Walking Shadow

by Clifford Royal Johns

  “Carla’s in jail,” I whispered. “I’ve got to get her out.”

  “They’ve got nothing on her. She’ll be out in a few days whether you help her or not. Maybe even quicker without your help. You’re more likely to mess things up, Benny. You might make them wonder why you want to get her out so badly, make them think maybe you’re worried about what she might tell them.”

  “But I’ve got to do something.” I felt my eyes welling with tears and my face grew hot. I put my head in my hands. I guess I sobbed.

  A moment later, Chen slapped me hard on the back of the head. “Get out of here, Benny. I don’t want to look at you right now.”

  I looked up at him. I could see the derpal dripping from his nose.

  Chapter 14

  I stumbled out the door into the confusion and noise of Under The River. People swirled around me as I plowed my way to the north gate. I ran up the stairs, and once outside, darted across the river to Hacker Drive before I slowed down. Head bent against the wind, I turned north along the river, trying to figure out why I would have killed the judge, what I had done to cause Paulo’s death, and why I would have done anything to endanger Carla.

  I tried to remember being with Carla at any time previous to the day we had dinner together. I tried to put her at various corners, at restaurants I went to, on the rocks at the lake, in my apartment. She just wasn’t there. Trying to find her in my memories made me frantic as though I were searching for my life’s savings, which I had somehow misplaced.

  It started raining sideways and in my face. It rained and blew hard enough to hurt, but I didn’t mind. I was working on bringing Benjamin out from under Benny. Whatever my past, the current situation demanded that I get Carla out of jail. I didn’t share Chen’s opinion that Kumar would let her go just as quickly even if I did nothing. She was in because of me, and I would get her out.

  I started thinking about what Chen had said. I could believe I had killed, but I thought I would need a reason. It just didn’t feel right, me killing the judge because he was paying Carla as a client. That seemed the only obvious reason, but since it didn’t bother me that much when I heard about it this time, why would it have bothered me more back then? Chen said I caused Paulo’s death in some way, but he hadn’t said how, and I couldn’t imagine it. Could Chen be displacing his guilt onto me? Was he there when Sukey and Paulo had their fight?

  I thought about my mother again. I remembered the Glen Ellyn scene, but that was all I could dredge up. The house we had on the west side when I was a kid was painted white with green shutters and had an evergreen shrub on either side of the red door, but for some reason I couldn’t remember the inside, only the outside. The image of an angel fish we had named Jerome popped unexpectedly into my head. But I couldn’t remember my mother’s name. I splashed on, following the sweep of the river toward the lake.

  I caught the CAT at Mythagain Street, rode it to Morph, and then walked to the Unapartments. I stood outside the building in the rain, staring up at the dots of silver light falling toward me from the sky, staring up at the wall that disappeared into the darkness. A buzzcar roared by on its way north, probably someone with a family and a dog. Someone with meat on the table and a refrigerator that ordered whatever they needed.

  I kept resolving to go talk to Kumar; to ask him what he wanted to let Carla out of jail; to make a deal with the shark. I’d tell him I killed the judge because of Carla, but that she wasn’t involved. It was just jealousy. Plain old jealousy, I’d say. But when I’d get to that part, I wouldn’t believe it. I knew I couldn’t say it with enough truth in my voice. Kumar would know I was lying.

  I started shivering and shook myself like a dog.

  The more I focused on Chen’s words, “You killed the judge, Benny. Don’t you remember?” the more I didn’t believe them. Chen must have been lying about that for some reason. Killing the judge at that time would have put Carla in danger, and Chen had said Carla meant something to me even before the murder. I knew I wouldn’t have purposely put Carla that close to a murder.

  Chen wasn’t lying about my tendency to forget things, though. I was tempted even at that point to just go forget it all; start over like Chen said. Forgetting was a seductively simple solution, but I would lose Carla again, and I couldn’t do that.

  There, standing in the rain, blinking up at the Unapartment building, I realized I would not have forgotten the last time either, for all the same reasons. That was the basic fallacy of all my assumptions. I wouldn’t have forgotten the murder, even with the street name trick, because I would have had to forget too much about Carla. I knew there was some important piece to the puzzle I was missing. I trudged home still trying to remember what Carla was to me before the murder.

  I opened the door to my apartment, turned on the light and stood dripping on the floor. I looked at my apartment with new eyes. Not much of me was there. The furniture was an aggregation of whatever I could find lying out on the street on garbage collection day. I had an orange gov-issue PAL, hooked to a base station, sitting on a small desk. My bed, one corner resting on a stack of bricks, sat under the only window, which was too high on the wall to see anything out of except the clouds and an occasional pigeon sitting on the sill. I had no pictures. No personal items. It was as though I’d survived a fire, but lost all my life’s possessions. I had some books, but they didn’t look too interesting. I’d found them somewhere and hoped to sell them. Two hardcopies of Forget What bills lay wrinkled on the floor. I had a plastic chair and a metal folding chair.

