Amnesiascope: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  Well, perhaps. I don’t know what’s real about love anymore, except that the last thing I want is to sound cynical about it. Perhaps you have to get to the end of your life to know what’s real about it or maybe, as my mother did with my father, you have to spend a life with one person to know how real is the turmoil of love as opposed to how glib is the turmoil of romance. I sent Lauren the letter and a week later it came back, unopened; I still have it, sealed in the envelope with the postmark, as though sometime I expect to have to produce it for a judge or jury, to prove that it really exists, and that I really made the effort of writing it. Lauren called yet again, months later, getting in one last cut: “I guess,” she said, “I stayed with Jason because at least he was honest.” And maybe you really believe that, Lauren. Maybe for the moment you’ve convinced yourself that’s true, so I won’t try and convince you otherwise, except to say you’re going to have to spend a lifetime convincing yourself of that one, because you couldn’t convince anyone else for two seconds. He abused you, he cheated on you, he lied to you on a daily basis, and you still stayed with him, and it isn’t my fault. It breaks my heart, and I’m as sorry as I can be, truly sorry, not the sorry of contempt or even pity but the sorry of empathy with another human soul who can botch up her life as efficiently as the rest of us. But it isn’t my fault, and I’m done apologizing to people for their bad choices. I’ve never expected anyone to apologize for mine.

  Trained by a world of men who stop caring about them once their youth and beauty run out, the women who have been double-crossed by time look around, all of their possibilities suddenly vanished, barely retaining what a vicious world trained them to consider their assets, and then they savagely reassess their situations, Thinking back, squinting hard at a memory, they reconstruct in their minds a hazy image. Then they say to themselves, Well, actually, he wasn’t so bad. He never hit me. He was faithful, far as I knew. He didn’t take my money. He listened to me as though I was more intelligent than an ashtray. In bed he could make me come, or at least tried to, and when I cried he took me in his arms and, not often, but every once in a while, even cried with me. He wasn’t, in other words, absolutely the most selfish, loutish individual I’ve ever known. There were even a few of my friends who thought I was a fool to let him go. No, now that I think about it, he wasn’t so bad at all; in fact, now that I think about it, I wonder if I still have his phone number, from all those years ago. … And so they call. Desperation on their lips and in their throats; and it just makes me feel lousy. I’m appalled by their terror, and the part of me that’s still left from before, back around the time I got married, from my idealistic days which even my best friends cannot bring themselves to believe I’ve so brutally discarded, that part of me wants to take the terror out of these women and cast it aside for them. I swear. I want to assure them their lives aren’t over, that they won’t be alone all the time, which is the thing that scares them shitless—and that if they are alone, it won’t be so bad. But I’m in that minority of people who believes it’s better to be alone than with someone you despise, unless, of course, the someone you despise happens to be yourself.

  Not long after Lauren went back to her husband, I moved into a little upstairs-downstairs studio in a cul-de-sac near MacArthur Park. On this street lived the last of L.A.’s elite, professors from the nearby art school and the inheritors of Old Money who had been there fifty years, since a time when this was one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Now of course the neighborhood was overrun by the hordes: punks and students and aspiring artists, of whom I was one. Next door lived a young couple, a day laborer named Roy who had been laid off about a year before and sat around all afternoon listening to the radio and doing drugs until his wife got home from work, when they would head off for the clubs in Chinatown. I fell in with them, I don’t even remember exactly how. He complained one night about how loud my music was through the walls, but appreciated my taste and decided I should come along on their nightly rounds; or maybe it was her idea all along. Her name was Madeline. She worked for a secretarial temp agency that sent her out to one law office after another, where eventually the moment arrived when the head partner propositioned her and she had to move on.

  It never took long. That she ever rejected such overtures at all—and I don’t know for certain she always did—may be a little surprising, given not just the generous financial benefits that were usually implied but her chameleon sexuality, as depraved one moment as it was demure the next. She had overripe red lips and wide brown eyes, under a storm of auburn hair. Those nights in Chinatown when the clubs’ crowds were dense and everyone was packed together and, from the shoulders down, everyone’s hands and fingers lived a secret life, she danced with me way too irresistibly, and reached over and unbuckled me and took me in her hand even while Roy stood there right next to us, since no one could see anything anyone was doing. Obviously I should have extricated myself from the situation. But I made the mistake of looking too long into her amazing face, which rendered anything her hands did or didn’t do irrelevant; and pretty soon the morning arrived when he was passed out from the night’s drugs and Madeline was on my doorstep. I promise I resisted her at first. But soon there was no resisting her. She offered herself again and again, provoking and taunting and humiliating me all at once; only looking back do I realize with surprise what she really wanted. She wanted me to hit her. She wanted me to hit her the way Roy had hit her, and perhaps the man before him and the man before him. Looking back it’s as clear as water that’s what she wanted, all the infuriating things she said to make me desire and hate her, all the infuriating things she said to make the two inseparable. But since I’ve never hit a woman the idea was incomprehensible, and instead our fucking got more crazed, as he listened through the wall next door; it tore at the last shreds of whatever I had left from Lauren, whatever I could still bring myself to remember, until one night in the dark when I slid myself into her, she glared back at me over her naked shoulder and hissed, “You’re such a beast,” and it exhilarated me. At that moment the rest of my life tore itself loose from everything that had come before, and I was free of what I had been, of my innocence and pain, everything awash in pitch-black but for the translucent squiggle of my semen,

