“I’ll pay you,” Cole told him. “Just tell me why I owe it to you, that’s all.”
“Oh, you’re a sweetheart, you are. I paid the December rent in this place, remember? You threw me out December twenty, am I right? Seventy-five bills a month for this crummy place, and I was only here two-thirds the month, so you owe me the other third, which is twenty-five bucks, and I waited now over a month, and today you pay me. I don’t want no stall, no rough stuff, you try anything like last time I’ll break your head, all I want’s the twenty-five bills.”
“Rough stuff? What—”
“I told you, cut it with that crap, I’m not interested. Big deal with the amnesia. Twenty-five bucks, that’s all.”
Cole took out his wallet. He had twenty-nine dollars left from last week’s unemployment insurance check. He handed over twenty-five dollars to Benny, who made a big show of counting it before saying, “That’s more like it. All you had to do was pay me right away, and we save ourselves all this noise and upset.”
“Benny, I’m not lying about my memory, honest to God. You’ve got to believe I wouldn’t do something like this on purpose.”
“Who gives a shit?” Benny moved toward the door.
“Benny, please, listen to me. My memory really is bad.”
“Who cares?” Benny stopped in the doorway, and spread his hands out wide. “Who gives a damn, huh? So get amnesia, so fall downstairs, so drop dead, who gives a fat rat’s ass?” He turned away and went out.
Cole stared at the empty doorway a few seconds, hearing Benny going away toward the stairs. On sudden impulse, he shouted, “Hey!” and ran out after him.
Benny was at the top of the stairs. He turned his head, frowning, and looking a little wary. Cole ran up to him and grabbed him by the front of the jacket. “The square of shiny metal,” he said. “Tell me about it, Benny.”
Benny stared at him. “The what?”
“You know about it. You all know about it. Tell me about it. Benny, God damn you, tell me about it.”
“Get your hands off me!”
“The square of shiny metal!”
They struggled a bit at the head of the stairs, and finally Benny broke loose and ran down the half-flight to the landing between floors. He turned and stared up at Cole, heaving for breath. “You’re off your nut, man,” he said, wonder in his voice. “Completely off your nut. You’re a goddamn lunatic, you know that?”
Cole struggled for words—his chest was aching, a lead pillar was in there pressing outward—and he screamed, “You ought to care! You ought to care!”
“Drop dead.”
Benny turned and ran on downstairs. A minute later Cole heard the front door slam.
He sat down wearily on the top step, and pressed his cheek against the cold metal of the banister post. He’d sat like this the very first night he was in New York, only one more flight up, up by the door to the roof.
“Edna,” he said. His eyes burned, but he didn’t cry.
31
The Sundays were the worst. There was nothing to do on Sunday, to begin with, no job to go to nor people to see. Marty and Jack were never around at the bar on Sunday, neither afternoon nor night; Cole had no idea how they spent their Sundays. Also, Sunday was the day he most often and most longingly thought of Edna; back in the town, he would be seeing her today.
During the week it wasn’t so bad. He went to work at nine every morning, and quit any time from five to eight at night, depending on how much there was to do and when they finally got the truck back to the office. Two or three nights a week, either Marty or Jack or both would go along with him to the bar, and the other nights he usually went to the movies or sat alone in the bar watching television. He was getting between fifty and sixty dollars a week, depending on how many hours he worked, and he was spending it a little too rapidly, which bothered him from time to time.
The second Sunday, he returned in a way to the old routine of cleaning the apartment, but with one difference. Instead of just cleaning it, he’d made it over completely. The cooking utensils and clothing and records he’d been keeping in the bookcase all went back to their rightful places, and he took the bookcase apart and made ten or twelve trips downstairs, carrying bricks and planks, leaving them all in the little railed-in area next to the front door where the garbage cans were kept. Since he didn’t listen to the records any more, he stored them away on the shelf in the closet, and dismantled the components of the record player, planning to try to sell them for enough to buy himself a radio. Eventually, he’d like to have a television set, too. Make the place seem more like home. But there wasn’t any place open on Sunday where he might sell the phonograph equipment, and so far he hadn’t had any time away from work during the week, so the components were still sitting bunched together on the table in the living room, covered with dust, waiting for him to find a chance to take them away and sell them.
Only once since he’d started working had he run into anyone from the old life. That was the second Tuesday, when he’d gone out on a job in the station wagon. Most of the time he rode with Marty and Jack in the truck, but every once in a while the boss sent him out on a smaller job, in the station wagon, driven by a silent guy named Scotty. They went, that Tuesday afternoon, to an address on Christopher Street, not far from Cole’s apartment. The party’s name was Joseph Powers, which didn’t ring a bell when he heard it, but when they got to the place and saw Powers Cole suddenly did remember him. Or recognize him, which wasn’t exactly the same thing.
Powers recognized him, too, and seemed somewhat embarrassed. After they said hi to one another there was nothing left for either to say; Cole busied himself with moving Powers’ possessions, feeling self-conscious and ill at ease, while Powers watched him with a worried and uncomfortable expression on his face. Cole was relieved when the job was finished and he said so long to Powers, and it seemed to him that Powers too was relieved.
