Chapter Text
The stranger had changed back into the white shirt and trousers he wore last night, scrubbed free of mud by Cristiano. He flipped though a magazine that lay on the table at which he sat. Glancing back to look at the cover, he asked, "Is that you?"
On the magazine's cover was a picture of Cris. The Portuguese man posed confidently dressed in nothing but his underwear, the print on the waistband reading, "CR7." It was only one of several other magazines on the table that featured him on the cover.
"I work in the marketing department for a fashion company, and that sometimes means being a model," Cris explained. Being naturally handsome had its perks; a large portion of his income came from doing various photoshoots.
This earned a raised eyebrow from his guest. "A model?"
"Do you not know what a model is?"
The stranger was silent for a moment, thinking of what to say. "If I remember correctly, a model is a representation of a proposal, structure, or design, isn't it?"
It was odd how the man could remember some facts but forget others—gaps in his memories, and then one gaping hole were any personal memories should be. "That's one type of model. A model can also be a person who is paid to show off clothes so other people will buy them."
"So people photograph you to put on magazine covers and it makes people buy underwear?" The stranger seemed surprised by this.
"Yeah, because people like it. It's all about marketing."
He looked back down at the magazine cover in fascination as if there were something amazing about the whole thing. Thinking about it, modelling might seem bizarre for someone first learning about it.
"If wearing clothes is what you have to do as a model, then aren't there a lot of people also doing the same?"
"Well, you have to be good looking to get a job as a model, which means I have to work out all the time after work," said Cris.
"And you are good looking?"
"Am I?" He knew the answer to this; he'd spent hours observing and admiring himself in the mirror. Gareth already told him that if he didn't already have a girlfriend (fiancé now), he would date Cris. And he also had quite the share of relationships in the past, including some with more famous people such as his beloved (former beloved now) Irina.
"I wouldn't know," the stranger replied, which Cris had to admit, was disappointing.
"You ready to leave?" he asked, already moving toward his closet to grab a jacket and his keys.
The guest nodded. He quickly shifted through the magazine once more, and then set it back down on the table. Then, he got up and came over to where Cris stood.
"It's cold outside, so you might want to wear this." He handed the stranger another jacket from his closet.
"Thanks." The shorter man slipped it on. Of course, it was too big for him, but at least the extra length of the sleeves would protect his fingers from the cold.
"Let's go."
~X~
"So this is where you first saw him?" asked Pepe. They were at the bus stop in front of the library where last night's incident took place.
Cris nodded. "He just stood there, waiting, even if there were no more buses for the night."
Képler "Pepe" Laveran Lima Ferreira was originally from Brazil, but had moved to Portugal from a very young age. While his Portuguese carried a bit of an accent, he had made an effort to speak more similarly to the Europeans. After graduating from school, he found himself moving to Spain, eventually becoming a citizen and a police officer. In the past, he had problems with using excessive force, but he had calmed down much since.
Marcelo Vieira da Silva Júnior, on the other hand, came straight from Brazil. They both patrolled his neighbourhood once every while, and he had hung with them when they were off duty several times. Cristiano was sure that Inspector Torres had chosen Pepe and Marcelo because of their connections to him.
They crossed the street, following Cristiano's footsteps from last night. In the ditch where he had fallen in was a large mound of mud that Cris had displaced when he was trying to escape.
"And that's where you were stuck, right?" Pepe questioned.
Cristiano nodded. "Wouldn't have been stuck there if a crime wasn't commuted last night!" he muttered under his breath.
"Pepe, how does it feel knowing that the Anti-Defamation League determined that you're a symbol of hate?" asked Marcelo.
"Feels wonderful," Pepe responded, his biting sarcasm flying right over Marcelo's head. "I love the fear in people's eyes when they see me."
"Is that why you're sometimes really violent when we arrest people?" asked Marcelo.
"I was being sarcastic, you dolt!" said Pepe.
"Careful; I hear the government has been cracking down on memes," joked Cris. While Marcelo lacked an ounce common sense, he was apparently much more intelligent than he let on; or that was what he heard from Pepe, anyway.