  It didn’t feel like home. I didn’t know what home felt like, but I somehow knew this wasn’t it. The problem with forgetting the past and starting over is that you don’t get to take yourself with you. It was why forgetting was used so much by the government. They could correct bad behavior with a quick wipe. Delete the person. Let them start over. For the most part, they didn’t need prisons any more, the criminals were new, innocent people immediately after treatment.

  Only I’d wiped myself. I didn’t know who I was. I wanted it all back. The pain of any memory would have been better than this sudden feeling of emptiness. Starting over isn’t as clean as it sounds. It’s clumsy and confusing. I felt like a nonperson, not important enough to arrest. Chen didn’t even kill me for causing Paulo’s death. He’d just sent me off like I was a schoolboy, with a lecture and slap on the back of the head.

  I was a walking shadow. Physically, I matched the Benny who should have been, but only in profile. I was just a silhouette. The real me, the accumulation of my experience and thoughts did not exist. I had forgotten him and his mother’s name.

  I climbed up and stood on my bed to look out my window. From there I could see the metal side of the next building glistening with the rainwater’s reflection from a street light. There were two dried out Carrot Doodles on the sill and to the right of them, “Arno has your stuff,” was written in the dust.

  Chapter 15

  My brother didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. “I was wondering how long it would take you this time,” he said, leading me back to his detached two-storey garage.

  As we passed the kitchen window, I saw Denise looking out the window at me. She looked unhappy, perhaps concerned. She often looked that way. Arno didn’t treat her well. She always tiptoed around like she was worried she would break something. I liked her, but I didn’t think there was much I could do to help her.

  We entered the garage through the side door. Arno kept his Moto on the first floor and his Milwaukee buzzcar on the second. “Seems like it takes you longer to remember your stuff each time you do a forget,” he said. He just stood there gazing at me, waiting for me to say something.

  I said, “So?”

  He grunted, flipped a switch hidden behind the door, and a section of the ceiling lowered. On it were three open plastic crates a half-meter or so on a side, and a couple of identical handprint-sealed metal containers each the size of a briefcase. I stared at Arno until he got the hint.


  “I’ll be in the house,” Arno said and then he left, closing the door behind him. He acted insulted, but I had more important things to worry about. I was alone with myself, and we’d never met.

  I approached my stuff cautiously, as though it were sacred. I looked through the crates first, resisting the urge to look in the locked boxes. I wanted to ease up on my history. The parts of my past I’d felt the need to hide, I didn’t want to expose yet.

  The open crates were full of the things we collect in life that we have no need to save, yet can’t quite recycle.

  One crate was packed with books all old and worn, Aristotle on rhetoric, The Complete Wilde, Emerson and De La Mare— “Memory, that strange deceiver! Who can trust her?” The crate also contained books on pattern languages, architecture, timber framing and cabinet construction, harmonica playing, Shaker societies and bookbinding. I’d read, no, I’d studied all of them. I’d also forgotten most of what I might have learned except for an errant quote now and then and maybe a glimpse of understanding about construction or music at particularly lucid times.

  Another crate contained pictures of people who I knew were important to me at one time, yet I couldn’t place them. A toy buzzcar that would hover a few centimeters above a surface and fly in circles. The power chip still worked. There were labeled disks, some music, some film, some immersion. I saw there was an immersion headset, but I didn’t try it out.

  The last open crate had tools; wood planes, chisels, auto-lockpicks, a glass cutter, an articulated bolt cutter, knives and two padded wooden boxes containing lenses.

  Here was everything I should have had at my apartment, but didn’t. My life’s accumulation, my only connection to the past, had been stuffed into a few boxes hidden above a secret panel in the ceiling of my brother’s garage.

  But, in the end, none of this seemed like mine. I felt like I had broken into someone else’s garage and was looking at their possessions. I felt like an intruder, embarrassed and a bit criminal.

  Finally, I pulled a handprint-locked box off the pile. There were two, but they both looked the same, so, in a fit of superstition, I took the one farther from me. I put my hand on the reader, and opened it. Inside were six bundles of swipe cards held together with rubber bands and seven bundles of cash each marked “fifty thousand” on a paper label. A quick glance through the cards showed each had nine thousand on it. At twenty cards per bundle, that totaled up to more than a million four. It was a shocking amount of money. Enough money to live like the mayor for the rest of my life.

  I stared at the contents of the box in stunned amazement. Wild thoughts ricocheted around in my head. I could spend money, real money. I could buy an apartment for Carla and me. I could afford to have a kid and fix whatever was wrong with him right off. I pictured a house.

  But then I started to wonder. Why would I have so much money? How had I acquired it? What’s more, I’d had the money to pay for the forget in the first place, but I didn’t use it. Why? I admit, I’m cheap, but cheap is a relative thing. To a rich person, a couple thousand is not a big deal, and I was a rich person.

  The other box seemed ominous now. I squinted at it fearfully. I knew it wasn’t more money. Somehow I just knew that. I’d packed them, then forgot them; some residual memory must have remained. I pocketed a few swipe cards and set the first box aside.

  I palmed the lock on the second box, but hesitated to open it. After a deep breath, I flipped the lid and pulled my hand back as though a snake might strike out at me. The box contained two guns without holsters, each with three clips banded to them, two unlabeled metal vials, which I knew immediately were some type of poison. The blue one would be a gas and the red one a liquid. Both were deadly. I knew this. It bothered me that I knew this, yet I recognized that these tokens of death were how I made the money in the other box.

