‘The Super is in prison for breaking and entering.’
‘That’s a no, then. Anything missing?’
‘Not that I can see.’
‘Okay, so, to recap: someone’s broken into your apartment and done a bit of tidying. You’re twitchier than a pig in a tin, and you’re waving your gun round like a flag. There’s a woman on the sofa with wrists like a road map, and you just paid Woodley quadruple rate to keep his mouth shut. Maybe now would be a good time for you to tell me what’s going on.’
I took my dressing gown off the hook on the back of the door, and got Laura Reynolds into it. I stuffed the bloody one in the trash where, knowing my housekeeping, it would probably remain for two years. Laura still seemed to be unconscious, but that was probably due to medication: there was a lot more colour in her cheeks, and with a combination of neat stitching and skinFix her arms looked a little better. Now that the blood had been swabbed away you could see both that the cuts were fairly manageable, and that they weren’t the first. Old, white lines in very similar places said that tonight’s dive for the tunnel hadn’t been the first of its kind. Didn’t make it any less important for her, I guessed, or any more clever.
I carried her through to the second bedroom as gently as I could, and got her into the bed. I laid a couple of my old coats on top of the bedding, and turned the heating up a little.
Then I went back in the living room and got the answering machine to repeat the messages which someone had already picked up. There were only three, and they were all from Stratten. The first was polite, the second businesslike. The third just said ‘Call the office. Now.’
Time was running out. I got a coffee and told Deck the score.
In the five months I worked memory, Ms Reynolds had been one of my most regular clients. Though I didn’t know her name then, she’d dumped the same memory on me six times.
The memory was this. She’d been down by a stream, in a patch of forest behind the house where she lived. I don’t know how old she was, but probably early to mid teens. The day was hot and it was late afternoon, and she’d gone into the wood for something important. The main impression I got was of anticipation, and vulnerability, and the memory always made me feel very young. She was standing there, waiting, when suddenly there’d been a shadow over her, and she’d looked up to see her mom. Her mother was a very tall woman, quite thin, with a mass of reddish brown hair. Laura had slowly looked up until she’d found her mother’s face. In the memory what she needed a break from every now and then was the expression she saw there. A look of fury—mixed in with a little glee.
The memory always ended abruptly at that moment, and I don’t know what the look meant or what had happened afterwards. I’d always been kind of glad I didn’t. It was one of the memories I could understand someone wanting to get away from once in a while.
Then last week I came back from lounging round a hotel pool in Santa Barbara to find I had an email message from an address I didn’t recognize. Before I even read it I ran a check on the source: sometimes people set their mail to send back a received signal when it was opened. The domain code didn’t set any alarm bells ringing, but even so I got the console to hardcopy without technically opening it.
The mail was from this same woman. We’d never been in contact before—all transactions were brokered through REMtemps on a double-blind confidentiality principle—but she mentioned the memory, and I worked out who she was. The message said she had something she wanted me to carry, and would make it worth my while.
I stared at the piece of paper for a few moments, then set fire to it and let it burn in an ashtray. I spent the rest of the day round the pool, and the evening in a bar at the beach end of State Street, playing pool and bullshitting with the locals.
When I got back I had another message from the same address. It listed a phone number. It also mentioned twenty thousand dollars.
I watched a movie on the in-house system for a while, but you know how it is. The back brain makes a decision instantly, and no matter how long you put it off, you know what you’re going to do.
At about midnight I left the hotel room and went back to the bar. There was a phone box round the back, out of sight, and I called the number from the message.
A nervous-sounding woman answered the phone. She had me describe her memory in detail. Then she told me what she wanted. She had another memory, one which wasn’t usually a problem. Ten years ago she’d gone on vacation with a man she’d just met, to some place on the Baja she’d known for years. Ensenada. They stayed there a while, hanging out, eating seafood, having a good time. Then she’d come back.
‘That’s it?’ I asked.
She’d recently met a new man. She liked him a lot. In fact, she was thinking of getting hitched. But they were going to go away together first, just to make sure. He wanted to go to the same town she’d been to with the other man all that time ago. She tried to suggest going somewhere else, but Ensenada had become a kind of lovers’ in-joke between them, and it would have looked weird if she’d insisted.
I still didn’t see the problem, and said so. As long as you steer clear of some of the taco stands, Ensenada’s a cool place to be.
She said she didn’t want to go back remembering what it had been like with the other man. She thought it might make her see things differently this time. She really loved this new guy, and didn’t want to compromise the trip.
I know it sounds odd, but believe me—that’s the way other people’s lives work. They’re both more bizarre and more trivial than you can imagine. Most clients had far worse reasons for forgetting something for a while: in a way I sort of respected her attitude, and wished I had a woman who was taking me that seriously.
I still didn’t see why we were doing the cloak and dagger stuff. All she had to do was specify me when she booked the storage.
So she told me. She was going to be away for ten days.
