Heaven or Hell

She reached down and stuck her hand under the blanket and rubbed my throbbing erection.

"I see these banana tits don't stop you from wanting to fuck me, do they?" she asked. I was harder than I ever remember.

"Can I?" I croaked.

"Jimmy, you can have all the pussy you want, as soon as you remember me," she said. "It really is all yours and always has been. What's my name?"

I concentrated so hard that steam had to be coming out of my ears. I remembered that it began with a consonant. It was right there on the tip of my tongue.

"Where the hell did you get those magazines?" the voice of the nurse shattered my concentration.

I looked around the room and only the nurse and I were there. "Oh, someone handed them to me while I was doing my memory exercises," I said. There was no way I was going to tell the nurse about the blond woman again. I think that the blond woman was someone that I knew who was sneaking into the hospital to see me and slipping out when someone else came near me.

At least I knew more now than I knew a couple of days ago. For instance, I knew that the blond woman, no matter what kind of games she was playing, was on my side. She wanted me to remember her.

I also knew that she was someone I knew and that we'd had a long standing relationship and that our relationship was a sexual one. I was sure that she was my girlfriend and probably a live in, since she often used terms like, "Home," and, "Our bed."

I could also tell that though she was dying for me to remember her, she was very careful. She didn't feed me any information or tell me anything. She too was concerned with not damaging my psyche or my memory by telling me too much too fast.

The next morning when Dr. Clark arrived, she saw the magazines and got upset at first. Then she started to show me certain pictures in them and ask me questions.

She picked up several of the magazines and showed me pictures. A lot of the pictures had no effect on me at all. They were just pictures. She showed me one of the car magazines and something clicked. When she showed me a picture of a new Camaro, my mouth forced itself into an evil smile.

"Okay, we got a reaction there," she smiled. "What is the first thing you think of when I show you this uhm..."Cammer...O?" she asked.

"It's pronounced Camaro," I said.

"So you like the Camaro?" she asked again.

"Fuck no!" I spat. That shocked her.

"But it did get a reaction," she said hesitantly. "What does seeing the Camaro make you think about?"

"Lunch," I said. "Or toast. It makes me hungry more than anything else because my Mustang eats those little toy cars for lunch."

"You have a Mustang?" she asked.

"Hell yeah," I said smiling. Another piece had fallen into place. The little horse emblems suddenly made sense. "I have a 2013, Glass black Mustang GT. It has custom black bar billet upper and lower grills. The same bar billet pattern as hood vents. It has black rims, black rotors, black brake calipers too. It has a Paxton twin screw supercharger and a custom intercooler. Both of them are also black. I have high temperature glass black enamel over my MagnaFlow exhaust system too. The whole thing puts out over seven hundred horsepower and..."

"I don't have a clue what any of that means," she said. "But it means something to you and that's another brick in the wall of your mind that's back in place.

"Do you remember anything else?"

"I remember that when I'm chasing down people on the job, I sometimes complain that the cars they assign us aren't as fast as my car and don't handle as well and...."

My eyes widened and so did my smile. "I'm a cop aren't I?" I asked. "I'm a God damned detective. I work out of precinct five-two, under Captain Greer. I work in an undercover squad with my best friend Pete, a female officer named Julie and a black guy named Link, which is short for Lincoln."

She was nodding her head and smiling as much as I was. The next thing I knew, I was hugging her. I looked up and the blond woman was standing in the door and she didn't seem happy to see me hugging Dr. Clark.

Dr. Clark didn't seem to be in any hurry to push me away either and we both felt awkward as we reluctantly let go.

"I guess we both got a little bit carried away," she said. "It was probably just our happiness that your memory is coming back."

"I think so too," I said. I noticed even as she spoke that her breasts might have been small but the nipples that were as hard as rocks and tenting her blouse were full sized and showing no signs of going down. It was hard for me not to reach for them.

"I think that's enough for today," she said and quickly left the room.

Once again she had to have at least brushed the blond on her way out of the room. As the blond sat down in the chair next to the bed, the expression on her face was anything but happy. "Keep your HANDS off of that nerd and everything else off of her too," she said angrily.

