by Claire North
“We?” I asked.
“I have a lot of people working on the problem.”
“How do you fund it all?”
“I steal,” she replied simply. “Like you, I am an exceptionally good thief, although I mostly steal through stock markets, which doesn’t even count as theft.”
Her hand, resting on the back of the chair, like the proud owner of a prize horse, wondering whether now is the time to sell.
Then she said, “Do you still want treatments?”
“I want to be remembered.”
“But do you still want treatments?”
I don’t remember what I said in reply.
Headaches.
A doctor who’d seen me eleven times already said, “Ah, you’re new here!”
Yes, I’m new here. I’m always new here.
Blood drawn; how much blood did I have left to take?
Brains, brains scanned, students brought in, introduced, Hello, you’re new here, still new, still always new, always and for ever just like yesterday, like tomorrow, goodbye, hello; hello, goodbye.
Byron woke from a nightmare, cold and shaking, saw me in the dark across from her, reached for her gun, froze, lips moving, struggling to find recollection. I saw her eyes white in the gloom, heard the rumble of a fat lorry passing by outside, waited, heard her breath slow, saw her lower her head back onto the pillow, close her eyes, go back to sleep, and I did not sleep.
I did not sleep.
On the sixty-eighth day of my association, I broke my own rule, and followed her, discreetly, to a meeting. It was the perfect evening for it, fog rising off the bay, a thin drizzle of rain obscuring the lights high in the hills, winter coming. I carried an umbrella, hid my face behind a scarf, wore a new, shop-stolen coat that I could discard on the way home. I followed her to the edge of Berkeley, watched her walk through the mist to the front door of a detached, two-storey white-timbered house with an American flag flying on the porch and a bright pink plastic rocking horse abandoned by the path, and when she looked back over her shoulder before knocking, I hid behind a car and counted to ten before peeking round to see who answered.
The man was in his fifties, olive skin and pepper hair, a checked shirt and grey jogging bottoms, a pair of slippers each with a rabbit face and a pair of floppy ears on the front. He shook Byron’s hand quickly, and led her inside.
I looked up his address when I got home. Agustin Carrazza, retired MIT professor, quietly shuffled into obscurity when it was suggested he’d had a few too many links with questionable experiments, of which the highlight had to be a 1978 case in which the water supply for a small town in Missouri was laced with a mild hallucinogenic, resulting in two days of confusion and chaos, three deaths, six pet deaths including one iguana, two car crashes, ninety-four injuries of varying degrees, the slaughter of two hundred and seventeen dairy cows and a statistically significant jump in the birth rate nine months later.
When asked in interview in 1998 if he’d ever been part of unethical or illegal experiments, his reply was classically Nixonian: “If the government says it’s ethical, then that’s good enough for me.”
That night I bought a couple of sleeping pills from a pharmacy that advertised itself with the picture of two grinning, Stetson-wearing snakes coiled round a crucifix, and slipped one into Byron’s water when she went to sleep.
One hundred and fifty snores later, I rolled out of bed, took her notebook from her bedside table, turned on the torch at the back of my phone and sat, like a child, under the duvet covers to read.
Her name is Hope, said the first page. You will forget her.
Pages of notes. Reflections and musings, scrawls in the corner –
Scared of ECT? Possible sister? Northern English accent sometimes. Reluctant to talk about family. Drinks tea with milk. Runs, average 10k per day. Steals habitually. Unaware of own habit? Stole pair of running shoes, bar of chocolate, apple, bottle of brown sauce, multitool and knife (hidden, taped under bed – weapon?).
Late home tonight.
Did I pull a gun on her? In my dream I woke, and held a gun against an intruder, but there was no one there, and I went back to sleep, but in the morning my gun had moved. Why?
Smell of alcohol on her shirt this morning.
Today I like her.
Today she is uneasy.
Today she is calm.
Today she is funny.
Today I felt pity for her.
Today she spoke of honour.
Today she stole a new mobile phone, hidden behind bathroom cistern. (Must move hotel; see what she does with change.)
Too many recordings, too many videos, not enough time to track. Will record all notes here, attempt to compile.
She does not trust me.
She is frightened.
She hasn’t heard the screaming.
She will not accept ECT; do not ask her again.
She is beginning to suspect that these tests will not cure her condition.
And fairly soon:
Is she following me?
Is she the she I think she is? Performance, a face in the camera, voice on the tape, what is she when there is nothing digital to recall her? What might she do? Who is she when I cannot remember her?
