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The thing about having amnesia is that, really, you can never be any freer than you are now. You don’t know your name. Your blood type. Where you’re from. Who you’re supposed to be loyal to. You don’t know the name of the guy who beat you up every week in seventh grade, or the first girl who really broke your heart. You wouldn’t know if you tried to commit suicide when you were twenty-three, or if that scar across your knuckles is from a bar fight or falling off your bike when you were six. You’ve got nothing to tie you down or hold you back. You don’t know who you are, what you’re choices are supposed to be, what anyone could possibly expect from you.
It’s freedom, and it’s lonely.
~
Peter – he thinks his name is Peter, though admittedly he’s as unsure about that as anything – is not a normal man. Sometimes it frightens him. Sometimes it makes not knowing who he really is a little easier to deal with
Peter finds out about his powers in pauses and bursts, skips and stops. They manifest when he gets stressed out or frightened, usually in a crowd. Never when he’s alone. He’s discovered four so far, and there might still be more. Every time he unearths something new he thinks it must the last, but it hasn’t been yet.
The first and second come in quick succession. When he woke up in that storage container, he sent a charge out of his hand that knocked out one of the men who touched him. When the rest tried to pull him out of the container and into a van, guns pointed into his back, his bare feet sticking to the cold dock beneath him, Peter didn’t know who they were or what they wanted, only that he needed to get away.
So he did. He flew, and he almost killed himself flying into things, and dropping and rising. He was shocked and frightened and he didn’t know who he was, and he flew until he saw the sun break over the horizon.
~
Peter lives his life on hunches and feelings, in the moment and on a whim and mostly carefree, because he can’t remember if he has anything important to actually care about. It’s easygoing, though occasionally things trip him up. Odd things, like the smell of paint and the taste of curry. Flashing lights. They spark little bits of feeling, half-memories that don’t really add up to anything until they do.
He could be married. He thinks about it sometimes. He didn’t have a ring on his finger in the container, but he didn’t have much of anything on then, and he doesn’t feel like the type of guy who wears jewelry. He only owns one thing in this world, one thing that was his Before, and he keeps the necklace in his pocket with him all the time.
It’s very simple – a small charm carved out of white stone, tied on a black cord. Something you’d buy on vacation, maybe, or make yourself. He wonders if it was gift from a girlfriend, or a boyfriend. Or from maybe a child, like a son or daughter or younger sibling. He likes to think it was a gift of some kind, that he wears it not because he likes it but because he likes who gave it to him.
~
He spends a lot of time going to bars. He gets into a couple of fights. It only takes a few before he realizes that he never bruises, that he doesn’t wake up the next morning with a hint of a black eye when by all rights he should have two. He avoids the bars in his neighborhood, because that’s all he needs, right? Someone slamming him into the bar and slicing his face open, only to watch it seal back up again. It doesn’t take him very long to figure out he’s stronger than he should be too – not just stronger but stronger, Superman-strong, crazy-strong like no human should be.
This doesn’t mean he stops fighting. He just gets smarter about it. He doesn’t go to the same place twice. He always fights a different guy, and never fights someone he probably couldn’t take if he were Normal, because he knows he’s a skinny little fucker and that no matter how good a fighter he is, it doesn’t add up to riling up two guys who look like NFL linebackers.
It’s still not smart. He knows this. He gets a prickle on the back of his neck every time he does it, like a kid knowing he’s going to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He’s got super strength but doesn’t much know how to use it. He doesn’t even win some of the fights. There are plenty of nights where he gets the shit kicked out of him and he’s left gasping in the gutter until his ribs heal and his face scabs over. He spends a lot of time washing blood out of his clothes these days.
He wouldn’t call himself self-destructive though, by any stretch of the imagination. Does he even have a self to destroy?
~
Peter works at a coffee shop that caters to the college crowd. It’s open pretty late, which he likes, and even though he’s got no past work experience – at least none he can remember – he knows his way around an espresso machine. He’s nice to the customers, but he doesn’t hit on them, which is apparently what got the last guy fired. Peter sticks to being nice.
