more John John

In the sightless dark he is aware only of his fear. Then something (a single snore?) reminds him of the hospital: he pictures to himself the lines of beds on either side of the ward. A deeper grumbling snore from a nearby body further reassures him. Relaxing he wonders what it was exactly that first told him where he was. After several minutes he pinpoints it — the distant breathy whisper of lift doors opening. Followed by the almost inaudible whirr of cables.
He is pleased with his discovery, is encouraged by that small exercise of memory: his mind is capable of making connections, conscious and unconscious. But still only of this life, this hospital life.
Nervously he tries to recall his precise state of mind on waking. He didn't know where he was. Did he imagine himself somewhere else? If so, where? But those black waking moments were filled only with the horror of his not knowing, a timeslip memory of his first fearful awakening.
First?
His unknown past frightens him. He fears what he might have been. Even if it was only someone mundane. Especially if it was only someone mundane. He does not want to be reclaimed by the owner of those clothes. The past is standing like a trap before him; one wrong step and the amnesiac will again be that equally anonymous man. Simultaneously, though, he longs to be more than this, than this joke-named hospital patient, than this object of easy curiosity.
Ignorance of himself is shaming. He wants to know, and fears the consequences of knowing. There will be no escaping him again.
The nurses are rousing themselves from the torpor of their uneventful nightshift. He fingers the covers free of his face. The slowlimbed night sister is packing up her papers at the table in the centre of the ward. He can hear the clink-chink of empty cups from the entrance to the ward. He knows the routine now. In a few minutes the nurses will begin opening the curtains, chiding patients from their sleep, sitting men up in their beds, remembering if and how many sugars they take.
The night sister reaches up to switch out the light above the table. Two patients from the end of the ward are making stealthily for the bathroom. John John hugs his stillness close to him, loath to move before he has to, reluctant to pre-empt the routine.
An unvarying routine, for a man with no past, is a comfort. Ensconced in a routine, with his mind employed only in the serene contemplation of what is coming next, the past cannot leap out and frighten him. That past, that huge past of all those years, is terrifying in his having forgotten it. That past, of all those people he supposedly knew, has nothing to do with who he is at present, is an alien being inside himself, the revival of whom will mean the obliteration of his present self. To have that unknown past suddenly entrap and possess him is a fearful prospect, will mean a death of sorts. He can shut off such fears behind the anaesthesia of hospital routine, can limit his whole existence to that predictable routine. Therefore, his instincts reason, better not to thwart the routine lest some wrong step start an avalanche of memory, bring his past smothering down upon him.
When the nurses finally abandon the susurrations and languor of the night, more patients struggle into armtwisting dressing gowns and, towels over their shoulders, slop towards the bathroom in loose slippers. John John now feels conspicuous being awake and still abed; and he doesn't want to attract unnecessary attention to himself. So he too slips out of bed, takes the hospital towel from the bottom bedrail and joins his bedsmelling brethren in the bathroom.
He is practised now at urinating; but not until he joins the three deep queue at the washbasins does he realise that he does not have a plastic toilet bag, nor its contents. Second in the queue he feels over the two day growth on his chin.
"Course," a large man says to him via the mirror, "you got no razor. I got a disposable you can have. Drop my soap back to me later."
'Thank you," John John says to the reflection, watches the large man scrape his pliant jowls.
The large man has drawn the bathroom’s attention to John John.
"Nurse says you can speak Urdu," a thin little man says from the queue beside him. His shoulders curve in around his sunken chest.
"Heard who?" the large man at the mirror says. Last evening the large man was jovial with his visitors.
"I heard one of the nurses say..." the small man begins. The other men groan at his humourlessness. The small man blinking shuts himself up: he is used to being disliked.
The other patients, having realised John John’s predicament, they too hasten to help. A man in the queue behind has two toothbrushes, blushing explains that when he first came in he bought a toothbrush in the hospital shop and then his wife brought his old toothbrush from home. The man in the queue before him offers a squeeze of his toothpaste, others offer the use of deodorants and shampoo. Nodding his gratitude to all, John John finds himself at a basin.
He recognises the face now as his own; and, though, made hasty by the lengthening queue behind he has time to realise that he has no memory of something so mundane as cleaning his own teeth: a thing he must have done every single day of his previous life. Even the minty tang of the pink toothpaste is unfamiliar. He knows what to do only from his five minute observation of the others at the washbasins. So too with shaving: if he hadn’t watched the other patients he would have had no idea what to do. So unpractised is he with the aerosol foam that he almost covers his eyes; and then he cuts the slack skin under his chin, the bright red blood spidering over the wet pink skin; and only then does he realise why the other men reached their heads back, and belatedly he does so.
When he re-enters the ward the curtains are all open and the tea trolley has made its rounds. Having returned, with more thanks, the tin of shaving soap to the large man further down the ward, he hurries to the normalcy of his bed and his waiting cup of tea. And, sat back in his familiar bed, cup of tea before him, the mound of Osman Rustar still clinging avariciously to sleep, he glances often and with pride to his new possessions, accoutrements of an ordinary man — a red toothbrush and a blue razor — and he pats his smarting cheeks and once more sinks comfortably back into routine, to await the appearance of the grumpy cleaners.
While waiting he recalls that first glimpse he had, through the curtains, of the old man opposite sat in his chair, as now, waiting. That’s all we do here is wait, he thinks; is that why we’re called patients? He grimaces at his mechanical attempt at humour. This waiting, though, does lay to rest the last of his bathroom agitation. And he knows that, after the cleaners have been, the newspaperman will come, then the nurses on day shift will drift in with breakfast. Nothing to alarm him there.

Voice Off. When a chimpanzee cannot make itself understood, in despair it throws itself onto its back. Au eighteen month old human child reacts in the same manner. An adult human when earnestly trying to put over an argument sits on the edge of its seat. When its interlocutor refuses to understand, the human adult throws itself back into the seat in despair.