rough, yet there was still tenderness beneath the steel. Her hair framed her face, black and long, stringy. She wore an undone cardigan over a dress shirt with tie and a pleated grey skirt, and at her waist was a holstered pistol. Wilton eyed it warily.
The girl eyed him back with eyes like ice.
They stayed like that for a moment. Wilton tried to keep himself pokerfaced, but the girl had a cold air about herself. He was unnerved. The girl said, “Who are you?” She did not move—she seemed more blasé than ever, if anything—but Wilton heard the threat in the words. Still he said nothing.
The girl continued to stare at him. Then she sighed, and rose, and as her shadow moved with her, Wilton noticed it for the first time: outspread from her shadow was a single wing. It was an angel’s wing, a dove’s, a bird-of-prey’s; it was the silhouette of all wings epitomised. And it stretched out across the wall, impossibly long, and expanded until it met and melted into other shadows.
Wilton forgot his fear, and exclaimed, “The… Fuck…! Is… That..?” He twisted his arm around.
He patted himself on the back. “That.”
The girl imitated him. Then she gave him a look, questioningly.
“On the wall. Your shadow, I mean.”
“Oh,” she said, and the ice in her expression melted away. Now she looked her age.
“You can see it.”
“Yes.”