Amnesiascope

by Steve Erickson

  But when I opened my eyes, the memory had vanished again. I don’t know how long I was unconscious; it was certainly a while, because when I regained consciousness the bathysphere was floating back on the surface of the water and the hatch was open, and the sky was not black or red but the pale gray of morning. I could still smell the smoke from the smoldering house and the fire that had moved south. The fireman and paramedic who revived me gave me a blanket to wrap around myself, and I was as wobbly climbing out of the bathysphere as I had been climbing the steps of the house when I arrived the night before. Up above, a cop was waiting for me; the charred house was crawling with cops and firemen. If there had been a human form in the tower the night before, there wasn’t anymore; there wasn’t a tower anymore, just a black stubble. Wouldn’t you know that the Memoryscope came through it all, though it didn’t exactly have the same shiny luster, scorched black as it was. I was led by the cops through the house and down the stairs, and out the car tunnel to a van where they let me put my clothes on, and then to an unmarked squad car that waited among half a dozen cop cars and several fire engines and ambulances. One squad car was pulling away, and I thought in the back seat I briefly saw Jasper. But I couldn’t be sure, and she was nowhere else to be seen, and I didn’t see her again.

  I was down at police headquarters several hours, almost all of it waiting for something to happen. Then a couple of detectives came around and asked some questions. They asked what I was doing at the house and what I had seen there, and how I knew Jasper. I told them exactly what had happened, from the phone call on, summarizing the gist of it while leaving out my own suspicions. They asked if I had an intimate relationship with Jasper and I said no; I wasn’t sure exactly what they meant by intimate, and decided to take a chance and leave Berlin out of it. They pointed out that the two of us had been naked in the bathysphere: “It was hot,” I explained. I was surprised they didn’t press me on it. As I look back, they must have known everything they wanted to know, and nothing I was telling them contradicted anything. At the end, when they said I was free to leave, the investigating detective in charge added, “By the way. Did you report a car stolen a day or two ago?”

  “From a car wash,” I said abjectly.

  Five or ten minutes later when they finished laughing, the guy in charge said, “Well, we have it.” They had found it on Cahuenga between Sunset and Hollywood, a mile and a half from where it had been stolen. It was still warm when the police got there, apparently abandoned only moments before by whoever had been driving; inside had been a knife and a streak of blood. They gave me a ride over to where the car was impounded, and after signing for it I was led through a maze of several hundred other cars. The car was pretty well trashed, just this side of undriveable. The side was caved in, the right front fender dented so that it barely obstructed the wheel. Driving it off the lot, I was sorry the detective had told me about the knife and the blood. I actually thought about taking it to a car wash, but that seemed to be tempting fate.

  Instead I just drove with all the windows down, to blow the evil spirits out. Everything that had been in the car was gone, of course, the clothes and books and papers probably pitched into a side alley somewhere, and all my tapes discarded too; the musical taste of someone dippy enough to get his car stolen right before his eyes at a car wash was probably a little too quaint for guys who drive around all night knifing people. In the stereo was the only tape the thieves apparently found too fascinating to toss: my cassette of the phone messages I received after quitting the paper. So I drove on listening to the messages over and over, heading for Downtown and passing the seared ruins of Jasper’s house and Viv’s Memoryscope, and then on down the highway toward San Bernardino, all the way to Fontana before turning north into the Cajon Pass. An hour later I was in Victorville and an hour after that Barstow. In a phone booth in Barstow I called a woman in Texas whose number Ventura had given me in case I needed to leave him a message. I told her to let him know the next time he checked in that I was heading for Vegas, and when I got there I would call her back for any message he wanted to leave me. I could stand to see him.

  I don’t know how many of the evil spirits I lost in the Mojave, but it wasn’t enough of them. An hour and a half after Barstow I crossed the state line, and a little less than an hour after that I was in Downtown Vegas, off the Strip, where I checked into one of the casinos there. Even in seedy Downtown Vegas, the casino valet did not look very impressed with my bashed-up car. I telephoned the woman in Texas again, who confirmed that Ventura had indeed called from somewhere in Monument Valley, got my message and was heading for Vegas, where he had a reservation at another hotel nearby. He would meet me the next night at the Golden Garter. I drew every cent I still had out of an automated teller and went and bought myself some underwear and a new shirt and toiletries, since I had nothing like that with me, and then wandered around Downtown the rest of the night playing blackjack and winning just enough to keep playing and wandering and drinking, On a corner some guy handed me one of those flyers that has pictures of beautiful naked women with phone numbers, so you can call them up and have them come to your room and if they bear the remotest resemblance to the picture you can pay them a hundred dollars to get naked for you and perhaps fuck you for several hundred dollars more. I called one and when she said hello, I hung up.

