UNREMEMBERED (Unremembered Trilogy #1)

2: Coverage

“Mystery continues to cloud the tragic crash of Freedom Airlines flight 121, which went down over the Pacific Ocean yesterday evening after taking off from Los Angeles Interna­tional Airport on a nonstop journey to Tokyo, Japan. Experts are working around the clock to determine the identity of the flight’s only known survivor, a sixteen-year-old girl who was found floating among the wreckage, relatively unharmed. Doc­tors at UCLA Medical Center, where she’s being treated, confirm that the young woman has suffered severe amnesia and does not remember anything prior to the crash. There was no iden­tification found on the girl and the Los Angeles Police have been unable to match her fingerprints or DNA to any govern­ment databases. According to a statement announced by the FAA earlier this morning, she was not believed to be traveling with family and no missing-persons reports matching her de­scription have been filed.

“The hospital released this first photo of the girl just today, in the hope that someone with information will step for­ward. Authorities are optimistic that . . .”

I stare at my face on the screen of the thin black box that hangs above my bed. Kiyana says it’s called a television. The fact that I didn’t know this disturbs me. Especially when she tells me that there’s one in almost every  household in the country.

The doctors say I should remember things like that. Although my personal memories seem to be “temporarily” lost, I should be familiar with everyday objects and brands and the names of celebrities. But I’m not.

I know words and cities and numbers. I like numbers. They feel real to me when everything around me is not. They are con­crete. I can cling to them. I  can’t remember my own face but I know that the digits between one and ten are the same now as they were before I lost everything. I know I must have learned them at some point in my eclipsed life. And that’s as close to a sense of familiarity as I’ve gotten.

I count to keep myself occupied. To keep my mind filled with something other than abandoned space. In counting I’m able to create facts. Items I can add to the paltry list of things that I know.

I know that someone named Dr. Schatzel visits my room every fi fty-two minutes and carries a cup of coffee with him on every third visit. I know that the nurses’ station is twenty to twenty-four footsteps away from my room, depending on the height of the person on duty. I know that the female news­caster standing on the curb at Los Angeles International Air­port blinks fifteen times per minute. Except when she’s responding to a question from the male newscaster back in the studio. Then her blinks increase by 133 percent.

I know that Tokyo, Japan, is a long way for a sixteen-year­old girl to be traveling by herself.

Kiyana enters my room and frowns at the screen. “Violet, baby,” she says, pressing a button on the bottom that causes my face to dissolve to black, “watchin’ that twenty- four-hour news coverage is not gonna do you any good. It’ll only upset you more. Besides, it’s gettin’ late. And you’ve been up for hours now. Why doncha try to get some sleep?”

Defiantly I press the button on the small device next to my bed and the image of my face reappears.

Kiyana lets out a buoyant singsongy laugh. “Whoever you are, Miss Violet, I have a feelin’ you  were the feisty type.”

I watch the television in silence as live footage from the crash site is played. A large rounded piece—with tiny oval-shaped windows running across it—fills the screen. The Free­dom Airlines logo painted onto the side slowly passes by. I lean forward and study it, scrutinizing the curved red-and-blue font. I try to convince myself that it means something. That somewhere in my blank slate of a brain, those letters hold some kind of signifi cance. But I fail to come up with anything.