  Inside this box was another. This one with an eyescan lock. This third, smaller box contained a few gadgets including a thatcher that said “slice” on the side, which I pocketed, and a block of nitroceramic used to start a fire when you don’t want anyone to know it was started on purpose, two egg-sized grenades painted to look like silver ornaments or possibly ben-wa balls, and a dime-sized stun plate, called a slapfaint, that you could smack on any open skin to incapacitate your victim. One block of nitroceramic was rigged to sensors on the box. The box would self-destruct in a burst of flame if someone tried to by-pass the eye scan.

  There was also an envelope taped to the inside of the lid. I sat down on the floor and pulled out the pencil and four hand printed sheets of paper. The sparse first page had many dates across the top, each lined out except the last; September 7, just before what I thought was my last forget.

  The letter started out with: “If you’ve found this then you’re on the way to recovery from your last forget. Make sure you add any new information now, as you may not have a chance before you have to forget again.”

  I pushed the pages away as though they had started to burn. I could feel what was coming next, and I didn’t want to know for sure. A tight fear gripped my stomach. I took two deep breaths, consciously calmed myself and cautiously picked the pages back up.

  The second page was divided into horizontal rows, each containing a name, a number in the thousands that increased going down the page and a check mark. The last name was Judge Omar Kimbanski. The number next to it was two hundred thousand. The last column was blank.

  Chen was right. I did murder the judge. I’d been paid well for it. It’s what I did. I murdered people for money.

  The list was on old paper. The first kill was Dujo Kay, nine years before. There were fourteen more names, some carefully written, some written with a flourish. The judge’s name was written with an unsteady hand. It looked as though I wasn’t happy about it.

  I had trouble reading the other names. My hands trembled. I started sobbing as I scanned through the list of people I’d killed already. I couldn’t remember any of them. I couldn’t remember their faces, I couldn’t remember how I’d killed them. I had listed their names, so I would know just how good I was.

  I scooted back against a wall and pulled my knees up against my chest. I put the paper down, wrapped my arms around my knees, and stared at my distorted reflection in the curved bumper of Arno’s maroon Moto. How I could have murdered all those people? I stopped crying, but the air left my lungs, and I barely had the will to suck more back in.

  Hysteria lay just below the surface of my consciousness, ready to reach up and pull me under. So that’s who I really am, I thought. I murder people for money.

  I wiped my eyes and tried to envision Carla’s face, her navy blue dress with the cream collar she’d worn to dinner, her bouncing foot, the hole in her shoe. I picked up the letter again and pushed on.

  The third page included a brief inventory and explained the use of the vials, the guns and how they were used, everything I would need to do my next assassination. The letter used that word, assassination, but I knew I was a murderer. There was no doubt of that.

  The last page explained the history of my murdering techniques with a clinical evaluation of method. The letter sounded dry and factual, as though I didn’t really remember the information when I wrote the letter, just that I’d read it in the previous letter or someone had told it to me. The descriptions made me wonder why I’d murdered Kimbanski in such an unprofessional way. Why hadn’t I poisoned him, or shot him, or used the slapfaint on him then slit his throat?

  The letter continued with advice on how to get more money out of my brother for an assignment. He found the clients and was the middleman, but I did the killing, and I admonished myself to make sure I received sufficient remuneration for it. The letter used the word agent to describe my brother’s relationship to me, but he was more like a pimp.

  I thought back to that day on the CAT tracks in the sunshine with my mother. How did two brothers like us emerge from such a sweet childhood? I suspected that my first forget was related to this inco
nsistency somehow, but I’d never know.

  The last bit of information was that I sometimes worked with a woman named Carla who was often able to maneuver the victim into a trap because she was so pretty and was a good actress as well as an accomplished assassin in her own right. Her assists were marked with an asterisk, it said. There were five marked that way, including the judge.

  Arno knocked on the door. I tried to control my voice. “I’ll just be a few more minutes,” I yelled.

  I held the pencil from the eye-scan box and carefully put a check mark beside the judge’s name. Looking back at the list, I saw that most of the other check marks were clean strokes, as though I were checking off a grocery list. The one I’d just made by the judge’s name was shaky and small. The check mark before that one wasn’t much steadier. Maybe I’d started down the path of guilt before the last one, before the judge.

  While I packed up the boxes, I took the rest of the cash and swipe cards. I distributed my wealth around in my pockets, putting most of it in pockets in the inner layers and keeping a petty cash pocket in my coat. I wasn’t sure if I could really come back. The desire to know more about my history was fading fast. I felt leaden, and it was hard to breathe. I locked the last box, noting that the tamper-proofing nitroceramic gelpacks were in place, and put it on the panel. The memorabilia of my life looked meager sitting there in a stack. The boodle in my pockets felt conspicuous, like a lie about to be found out.

  I had considered myself opportunistic, but not evil. Maybe there’s a thin line between the two, but I knew which side murder for money was on, and I thought I was no longer on that side of the line.