When he woke up, he was unsure of two things. The first was common enough for sleepwalkers and drunks; he didn't know where he was. The second belonged to a more exclusive group, a club he likely hadn't expected to one day accept him into their ranks.
He wasn't sure who he was.
Not in an existential sense, like so many college students who drop out a semester shy of their degree to travel Europe or join a cult somewhere in the desert. He wasn't sure who he was in a general sense; he couldn't remember his name or what he looked like in the mirror. He couldn't remember how old he was or where he grew up or what he did to pay for the groceries.
He didn't feel like he'd suffered a head injury. Wasn't that how it always happened in movies? A bang to the head or an extended swim in the hypothermic waters? Either way, he felt more or less fine. A little stiff in the joints from sleeping on a concrete floor for an indeterminate number of hours. But otherwise, no worse for wear. Certainly not bad enough to suffer the neurological enigma of amnesia, as he understood it. Maybe his memory had simply gotten jet-lagged, its circadian rhythm thrown off somewhere between here and there, wherever here was. It was possible—maybe even probable—that his memory would come back on its own, in time.
He started to push himself up, but the muscles in his back locked up painfully and the socket of his left shoulder burned. Thinking better of it, he lay back down, his bare chest adhering again to the flesh-warmed concrete where he'd been. His left arm was completely dead; asleep to the point of feeling weightless. It wasn't paralyzed; he could still move it awkwardly. Just asleep. He took a tentative gnaw on the back of his hand and felt only the slightest tingle of pins and needles.
How long have I been on this floor?
He rolled over onto his back, this time, and sat upright at the waist. At a new angle, he noticed that he was naked and he made a modest effort to cover his privates with his dead left hand. He braced his good hand against the wall and labored to his feet. A sharp pain in his palm made him wince. There were partially healed cuts tracing the fold lines, and a dark, circular bruise in the center of the palm. Along with the injury to his hand and the soreness of his body, he was weak. He didn't need memory to tell him that he felt weaker than he ought to, and a glance down at the valleys of his chest told him that he was too skinny. Not quite the emaciated camp horrors of a war documentary, but close. There were shadows between his ribs and his skin looked like a wet sheet clinging to a laundry rack.
A little unsteady on his feet, he used the wall for support and looked for the nearest door. He was in a room about the size of a two-car garage, the unremarkable concrete floor solid but for a single circular drain in the center. The walls were stacked blocks, also concrete, the mortar troweled expertly flush to the bricks' edges, creating a seamless surface.
The room was cornered in shadow, ill-lit by a solitary incandescent bulb that hung at head-level from its thin cord in the middle of the ceiling.
Everything was swept, no dust, no debris. The room smelled faintly of ammonia.
The only thing in the room with him, the thing which seemed out of place and spotlighted by its own presence, was a pedestal near the front of the room. On the top was a single red button.
He was more interested in the door on the opposite wall. Braving the threat of collapse, he started away from his support wall to cross the room. He noticed small stabbing pains in the soles of his feet, as if marked by small lacerations like the ones on his palm that were only starting to heal. At his acknowledgment, they began to itch distantly. He thought he could ignore it, at least for now. At least until he could get through that door and find out where the hell he was.
