Pam plans to walk the seven blocks from the bookstore to her apartment without stopping, but something in the window of one of the shops she passes catches her eye. She’s had quite a morning, and the anticipation of going to dinner with this mysterious Jim person is fluttering around in her like the early stages of stomach flu.

Her shift had ended at six, but for some reason, “seven o’clock” had flown out of her mouth before she’d had time to correct herself. Why’d I do that?, she wondered, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. A woman carrying an expensive-looking art portfolio who has been walking too closely behind her walks directly into her like something from The Three Stooges, her bag softly hitting the back of Pam’s knee.

“Hey, watch it,” the woman mutters, annoyed, continuing on her way. Pam barely hears her.

She’s wearing her bright orange fur coat, yet when the wind blows it easily finds its way in, shocking the skin that’s exposed beneath her ripped t-shirt. Her too-long blue jeans, which have pen doodle-marks all over the thighs (she bought them downtown a few weekends ago for seven dollars) have been dragging underneath her Converse All-stars, and over time have collected a disgusting amount of city sludge at the bottoms. She’ll have to cut off the dirty parts when she gets home. This was not something to wear on what for some strange reason felt like a … well, a date. After all, he was the man she’d been in love with before she moved to New York.

Oh yeah? Well, then why can’t you remember him? The sarcastic, jaded part of her brain questioned. If he was the love of your life a few months ago then why doesn’t his face look the slightest bit familiar? And he’d said something about my memory just erased…

But all that was to wonder about later. She wanted to get home, have a bath, and change, and she’d still need time to get back to the bookstore, where he was meeting her in less than an hour. So why was she wasting time here, standing in front of this store?

She looks up, and to her surprise sees herself in the window of The Gap – the antithesis of everything she liked to wear. She actually liked to make fun of the clothes in this store with her art school friends – like, who would wear this stuff? Talk about generic and boring!

Her harried reflection, her long hair, her nose stud and especially her nearly fluorescent coat looks entirely out of place; on the other side of the glass are three mannequins, all dressed in jeans of differing lengths, button-down blouses and long, preppy pea coats. I guess it kind of looks nice, if you’re into that kind of stuff.

Her eyes catch on a peach-colored button-down shirt, layered underneath one of the coats, and suddenly she wants to buy it. I kind of like that, she thinks, wondering why the hell she would want to dress like such a boring frump when she could swing around the corner and find something one-of-a-kind and funky at the secondhand store on Chandler Ave.

Before she can stop herself, though, she’s in the store, and the preppily-dressed salespeople are eying her suspiciously – probably thinking I’m a bag lady in here just trying to get warm, Pam thinks, feeling a bit self-conscious.

“Can I help you, miss?” A young man wearing a button-down and sweater vest is breathing down her neck before she’s been in the store for five minutes, and she’s flustered.

“Ummm… yes, I’d like to try on one of these shirts,” she says, realizing that the blouse is already in her hands.

“Sure thing,” he says, taking the shirt from her and leading her into the dressing room. “Here you go. My name’s Tom if you need a different size,” he adds, and the look he gives to Pam’s oversized coat and then to the size Small blouse shows clearly that he doubts she’ll fit into it. Jerk, she thinks, even though she guesses the kid is cute, even if he is a little preppy. Her type’s usually the bad boy, so it surprises her that she’s a bit attracted.

She removes her coat and hangs it on the hook in the dressing room, then carefully lifts the t-shirt over her head, trying not to poke herself with any of the pins she’d used to hold it together. She’d done that more than once with this shirt.

Pulling the blouse around her body, over her purple bra, she realizes with wonder that it fits perfectly. Slowly, she pushes each button into its corresponding button hole, stopping at the second from the top. Even with her junky jeans, the blouse looks becoming on her. And she can’t help but feel a strange familiarity (how stupid, she thinks, to have strong feelings about something as ordinary as a blouse), as if she’s worn something like this before. Maybe before, when I was working in that office, I used to have to dress up a little more. She thinks about Jim – or tries to – but nothing comes to her. Perhaps the name sounds familiar? But surely not the face, or any details. The first thing she could remember without that weird blur around the edges was moving into her apartment in Brooklyn. Anyway, if we were so in love, why would I have moved away? And, a bit more unsettling: Why can’t I remember anything?

Briefly, she wonders if she’s going insane, or if the man who came to the bookstore earlier really even existed.

“How’s it going in there?” the salesguy calls, jerking Pam from her reverie.

She steps back, posing in front of the mirror. She pulls her hair back from her face, blinks back at herself. In a quiet voice, she replies, “I’ll take it.”

