“Call Me Sal” by Jon Wesick

I woke in a hospital bed. A bag of fluids was fed through an IV in my left arm, and my throat felt like a toilet brush had run through it a dozen times. I reached for the call button and noticed a bandage binding my right hand. No one came. I watched Sesame Street on the wall-mounted TV until I felt drowsy, slept for hours, and dreamed of puppets in garbage cans.

An Asian woman in a white coat entered, followed by a young man with an unruly mop of curly hair. She wore a face mask, and her perceptive eyes peered through plastic-rimmed glasses.

“I’m Dr. Bitago, and Mr. Stevens is a medical student. Do you mind if he sits in?”

“Knock yourself out,” I croaked. “Water?”

Stevens filled a cup and held it to my lips. It soothed my throat a bit.

“Do you know where you are?” Dr. Bitago asked.

“The hospital.”

“I guess that’s obvious. What day is it?”

“Couldn’t tell you. I’ve been unconscious.”

“Fair enough. What year is it?”

“I, uh … I don’t know.”

“Who is the president?”

I thought back. There was the guy who didn’t run again, the guy who resigned, the guy who got impeached, the guy who got us into two costly wars, and the guy voters elected after he staged a coup. “The crook.”

“What is your name?”

My memory was a library without a Dewey Decimal System. The information was there, but I couldn’t find it.

“That’s all right.” Dr. Bitago scribbled on my chart. “You’re suffering from retrograde amnesia caused by head trauma. I’m prescribing a cholinesterase inhibitor. Your memory should come back, given time.”

“George!” A woman burst into the room, threw herself on the bed, and pressed her body into mine. She was cute as a bug’s thorax with brunette hair curled into a poodle clip, a pearl necklace, and a knee-length skirt. “I came as soon as I heard.” Her kiss smudged my mouth with red lipstick. “Are you all right, darling?”

“Mr. Hartly is suffering confusion,” Dr. Bitago said.

“Will he recover in time for our wedding?”

“It’s hard to tell in a case like this,” Dr. Bitago said. “Some amnesia cases clear up in hours. Others drag on for years.”

“Don’t worry, darling.” My fiancée, her eyes swimming like Diana Nyad in concern, took my bandaged hand. “Take as long as you need. We’ll get you the best medical care. Daddy will pay for everything.”

I gazed at the woman and could only think of one thing to say. “What is your name?”

“Evelyn. Evelyn Randall.” She burst into tears and ran from the room.

***

“How are you feeling, George?” I could tell from his mahogany desk that Elliot Randall III was more than the big Parmesan. He was a ninety-six-month Reggiano, complete with Protected Designation of Origin. A painting of a nuclear reactor’s containment dome and hourglass-shaped cooling tower framed by a factory window hung on the wall behind him. He noticed me staring. “Like it? Done by one of the neo-Precisionists named Taylor Davies. Celebrates geometry, progress, and industry. Can’t get enough of the stuff. Care for an appletini? I’m having one.”

“Sure.”

“Excellent!” He paged the butler. “Jenkins, bring George an appletini, and might as well bring me a refill, too.”

My drink was somehow too sweet and too sour at the same time.

“Something wrong, George?”

“You’ve been so kind to me, sir. It’s just that, well, Evelyn and I are engaged, but what if I never remember her?”

“Drop the sir. Call me Elliot.” He stood and put his hands on my shoulders. “Trust me. The love of a good woman will bring you back.” He walked to the window. “Carrying that worry won’t help you recover. After my heart attack, I talked to a psychiatrist. Together, Dr. Sinclair and I explored the expectations I had to let go of in order to live a happier life. You should talk with him.”

“If it will bring me back to Evelyn, I’m glad to do it.”

Evelyn burst into the room.

“Daddy, you’re going to be late for rehearsal.”

“Got to go, George. We’re putting on a musical at Father Bing’s orphanage.” He and Evelyn burst into the theme from Oklahoma, complete with dance steps. “Come on, George. Join in.”

From my penny loafers to my newsboy cap, my skin blushed the same shade of scarlet as that of the woman in Gone with the Wind. Even though my stomach was full of pterodactyls, I worked up the courage to croak the chorus. After the song ended, I exited to the game room, turned on cable TV, and flipped channels before settling on MTV, playing an old video of Paul Simon singing “Call Me Al.” Something about the African melody stirred a memory. I was trying to place it when Evelyn walked into the room.

“Horrible man!” She changed channels until she found Angels in the Outfield. “It’s nothing but cultural appropriation. Want some iced tea?” She poured me a glass and kissed me on the cheek. This was all the intimacy I experienced because “we” didn’t believe in sex before marriage.

The tea was somehow too bitter and too sweet.

“Time for your pill.” Evelyn shook a capsule out of a pill bottle.

There was something about that phrase, pill bottle. I swallowed my medicine and began to feel as sleepy as a bear on melatonin after devouring a Thanksgiving turkey.

