Amnesia Moon

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Well, a lot of things don’t make sense. I’ve learned not to trust what I see on television, that’s all. People telling you they’re your friends, looking all charismatic. I thought you knew better.”

  “This isn’t television like you have here. It’s a tape. It’s images of people I know talking to me on a tape.”

  “Well, it sure looked like television to me.”

  “You’re not being reasonable, Edie. Besides, that’s not the point. That’s not why I have to go. Ian says I have to take his test. He won’t leave us alone, Edie. He’ll do whatever it takes to split us apart.”

  Her eyes grew wide and hopeful. “That’s not important, Chaos. We can deal with Ian—”

  “He’s from the government, he can do anything he wants. He’s only holding back because he thinks he can have you. If I stay, he’ll ruin your life and call it luck. He’ll take you away from your kids.”

  She was quiet for a minute, and then said, half to herself, “You’re only trying to make it seem like it’s for me that you’re going away.”

  “No . . .”

  “Yes. You tell me it’s for my own good. And then Ian will come and tell me it’s more proof of my bad luck. You’ll just make him right if you go. Everything happens to me. Ian’s right.”

  “No. If I stay and take his test, then we’ll both have to do what he says. I’m leaving because I don’t believe in luck.”

  “Why can’t you be honest? You’re leaving because you want to see that woman.”

  The word woman sat there between them, ringing in the silence. Chaos couldn’t think of anything to say to displace it.

  “It’s okay,” said Edie. “You have to find out. You can’t just keep wondering. I understand. You have to go.” She hesitated, and added, “I can’t live with your dreams anymore anyway. I feel like I’m sleeping with her.”

  “It’s not just about her,” said Chaos. “It’s about me. Who I was before.”

  “Okay.” She ate another cracker. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  He felt beaten, despite getting what he wanted.

  “What about Melinda?” she asked.

  “Can she stay here with you?” He didn’t want Melinda along. And Edie might see it as a promise that he’d come back. He didn’t know if it was.

  She hesitated, then said, “All right.”

  But Melinda was standing in the kitchen doorway. The television played unwatched in the other room.

  “You jerk,” she said. “You’re going to see that girl.”

  “I’ll be gone a day or two,” he said, fumbling.

  “What, you think I want to go with you?” Her eyes were wet, but her scowl didn’t allow any weakness. “You jerk. You’re just like Kellogg with your stupid dreams. I hate it.”

  Melinda and Edie slept in the two bedrooms that night, and Chaos sat in the living room watching the television until he fell asleep with it on. He woke to sunlight, a test pattern, and the sound of Fault’s motorcycle revving down in the street.

  Everett remembered San Francisco.

  Fault took him through it the long way, through the Submission District, before climbing the hill into No Alley. The streets of the Submission were alive, teeming, the solar neon glowing, the sidewalks hectic with peddlers, the roads clotted with traffic, animal, mechanical, and pedestrian. Steambath proprietors stood beside their cubicles hawking quarter-hour sessions to the street people. Customers squirmed into taquerias past drunks and children and pickpockets and drunken pickpockets and child pickpockets and drunken children. Half-completed sex-changes leaned out of the windows above the shops and shrieked to one another across the street. The stream of traffic parted, scooting dogs, vendors, and Fault’s motorcycle up onto the sidewalk to make way for a gigantic two-wheeled RVcycle, its bloated kitchenette body aloft with antigrav.

  It was just as Everett remembered, but it was changed, too. Or maybe it was Everett who had changed. The city had always been in ruins, a place that had never cohered. There were probably people living here who thought that there had been no rift. Everett suspected that if he stayed in the city, he might eventually come to agree with them.

  Fault tried to swing back into the street, but a corroded televangelist robot staggered into their path, blocking the motorcycle. Its ferroplastic limbs creaked with every movement, and when it knelt to bless the ground, Everett saw that strips of shredded rubber hung from its soles. Fault honked his horn. The televangelist looked up. The computer graphic face of its television head babbled and ranted quietly as its video eye stared, taking them in.