* * *

His head is pounding. Seems like maybe having those drinks all over Manhattan last night might not have been the best idea after all. Jim wanders the street, mid-afternoon, feeling as though, while he was asleep, someone had cracked open his head, dipped in a spoon, and stirred his brains around like homemade chili. Coffee hadn’t helped, a shower back at the hotel hadn’t helped, and now he wasn’t sure where exactly he was going. So he wandered, looking closely at each building he passed, some brick, most metal and glass.

How do those things stay together without just… falling? He wonders, head tilted all the way back as he peers up at skyscrapers. He thinks about the infrastructure of buildings, what holds them together. It’s not crazy glue, he thinks, laughing a little to himself under his breath, but he feels a little crazy this morning. This isn’t like any hangover he’s had before, and he had quite a few, back at Scranton University, but even those memories are hazy.

He’s cold, and he ducks into an alleyway to find immediate relief from the wind. As he does, “Born to Run” blares from his cell phone – an incoming call. “Karen” is flashing across the screen.

Damn. He was going to call her. He hadn’t shown up for dinner the other night, and hadn’t spoken to her since; she was probably pissed, so he steadied himself before answering, preparing himself for a fight.

“Hi,” he says, noncommittal.

“Jim! Oh, thank God. I’m glad you picked up. Are you okay? What’s going on?” The concern in her voice startled him almost more than anything else had this morning.

Too many questions, he thinks. His head is still really hurting, and he leans against the side of a building for support, then presses the hand not holding the phone up against his forehead.

“I meant to call you,” he manages, gritting his teeth together. Suddenly the pain in his head is fierce, as though someone’s inside of his brain, knocking their fists against his head, trying to get out.

“It’s okay. Where are you?”

“I’m in New York.”

Karen sounds taken aback. “New York!?… Jim, what are you doing up there? Are you…” She trails off.

“What, am I what?”

“You’re up there looking for Pam, aren’t you? You think she might have gone there?”

“Who?”

“Pam.”

Who the hell is she talking about?

“Kar, I don’t know who Pam is.”

Karen sighs, a long, weary breath. “Do we have a bad connection, Jim?”

“No,” Jim says, the pain in his head subsiding a bit. “We’re connected just fine. Look, I don’t exactly know what I’m doing here, to be honest.”

“Do you want me to come up there? I will, if you need me. I can tell Michael…well, I don’t know what I’d tell Michael. I’d figure something out.”

The idea of Karen being here with him – he likes it. He’s a little disoriented, and he doesn’t know what possessed him to drive here all the way from Scranton at a moment’s notice. If Karen came up, at least he’d know where he was going.

“Why don’t you come up here,” he says. “It would be nice to have some company.”

He can hear the smile in her voice. “Okay then. I’ll be there in a few hours. Tell me where you’re staying.”

* * *

He passes her the joint and exhales a jet of smoke from the center of his scraggly beard. “I can’t believe they haven’t caught us yet,” Walter says, leaning back in the chair – Mierzwiak would have a heart attack if he walked in right now, he thinks, chuckling a bit. Edna is lying on the floor on her stomach, her chin resting on her arm. There’s a middle-aged, chubby man on the fold-out cot with about a hundred wires taped to his head and five monitoring devices pin-pointing memories of an ex-wife who had strayed. The man, obviously dreaming, stays still, but his eyelids dance from side to side.

She peers over at him from behind thick-rimmed black eyeglasses, ones that she doesn’t really need. “Yeah, we should probably stop,” she says dryly, finishing the bit he calls a joint and stubbing it out in the ashtray on the scratched glass table.

“You know,” he says, turning the page in the Proust book he holds on his lap, “I felt kind of bad about these last few.”

She takes a deep breath, then rolls onto her back, gazing up at the ceiling. “The guy was hot, in a geeky sort of way.”

“Kind of ironic, coming from someone who’d rather write in her Xanga journal on a Saturday night than come out to a party with me.”

She doesn’t flinch. “That’s because I’m not the least bit attracted to you, Walt.”

“Whatever, you want me.”

“Yeah, okay.” She pauses. “I think Mierzwiak is starting to lose it, what do you think?”

Walter considers. “Yeah, the old guy isn’t as sharp as he used to be. And he’s making mistakes. Like with the last one, he missed a few things… I told him, and he looked like he wanted to throw me out the window. That’s the last time I point out one of Howie’s mistakes.”

“Yeah,” she replies, obviously lost in pot-induced thought. “I can’t believe one of his old employees actually had the hots for him. What was she thinking?”

“I have no idea.”

“You know, Howie also forgot to record some of the observables with the girl.”

“Good thing we’ve got those tapes.”

“Yeah, but they’re just audio…. I don’t know. He’s messing up. I feel bad for these people, spending all this money, and then it ends up being a botched job. Old memories aren’t supposed to come back.”