  A few years back, right after the Quake but before things really began with Viv, I was in a bookshop vying with a woman for the most advantageous position among the shelves from which absolutely, positively, without any doubt whatsoever, it could be determined that the store didn’t carry any of my books, when I looked over at the woman and said, “Sam?” Sam was a strawberry blonde I knew back just before Lauren. It had been nearly fifteen years since I’d seen her, and her cruel waif’s beauty had grown tired around the edges while remaining, after all those years, as remarkably uncomplicated by self-consciousness as it ever was; there wasn’t an idea in her head someone else hadn’t put there. Even her “wit” had a hand-me-down quality: “Just a sharp intake of air,” she would say when she yawned, that sort of thing. Now all these years later in the bookstore her eyes still tended to dart around her like they had always done, but a little more frantically, as though in fifteen years she’d learned how little her beauty counted, how the watching universe was less impressed with every passing moment. She stood in the aisle of the bookstore holding the last copy of my last book in front of her as though it were a shield, and I guess we exchanged a phone number or two, because she called me not long afterward, and for a while I tried to dodge my own impulses, which is easier to do in the daylight than the dark. Finally one night I decided to drive down the coast to see her.

  She lived in a trailer park. She was rather mysterious about what had happened to her in the last fifteen years, but lying around the trailer were the distinct remains of a marriage gone bad. Pages in fashion magazines of photos of beautiful young girls who might bear resemblance to a younger Sam were dogeared a little too ferociously. Hanging around the trailer and then going out to get a bite to eat quickly re
minded me that we never really had a thing in the world to talk about, that our best moments were the silly ones; and as plainly as I honestly could, as delicately as whatever feeble code of honor I still have allowed me to, I tried to explain what I was not there for. And in that familiar tarantella of feminine ambivalence Sam decided to let me go home with barely a kiss, and in my rearview mirror I watched her watching me leave from behind the trailers front screen door.

  Before I met the highway, however, I turned back. The night was just too dark—that darkness where memory becomes the only thing you see before you. The window and doorway of Sam’s trailer had gone black by the time I returned, twenty minutes after I left; I didn’t knock, I didn’t call out. I made my way through the darkened trailer back to the bed still thinking about how she looked and felt all those years before, the arch of her back, the wideness of her hips, that silky undeveloped feeling of her labia that still suggested forbidden adolescence; and now I couldn’t quite tell if she was awake or the sound I heard in the darkened trailer was the rustling of her sleep. If she had said no or begged me to stop I swear I would have; I’m almost sure of it. But when I saw flash across the white of her back the sputtering glow of the broken streetlamp outside her window, and as the sound of the screen door I had neglected to latch behind me blew open and shut in the wind and mixed with the little half-asleep sounds she made as I fucked her, there was that same old feeling in me of memory going up in smoke, of the future going up in smoke, of nothing to be remembered that had come before or would come yet, that feeling of being lost to myself and the past and the future, that delirious amnesia which, because Sam was practically a perfect stranger to me again, was all the purer, as though she was the purest drug on the street now racing through my veins. I don’t confuse it with love. But I don’t deny either that it might be a kind of love. It’s the last truly anarchic act left to us by the millennium, the last opportunity to seize love back from the sexual ideologues whose only real love is power anyway: and who knows what was filling Sam’s head at this moment, all the memories that flushed and deserted her? Who knows if her eyes were filled with the faces of young girls from fashion magazines and whether she was thinking in this moment of obliteration that she was not just one of those girls but all of them, rows and rows of young girls on rows and rows of beds? Maybe her head was filled with majestic insights I could never imagine, maybe she was solving one riddle of the damned cosmos after another and I was nothing but the generator of all her revelations. I didn’t finish with her but left still hard, planting a kiss in the small of her back.

  On the highway in the middle of the night, I pulled over to the first pay phone I could find. I phoned Morgan, who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and who didn’t answer; then I called Dory, who lives on the floor below mine in the Hamblin, and whose husband works at night for the phone company. She didn’t answer either. Then I called Ylana with our signal—one ring and then hang up, and then call back. I never quite understood what the point of this signal was or who was being deceived, but I used it anyway as she had always asked me to. I had met Ylana in a bookstore too, like Sam; she had just been caught trying to shoplift a book. Mortified, she was insisting to the store manager that she had simply put the book in her bag without thinking, when I piped up in the middle of the confrontation, “I’m sure she didn’t mean to steal it.” We were all standing in the doorway where she had nearly made her getaway, Ylana and I and the grim store manager and the weasely little clerk who caught her.

