2:10pm: NaNoWriMo Story
I have joined
NaNoWriMo this year and will be writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I will be posting as I write it here in my LJ. I will later post it somewhere else so it can be read in order. Here comes the first 2253 words:
I am waking up and finding it is dark. My eyes are closed, but it feels dark beyond that. It is dark as if my mind's eye is closed.
I am feeling a little chilly, but not exactly cold. Whatever I am lying on is hard, certainly harder than what I normally sleep on, although I am not sure of that, since I have no recollection of sleeping on anything else. Actually, I have no recollection of anything else at all. I don't remember how I got to this hard surface, nor do I remember anything else. Where I live, where I grew up, where I work, what my name is. All are “404” to me.
“404?” That's the web code for page not found. Why do I remember that and nothing else?
I search the rest of my memory. The President of the United States is Barack Obama, and he gave his acceptance speech in Chicago to a huge and excited crowd. He was elected in 2008, and I do not know of any President elected since. So, I can conclude it is between 2008 and 2012, or I can conclude that it is later than that and I have lost even more memory that that.
I am finding I remember all kinds of things. Trivia. Nothing personal. Nothing that might suggest who I am or why I am here. I can remember the general highway layout of the Northeast, and I am even recalling a number of neighborhood layouts, but none with the familiarity that would suggest I live there.
I suspect that all of my varied and wide knowledge will not help me to figure out this one puzzle in front of me. It is time to examine the physical.
I have not moved yet, since I woke. I am running a mental check of my body for any alarming sensations. No great pain or apparently crippling injuries that I can feel. I am feeling some stiffness as might be normal. (Yet another thing I seem to remember, the feeling of waking up sore from a hard sleeping surface.) I also am feeling what seem to be a bunch of layers of clothing.
I am experimentally wiggling the fingers on my right hand. They seem to work. An excellent start. Now, I am moving my right arm, which also seems quite functional. The left arm is giving similar positive results.
I am wiggling my toes and feet. Also positive results on both feel. That rules out any kind of injury causing paralysis, and possible rules out catastrophic stroke. These concepts seem familiar. I am wondering why.
Four functioning limbs and no functioning memory. There are worse places to start.
Using my hands, I am checking myself over. I am not opening my eyes yet. One thing at a time.
The ground feels like concrete, maybe a sidewalk. I find what feels like a hat upside down near my head. Some kind of wool/felt material. I am wearing a canvas coat of some kind, and another jacket under it. As I moved my feet around, I felt shoes, which I feel I may be needing, since I am not hearing anything in the way of people or cars around, so I will probably need to walk somewhere.
Thinking of sounds makes me realize that people lying on sidewalks is an unusual thing to most people. I suspect that if there were people walking by, someone might have stopped to check on me or called the police or something. I have been lying here long enough to become stiff, and no one has come by.
I am hearing a car. It is one of those quiet ones where you don't hear the engine, just the wind noise when it is moving. It is a few hundred feet away. I hear it come to a stop. It sounds like it is stopping at a traffic light, rather than parking. (How can I tell the difference between those by sound? Maybe I'm a foley artist?) A moment passes during which I am listening to the very faint sound of the engine humming, before I hear the sound of the tires turning on the pavement as the car drives off.
The air smells fresh and crisp, like an early fall night.
The time has come. I am opening my eyes. It takes a moment to focus. I am seeing white on my left side and black on my right. That's strangely philosophical, and in its abstractness is a bit disturbing. As things come into focus, I realize that the white is a stone wall. It is the kind of whitewashed, stone wall that businesses sometimes use because they are a single clean color which makes them look professional but textured which makes them not look generic.
The black is the sky. It's not actually black. There is an orange tinge to it, indicating much local civilization. That's good, I suppose. I am thinking that bring in a city is better than being out in the woods in the current condition.
I am sitting up and looking around. There is a red sign on the building, but I am at such an angle as I cannot make it out. I am on a sidewalk in front of a large store of some kind. It is a white stone building with a windowed entry area. A little light comes out of the entry, but little enough to suggest the store is not open.
The parking lot to my left confirms this conclusion. It is a fair sized parking lot, but there are no cars in it. Beyond the parking lot lies a small hotel of some kind.
Looking down the sidewalk and past the end of the building, I see what appears to be a highway. There is a guardrail down the center of it. No, it is not a highway, I can see the refection of the light from a traffic light. The signal itself is obscured by the building, but I can see the greenish light reflected off the guardrail.
I look down at myself. Black canvas long coat. Grey pants with light pin stripes. Black shoes. Those are some ratty looking shoe laces. I should get new ones. This strikes me a strange priority at a time like this.