Walter shrugs, suddenly feeling the stirrings of mid-day hunger. “They didn’t, before. And they shouldn’t. But…with these last two, it felt like they were fighting it… I don’t know, E. Wanna have sex?”

“Not right now.”

“Wanna order take-out?”

“Yes please.”

“Done and done.”

* * *

She wraps her arms around him when she gets there, and she smells sort of like a new car. Polished and clean, she leads him to her favorite local restaurant – an Asian eatery called Chow’s House. Over noodles and snow peas, she tells him about everything he’s missed at Dunder Mifflin – Dwight brought his pet chinchilla to work, Kelly and Ryan had a fight (and then made up) in the break room, Michael made a memo that “the jeans I’m wearing today make my butt look really good.”

“Jim?”

He’s quiet. For some reason the jokes, the people he knows there, they all seem distant, vague. It’s just not funny for some reason.

“Yeah?” he says, focusing on picking up a piece of red pepper with his chopsticks.

“Are you really okay? You seem… not like yourself.”

He gives her a small smile. “I’m me, I promise. Who else would I be?”

She nods, swiping a strand of hair behind one ear. “Dwight says hi, by the way. He asked me to give these to you… he’s such a weirdo.” She reaches in her coat pocket and comes out with a handful of black jelly beans. One of the beans has a piece of fuzz on it, and Jim picks it off and tosses it aside.

“Those look appetizing,” he says, rolling his eyes. For some reason, he feels a weird crunch, a collapse, in the center of his chest when he sees the candies roll onto the table. The feeling is stronger than the one he had when Karen walked into the lobby of his hotel, and he’s not sure what that means.

“Jim,” says Karen, growing serious, “Look, I know you don’t want to talk about Pam, but I feel like we need to. It’s like this giant… annoying… curly-haired elephant in the room.”

“Karen, I told you… I don’t know why you keep bringing up this ‘Pam’ person.”

She blinks at him, looking slightly annoyed. “You can’t just pretend like she doesn’t exist. I know I can’t.”

“Karen… I don’t care about Pam… whoever that is. I’m with you, okay? I don’t know what else to say.”

They eat in silence for what seems like an eternity, wooden chopsticks scraping against the bottom of plates, the clinking of glasses, with absolutely nothing to say. The dining dead.

“I’m really glad I came up here,” she says finally.

“Me too,” he says, though he wonders.

* * *

They eat at an Indian restaurant about ten blocks from the bookstore where she works, and before they’ve even arrived he’s reached for her hand, which she gives him hesitantly. She straightens her hair, throws on a Psychedelic Furs t-shirt that she’s ripped at the top to make it open-necked, strands of plastic beads, and a purple skirt, which sort of clashes with her orange coat, but she doesn’t care. Over nan bread, he tells her about their life together, back in Pennsylvania. She’d been engaged to a macho asshole who never listened to what she wanted, and then he came along, hearing what she was saying without really saying it, making her laugh, watching her sleep. They all sound like beautiful words.

“That sounds wonderful,” says Pam without really meaning it, suddenly feeling she’s riding in a car driven by someone she doesn’t even know. The bright purple and gold colors of the restaurant, the vibrant twangs of the authentic Indian music playing softly in the background, and the strong spice of her dinner are pleasant, but for some reason she finds herself thinking of that blouse, which she’d hung in the back of her closet, behind her summer dresses, and even behind the garment at the way-back of her closet – her wedding dress – one she couldn’t even remember trying on or buying.

For some strange reason, she thinks of the guy who had shown up at her art show. He’d said he had been in love with her, once. Had she loved him back? Or had he been a weirdo, a stalker, or just a friend with a crush?

She wonders, for the first time, if perhaps she had dressed differently when she had lived with Jim. If maybe she dressed in button-down shirts and proper work skirts instead of ripped apart vintage concert t-shirts and other people’s jeans. And if she had looked different, maybe she had been different, acted different.

“… So then, it was about a month before your wedding to Roy, when I told you that I loved you, that I had to have you. We started making out like crazy, doing it all over the office. It was awesome.” He chuckles, but Pam barely hears it.

Every time she blinks, she sees flashes of bluish-purple, iridescent, hair up, curls falling down her back. He must see some remembrance in her eyes, because he asks if it sounds familiar.

“I… maybe,” she stammers, feeling a bit scared at the intensity of the memory. All she remembers is a blue, prommy-looking dress, and suddenly all she wants to do is go home and look through the boxes of things she never unpacked, to see if the memory happened, if she actually owns that dress.

She takes a drink of water, trying to stop the feelings from sweeping completely over her. It’s as though she’s seeing herself in the dress from behind one of those frosted glass doors – she can see colors, shapes, but can’t seem to put everything together. She can’t see clearly.

