Amnesia Moon

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I guess not.”

  “But you can’t remember your real name, can you?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t remember your name—that’s bad luck in my book. But there’s a lot you can’t remember, all that stuff in the dream. The woman you’re worrying about.”

  Chaos winced. Were the dreams leaking out that far? He avoided meeting Edie’s eyes.

  “Should I go on?” said Cooley. “My guess is you come from a place so fucked up that you think all your problems are normal. There are places like that out there.”

  Chaos didn’t say anything.

  “I think I’ve made my point. Of course, one of your worst patches of luck in a long time, though you don’t know it yet, is running into old Edie here. That’s as bad as luck can be. You’ve got nothing to offer each other but trouble.”

  “Puke, puke, puke,” said Edie. She turned and went into the kitchen.

  “I’m not saying you can’t make it around here. Come take the test. I have a feeling you’ll do all right, well enough to get by, anyway. I sense that about you. It’s just the combination that’s deadly.”

  You want Edie, Chaos was tempted to say. If that’s bad luck, it’s yours as well as mine.

  Instead he said, “I don’t believe in luck.”

  “No?” Cooley got up and put on his jacket. He adopted a pained expression. “She tell you about Dave?”

  “What?” Chaos was confused. “What about him?”

  “Ask her.”

  “What—”

  “We’ll talk more later. Take care.” Cooley hurried out. Chaos heard his car start, then roar into the night. When the sound died away, the house was very quiet.

  He found Edie sitting at the kitchen table with her arms crossed and her head rolled back, staring at the ceiling. “There’s something I ought to tell you,” she said after a while. “It might help you make up your mind about Ian.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “He’s been coming on to me during this whole thing. He says that if I were with him . . . that things wouldn’t be so bad for me.”

  “I could tell,” said Chaos.

  “He’s so confident about his own luck. He says that what he’s got in the luck department will more than make up for anything I lack. Those are his exact words. He says that every time he takes the test, he scores better and better.”

  “But you haven’t taken him up on it.”

  “I hate him.”

  Chaos could see that it was more complicated than that. She wanted to hate Cooley, but couldn’t completely. It reminded Chaos of himself and Kellogg.

  You have nothing to offer each other but trouble, Cooley had said. And it was probably true, but not because of luck. Chaos couldn’t afford to stay here and let the local syndromes take root.

  But then how could he help her in her struggle with luck? What could he offer a woman whose worst problem he couldn’t even take seriously?

  As for him, he wasn’t even sure he had problems, not in that sense. His life was too full of gaps for that. The world had problems; he was just on the receiving end.

  Or maybe Gwen was his problem. She was there, whatever boundary he crossed. But Gwen was hardly something Edie would want to help him with.

  “He told me to ask you about Dave,” Chaos said.

  “He would do that,” she said quietly.

  “What did he mean?”

  She sighed. “Dave’s sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “His kidneys. He was born defective. About a year ago they failed. His father gave him one; it had to be a close relative, me or Ray or Gerald. Now Dave and Gerald each have only one. There’s nothing mysterious about it, though. It’s just something that happened.”

  Chaos went over and put his hand on the nape of her neck.

  “He wants you to think something bad will happen to you if you stay with me,” she said. “Like Gerald or Dave.”

  “He’s jealous.”

  She nodded. “I don’t care. He can keep bothering me if he wants. I don’t even notice anymore. As long as he doesn’t send me to a bad luck camp. It’s awful. Everybody walking around on eggshells, wondering who’s going to suddenly stub their toe or choke on a sandwich. I’d kill myself.”

  “That won’t happen,” said Chaos. “You won’t go.” He wondered what he meant by it.

  They’d fallen asleep on the couch together, figuring out a way to sleep entwined so the narrow cushions were enough. But he was woken at dawn by the sound of an engine outside the house. The room glowed with yellow light. He lifted his head and listened for a minute as the sound peaked then faded. He closed his eyes again and pressed his face back against her hair. He heard footsteps on the porch. Someone knocked lightly on the door.

