Passenger

by Ronald Malfi

  It takes the road to bring it back to me. Because it happened on this road in the first place. The needling in my brain explodes into light and a sunburst of memories engulfs me—

  My name is Palmer Troy.

  I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. My birthday is August 31. I’m thirty-two years old.

  In the fall of last year, I was hired to head up the music program at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore City. It is a big step, advancement from teaching music classes at the community college in Ithaca, New York, so I take the job. We pack up and move. The school has already selected us a single-bedroom apartment on St. Paul Street, just a few blocks from the institute, until our house in the suburbs is ready. It is only temporary. We can do it. We can make it work. It will be perfect. Madeline will miss her mother, but it will be perfect. You just wait and see.

  You just wait and see.

  It is on this stretch of road that the baby, the small child, starts to choke. It means nothing at first. Babies sometimes choke. But it lasts too long and Madeline turns over in her seat and starts shouting the baby the baby Palmer the baby’s choking the baby.

  You see the baby in the rearview—and his little face is blue, his eyes bugging out, the drool pooling on his New York Giants pullover. The drool is red and you immediately think: blood.

  You slam the brakes and the car jerks to a stop. Popping your door, you jump out and yank the rear door open. You dive for the baby, instinctively tugging at him, tugging, not grasping that it is the child safety seat that prevents the child from going with you. Madeline screams the baby the baby and somehow you manage to get the child unbuckled from the safety seat. What looks like a thousand colored balls spill from the car and spread like a stain across the pavement.

  Here, in the middle of the vacant highway, with the car doors open and Moonlight Sonata on the radio, you administer the Heimlich to the small frame. The child is not breathing, will not breathe, and your hoarse voice whispers come on come on come on baby breathe baby come on baby breathe but he doesn’t breathe.

  Baby doesn’t breathe.

  They are gumballs, colored gumballs. There was a bag in the back seat. The child had gotten into the bag. The red drool is not blood but red dye. Coloring.

  There is a give and the gumball is fired from the child’s mouth to the street. It rolls, barking into the other spilled gumballs as it goes, its red faded to a moist, shiny pink.

  But you are in a fury.

  There is an obsession to you now.

  To save a life.

  To save your child’s life.

  You keep pumping. Those arms are mechanical arms. The adrenaline is furious. You are frantic and Madeline is screaming from the car over the sonata and there, in the middle of a vacant wooded highway, the boy dies from what is later determined to be a crushed ribcage and collapsed lung.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Somehow, with the sky still dark, I make it back to Baltimore. I have driven all through the night on some psychological autopilot. The day has a fatigued parchment tint to it. I coast the pickup truck down Pratt Street, the neon-lit, yawning expanse of the Inner Harbor to my right, fighting through the fog. It has snowed in my absence; now, a light misty rain muddies the streets. The black waters are motionless and like smoked glass beyond the piers, streaked with sodium lights from across the harbor. Through the fog, the ribbed, slate-hued hull of the U.S.S. Constellation looks like a fallen prehistoric beast. The traffic on this street is all one-way, taillights through the windshield smeared to red contrails by the wiper blades. A dense fog has descended upon the city, obscuring the trademark red letters of the Legg Mason building.

  The weather makes for bad driving so there is very little traffic on St. Paul Street. I pass the old stone church. Like a living thing, it seems to retreat into the fog, hiding from the street. I recall my first visit to the church, almost a full year ago. Six days stumbling lost and useless about the city before I am drawn to it. I read the pamphlets on the bulletin board and, seated in the front pew, paw with lethargy through one of the leather-bound Bibles. When the old nun appears beside me, silent as a wisp of smoke and wincing from some mysterious stomach pain, I tell her my name is John, because that is the book of the New Testament I am looking at when she asks.