  Everett remembered the machines, though he’d never before seen one in such disrepair. Ordinarily, they’d launch into street-corner sermons at every opportunity, trying to convert unbelievers to a variety of faiths. This one was preaching to no one but itself.

  Fault honked again. The face on the screen, a corpulent, middle-aged country preacher, wrinkled its chin and frowned. “Lost sheep,” it muttered. “In need perhaps of a shepherd?”

  “Get out of the way,” said Fault.

  The televangelist only planted itself more firmly and lifted an accusing finger. “Or devils, perhaps . . .”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Fault, and he began backing up, pushing with his heels on the pavement, to get clear of the robot.

  “You speak the name of your master, devil,” fumed the televangelist. Pamphlets spilled out of the pockets of its ragged tunic, littering the sidewalk.

  Fault rolled clear and then sped away around the robot, back into the crowded street. Soon they were out of the Submission and into the hills.

  Everett remembered Fault now. It was with as much contempt as affection. Everett and Cale had been friends. Fault a third who dogged their steps, the last to get any joke. That was how the memory went. Everett felt stupid that Fault had herded Chaos blindly around Vacaville, getting him into trouble at the mall. Everett could have avoided it easily, but Chaos hadn’t known any better.

  Stupid Chaos, Everett thought. But he got me through.

  No Alley was shrouded in mist. As they rode into it, Everett thought suddenly of the green. He shook it off. A seamless green fog in the mountains was something quite different from the bank of white that covered the hills of the Alley. San Francisco was supposed to be foggy.

  Still, they seemed to have ridden out of the city into a zone of erasures. An occasional rooftop broke through the cloud, and the street was visible at either side. But while the streets of the Submission had been full of parked or junked cars, here the curb was empty, and past it gates and stairways led up into the haze.

  When Fault stopped at the gate of the Hotchkiss house, Everett felt a shock of recognition. The house loomed behind a veil of cypress trees, aloof and protected. The upper story was mostly glass, the Victorian architecture ripped out and replaced with a modern greenhouse window. It seemed to reflect glints of sunlight, though there was no sun, and Everett’s eyes hurt when he looked up at it. Fault parked the motorcycle just inside the gate, and they walked up the driveway to the house together in silence.

  Fault went down the concrete steps to the basement apartment. Everett looked at the upstairs doorway, remembering more. “Cale still lives with his father?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The basement had been headquarters for Everett and Cale, the place where they’d told the jokes that Fault got last. Now it had reverted to some primal hideout. The floor was littered with laundry and bedclothes, and Cale’s books and computers were gone.

  “Where’s Cale?” asked Everett.

  “This is my place now,” said Fault. “Want a beer?”

  Everett shrugged.

  “Here.” Fault went to the refrigerator, a giant, battered, eggshell-colored antique patched with glue spots from scraped-away decals. Its door was padlocked. Fault dug in his pocket for a key and undid the lock. When he opened the door, Everett caught sight of the contents: six-packs were jammed in sideways to fill the lower shelves, and the
top shelf and door racks were filled with stoppered test tubes.

  Fault handed Everett a beer, took one for himself, and carefully repadlocked the door. Everett examined the bottle. The cap had been screwed back on with a tool, pliers maybe, that had sheared away the metal ridges as well as parts of the glass threading. The label, pasted on over the bleached remains of a previous one, read: WALT’S REGULAR ALE. He tasted it: homemade. A step above the bathtub gin he’d been drinking in Hatfork, but only a step.

  “Where’s Cale?” asked Everett again. He thought, too. Where’s Gwen? but didn’t say it.

  “Relax,” said Fault, pausing to chug at his beer. “You ought to see Ilford first.”

  “Ilford?” Everett was unsure of the name.

  “Cale’s dad. He’s been waiting for you,” said Fault, slurping. “He wants to see you, welcome you back.”

  “You told him I was coming here?”

