* * * *

I am lying naked on a flat, leathery surface covered by a shiny silvery sheet. I have returned back to bed in the high technology medical facility within the lunar base. Computerized panels and blinking lights are everywhere. There are familiar beeps and tones playing from somewhere deep inside the panels on the walls. I absolutely know where I am. I know with utter certain that I am back at the lunar base. I can feel the lunar gravity.

A man walks up next to me. He is wearing a completely white medical uniform and thick black boots. He looks tanned and fit. A thick mustache that is frosty white like his long, curly hair punctuates his friendly face. He resembles a guy who was either a Nineteen Sixties rock and roll star or some renown Shakespearean actor from England who stopped coloring his hair and has grown a mustache especially so that he would not be recognized in public. He hands me a thick blue robe and motions for me to get up from the bed. I examine him as I quickly put on the robe. I feel two fingers touching my forehead between my eyes. He holds two fingers there on my temples for a few seconds.

He speaks to me slowly and deliberately with what seems to me to be an official, British accent: “Welcome back, Mr. Avila. Tell me how you feel.”

“Dazed. Lightheaded.”

“How’s your memory?” he asks.

“Faulty,” I say to him with honesty. “Cannot remember my name. I don’t think I know your name. I do know that we’re in the lunar base. Gravity tells me that. Why did you touch my forehead like you did.”

“Standard procedure,” he responds.

I ask him, “I must be dreaming? Are you fucking with me?”