A man disappears in New York, then finds himself in Chicago with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. He has an echo of his own name, a sense that the person who dropped him off was “his brother” and a sense that he wants his old identity back, whatever it is.
In comparison, you have Unknown White Male, the documentary (right?) about a British New Yorker who also loses his own memory of his own identity.
Both were financially stable white men living in New York. One was an attorney, the other a stock broker. One was last seen in the regular routine of his old life while driving his car out of his office parking garage, the other was riding the subway near Coney Island. Both of them got moving but left something precious behind. Why?
This kind of retrograde amnesia is supposed to be very rare, outside of fiction. But how any people without cars and stock-broker money become victims of this kind of phenomenon and never get found? How much of our memories are we shedding every time we ride in the car or on the train, to keep our minds unencumbered enough to move? How much have you forgotten about yourself, the people you knew and the things you’ve seen? Normally these memories come off like flakes or fibers from your brain, like scales coming off a snake coiled in your head. Why is it, then, that sometimes the whole memory gets sloughed off like a snake’s skin?
