Wrong Number

All it took was one freaky moment for my memory to go out the window.

She kissed me, and nothing was stranger; her mouth tasted of booze and cigarettes and other things I couldn’t stand. But I didn’t break from her. Instead I held on, eyes shut, lips parted, intoxicated by the face pressed into mine. What did she look like again? Jesus, I couldn’t say. It was like falling in love and being hit by a train at the same time.

Part of me wanted to reel in disgust from this gutter-snipe’s filth hole, no doubt filled with swearing by day and other unwholesome acts by night. The rest wanted to forever fall into her delight. The kiss lasted a few seconds, maybe, but it felt like hours had slipped away by the time our lips unlocked. My eyelids were heavy, and movements slow, too slow to realise in time that she was gone.

Like a piss in the wind, she just disappeared. Is that how people treated each other these days? Steal a kiss, steal your memory, then fly off into the night?

Oh yeah, I forgot about my memory.

I looked around my surroundings, trying to get some sense of where I was. It was night, in a busy street, full of busier people, and enclosing me on all sides were great metal monoliths, huge buildings of glass and steel, reaching into a sky so black it seemed shunned by the stars. They were monuments, or perhaps spiritual on some subconscious level, I thought. As druids erected huge stones in the days of yore, to appease their gods of wind and rain and earth, so too did we construct our temples; this metropolis around me was an alter to whatever perverse thing we worshiped.

Pretty insightful, for a dude who couldn’t remember his own name. F**k, just who the hell am I? I knew moments ago, before she kissed me, but now I was a nobody. I felt my face to jog my memory, but there was nothing. She must’ve had some kind of amnesia agent on her lips, which gave me hope that this was a temporary state, but all the same, this s**t frightened me.

In despair, I went to rub my eyes, but stretched myself. I was holding something…a piece of note paper, with something written on it! At last, a f*****g clue! I studied the writings:

44-67-83-21-90

Well, at least she left me her phone number.

I pulled out my phone and dialed quickly. Amazingly, the thing actually rang, though the ring tone went for near a full minute.

“Hi, you’ve just called the Wrong Number,” a reply came at last. A female voice, high and chirpy and all the more god damn sinister for it. “I think you called 83-22-90. But it doesn’t matter, we got what you meant. Sorry I had to steal your memory, it’s never fun just to have to kiss people you don’t really want to. Not that you’re a bad kisser or any thing, don’t worry, but, yeah, you know. Anyway, you can have your memories back, that’s no problem, we just need you to do a few things for us. If you go to the end of the street and turn left there’s a laundry place. It’s run by this little Filipino lady, she’s super sweet, you’ll just love her! But yeah, go in there, sit down opposite the third machine of the right and someone should give you some instructions. Make sense? Good! I’ll see you soon.”

She ended the call in a way that almost seemed the oratory version of a :). I shivered; anyone who can express the manipulative side of written communication through speech was not be trusted. But all the same, what choice did I have? F**k, she held my entire life hostage.

I stuffed my phone and the note into my jacket, and, with my head down and my eyes suspicious, I made my way down the street. This Filipino woman better be as sweet as I was promised, I thought, or there’d be hell to pay.