Mike I woke up in an unfamiliar room. The walls were green and white, and there was a window from which I could see how outside the fog had swallowed the world. There was a tree that had bright orange berries in it. There were so much berries that the branches were hanging low from their weight. I knew the name of that tree but could not remember it. I looked all around me and realized, I was in a hospital. I did not remember what day it was or how I got there. I stared out the window in silence. Why am I here?
Soon a man in a white coat walked in.
“Good morning, Mr. Ambrose”, he said. So he knew me. I did not remember meeting him before.
“Morning. Have we met?” I asked curiously. He had an unshaved face with tiny gray beard and big, friendly-looking, brown eyes.
“Sure we have, Mike. You've been here as my guest for three weeks now”, the man answered.
“Three weeks! Oh my, I don't remember at all!” I yelled in disbelief. The man smiled at me and told his name was Rafael. I apologized my forgetfulness but he said it was fine. He asked how I was feeling and I said that my mouth felt a bit dry so he brought me a glass of cold water and it tasted refreshing. After that I remembered the tree and asked him:
“Rafael, what is the name of that tree with those nice orange berries? I can't quite recall.”
“It is a Rowan, Mike. It is very beautiful this time of the year. It is often said, that the winter is going to be a long and cold one if the Rowan makes a lot of berries. That is so, that the birds have enough food to last till spring.” I felt satisfied with the answer. Rowan, of course. Why did I not remember that?
After Rafael left, I closed my eyes and fell asleep for a while. I was picturing how the Rowan would look during winter, surrounded by all that white snow. I woke up, when someone was knocking on the door. A beautiful woman with blond hair and blue eyes walked in. I recognized her immediately. She was Katherine, my wife! I got up, my back was hurting. She smiled at me and there were tears in her eyes.
“Mike, my darling! How are you today?”
“I'm fine. I just don't seem to recall why I'm here. Have you visited me before?” I asked and smiled back at her. Katherine sat down to a chair next to my bed, took my hands and kissed them.
“Everyday.”
We chatted for a while. I pointed to Katherine the Rowan outside and told her what Rafael had said to me about the winter and the birds. She smiled at me but it was a very odd smile. The corners of her mouth turned downwards but she was smiling nevertheless.
“That is awfully nice from the Rowan, is it not”, she said and I nodded. Silence fell. I was getting sleepy and a little nauseous. I asked Katherine, if she could tell me a bed time story like my mom had used to do when I was little.
“Have you ever heard the story about the two addicts who traveled in time?” Katherine asked me and turned her head to the right. I thought about it for a while but I did not recall anything of such. I shook my head.
“Two buddies, ready to try everything in order to get high, they got this new drug one day, right? No one else had tried it before so there was an obvious risk to it, but they wanted to try it no matter what. The drug was revealed to be a time machine and they ended up traveling far into the future”, Katherina explained. She stared at her hands that were resting on her lap. Her fingertips were gently brushing against each other. I stared them too. She continued:
“In the future, they found another world entirely: the sky had been torn apart, the world looked weird. There was odd-looking buildings and one which was the weirdest, a tall, white mountain of a building, a research laboratory, in fact. Inside they found new technology, and the most exciting was The DoomGiver. It was developed by The Scientist and it was used to carry out a death sentence as a part of the justice system. But it did not only kill, but erased from the very existence. That meant that the whole reality was changed so that the criminal was never even born and thus, the crime never committed. All the bad deeds were erased but so were the good ones too. The world got suddenly different, the reality was altered. But The DoomGiver was only used in the most hideous crimes, like when someone had started a war or committed a mass-murder. All this was explained to the two time travelers by this Scientist.”
“I don't get it. What then?” I asked restlessly. I raised my eyes from Katherine’s hands and looked out the window. The fog was still lingering but behind it I could make out the setting sun. I felt uneasy.
