Siemens

Siemens is the workplace through which Derek Simmons first recognizes a personal memory returning after amnesia. The company itself is only briefly described, but that brief reference carries weight: recollection of a former colleague becomes evidence that Simmons is remembering his own past rather than repeating information supplied by someone else.

Workplace and Colleagues

Simmons recalls that he had worked at Siemens and that Stan Marini had been part of the maintenance crew there. The account gives no further detail about Simmons’s duties or the company’s operations; its significance lies in this link between the two men and their shared employment. Marini had married at about the same time as Simmons and later moved to New York. These details place the former coworker within the personal history Simmons is beginning to recover, rather than presenting him as a name encountered only in the news.

The Memory Trigger

In the middle of March 1987, while at home changing television channels in search of a film, Simmons came across an NY1 television station report about a man from Bergen County who had died by suicide. On seeing the man’s photograph, he recognized Marini. He was about to change the channel when he also recalled that Marini had worked with him on Siemens’s maintenance crew. The recognition mattered because Simmons understood that no one had told him about this connection and he had not read it. The report supplied Marini’s face and news of his death; the recollection of their shared employment came from Simmons’s own returning memory. Siemens therefore marks a concrete boundary between information newly encountered and a past he could not previously access.

Significance in Simmons’s Story

The Siemens memory is an early sign that Simmons’s amnesia is lifting. Its force comes from its ordinary specificity: a former colleague, a maintenance crew, and a workplace. Rather than recovering his past all at once, Simmons first recognizes a detail that can be checked against his life before the memory loss. That recognition begins the rapid return of memories that will include his marriage to Anne and the events surrounding her death.