DAY ONE

CHAPTER 1

"SHET, who are you?"

"I am the God maker."

"Are you God?"

"No, you are. That is, you will be."

"How? What are you talking about?" he asked bewildered.

SHET blew a cat hair from his jacket and whispered, "You'll have to figure that out for yourself."

Compelled by SHET's seemingly disembodied whisper, he followed the cat hair drifting to the floor and felt drifting, falling. Just before he hit the floor, he awoke startled and confused.

A nurse was shaking him gently. "Sir," she said quietly, someone is here who might help you remember.

The last rays of sun that shimmered through the half-open blinds enhanced the dust particles between the two men into transparent colossi that divided their two worlds. He heard a man's bored voice trying to sound friendly as if hearing it from another dimension.

"I am Dr. Green. How are we today, Mr... Hmm... Mr. John?"    

"John? Is my name John?" he asked eagerly.

"Is it?" He saw pity in the nurse's eyes as she left the impersonal hospital room.

The doctor was reading a file, nodding, and hmming, and then, he apparently decided to try a different approach. He smiled. "What is your last memory?"

"I have no memories. This looks like a hospital. Why am I here?"

"You were found naked and unconscious in the hospital cellar."

"How did I get there?"

"That's exactly what we would like to know. Do you have any recollection of anything? Your childhood? Your profession? Family? What you ate last? Anyone's name with whom you might be associated? Anything?"

"I remember forests, stars, animals, people, the ocean, brooks... I remember wars and labor, death, love and dreams, joy, agony... But nothing seems real. None of these memories are as real as this room or as you. It feels as if my memories are everyone else's memories, as if I don't exist."

"Now we are getting somewhere. Tell me one of these memories in more detail," said Doctor Green as he looked at his new patient with a bit more interest in his eyes.

"I can't. To pick out one memory, I have to close the doors on all the others; and I can't close any memory door, so they're all there, all of them, together."

Doctor Green was scribbling something in the file. "How do you feel about that?" he asked while still writing.

"Frustrated. Overwhelmed."

"Would it be correct to say then that you believe that you don't know who you are, and not because you lost your memory in the classic sense, but because you have all your memories flooding you at once when you try to pick one out?"

"Yes. Please doctor, tell me. Who am I?"

The doctor finished writing in the file and then closed it, placing his pen into his breast pocket as he stood. "Rest now. We shall try hypnosis or perhaps medication tomorrow."

Of course, he thought, as if I'll wait for that.

CHAPTER 2

He was ravenous when he was served supper, but after a few bites, he remembered that the only aspect he could identify as belonging to himself was his hunger. Upon realizing this fact, he lost his appetite. A fly buzzed around the morsels on his plate. Lost in observing the fly, he heard the bug's mumblings in his mind: "Yes, yes, this is delicious. Just right, almost rotten, or close enough anyway."

"Who am I?" he asked the fly.

The fly rose and hovered over his nose, taking a closer look at the questioner. "What is ‘I?'" it asked. "I have many eyes, and each one sees a different picture. Is every eye an ‘I?'"

"Perhaps, but that's not what I mean. You see, I have all these memories, maybe all memories, but they are meaningless because I can't find me. I don't see myself."

"Did you eat?"

"Yes, a few bites."

"Then that's you, the one who ate."

"No, you don't understand. I want to know where I came from. I want to recall my experiences, what I learned, how I developed. All my memories belong to everyone. They are not mine, and I want to behold one continuous experience - me."

"Suit yourself," said the fly. Having lost interest in the conversation, it returned to the plate.

He got up and looked around the room. There was a chart at the end of his bed. He tilted it to see what is said:

            JOHN DOE, AMNESIA

I remember everything that ever happened, so I am not an amnesiac, but then, all that I remember makes no sense - it is meaningless. Is this condition the same thing as drawing a total blank? Nothingness? He was growing agitated. What if they are right? What if, in reality, the undifferentiated-everything-at-the-same-time is nothing? Where then is meaning? My meaning? Me?

He made his way across the floor and opened the door of his room to an empty corridor. He walked down endless corridors and winding staircases. He heard the motionless outstretched hands reaching for invisible hope, the empty eyes locked in dread, he saw the silence of enclosed agony and death, the chiming of new life amongst decay, life and death piled into his burning question: Who am I?

As he approached the entrance, the huge glass doors opened and the humid night air hit him with the buzzing noise of the town: cars honking, flashing advertisements, busy shops, girls waiting for customers. He sauntered in the mist that enhanced the pungent smell of crawfish Jambalaya, Étouffées and Gumbos mixed with the cacophony of live jazz and songs from radios blasting through the open windows. After several blocks, he stopped to examine the posters on the front of a movie theater. The doors opened and people were flushed out in a continuous stream. As if spit out from the crowd, a little bewildered girl stopped next to him, hesitantly looking around as if trying to orient herself or perhaps waiting for someone. The stream of people stopped as abruptly as it had begun and the doors closed, but the little girl was still standing there, looking lost.