***

I dreamed I was in a casino surrounded by eyeballs. The guy from Casablanca was playing Paul Simon on a piano supported by giraffe legs. Tortilla chips surrounded a fedora of Camembert cheese. Hieronymus Bosch sat across the poker table from me and went all in. I had a royal flush, so I added my chips and called.

Bosch turned over a pair of twos and took the winnings. I appealed to the pit boss, but he merely boarded a Ford trimotor and flew away. I put the cheese on my head and exited to a black-and-white exterior of shadows and Dutch angles.

***

“Come in, George.” Dr. Barney Sinclair ushered me into his office. He was a wiry man with salt-and-pepper hair, oregano eyebrows, and a paprika smile. A watercolor of railroad tracks and a grain elevator hung behind his desk. Like Elliot’s painting, it contained no people. “I see you noticed my Taylor Davies. It cost a pretty penny.”

“Just how pretty are we talking about?” I asked after hanging up my cardigan.

“Pretty enough to pay for annual face lifts for the rest of your life.” Sinclair looked at my chart. “I see you’re suffering from amnesia. The best way forward is to recover recent memories from immediately before your accident. These are the freshest and easiest to access. Then we can work backward to help you remember your identity. Does that make sense?”

I nodded.

“Memories often surface in dreams. After trauma, they can seem confused, but together we will translate the language of your unconscious. Had anything notable lately?”

I described my dream about the casino and the cheese hat.

“Cheese represents milk, the breast, and the mother. Putting it on top of your head may mean emotional needs taking precedence over intellect. Either that or you’re a Green Bay Packers fan.” Dr. Sinclair laughed at his own joke. “Hieronymus Bosch symbolizes the struggle between spirit and flesh. I think that’s enough for today. I’d like you to keep a dream journal and ask my assistant to set up an appointment for Thursday.”

***

I speared a cube of Swiss cheese on a toothpick and grabbed a plastic cup of cheap Cabernet. Evelyn said getting out would be good for me so she dragged me to an open house at Taylor Davies’ studio. Vegetables guilt-tripped me from a plastic platter, but I left impaling ranch dressing with spears of broccoli to the vegans. Skyscrapers, smokestacks belching smog, water towers, and apartment buildings adorned canvases in simple geometric forms. I liked the paintings and would have bought one if they didn’t cost more than a third-world country, complete with a secret weapon-of-mass-destruction program. A beefy man with a flushed face was yammering at a thin teenager in chinos and a polo shirt. The score from Annie on the sound system made it hard to hear, so I centimetered closer.

“Machine learning and crypto are huge. If I were you, I’d major in computers.” The big man turned and shook my hand. “Abel, Abel Gardner. And you are?”

“George,” I said.

“George what?”

“Just George.”

“If you’re famous like Bono, Sting, or Cher, one name is enough. What do you do, George?”

“Try to remember.”

“I like to look back at my glory days, too. Charity work helps me bring back the fire of youth. Like I was telling Niles here, software is the wave of the future. That’s why 8086 Africa sends laptops to Nigeria.”

“George.” Evelyn steered me away. “Come meet Taylor Davies.”

Davies wore tinted glasses and a beret. The sparse hairs above his lip looked like a naked mole rat on chemo.

“Semiconductors are the coal and steel of the Twenty-First Century. That’s why I apply the spirit of Precisionism to tech.” He pointed at watercolors of integrated circuits where MOSFETs resembled buildings connected by copper-conductor roads. “Doubling the number of components on each chip every two years shows what you can do when you set the free market loose.” He walked over to a painting of a chandelier of electronics. “Quantum computers.” Then he stopped in front of several pictures of rockets and spacecraft. “Asteroid mining will supply rare-earth metals at pennies on the dollar.”

A woman in stretch pants engaged him in a conversation about technique.

“You’re looking tired, George.” Evelyn put her arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get you home.”

***

I dreamed I was playing Texas hold ‘em with library cards while a bonobo sang Paul Simon lyrics. This seemed absurd, so I joined a panda, a Great Pyrenees dog, and a rhinoceros at a roulette table.

“Your bet, sir?” Wesley Snipes asked.

“Black.” I dropped a pair of brass knuckles on the green baize.

The turning roulette wheel became a penny-farthing bicycle ridden by a woman who looked like an actress named after a bird. The handlebars were made of hair, and these transformed into a nose-shaped automobile with headlights in the nostrils. This transformed into a fire engine, and then a painting called, “I saw the figure six in red.”

The next day, Dr. Sinclair told me I was making progress.

***

I picked up a paperback by Michael Connelly after Evelyn got up halfway through Fiddler on the Roof to phone the caterers. Reviews called the novel a page turner. Somehow that phrase resonated. Page turner. Page turner. I began reading. The protagonist’s name was Hieronymus Bosch, just like the painter in my dream, and he was a detective. Did that have any significance?