  “Didn’t have to tell him. Your dreams get around, Everett.” The nursing sounds accelerated until Fault had reduced his beer to a bottle of suds. He set it on the floor and said, “Let’s go.”

  Everett followed him outside, up the flagstone steps to the front entrance of the main house. Fault left the door to the basement apartment ajar. With his beer and test tubes secure, there was nothing else in the apartment worth protecting, apparently. The fog had tucked in closer, now veiling even the gate where Fault had parked the motorcycle. At the door he turned and took the half-full beer from Everett’s hand and hid it in the bushes at the side of the doorway. “Get that later,” he said, as if it was an explanation.

  They went into the house, and Everett felt his senses immediately overwhelmed. The living room was like a museum, the walls covered with paintings, the antique furniture polished to a creamy glow. The glass coffee table held an ornamented golden clock with a pendulum that clacked softly and sent a shivery golden reflection running back and forth across the glass. Everett was hypnotized by the room, so dazzled and drunk that he wanted to lie down. After the apartment downstairs, not to mention the homes in Vacaville, it was like stepping onto a movie set. Fault immediately seemed froglike and compromising; Everett wanted to step away from him, not be associated.

  As strange as the room was, it carried the same charge as Cale Hotchkiss’s face on the videotape: Everett remembered it. Then Ilford Hotchkiss stepped into the room, and Everett had to wonder if he really remembered anything at all.

  He was too young to be the father of the man on the tape. He was exactly Everett’s size, but so upright and hard, his hair and eyes each like glossy stone, like marble, that he seemed immense, a portion of the room that had broken off to offer a handshake. At the same time he was so groomed and fine that he seemed miniaturized, a jewel-like mechanism like the golden clock or one of the bonsai trees that lined the mantel. His hair was gray at the temples, but the gray seemed just a polite touch, a ruse. Like the room, he looked better than anyone Everett—or Chaos—had ever seen.

  He also looked too much like his own son. A part of Everett was sure this was the one on the videotape, altered just enough to impersonate his own father, and he almost blurted “Cale—” as the man stepped up and took his hand.

  “Billy,” Ilford said, looking straight into Everett’s eyes, “why don’t you fix us a drink? Scotch all right, Everett?”

  Everett nodded absently, and Fault scurried over to the bar. Ilford led Everett to a chair and seated himself on the couch on the other side of the glass table and shimmering clock. Fault handed them each a drink in a square, beveled glass, a sharp contrast to the recycled beer bottle Everett had just surrendered. The glass weighed so much, it felt magnetized to the floor, and the liquor smelled so rich and intense, it didn’t seem to need drinking.

  “It’s extraordinary to see you, Everett.” Ilford’s smile was waxen, and his eyes bored into Everett’s, searching—for what? Recognition? Complicity?

  Everett took a sip of the whiskey, stared into the glass.

  “I heard you’ve been in Vacaville,” said Ilford evenly.

  “Yes.”

  “Quite a scene.”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, what did you think of it?”

  “Like you say, quite a scene.” Everett wanted to grab the man and scream, Who are you? Where’s Cale? Where’s Gwen?

  “Well, compared to that scene I think we’ve got something pretty good here.”

  “You mean San Francisco?”

  “More specifically the Alley. It’s very local. I’m sure you’ve noticed how local things can get nowadays.”

  “You don’t have . . .” Everett waved his hand, wanting it to be understood without his having to say it. “You don’t have someone in charge here? You know, that way?”

  Ilford laughed without opening his mouth, then said, “Not that way.”

  Fault came back with his own drink, a glass almost level to the top with brown liquor. “Everett doesn’t need convincing,” he said, grinning. “He came halfway across the fucking country to find us.”

  Everett took another gulp of his whiskey, then raised his eyes and considered again the man seated on the other side of the table. Ilford Hotchkiss appeared to waver in and out of focus, as though struggling unsuccessfully to cohere, but when his eyes met Everett’s, he reassembled his tense smile, and the rest of him gelled around it. Am I drunk? Everett wondered. He set the tumbler down with a too-loud thwack on the glass and leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes. He wanted to squeeze away the shimmer of the room, the overprecise details in the paintings and bonsai trees and Ilford’s confusing face, but they remained etched into his vision, as though printed on the inside of his eyelids. And his ears couldn’t shut out the racket of the clock.