She seems forlorn. Did she seek the answer to her question in the movie? he wondered.

"What was the movie about?" he asked the little girl.

"I don't know."

"What did you see?"

"The back of the man in front of me," she said in a pitiful voice. "I ran away from my mom and hid in the movie theater," she added coyly.

"Why would you do that? Aren't you happy to have a mom?"

"I don't know... She keeps telling me to sit straight and not to laugh because I'll have wrinkles. ‘Joanne, clean your room. Joanne, you should be good like your cousin. Joanne, you should do this and you should do that...' All the time, ‘Joanne, where are you? Joanne, what are you doing?' And when I tell her what I am doing, she tells me to do something else."

"Why does that upset you?"

"Because I feel so lonely," she said almost crying.

"Lonely? But your mom seems to be with you all the time."

"Not really. She is not with me, she is with the Joanne she wants me to be."

He stood silently listening to her. Joanne raised her eyes from his hospital slippers and reached out for his hand, as if an automatic response to having found a real friend. He looked at their clasped hands a moment, then into the young girl's eyes as she stared up at him. He gazed into the eternity of flickers of loneliness within the fire of curiosity, islands of joy within a sea of sadness, or was it the other way around? Islands of sadness within joy? Was that life? he wondered. As they started walking down the busy street, she said with enthusiasm, "If you tell me your secret, I'll tell you mine."

The strange couple strolled unnoticed, until a police car stopped with screeching brakes next to them. Two policemen jumped out, plastered him to the wall, and searched his hospital gown for weapons.

"You are under arrest for kidnapping and assaulting a minor," shouted one of the policemen as the other handcuffed him, and he started reciting the arrestees' liturgy.

CHAPTER 3

"Assaulting little girls, huh? What kind of a sick motherfucker are you?" roared the bald headed mountain of a man with bulging muscles on the bunk across the cell.

He heard the coarse voice as if from another room, another reality. Mesmerized by the agitated tattoos of lions, lizards and dragons that danced over the man's arms, he hardly noticed the hostility aimed at him.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked.

The muscled mountain bent down, almost touching his face, and hissed, "Are you threatening me?"

"I don't know who I am," John Doe said flatly, "and I had hoped you would know."

Noticing his hospital attire, the bulging man spat, "You think you are Napoleon or God or something, I suppose, but you are blown man. You are history." He started shaking the iron bars, screaming, "Get this loony out of here before I strangle him!"

John Doe felt excitement rising within him. Yes, I am history, he thought. I have all the pasts, presents and futures within me. Suddenly, he remembered his dream. He recalled SHET telling him he was God, or at least, that he would be God. Yes, God would be the history of all times. He would be omniscient, but would that be sufficient to also know that he was God? Would God know that he is God? Could God know himself?

For a split second, he felt something stirring within him, an ephemeral shadow slightly beyond awareness, something like a fleeting moment of almost that slid into nothingness nearly as soon as it came into being, like a dream one may have had that remains beyond reach at the edge of consciousness.

The iron doors opened and he was ushered into a room with a mirror. Several officers asked the same questions. Some were nice, some shouted, some threatened, and he recounted to each and every one of them how he met Joanne, and how they had walked together for only a short while when the policemen had showed up. And then he was left alone. He went to the mirror.

I don't know this little guy. Is that who I am? he thought. He did not recognize any familiarity in the blank eyes, and the body looked like an empty shell. No, this cannot be me, he thought. It's just a face that could belong to anyone. He touched the mirror tenderly and saw no space between his finger tips and the reflected image. Then it hit him: Of course, this is not me! It is my mirror image.

He started laughing. The engulfing quivers of relief rose like bubbles of joy that burst into freedom; echoing off each other they filled the stern room with primordial delight. He looked at his hands and understood that he did not need a mirror to see his reflection, for if he looked at himself, whatever he saw would be his image only, not the man himself. He felt elated by the realization that he could never see himself; whatever the looking self would see would only be the image of the looking self, not the looking self itself.

Suddenly he stopped laughing: But who is this looking self?

On the other side of the mirror, one of the interrogators remarked, "He is acting. Did you see how he checked the mirror? He knows it is a two-way mirror and that we are watching him. He knows much more than he lets on." The man smirked at his partner.

"I think he is a nutcase," the other detective replied. "He probably won't stand trial in any event. Did you see him laughing? Normal people sweat and piss themselves when they are in deep shit. They don't laugh like that."