The Man In the Photograph

December 1, 2006

ERIC

December 1, 2006

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the only link I had to my past. When I woke up on the side of the road with no memory of who the hell I was, all I had with me was a nylon duffle bag that contained three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, a shaving kit, a Ziploc bag that had $7.87 in change in it, a yellow Sony Walkman with a cassette of Phil Collins' No Jacket Required album in the tape player, and a wallet that didn't have any credit cards, identification, or anything really to give me clues as to who I was. In fact, the only photo left inside was one of me lying on a couch, listening to the same Walkman in the duffle bag, with a baby lying on my chest.

In that photo I had a goatee, my hair was considerably darker, and the baby was bald. It was impossible to tell if the baby was a boy or a girl since it was wearing a white t-shirt and a bulky disposable diaper. The baby's ears weren't pierced. If I had to guess, the kid was five, maybe six months old, but no older than that. Then again, the kid's mouth wasn't open to tell me how many teeth he or she had. What I did know was that the baby was playing with the yellow cord connecting the headphones to the Walkman.

The background of the photo offered no clues either. A bank of wooden kitchen cabinets were in the space behind the photo. A chrome barstool with a maroon vinyl seat was in the corner. Linoleum was on the floor. I spotted a small rug that I assumed was in front of the sink. I was younger, too, but I couldn't say how much younger. On the back of the photo there was some neat handwriting that I couldn't even read because my brain was like a blank slate. I could walk and talk but my sentences were the simple kind one might expect from a young child. Complex sentence structure wasn't something I was capable of anymore.

I was a scared man on the side of the road with essentially no money and no idea who I was or how I got where I was. I didn't know where I belonged, where I came from, or where I was going. Everything before I woke up on the side of the road was nothing but blackness for me. Eventually I found a fire station, of all things, and some of the firemen were sitting outside enjoying the nice evening. They were kind enough to get me to a clinic in the area. Pontiac, Illinois wasn't a big town. It hadn't gotten much bigger since the night I stumbled up to that fire station back in October of 1992.

Back then there was no social media. Police managed to get the photo of me and the baby on the air with the local television stations, but no one seemed to know who I was or where I came from. It made me wonder if I was just passing through. Historic Route 66 passed through St. Louis, Missouri on the way to Chicago. Of course there was more than 200 miles between Pontiac and St. Louis, so I wasn't sure if that even meant anything. Cops had nothing to go on. What they did know was that St. Louis was a good place for people to get carjacked because there were so many highways going in so many different directions.

When I appeared in rural Illinois back in 1992, DNA wasn't something law enforcement had a database for yet. Scientists were still trying to figure it all out. Getting myself tested and typed and put in a system wasn't a thing. Even after it was, it was useless. Apparently in my former life I had never been arrested, in the military, or fingerprinted for any reason. I was, however, in decent physical shape at the time so I probably wasn't a couch potato. Fourteen years had passed since then and I still had no idea who I was. I couldn't even prove that I was a citizen of the country.

The best doctors could tell me was that I might have been in something they called a fugue state. When I was taken into the clinic, I didn't have a nasty bump on the head that might explain my lack of memory. They did x-rays and whatever else, hoping to find that I had suffered some sort of head trauma. There was nothing they could find to explain why I couldn't remember my past. Ultimately it was a psychiatrist that suggested the fugue state.

Since that time, plenty of people had suggested I was faking it. I wish that was true. I wish I could remember who I used to be. That baby in the photo would be pretty close to grown up. The writing on the back told me, once I re-learned to read, that the picture was from January of 1985. That would make the child 22 now. If that baby was mine, I missed its entire life. I didn't feel good about that. Not that I hadn't tried to figure out who I was.

I reached over for the laptop I had been assigned at work and opened it. Now there was social media. Facebook had opened itself up to more than college students in the last few months. I wasn't sure I was really into the whole idea of putting my life on the internet, yet I felt like I didn't really have a choice. It might just be the thing that finally helped me get back home.

Wherever that was.

Long ago I scanned the image, the only real link to my past, so that if I ever lost the physical copy of the photo, I would still have one. I used a recent photo of myself as my first profile picture. There was a lot I had to leave blank. I didn't know my real birthday. For the last fourteen years I had been using the day I was found by the firemen in Pontiac, so I listed it as October 3, 1962. It had been estimated I was about thirty-years-old at the time I was found. I didn't know my real hometown, but again I used Pontiac because maybe, just maybe, my family or friends would know why I was there.

I wasn't a fool. In the time since I had been found, I also figured out that Pontiac was a good place to dump a body. It was quiet and rural. Obviously I couldn't have been missed that much or I would have been reunited. My social worker, Belinda, had tried as hard as she could to get me featured on Unsolved Mysteries back in the '90s but there wasn't enough interest from the producers. Whatever. I did the best I could to make the most I could out of my life. I learned how to use computers and discovered I was really good at technology and marketing.

For the last eight years, I had been working for a marketing firm in Chicago. I had a nice apartment near Lake Michigan. I paid taxes. Traveling had to be done by train or bus since I couldn't obtain a license. That was part of why I had chosen to live in the city. I could take the subway, buses, or cabs to just about anywhere I wanted to go in Chicago. There were museums I loved to visit, especially the Museum of Science and Industry. I went to Lincoln Park Zoo on a regular basis. In the summertime I liked going to the beach. Lately I have been thinking about getting a dog.

Part of me wanted to get married, maybe even have a family. But then I would think about the baby in the photo and I found myself wondering how he or she would feel if I got my memories back someday. What if I remembered I had a child and what their name was? How would they feel, knowing I had been gone for so long and in that time I had basically started over again? How would my spouse feel about it? The new one, I mean. If I got married again and then discovered I was already married, then what? Did our marriage become void? If we had kids, that would be a catastrophe for them.

Getting a dog seemed much safer, even if it was a little more lonely.

My very first post on Facebook was that lone photo I had from January of '85, of me and a baby whose name I didn't know. In the caption I explained what I knew about myself and I asked people to share it. I didn't know how far it would go or if it would make the rounds on the internet, but I had to hope that maybe, just maybe, it would get out onto the world wide web and someone might finally know who I was.