Amnesiascope

by Steve Erickson

  Along with this confession from K, the second piece of mail I received was a package from Shale (a New York postmark). It accompanied an article that ran in a magazine back east about what had happened at the newspaper. “A good piece,” Shale wrote, “the writer got most everything right; but there’s something I should tell you …” and then, as delicately as possible, went on to explain that the piece mentioned—and quoted—every writer who quit except me. It was curious. Well, no, it wasn’t just curious: it was breathtaking, how irrelevant I actually was in the scheme of things, so uniquely insignificant that my resignation alone among all the others was not worth noting. And then I could only wonder: was it moral vanity on my part after all, to have quit? Was the point of my gesture simply to catch someone’s attention? Perhaps I had really begun to vanish long ago, like the lights blinking out on me in Central Park, without knowing it, my solipsism too consuming to notice my own vanishing until I was now presented with this incontrovertible evidence, the void of my name. Perhaps it was that, after I distanced myself from memory, memory now distanced itself from me. I began pulling out old newspapers. I began pulling out all the issues where my reviews had run, to reassure myself of something I had probably never been assured of in the first place: and that was when I saw it, or, more accurately, saw what there was not to see. I couldn’t find a single review I had written. “I’m sure I had something in this issue,” I was babbling to myself, the front room frantically strewn with newspaper: but there was nothing in any of them. Nor an entry in any table of contents. I checked the staff box; I wasn’t listed there either. Had they inadvertently omitted me some time ago, and I just hadn’t realized? There was no indication at all I had ever written for the newspaper, with a single exception; and I don’t have to tell you, do I, which particular piece that was.

  I called Viv. She was living in a suburb of Amsterdam, searching the Dutch marshes for the exact coordinates where to erect her Memoryscope pointing at Los Angeles. It was midnight; she answered sleepily, eight o’clock in the morning on her side. We talked from the opposite sides of consciousness, hers the side of waking, mine the side of somnambulism. I think I called to prove to myself I was still here, but talking to Viv just proved to me she was there, and made me crave her all the more, tormented both by how close she sounded and how far away. So everything I did and everywhere I went for the next few days all I could think of was Viv, in the market and at the cafe down the street, walking along the Strip and staring at the old St. James Club outside my window. It was Viv I was thinking of the afternoon at the car wash, when I was watching the two Mexican guys dry my car, wiping down the fenders and tires; in the distant hills to the east was the first fire I had seen since back before Christmas. I couldn’t quite place which ring was burning, it looked farther than Silverlake, over around the empty high-rises of Downtown northwest of the Glow Lofts; and I even said to another guy standing there waiting for his car too: I guess they’re burning again—and he said no, rumor had it this was not an official fire but rather accident or arson, what with everything so dry; and I was watching the smoke, my mind following its circles up into the sky, when it occurred to me, I’m not sure exactly when, that only one of the two Mexican guys was actually drying the car, the other wasn’t doing anything but walking around looking at it, and that he was quite well dressed for a car-wash attendant. In fact I was thinking he was probably the best dressed car-wash attendant I had ever seen, when he blithely got into the car. The first attendant looked at him blankly, with no real alarm; and it was just about the time the well dressed guy in the drivers seat was turning the key in the ignition that I finally got out of my chair and began walking toward him, a message now having finally, lazily blurted across my brain: This guy who’s starting your car right now does not work for the car wash. I was at a dead sprint by the time he was pulling my car out the driveway, and I was running alongside pounding on the roof as he hit the gas up Hollywood Boulevard. He was already flipping the ashtrays, raising and lowering the power windows, fine-tuning the bass and treble on the stereo and generally enjoying all the snazzy accessories of his brand new clean car, adjusting the rearview mirror for a particularly good view of me running helplessly after him.

  In retrospect it wasn’t such a big thing. People get their cars stolen in L.A. all the time, and worse. My running alongside the car as he was driving off, trying to get the door open and my murderous hands on him, wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done; for all I know he might have pulled out a gun and shot me. Far more serious to me was that, as it happened, I had a lot of personal effects in the car, clothes and tapes and books and papers, though I don’t really remember why. It was as though I had consolidated my whole life in one place just for the taking. At any rate, I plummeted. Whereas in any other circumstances the theft of the car would have been just a colossal drag, now it took on an unbearable weight after everything else—Viv leaving, quitting the paper, the dispersion of the Cabal. And then all the other things. The other things that had been there all along, the slow vanishing of my life one thing at a time, one person at a time, one moment at a time and one dream at a time. I lay at home in bed watching the fauna and spores grow out of my walls and ceiling, feeling at the same end I felt in that dream when suicide was not so much a radical emotional act as a sensible one, one that would get me in sync with the true status of my life. That’s all the theft of my car was, the last straw; in another frame of mind I would have absorbed it or taken it as a sign of something. But I wasn’t in any frame of mind to take anything as a sign of anything, so I lay on the bed listening to hang-ups on my phone machine, silences so long and ominous that even the machine couldn’t stand them, and began hanging up first.

