Redshirts

agent or entertainment lawyer or whoever he was softening out to a buzzy murmur that became more relaxing and gentle as you went along.
    So that was your accident, which you remember in what you now consider absolutely terrifying detail. It’s as clear in your head as a back episode of one of your father’s television shows, preserved in high definition on a Blu-ray Disc. At this point you’ve even added a commentary track to it, making asides to yourself as you review it in your head, about your motorcycle, the BMW, the driver (who as it turns out was an entertainment lawyer, and who was sentenced to two weeks in county jail and three hundred hours of community service for his third violation of California law banning driving while holding a cell phone) and your brief, arcing flight from bike to pavement. You couldn’t remember it more clearly.
    What you can’t remember is what came after, and how you woke up, lying on your bed, fully clothed, without a scratch on you, a few weeks later.
    It’s beginning to bother you.
    *   *   *
    “You have amnesia,” your father said, when you first spoke to him about it. “It’s not that unusual after an accident. When I was seven I was in a car accident. I don’t remember anything about it. One minute I was in the car going to see your great-grandmother and the next I was in a hospital bed with a cast and my mother standing over me with a gallon of ice cream.”
    “You woke up the next day,” you said to your father. “I had the accident weeks ago. But I only woke up a few days ago.”
    “That’s not true,” your father said. “You were awake before that. Awake and talking and having conversations. You just don’t remember that you did it.”
    “That’s my point,” you said. “This isn’t like blacking out after an accident. This is losing memory several weeks after the fact.”
    “You did land on your head,” your father said. “You landed on your head after sailing through the air at forty-five miles an hour. Even in the best-case scenario, like yours was, that’s going to leave some lingering trauma, Matthew. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve lost some memories.”
    “Not some, Dad,” you said. “All of them. Everything from the accident until when I woke up with you and Mom and Candace and Rennie standing over me.”
    “I told you, you fainted,” your dad said. “We were concerned.”
    “So I faint and then wake up without a single memory of the last few weeks,” you said. “You understand why I might be concerned about this.”
    “Do you want me to schedule you for an MRI?” your dad asked. “I can do that. Have the doctors look around for any additional signs of brain trauma.”
    “I think that might be a smart thing to do, don’t you?” you said. “Look, Dad, I don’t want to come across as overly paranoid about this, but losing weeks of my life bothers me. I want to be sure I’m not going to lose any more of it. It’s not a comfortable feeling to wake up and have a big hole in your memory.”
    “No, Matt, I get it,” your dad said. “I’ll get Brenda to schedule it as quickly as she can. Fair enough?”
    “Okay,” you said.
    “But in the meantime I don’t want you to worry about it too much,” your father said. “The doctors told us you would probably have at least a couple of episodes like this. So this is normal.”
    “‘Normal’ isn’t what I would call it,” you said.
    “Normal in the context of a motorcycle accident,” your dad said. “Normal such as it is.”
    “I don’t like this new ‘normal,’” you said.
    “I can think of worse ones,” your father said, and did that thing he’s been doing the last couple of days, where he looks like he’s about to lose it and start weeping all over you.
    *   *   *
    While you’re waiting for your MRI, you go over the script you’ve been given for an episode of The Chronicles of the Intrepid . The good news for you is that your character plays a central role in the events. The bad news is that you don’t have any lines, and you spend the entire episode lying on a gurney pretending to be unconscious.
    “That’s not true,” Nick Weinstein said, after you pointed out these facts to him. He had stopped by the house with revisions, which was a service you suspected other extras did not get from the head writer of the series. “Look”—he flipped to the final pages of the script—“you’re conscious here.”
    “‘Crewman Hester