Chapter Two
I’ve been forgotten all my life. The day I was born, my parents left me at the hospital and drove home. They didn’t realize it until a couple of hours later, when my grandmother arrived from out of town and asked where the baby was.
My mother cried all the way back to the hospital, feeling guilty because she couldn’t even remember giving birth to me. It probably didn’t help that my grandmother was in the back seat, telling her what a bad mother she was obviously going to be. When my parents returned to the maternity ward, the nurses were very confused, because no one had filled out the paperwork on my birth. They finally located me because I was the only baby left after they’d accounted for the rest.
After they got home, guilt over forgetting me made my mother cling to me. She sat in the rocking chair in the living room and held me for hours. To her shock, both my father and my grandmother forgot my existence after leaving the room.
Once I was old enough to understand, my mother read me the journal entry she wrote that night, still cradling me in one arm. She was exhausted, but terrified that she would forget me again if she fell asleep.
Which is exactly what happened.
* * *
For obvious reasons, I wasn’t the easiest child to raise. My mother never complained to me, so it wasn’t until I read her diaries that I understood how difficult it was for her, particularly at first.
She would be puzzled to hear a baby crying in the apartment and go to investigate. I would be in a crib in the room she and my father had decorated as a nursery back when she was pregnant. She would pick me up to try to calm me down while she figured out whose baby I was. Then she would remember that she wasn’t pregnant anymore and wonder if I was hers and if she had amnesia. Then she would go and check her journal to try to figure things out.
I don’t know how many times she went through that cycle of rediscovering me before she started pinning a note on my jumper that read “Tina, you don’t remember him, but this is your baby, Nat. Read your journal.”
Over the next few years, my mother set old-fashioned wind-up alarm clocks with notes on them to remind herself to feed me and check up on me. Even after I was old enough to find her when I needed something, she kept detailed journals of her interactions with me. Fortunately, she liked the feel of writing in a paper journal, because anything she typed into a computer about me would soon end up changed to read as if I had never been there. Eventually she discovered that if she printed something out immediately, the printed copy wouldn’t change, so she would sometimes take pictures of me with a webcam and print them out to put in a photo album.
Because all the hospital records were on computer, there was no record of my birth, and since she and my father hadn’t decided on a name before I was born, she wasn’t sure what name they told the hospital for the birth certificate.
So she called me Nat, after Nat King Cole, because she hoped that someday I would become unforgettable.
Of course, that had never happened.
* * *
It was just my mother and me as I was growing up—my father couldn’t handle it and left when I was just a few weeks old. After he left, he didn’t remember having a son, just that he and my mother kept arguing.
The amazing thing about my mother is that she could have given up on me at any time, just like he did. All she had to do was abandon me somewhere, and a minute later she would have forgotten I even existed, and she could have moved on with her life because no one else remembered me either. Instead, she quit her job and lived off welfare in order to take care of me.
I was homeschooled, of course. It would have been too awkward having to reintroduce myself to classmates and teachers multiple times every day, constantly being the new kid.
I never had a friend for more than a day. If I spent all day with someone, they’d remember me while we were together. But eventually they had to sleep, and when they woke, the memory of me would be gone.
So I grew up unconnected to anyone but my mother, and even she needed to be reminded to read her journals so she would know who I was. I know it sounds like a strange life, but it was the only life I knew, and I was happy enough.
* * *
When I was eleven years old, my appendix ruptured. Because we had no car, my mother called 911. The pain I felt while waiting for the ambulance was the worst of my life.
In an attempt to distract me from the pain, my mother asked me to recite the Vice Presidents of the United States. “John Adams,” she said, to get me started.
I didn’t have a photographic memory, but my mother discovered early in my childhood that I was very good at memorizing things. She told me many times that my excellent memory was “ironic,” which at first I thought meant it was magnetic like iron, until I finally looked it up in a dictionary.
When homeschooling me, she helped me develop my skills by giving me lists, like vocabulary words or state birds or elements of the periodic table, to memorize. When I was ten, I even memorized the first thousand digits of pi.
So, lying in my bed while the ambulance was on its way, I recited the Vice Presidents of the United States, followed by the capital cities of Europe and the plays of Shakespeare in chronological order. And by concentrating my mind on something other than my physical pain, I was able to bear it.
That memory training came in handy in other ways once I started working for the CIA. My Russian accent might be terrible, and the grammar didn’t come naturally, but I memorized large amounts of phonetically spelled vocabulary without too much trouble. And, of course, I had memorized the authentication protocol sheet I used with Edward.
