mean, not lately. But in college and my twenties, of course. Why?”
I looked around the room, thinking. Postorgasmic oxytocin was probably needling through my brain like truth serum, inky and insidious.
“I’ve just been thinking back to those days. Remembering. Well, remembering what it’s like to wake up and not remember anything, which is sort of a Möbius strip of remembering.”
He stroked my arm absentmindedly. “I mean, it’s a normal part of being young. Figuring out your limits, and hopefully you have friends there to take you home and keep you safe and give you Gatorade.”
“That’s true.” I scratched my forehead. “It’s weird that it’s normal, though, isn’t it? It’s weird that we aren’t more terrified of it. Like, what did ancient civilizations make of it? Shouldn’t we be more freaked out by people walking and talking and, like, interacting with others when a critical part of their brain is offline?”
He considered. “What actually happens? Are the brain cells too fried to pull up memories the next day?”
“No, I looked into this once.” I laughed. “Not even for an article, I was just curious. It’s actually that your brain isn’t laying down memories. It stops recording. So not even extensive hypnosis or something could bring those hours back up.”
I heard the smile in his voice. “I knew you’d have researched it.”
“It’s what I do.” His hand stopped moving near mine and I wove my fingers into his. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done while blacked out?” I tossed it out like a statement, a challenge.
“I got into a fistfight once,” he offered. “Stupidest thing. Apparently this guy bumped into me in a bar and I was wasted and in a bad mood about something—a lady, probably—and I was like, ‘Hey, fuck you, man.’ And he turned around and said something threatening like, ‘You wanna go?’ And even though he had about eighty pounds on me, apparently I was like, ‘Let’s go! Right here!’ And all my stupid friends were just watching like assholes as I took a swing at this guy. Who came back and punched me, busted up my nose, and threw me onto a table. So idiotic.” We both giggled. “What was yours?”
There were options. The Warsaw Incident, which of course I’d never tell him. The time I’d spent my entire savings on round-trip tickets to Balikpapan, Indonesia (I’d drunkenly agreed to go to Bali and was five hundred miles off the mark); the time I’d come home late and inexplicably screamed at my messy roommate, shoving her tub of dirty dishes off the counter and then cutting my foot on broken glass during my defiant, wobbly exit. Lloyd flickered into my mind, too, the terribleness of that one morning after, but I swallowed and rattled off my default blackout story.
“I was out one night and started talking to this guy,” I began, “and we had a bunch of drinks together, and then I think I invited him over, but he was like, ‘Ehh, I just want to stay here with my friends.’ Which, god knows what was actually going on, but I was pissed. So I went outside to hail a cab—this was when you had to actually look for them on the street—and some girls who, in retrospect, must have also been wasted saw me looking all furious and were like, ‘Fuck him, come hang out with us!’ and we went into the bar next door. I don’t remember anything after that, but the next morning, when I finally woke up and went to check my purse for my wallet and phone, I reached in and pulled out”—I mimed it, the slow vertical reveal—“someone else’s purse. Like a clutch? The entire thing was in there. And full of this poor girl’s stuff—wallet, phone, lipstick, keys. I remember shuffling out to the living room where my roommate was watching TV and going, ‘Hannah, I did something really, really bad…’ ”
“So you turned into a pickpocket?!” Michael was laughing now. I giggled, too, but I could still feel it, that balloon of shame, the feeling of fumbling into the past and finding nothing but air.
“That’s the thing, I don’t even know! Did I take it by accident? Did she ask me to hold it and I got lazy keeping it in my hands, so I dumped it into my purse? I have no idea! I didn’t recognize her at all.”
“God. What’d you do?”
“The phone was dead, but I had her name from her driver’s license. I tried