by Jim Nelson
Later—much later—I learned Cline’s secret. The reason for the film noir lighting effects and shadows and odd camera angles was that they’d put Cline’s cameraman in a fat suit for the establishing and continuity shots. He’d dubbed all the lines as well. With digital editing and some low-budget computer effects, they’d found a way to cannibalize my audition into Cline’s twelve-minute indie film. When the audience groaned at my excess body fat and wiry back hair as I climbed onto Melody’s lithe naked frame, part of the time, they were moaning at a rubber fat suit Cline had paid for out of her own pocket, a horror film prop she’d bought on eBay for a cool six hundred and fifty dollars.
When the lights came up, standing red-face at the rear of the balcony, I found myself facing two dozen audience members heading for the exits to vote on the film. When I rushed downstairs I found myself in a lobby with a hundred more milling about.
They knew me. They’d just seen me dismembered. Huffing and red-faced and in the flesh, I fulfilled every expectation made on-screen. I was sweating hard. My shirt was drenched in the wrong places. My pocked skin must have glistened like a toad on a rock. Beet-red and suffering tunnel-vision and shortness of breath, I strong-armed my way through the crowd for the exit. The laughter followed me all the way. I forced my way outside and ran who knows how many blocks up Clay Street. I’m sure if you’d followed me, you would have said I waddled up the hill. I’m sure you would have laughed too.
*
I retreated downstairs and faced the concessionaire once more. “Give me a Coke."
He dispensed the black soda from a fountain and added a red paper straw. “Add a drop or two?” He meant Pharjé.
“Straight is fine,” I said. “This seems like a couples kind of place."
“This place?” He laughed with a trace of derision. “You’ve never been to a blue lounge before, have you?”
In a true blue-out, floating along in a state of pure bliss, utterly detached from one’s past, sexual encounters are frequent and notorious. That’s what humans want to do when they have not a care in the world: They screw.
“Did you see a young blonde come in here today? Tall and thin?"
"Lots of blondes come in here," he said.
"She's different. She looks like summer personified.” I described Leigh in more concrete terms for him.
“Oh, I did see a girl like that. But she wasn’t by herself. A boyfriend or something showed up looking for her.”
“What kind of guy?” I offered my first guess. “Was he wearing a turtleneck? Unshaven?”
“He was,” he said.
It sounded like Max had come by. “Is he still in there with her?”
“No, he tried to get her to leave. He practically dragged her to the spot where you’re standing when she shook him off. Are you her father or something?”
“Or something,” I groused.
“Well, I don’t know who the guy was, but when he got kind of rough with her, I told him to get out.”
"What kind of rough?"
"He was manhandling her. We should have called the cops, but he got so sick of her, he threw up his hands and left."
"And she went…?"
He pointed to the theater doors. "Back inside."
I reentered the theater with more purpose now. This time, I didn't step aside to avoid the daytrippers eager to grope and talk up each other. My memex let me know I was in the presence of small kings and small queens. Their voices in my mind let me know I was a pink-smoke smudge pushing them aside, hurrying through like an elephant in a bazaar. Before I knew it, I was at a table wedged in a rear corner. Leigh Blessing sat with her back to the room hunched over a chess army of red thimbles. I knew the thinking. You think consuming Pharjé by the drop, you can maintain control. After thirty or so drops, you’ve drunk the ocean.
“I know you,” she said, eyes vacant.
“We met before—”
I caught myself. With Pharjé suppressing her memories, she shouldn’t be able to remember me. She should not have known who I was at all.
“You were in that movie,” she said. “Detachment.”
It landed like a cement block. “Who told you that.”
“I studied the film,” she said. “I spent over a year tracking down every person on the cast and crew. Including the director. I was writing a research paper on it. Do you know it was viewed by over thirty million people within a year of its release on the Old Internet?”
"We met in a blue lounge before," I told her. "I used to build web sites and write socket layers. That's how you know me."
"No," she said, nodding her head slowly. "That was the first you." She pointed at me with a lazy index finger. "You were the boyfriend in Detachment. That's the second you. And this—" She waved her finger up and down my frame. "This is the third you."
“How do you remember the film?” I held a dry red thimble to my nose. I could smell the lingering peppermint effervescence of Blue Pharjé. “How do you remember anything?”
With a crinkled frown, she returned to the chess army of empty glasses before her. “This stuff doesn’t do anything anymore. I don’t forget. It sharpens my memories. I so want to forget.” She made an exaggerated, slightly drunken sigh. “I pay all this money and I don’t forget a thing. Isn’t that why you pay for Blue Pharjé? To forget?”
I dropped to the chair beside her. “You remember the last time I saw you?”
“We went out to Lands End,” she said. “It was your idea.”
“My idea? Why the hell would I want to go out there?”
“You wanted to see the lights,” she said warmly. “You wanted to hear the thunder. It's dry and warm out there. You thought we would both feel better.” She took my hand in hers. She rubbed it warmly. “I would never go there by myself. Only with you.”
“We have to leave this place.” I stood and took her by the arm. “We have to go right now. This place isn’t safe. Are you wearing?”