  The day after my car was stolen I was lying there on the bed—from time to time I think I must have been vaguely aware I could smell smoke, from somewhere out the window far away—when, with the fall of darkness, the phone machine clicked on again, once again to no voice on the other end; and I grabbed it. I’d had enough. It was time to let the world know who it was dealing with: a man who had had his car stolen from a car wash. But when I answered, right before I heard her voice, I was thrown back in memory by the sound of her breathing; I was in Berlin again, answering the phone in my hotel room in Savignyplatz. And then she said, in her slight German accent, “Can you smell the smoke?”

  “What?”

  “Can you smell the smoke?”

  “Who is this?” I said, but I knew who it was.

  “You know who it is.”

  “Yes, I can smell it.”

  “Do you know what it’s from?”

  “It’s from the fire.”

  “Of course. But do you know what the fire is from. …”

  “Are you all right?”

  “It depends,” said Jasper, “what you mean by all right.” Her voice sounded hollow and strange. “In a way, I’m all right. In a way, I’m better than ever, I’m free. But in another way, you know, I guess it’s not all right.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I guess it’s not really all right … you know. I mean, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering what I’ve done.”

  “What have you done?” I said. But I didn’t have to travel very far around the dark side of my imagination to guess. I could see him standing on the stairs looking down at us in the dark, the night that Jasper, Viv and I were at her house.

  “Help me,” she said.

  “Are you at your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is your father … is your stepfather there?”

  “Well … it depends what you mean. In a way, yes, he’s here. Could you please come now?”

  “No, I can’t. I don’t have a car. It was stolen yesterday. From a car wash,” I added.

  “I need you to come,” she just said, in the same tone of voice. “For me. It’s not for him. There’s nothing to do for him anymore. But before whatever happens n
ext, it just seemed right that I should call you, of all people.”

  “Jasper—” I said, and she hung up. I put down the phone, picked it up again to call the police, but replaced the phone before I did. I checked the cash I had on hand which, with a little bartering with the cab driver, might be enough to get me to her house; how I would get back I’d worry about later. As I left the Hamblin the Santa Anas were blowing more fiercely than ever. Maybe it was just the hour but the city had never seemed so debased and deserted; I had the feeling the only ones left were Jasper and me and the cab driver, and maybe the asshole who stole my car, assuming he wasn’t already half way up the coast with it. The Korean cab driver seemed agitated the minute I got in the taxi, and grew more so as we crossed town. The whole noisy night had turned itself inside out, the usual cacophony of alarms and helicopters blotted up into emptiness and only the wind coming through the taxi window and the sounds of running footsteps and cries in the dark that sounded neither human nor animal. Through the branches of the trees stripped by the Santa Anas I could see shutters banging and windows being closed to keep the night out; through the windshield ahead of us the sky was red from fire. Are they burning tonight? I asked the driver, but all he answered—he must have repeated it five times between Hollywood and the switching yard east of Downtown—was “Strange city tonight, strange city,” and the way he said it I couldn’t be sure if it was a coded message or just broken English. Half a mile from Jasper’s house he refused to go further, glancing fearfully at the ravine of flames. I walked the rest of the way, crawling over railroad tracks and crossing the plain that surrounded the house, the dark form of which I could now see in the distance, a wood and steel stalagmite jutting up out of the wasteland, the dark form of Viv’s Memoryscope just beyond that. At the time, the fire in the hills seemed far away.

  The door to the car tunnel was open. I went in and every few feet called out. The front door of the house was open but there was no light on beyond it, and I kept calling Jasper’s name. I went up the stairs to the second level, my legs so wobbly I could barely climb. Jasper was waiting in the large circular room lined with windows, seated in the black chair in the room’s center. No lights were on but I could see her clearly in the light from the fire in the hills that had seemed far away just minutes before. Just beyond the windows, the long tank pool was dark. She was wearing the same simple dress she had worn at the filming of White Whisper, the room was hot and with one hand she kept pulling her hair up on top of her head to cool the back of her neck, while the other hand held a cigarette. She didn’t appear crazy at all. She was very calm. She didn’t even glance at me as I came in.

  I was looking around. Whatever I expected, there was no sign of anything amiss. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or angry. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said calmly from the chair.

  “What’s happened?” I kept looking around me.

  “What do you think has happened?” she flirted. I was paralyzed by this feeling of wanting to strangle her and wanting just to get out. Her face changed at this, and she said, “Don’t leave. You can’t leave.” She added, “Please help me.”

  “You have to tell me what’s happened,” I snapped. I kept looking for him. “Where’s your father?”

  “Please help me,” she kept saying. She stood up and walked toward me in the dark, through the red light of the fire through the window. “Right now you can help me most by not asking too many questions. There will be lots of questions later. Right now what I need most is someone who won’t ask lots of questions, who will just be here with me awhile before everything changes.” I crossed the room to the windows. Outside, Viv’s Memoryscope was silhouetted in the flames, which seemed to become less distant by the moment. “I could smell the smoke this morning,” she said, coming up behind me, “the minute I woke. I could smell it with the break of day. It’s Viv’s smoke.”