“And you asked me what we were doing,” Jim continues, “and I said, ‘I’m in love with you.’”

Pam grips onto the edge of the table, feeling as if she might faint. She remembers hearing those words, remembers them spoken to her beneath moonlight and with the taillights of departing cars drifting farther into the distance, with a palpable sense of emotion and fear in the air. She remembers feeling afraid and nauseous but not entirely surprised. The words she remembers felt different than the words this man was saying to her now, at this table, in this moment. The words felt real, honest, not rehearsed. What Jim was saying to her now felt contrived, copied, weaker than they had before. It was like someone had made a hundred carbon copies of that memory and now she could barely read the gray smudges that were left.

And his voice sounded…wrong.

Still, though, she sat and listened and smiled and nodded. He ordered a second bottle of wine, and soon the room was filled with a comfortable haze. She didn’t feel unsafe around Jim, that was for sure. He did feel… familiar, in this weird way, as if she had known him in the past. And maybe he was just nervous.

As he explained to her about the mind erase – that she had been scared and wanted to forget about her horrible first fiancé – everything seems to make more sense. I mean, who even knew you could do something like that? How much did I pay for that?

And his name. She couldn’t explain around that. Jim. Just saying the name out loud felt familiar, as if she’d said it – perhaps screamed it – a hundred times.

“You seem tired,” Jim says, and she smiles; he notices. “Let’s get you home.”

Of course she invites him upstairs – Jim, Jim – and suddenly the lights are all off except for the Chinese lamp over the bed, and her Psychedelic Furs t-shirt is now on top of the lamp and her skin is tingling and he’s hard against her and pressing her hands above her head, and his fingers are everywhere, and then her bed is slamming against the wall, drawing forwards, slamming back. “Pammy,” he moans, and she doesn’t like that one bit. Fiance or not, she doesn’t like that nickname one bit, but she bites her lower lip and closes her eyes and focuses the best she can on the name Jim, trying, trying to remember more about that dress, and what exact shade of blue it had been.

She hasn’t been with anyone else since she’s moved to the city, but she doesn’t tell him that. She doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask her if the sex is good, but that’s okay, because she doesn’t like lying.

After, he tries to cuddle up behind her, but for some odd reason she inches away, reaches for her t-shirt and wadded up underwear. As she reaches over, she feels his hand on her shoulder blade, a question.

“What’s this?” he asks, and his voice is different than it was at dinner, all kind and attentive. It’s lower, a little ominous, and while Pam thought she liked the bad boy thing, she doesn’t like his tone – it sounds angry – maybe even jealous?

“What?”

“You have a tattoo.”

What?

“Very funny,” she says, struggling to pull her underwear on underneath the covers. “I don’t have any tattoos.”

“Yeah, you do,” he says, his voice gritty. “You never had this before. I would’ve remembered.”

“You’re crazy,” she thinks, pulling on the t-shirt and heading towards the bathroom to check it out. Of course, she could’ve just walked across the room topless, but for some reason she just doesn’t want to.

In the bathroom, she turns on the shower, feeling like she needs to wash him off of her. As the room fills with steam, she turns slightly, pulls down the shoulder of her shirt, and stares for nearly five minutes, until Jim knocks on the door and asks if she’s still alive in there. She’s never really looked at herself naked, or spent a lot of time in the nude – just usually sheds her clothes on the floor and jumps in the shower without a second thought. So she’s never noticed this before.

Pam Beesley has a tattoo. What the fuck… where did this come from?

It looks like it’s in shorthand, but she easily deciphers the message. And it makes her more confused than ever. Without a second thought, she flees the room (leaving the shower on, she’s going to have a great water bill this month), flings open her closet door, and, kneeling down, starts riffling through the two boxes there, marked JUNK in black magic marker.

“What are you doing?” Jim calls, still curled up in bed. She doesn’t answer.

She rips the tape off the larger box and thrusts her hands into its contents, searching, lifting up art supplies, office supplies, trinkets of all sorts, and…here it is. She finds it at the bottom, and her heart hurts when she sees it crumpled up like a piece of garbage. She brings it over to the bed, trying to smooth out some of the wrinkles.

Jim is looking at her – at the dress – worriedly. “Do you remember anything?” he asks. "Getting the tattoo?"

“No,” she says absently, wondering why he's so upset. She's running her hands over the smooth, soft surface of the dress, feeling phantom hands, warm on her hips. I’m in love with you… I’m sorry if I misinterpreted our friendship. The voice was at once warm, sad and pleading – and it didn’t sound anything like the voice of the man now sitting straight upright in bed, staring at her. She shook a bit underneath his gaze, now totally confused. According to the writing etched into her body, this was the guy she’d been in love with.

The tattoo on her right shoulder read, quite unmistakably: RMBR JM HLPRT.