  He got up and slipped into his clothes, thinking: Is this her bad luck or mine?

  He opened the door and smelled cigarette smoke. The sun was just rising over the factory on the other side of the street, and the low hills behind the factory were covered with mist. Sitting on the edge of the porch was a man in a worn leather jacket holding a bright red motorcycle helmet, his back to the door. The man tossed a cigarette butt into the dewy patch of grass between the porch and the street and turned his head. “Hey, Everett,” he said. “I wake you up?”

  “Billy,” said Chaos. The man’s whole name was there in his memory: Billy Fault.

  Fault grinned, got to his feet, stuck out his hand. Chaos stared at him. Eyes too close together, forehead too narrow, smile all gum. You would have to have reasons for being friends with a face like that; the face itself didn’t supply any. Chaos suspected he’d had reasons sometime in the past. Seeing the face again was like finding the same odd-looking rock on a beach twice.

  “Actually, I knew you were asleep. That’s the only way I could find you here. Your dreams, I mean.”

  “Dreams?” Chaos didn’t want to hear this.

  “Yeah. I’ve been picking them up for a couple of nights now, finally tracked you down . . .”

  “Tracked me down how?”

  “Just tuning in on the dreams, Everett. Like tuning in on a radio station. I’m good at that, extra sensitive. Still took me all night, though.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “San Francisco, same as ever.”

  “As ever when?”

  “We’re all still there, Everett. Everybody except you. You’re out here in Fuckaduck—excuse me, Vacaville.”

  Everybody except you. Who did that mean?

  Gwen?

  “—can’t get over this place,” continued Fault. “All these old cars, it’s like some kind of old suburban nightmare Twilight Zone episode. Neeny-neeny, neeny-neeny . . .” He wiggled his fingers in front of Chaos’s face. “You been here a long time?”

  “No,” said Chaos. “How far is it from here? San Francisco, I mean.”

  “It’s about an hour’s drive,” said Fault. “Whole different world, though. You’ll see. You’re coming, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cale’s expecting you.” He stopped and studied Chaos’s expression. “You remember Cale, Everett?”

  Cale Hotchkiss. That name was there, too. “Yes,” Chaos said.

  “Good,” said Fault, grinning. “Well, you and Cale have some catching up to do. Listen, you want to go for a ride with me? There’s a guy out here I want to visit.”

  “All right,” said Chaos.

  At that moment Edie stepped out onto the porch, dressed in a robe and blinking in the new light.

  “Edie,” said Chaos nervously. “This is Billy. An old friend from, uh, San Francisco.”

  “Hello,” said Edie, staring.

  “Hi,” said Fault.

  “We’ll be out for a while, I guess,” said Chaos. “Go back to sleep if you want. I’ll be back.”

  Now she looked at Chaos, her eyes questioning. But all she said was, “Okay. See you then.”

  “Good, okay,” said Chaos. Fault lit another cigaret
te and started down the steps.

  “Remember, I move today,” said Edie.

  “I’ll be back before noon,” said Chaos. He followed Fault to the motorcycle and climbed onto the back of the seat.

  “I try to visit this guy whenever I’m out this way,” said Fault as they roared down the highway around the edge of town. “Each time I think it’s probably the last time I’ll see him. He’s a survivor, though. Back in the sixties, they tried to give him the chair.”

  “The chair?”

  “He was famous before. Part of some murder thing. He didn’t do it, though. They used to say his girlfriend killed the President. He’s just a classic scapegoat, told people things they didn’t want to hear. There’s never any percentage in being ahead of your time.”

  “Before?” It was all Chaos could do to get the question out. The wind was driving thin streams of tears out of the corners of his eyes.

  “You know,” said Fault. “Before all the rules changed.”

  Fault sped past the few cars on the highway and exited on the far side of town, onto a street filled with abandoned fast-food restaurants. He slowed down under a billboard that read: FOOZ! GET LOST IN THE WORLD’S LARGEST OUTDOOR MAZE! He stopped, cut the motor, and kicked out the stand. “That’s where he lives.”