Looking at my left wrist, I find I am wearing a digital watch. On instinct, I push the lower right button. A greenish glow illuminates the face of the watch. 4:07, it says. In the upper right corner of the watch, there is the number 13, which is not changing like the number at the bottom which must be the seconds. So, it is the 13th. Of course, it could be March 13th or May 13th or October 13th. I suppose they figured that most people using this watch would be able to keep track of the month. I suppose that I can normally do that as well.
I get to my feet and brush myself off. I am gratified to find that there is no blood on my clothing or the sidewalk. I am becoming quite confident that I am not physically injured. This is both reassuring, in the sense that I only need to deal with one problem at a time, and not reassuring, in that it leaves no clues as to how I attained this most peculiar predicament.
As I was getting to my feet, I felt things in my pockets. Clues, perhaps.
My trench coat has two pockets. In the right pocket, I find a digital camera. It is not familiar, but that does not tell me anything. Nothing else I see looks familiar either. If someone told me that I had been put into a stranger's clothes and dropped in a place I had never been, I would believe it.
There is a power button on the top of the camera. I press it. With a whirring sound, the lens moves out a couple of inches. The small display shows a very clear image of the sidewalk I am pointing the camera at.
There is a button on the camera with a green triangle which makes me think “play”, so I push that. An image of a man with a short beard appears on the screen. He looks like he is in his mid-thirties. His face is roundish, but he does not appear particularly overweight. He is wearing a very attractive black fedora with a tiny feather in the hat band.
I glance down at the ground, remembering the hat I had noticed earlier. There it is. Black, fedora, tiny feather. I reach down and pick up the unfamiliar hat, placing it on my head. “Never pass up items you find on a quest,” I find myself advising myself. “You never know when they may be useful.”
This phrase came to mind, but I cannot think of what kind of quests I might have been on in the past to give me such peculiar wisdom.
Looking again at the camera, I realize that there is an indication on the screen that I can press right on the control pad to play. This must be a video that I am looking at rather than a still photo.
I press the button.
The face on the screen comes to life, and sound comes out of a small speaker on the bottom of the camera.
The man in the video, who I am now strong suspecting is me...or at least the owner of my hat...looks like he is about to speak. He is opening his mouth, but then he closes it again. He looks annoyed, tired, frustrated.
“Nevermind, I'll do it later,” he mutters. I see his hand move to the top of the frame and the image freezes. It looks like he had been holding the camera and pointing it at himself to record this.
“Nevermind, I'll do it later,” I say experimentally. My voice sounds quite different that the one in the video, but voices often sounds different to oneself. What I do notice is that the cadence seems to be the same. I say it exactly the same as the man in the video. I am thinking that mysterious man is me.
I turn the camera off and put it back in my pocket.
Checking the other pocket, I find a flier. The Castle Behind the Castle Players and The Zydrate Network are presenting The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Repo! The Genetic Opera at the Academy of Music in Northampton on Friday and Saturday, October 30th and 31st.
I have never heard of either group, nor have I heard of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or this Repo! The Genetic Opera thing. The flier has a picture of a man in a corset and fishnets and another picture of a person in a mask that covers everything but his eyes.
There is no year on the flier, but I realize that knowing that the 31st is a Saturday would let me figure out the year if I had a calendar. Of course, nothing confirms that this flier is not over a year old.
I place the flier back in my pocket and realize that I am hungry.
I check my pants pocket. That seems like a reasonable place to keep a wallet which might contain money. Money, as Homer Simpson's brain once informed him, can be exchanged for goods and services. Sure enough, I find a wallet in my right pocket. It is a black, leather wallet which looks like it is relatively new.
First, I check for money. Yes, there are a few twenty dollar bills in there. I vaguely remember that some people call twenties “Yuppie food stamps.” I also vaguely remember finding that amusing.
It then occurs to me that wallets are full of things like credit cards and licenses which contain information. This wallet is no disappointment in that respect. The license says Marcus, William living at 362 Amherst Road, Sunderland, Massachusetts, 01375. I am 29 years old, and do not have a restriction on my license requiring me to wear glasses.
“He says his name is William, but I'm sure it's Bill or Billy or Mack or Buddy,” sings Sheryl Crow in the part of my mind which stores useless information like song lyrics.
I keep looking. I have a debit card from Greenfield Cooperative Bank, a few credit cards. There is an ADT keycard. That looks fancy. I wonder what fancy door that opens. This card tells me that I have been a Shakee distributor since 2008. I am wondering how long ago that was. I am wondering what Shaklee is.
For all the good that it does me, I know my name is William, although I have no idea if I go by William or Will or Bill or Fred. I feel like knowing that would be useful. It is one thing to be unable to remember who you are, but to know your name and still not even know what you are called is quite another. It becomes apparent to me in that moment that this may be a more frustrating quest than I had previously anticipated.
I find that before dealing with such a challenge, I should find breakfast. A large omelet sounds quite appealing. I am wondering where I can find one at 4:30 in the morning wherever I am.
Current Mood: 
excited
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