“They went back to their own time, and they promised to never use the drug again. Months went by, years. They kept going like they had before but then something happened. The reality began to distort. Suddenly they felt like living in the past, then the future. The sky opened revealing a bloody wound under it. It was the same sky they had seen years ago in that distant future. But it should have been thousands of years away. That is when the two buddies decided to take the drug again, and so they traveled into the future. They were greeted by a chaos, the end of the world, the same sky they had seen in their own time. They went back to the research laboratory and found The Scientist sitting inside The DoomGiver. He explained to the two travelers that using The DoomGiver had torn holes in the universe and all space and time was leaking through sky and mixing into one. However, he had a solution: he would erase himself, so that The DoomGiver was never created and the past was never altered. The two buddies looked at each other in disbelief and waited for a goodbye that never came. The Scientist just pushed the button and everything disappeared.” I stared into the fog and wondered. The story made no sense. I guessed it should have had a meaning, perhaps I just could not remember it.
“Why did you tell me that story?” I asked and looked straight into Katherine’s sky blue eyes.
“I don't know.”
That night I dreamed that I was lying on an operation table. My skull had been cut in two from the middle and there was blood gushing from the wound. Under it, the brain tissue had lost all color and turned white like fallen snow. Suddenly it all changed. I stood outside, it was winter, and the heavy snow pulled the Rowan’s branches down. The ground was covered in a veil of white powder. In the sky, I could see the wound they cut into my head and the doctors leaning towards, peeking inside me. Then Katherine’s face appeared beside them. She looked as if she did not see me. I smiled at her. Suddenly, I noticed a box in front of me, it was full of buttons and wires. It had a door and it was slightly open, inviting me in. I stepped inside, there was a armless chair that spun around. I felt as if it all had happened before.
I woke up in an unfamiliar room. Is this hospital. Why am I here?
Katherine
I rubbed my head with one hand and my stomach with the other. I was sweating a lot for some reason. I sat in a living-room couch and in the background the characters of a soap-opera gasped in horror because of some new plot-twist. I was not paying attention. It had turned dark outside, pitch-black in fact. Even though I could not see it, I knew the fog was still there. I could also hear the neighbor’s dog barking somewhere far away. It always barked when someone walked past their house, so perhaps there was a jogger even if it was a bit too late for that. I felt dizzy, and I had to close my eyes.
Day after day it got harder to visit him in the hospital. Mike could not make new memories anymore and seemed to remember less of his past everyday. Everyday he asked about the Rowan tree and everyday he wanted me to tell him a story. I always told the same one. He had told it to me once. He had claimed that he saw it all in his dreams when he was younger. Everyday I told that story and everyday was as if he heard it the first time. I tried to convince myself that if I just kept telling it, he would one day remember. I knew, however, that he would not. Soon he would forget me too. I secretly wished that he would leave this world before it happened. Some days he seemed like himself, some days he was someone else, aggressive. I knew it was due to his condition but it did not make things easier. I was losing someone I had always known. Some times Mike heard things or saw things that were not there and often his speech was blurry. The doctors had not given him much time.
Unfortunately, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease can usually be detected only when the symptoms get severe. It was after months before Mike agreed to see a doctor. All the people around him had already noticed that he was not himself and forgot things more than due to some stress or such. When the diagnosis was made it was already too late and the doctors gave him from couple weeks to a month. On the other hand, it changed nothing since Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease always ended up in death.
We had only been married for two years. We were young and we had our whole lives ahead of us. Lives, that could not be lived anymore. Tears ran down my face burning the dry and broken skin. They would not stop coming even though I had cried every morning and every night. It was hard to breathe and a felt a panic attack coming. It came every time I remembered that in Mike’s case it was a familial disease. It took away the only light in my life, the pregnancy. My stomach had not grown almost at all probably due to all the stress, sleep deprivation and the fact that I was not eating. Soon I would have to make the decision whether I would keep the baby or not. I pressed my hand on to my stomach.
I had told Mike about the baby but it was no help, he did not remember. And I did not want to tell him that everyday, again and again. I needed to make the decision alone. The decision whether the baby would be erased from existence before she really existed at all.
