The room was bright: white painted walls, pastel shades for drapes, the floor painted a slate blue and scattered with mats. Through the open window a soft breeze drifted. Looking out beyond the olive groves one could see the deep blue of the Sea of Galilee. The bed linen was crisp and white. It was a scene of peace, except for the room’s lone occupant.
He began to move, thrashing about in the bed. Perspiration beaded on his forehead then ran down his face. His lips moved and he cried out. At this the nurse, watching behind the one-way glass, pressed the record button on her console. The room was wired for sound and the turning tape reels recorded another burst of garbled vocalizations. For a brief moment he thrashed about, then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. His face relaxed, his breathing became more even, the perspiration dried. He slept.
The nurse pressed the Stop button and resumed her watch. It was rumoured that next month they would install voice activated mikes in the room, but as he was on a 24-hour personal monitoring, it wasn’t a priority.

The doctor looked at the patient, who was now sleeping peacefully. He read the nurse’s chart, pursing his lips as he digested its contents, then handed the clipboard back.
“He had another episode?”
“Yes, a brief one.” She liked Dr. Allon and she sensed that he both knew and appreciated her interest. “It didn’t make any sense.”
“They never do,” he responded. “But I’d better listen to it anyway.”
She depressed the Play switch and they listened.
“Play it again.”
She did.
“ Well, apart from a rather colourful selection of profanities, you’re right it doesn’t make any sense.” His voice was soft and husky. He pulled up a chair and straddled it. Twenty-nine years old, dark hair already fast receding, he had a strong face with soft brown eyes. When he looked at her she felt a flush of heat, a stirring of emotion.
“ He’s a real surprise..”
She let his words hang, afraid that she would betray her feelings.
“ When they brought him here it all seemed pretty straightforward. A couple of bullet wounds, the effect of the journey, no one thought we’d be getting into this. We don’t even know his name.”
“His passport said Charles Raines and so did his ticket,” she ventured.
“Well, you’d probably register your ticket under the name on your passport.”
She coloured at that. “I meant we do know who he is.”
“You’re right.” He responded. “I’m sorry.” and he left her, leaving her to wonder whether he was sorry he had been sarcastic or sorry she was right. Being an optimist …

It was a conference, the third they had held on Charles Raines. This time there were four men present. Dr. Yigal Allon, the psychiatrist, cast a professional eye over the others. They all seemed comfortable, this despite the fact that the room had no windows and was of stark cinder block construction. Allon would have been surprised to learn that it was swept electronically once a day and always prior to a meeting. Located in a rather nondescript house on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, the air to the room was filtered and tested for biological contaminants and chemical agents. Had either Allon or Dr. Benjamin Moshad known this they might not have been so comfortable.