I still found it quite ironic that people could forget me within a minute, yet if I concentrated I could still remember lists of useless information I had learned as a child.
* * *
One night when I was thirteen years old, my mother shook me awake to the sound of sirens. From the fourth floor of our high-rise apartment building, I looked out my bedroom window to see fire engines pulling up in the street.
By the time we got to the hallway, the fire was in the stairwells. We went back into our apartment to try the fire escape, but the fire had started below us on our side of the building—the steps descended into flames.
My mother screamed out the window for someone to help us, then we huddled together low to the floor, trying as much as possible to avoid the smoke filling my room.
Suddenly, she rose to her feet. “My journals!” she cried. When I started getting up to go with her, she said, “Stay here.” She rushed out the door, headed toward her bedroom.
She came back a few moments later with some of her journals cradled in her arms, but flames had caught onto her nightgown.
I remembered what she had taught me about fire safety. I grabbed the blanket off my bed and tackled her to the floor, wrapping the blanket around the flaming part of her nightgown. “Roll,” I said.
She rolled, and the flames went out.
But the smoke was thicker now, and we were both coughing. My lungs felt like they were burning, and I lacked the strength to even reach out to hold my mother’s hand.
Through my squinted eyes, I saw two shapes enter the room. Firemen. One of them hoisted me over his shoulder and started out. I saw the other pick up my mother—and the journals fell from her grip as he lifted her.
“No! I need those,” she said, but he ignored her.
The firemen carried us out and put us on stretchers.
I can still remember the way my mother’s voice wheezed as she called my name, trying to make sure I was all right.
The paramedics rushed us both to the hospital.
In separate ambulances.
* * *
Later that night, I crept down the corridor in my loose-fitting hospital gown, hoping none of the nurses would notice me. At each door, I checked the digital sign outside each room, until I found the one with Tina Morgan on it. I opened the door and slipped inside, then closed it behind me.
After my eyes adjusted to the dark, the light coming through the open blinds was good enough that I could see my mother lying asleep in the hospital bed. I wanted to turn on the light, then wake her up and see if she remembered me, but I was scared she wouldn’t. My only hope was to go back to our apartment and find some of her journals and photo albums so I would have proof when I told her that I was her son.
So I quietly said goodbye and slipped back out the door.
“Hey, kid!” a man said. “What are you doing?”
I turned to see a dark-haired man wearing a white lab coat over pale green scrubs, and I vaguely remembered that he was one of the doctors who had been checking out some of the other people rescued from the fire.
“It’s my mother’s room,” I said. “We’re fire victims.”
“You need to get back to your room.”
“I don’t remember where it is,” I lied.
“Come with me,” he said. He led me to a nurses’ station. Of course, with room assignments and even the door signs being computerized, there was no record of my being in the hospital at all, so I had to wait while they sorted things out.
After they put me in my room, I waited a few minutes, then snuck out. Obviously, I couldn’t go home in the hospital gown, so I took some scrubs that were way too big for me from a locker, promising I would return them after I got the evidence I needed to prove to my mother who I was.
After all, I wasn’t a thief.
* * *
Our apartment didn’t even have a floor anymore. I spent hours looking through the still-smoldering debris that remained in the apartment below ours, despite being found and taken out several times by police who were trying to keep people away from the building.
It was evening and my borrowed scrubs were blackened with soot by the time I had to face the truth: All my mother’s journals, everything that connected her to me, had burned to ashes in the fire.
* * *
“But a DNA test would prove you’re my mother,” I said. It was a month after the fire that had destroyed all the evidence I was her son, and we were standing in the living room of my mother’s new apartment.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what scam you’re trying to pull, but it won’t work.”
It was my third try, and the first two had ended this same way—she would rather believe her false memories of the past thirteen years than believe she had forgotten her own son.
I realized that in our old apartment, with my obviously lived-in room and the sheer accumulation of journal entries and photos, she had been able to convince herself she was my mother, but in this new home, it would take something more than a simple picture.
“Mom, please list—”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. She strode to the door and yanked it open. “Just leave or I’ll call the cops.”
Across the hall, a woman carrying two bags of groceries paused in her struggle to open the door and peered at us.
“Wait, I can prove the forgetting thing is real,” I said to my mother. Raising my voice, I said, “Excuse me, ma’am, do you need a hand with those groceries?”