"We were just excited," I said. "My memory is coming back."

"You're still excited," she spat and I don't think it's from your God damned memory. She reached under the hospital gown and pulled out my dick. She leaned over and started licking my blood filled organ from the base of my balls to the tip. Then she swallowed the whole thing in one gulp and began bobbing her head quickly up and down while massaging the shaft in her hand. It took her less than five minutes before I was ready to howl. She pressed her hand over my mouth and tickled the base of my balls and I just let it go. She swallowed every drop that I put out.

"What's my name?" she asked. I was breathing so hard that I couldn't form words.

Then I stared into her eager eyes. "I don't know," I said.

"Remember, no pussy until you can say my name," she told me. "So I guess you don't get the rest of your favorite thing. What's your car's name?" she asked.

"Smoke," I said without hesitation. I smiled as I said.

"That pisses me off," she said. "You can remember that God damned car's name and not mine. You even got excited about that boney bitch and her tiny tits but you can't remember my name."

"You could always tell me," I said.

"No, in order for this to work, you need to remember my name and what we mean to each other," she said. "Take a nap and keep trying to remember."

I did. I started thinking and trying to remember as much as I could. It began as a trickle and the trickle became a flow. It all started to come back then. I remembered names and faces and places and events. Every day, Dr. Clark and I dug further into my memory. At the same time my body got stronger. Dr. Griggs came back from vacation and pronounced me ready to begin physical therapy to rehabilitate my body.

She also broke my heart when she introduced me to her husband and their kids. Dr. Clark saw me every day. She even came over to sit with me for a while on the weekends which even my nurses thought was unusual. "I think you're her first patient that's a bona fide hero," one of them told me.

Over the next couple of weeks both my body and my mind got stronger. The only things I couldn't remember where the incident that put me in the hospital in the first place, or the blond. I started to think that maybe they were linked in some way.

Dr. Clark told me that in order to move on. I had to come to terms with what had happened that day and then go through therapy to deal with my feelings about the incident before they'd let me go back to work. We decided that my mind was probably refusing to allow me to remember it because it was extremely traumatic.

We decide to very slowly, bit by bit, go over the incident and discuss how I felt about each piece of information before moving on to another bit.

The very first day that we started she told me one thing. She held my hand very tightly and told me, "You know that you're a cop, right?" I nodded. "You had to kill a man in the line of duty. You shot him three times."

I thought about it and it made sense. That explained another of the bits and pieces from my nightmares. The three loud bangs that I'd heard over and over were the three shots. When I thought about it, I was sure it fit.

She asked me what I was thinking and what I saw in my mind when she told me about it. I described what I remembered. There was a man. He was a big guy. He was bigger than me and I remember being in pain and falling and I reached up and shot him. He kept coming even as I fell. I shot him again full in the chest and he kept coming. My first shot had been in his shoulder and it hadn't even slowed him down. The shot to the chest made him pause but nothing more. My last shot had been as he was leaning right over me. I hadn't wanted to do it, but I shot him right between his fucking eyes. He fell on top of me, as dead as the back street boys. I didn't have the strength to even push him off of me or roll out from under him.

I was shaking and sweating as I remembered it. Dr. Clark had her arms wrapped around me and was rubbing my back. "It's okay," she said. "It can't hurt us. It can only make us stronger. It's only a memory. It isn't happening now. It's already happened and we lived through it. It won't ever happen again. It can't cause us any pain because we understand it for what it is."

I was rubbing her back too and as we hugged, I smelled her. Her perfume, her soap even the tiny traces of sweat were intoxicating. I couldn't help it, I let my nose gently graze her neck and she moaned. At almost the same instant, the big florescent light tube in the hall just outside of my door way exploded. Dr. Clark and I moved away from each other but I saw the blond woman standing in the doorway with both of her hands clenched into fists. She turned and walked away pushing one of the nurses who came to investigate out of her way.