Stratten wouldn’t accept a booking for more than a week, I knew that. He seemed to have pretty much cornered the memory market, and I assumed therefore that he was kicking back to a couple of key cops somewhere, but if they heard he was extending the time limit all bets would be off. Also, the memory the woman wanted to leave wasn’t a fragment. It was for the whole period, three entire days.
No-one had ever tried anything remotely that long before.
I thought I was going to say no, but instead found myself just telling her the money she was offering wasn’t enough. I would have to go on leave from REMtemps for a week and a half. I could earn that much anyway in that time, without the risk of pissing Stratten off.
‘Fifty grand,’ she said.
I have a way of dealing with temptation. I just succumb, and get it over with.
Early the following afternoon I sat in my room and waited for the transmission. A third of the money for the current job was already in my hands, and on its way to three different accounts. The rest would come later. The woman had found a hacker with a lashed-up transmitter, and this dweeb had been able to acquire the code of my receiver. This spooked me a little. I made a mental note to find some way of hinting to Stratten, when the job was done, that the system wasn’t as impregnable as he thought. If he wasn’t careful the black market was going to start cutting into his business. Worse than that, memory temps could find themselves stuffed with all kinds of shit they weren’t expecting or being paid for.
I spoke on the phone with the woman and arranged a time for her to take the memory back. It was a different number from the one she’d originally given me: presumably the home of the hacker.
Then I closed my eyes and got myself ready to receive.
It came moments afterwards. A pulse of noise and smell that filled my mind like the worst migraine you’ve ever had, magnified a hundredfold. I grunted, unable even to shout, and pitched forward out of the chair onto the carpet, hands and legs spasming. I seemed to go deaf and partly blind for a while, but that was the least of my problems. I thought I was going t
o die.
After a few minutes the shaking lessened—enough that I could crawl to the bedside table and grab a cigarette. I hauled myself up onto the bed and lay face down for a while, waiting for the pain to go away. It started to, eventually.
Half an hour later I was sitting up and drinking, which helped. My sight was clearing and I could hear once more the sound of people larking around by the pool below my window. I still felt like shit, but at least I was going to live.
The brain is designed to accept life piecemeal—not as sounds, sights, feelings and tactile impressions condensed into a single bullet of remembrance. Our minds are structured by time, and like things delivered sequentially. I hadn’t really considered the difference between getting a quick, single fragment of someone’s life, and taking on three days’ worth of experience in one hit. It was like having the world reconfigured as a place where time and space meant nothing, and everything was one. If I hadn’t already spent years bench-pressing with my mind I’d probably have been slumped in a corner, drooling and staring into nothingness.
As it was my head was still humming and thudding, trying to wade through what it had received and sort it into chronology and types. I could feel countless threads of data squirming over each other like snakes, searching for some kind of order. Sunburn on my shoulder; salt on my lips from a Margarita; a flash of sun on a car window. A thousand sentences all at once, some of them leaving my head, others coming in. My brain was lurching under the weight, misfiring like a heart on the verge of arrest.
I reached unsteadily for the phone. Large amounts of room service was what was on my mind, but first I had to call the woman and let her know that the transmission had gone through. I’m quite professional about these things. I dialled the number and waited as it rang, holding the glass of iced gin up against my forehead and panting very slightly.
There was no answer. I tapped the pips and redialled. This time I gave it thirty rings, before putting the phone back again. I knew she wasn’t going away until the next day, so maybe it was no big deal. By then it was forty-five minutes since the dump. Probably she was out, making arrangements—or perhaps she’d gone home.
I munched slowly through a burger delivered by an offensively self-confident bellboy, keeping half an eye on what was going on in my head. It felt like a hard drive running optimization software, without enough slack to swap all the data around. Fragments of her golden vacation were lodging into place, but the rest was still jumbled and hazy.
When I was done with the food I called the number again. I let it ring for a long time and was about to put it down when someone answered. ‘Hello,’ said a voice I didn’t recognize. ‘Who is this?’ There was a weird sound in the background, like a tannoy.
‘Hap Thompson,’ I answered, slightly taken aback. ‘Is my client there?’
‘How the fuck do you expect me to know, dickweed?’ snarled the voice, and the connection was severed.
I tried the number again, immediately. It rang, but there was no answer. Then I called the operator. She told me there was no fault on the line but wouldn’t give me the address.
I called Quat. He said he’d call me back. I stumbled around the room for ten minutes, gobbling aspirin like candy.
Quat called, hack done. The number was from a booth in the first class departure lounge of O’Hare airport.
I called the other number I had for the woman. The line was dead. Then I blacked out.
When I came to, I was pretty scared. Two reasons. The first is that it had never happened to me before, except the tiny blips you got immediately after receiving a memory. The second was that my client had clearly fucked me over.
