I came to in pitch darkness, lying in a bed entirely too large for just a single person. My head hurt something fierce, and my body felt like it was RKO'd by a semitruck. Even with that being the case, I had woken for a reason; nature called. It took me a bit to find the bathroom, guided only by the small slivers of moonlight that peak between the nearly-closed shades. I entered the bathroom and closed the door behind me, losing even that tiny bit of light I had before. A rookie mistake. There had to be a light switch around here. Flip.

The lights came to life, and I came face-to-face with myself in the mirror. Or at least, that's who it had to be. For some reason, I couldn't seem to remember things very well. The person in the mirror looked unkempt and wild, and his eyes looked cold. Was I an unkempt person? My head started to spin; I grew dizzier and dizzier until I unceremoniously plopped down onto the toilet, thankful that the seat had been left down. Where was I? Who was I?

Quickly, my breathing grew shallower and shallower as my heart began to pound. What was going on? My eyes caught on black lettering etched onto my forearm. They read, "You have Alzheimer's. You love your wife. Your name is Keith." Keith. That answered one of my questions, but I didn't understand why I was alone in that room, nor why my head hurt the way it did.

I needed explanations. Perhaps it was my fortune, or maybe divine providence, but it was at that moment that I found my next clue. On my opposite hand, scrawled hastily in what appeared to be black sharpie, was, "THE TATTOOS ARE A LIE." And all of a sudden, any semblance of understanding that had begun to build shattered.

Still sitting on the toilet, I heard a dull thumping. It grew louder, and louder, and louder until it just... stopped. A knock at the bathroom door. "Honey, are you alright in there?" a feminine voice asked. "You've had a rough night."

The wife. "Yeah, I'm just fine. I had to use the restroom."

"Okay. I'll be right out here waiting for you, honey. Take your time." She walked away, and by the creak of the bed, sat down on the bed. For the life of me, I couldn't remember what she looked like. Her voice was unfamiliar. Everything about this place was foreign. And a part of me refused to believe that Alzheimer's was the answer.

My instincts were screaming at me. The tattoo seemed entirely excessive for a reminder about Alzheimer's, and the scrawls on my hand looked as if they were written with haste, the last letters written even more poorly than the first ones. Something wasn't right.

I got up from my seat and, as quietly as I could, began to root through the bathroom. Maybe something would jog a memory or help me understand. For the life of me, everything seemed reminiscent of what a normal bathroom would look like, barring that none of it rang a bell for me. Then I got to the cabinets below the sink. There were empty containers of just about every painkiller imaginable, along with things he'd never even seen or heard of.

"You okay in there? Do you need some help, hun?" my wife called.

My heart beat fast. "I'm good!" I responded with as measured a tone as I could. What was this? I tore through the cabinet as quickly as I dared, but when I reached the back, my heart - which had been beating so fast - froze. It was a picture of me, along with a list of what I presumed to be my daily routine. A 7:00 AM run, an 8:00 AM grocery run, and everything else I did leading up until the evening. This... this I remembered. Vaguely, but there was definitely something there.

This was not the schedule of a man with Alzheimer's. I tried working through the brain fog that had defined my working memory up until that point, but I was drawing blanks. I turned the page to see if there was anything on its back. And there was. Written in very detailed steps was the process of drugging someone to the point where they could hardly remember a thing.

"Oh shit," I mumbled.

"What was that?" my 'wife' got up from the bed. "Okay, I need to make sure you're alright, hun."

As hastily as I could, I got to my feet and locked the door. I needed to get out of there.

"And did you, Keith?" a scrawny boy asks. I look at him and gesture to the grey walls that surround us and the little metal trays that contain the last vestiges of whatever slop we had for lunch earlier.

"No, James, I didn't."