“Please, Ms. Leibniz. We need you to remember.”

“I don’t remember. I can’t. I’m trying to, but I just can’t—I’m sorry.”
Virtually every single morning of my stay at St. Matthews, a Los Angeles-area hospital particularly well-known for its success in treating amnesia patients, the same scene played out, with only minor variations. Shortly after I finished taking my morning medicine, either one officially dressed man or a whole cadre of them would seek entrance into my room, a neat and sterile living space in which countless tests had been performed to try to recover my memory. They would check with either my doctors or my nurses to try to find out if I had made any progress. After finding that I had exhibited none, they would nonetheless ask me personally for any secret details about the crime that had left me in this condition that, for some reason, I was supposedly withholding from both my caretakers and from these policemen.
Regardless of how many times they asked me, however, the amount of information they had remained static. Six months ago, a pair of bikers found me lying on the side of the road during an early morning bike ride—masters of deduction, the detectives concluded that I had been left there during the night. These detectives had taken a substantial interest in me: apparently, I was the sole survivor of "The Owl”, a serial killer notorious for taking victims during the night and depositing them in relatively populous locations, also during the night—always with bruises, injuries, and scars—and usually dead, just not in my case. I was the seventh victim in a little under a year, but in the six months that had passed, no more had appeared. In those six months, I received countless visits from doctors, police officers, and detectives, none of whom had any success in either restoring my memory or gaining more information to uncover who this killer was.
That is, until I met Paxton Berger.
He was the most intimidating, burly man I had ever met—of course, considering I only remembered six months of my life, that superlative was drawn from a fairly small sample size. Even before I first saw him, I noticed that things were going to be different with him—instead of coming during the morning and seeking entrance into my room, he arrived during the afternoon and had the doctors send me out in the lobby. He seemed to tower over everyone else around him as the clear dominating presence in the room—even the thermos of coffee he held in his left hand was substantially larger than anyone else’s. As I entered, I noticed the empty gun holster on the right side of his belt—presumably, he had been asked to remove the firearm from his person. He had been writing notes down in a notepad while talking to doctors, but upon seeing me, he walked up to me and, after barely even attempting to introduce himself, took a brash tone with me. “Ms. Leibniz, I demand that you come to the precinct at once.”
“I’ve told you all there is to know—that is, nothing.”
Paxton Berger immediately intensified. “Ma’am, there is a serial killer out there on the loose; I need to catch him. Perhaps what you need is a change of scenery to help refresh your memory.”
I was becoming annoyed. “Maybe having someone who I can actually trust would also help with that.”
“It’s not my job to be trusted; it’s my job to produce results.”
From there, I don’t know what came over me. I grabbed a small chair from the corner of the room and flung it at him. “I’ve had enough of you people.” A scene had clearly broken out; people had become accustomed to the policemen who visited me every day and were clearly surprised by my sudden outburst. “I don’t know any of the answers to your stupid questions!” A few orderlies stood by, watching. “I don’t know any answers to any questions, I don’t know who left me out on the street that night, I don’t know why I’m the lone survivor, I don’t even remember my pet dog’s name—how dare you demand that I come with you when I have done nothing but comply with your questions and your proving?”
To my surprise, the next person to speak was Dr. Hart, the amnesia specialist who was heavily involved in my treatment. “Kendra… Did you say ‘my pet dog’s name’? You’ve never mentioned that you had a dog before.”
Everyone immediately understood—my memory was returning, if only in bits and pieces. Dr. Hart rushed me back into my room, with Paxton Berger observing, but not following.
Dr. Hart handed me my medicine—while I halfheartedly swallowed, he began to speak. “I have to admit, I’m surprised that worked.”
“That was planned? You knew about this?”
“Yes, a specialist recommended that someone try to induce rage in order to bring out the memories. I objected to it, but they were all anxious for results. Do you remember anything else?”
“No, everything’s gone again. It’s like these memories are on the fringes of my brain, and I keep on trying to grab them but I just can’t hold onto them.”
“But this is major progress. I think you’re ready for the next step in your treatment.”
Paxton Berger entered the room, and the next thing I knew, Dr. Hart and Paxton Berger (he seemed to now be the lead officer on the case) had taken me to a specialized hypnotic therapist. “Amnesiacs tend to retain memories in their deep subconscious,” she explained to me. “That’s why you can vaguely feel that they’re there in your head, but not actually remember them. One effective treatment for amnesia to help draw these memories from out of the deep recesses of your brain is to thus hypnotically induce a trance-like, unconscious state. In this state, I will mentally prompt you—if this works, your memory should return further to some degree. Are you ready?”
I said I was ready, and, sure enough, I found myself in a deep haze—it was a bizarre experience; I was experiencing my memories as if they were a dream. At first, the only memories I could remember were incredibly painful ones. In my attempts to cope with the pain from the torture (a mix of electrical shocks and outright physical beatings) and the restraints, I had focused as hard as I could on my captor, but I could recall few characteristics in my hypnosis-induced trance—all I could make out was that the killer was a man of impressive stature who seemed to always move with ruthless, robot-like efficiency. Otherwise, all I could remember was a hand moving there, pain, a hand moving there, more pain… In the immense physical struggle to stay conscious and alive, I looked for anything to hone in on in an effort to mentally escape. And, oddly enough, I decided to focus on those hands—after all, these instruments of my torture were the only things that were in constant view. In doing so, I noticed that my captor had no preference in hand usage; sometimes, he would use his left hand to tighten my restraints, while using the right one to work his devices; other times, it would be the other way around.