“Esmerelda keeps leaving trashy novels around.” Evelyn snatched the book from my hand and tossed it on the Ottoman. She shook a capsule out of a pill bottle. “Anyway, it’s time for your medicine.”

Those pills always came out whenever I was on the verge of remembering. Maybe Evelyn didn’t have my best interest at heart. I palmed it and swallowed the glass of water.

Halfway through “Sunrise, Sunset,” I said, “I’m feeling drowsy. Think I’ll take a nap.”

“That will be good for you.” Evelyn thumbed through an Architectural Digest.

My bedroom window looked out on the driveway where Jenkins polished the Bentley until it gleamed. There was a bulge under his suit jacket. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed. After an hour, withdrawal symptoms hit me like a ton of vinyl siding, not the good stuff either, but the kind that cracks and fades in hot weather. My legs felt like I’d peddled the Tour de France on a penny-farthing with a crooked wheel, and I began to shiver. I didn’t have the strength to undress, so I got into bed and pulled the wool over my eyes.

After eight hours of shivering and sweating, I woke clear as a Tibetan singing bowl. Phrases finally made sense. I was private detective Morris Pillbottle, and Paige Turner, not Evelyn, was my girlfriend. Number six reminded me of Patrick McGoohan’s TV show The Prisoner. I remembered meeting my client the previous week.

“You’re that famous, surrealist painter.”

“Call me Sal.” He took a seat and rested his cane against my desk.

“Where’s your famous mustache?” I asked.

“That’s why I need you. You see, my mustache and I had a bitter argument. When you live with someone a long time, it’s inevitable. Anyway, I said some things I shouldn’t have, and my mustache threatened to leave. I said, ‘Fine. Who needs you?’ Now, I realize I was wrong, and I want it back. I’ll pay you a handsome fee to find it.”

“Just how handsome are we talking about?” I asked.

“Fish!”

My memory loss was a con. Elliot, Evelyn, and Dr. Sinclair were crooked as a Möbius strip in a Klein bottle. I couldn’t smoke them out with all the pit barbecues in Texas. No, the only way to catch these sleazy weasels chartreuse-handed was to take them to Sal’s handlebar mustache, and I remembered just where it was.

***

“This could be a breakthrough.” Dr. Sinclair held the door for Evelyn, Elliot, and me to enter Taylor Davies’ studio.

“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “A mustache was holding a paintbrush.”

“Do you remember what it looked like?” Dr. Sinclair asked.

“I’m not sure.” I sat on a plastic chair. “It’s all so confusing. I think it resembled the one on William Howard Taft.”

“What about the paintbrush?” Dr. Sinclair asked.

“You have to try, darling.” Evelyn knelt and put her arm around me. “Once you remember, we can be together.”

 “I’ll try.” I led them into a workshop that smelled of turpentine. There were three easels and a table that held paints and cups with brushes bristle-side up. “I remember the brush had a blue handle.”

Evelin snatched a paintbrush out of a cup.

“This isn’t it!” she said. “Where is it? Where’s the mustache?”

“We need to be patient,” Dr. Sinclair said. “Perhaps hypnosis will help George remember.”

“I’m sick of patience! We wasted too much time with your plans.” Evelyn motioned to Elliot. “Grab him!”

Elliot cinched my arms behind my back, and the spindly painter’s hit my belly like a mosquito colliding with a Boeing 747.

“I’ll ask you once again,” Evelyn said. “Where’s the handlebar mustache?”

“Right here!” Sal emerged from the Prussian-blue shadows with his arm around his iconic mustache. “I’ve missed you, darling,” he said and planted it above his lip.

“After Sal hired me to find his missing mustache, I realized spurned whiskers would seek a rival painter whose style was a polar opposite to surrealism, but Taylor Davies was abusive, and the mustache wanted to leave. It hid the only place it could, in the bristles of a paintbrush.” I paced back and forth while explaining. “Having sunk millions into Davies’ paintings, Elliot and his daughter needed a marketing scheme to make them more valuable. A handlebar mustache worked for Sal, and they figured it would work for them, too, so they couldn’t let Sal’s whiskers leave. Unfortunately for them, Jenkins acted too soon when I arrived to search the studio. They then induced memory loss with those pills and had art historian, Barney Sinclair, pose as a psychiatrist to trick me into revealing the mustache’s location.”  I turned to Davies. “How am I doing so far?”

 “Even if you’d stolen my mustache, you would always be a mediocre artist,” Sal told Davies.

“Hand it over!” Evelyn drew a pocket pistol from her purse.

“I wouldn’t.” .357 magnum drawn, Paige Turner stood from behind the reception desk.

Lieutenant Filefolder and a dozen cops flooded the studio and handcuffed the miscreants.

“You got my message, then?” I asked Paige.

“Yeah. Esmerelda’s been a library patron for years.” She took my hand. “You’re overdue, mister. I’m returning you to the library and filing you under 813.085 – romance.”