  The next night I waited at the Golden Garter. While watching the strippers I got into a fragmented conversation with a guy I thought was about sixty years old until I saw him better in the light, which revealed that beneath his white hair he was probably closer to my age. He was a nice enough guy, kind of sweet in the purely unvarnished way of someone who has a screw loose. Soon I was waiting for Ventura to show up just to extricate me from the situation; but instead another guy came along who looked like he stepped out of one of those old Fifties or Sixties mob or private eye movies, very dapper—the last guy I knew this dapper, before the one who stole my car that is, was Abdul. Everything about him was sharp from his tailored clothes to his shoes, in striking contrast to the dimwit with the white hair, who it became clear was the older brother that the younger one looked out for. After that a couple of other guys walked in who looked like they were about to shoot up the joint. I was beginning to think I should get out.

  “You should get out,” the well dressed private-eye said.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” I explained uneasily.

  “Oh. He’s not coming.”

  “What?”

  “Guy named Ventura? He’s not coming.”

  Amazed, I finally managed to sputter, “You know Ventura?”

  “Let’s say we cross paths now and then, whenever he’s in Vegas. Anyhow I have a message for you: he’s not coming.” He went on, “His car blew up on the Arizona highway, somewhere in the desert.”

  I was flabbergasted. “Is he all right?”

  “Yeah, he’s all right.”

  “But is he all right? He’s very attached to that car.”

  “Now that you mention it, he sounded oddly serene when I talked to him.” He said it like the sort of guy who didn’t say the word serene more than once or twice in a lifetime, not to even mention the word oddly. “Anyway,” he looked over his shoulder at the other two guys near the doorway, “you really should get out of here now.”

  So I got out. I went back to the hotel room and called the woman in Texas, getting no answer, and then tried to call Viv in Amsterdam, also getting no answer. I knew then I was going to do one of two things, which was call the girl in the flyer I had hung up on earlier, or slip out of the hotel without paying my tab and get in the car and keep going up the same highway I had come in on. I don’t know how long it was before I crossed the corner of Arizona that leads up to Utah. I was well into my tape of phone messages for the umpteenth time before I impulsively ejected it from the tape player and threw it out the same window all my other tapes had gone out, five or six hundred miles back in Los Angeles. At some point I pulled over to the side of th
e road and slept a bit; I woke to the sun coming up over what I presumed was the distant southern tail of the Rockies, the rocks of Utah glimmering an iridescent rust. I drove on.

  Somewhere north of St. George, in the middle of nowhere, I was chased for a while by two maniacs in a black sportscar. They pulled up inches behind me and stayed with me for thirty miles; at one point I suddenly swerved to the side of the road and stopped, and then took off again as fast as I could when they stopped too, a couple of hundred yards ahead. I kept trying to shake them like this until they finally drew up alongside me, looked me over very carefully and, apparently determining I wasn’t whoever they had thought I was, shook their heads and then sped on, leaving me in their dust. An hour outside Salt Lake City I got a speeding ticket. I was sure the cop was mistaken when he said I had been going ninety-five miles an hour; surveying the damage of my car, however, only seemed to confirm his suspicions. I tried to tell him about the psychos stalking me in the black sportscar; he couldn’t have been less impressed. An hour later I was stopped for speeding again: “I just got a ticket!” I almost sobbed to the second cop, who looked at me like I was a mental case. Nearing the border of Idaho I finally checked into the last motel room in a little town where every other motel had a No Vacancy sign in front. The motel room reeked of the sweet smell of insecticide and before I crossed the street to the local steak house, where I had a filet and salad and three straight vodkas, I opened the window to air the room out. When I came back after dinner I found the room swarming with bugs. A cloud of gnats had blown in through the open window, attracted to the bathroom light, and a strange sense of hysteria welled up inside me as I closed the door of the bathroom trying to shut the bugs off from the bedroom. I took off my clothes and got into bed, and lying there in the dark I felt gnats covering my entire body.

  I knew I wasn’t actually covered with gnats. But it didn’t matter that I knew it, I could feel them anyway; I could feel them from my feet to my chest, crawling all over me. I kept telling myself I wasn’t really covered with gnats but it didn’t matter how often I said it, I didn’t believe it. That was when a black wave of fear came over me, because I knew at this particular moment I was losing my mind. It was the most peculiar and terrifying thing, to hear the arguments of my rational mind and know they were true and still reject them, to bear cool, almost analytical witness to my own breakdown. My psyche simply did not believe my brain. I was seized with an almost overpowering impulse to get out of bed, dress, jump in the car and speed down the highway in exhaustion, as I had been speeding ever since Vegas, piling up speeding tickets because I could not make myself slow down. And I knew—there wasn’t a doubt in my head—that if I succumbed to this impulse I would run the car straight into the side of a mountain. I knew without any doubt whatsoever that I was moments across the line from sanity and moments this side of killing myself; and yet it was everything I could do to resist the impulse anyway. There in the dark, crawling with gnats I knew were not really there, everything came rushing back to me, the onslaught of memory and all my failures; and for the first time in my life I felt something that was unique to me: a loneliness to which I had vainly prided myself as being untouchable. I didn’t have any doubt I was moments away from this being the last night of my life.

  I turned on the light. I threw back the sheet and looked at my naked body for a long time, pointing out to myself over and over again that it was not covered with gnats. After an hour I finally began to believe myself; and finally I pulled the sheet back up, turned off the light, and went to sleep.