I fell more and more into my trance as I drifted further away from the pain by considering things like the odds of being killed by someone ambidextrous—less than one percent of the population lacks a dominant hand, after all—and in doing so, the experience of my memories became less obstructed. I began to hear voices and make out faint outlines of a face, though nothing substantial enough to identify anybody recognizable.
The faint outline’s words began to become audible. “If you take this pill, your life will be erased. It will never return. You will be no one. Not only that, I will not spare you. If you thought this one day of physical torture was painful, you must understand that it will get worse. I will follow you, and I will ensure that you are destroyed—mind, body, and soul.”
“And what happens if I don’t take the pill?”
“Then I kill you quickly now. But if you take this option, I will continue—not with you, but with other victims. If you take the first option, you will be the last.”
“How can I trust you?”
In the haziness of my memory, I could vaguely remember a faint smile. “It’s not my job to be trusted; it’s my job to produce results.”
As soon as I reached this point in the memory, I abruptly awoke from the trance.
“Ms. Leibniz?”
“I remember, and I know.” I asked the therapist to leave the room and promptly explained my memory to Dr. Hart and Paxton Berger.
“So then, who is The Owl?” Paxton Berger impatiently asked.
“You are.”
Berger’s usually resolute and solitude appearance momentarily allowed a look of incredulousness to escape into view. “Do you have any reasoning at all for that?”
“Those words. ‘It’s not my job to be trusted; it’s my job to produce results.’ You and my captor said the exact same phrase verbatim.”
The look of incredulousness dissolved into a mocking tone. “A common phrase is hardly enough to indict someone, Ms. Leibniz. I’m sure the Zodiac Killer said ‘I’m hungry’ many times in his life, should looking for food be considered tantamount to murder? Besides, if I was the murderer, why would I even be working this case and attempting to bring your memory back?”
“Because that murderer said he would try to destroy me psychologically, and that he would follow me. What better way is there of doing that than to work on my case and to try to discredit my memories, to make me feel like my own brain is tricking me?”
“Dr. Hart, please restrain your patient.”
“I’m not done yet. I remember one last thing. My captor was ambidextrous—that was the only physical characteristic of him that I remember. Mr. Berger, your empty gun holster is on the right side of your belt, but I’ve noticed that you virtually do everything else, from drinking your coffee to jotting down notes, with your left hand.”
“This is absurd!”
“I agree,” Dr. Hart, the normally right-handed man said while holding a gun in his left hand.
Dr. Hart forced me and Paxton Berger to sit down, holding us at gunpoint.
“This charade of the last half year has been very amusing, Kendra, but I’m afraid all good things must come to an end.”
I was shocked, but couldn’t help but feel a sense of tranquility around the man who had taken care of me for six months—even if he was now pointing a gun at me. “I believe there are some questions that need to be answered.”
“I don’t quite have the time to entertain a game of Twenty Questions, but I suppose I can explain a few things.”
To his credit, Paxton Berger remained calm and resolute. “Let’s start with who.”
“Why, I am Dr. Eugene Hart. I freelance as a purportedly psychopathic killer named ‘The Owl’ in my spare time, but I’m still a doctor by profession.”
“Doctors are supposed to save people. Or memories, in my case. I feel as though your profession and your hobby conflict a little bit.”
Dr. Hart remained impressively relaxed. “Selfless goals, moral actions—sacrifice for the greater good. That’s what my job is supposed to be about, correct?”
I could tell Berger was looking for an opening to try to catch Dr. Hart off guard, but his distancing was perfect and he was ready to shoot at any moment—we allowed him to continue. “The nature of my profession was what pushed me to do what I did. Throughout all of those years of working hard to save lives, the disgusting selfishness of the world became progressively more apparent to me.”
“So you decided to contribute to that selfishness by killing people?”
“No. These killings were a test. A test that six people failed. Kendra, you were the last victim because you were, at last, semi-living proof that there exists people in this world who are morally conscious enough to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. I respect you, Kendra. Had the circumstances been different, I believe we could have been good friends.”
“That’s a darn shame, isn’t it.”
“Indeed. Instead, I worked tirelessly for months to ensure you didn’t have a memory and now currently have you at gunpoint.”
Berger replied cynically. “I take it that since you’ve now revealed your identity to us, we won’t be walking out of here alive?”
“And if that’s the case,” I continued, “There’s just one thing I’m confused about, and I believe you owe it to me to explain. You said that your torture for me would be psychological in nature and that you would kill no more victims if I chose not to die—why have you now decided to return to violence?”
“Who said this wasn’t psychological?” Dr. Hart ominously said before putting the gun to his head and firing.