  “Do you know this woman?” the manager asked me.

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll handle this,” he snapped.

  “But, you see … I wrote this book.” And I had. It was one of the earlier books that could still be found in paperback before going out of print. I had never seen anyone buy a book of mine, let alone steal one. “This is me,” I went on, pointing at my name on the cover.

  Of course, no one had any idea whether it was really me; that was the first thing. The second thing was, What difference did it make to the situation at hand? And yet the startled manager sputtered, “Oh, well. … Yes, then, I guess. …” Ylana quickly paid for the book and I hustled her out of the store. As with the store manager, it never occurred to her I might not really be the author of the book; she instinctively knew it was so, and when we got to the car she turned triumphantly with her witchy mouth in a half smile and half pout, and touched my face. In that moment I knew she would give me anything I asked for that didn’t involve more than two or three hours, and that moreover she expected nothing in return. So now, calling her from the phone booth on the highway in the middle of the night, she answered, having gotten the signal; and without my saying a word she breathed into the receiver, “The beach,” and hung up. Before I got back in the car I called my own number to pick up any messages off my machine, and there was one from Dory. “I know it was you who just called,” she said, “I’ll be waiting. The door will be unlocked. He won’t be back till morning. …”

  Halfway up Pacific Coast Highway, heading for my rendezvous with Ylana at our special beach, I could smell the ash of Los Angeles through my window, I could see the red midnight sky in the distance, and I thought about these women who gave themselves to the sensual moment that lived inside them, to the hunger that resided where their legs met and whatever hands rapturously gripped them by their hips. It would be an insult to simply compliment them for the courage of their carnal convictions; that courage came to them so naturally as to not even involve the calculation of petty courage. Rather it was the unthinking, unconscious surrender that inspired me; for its one brief moment I was almost good enough to be inside them. Driving up the coast highway in the night I might have been completely overcome by gratitude if I’d had the time, it might have driven me right off the highway, but I was still hard from Sam and I had to get to Ylana and our special empty beach, and an hour later I pulled up and parked the car and stumbled down the hillside in the dark, wandering along with the ocean in my ears not able to see anything, groping like a blind man—when a hand reached up out of the dark and took mine. She pulled me down on the sand. She was completely naked. She unbuckled my pants and slipped her mouth onto me and I heard her giggle because she could smell Sam on me, and there was no way she was going to let me get away with that. She pulled me into her before she was completely wet and scissored her long legs across my back, and of course now I had a predicament, which was that Dory had left a message on my machine that she was waiting, and so, as with Sam, I was committed not to finish with Ylana; I held back as much as I could. But then a cloud moved and the moon was exposed and flooded the beach with light and in the wind off the ocean was the smell of blood and body oil, and on top of me she swayed against the pandemonium of the stars behind her. And when she brought her long hair up to completely cover her face and said, “Would you like me like this, to be nothing but a body for you?” I could barely make out in the moonlight the wild little smile that was on her lips, but I knew my scheme about holding out for Dory was at great risk, and as I tried to maintain control of the situation the wench gave the slyest little wiggle of her hips; and it was all over. And she laughed.

  So now twenty minutes later I was back in the car speeding through the Palisades down Sunset Boulevard. I was exhausted, depleted, not an impulse of desire lurking anywhere from my brain to my heart. I wanted to go home and go to bed but of course I couldn’t do that, because Dory was waiting and while I could pretend I hadn’t gotten her message until it was too late, and while she might not be in any position to complain about it, given the husband who worked for the phone company, I might be able to deceive her but I couldn’t deceive myself or the obligation I had to her. It didn’t matter that my desire was gone or that it would have been easy to ignore hers, it didn’t even matter that we were barely acquaintances, crossing paths at the mailboxes one afternoon when she was mad at her husband and grumbling at her mail and we started talking and wound up going up to her place for a g
lass of wine. … What mattered was that I had telephoned her tonight because I wanted her and she had answered, and now I couldn’t just forget her because I had been satisfied by someone else. I was obligated by my desire for her of earlier that evening and though the desire had passed, the obligation had not, because I was obligated by desire’s memory; she had offered her self to that desire and for her it wasn’t just a memory, it lived and breathed in the moment, it was still a part of her present even as it had already spurted into my past: even desire has its laws. So you can see how when I reached the hotel and pulled the car into the garage I had no choice but to head up to her apartment; the door was unlocked. I had no choice but to make my way into her bedroom and turn the top sheet back and run my fingertips down her belly; she shuddered. I pulled her to the edge of the bed where I knelt so I could separate her thighs and open her with my fingers and press my mouth against her; even in my exhaustion I couldn’t help loving the moan that answered. Half asleep I slipped my tongue inside her. I don’t know how long it took, maybe it was minutes or maybe it was hours, I just remember kissing her when she came and her purr of response before she fell asleep. …