Once Around The Sun
CHAPTER ONE
It was the first day of January when a Coastguard harbor patrol boat found him floating unconscious in San Diego Bay. He was wearing a life vest and was unconscious. As they pulled him into the boat he opened his eyes and gave the two sailors who were lifting him a blank stare.
Their experience from other rescues told them he was confused and disoriented, so they wrapped him in a gray wool blanket. A trickle of blood was coming from a gash on his forehead. One of the sailors poured him a cup of hot coffee from their thermos jug and handed it to him.
“What is your name mister?” he asked, “I need it for the boat’s log. He didn’t answer but stared straight ahead, and remained silent.
“Come on Mister, tell me your name,” the sailor repeated.
Suddenly he looked at the sailor oddly and responded, “I can’t remember who I am.”
“Do you remember how you wound up floating in the bay?” the sailor asked.
“No, I don’t remember anything at all,” he responded.
When they arrived at the Coastguard station an ambulance was waiting. He guessed that the patrol boat had radioed ahead for it. The civilian paramedics quickly examined the man. The only physical wound they could find was a nasty gash on his forehead just above the left eye. They cleaned the wound and placed a temporary bandage on it. He started to object when they placed him on a gurney and strapped him down, but then decided that maybe he should go to the hospital.
As the ambulance pulled into the emergency ramp at the hospital he got a glimpse of a sign that read, “Paradise Valley Hospital.” As they were checking him into the emergency room he could still not remember his name, so they signed him in as “John Doe.” The doctor that examined him put four stitches in the head wound. As the doctor finished tying the last stitch, he said, “There, all finished. In a few days you’ll be good as new.”
“Doc, I can’t remember who I am.”
The doctor smiled and answered, “That’s probably due to the blow to your head. Temporary amnesia is common when someone is hit on the head like you were. Get a good night’s rest and in the morning you’ll probably have total recall.”
He was then given a sedative and placed in a room with three other patients. Within ten minutes John Doe was fast asleep.
When he awoke some ten hours later he felt groggy from the sedative. He got out of bed, and put on a blue cotton robe that was draped over a chair next to the bed. A door slightly ajar revealed where the bathroom was. He stood in front of the mirror staring at his face for a long time. The doctor had been wrong. He still couldn’t remember his name or anything else about his life.
It was a very strange and scary feeling. Staring back at him from the mirror was a man about thirty years old with deep-set brown eyes and bushy eyebrows. He had a rather dark complexion and his nose was rather large and aquiline. His short black hair clung to his head in tight curls. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember who he was. He left the bathroom and returned to the bed.
The doctor that had treated him the night before came into the room about half an hour later carrying an x-ray. “Well, how are we feeling today?” he asked cheerfully.
“Not so good Doc, I still can’t remember a thing.”
Looking at the x-ray, the doctor said, “Well, that’s not surprising. You have a pretty good concussion here. It’s not uncommon for a case of your type to suffer temporary loss of memory, but cases of true amnesia are extremely rare. I’m sure you will recover your memory shortly.”
“I don’t know Doc, I can’t still remember anything at all,” he said.
The doctor noticed that he spoke with a slight accent. “Well maybe your accent will give you a clue to who you are,” he suggested.
“What do you mean,” he asked.
“Well, you probably weren’t born here in the United States, so the immigration service might have a record of your fingerprints from when you immigrated to this country.”
He thought about it for a few minutes. “That’s a great idea Doc, I bet they do have a record of me.”
“Glad to be of help,” said the doctor. “But whether you remember who you are or not, I’m going to keep you here in the hospital one more day for observation,” the doctor added.
Later that afternoon, when one of the other patients in his room changed the television to a Tijuana channel, John Doe discovered that he understood Spanish perfectly. “Maybe I came here from Mexico,” he thought. He resolved to go to the immigration office as soon as they let him out of the hospital.
That evening, as he was watching television in the lounge, a story about him being rescued from San Diego Bay by the Coast guard came on the news. It told how the Coastguard had found him floating unconscious in the bay and that he was taken to Paradise Valley Hospital, where it was discovered he has amnesia.
His first thought was, “maybe someone that knows me will see this news report and come to the hospital.” But nobody came.
The following morning he was released from the hospital. As he was standing outside wondering what to do, the doctor that had attended him came out.
“Hi, I’m off duty now, can I give you a lift somewhere?” he offered.
“I need to go to the immigration office if it’s not too much trouble,” he replied hopefully.
“Sure, come on. Maybe they can find out who you are,” the doctor answered. He slid into the passenger seat of the doctor’s Porche and they entered the highway and headed west towards the downtown area. In a short time the doctor pulled up in front of a red brick building next to the Federal Court House just off Broadway. He thanked the doctor for the ride and entered the building.