  “In the maze?”

  “Yeah. He’s the only guy around here who doesn’t have to move all the time.”

  “I met someone who lives in an elevator,” said Chaos.

  Fault raised his eyebrows. “Vacaville used to be famous for two things: a mental hospital and a maze. Lucky’s lived in both of them.”

  “I never heard of a place with a maze before.”

  “They modeled it on a famous maze in Japan, it was Japan’s biggest tourist attraction. People coming from all over to get lost in this giant maze. But it didn’t work in translation. I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything’s neat and tidy. In America everybody’s already wandering around lost. Even before the changes.”

  America. Chaos remembered that name, too. It was the name for everything, all of this: Wyoming, California, Utah, and lots more. It wasn’t just the second word in Little America. There was a Big America, only it was so big, they didn’t have to call it that.

  “When the change came. Lucky and some other guys broke out of the hospital and hid in the maze. The others left, but Lucky never figured it out. He thinks he’s still famous. The truth is nobody would even’ notice him now. I gave up trying to explain it to him.”

  Fault led him through a brightly painted carnival entrance and into the first chamber of the maze. The high walls were covered with graffiti, some arcane, some obscene. Fault followed a series of red spray-painted arrows, and Chaos, trailing after, quickly lost his bearings.

  “Lucky,” called Fault.

  Chaos was full of questions, but he didn’t know where to begin. He wanted to ask Fault about the changes. He wanted to ask about Gwen. It was Everett that Gwen loved in the dreams, so if Chaos was really Everett . . .

  Chaos tried not to think about it.

  They turned a corner and, in a roofed-over section of the maze, found Lucky. He lay on a plastic mattress in the shade, reading a coverless paperback and humming loudly. He looked up at them and smiled, displaying a mouthful of ruined gray teeth. His face was weatherbeaten and wrinkled, and surrounded by a fringe of ratty beard. His clothes were rags.

  “Hey, Lucky,” said Fault. He reached into his leather knapsack, pulled out a couple of cans of food, and handed them to the gaunt figure. Lucky sat up on his mattress and read the labels appreciatively, then tossed the cans onto a pile of junk under a rusted card table.

  “You doing okay?” said Fault.

  Lucky shrugged and smiled again. “Not doing anything.”

  “But you’re hanging in there.”

  “Not hanging either,” said Lucky, and tittered. “They tried hanging me, Jack, they did their best. No, I’m just sitting here in this maze trying to keep the rain out of my beard and the pigs off my tail. Who’s your friend, Jack?”

  “His name is Everett, Lucky.”

  “Everett. Hmmm.” Lucky scratched at his beard, first thoughtfully and then like he’d found a flea. He seemed about to speak, but the moment stretched on and on.

  “Lucky . . .” started Fault.

  The old man suddenly straightened and glared at Chaos. “Why’d you come here?” he said.

  “What?” said Chaos.

  “Why’d you come here, Everett? What the hell are you doing in Vacaville?”

  “Everett’s been kind of out of things for a while,” said Fault. “He’s coming back to the city to see his old friends, get back in touch . . .”

  “Why can’t you let the man speak for himself, Jack?” Lucky waved his hand impatiently. “Get in touch, yeah, yeah. Where you coming from, Everett?”

  “I was living in the desert,” said Chaos.

  “Oh? I used to live in the desert.” He turned to Fault. “That’s not out of things, Jack. The desert is where it’s at.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” said Fault.

  “Yeah, I know, that’s the problem. You didn’t mean anything.” He turned back to Chaos. “Don’t let this jerkoff put you down. It’s hard coming in out of the desert. I ought to know, man. When you get back to the city, they don’t understand you anymore. Not after you been in the desert.”

  “But Everett’s from the city,” said Fault. “He’s coming back to his friends.”

  “This isn’t about friends,” said Lucky. “Is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chaos.