After nearly sixty pages of notes, the writing transformed into a language I couldn’t recognise. Alpha-numeric, characters and symbols, numbers and dashes. I took a stab at deciphering it, but it resisted monoalphabetic frequency analysis, and I didn’t have time or expertise to break it down into anything more complicated. Still Byron’s handwriting, but a code, and my head hurt, and I was tired, so I photographed the pages and put the notebook back, and re-sealed the hair she’d left stuck over its pages, and tried to go back to sleep.
On the seventieth day, she said, “Have you been following me?”
“No.”
“I shouted at a woman in the street today who I thought was you.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t me.”
“I know. When I went back the other way, she was crying down the phone, and I remembered her face.”
I shrugged.
“I mean to say… if I say anything, I think I should apologise now.”
“You haven’t said anything that bothers me,” I replied, and that same evening she said, “Have you been following me?” and I said no, and we had the conversation again, but this time she didn’t manage not to look afraid.
That night I stole a book on cryptography, and by the white light of the bathroom, studied while she slept.
On the seventy-first day, alone in an internet café in Bayview, I started an email to Luca Evard. I wrote it five times, and on the sixth attempt, deleted the draft and went for a run instead. That evening, as Byron held her secret twice-weekly meeting with a group of underemployed postgrad Berkeley computer-science students who were busy breaking Perfection down into its component parts, I caught a cab into the hills of San Rafael, and with two hundred stolen bucks walked into the China Creek Casino. I counted cards, made no effort to hide my methods. CCTV cameras watched, but no one came. I was a stranger who bet lucky
now
and now
and now
all past patterns forgotten.
At five thousand US dollars, I was ready to go home, when I saw the 106 Club. They were secluded from the rest of the casino by a sliding glass partition, playing high-stakes games in a function room where clean water rolled down the inside of the walls and champagne bubbled from a fountain ensconced in a bed of ice. I considered walking away, didn’t. I stole a drunk woman’s mobile phone, used the invite recorded in pixel form on its memory to get me through the doors of the club.
The lights were a moonlight blue, the games were poker and roulette. They played terribly. Ridiculous bets, $7,000, $10,000, and why? Because you’re worth it, baby, hey, baby, you just say the word. $15,000 lost on a ridiculous turn of the cards, hit, she said, though she had seventeen in her hand and the dealer couldn’t be carrying more
than fifteen at a shot, and the dealer hit and as her money was taken, she laughed, screamed with laughter and said, “I wish my ex was here to see this!”
A man came up to me said, “You don’t seem happy.”
“I’m not sure I enjoy watching money being squandered.”
“It’s just money,” he replied. “It’s just paper.”
“It’s time,” I said, sharper than I’d meant. “It’s the means to purchase time. It’s the cost of a new bed in a hospital, a solar panel on a roof; it’s a year’s salary for a tailor in Dhaka, it’s the price of a fishing boat, the cost of an education, it’s not money. It’s what it could have been.”
The man stared at me, physically pulling his head back on his neck, like a bird recoiling from a potential predator, and he was beautiful, and he’d had treatments – of course he’d had treatments, look at him, charisma, confidence, the sense of his own worth, worth, to be worthy – of a quality that is commendable, admirable, respected, and he said,
“Wow, that is so deep.”
He meant it, of course.
“You’re really real,” he added breathily. “Say something else.”
I decided he wasn’t worth punching, and walked away.
Chapter 67
I buried $5,000 in a plastic bag beneath a cypress tree up the hill from Marin City. Would I need it? Didn’t know. Never hurts to have a backup plan.
When I returned to the apartment, the sun was rising and Byron was awake, her skin as grey as the morning sky, and I doubted she’d slept. As I stepped through the door, she rose to her feet, fast, opened her mouth, stopped herself, and for a moment, the two of us faced each other, my picture in her right hand, her lips sealing tight.
I counted back from ten slowly, and when I reached one, so did she, and she said, “Did you follow me yesterday?”
“No,” I replied.
“I saw… women. A woman. Women. Who I thought…”
“Matched the words that are my description?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“How can I know that? How can I ever know?”
There it was. Fear in her eyes. A woman who lived alone, who has nothing but her thoughts and this instant. Terror of the thing that sits on the shoulder of all lonely travellers in the night. Am I mad? Am I mad and I don’t know it?
You – are you real?
Are you real, stranger I cannot remember?
Is this real, this moment, are you, am I, is this, is any…?
There’s a gun on the table next to Byron’s bed, and she is so scared, so, so frightened.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. Listen to your recordings. Remember my name.”
She licked her lips, and said, “The sword out-weareth the sheath,”
and the next day there wasn’t any jam at breakfast, and I had a headache.
On the seventy-third day, I realised I’d been counting the days wrong.