I found her limp memex on the red table among the empty thimble glasses.
“I want to forget,” she said to me. “I so want to forget Gannon.”
“Come on.” I attempted to pull her to her feet. “The cops are looking for you.”
“You killed him,” she said. “You pushed him over the edge and down he went.”
It took some doing, but I got her out of there. In the journey from her table to the sidewalk outside, her mood swung from dour silence to babbling to dejection to elation. She mumbled on and on about Cassandra Chancellor, Stanford University, the history of Alcatraz Island, the history of the Old Internet. On one topic, she was quite firm: I killed Gannon Chancellor.
28.
In her blue-addled state, Leigh didn’t piece together our destination until the taxi pulled up before her old Jones Street apartment building.
“I don’t want to be here,” she said. “I want to go home.”
On the trip over, I took the front seat of the driverless taxi so she could lie out across the rear bench.
“The police are waiting for you at Lake Street,” I said.
She'd become a pan of bread dough on the ride over. It was a Herculean trial lifting her from the taxi and carrying her across the sidewalk to the entry of her old apartment building. With every step, she produced a new emotion like drawing a fresh card from a shuffled deck.
“I feel sick,” she said, looking pale.
“Let’s get you inside.”
Her face crumpled as though she would start crying. “I should turn myself in.”
“If we stand out here much longer, you won’t have to.”
"I'm so guilty."
"You're guilty of nothing. Stop it."
"No, I am, I did something horrible." She caressed my face with a look of sincere concern. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because you’re gassed out of your mind. You had more blue than you think.”
“And you think you can save me," she sneered.
The only rescuing she needed n
ow was from herself. I was not the person for that weighty job.
“No, I need some answers, and I need them fast."
Leigh’s memory was fuzzed-over, but she knew how to get us into the building. She still kept the keycard to the second-floor apartment in her purse. The domicile smelled even more lonely than before. Although it had only been two days since I broke in, three additional layers of dust had settled on the counters and windowsills. The room was gray and emotionless. The architecture was so stately and formal, I’m unsure if anyone could have brought passion to that cold, dour apartment.
“Someone was here!” Leigh exclaimed like a delighted child.
The bag of groceries I’d left on the kitchen counter after my break-in remained in place. She rushed to unpack the bag like a child to waiting Christmas presents.
“Someone was so thoughtful,” she said with a healthy beam across her face. All the remorse and dejection downstairs on the street was gone. “I’m famished. I didn’t realize until now. I’ve not eaten since…” The Pharjé kept her from remembering when she’d last eaten.
I poured two tall glasses of cold water from the tap and offered her one.
She retreated to the breakfast nook with the glass of water at her lips. I went about the apartment drawing curtains and cracking windows open. A hazy drizzle drenched Nob Hill. The sunlight was as gray as the paint on the walls and the fabric covering the furniture.
In a few minutes, I had a small white onion and two garlic cloves chopped and sautéing in a skillet. In an empty pantry that smelled of baking flour, I discovered diminutive bottles of connoisseur olive oil and red wine vinegar forgotten on the back shelf. I put them to good use. Once the onion and garlic was browned, I added sliced cherry tomatoes and a handful of sundried tomatoes from a wax paper envelope. The canned tomato sauce went in last.
“That smells wonderful,” Leigh said glumly from the breakfast nook.
“Tell me why you think I killed Gannon.” Before starting, I’d stripped off my jacket and hat, stuffed my tie inside my shirt, and rolled up my sleeves. I failed to locate an apron. My cream cotton shirt was pinpricked red from the bubbling sauce.
“Gannon came to Lands End that night we were there.” She had a faraway look on her face. “He hit you. Just knocked you to the ground. Oh, I was so worried for you. I bent down to help you. When I got back up, he was gone. Hey—” She peered at my purple face and brightened up. “That’s why you have that! Gannon!”
“He’s a real peach,” I said. “If I was on the ground, how could I have killed Gannon?”
“I—don’t—know.” It came out a staccato sputter. “Gannon was terribly jealous of anyone who came close to me.”
“Like Dr. Clift at the New Year's Eve party.”
“Especially Dr. Clift,” she said.
“You think Gannon was jealous of me?”
“We were holding hands when he found us,” she said.
I set down the spatula and approached her.
"We were even hugging, I think," she said quietly.
“Why?”
“I don’t remember—I need to sleep…” She lay on her side across the nook's padded bench.
I took her by the arms and up-righted her. “I need you to stay awake, Leigh. I need to know everything that happened that night.”
There are tales of blue junkies like Leigh—people who develop a right-angle immunity to the memory-suppressing effects of Blue Pharjé. She’d abused the neuroliqueur for so long, her brain chemistry had routed around the primary effect, even though the other side effects remained: euphoria, empathy, fearlessness, naiveté. At this moment, she was in a twilight state. She could recall other blue-outs when under the effect of Pharjé. If I allowed her to fall asleep, when she woke, the blue-out would be over and she couldn’t tell me a thing about our night at Lands End.
“I just want to close my eyes, just for five minutes—”
“No.” I took her by the arms and shook. Her head lolled atop her neck. “Stay with me.”