  “It’s about a woman, isn’t it? You’re looking for a woman. That’s what this is about. That’s why Everett’s coming back to the city. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chaos.

  “Listen, Lucky,” said Fault. “We’ve got to go.”

  “Yeah,” said Lucky. “You always gotta go. See you later, man.” He was back in his book before they’d turned the corner.

  “Sorry about that,” said Fault on their way out of the maze. “He doesn’t usually get so weird.”

  “It’s okay,” said Chaos, still full of questions. He almost wondered if he was still on the couch beside Edie, dreaming. The maze was strange enough, in fact, for a Kellogg dream. But when they walked back out to the motorcycle and he saw the hills above Vacaville, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. Or rather, that his life and his dreams were finally coming together.

  “Billy?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “When did it happen? The changes, I mean.”

  “A few years ago.”

  “What happened?”

  Fault grinned, showing his gums again. “That’s a big question, Everett. Basically a lot of the old connections between things fell away, which gave people a chance to make up new ones. But the new ones don’t always stick. That’s my version, anyway. People like Cale have got a lot of complicated ideas about it.”

  “But there was a disaster of some kind.”

  “I don’t personally consider it exactly a disaster . . .”

  “There’s a lot I don’t remember, Billy.”

  Fault looked impatient with the conversation. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Want to go find something to eat?” He patted the end of the seat.

  “Sure,” said Chaos. He got onto the motorcycle. The sun was high now, not quite overhead. He wanted to get back to Edie and Melinda in time for the move, but he was hungry too. He also wanted to ride on the motorcycle again, wanted to feel the wind. In fact, he sort of wanted to ride Fault’s motorcycle without Fault on it. He didn’t suggest it.

  At the mall they got in line for one of the cash machines. Fault was armed with a bootleg bank card. He’d steered them confidently into the middle of town, seeming comfortable here, but they were drawing a lot of stares from the people in cars, on the sidewalks, and in the parking lot of the mall. Chaos hadn’t seen any other motorcycles in Vacaville yet and he felt conspicu
ous.

  Fault coaxed money out of the machine and led Chaos to Palmer O’Brien’s, a restaurant named after a character Chaos had seen on Edie’s television, a sort of rockabilly singer turned maverick government man. Inside, over the counter, was a huge blowup poster of O’Brien with a guitar, and the menu, which Chaos and Fault found printed on the laminated placemats at their booth, featured Palmer’s Breakfast Scramble, Palmer’s Club Sandwich, and The O’Brien Boiled Dinner, all the hero’s favorites. And apparently he really ate there, or had once: the walls featured several framed glossies of O’Brien at various booths and visiting the grateful slobs in the kitchen.

  The restaurant was full but very quiet, and Chaos felt the weight of attention on them as they sat down. Were they just unfamiliar faces in a local hangout, or was there something in Fault’s manner that said he didn’t belong? Chaos hadn’t attracted so many stares at the mall two days before, but then he’d been in Edie’s company. Whatever the reason, when the waitress came to take their order, it was as though the whole restaurant was listening to see what they would eat.

  Chaos ordered a ham sandwich. Fault studied the menu, keeping the girl waiting, then giggled to himself. “I don’t know,” he said, looking up, “I don’t see it here . . .”

  “Yes?” said the waitress impatiently. She was young and had a natural pout.

  “Could you bring me Palmer O’Brien’s Head on a Platter?”

  It got so quiet in the room that Chaos could hear people shifting in their seats as they turned to look at Fault. The waitress stood back on her heels and scowled.

  “Just kidding,” said Fault, still giggling. “I’ll have what he had . . .”

  But she was walking away, and it wasn’t clear that she’d heard him. She certainly hadn’t jotted anything down; her pencil was back behind her ear.

  Fault sank into the booth and screwed up his face sarcastically. Very gradually the conversations around them resumed.

  “Fucking sheep,” said Fault quietly. “I wouldn’t live in this place if you paid me. Everybody in love with their little tin god soap opera stars . . .”