He likes it. He likes to help people. It comes as naturally to him as breathing. He holds doors open for people – women, yes, but not just pretty ones, and men too, if they look like they’re in a hurry or they’re carrying something. He likes the smiles he gets for his trouble, the quick grateful nods. He helps his elderly neighbor bring her trash out to the curb and when the kids who live two doors down lose their pet gerbil, he coaxes it out from under the radiator. They think he’s cool because he wears a leather jacket and stays out all night. Peter wants to tell them to stay in school and say no to drugs and go to college.
He wonders if he has kids. Somehow he thinks he doesn’t, because he sees all kids as cute – fluffy or curly-haired, blonde or brunette or freckled or buck-toothed, quiet or screeching banshees – and he figures if he had some of his own he’d like certain kinds of kids better. Not the soundest of logic, but shaky is all Peter has to go on lately.
~
Sometimes Peter catches sight of his reflection in the mirror and can’t look away. Like maybe he doesn’t recognize himself. Like he expects to see someone different every time he looks.
He wonders what he was like as a kid. If he had braces. If he had to grow into his nose, or his ears. Did he have freckles when he was younger? Pimples, maybe. It probably wasn’t all that long ago. Peter looks a bit like a teenager when he’s clean-shaven, and when he smiles, but there’s something about his features – they’re very formed, very hard. Set. And anyone who looked into his eyes would think he was older.
He feels Old Enough.
~
Peter dreams a lot. Nearly ever night, in fact. Most of the time they’re pretty lucid. Clear and rational enough for Peter to wonder if they’re not dreams at all, but memories. Then again, rational can be many things for a man who can fly and heal and send charges from his hands.
He dreams of people, mostly. Sometimes huge crushes of them all around him, like maybe he lived in a city once. But he also remembers beaches and lighthouses, sand between his toes and salt curling up in his hair. His hair used to be longer, he’s pretty sure of that. He’s been growing it out, trying to see if it makes a difference.
He dreams of hospitals too – hospitals all the time. He haunts the hallways, bitter lukewarm vending machine coffee on his tongue, grainy eyed and removed. He passes by room after room after room, the smell of disinfectant and death everywhere. He hears people crying. He’s pretty sure he’s looking for them, but he doesn’t know. Maybe he’s the one who’s sick. Maybe he’s the one who’s crying. Dreams are strange like that.
Other times, though – there are sex dreams, of course. Peter is your average American male in many respects. There’s a group of girls who stop at the coffee shop a few times a week, and any one of them would be more than enough to satisfy any man. Sometimes Peter thinks about asking one of them out – Morgan, he thinks, or maybe Maureen. She’s got curly brown hair, big dark eyes, and smiles a lot, flashing perfectly even teeth, and she flirts a little with him when he asks how she’s been. He doesn’t know what holds him back, only that something does.
But the most common dream, the most painful, the one that sticks with him – it’s not rational at all. It doesn’t make any kind of sense.
It starts off in the dark. In the sky, with little pinpricks of starlight all around him. He knows he’s high up, higher than you could ever be on a building, and freer too, like maybe he’s flying, only it feels so good, so amazing, that he wonders if it isn’t just a dream. Then it starts getting hotter, like they’ve skipped past the night sky and gone straight into the sun, and Peter feels his skin start to pull. Start to melt.
This is the part he hates.
To call it painful is an understatement. Torture. He thinks maybe this is what dying feels like. That’s when he realizes he’s screaming, howling until his throat is raw, and the worst part is he’s not the only one. When the realization hits him he starts to twist, to turn around. That’s when he sees him – at least Peter thinks it’s a him. All he really sees are brown eyes. Soft eyes, but resolute. Determined to go down with the burning ship that is Peter. The eyes are what haunts Peter – not the pain that surrounds them, not the light that consumes them. Just the eyes.
Peter always wakes up with his tongue pushed up under his teeth, a nasal hiss trying to curl into something else.
He’d give anything to know what it was.