"Maybe when he hit you, you hit back," she murmured. "Maybe it was self-defense." She blinked to stretch her eyelids wide. "I should be angry with you, but I'm not. I don't know why."
"Because of the Blue Pharjé, that's why."
"If the police ask, what should I tell them?"
"Whatever you do, don't lie to them," I said.
"Did I ever lie to you?"
"Just now. When you said I killed Gannon. I have a good idea who killed him and it wasn't me. I think you know it wasn't me.” I interrupted her halfhearted protest. "Tell me what you remember about Lands End. Don't interpret, don't guess, just tell me everything."
Her limp neck couldn't hold her head straight. It twisted around and away from me.
“I wasn’t much of a girlfriend,” she said. "Gannon deserved better than me."
I made a noise indicating my disgust with her. At the stove, I stirred the sauce and checked the boiling pasta.
"What does that mean?" she said, picking up on it.
"It's nothing."
"No, tell me."
My father had a word for people who mutter an insult under their breath and then deny it. He called them chickenshit. At that moment I was being chickenshit.
"I've been wondering what attracted you to Gannon," I said from the stove. "I mean, beyond the obvious reasons. He was quite a specimen. But I swore to myself Leigh Blessing wasn't the kind of woman so easily taken in by that. I held you up a little bit, I suppose. I thought you would look a little deeper."
I had her attention.
"Your whole life has been men opening doors for you and men buying you nice things," I said. "Every thought you air, there's a man to tell you just how right you are. Every desire you express, there's a man rushing to fulfill that desire," I said. "And that's something you fear very, very deeply. You deeply hope I'm wrong."
It hung in the air for a moment. “How do you know?”
In a delayed mild panic, she looked about the room, head jerking left and right. She finally realized her slender purse was strapped across her frame. She fumbled to unsnap it. She produced her memex.
“Did you hack me?” she said. “Did you get into my memories?”
I drained the pasta in the sink. A pillar of Hades steam billowed up from the colander and surrounded me.
“We like to think of ourselves a certain way. We paint a picture of ourselves and we want everyone else to see us that way. Every morning, we pull on our clothes like an actor getting into costume. We apply the pancake and makeup. We go outside and hold ourselves in a certain manner. We talk of ourselves in a certain way. The fear, then, is someone seeing through the facade and shattering the lie.”
“Not everyone has that fear,” she said. “Gannon wasn't like that.”
“If you're a good enough actor, you start to believe the script,” I said.
She said, "I do have that fear." Then, “Most men do agree with everything I say." It came out faster now. "I can’t tell if they’re taking me seriously. Every time a man agrees with me, I have to ask why he’s agreeing with me. I don't want to be suspicious, but I have to be. And whenever a man tells me I’m doing a good job, I have to wonder if I’m really doing well or not. I have to ask what he wants from me. It used to frustrate me. But lately, it’s just become…“
“Tiring.”
She looked exhausted. “You know, don't you?”
When I’m on a crowded trolley and people start laughing, are they laughing at me? When I make a joke in passing, are they laughing at the joke or at me? When I was young and fat, every computer professional I dealt with felt the need to explain even the most rudimentary of technical details down to me. Any ambiguity in what I said was interpreted as ignorance. Did they think I was new to the field? Or did they look at my face and waistline and think I was slow and dim? It's tiring even recounting it now.
"Why were you two arguing that day?" I asked her. "Before you came home to Lake Street? I saw you on the sid
ewalk. He shouted at you."
"Sometimes we fought—"
I tugged at her shirt sleeve. "I saw that bruise on your arm. Looks to me he was doing all the fighting."
"He can't control himself sometimes—"
"What were you fighting over?"
"I told him I wanted to talk to the police!" She looked disgusted with herself. "Mr. Aggaroy was dead because of what we did. No one was supposed to get hurt. It was obvious to me who had killed him. We had to tell the police." Her voice softened out of respect for her dead boyfriend. "Gannon would've come around. He would've."
I shook my head and coughed a single laugh. "Gannon didn't open doors for you, did he. He didn't agree with everything you said."
"No," she said softly, wide-eyed. "He didn't."
"He probably disagreed with every position you took. Looked down on you and said you were being a child for thinking this or that. And you found that irresistible."
She croaked, "He was generous in his own way."
I was tired of her making excuses for him. I dumped a pile of noodles on a plate and poured on a layer of sauce straight from the pot. When I placed the meal before her, the wet noodles slopped across plate, almost spilling on the table. On my way to the bathroom to take a leak, I called out she could find a fork herself.
*
Leigh nibbled at the rigatoni with a kind of delicacy I found alien. Even famished, she seemed incapable of attacking a plate of food. Her slender fingers manipulated the fork with finishing-school precision. She place a single piece of pasta in her mouth at a time and thoughtfully chewed it. She raised the glass of water to her lips and washed down the bite with nothing more than a sip.
The most straightforward approach would have been to hack her memex, just as she’d suspected me of doing. Instead, I heard the story the old-fashioned way. Between bites, she talked. The twilight of her mild blue-out was fading. I started the coffee while she narrated. I sat across from her. I hung on her every word.
