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first few months my brain didn't work right. Not that itwas broken, but all the software had to be reinstalled from scratch. I didn’t really think about much, at least not in the way we adults think. I just existed, like an infant, in a state of perpetual incomprehension. Trying to wrap my head around the big issues: time and space and how my pee-pee worked. They figured out I could understand Spanish, though I rarely said much in any language. At most I would offer single-syllable croaks, like a reticent bullfrog.
    One blurry memory stands out from those early days. It happened about two weeks after I woke up. Someone called me in the hospital. The nurse put the phone on my food tray. There was a man on the line speaking Spanish. He said he was a police officer. He kept asking about “the fire” and what I remembered. He must have eventually tired of my uninformative grunts because, after repeating his questions three or four times, he hung up. I never heard from him again.
    My rehabilitation was slow. They put me with a Spanish-speaking physical therapist named Lucinda. It was Lucinda who started calling me Jake because my hospital wristband was blank, and they needed to call me something. I guess she watched a soap opera that had a character by that name. I picture him as a broad-shouldered, brawny specimen of manhood, without physical defects of any kind. A person very much unlike me, but a person I would have been delighted to become.
    I grew rather fond of the name. It always struck me as very normal, without resonance or reminder of my erased past, as might have been the case if they'd called me Raul or Gabriel or anything Mexican sounding. I suppose most of the crucial things in life are arbitrary. And it doesn’t matter what a thing is, but only how tenderly you embrace it that makes it your own. And so, I'm Jake.
    It was also Lucinda who began acquainting me with the few known facts of my existence. She told me I’d been in a fire and that during the fire I suffered a head injury. It was the head injury that left me in a coma. This should have been obvious from the condition of my body, but it came as news to my redeveloping mind. She also told me I was a transfer patient sent to Baltimore General from somewhere else, especially for the treatment of my burns.
    After five months of rehab, the doctors decided I wasn't sick enough to hang around anymore and they needed to figure out what to do with me. I was sixteen by then, at least that was what they estimated my age to be. This made me ancient by orphan standards and made my prospects of being adopted slim to none. The only option offered me was foster care. My foster family had two kids of their own and spots for four more foundlings like myself. Sometimes the bunks were full, sometimes empty. No one ever hung around long.
    My English got better and I started asking questions. Where was I from? What happened to my family? Unfortunately, my foster parents knew next to nothing about me and seemed little inclined to help me find out. They did tell me I was probably from Mexico and that my parents must have died in the fire, since that was the most plausible explanation for how I wound up in foster care to begin with.
    Later, I asked the same questions of my foster care case worker, a fastidious and bow-tie wearing black man named Ensel. Ensel hadn’t become involved until the hospital got in touch with social services toward the end of my rehab stint. All he had to go by were the documents in front of him, mostly medical records that included nothing about the fire or my life before.
    Ensel pointed out that my amnesia had short-circuited the system. The process presumed an individual who knew about his own life and could fill in the gaps when the case was shuffled between agencies. I was not such an individual. As a result, fire investigators, medical care providers, and social services knew next to nothing of one another’s work. Information that could have