  “Something the matter?” said Ilford.

  “He’s beat,” said Fault.

  Fault and Ilford, the hovering pair of them, were absurd and horrible. They were gargoyles at the rim of a void, a void consisting of the absence of Cale and Gwen. Cale and Gwen were his true destination, the lure that brought him here and held him.

  But he was stuck instead with Fault and Ilford.

  What kind of deal had been struck in this house?

  He was suddenly desperately weak. A straight line ran from Chaos’s argument with Edie the night before to Everett’s pouring whiskey on top of beer just now. It was too much, he was too many people, one too many at least. And so was Ilford Hotchkiss.

  It was raining when he woke very early the next morning. The house was silent. He’d been put to bed in a spare, clean room whose windowpane was gently raked by wet eucalyptus leaves. He slipped out from under the covers, dressed in new clothes from the dresser, and tiptoed downstairs. The rain had failed to disperse the fog; the house was still isolated, like a figurine in a milky fishbowl. He went outside, still in his bare feet, and stood in the cold wet wind and breathed the morning air. The water spilled off the roof in a line of drops onto the flagstones that led around the corner of the house and down to the basement apartment. He tiptoed back through the house and upstairs to put on his shoes, then went through the rain down the steps.

  There in the squalor of what had been Cale’s apartment sat Fault, slumped in a chair by the window, watching the rain. He turned and smiled vaguely at Everett, and said, “Up early.”

  Everett felt voiceless, as though he’d wandered from his bed only in a dream.

  Fault waved carelessly. “Sit down.”

  Everett sat in the free chair where it stood, rather than pulling it up closer to Fault.

  “You can’t tell Ilford,” said Fault warningly.

  “Tell Ilford what?”

  “That Cale’s here.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem, Billy. Because Cale’s not here.”

  “Oh, he’s here, all right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I visit with Cale every morning when it rains. Lately it rains every morning.”

  Fault was insane, Everett saw now. But, then, where
did the video come from?

  “I mean, he’s not here now.” Fault jumped up from his seat, suddenly animated. “He wore off just before you came in. But there’s more.”

  “More where?” Everett didn’t mind playing along.

  “In the fridge.”

  “There’s more Cale in the fridge.”

  “Right. My stash.”

  Everett sighed. “Well, then, break some out. Don’t be selfish.”

  “But you can’t tell Ilford.” Fault began digging in his pocket for the padlock key.

  “I won’t.”

  Fault opened the lock and leaned into the refrigerator. He emerged with one of the stoppered test tubes in one hand, a syringe in the other, and nudged the door shut again with his foot.

  “Here you go,” he said musingly, then uncorked the vial with his teeth. “Gib me an arb,” he said around the cork as he deftly plunged the syringe so that it filled with the contents of the tube.

  “What?”

  Fault spat out the little cork and said: “Arm.”

  Everett stared dumbly.

  “C’mon, roll up your sleeve.”

  The rain clattered on the stones outside, heavy and inevitable. Beyond that there was only fog. Everett could feel the weight of the house above them, the gleaming living room, the golden clock, the cabinet full of amber whiskey, all pressing down on the squalid apartment. Fault loomed towards him, smiling raggedly, the ready syringe held softly at his waist. Everett imagined that his entire journey from Hatfork had led to this moment, to this phantom house in what should have been a city but was only an island in fog, and that his destination had been condensed to a pinprick point. He rolled up his sleeve and held out his arm.

  “Everett.”

  Cale was sitting across from him, on an invisible chair in a featureless expanse of blank space. It was the Cale from before, the Cale from the videotape he had viewed as Chaos back in Vacaville. The friend he remembered. But, actually, couldn’t remember, not in any way that held together or matched what he’d found here.