  There is a parking space only a block from my apartment. I pull Clarence’s pickup truck into the space and crawl out of the cab. The air has a thickness to it, weighty as original sin. It’s like being miles under the sea. I pull my jacket tight about my body. Tuck my red scarf down into the folds. A single female voice, angel-wise and heaven-sent, echoes through the swirling mist, seemingly coming from all directions at once—

  Eres mi amor, mi amor

  Eres mi amor,

  Somos amantes y somos amigos

  Eres mi amor, mi amor

  Eres mi amor…

  I pause on the sidewalk and swivel in the snow. The rain fades to a mist that hangs in the air, frozen in time.

  Somos amantes y somos amigos

  Eres mi amor, mi amor

  Eres mi amor…

  That is it: the haunting, melancholic piano melody I have been playing all month, the sad song that is really a love song. I have forgotten but now I remember. Just as I remember hearing the woman sing months ago, back in the spring, while the windows are open. How she sings in Spanish and I don’t understand any of it, so I check out tapes from the library—I use my fake Paul Howard driver’s license, in fact, to get a library card—and I teach myself Spanish. A little. But enough to know the words…

  Mi amor, mi amor…

  My eyes find their way across the street to the construction site. Fixed to the fencing, a placard that reads hanely construction floats through the fog. Hanely. I know it is possible to see the sign, the name, from my bedroom window. I have used it before as my own, adopted it, while trying to find my real identity. One of my many jaunts. One of my many odysseys. Because the city is full of names for the taking. And I have taken. The streets are lousy with them—Paul, Howard, Franklin, Charles, Madison, and countless smaller byways—because it is a city of the nameless, of the empty, of the wandering multitude who have no future because they have no past. Of homeless men in suits of bubble-wrap and electrical tape. Of nameless commuters filing on and off countless city trams.

  Walking up the stairs to the third floor apartment, the entire building is silent. For once, I feel I am the only living soul in the city. I mount the second-floor landing. Here, the head of the newel post, the oversized pinecone, comes off in my hand. It had been broken by me on my first return, absent of memory. As I have most recently collapsed to the landing and pulled my legs to my chest, envisioning the long stretch of highway, too shaken to continue up to the third floor, I also took that walk before. Only I didn’t collapse to the floor that time. I grabbed the oversized pinecone and broke it loose, carrying it with me as I tumbled down the flight of stairs.

  Upstairs, I enter my apartment. The windows are shaded against the light. Cave-cold, black as space, my breath is visible as I cross the floor.

  How many times have I returned to this apartment without my memory, only to return again with it? I cannot remember…though not because my memory is faulty but, rather, because I have done it so many times now the exact number eludes me.

  In the kitchen, the doors of the refrigerator are barren. Yet I can remember now the slip of paper I taped to the door at one point, saying:

  If you lose your memory, know this:

  You suffer from spontaneous amnesia.

  There are notebooks in the bedroom.

  They will tell you all about yourself.

  I had written that to fool myself. To trick my already crippled mind. Because I have come back a number of times, each time trying to keep myself from remembering any way that I could. I had made up a history for myself in those notebooks. An attempt at starting fresh, starting over, starting new.

  But in the end, there is no escaping the memory of memory. No escapi
ng time immemorial.

  Notebooks in the bedroom detailing a make-believe life with a make-believe name. To start over. To start fresh. Paul Howard, Howard Franklin, Franklin Madison…

  I get rid of most of my clothes, most of my furniture, because those things eventually lead to other things. And those other things inevitably direct me down a path. And the path—the path always leads to the remembering. Which is when it begins all over again. So I buy new clothes—brand new jeans, new sneakers, a crisp white shirt—because there are no memories affiliated with these new things.

  I clean out my bank account to buy the rundown apartment outright so I will leave no trace of rental agreements, no mortgage payments. I cancel my credit cards and shut down my telephone line. My utilities are addressed to resident and that is just fine. I have no criminal record so the police will not know who I am.

  I can vanish.

  I’m a ghost.

  Soy fantasma.

  The package I mailed last August. On my birthday. It was filled with the few belongings I’d kept from my son—toys, a pair of tiny shoes, that sort of thing. I mailed it to Madeline with no note, no explanation. I just wanted her to have it so it didn’t wind up in the Salvation Army or someplace. I just wanted her to have it before I stepped out in front of that bus.

