My short-term memory is shot, for sure, and I remember only bits and pieces of my longer term memories. Fortunately for whomever I am, I had the wherewithal to save these Mementos in the Cloud so I can find out who I was in order to know who I am. I do recall that I found Notes, entitled ‘RICO’ and ‘Kiev’, confirming that I was offered $50,000 cash to get lost for a while and keep my mouth shut, or else, after stumbling into corruption in Miami Beach involving certain wealthy Russian nationals whose names I had better not remember.
I took the money and ran for my life in more ways than one, for I was persuaded that the innovative stem cell therapy available in Kiev would fix my hands, regenerate my brain, and extend my life by decades. Even the brain dead had been restored to full mental capacity by the doctors there, according to my source, a member of The Hermetic Order of the Double Cross, a secret society whose symbol is an abstracted form of an otherwise obscene hand sign given with the middle finger raised from a closed fist. That virile representation happened to be more than mere coincidence or even synchronicity given the structural difficulty in my right hand at the time, where the tendons had most painfully double-crossed me with severe arthritis, the inflammatory rebellion that set me on my hodological path to the clinic in Kiev.
I recall the flight to Warsaw and the bus to the border, where I had to sacrifice $10,000 to bring the balance of my cash in so as to leave no electronic banking record, and then on to Kiev on another bus. What I saw along the way, especially the severed heads and limbs of people blown apart at the station, gave me cause to be glad I had purchased a war risk insurance policy. I do not fear death per se since I am almost dead already.
Death is nothing in itself, and I have gotten beyond the denial phase to accepting the fact that I would end in nothing sooner or later, but there was the risk of suffering at length from a missile attack. The risk insurance premium was only 3.3 Euros per day, so I had assumed the risk I was taking of being wounded was relatively small, but not after reflecting on the ghastly scene.
The hotel where I had booked a room had been bombed a few hours before I arrived. The soldier who picked me up informed me I would be accommodated underground, instead, at Klinika Kompaniya Mozok.
It was not easy for civilians, let alone an American, to gain access to this obscured military clinic. There were a number of patients there when I arrived, mainly Ukrainian soldiers of high rank, some of them bedridden with head wounds. I was told one of them had attempted suicide, shooting himself in the head after his wife and twin girls were ravaged and murdered by Wagner mercenaries fresh out of prison.
I was treated by Dr. Georgi Lozanov from Bulgaria, a neurologist who had been inspired in his youth by Dr. Walter Freeman’s lobotomies in America. Three of my arthritic knuckles were immediately treated with amniotic stem cells from a young mother who had sold some of her fluid to the lab, where it was cleaned of fetal feces and urine and the cells extracted and processed. I received the embryonic brain regeneration cell treatment the next day, without anesthesia, via a small lobotomy cut in my right eye orbit, and then a nurse handed me a peculiar inhaler along with instructions. Just my luck that a missile hit the lab as I stuffed them in my security belt. I was apparently the sole survivor. With eyes blackening and being somewhat dazed, I climbed out of the rubble and made it back to the pickup point.
I duly noted the foregoing events during my return to Warsaw, on to New York, then back down to Miami Beach. Fortunately, I had been forewarned that some of my memories would be gradually lost during the brain regeneration process, therefore this resort to my Mementos for the composition of a Best Seller based on true events to fund my future life to 150 Years of Age. And maybe longer, for all I know, given scientific and technological advances in this day and age.
Fiction by David Arthur Walters