I checked out of the hotel and drove fast back to LA along Highway 1, bolting myself into the apartment. I panicked when I found a note had been stuffed under the door, but it was only from my old neighbours, the Dickenses. They were a nice young couple with three kids, originally from Portland. Year ago someone came up with an idea to sell everyone on how well the country was doing. They invented an imaginary family: parents of a certain age, such-and-such background, current and past employment, recreational habits, kids’ sexes, ages, SAT scores and eye colour—they were very specific. Then they hung an entire campaign around it, staking their reputation on claiming that such a family was so many dollars better off every week—thinking nobody could disprove it. Problem was, they screwed up. There was such a family—the Dickenses. Some suit in the Statistics Bureau panicked and took a contract out on them, and they’d been on the run ever since. The note just said they’d seen someone sniffing around, and they were gone. They left me their keys, and said I could have the milk in their fridge.
I hid the memory receiver in the bedroom and spent the rest of the day in the bathtub, slowly drinking. By the time I got out, I could piece together most of the first two days of the memory. The woman had been down in Ensenada, but she’d been by herself: mainly she’d spent the time drinking Margaritas in Housson’s and a variety of other bars. The first night was pretty quiet, and by midnight she was back where she was staying, a small and run-down beach resort called Quitas Papagayo, about half a mile up the coast. I’d stayed there myself, a long time ago, and even then its halcyon days had been thirty years behind it. On the second night, drunk, she nearly ended up going home with an American sailor. On the whole I was glad she changed her mind, and bawled him out in the street instead. She kept screaming at him as he hurried away up the street, then went back in the bar and drank until it closed. God knows how she got home: she couldn’t remember. Hardly the vacation of a lifetime, though I’ve had worse, I’ve got to admit.
And it hadn’t been ten years ago, either. She’d taken an organizer with her, and checked her email obsessively—the dates on screen made it clear her ‘holiday’ had taken place only a couple of days before she contacted me. Finally she got the email she was waiting for. It was short. Just an address. She walked straight out of the bar and got in her car, and was back in LA early evening.
The next part of the memory, the murder at the crossroads, took a long time in coming. I’d never experienced anything like it before. Though it was very recent, it was already distorted, and shot through with darkness. It was as if a process of blanking had already started, before she decided to get rid of it. I don’t know why she wanted to lose the time in Ensenada as well: when you take other people’s memories, you don’t always get all the thoughts that happened during them. It’s like some people’s sense data and internal workings take part in different parts of their head, like they’ve trained a part of their mind to remain distant at all times. All I got during the time in the Baja was a draining feeling of misery, of a desire to be either drunk or dead—mixed with dark elation. Not a good way to feel, sure, but I got the sense that this was how she felt about half the time. Ditching two days of it wasn’t going to make much difference. Perhaps she’d spent those two days working herself up to what happened—reliving certain things in part of her mind, girding herself. I don’t know.
But in the end I was able to form a coherent idea of the last night, and what had happened, and learn her name when the guy used it just before she killed him. I told Deck everything I could remember, from the way the crossroads had looked, to the way the man called Ray winked, to the number of shots she pumped into his body. The feeling of emptiness as she stared down at the corpse, reloading the gun for the sake of it.
The numb despair, as she ran away, at realizing that it had made no difference.
Laura Reynolds was breathing easy, apparently now asleep. Retelling the memory made me feel something new towards her, though I wasn’t sure what. Guilty, perhaps. I’d taken something that had previously only been in our heads, and brought it out into the world. I’d never done that before, and regarded the confidentiality of my profession with a kind of half-assed pride. I hedged the feeling down, told it to go away. She’d deliberately dumped something on me which could get me sent to prison for ever.
Deck was standing
at the window when I got back, looking down at the street. The sky was beginning to lighten round the edges, and somewhere the smog machines were stirring into life. Looked like we were heading for a hot day, unless the chemicals in the sky decided they fancied a blizzard instead. Being a weather man in LA isn’t the joke job it used to be.
When Deck spoke it was as if he was working up to something, clearing the side issues out of the way first. ‘Who do you think the guys at the end were?’
‘I have no idea. They’re weren’t cops, I’m pretty sure of that.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t know. Something about them. Plus they looked familiar.’
‘Plenty cops look familiar to me.’
‘Not like that. An old memory.’
‘Yours?’
‘I think so. I don’t think they sparked anything in her at all.’
‘Could it be them who’ve been in here?’
I shook my head. ‘They didn’t see me, remember?—I wasn’t actually there. I didn’t do anything. It just feels as if I did.’
He looked at me. ‘You know what will happen if you’re caught with that in your head?’ He’s warned me about this since I started memory work.
‘Murder One. Or Half, at least.’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Deck walked past the door, and rootled through the pile of yesterday’s news. I guess I should cancel the hardcopy paper, save a few trees somewhere: but reading it off a screen isn’t ever going to be the same. He found the edition he was looking for, and handed it to me.
I scanned the front page:
There might be an earthquake at some stage.
A property entrepreneur called Nicholas Schumann had killed himself in a spectacular way: financial problems cited. I remembered the name, vaguely: he might even have been one of the wheels who redeveloped Griffith. Must have taken some piece of phenomenal stupidity for him to have lost all that money.
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