There was a sign with an arrow pointing to the left that read, “Immigration Services.” He followed the arrows into a large room filled with people sitting on benches. He saw that they were calling people by numbers so he walked to the front of the room and tore a ticket from the machine on the wall. His number was 137. He knew he was in for a long wait when the next number they called was sixty-five.
He sat down in one of the blue molded plastic chairs and waited for his number to be called. While he waited he looked around at the people in the room. Most were obviously Mexicans, but there were also a sprinkling of Chinese, some Filipinos, Africans, and some that looked to be east Europeans. He overheard two men speaking Greek behind him and was surprised that he could understand every word they were saying.
“How come I can understand both Spanish and Greek?” he thought to himself. He was even more confused than before. Then it hit him! “I’m probably a language professor at some local college!”
It was nearly four hours later when he finally heard his number called. “Number 137, please go to window “C,” a voice said over a loudspeaker. He got up and walked to the small window marked “C.”
“How may I help you?” asked a very bored looking uniformed official without looking up at him.
“I know this is rather unusual, but you see I have amnesia and I thought maybe you would be able to help me find out who I am,” he told the official.
“Oh yeah” he responded, “you must be the guy they found floating in the bay. I saw the story about you on the news.”
“Yes, that’s right. I thought that if I came here from another country you might have a record of my fingerprints,” he said hopefully.
“Well, if you immigrated into the United States, we’ll definitely have a record of your fingerprints on file,” the man assured him. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a fingerprint card and placed it on the small counter. He then opened up an inkpad that was lying to one side and said, “We’ll take your fingerprints right now, and within a few days we should be able to tell you if you have an immigration record.”
The man took each of John Doe’s fingers and rolled them carefully on the ink pad. Then he placed his fingers one by one on the fingerprint card and rolled the prints onto the form. When he was finished he handed him a small paper towel so he could wipe the ink off his fingers.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” the man said jokingly. “Come back in a few days and we should have some answers for you,” he added.
As he was turning to leave, the immigration official called him back. “Why don’t you go to the police station and check there too. If you were ever arrested they should have your fingerprints on file,” the official suggested.
“That’s a good idea, thanks,” he said as he walked away from the window.
Outside the immigration office he found a cop and asked directions to the police station. It took nearly half an hour to walk to the station. It was a new building and covered an entire city block. Inside he explained his problem to the desk sergeant.
“Well mister, you’re in luck because we have a new computerized fingerprint system, and I can check on you real fast,” the sergeant told him. “If you’ve ever been arrested we will have your prints on file.” The sergeant pulled out a fingerprint card, and again he went through the process of inking John Doe’s fingers and then rolling them onto the card one by one.
While he was wiping the ink off his fingers the sergeant scanned the fingerprint card into the computer. He then typed something rapidly into the computer, and said, “There, we’ll have an answer for you shortly.” “How about a cup of coffee while you wait?” the sergeant asked.
“Yes, thank you, a cup of coffee would be good.”
“How do you take it?” the cop asked.
He thought for a minute and answered, “You know, I don’t even know how I drink my coffee. Just give it to me black I guess,” he told the sergeant.
The coffee was strong, the way coffee gets when it has set in the pot for several hours, but had a good rich flavor to it. He drank two cups while waiting for the computer to match his prints with someone in its files.
Finally, the sergeant said, “Well, mister, I have bad news for you, or maybe it’s good news. The computer couldn’t find a match of your fingerprints with any in the files. That means you’ve never been arrested or had a driver’s license in California.”
“I guess it’s good news that I’m not a criminal, but it doesn’t help me find out who I am,” he answered.
Noting the disappointment in his voice the sergeant offered, “Look, mister, I’ll send your prints to the FBI and have them check too. If you’ve ever had your fingerprints taken, like for military service, or a government job, or anything else, they’ll have a record of them.”
“Thanks a lot for your help,” he answered, and got up to leave.
As he was walking away the desk sergeant asked, “Do you have a place to stay?”
“No, I don’t and I don’t have any money either,” he told him, somewhat embarrassed.
The sergeant gave him directions to a nearby homeless shelter. “You can probably stay there for awhile until you get yourself straightened out.”
“Okay, thanks, I’ll give it a try,” he replied. He really didn’t have any place else to go.
As he walked the streets of San Diego to the homeless shelter he thought about how he might find out who he is. “It’s odd that I can speak English, Spanish, and Greek,” he thought. “Maybe I’m a language teacher or an interpreter.” But somehow neither of those seemed quite right to him.
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