"Pepe, look!" yelled Marcelo. He was pointing at a pothole a few metres away, lid strewn ajar. The three gathered around the pothole, peering into the darkness of the sewers underneath. It was still flooded from the rain. "That's dangerous; somebody might fall in and drown!"
"If it hasn't happened yet. Was this open last night?" asked Pepe.
"I'm not sure; I wasn't really paying much attention after what happened," confessed Cris. "Do you suppose someone could've gone down there?"
"Or maybe someone left the sewers through here," Marcelo suggested.
"What do you mean?" Pepe asked.
"'Wandering around in darkness for what seemed like an eternity,'" said Marcelo. He was repeating what the stranger had recounted of his experience last night. "Could he have been in the sewers?"
The amnesiac apparently didn't remember much of what happened to him; only that he was in a very dark place and somehow, he wound up wandering the outskirts of Madrid, far from the city centre.
"Could be, but if that's the case, how did he end up down there?" Pepe mused, scratching his chin. "It's also flooding, so he'd have to escape before the rain."
"Maybe Juanfran can tell us something," Cris said.
"Juanfran?"
"The librarian," he explained. "I came here to return some books, remember? And the bus stop is right in front of the library."
"True," said Pepe. He tuned to his partner, who was still staring down into the pothole. "What do you think, Marcelo?"
The other policeman looked up. "I think that's a good idea."
~X~
Juan Francisco Torres Belén, or Juanfran, wasn't just a librarian; he also owned a large collection of antiques, which he displayed next to his book collection. A large fraction of his books themselves were antiques. While he didn't normally allow people to borrow the old books, he made an exception for his most frequent visitors, including Cristiano.
Not that Cristiano was interested in antique books to begin with. He was more interested in the extensive section dedicated to vintage automobile magazines, same dating as far back as the fifties.
And Cris really loved cars. Not as much as he liked looking good, but still.
In return for borrowing magazines, he had to listen to Juanfran's terrible, angsty writing, from the perspective of a tortured poet from the Spanish Civil War.
The little bell on the door gave a familiar little jingle as he opened it. Inside, Juanfran was sitting at the front desk, flipping through a book of poetry. Crumpled papers were strewn carelessly all over the old wooden desk. At the sound of the bell, Juanfran set down his book and looked up.
"Cristiano!" welcomed Juanfran. "Back already?"
"Well, I'm helping these two with an investigation." He gestured toward Pepe and Marcelo, who were just walking in through the door.
Pepe stepped forward. "You're 'Juanfran,' aren't you?"
Juanfran smiled nervously, eyes darting between the two policemen. "Yes, officers. How may I help you?"
"We would like to ask you if you saw someone standing at the bus stop outside this library last night," said Marcelo.
"Last night?" Juanfran frowned. "I wasn't paying attention much to what was outside; it was pouring. However, the person whom you are asking about might have come in here. Could you describe to me who you're looking for?"
"Uh, short, wearing all white, dark hair," said Cristiano when Pepe looked to him to describe the stranger.
He nodded vigorously. "Oh yes, I do remember him. Tiny lad, sort of suspicious. He was the last person who came in before Cristiano here last night," Juanfran said, glancing over at the policemen in alarm. "Is he a criminal? Is that why you're looking for him?"
"No, just a missing person," Pepe reassured. "When did he come in last night?"
"A little before the rain started. He left a few minutes before Cristiano came in."
"That would be around 9:00 then," said Cris. He had gone straight to the library after work so he still remembered the time he'd visited.
The librarian continued, "He looked really confused and wouldn't stop talking to himself, so I thought he was a junkie. I told him to leave if he wasn't interested in books, and to be honest, I didn't want a junkie handling my antique collection!" He gestured to said collection, which was easily tens of thousands of euros.
"So you booted him?" asked Marcelo.
"Well, he seemed clueless, so I told him if he waited at the bus stop he might find a ride downtown. No buses actually come here that late, but I thought he was tripping and I just wanted to get rid of him," Juanfran explained.
"That's okay. I thought he was high at first, too," confessed Cristiano.
"That makes two of you," Pepe remarked. He finished writing the last of his notes down on a notepad. "Is there any other information you can give us?"