Friday, the thirtieth of January, he’d taken time from work and gone back to see the doctor again. It was only a repetition of last time, with the same questions about his symptoms, to which he gave the same replies, and another session with the truth serum. This time, the doctor spent more time on the square of shiny metal, and Cole did manage to produce more information about it than he’d known he possessed.
Its size, for instance. Though it appeared in his dreams in various sizes, the ‘right’ size, it had seemed to him under narcosynthesis, was small, about a foot square, approximately the size of the piece in the mobile at Helen Arndt’s place. And when it was small—he hadn’t known this before, and couldn’t guess what it meant—it was very often being held by a policeman. A tall, stern policeman in a blue uniform, with a badge shining almost as brightly as the metal square.
From the doctor’s subsequent questions, it was obvious he felt he was on the trail of something important, some opposition to authority buried deep within Cole’s mind. But when he’d asked Cole if the square of shiny metal were the most important element in his dreams, Cold had told him no; the most important thing was Edna.
Edna! Could nothing bleach her from his mind?
The doctor had seemed dissatisfied with his second session, and had urged Cole to come back shortly, but Cole had told him about the moving job and had claimed he couldn’t get another afternoon off for a month. The truth was, he had no intention of going back at all; it only wasted time and stirred things up. The night after this last interview with the doctor was hell; the dreams came shrieking in at him, descending from the ceiling with jagged jaws, back again to their very worst. After a few such nights, the dreams eased somewhat, and permitted him uninterrupted sleep once more. He told himself his state was improving, soon everything would be all right.
But it would not. It was just no good. He could have made some sort of adjustment to his evolving life if it hadn’t been for Edna, but with her so much in his mind it was just no good, and finally he had to admit it to himself.
He thought of Edna mornin
g and night. Half the time, he awoke in the morning thinking he was back in that town, in the Malloys’ house, and wondering if he was supposed to see Edna today. Half a dozen times a day he would see things or hear things that he would instinctively make an effort to remember, so he could tell Edna about them when next he saw her. These mistakes were always followed by periods of depression and loss, when he was silent and indrawn, not responding to anything said by Marty or Jack. All his feelings were brief and tenuous, and soon the depression would fade away, until the next time; but there always was the next time, and it was just no good.
The dam broke not on a Sunday after all, but on a Tuesday, the seventeenth of February, three and a half weeks after he’d started working for the moving company. He awoke with a confused jumble of impressions and ideas, thinking he was in the town, thinking also of the square of shiny metal and telling himself he would have to talk with Edna about that and see if she knew what it was.
The mistake lasted only a second or two, as it always did, and then he was straightened out again. If only he’d been able to work things out better with that old girlfriend of his, he thought idly, she might even be living here now with him, serving surely as a source of distraction, and he wouldn’t spend so much time thinking of Edna.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up, and suddenly stopped motionless, his mouth open.
The girl’s name.
His old girlfriend, the one he’d met during the holidays, she’d even been up here.
No.
He shook his head slowly, back and forth, back and forth. He couldn’t remember it. The name had been in his head, on his tongue, not two months ago, but now he couldn’t remember it. It was gone.
What else? God help him, what else?
The acting job. The man who’d gotten so mad at him, he remembered that, or at least that part of it, but what was that man’s name? What had the acting job been? He’d done it wrong, he remembered being in the makeup room afterward with the man talking sarcastically at him, but what about before that, the acting job itself, what had that been?
Helen? What was Helen’s last name? She was his agent, he really ought to know her last name. Sure, it was written in his little phone book over there, but it ought to be in his head.
It was all gone. There were probably other people, other places, other events, about which he’d forgotten so much he couldn’t even ask himself questions about the details. Everything ran though his mind, dribbled through like sand in an hourglass. His mind was a sieve, in which some of the larger pieces of memory took longer to wash through, but everything washed through eventually, nothing was ever retained. Except, so far, Edna; so the memory of her must be, in some way, the largest piece of memory in his experience, for it to be taking so long to wash through.
It wasn’t coming back, his memory just wasn’t going to come back. It wasn’t any better today than it had been the day he’d arrived in New York. It wasn’t any better right this minute than it was the day after he’d had the accident that had caused this, whenever and wherever that accident had taken place; that fact was so far in the dim past that not a trace of it now remained in his mind.
It seemed to him now that he had known for a long while his memory wouldn’t improve. It was so obvious, once he allowed himself to think of it, that he couldn’t believe there had ever been a time when he hadn’t known it as the truth.
He smiled, tentatively at first, reluctantly, but finally with full pleasure and relief. The memory wasn’t coming back! No longer would he have to wait here, no longer struggle to be someone he wasn’t, no longer expose himself to people who could feel for him only combinations of pity and impatience and disgust. If his memory was gone forever, he was free.
And Edna? What had kept Edna in his head after all this time, out of all the separate facts and elements that had entered his broken memory? He had kept her there, wasn’t that obvious?