The woman answered, “No, thank you.” She quickly opened her door and entered her apartment. The lock clicked behind her.
My mother scoffed. “What does that prove, other than your real mom taught you to be polite?”
“Just wait a minute, then go ask the lady across the hall if she’s ever seen me before.”
She stared at me. “You seriously believe this. You need help.”
“Please, just try.” I held up my hands in surrender. “If she remembers me, I’ll leave with no more fuss.”
After a moment, she stepped into the hall.
“Wait,” I said. “It takes a minute.”
When time was up, she knocked on the door. Footsteps approached on the other side, the lock turned, and the door opened a few inches. A chain prevented it from opening further.
“Excuse me,” said my mother, “I know this sounds crazy, but you remember this young man offering to help with your groceries as you were coming in just now, don’t you?” She pointed to where I stood in the doorway.
“No. And if he did, I wouldn’t’a let him. Can’t trust kids these days. Probably run off with them.”
“But you’re sure he didn’t—”
“Never seen him before. Go away.” The door slammed shut, and the lock clicked.
“See,” I said. “I told you, Mom. People forget me.”
Her shoulders slumped as she turned to face me. “It can’t be true. How could I forget my own child?” Tears brimmed in her eyes.
“It’s not your fault,” I said as she walked past me and sat on the couch.
“You look like your father,” she said. “I should have seen it before.”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember him. You raised me.”
“I thought the fire was a wakeup call,” she said. “I was finally getting my life back together, finding a job, making friends. But it was you, wasn’t it? My life for the past thirteen years is a blur because I can’t remember you, not because I was depressed.”
“It was me.”
She let out a half-choked sob, which reminded me of how often I had found her crying in the mornings, and how if I asked her what was wrong, she always said it was nothing. It had been me, all along—every day as she woke up and discovered the truth, she had cried.
“I must have been a terrible mother,” she said.
“No, Mom, you were the best.” For the first time in my life, I saw the real sacrifices my mother had made to raise me. “I love you and always will, no matter how many times you forget me.”
That only made her sob more.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“For what?”
“For coming.” I turned and walked out the door.
When I heard her call for me to come back, I began to run.
* * *
And so I was thirteen years old and living on the Dallas streets the first time I got caught stealing. Three weeks after I ran away from my mother, a store detective grabbed me as I stuffed a three-hundred-dollar digital camera inside my Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. He took me back to his office to keep an eye on me while he called the police.
Until then, I had always gotten away just by running fast and turning corners. When I was out of sight for long enough, my pursuers would forget who they were chasing and why. But even after calling the cops this store detective watched me like I was his favorite TV show, and I was scared the cops would take me and lock me in a cell and then forget about me and I would starve to death.
Fear did not make me piss my pants, but it gave me a powerful urge, and I begged the detective to let me go to the bathroom. He finally relented and escorted me to the restroom, going so far as to follow me in.
I headed toward the urinal to relieve myself, but inspiration struck and I went into a stall instead.
The detective walked over and stood just outside the stall door. “No funny business,” he said.
“No, sir,” I said as I sat on the toilet seat. Then I held my breath. And despite the pressure in my bladder, I held that in, too. I sat as still as I could, not making any sound as I counted the seconds. Eventually the detective walked to a urinal, relieved himself, flushed, and walked out. Without washing his hands, I might add.
That’s how I figured out that bathrooms were my friends.
After that first time I was caught, I realized that relying on my talent alone to get me out of tough situations was stupid. So I decided to learn how to pick locks.
I couldn’t just go to lock-picking school. I couldn’t even order a locksmith training course over the internet like any civilized person, because when it came to computers, I might as well have had someone follow me around, hitting Ctrl-Z to undo whatever I had done.
So I traded some stolen jewelry for a used lockpick set at a pawn shop. And then, with the help of some library books, I taught myself to pick locks—first with the standard picks, and then with improvised tools.
The skill served me well in many ways. First, I no longer had to sleep on the street or at a homeless shelter, because I could get into nicer places while their owners were away. Second, I could steal the kind of stuff people tended to keep under lock and key. But most importantly, I had a way out in case someone locked me in a room and forgot about me.
Becoming a thief was only partly out of necessity. At the time, I was a friendless teenager who had just lost the only person who cared about me, and I was angry at the world. Stealing was my revenge.
But my mother had not raised me to be a thief. She taught me right from wrong, of course. But more than that, she believed I had a destiny.