Moshad was the other medical professional present. A rotund sixty-year-old, his bald head wreathed with a circle of white hair, he was an ebullient man. Moshad had made his reputation as a leading trauma specialist in the Yom Kippur War and it had grown in the years that followed. He wasn’t sure why he was at the meeting. His part was done, “Bloody good job too!” he told all who asked.
“Dr. Allon?” Allon looked at the speaker. Ariel Yeshiva was the youngest person in the room. A member of the Prime Minister’s Office, he spoke with authority although Allon’s trained eye sensed that the authority stemmed from the position and not from the man. Dark-haired, he had the looks that swept women off their feet and yet his body language betrayed his insecurity. Allon opened the file.
“The patient is still experiencing periods of severe trauma.” Allon began. “The periods are becoming further apart; they typically last from 8 to 10 minutes. They are characterised by severe stress, perspiration, elevated blood pressure and heart rate, involuntary arm motions and incoherent speech. They occur only while the patient is sleeping and the patient returns to sleep after the episode. The patient has no knowledge of the events and replaying the outbursts to him have triggered nothing.”
“You replayed your recordings?”
Yeshiva’s question took Allon by surprise: were they State secrets?
“In my discussions with him, I suggested that he let me tape one of his episodes and that he listen to it. I brought in a portable tape recorder and we did it.” Yeshiva relaxed at that. “When I replayed the tape to him it meant nothing.” Allon shrugged.
“Physically he has recovered?” Moshad’s question was also a statement of fact.
“Yes.” Allon frowned. “He walks, he jogs, he swims, he plays tennis. I have no doubt he could even shoot. Physically he has recovered, but his mind?” He let the question hang.
“Have you let him shoot?” Moshad demanded. As a surgeon he was pleased to know that his skills were still there, not that he had ever doubted it, but it never hurt to emphasize it in the presence of others. Healing bodies was the easy part; the mind was something else. Normally he didn’t worry about such things, the repair of the flesh was his speciality; however, if he had to be in this meeting, he might as well offer some constructive suggestions.
“The clinic is hardly the place for a shooting range.”
At this the fourth man in the room, tall, thin and pale as if he spent a lot of time inside, scribbled something on a yellow pad, tore the sheet off and passed it to Yeshiva. Having done this he resumed his somnolent pose with his fingers steepled, his eyes closed. Yeshiva glanced at the paper. He looked at Allon.
“Suppose you had access to a range, do you think it would have any effect? Good or bad?”
“Let’s review the problem.” Allon began. “Let’s for the sake of argument call the subject Charles Raines.” He began to tick off using his fingers. “He has a passport in that name. He has an airline ticket in that name. He has a hotel reservation in that name. He has a car rental in that name. But, and it is a big but, he doesn’t respond to that name. We’ve tried many ways and to him Charles Raines means nothing. He doesn’t know who he is. The event, which triggered this amnesia, was the airport massacre, in which he played a prominent role. If the reports are correct he killed three of the terrorists and wounded another. He himself was wounded in the attack. We flew him here immediately.”
‘With the consent of the British authorities,’ the thin man reflected. ‘They were only too pleased to get him out of the country. Was this an angle?’
“My colleague, Dr. Moshad treated him for his injuries, with great success I might add.” Moshad inclined his head in acknowledgement. “But, when he recovered, he had complete amnesia. Some amnesia is normal with an anaesthetic, but usually it is centred on the trauma, the operation. In the case of Raines it is total. At this point I was brought in and I have been treating him, with, I have to confess, little success. It would appear gentlemen, that I am the failure.”
“Doctor.” It was Moshad. “The attacks or episodes: you say they are beginning to get further apart? Would they perhaps be getting shorter?”
Allon pulled three pieces of paper from the file and slid them across the polished hardwood table. “This is the data we have. There is, as you can see, some variation in the length of each episode, but it doesn’t support the hypothesis that they are getting shorter.”
“Well then, Doctor, is there any aspect of the episodes apart from the lengthening period between them which suggests a reduction in their severity?”
Allon shrugged. “Nothing that we can see.”
“So Dr. Allon, where do we go from here?”
Before answering Yeshiva, Allon surveyed the others. Satisfied that he had everybody’s
Attention, he fastened his eyes on the questioner.
“It may be that the period between the attacks will lengthen until effectively they cease. At that point we will still have the problem of a person who doesn’t know his name.”
“If this is the prognosis, we should meet again gentlemen. I would suggest same time, same place next month. I’ll have my secretary send you reminders. You may all rest assured that the government is most grateful for your efforts.” With this Yeshiva got up and, collecting his notes, led the way out of the room, followed by Moshad. Allon was just completing stuffing his files into his briefcase when he happened to glance at the thin man, who had not moved: instead he motioned Allon to close the door and stay.
“Call me Daniel. Our government leader forgot to introduce me.” The voice was flat and accentless; it would, Allon knew, be hard to place. “I have a friend who would like to meet your Mr. Raines. This friend has access to a firing range and a training building where we can simulate a real life situation. Would this help?”
“It might, but it might also undo all the good we have done and send him back to...” he left it unsaid. There was silence. Allon noted that Daniel had a long thin scar running down his right cheek. The silence stretched into minutes. “If only,” Allon ventured, breaking the silence, “he would recognise his name.”
“He probably would recognise it if we knew it, but I can tell you it is not Charles Raines.”
“I don’t understand. We have a passport, a plane ticket, and a hotel booking…” Again the litany, again he ticked them off on his fingers.
Daniel smiled and his soft brown eyes seemed to convey sympathy. “We’ve also got a car rental in the States, a flight across the Atlantic in the same name, but as our American friends say, “it ain’t worth a hill of beans”. You see, if you push back further you don’t find any history.”
Allon stared at him. “History?”
“History: a man has a history. A place of birth, neighbours who knew him, traffic tickets, a wife or a sweetheart who mourns him, men he played sports with, jobs that he did, employment. He’s a tennis player you say. Tennis isn’t solitaire; you need at least one other person to play with and you tend to be seen. You acquire a history. You see what I’m saying? Our man, Charles Raines doesn’t have a history. He pops up at the airport freshly minted. He only has a present. It was fortunate for a lot of people that he was there. They don’t care that he only has a present; they don’t care what the reason is for this.”
There was a short silence while Allon digested the new information.
“ What is the reason?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say something like Witness Protection. Usually they do a better job, but if he were going on a trip, they probably thought they could get away with it. Then when he got back they would fix it up.”
“So how do we find out who he really is?”
“We don’t. We can’t.’ he lied. The reality was, it wasn’t worth burning the asset for
what was probably not the reason anyway.
“Then, how do I ...”
“…Maybe, Doctor, you don’t. Perhaps we can give him an identity.” Allon was going to respond, but was waved to silence. “Let me put it this way. It was fortunate that Charles Raines was at the airport. He did a service to Israel and to a lot of people. Now we find that he has forgotten who he is. If we can’t help him recover his identity, your job incidentally, then we supply him with a new identity, that’s my job. Is that a problem?”
“He’s an American. You can’t make him an Israeli.”
‘So, we make him an American. We give him an American identity.”
“I’ll have to think about that.” Allon rose from the table.
“Think about it, by all means, and also think about letting my old friend meet him and letting him run a live fire exercise.” With that Daniel stood up, drawing himself to his full six foot three. “But don’t think too long on it, as my friend will probably want to meet him in a couple of weeks at the latest.”
“This friend, he has a name?”
“Nahum will do.”
“Nahum?”
“Just Nahum.”