He was thinking thoughts now that had been trembling on the brink of consciousness for weeks, that he had been all unwittingly forcing down out of sight—because he’d been so mistaken about who and what and why he was—and which had finally become so strong that they had to force their way to the surface. The relief was incredible; he felt so light.
Edna. She isn’t pretty, she isn’t self-confident or self-assured, she’ll never be very smart. But say all that and you have said nothing, nothing, nothing. She is mine if I want her, and I do want her, more than anything else in the world that it is possible for me to have, and that is all there is worth saying. Who cares if it’s a feeling that can be called love, or if it’s only a lot of smaller feelings in combination, the result is still the same.
It was so easy, once he started, once he began to look at himself. All he had to do was make the first small step, to acknowledge that his memory was never going to improve, and all the rest followed naturally and inevitably and beautifully. It seemed to him that he had trembled on the brink of that first small step time and time again, with Helen, with the doctor, with everybody, but it had taken a whole series of shocks—the acting job and all the other things he could no longer remember—and then some time for his mind to absorb their implications, before the first step could be taken.
Everything opened from there like a flower. He finally understood why Edna was still in his mind. He finally understood how he could get off this treadmill and find some tiny dance step of his own to perform in blessed peace and oblivion. He finally understood what there was still to do with his life.
He wouldn’t be going to work today, that was the first thing. Not today, or tomorrow, or ever again, not with the moving company. No, and he wouldn’t be living in this barren cold apartment any more, this apartment stripped of the old Paul Cole but not furnished with the new Paul Cole because the new one hadn’t been born until just this minute.
He would go back to that town, that was the first thing. Now, today. He would go back there, and see Edna, and explain everything to her, and try to get her forgiveness, and he was sure she would forgive him. He’d live, for a while at least, with the Malloys, and he’d work again in the tannery. Instead of searching for someone to be, he would relax and be whoever he was.
If he managed to get a bus this morning, he should be there by tomorrow sometime. He no longer had his suitcase or canvas bag—he must have pawned them somewhere, he couldn’t remember—but he could get another bag, and there wasn’t that much he wanted to take with him anyway. He had over forty dollars, and if that wasn’t enough to get him where he had to go he could always pawn something else.
Where he had to go. Startled, he realized he didn’t remember the name of the town. How was he going to go there, if he didn’t know the name of it?
He hurried over to the desk and started going through it, reading every scrap of paper he came across. Surely, somewhere, somewhere, somewhere he’d written down that name, a name as important as that.
Nothing. Nothing, and again nothing. One folded scrap of paper tucked away in a corner of a desk drawer read: 542 Charter St. He frowned at it, and then recognized it; that was where he’d lived with the Malloys. The street address, but not the city. Why hadn’t he written the name of the city? How stupid could he have been?
This scrap of paper had been with a few others in the same drawer, all obsolete notes he’d pulled from his trouser pockets at one time or another and stashed away here for some forgotten reason. None of the other notes made any sense to him, nor did any of them mention the name of the town.
What about the notes on the walls? He read them, but they all referred to matters here in New York. He went through the pockets of his clothing in the closet, but there was nothing in them either.
He went back to the desk, went through the whole territory again, desk and walls and pockets, went out to the living room and looked despairingly this way and that, looking for someplace more to search, and there was nothing. 542 Charter St., that was all.
On the third time through,
searching the same places all over again, he picked up a tax form, and saw Helen Arndt referred to, and then he realized there was a way to find out. Helen would know; it was as simple as that.
He phoned, but it was too early and no one answered. Burning with impatience, he dressed, and put clothing out on the bed to be packed, and made himself some breakfast. Finally it was nine o’clock, and he called again, and this time got a female voice that told him Miss Arndt hadn’t come into the office yet but was expected any minute. He said he’d call back, and then sat at the desk, watching the clock, smoking nervously, until it was nine-fifteen, and this time when he phoned she was there and he was put through to her. He told her who he was, and she said, “Oh. What’s the problem?” Her manner was cold and abrupt.
“I need some— There’s a piece of information I need.”
“Oh?”
“I want to know the name of the last town I was in with that touring company. I was with a touring company, wasn’t I? When I got hurt?”
“The name of the town where you had the accident?”
“Yes. You’d have it there, wouldn’t you?”
“What is it? Taxes?”
It was simpler to agree. “Yes.”
“I’ll look it up. It’s Deerville, I know that much. Nebraska, or Kansas, or Iowa, I’m not sure. Deerville. I’ll look up the state.”
“Thank you.”
She came back on the line a minute later and told him the state, and he wrote it down and thanked her again. She said, “Any time,” brusquely, and broke the connection.
Next he phoned the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and learned that a ticket to Deerville would cost him thirty-five dollars and twenty cents. He wrote everything down, and when the call was finished he counted all his money. Including a little change, he had forty-six dollars and fifty-five cents. In addition, there were three dollars and change in the checking account, which he could withdraw on the way uptown, so he’d have almost fifty dollars. Fifteen dollars left over, after the bus ticket, to last him until he started working again. He could do it, he could leave here today.
Memory (Hard Case Crime) Page 34