When I asked the nurse about it later she remembered the blond woman but not her face. She also thought that she'd tripped. She didn't remember the blond woman pushing her. She told me that she was sure the woman worked in the hospital because she'd seen her before. That told me that my girlfriend or whomever she was, worked in the hospital. That was why she could show up whenever she damned well pleased, whether it was visiting hours or not.

As the nurse looked around the room to see if she could figure out why the lighting tube had simply exploded, a maintenance man came in and first swept up the glass. Then he put up a new lighting tube.

"I've never heard of one of these things exploding before," he said. "Even when they get really old they just stop lighting up."

"Maybe it was a power surge," said the nurse. He looked at her like she should stick to nursing.

"Lady, all of these lights are on the same circuit. A power surge would have blown them all out, not just this one," he said.

"Maybe it was defective," she said.

"Uh huh," he said. "I have records of when we install and change every frigging bulb in this hospital. That tube was about a year old. So it's been through an entire year of being turned on, off and dimmed, but it waited a year to just explode. Yep that sounds logical." He kept grumbling as he took his ladder and his tools and left the room.

"So Dr. Clark..." said the nurse. "I didn't know that you worked weekends."

"The dreams he's been having are upsetting me," said Dr. Clark.

"No Shit, they're upsetting all of us, when he wakes up screaming like that," said the nurse as she turned and left the room.

"We've uhm...done enough for today," said Dr. Clark.

"Will you be back tomorrow?" I asked.

"Do you want me to?" she asked. I nodded my head as hard and as fast as I could. She smiled.

"Jim, don't push this. Let your memory come to you in its own time frame," she said. "The things we're going through now are traumatic. We don't want your mind to close them off from you."

"See you tomorrow," I said.

A few minutes later the nurse came in and brought me lunch. "What is it with you and female doctors?" she asked.

"I've been locked up in here for over a month," I said. "Doctors are the only people I seem to meet."

"What about nurses?" she asked. As she walked out of the room, I swear her ass was twitching more than normal even through her scrubs. As she got to the doorway just under the lighting fixture that had exploded she stopped. "There are some very attractive nurses around here who aren't married and aren't emotionally stunted either," she said. The light fixture over her head crackled and brightened and then returned to normal.

As the nurse sauntered off to look in on other patients I assumed, I smiled and looked at the tray she'd brought me. Before I could reach for the tray, there she was. She came beside my bed swaying her hips back and forth in the same manner the nurse had just done. "What about nurses?" she asked, mimicking the nurses question. "What about whorish fucking nurses and slutty assed doctors, Jimmy?" she asked angrily. "Which do you prefer? Or does it even matter when you have a woman at home whose fucking name you can't even remember? I'm getting tired of all of this bullshit. I think the main reason they won't tell you about me is because those whores want you for themselves. This is like that movie, "the Vow." They want you to completely forget about me so they can have you. And you're starting to treat me like all of your fucking friends did before we got together..."

"Rhonda, it's not like that," I said. "And I'm not like any of them. We got together because I've always loved you and you fucking know it." As I looked into her eyes, she smiled and then her face changed.

"We'll finish this later," she said. "I have to go. "Nurse hot panties," is coming back."

I looked in the doorway and noticed that the nurse was indeed stepping back into the room. She brought another maintenance man with her. She dropped something onto my chest. I'd expected it to hurt but it didn't.

I reached for it and it was a TV controller. "I'm going off duty, now," she said. "I got Ed to hook up your TV. Maybe this way you can stay out of trouble until I get back tomorrow."

"Thanks," I said.

"Don't thank me," she said. "Just try to stay away from unavailable doctors until I get back."

I grabbed her arm as she tried to leave and pulled her back down on the bed next to me. "I know that Dr. Griggs is married," I said. "But Dr. Clark doesn't have a wedding ring or..."

"You'd have a better chance of getting into Dr. Griggs' panties," she said. "I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but with you being a cop and all..." her voice had dropped to a whisper.