“You have your talent for a reason,” she would say. “God must have something special he wants you to do.” I guess that was her way of justifying the sacrifices she made for me—that it was all part of some grand plan. She was so sure about it that I believed her.
Until the night of the fire.
* * *
I didn’t date much as a teenager—or as an adult, for that matter. My talent did provide me with an initial advantage in meeting women, as I could try approaching a girl several times in order to find out what she liked. As for the end of a relationship, I never had to worry about breaking a girl’s heart or being pursued by a jealous ex-girlfriend. A minute after I left, she would be over me.
While all that would have been great if all I wanted were one-night stands with women I’d just met, I longed for something more than that. I would have been thrilled just to have a real date. I lost track of the times I’d take a woman out to dinner, only to have her go to the restroom and forget she was out with me. And begging a woman not to go to the restroom doesn’t make a good impression. Neither does following her to the bathroom and trying to carry on a conversation through the door.
In that situation, bathrooms were not my friends.
When I was seventeen years old, I worked up the courage to flirt with a cute cheerleader from the local high school in the food court at a mall. After a few forgotten attempts, she thought I was funny enough that she invited me to a party at her house that night, writing down the address with pink ink on a paper napkin. I knew she wouldn’t remember me, but I fantasized I would just flirt again and maybe we’d end up making out.
When I got to her house, the party was in full swing, with some kids already drunk enough that they were throwing up on the lawn. Her parents must have been rich, because the house was huge—three stories tall, with so many rooms filled with so many people that after half an hour of searching, I still hadn’t found the cheerleader.
One guy heard me asking about her, and he said she was his sister and he knew where she was. He called it the “secret party within the party.” I showed him the napkin, and he said since she’d invited me personally, he’d take me to her. Like an idiot, I followed him. He unlocked a door and shoved me inside, then closed it.
It was not a secret party within a party. After I managed to find a light switch, I discovered it was a windowless storage room.
I could hear him and his friends laughing outside, but soon they forgot me and wandered off. I reached for my lockpicks, and to my horror I discovered that in changing into nicer clothes for the party, I had left them in my other pants. I cursed myself for my stupidity.
Looking around the storage room for something I could use to unlock the door, I noticed lots of ceramic figurines, silver candlesticks, crystal vases, and other assorted fragile or valuable items. I realized that in finding a secure place to lock me up, the brother had put me in the same place that he and his sister had locked up the things they didn’t want people breaking or stealing during the party.
I laughed when I found their mother’s jewelry box. The party had turned out to be worthwhile after all.
* * *
Twenty-seven days before my eighteenth birthday, I was wandering through a mall looking for a good chance to steal something. As I passed a jewelry store, an employee took out a ring for a man and woman standing in front of the display case that held the really expensive diamonds. There was a pawn shop downtown that would only give me about five percent of what it was worth, but the rings in that case started at ten thousand dollars, so I figured it was worth trying a little snatch and run.
Like many mall jewelry stores, this one didn’t have a door, so I just walked in, approaching the couple from behind, keeping them between me and the young man who worked for the store so he wouldn’t see me until I was close. I stepped up to the counter right next to the woman, who was holding the ring, and with a quick motion I grabbed it from her hand.
Just as I was about to turn and run she said, “Hey!”—and I knew that voice. I looked at her face.
My mother. And she was looking at me with surprise and disgust.
I froze, my heart pounding within me.
The dark-haired man she was with said, “Give that back!” He looked familiar, and after a moment I recognized him as the doctor from the hospital we were taken to after the fire.
I looked back at my mother, and there was no love or even pity in her eyes.
Then the employee reached for my hand holding the ring, and I dropped it and ran, thoughts whirling in my head.
My mother had not raised me to be a thief. She had taught me right from wrong, taught me to be a good person, and I had thrown that all away after I lost her.
When I got back to the house I was currently staying in—the owners were away on vacation—I tried to put my mother out of my mind, but I kept seeing her face. If she knew that I was living as a thief, stealing from ordinary people, she would have been very disappointed in me. She had believed God gave me my talent for a reason, but I was just using it for myself.
Even though she didn’t know it, I had failed the only person who had ever cared about me.
To distract myself from my shame and guilt, I turned on the big-screen TV and flipped through the channels. I stopped when I came to a car chase: two sports cars racing across the ice, one shooting at the other with a Gatling gun.
It was a James Bond movie. I let it distract me until I realized maybe I could put my talent to good use after all.