   The mobile home in Montana was old and dilapidated. It had seen too many winters and too little maintenance. The roof repaired, the previous summer, with aluminum flashing and a coat of tar, now leaked, again. Grant Baker, a short stocky man, clambered up on the roof, grunting at the effort. Some would have called him fat, although not to his face, for it was seamed with the scars of too many bar-fights, a testimony to his short fuse. Baker stood 5 feet 8 inches high, weighed in at 220 pounds and on the roof he was conscious of every one of those pounds. The leak was where the pullout joined the main structure. Here the ice had backed up under the flashing. In Montana, 20 miles from Missoula, where the valley opened into the plains, one didn’t get much rain. This time of the year, early March, one didn’t get any and the snow and ice crunched under his boots. They’d had a lot of snow that year and the winter had been milder than usual courtesy of El Nino, the scientists said. Yesterday had been a case in point. It had spiked above freezing and with the old oil furnace in the trailer cranking out its heat, the first tell-tale signs of a leak had appeared. Today everything had tightened up as winter re-established itself.
He shovelled off the snow, exposing the ice, then set to work chopping the ice, stopping periodically to push it off the roof. His concentration was such that he missed the sound of the pickup returning. Estelle, his wife, had been to town to get groceries and the mail. The first he knew of her return was the sound of the trailer door being slammed shut. It was only 10.30 in the morning and his mind was just turning to thoughts of an ice-cold beer, when he heard her scream…

Grant Baker got off the roof the fastest way he knew, which was to jump into the snow piled up around the trailer. He landed waist deep, not too far from the satellite dish and when he entered the trailer his boots, logged with snow, slipped on the curled up vinyl flooring. There was a thump as he steadied himself against the thin wood veneer panelling and then he went down the corridor to the living room.
The living room included the tipout and was square shaped. In the right hand corner there was a much-chipped entertainment centre housing an old television, complete with large chrome dials, and a VCR. On its top shelf a Sony boombox completed the electronic hardware. There were a few audio and videocassettes on the shelves and a brass standard lamp in the adjacent corner. The left side of the room was dominated by a chesterfield and a matching chair, their printed fabric faded and torn. A coffee table displaying a Satellite guide was the only other item of furniture. Estelle was sitting on the chesterfield, sobbing. To the left of the Satellite guide he noticed an official looking envelope.
“What’s wrong ‘Stelle?” There was no answer save the sobbing. “’Stelle, what the hell’s wrong with you?” Her head was buried in her hands, her face hidden by her tousled dirty blonde hair. “’Stelle for Christ’s sake! What’s wrong!”
She raised her head just enough to pass him the tear-stained, crumpled letter. He smoothed it out, but it swam just out of focus. With an oath he went in search of his glasses, which he found on the VCR. The letter was from the State Department and was brief. He read it twice; just to be sure it really said what he thought it said. Then he held his wife and together they rocked and cried.