  The next morning I got back in the car and continued on up the highway. That afternoon I got another speeding ticket, which I accepted as jauntily as the cop delivered it, since this was a particularly ridiculous ticket; this time I was quite certain I hadn’t been going a mile over eighty. I was on a small road out in the Idaho countryside, because the map said it was the only road to where I was going, and just before dusk I reached Craters of the Moon, and the line of cars backed up for the festival.

  I waited in the line for a little over an hour before I finally reached the entrance booth, only to realize I hadn’t brought with me the letter of invitation that I received the day I quit the paper. But the guard had my name on a list and let me pass anyway, and I cruised through the black craters and rolling charred valleys where everyone was waiting for the film to start, a lunar drive-in of a thousand cars stretched before me. People were sitting on their hoods facing a huge white sail that had been hoisted from a mast in the earth. I parked my car and got out. Darkness fell.

  The film was projected onto the white sail. Now and then the film would fill with a wind blowing from Canada through the craters; we were a black ghost ship called Marat sailing the Idaho plains. There was no sound from either the film or the audience until the end, which was greeted with a rising, sustained roar. I was relieved the movie was nothing like I imagined it. Somewhere between my review and this moment it had become its own thing. Afterward a tiny old man stepped in front of the blank white sail and, in the lights, merely waved; and as the people and cars were leaving I wandered toward the screen, drifting against the tide of the exiting migration. Just as I was beginning to think I was wasting my time, I saw him, surrounded by a crowd of festival officials and photographers flashing their cameras, and I stood there a while watching, ten feet away, only because I wanted to get a look at him.

  God, he had to have been a hundred. But he seemed as sharp in spirit as he was feeble in body, basking in all the attention even as he looked like he had been around a little too long to take it all too seriously. And then in all the hubbub, there in the dark where I wouldn’t have thought he could possibly see me, he saw me. He turned, looked right at me and smiled expectantly, as though he was waiting for me to say something. I came closer and one of the officials stepped up to keep me back, but the old man signaled to let me through. People stopped for a moment, thinking he was about to say something and wanting to hear it; but I was the one who spoke. “Everything is gone from my life,” I told him. “Everyone has left. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore. And I’ve driven all the way from Los Angeles just so you could tell me.”

  For a moment I thought he didn’t hear me. For a moment he turned back to all the other people trying to talk to him; but then he raised his hand and—

  And Adolphe Sarre turns back to me with the same smile, no longer expectant but fulfilled, and at a volume I should not be able to hear but which I can make out perfectly, all he says is: “Embarrass yourself.” And we look at each other for one more moment before the crowd swallows him up.

  I return to the car, get in and, at the first sane speed I’ve driven in three days and a thousand miles, head back the direction I came, the perfect Stuttering Fool of the American Tarot.

  I cross the Idaho-Utah line and I don’t stop, because even if I had the money for a motel room, I’m not stopping anyway. Out of utter fatigue I pull over just shy of Nevada and sleep an hour, and then continue, passing Vegas a little before noon. A little after noon I’m back in California, Station 3 just beginning to filter in at the far end of the radio, and in a daze I take myself on into Los Angeles, nearly seventeen hours after leaving Craters of the Moon. Far past exhaustion, far past adrenaline, without a reason for being back, without a single reason to take me across one black ring after another into the bull’s-eye of Hollywood and then through the Black Passages on the other side, through Beverly Hills and out along the border of Black Clock Park into the Palisades, I pull my car off Sunset Boulevard and drive up to the same bluff where I went the morning after Viv and I kidnapped Sahara from the Cathode Flower, just in time to see the sun fall into the sea.

  From the bluff I have the same view of the whole bay, the smoking ruins of Malibu to the north and, to the south, the paramilitary outposts of Palos Verdes. At sea the hundreds of Chinese junks that sail out this time each month depart with their mystery cargo.

  Listen. I’m going to try one more time
. I don’t promise anything will come of it, or that I won’t try to put it off for as long as possible, or that in the meantime I may not have to do something sensible first, like find Viv for instance. I don’t promise that the deep fault line that runs from my psyche through my brain out my front door and down the street won’t run all the way from L.A. to America and beyond, all the way from memory to the moment and back, splitting me up the middle and leaving half of me on one side and half of me on the other. Not far from this very bluff where I am now is the beach where I once told a woman about talking to myself; actually I can almost see the very place, right down there. Now, just for a while, we’re going to pretend that I’m talking to myself again, like I used to. Now, just for a while, we’re going to pretend—don’t take this personally—that you’re not here at all. Most of the best things I’ve ever said, the most fluid, stutterless, sonorous things, were to myself, and now I’m going to try one more time to say everything I can find in me that might be worth saying, and hope that whatever I find in me to say is only the road, and not the place to where the road is going. And then when I’m finished, perhaps I’ll be finished for good. There’s always the off-chance that, from another bluff, I’ll actually be able to see the place to where the road is going and that, having seen it, I’ll find that nothing else needs to be said. But there’s also the chance that, having seen it, I’ll find something entirely new that needs to be said, something I never knew before that I could say. And then, having tried one last time, perhaps I will try once more.

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