Anamnesis: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

keep my eyes shut a moment
longer before Lucya kicked me out. It was a miracle she hadn’t already.
    Of all my nightmares, the one I’d just
woken from was the best. Or least terrible, I should say. The others jolted me
back into the world in blind panic, sweaty and confused with my heart beating
out of my chest. The cologne man dream was one I could deal with. It was the
kind of dream I tried to get answers from after I first woke up from my lost
time. Who was the doctor? Could I remember his face? Had I smelled that cologne
again? Would I recognize it, or the doctor, if I saw them on the streets?
    During one of my binge reading sessions I
turned to philosophy. Most of it was beyond me—it was the pointless bullshit of
college students—but one thing stuck. Plato’s theory of anamnesis. He believed
the soul was immortal. All knowledge it obtained carried on to each of its
incarnations. But during the trauma of birth, it forgot everything. Learning
was only recovering what we already once knew.
    For a while, I was obsessed with
anamnesis. During my four year blackout, there were intermittent times where I
was me, where I formed those memories that now haunted me. Each of those times I
surfaced from the darkness was a little traumatic birth. Each time I forgot
more and more until the last birth, when I woke up on Alki beach for good.
    If learning was recollection, didn’t that
mean I had answers buried in some deep, mystical part of my soul? I wanted to
think the dreams were a cue from my soul that would help me remember.
Everything I wondered, I had the answers to. The space between my memories
appeared empty, but what if it was just hidden? What if it only needed the
right circumstances or trigger for me to recall?
    Just because anamnesis stuck with me
doesn’t mean it was excluded from the whole college student bullshit theory.
After having the dreams enough times, I realized they were jacked up remains of
memories my mind wanted me to relive for its own sadistic pleasure. That was
it. My mania to discover what happened to me knew no bounds, and at the time,
anamnesis seemed a legitimate concept to cling to.
    According to my rough count, this was the forty-fifth
time I had the doctor dream in the past year. It might seem frequent, but I was
on my two hundredth replay of the ice bath nightmare. There’s that for
comparison.
    The nightmares are the same. The feeling I
have when I wake up is the same. I kept a dream journal for months, tried
self-hypnosis, meditation. No matter how I try to interpret them, they give me
nothing.
    It was Olivia’s reprint of my blog that
got me to thinking of anamnesis. Maybe that sparked the rare dream to replay.
    At the thought of Olivia I couldn’t help
but groan. Then I remembered the girl in the alley. They set me on this bender.
The splitting headache, dry mouth, and nausea were their fault. It began after
I left Skid at Goodwill. From there, things get fuzzy.
    “He’s awake.” Lucya’s rough voice came
from across the bar. “Ethan, I let you sleep long enough. You get the fuck out
of here or I’m going to have Artur toss your ass out.”
    I opened my eyes to get a glimpse of my
surroundings then squeezed them shut. Lucya’s bar was a room twice the size of
my studio in the basement of a shitty apartment building in Belltown. It was a
total dive the Melnikov family used as a meeting place and drug front. Windowless,
it was lit by year-round multicolored Christmas lights, hanging lanterns, and a
couple overhead lamps. Other than the bar, there were a couple mismatched card tables
and a scattering of homeland photographs on the walls.
    I dredged through the past two days and
tried to figure out how I ended up at Lucya’s. I remembered seeing the bottom
of a bottle of Bulleit, waking up drunk and in desperate need for a meatball sub,
and walking around Seattle. My jaw ached and I recalled asking someone for a
cigarette and getting punched. After that, nothing. The irony of