"You're doing quite well," Janice encouraged. "Some patients have trouble just getting up at all."
Sam afforded herself a small giggle of delight as she took a few more steps, then some more, until she found herself standing in front of a full-length mirror at the opposite side of the room. She blinked once or twice, fixated on the unfamiliar face staring back at her. Absently, she raised one hand to her cheek and touched it, the reflection in the mirror confirming that the stranger's image was, in fact, her own.
"Janice, Elise... do you mind if I have a few moments alone?"
After looking to one another for objections, both women agreed.
"We'll be right outside the door if you need anything," Janice said on their way out. "Don't strain yourself too much."
Once she was alone, Sam turned back to the mirror, staring fixedly at her own reflection. She'd thought that she would at least recognize some trace of herself or have some memory of her own appearance, but the person looking back at her in the mirror just seemed so utterly foreign. Her doctors had made no mention of any reconstructive surgery, so she assumed that her inability to recognize herself was the result of her memory loss. She ran her palm over the top of her head, realizing for the first time since waking up in the facility that she had no hair. Or rather, what she had was a thin layer of fuzz, proof that she'd once had hair but that it had been shorn at some point in the recent past. Probably when she was being treated at the hospital, she reasoned.
"Hello, Sam," she said to her reflection.
She took in the contours of her face, trying to become familiar with her own appearance. The bones of her face were generally round, but tapered to a narrow chin, giving her face overall a heart-shaped appearance. Her eyes were a piercing blue that seemed to mesmerize her every time she looked at them, though she assumed that if she'd had memories of looking at her reflection all her life, they would have been far less interesting to her. She traced the curve of her jawbone and down the lines of her neck with her fingertips, until she reached the top hem of the hospital gown she was wearing. Curious to see what lay underneath, she quickly untied the strings holding the gown together at the back and allowed it to slip off one shoulder, and then the other, exposing her chest.
Holding the gown up underneath her breasts, she sized herself up.
"C-cup, maybe?" she said under her breath. "D, if I'm lucky."
Letting the gown slip down further, she took in her stomach and hips, and felt a nagging in the back of her mind. Not a memory, per se, but definitely something remembered. More like a feeling, a sense that this was not the first time she was standing in front of a mirror evaluating herself.
Dissatisfaction.
Her stomach seemed too soft and flabby, her hipbones just a little too wide. And as the gown dropped further, her thighs too thick. Not enough gap between them.
"I can't even remember who I am, but of course I remember just enough to be unhappy with my body," she lamented. "Just great."
Setting the crumpled gown aside on a nearby chair, she assessed her nude body as a whole, unable to shake the lingering dissatisfaction with her image. She absently ran her fingers through the unruly bush of hair on her mound, which had clearly gone unmanaged in the time that she was confined to bed. Again unsure of why, she felt that perhaps a trim or shave might help improve her outlook on her body. She made a mental note to ask Janice if that might be a possibility. She returned her gaze to the fuzz on her scalp, and wondered how long it would be before she had a full head of hair again. Guessing from her eyebrows and pubic hair, she figured it would be a medium to dark brown, and tried to picture herself with various lengths of hair, but nothing her imagination could come up with seemed familiar.
Janice and Elise returned as Sam was tying her gown back up.
"Hey Sam, you doing okay in here?" Elise asked, clearly attuned to her patient's shift in mood.
"I guess," Sam sighed. "I was hoping that I would see something I recognized of myself, but so far... nothing."
"I know, dear. It takes time. Maybe the best thing you can do for yourself right now is get to know the you that's here. With memory loss, it can be hard to tell when things will return."
"On the bright side," Janice added, "now that your legs are on the mend, we should be able to move you out of this room into the longer term recovery units here in the facility. They're a lot less like a hospital room and more like a studio. More privacy, better amenities."
"I'd like that," Sam said with a smile. She was looking forward to being able to go to bed without the presence of all the machines and the night nurse.
"We'll just keep you here a few more days to make sure things continue to progress, and if everything looks good, we'll get you moved. We'll also get you started on some basic physical therapy to make sure your muscles recover correctly, but from what I've seen so far, it looks like the treatment has done most of the heavy lifting for you."
As promised, a few days later, Sam found herself walking down the hallways with Janice and Elise, leaving the medical wing and headed toward the residence units. As they walked, she got the sense that the facility was much bigger than what she had seen so far, and also noticed that all of the walls, like those in the medical room she had occupied for the weeks before, appeared to be solid concrete.
"Are we... underground?" she asked. "I don't think I've seen a window yet."
"Very astute," Elise said, raising an eyebrow in surprise. "A lot of people don't notice until they've been in their residences for awhile. The answer is yes, we are underground. This entire research project is heavily backed by the government, and because of the potential ramifications, they take secrecy very seriously. We're occupying an old underground military installation."
"What happens if people want to go outside? Get some air?"
"Unfortunately, we don't allow that until patients are... further along," Elise explained. "But we make every effort to balance the lighting and environmental conditions in the facility to make them comfortable."
For Sam, it was enough just to be out of her hospital bed and moving about, so she didn't push further. She did make a note to bring it up at a later time, though.
When they arrived at her residence unit, she was impressed by just how much it did resemble a studio apartment, as Janice had promised, despite the lack of windows. The unit was fully furnished with surprisingly updated and contemporary furniture, and sported a generously sized bathroom with a bathtub and separate shower. The kitchen was fully stocked, and the wardrobe contained a full supply of basic clothing items. Nothing fancy, but more than enough to get by on. After leaving her with directions to get back to medical and instructions for reaching medical staff in case of an emergency, the doctors left Sam to get settled in.
Her first course of business was to take a long, hot shower, during which time she also took the opportunity to shave her underarms, legs, and pubic hair. She had initially planned to just trim around the edges of her bikini line, but she began to shave off progressively more and more hair trying to find a pattern that suited her liking, eventually settling on leaving behind just a thin strip of hair down the center of her mound. Afterward, wrapped up in a white, fuzzy robe, she availed herself to some of the food and drink in the kitchen before turning on the television. The channel selection was extremely limited - perhaps because they were underground, or perhaps because the government didn't want to pay for better service - but she was able to find some old shows to serve as white noise while she pondered what was next for her. She was lucky just to be alive, from all that she had been told, but she couldn't help but wonder what the exchange would be for her life. She wanted to believe that this was all just a medical trial that she had been fortunate enough to fall into, but was that really it?
*****
Over the next few weeks, Sam's life settled into a routine of medical checkups and physical therapy. Janice seemed pleased with her recovery overall, and her physical therapists seemed impressed as well by how quickly she was regaining her strength. Her hair also grew back more quickly than she had expected, and it wasn't long before she was sporting shoulder-length, medium brown locks with occasional streaks of dirty blonde. With the exception of her memory, which had not returned beyond occasional flashes of past events, everything seemed to be getting back to normal, until one day during a routine blood draw, the needle that Janice pressed to the vein in Sam's right arm flexed and bent, instead of breaking her skin.