"Not that I can think of."
"Thanks for the information, Juanfran," said Marcelo.
Juanfran nodded. "Good luck with your investigation. And do visit sometime."
They headed back out, continuing with their investigation. When they failed to find anything else of note, they drove back to report to Inspector Torres.
~X~
"So you don't remember anything at all?" Doctor Luka Modric asked the man who sat in front of him.
He shook his head in the negative. "I do remember flashes...sensations... But I don't know what they mean. They feel disjointed, as if they don't belong to me."
"Can you describe to me these sensations?" Luka pressed.
The man paused for awhile, thinking of a way to describe what seemed incoherent to him. "For example, I remember the blue sky, but I don't know the...the context...behind this memory."
"Can you name me the eight planets in order?" asked Modric as he scribbled down his observations.
"The eight planets?" The amnesiac remained silent for a moment before replying, "Can I have a reference?"
"A reference?"
"A picture, perhaps," he suggested.
Luka pulled up his tablet and searched for an unlabelled diagram of the solar system. "Will this work?"
The amnesiac furrowed his eyebrows in concentration, studying the image for a bit. "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn...Uranus, Neptune." He spoke slowly, occasionally stalling in between.
"There seems to be a connection between the images and your ability to recall facts," said the doctor. "Can you try to remember when you might have seen these pictures? You must have seen them before."
Again, his patient shook his head.
"Retrograde amnesia," Modric surmised, writing down more notes on his clipboard. "Oddly enough, your semantic memories are intact. This is the first case that I've encountered where episodic memory was affected while the rest of your declarative memory remains. In fact, it almost seems biologically infeasible. Perhaps your brain scans will reveal something; please wait here."
The Croatian doctor left the office to fetch the brain scans. His patient, while mostly physically fine, was a bit malnourished. It would help him to put on a bit more weight. There were no physical injuries aside from a few bruises, the most notable ones around his wrist. The shape the bruises were in suggested that tight restraints had been used on him; that alone made it possible that he was dealing with a criminal case.
~X~
He was in the middle of analysing the available scans when Inspector Torres of the Madrid Police Department entered the room. It was the inspector who had assigned him to work with the amnesiac that morning.
"Doctor Modric," he greeted. "How's your patient?"
"No sign of concussion, or any head injuries—bruises, bumps—for that matter. There's no physical damage that suggests that trauma or an infection could be behind his memory loss," the Croatian doctor reported. "His brain functionality is not abnormal, aside from lack of activity in the medial temporal lobe and midline diencephalic structure. But there's no damage to those regions, per say. We're at a complete loss to what had happened."
Now Torres was unsure what the medial temporal lobe was, but he was sure that it had something to do with memories. "I'm not a doctor, so you'll have to tell me what that means."
Luka struggled for a while in coming up with a way to explain his findings to Torres without using too much scientific jargon. "His memory is not completely lost. You see, episodic memories, that is, memories about events that happen in your life, are extremely important in the recollection of facts. He can still remember certain facts, like what the names of planets in order are, because a lot of his episodic memories are still in tact."
"But then why can't he remember anything about himself then?"
"The problem is that while he can remember the critical events needed to recall these facts, what he seems to be unable to do is to recall any sort of personal memory that would give him a hint of who he is."
"Can that even happen?"
"I'm completely surprised myself. This sort of thing never happens. It's unnatural!" Luka exclaimed.
"Unnatural?" Torres echoed.
"It's almost as if his memory erasure is...artificial."
A silence passed between them.
There were still many things about the human brain that were still beyond comprehension, things that the deepest of human knowledge could not explain. For his memory to be altered in such an unnatural, seemingly infeasible way was...unsettling. At least it was to Luka. He wasn't sure if Torres could understand the impact that it would have to the scientific community if that were true.
"Did your end of the investigation lead anywhere?" asked Luka quietly.
"Yes. In fact, that's what I came here to tell you. We've searched our missing persons database using his facial scans, and there's only one person whose profile matches," Torres informed him. The urgency with which he spoke indicated that whoever this man was, he was important.
"Who is he?"
"Without a doubt, he's Lionel Andrés Messi Cuccittini."
~X~