  I turned back to her, away from the window. “What?”

  “Did I show you my scrapbook?” she said. “That night you were here? Yes.”

  “You showed Viv.”

  “I showed Viv.” There was the whistle of a train; but it sounded like a shriek. “I don’t think Viv liked my scrapbook.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” I said. “If something has happened, you need to call the police, and if you want I’ll stay with you until they come. But otherwise I don’t want to stay.”

  “It was you in Berlin.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” she insisted evenly, “it was.” The train shrieked again. I turned from her and went outside onto the patio where the pool was. I peered over the wall.

  I was astounded to see the train rumbling in from the north toward the switching yard. It wasn’t moving especially fast or slow, but its whistle was increasingly shrill and strangled. The caboose was on fire, and the fire was moving up the train very fast, car by car; like a snake on fire the blazing train coiled across the dry field where the bloom of the rains had already turned to kindle. Everything behind the train went up in flames, and it appeared to be heading straight toward us when it jumped the track and skidded for the Memoryscope. Stopping just yards from the sculpture, it toppled onto its side in a blinding white din, and the field exploded as though soaked in gasoline.

  Embers sailed toward us over the wall. They caught on the tower of the house and in their light I almost thought I saw a motionless human form stuck on the towers pinnacle. One part of the house after another was burning, and I don’t remember whose idea the bathysphere was; since I was becoming more and more panicked it might have actually been Jasper’s, which seems remarkably cool-headed on her part. But it was obviously the only place we had any chance before we were overwhelmed by fire, and now it bobbed in the water as though having been placed there all along for just this moment and purpose. Without saying anything she stepped briskly around the flickering black water of the pool; and when I had clambered down into the module behind her, groping in the dark, she pulled the hatch closed. It was pitch black inside. In the dark the faint outline of the dials and meters looked like ancient etchings on the wall of a cave. Through the sphere’s glass porthole we could see the red sky above as we sank to the bottom of the pool; a huge red bubble floated up from beneath us. For a second it enveloped us, and then disappeared toward the surface.

  In the windows and glass hatch the water shimmered bright red, and I could see the flames sweeping overhead. The question was whether, escaping incineration, we were just going to cook to death. Even with the air cranked to maximum, the heat from the water of the pool came through, and without a thought Jasper ripped off her dress. In the fiery red glow her body was as absurdly fecund as ever, like a seed about to burst. Soon I peeled off my own clothes. We’d been lying there several minutes on opposite sides of the small compartment, faint from the rising heat and the dwindling oxygen, when she said, not long before I passed out, “Tell me. …”

  “What?” I murmured.

  “I know it was you on the telephone in Berlin,” I heard her say from the other side of the bathysphere. “But … that night … it was you who came to the hotel, wasn’t it?”

  “Why?”

  “The last time you were here, you said—”

  “Forget it,” I whispered.

  “You said … what did you say? You said, how did I know it was the same man. How did I know the man in the hotel room was the same as the man who was on the telephone.”

  “We shouldn’t talk,” I croaked.

  “But just tell me,” she said. “I mean, why did you say that? It was you who came. It was. Right?”

  “Yes, it was,” I said. Maybe she knew it was a lie and maybe she didn’t. Lying to a woman isn’t easy; she knows when you sound funny. And it would have been too much to explain, there under the flames, that between the phone call and the rendezvous in the hotel I had died in Berlin, though not for the last time, and perhaps not even for the first time. Each time you d
ie, the old skin falling away to reveal someone else, it’s not such an easy question to answer, how much remains of the man who once was. So even if I had made it to our rendezvous, it still isn’t so certain that the man in the hotel room would have been the same as the man who was on the telephone. But I wasn’t going to explain all that now, even if I was naked with her in a bathysphere at the bottom of an old tanker full of water, everything above us burning. I wasn’t going to use up the last bit of the air we shared to tell her all that. It wouldn’t have mattered, and it wouldn’t have been what she wanted to know anyway.

  Right before I passed out, I suddenly understood what she had meant about the smoke. Slumped across the bottom of the bathysphere, staring up through the glass hatch, I suddenly realized what she meant when she said she had smelled it with the first break of day. Whether she was crazy with her demons or crazy with the truth that night, or crazy with both, I don’t know; so I can’t be sure that it was really the Memoryscope that started the fire. I can’t be sure it was the first ray of dawn, coming over the eastern hills, that cracked the mirrored length of the Memoryscope and ignited the fire at its cross hairs, in the hills of the distant ravine at the flashpoint where memory meets amnesia. But right before I passed out, staring up through the glass hatch, I saw streak across the sky not the light of fire, not the light of electricity, not the light of combustion, but the light of the last memory Viv’s sculpture ever broadcast; and naturally it was the memory that explained everything. It was a memory from so far back in my life as to have been seemingly beyond remembering; but there it was, through the glass hatch of the bathysphere in the red sky above me: the first word I ever stuttered. When I saw it, just before my eyes closed, I murmured, “Of course,” and I’m almost sure I heard Jasper whisper back, “G-G-Goodbye.”