"Amanda, Dr. Clark, became a shrink because she saw so many therapists herself. Don't waste your time on her because emotionally, she's not all there. I think she was in her first or second year of college when a guy snuck into her dorm and tried to rape her. He didn't get very far. She screamed and a bunch of people ran in and the guy went out through the window. But ever since then, she's never even touched a guy. I mean it. Even at staff parties she doesn't even dance with guys. So no matter how charming you are, no matter how big and innocent those blue eyes seem...you're just wasting your time. You won't be getting any pussy from that one."

She was leaning her face so close to mine that I thought for a second that she was going to kiss me. "It's all done Beth," said the maintenance guy. Beth turned and gave him some bills. "And don't worry," he said. "This is a completely under the table hook up. It won't appear on his bill. And I gave him all of the channels."

As Nurse Beth and her conspirator left, I turned on the TV. Beth didn't realize it at the time but she was making a huge mistake. The first thing I did was scan through the channels to see what I was missing out on. As I passed a channel, I saw a beautiful green Mustang and stopped immediately.

It was one of those heartwarming stories. The guy on the TV spoke English with a slight accent.

"I am happy to be here in America," he said. "And it is a beautiful car. It is much better than my old one..."

"No way," said another guy. "I love that car." The second guy was that new Senator from Washington. He was the guy who was going to marry the president's daughter. I tend to distrust politicians, but that guy seemed more like a cop than a political dweeb.

As I watched the show the story came out. The guy with the accent was from a country called Pacmanistan. His name was Piotr and had somehow helped the senator rescue the President's daughter. In repayment of that favor the new senator had given him a brand new Mustang, gotten him a work visa, and also got him a job in the IT field.

From the looks on everyone's faces, this wasn't just some TV face time thing for publicity. The senator wasn't making a speech. When a couple of reporters had asked how this reflected the party's stance on immigration, the senator had looked as if he was going to say something but the president's daughter, who seemed to be incapable of letting go of his hand, had yanked his arm.

Obviously, her intervention had changed his mind about what he was going to say. "Fu..." he had begun. But after the yank he cleaned it up. "Fu..or the last time. This isn't about votes or politics," he said. "This is about repayment of a favor. No comment."

I'd have loved to know what this Piotr guy had done to deserve a new Mustang, a new job and a new country but the show went off without revealing too much of the story. It was probably classified or some shit like that anyway. They were probably going to put out a book about it and charge a lot of money to read the story. I was figuring that the whole damned story was probably already out there on the internet. (Read "While you sleep." if you haven't. SS06)

After that I changed the channel and as I went to a news channel, my head exploded.

"...is still recovering from his run in with serial killer Cary Granite. We wish him a speedy return to health." They were talking about me and there were two pictures on the screen. The picture on the left was me. I didn't have the scruffy facial hair that I'd grown during the time I'd been hospitalized but it was definitely me. The picture on the right was...was...

It was the sound of voices that woke me up. There were all kinds of people murmuring and I couldn't make out what they were saying. But Amanda Clark's voice was far louder than all of the rest of them and she was clearly pissed.

"Who the fuck gave him a television in the first place?" she screamed. "How the hell did this happen? I want to know how this happened, right God damned now!"

Amanda sounded like a mother bear defending her cub. A lot of men were moving out of her way. One of them I recognized as the city's police commissioner. Another man there was my boss. There were two nurses. Dr. Griggs was there too. She was next to my bed and watching my vital signs. As my eyes fluttered, she smiled at me.

"I'm going to give you something for the headache," she said. Even as she said it she increased the drip of my medication and I started to fall asleep. I could still hear the voices though. I fought going to sleep because I didn't want to have that dream again. I concentrated on the voices to avoid sleep no matter how much my head hurt.

There was a female voice. It was probably one of the nurses. She told them about how she'd come into the room after hearing me scream. She'd noticed out of the corner of her eye that the TV was on and that I'd seen the news story about my incident. She'd immediately checked my vital signs and found me unresponsive but breathing. She'd called for the trauma team and had them page Dr. Griggs and Dr. Clark. I never got to hear the rest because I was asleep before she finished telling it.

The next time I woke up, Dr. Griggs was the only person in the room. She smiled at me as I opened my eyes. She even leaned over and kissed me on my forehead.