“Okay. I think maybe I should take you to meet my girl, Toshi. She works in this area, so she might know this double happiness place.”
I follow him a few blocks. I’m still trying to find the double happiness sign, but it’s even harder now because I got some sick on my address book and the ink’s smeared. Also, there are black spots dancing before my eyes making it hard to see where the pavement really is.
When we finally stop, I almost cry in relief. Because we’ve found it, the double happiness place. Everything is familiar. The steel door, the red scaffolding, the distorted portraits, even the faded name on the facade, Ganterie, after the glove factory it must have once been. This is the place.
Toshi comes to the door, a tiny black girl with tight dreadlocks, and I want to hug her for delivering me to the white room. I want to march straight to the white room and lie down next to Lulu, to have everything feel right again.
>“Ce ne sera pas nécessaire,” I say.
“Ahh, you speak French?” he asks in French.
I nod. “It came back to me.”
“Good. Everything else will, too.”
“So I can go?”
“Someone must come for you! And you have to make a report to the police.”
Police. It will be hours. And I have nothing to tell them, really. I take the coin back out and play it across my knuckle. “No police!”
The doctor follows the coin as it flips across my hand. “Do you have problems with the police?” he asks.
“No. It’s not that. I have to find someone,” I say. The coin clatters to the floor.
The doctor picks it up and hands it to me. “Find who?”
Perhaps it’s the casual way he asked; my bruised brain doesn’t have time to scramble it before spitting it out. Or perhaps the fog is lifting now, and leaving a terrific headache behind. But there it is, a name, on my lips, like I say it all the time.
“Lulu.”
“Ahh, Lulu. Très bien!” The doctor claps his hands together. “Let us call this Lulu. She can come get you. Or we can bring her to you.”
It is too much to explain that I don’t know where Lulu is. Only that she’s in the white room and she’s waiting for me and she’s been waiting for a long time. And I have this terrible feeling, and it’s not just because I’m in a hospital where things are routinely lost, but because of something else.
“I have to go,” I insist. “If I don’t go now, it could be too late.”
The doctor looks at the clock on the wall. “It is not yet two o’clock. Not late at all.”
“It might be too late for me.” Might be. As if whatever is going to happen hasn’t already happened.
The doctor looks at me for a long minute. Then he shakes his head. “It is better to wait. A few more hours, your memory will return, and you will find her.”
“I don’t have a few hours!”
I wonder if he can keep me here against my will. I wonder if at this moment I even have a will. But something pulls me forward, through the mist and the pain. “I have to go,” I insist. “Now.”
The doctor looks at me and sighs. “D’accord.” He hands me a sheaf of papers, tells me I am to rest for the next two days, clean my wound every day, the sutures will dissolve. Then he hands me a small card. “This is the police inspector. I will tell him to expect your call tomorrow.”
I nod.
“You have somewhere to go?” he asks.
Céline’s club. I recite the address. The Métro stop. These I remember easily. These I can find.
“Okay,” the doctor says. “Go to the billing office to check out, and then you may go.”
“Thank you.”