MY EYES OPEN and squint at brilliant, blurry whiteness. Far away, chimes sound from underwater. Am I underwater? Where am I? A blurry face floats into my field of vision and looks at me. Am I standing? If so, how is this face appearing sideways?
“Hello, sleepyhead,” it says.
It is a woman (pardon my assumption, but I am foggy and have not the energy for nonbinariness), and I understand I am lying on my back. I still do not know where I am.
“Where am I?” I ask, in order to find out.
“You’re in the burn unit of the Burns and Schreiber Burn Hospital in Burnsville, North Carolina.”
I take this in for a long while.
“Am I burned, then?”
“Yes.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Three months. You’ve been in a medically induced coma, which is fortunate because most of your painful treatments have already been attended to.”
“Is my name … Molloy?”
“No, honey. Oh, dear. You don’t remember who you are?”
“I thought perhaps I was a comedian named Molloy.”
“No. Your name is Balaam Rosenberg.”
“Oh. Right. Except I go by B. so as not to wield my maleness as a weapon.”
I say this to her by rote. It is a blurry statement without weight or meaning.
“I see,” she says.
I don’t think she does. Nor do I, frankly, at the moment. She checks my pulse.
“Am I disfigured?” I ask, suddenly terrified.
“We don’t know what you looked like before you came here, so it’s hard for us to tell. There are no photographs of you online, only an upside-down caricature of you on the jacket of an obscure book we were able to order from Alibris for six cents. We studied your driver’s license photo, but it is very small. For some reason, smaller than is typical. We didn’t want to reconstruct your face to be very small. So we did the best we could, scaling it up using a piece of graph paper. Here, have a look.”
She holds a mirror to my face. I am afraid but force myself to look. I am pleasantly surprised. The beard is gone but so is the port-wine stain. It’s not bad. I don’t think you could tell I’d been in a fire. My nose does look bigger.
“My nose does look bigger,” I say.
“Does it? We had to rebuild your nose. We couldn’t tell from the driver’s license, which wasn’t a profile, of course. We just guesstimated based on your religious heritage that it would look like this.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning what?” I ask.
“Oh. Well, Rosenberger Rosenberg—we just assumed—”
“I am not Jewish, if that’s what you just assumed.”
Then I hesitate. I don’t think I am. I feel certain I am not. I’m a little foggy about things, but of that I am fairly certain.
“I’m sorry, sir. That is our mistake. We did take the liberty of circumcising you, thinking it had been an oversight on the part of your parents and family mohel not to have had a bris performed, and we also needed skin to graft for your nose.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Let me get the doctor. He can explain it better.”
“So my nose is made from penis foreskin?”
“Just part of it. Because the nose is on the larger side we needed more than just your foreskin, as your penis, while maybe not technically a micropenis, is a little on the small side. I’ll get the doctor. He can explain the whole procedure.”
She hurries from the room. I study my new face in the hand mirror. It could have been worse. They did an excellent job with the grafts. I don’t look like a burn victim. And the port-wine stain is gone. I might even look a bit younger. I am about to train the hand mirror on my penis when the doctor walks briskly into the room.
“Mr. Rosenberg. Hello. I’m Doctor Edison-Hedison.”
He shakes my hand, squirts some antibacterial gel into his hands from the wall dispenser, and rubs them together, also briskly.
“How are we feeling today?”
“I’m OK. I don’t remember much.”
“Well, you’ve been in a medically induced coma for three months. Your memory should or shouldn’t come back at some point or not.”
He looks into my eyes with a bright light.
“Mm-hm,” he says.
“Did you say my memory should not come back?”
“It’s been known to not happen. Studies show there can be long-term, deleterious effects to the brain from induced comas. Well, any type of coma, actually. But we hope not. We surely hope not.”
“I don’t even remember how I was burned,” I say.
“Um, a truck fire, I believe,” he says vaguely, then calls off: “Bernice?”
The nurse enters.
“How was Mr. Rosenstein burned?”
“Berger,” she says.
“Burgers,” he repeats to me. “Some sort of grease fire while you were grilling, I suspect.”
“No,” corrects the nurse. “His name is Rosenberger. He was burned in a truck fire.”
“Rosenberg, I think,” I say.
“I thought it was a truck fire,” says the doctor, pleased with himself. “That’s what I said!”
“I don’t think I have a truck,” I say.
“It was a rental,” says the nurse. “The cashier at the Slammy’s—”
“I love me some Slammy’s,” says the doctor.
“The cashier,” repeats the nurse, checking her notes, “Radeeka Howard told the firemen you told her you had a movie in the truck. She called you a ‘crazy Jew who wouldn’t leave me alone.’ That’s neither here nor there, but it’s in the report, so I thought you should know.”
I rack my brain. I do remember something about a film. I was hauling it to New York, but I cannot recall any more than that.
“Was anything saved from the fire?”
The nurse unlocks a cabinet, removes a small plastic bag, and hands it to me. Inside it, a singed doll. A donkey, I think. Or a jackass. I don’t recall the distinction. Or a mule? It has hinged legs, tail, and head. Burro? I study it, trying to recall something, anything. Nothing comes. There’s one more thing in the bag: a single frame of film. I hold it up to the light. It shows a fat man in a checkered suit and derby hat. He smiles, coyly, childishly, grotesquely into the camera. Right above his head there seems to be an iron bar. Motion blur suggests it is moving toward him at significant velocity. Is someone about to hit him in the head with an iron bar? If so, he is at this moment blissfully unaware of his impending doom. As are we all in our daily lives, I muse. A word pops into my head, as if from nowhere, as if from some deep, hidden place. I say it aloud:
“Molloy.”
What does it mean? From whence does it come, to drop unbidden into my consciousness like a speeding metal bar? I recall that Molloy is a character in the eponymously named Molloy by S. Barclay Beckett. It is a book I have never read,