Not seventy-three days, not ten weeks, not three months since I’d come to San Francisco with Byron. Not at all. A storm rolled up the bay, and rain ran down the hills, and as the overcast urban yellow of the sky gave way to unrelenting, sea-soaked black, I found the ticket stub from the flight from Seoul, and the date didn’t make any sense, and I checked it against the date on the newspaper, and I’d got it wrong, I’d counted something wrong, not seventy-three days, but eighty-nine, eighty-nine days in America.
So I went upstairs and started to speak to Byron, but Byron said, “The soul wears out the breast,”
and there was jam at breakfast, but it was seedless, which I’ve never understood the point of at all.
Chapter 68
A day in a
café
diner?
Call it a diner.
Booths.
Counter.
Coffee machine.
Bacon.
Syrup.
Waitress in a funny frilly white apron and a green jacket with her name embroidered in gold. Rainbow.
At first I thought it was a brand name, or a style decision, but then she said, “Hi, my name’s Rainbow, what can I get you today?” and
how did I come to be in this place?
Road outside, four lanes of traffic going this way, four lanes of traffic going that. A thin line of scraggly scrub in the middle. A pavement just wide enough for a wheezing mother and a narrow pram, for the poor people to walk on
because even the poorest of the poor have to drive; this is America,
General Motors, Ford, Nicola Tesla, DC/AC, the victory of the highway, the death of the trains, I had read something…
A plate put in front of me, bacon, tomato, sausage, potato, toast, strong black coffee I didn’t order this, did I?
“Do you want something more?”
An empty plate.
Someone has eaten my food, when I blinked, and now the plate is empty and I said, “No,” because I was full, really full, properly, properly full and my head ached and it was
now
which was two hours later than
then
which had been a now
which was dead.
And a woman whose parents had decided to call her Rainbow said, “More coffee, honey?”
And I replied, “Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a-roving, By the light of the moon.”
She said, “Oh isn’t that just so cute…”
but a man stood on my foot and I said, “Fuck off!” and he just made a face at me and kept on walking.
And I was hungry again, but I kept on running, just running, and in the morning Byron said, “Shall we try another today?”
and I can’t remember what I said in reply.
Chapter 69
A
place.
A
time.
I am
this time.
This place and my head
is killing me.
These are the words I have written on the palm of my hand, big black letters.
My head is killing me.
When did I write these words?
I look around and it is
darkness.
This now, this present tense, this instant, this second, it will be for ever now as soon as I realise it, not a memory, not a thing embedded in the past, but the eternal revelation, an understanding that time does not diminish, an impact that distance cannot lessen and it is
now.
Now.
Now.
That I realise I have been forgetting.
Fairness: a correction.
I think I have known for a while.
A gap between knowing a thing, and comprehending it. Between perception and belief.
Undoubtedly time has been lost, but hours fly by every day on inactivity
office routine
commuting
dawdling, doodling
staring off into space
cleaning
cooking
washing
sleeping
the list is endless, okashi as the scholar said, delightful, delightful, a delightful little list
delightful clap our hands together oh how droll
you’re so real, so quaint, so cute so
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
I run.
I run, until at last I find a taxi, and that taxi takes me to a tree, and from under the tree I retrieve $5,000 and with it I buy a room in a motel just off Route 101, El Camino Real, the Royal Road, once used by Spanish monks to connect missions and pueblos, now the road from California in the south to the Canadian border in the north, running along the West Coast for more than a thousand miles
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckf
uckfuckfuckfuckfuckfucketyfucketyfucketyfuckfuck
The owner of the motel, looking me over once, says carefully, “Cash first.”
I give him cash.
“You got ID?”
I do not have ID.
“You in trouble?”
I am not in trouble. He hears my British accent and wavers. Casual discrimination is all very well and good, but I’m a foreign woman, who knows what problems I might bring?
I put more cash on the table, and he says no more on the subject, except, “We only clean towels on Tuesdays.”
In my room, I discover my feet are blistered. Most are new; some are old. How far have I run? There’s a mobile phone in my pocket, but I’ve already pulled out the SIM card, damned if I’m making that mistake now.
I have a bath, examine my entire body, needle marks in my arms, in my ankles, my wrist, my neck, no memory of when they happened. I explore the top of my scalp with a mirror, feeling my way through the hairs like a gorilla seeking lice, and yes, there, and here also at the back, slight bumps where needles have gone in, someone has been injecting things into my brain and I thought I was so clever, so clever and in control, so fucking fuckety fuck fuck fucking clever FUCK
I look through the photos saved on my mobile phone, find the pictures of Byron’s coded diary, and go to work.
Chapter 70
Snatches of other people’s lives, in a motel off Route 101.