  In the yellow midday gloom of my apartment, I sit on the floor with my legs tucked under me, and look at the palm of my left hand.

  The address, smeared to hieroglyphics, is still visible.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I leave a note for Nicole at the post office the next day, asking her to meet me after work at the Walters Art Museum café. Twenty after five, Nicole arrives. I am seated at a table by myself, my hands clasping a paper coffee cup. I look up as she approaches and she smiles at me. I can’t bring myself to smile back. She is not the first Nicole I’ve met in the past year and a half. There have been plenty of Nicoles—plenty of Clarences and Patrices and ceramic tile floor salesmen—and I have forgotten them all. Over and over. Only to remember them again.

  “Hi.” She sits and, for the first time, I see she is wearing makeup. It is a new experience for her, the application crude and overindulgent, the way a ten-year-old girl might do it. “I’ve been doing more research on amnesia. I had some stuff to tell you but, well, I—”

  “Say my name,” I tell her.

  Her near-adolescent eyes search mine. “What do you mean?”

  “You know it,” I say. “My name. I’ve told you before.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s Palmer,” I say. “My name is Palmer Troy. You know this because I told you once before.”

  She can only stare at me, her mouth still frozen in the shape of her last word. She has been caught. She has been called out. Around her, the first floor of the museum granulates and turns black and white.

  “I’m not angry,” I say. “I don’t even care why you pretended not to know me. Here.”

  I turn one of her hands over and spool the dog tag into her palm. She does not even take her eyes from me to look at it.

  “Palmer,” she begins. There is moisture collecting in her eyes.

  “I walked in front of that bus on purpose, Nicole. It wasn’t an accident. I never told you that, but it’s true. Some physical therapy and some metal plates in my body and now I’ve been shown a different way. If I can’t die, then I can at least forget.”

  From my coat, I produce a bus pass for the Madison stop. I place it on the table, my fingers resting on one corner.

  “It doesn’t matter how many times you do it,” she says, a single tear spilling down her cheek. She is trying her best to fight it. “It doesn’t matter, Palmer, because you always remember. In the end, it always comes back to you. You can’t escape it.”

  “Not this time. I left too much room for memory in the past, but this time I will start over with nothing.” And I turn my hand over on the bus pass, my left hand, the palm facing up. It is a blank, unmarred, perfectly pink palm. I have washed the address off completely. “This time it’s all or nothing.”

  I stand and move away from the table. Nicole does not move, the dog tag still cupped in her palm. Again, she does not face me.

  “Please don’t try to find me,” I tell her, then leave.

  * * *

  Life is drifting by in shadows, in pillars of black salt. The city is enveloped in the burning fog of molten lava, pools of lava, swirling in electrical tornadoes. Outwardly, the world is dead, is blue-black-green, is smoldering and frozen like a distant plant’s distant moon. We are making love in a whirlwind; we are freefalling from the ground up. And all of it equates to nothing more than an invisible man’s quiet thinking.

  In the streets, the alleys, all the darkened corners of the city, a young mother and child huddle together on a stoop and say, You can be anyone you want. They say, Anyone in the world.

  * * *

  The bus shudders to a stop, the moan of its brakes like the melancholic mating call of humpback whales.

  You sit up, awake.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ronald Malfi is an award-winning novelist and short fiction writer whose most notable works include Via Dolorosa, The Nature of Monsters, and the critically acclaimed modern gothic novel, The Fall of Never. His short fiction has appeared in countless magazines and collections throughout the U.S. and abroad. Most recognized for his haunting literary style and quirky, memorable characters, Malfi’s fiction has transcended genres to gain wider acceptance among readers of quality American literature. He resides in Maryland with his wife, Debra, where he is currently at work on his next book.

  Table of Contents

  P A S S E N G E R

  Ronald Malfi

  PART I

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART II

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  PART III

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  About The Author