Fault, the room, the window, were all gone.
“You’re here,” said Cale. He smiled, leaned forward, but didn’t extend his hand.
“I guess I am,” Everett heard himself say.
Anyway I’m somewhere, he thought. And you’re in it, this somewhere I’m at. We’re in it together.
“There’s a lot we have to talk about.”
There was a staggering understatement. “Your father—” Everett began.
“Fuck Ilford. He’s not important. Leave him out of this.”
“Okay,” said Everett.
It made a kind of symmetry, at least, with Fault’s injunction against telling Ilford about Cale.
Everett turned his head, wanting to grasp the nature of this null-zone that had replaced the world. Behind him lay only depthless gloom, a gray that might be as near as his eyelids, as far as the stars. Staring at it produced a sensation at once vertiginous and claustrophobic.
He turned back. Cale was seated at a comfortable distance. He was the only point of reference, the only marker of scale.
“Cale—”
“Yes?”
“There’s a lot I don’t remember. Or understand.”
“You remember me?”
You as a drug in a test tube, or as a ghost lurking behind your father’s features? Everett wanted to ask.
No, the one he should remember was a man living in a basement apartment, a friend.
With all he’d reclaimed when he rode on Fault’s motorcycle out of Vacaville and into San Francisco, Everett was still adrift. And here, in a city of erasures, things had narrowed to him and Cale.
Ask me the question again about the train yard, he thought, wanting to relive the tangibility of that moment.
“I remember you from before,” he said simply.
“And then what?”
“And then I remember Hatfork. A town in Wyoming. Being a man named Chaos.”
“You don’t remember the break?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s like a jump cut in a movie. Everyone is missing something.”
Like you, for instance, Everett wanted to say. Missing a body.
Then he wondered: Was that better or worse than what he was missing?
“I came to see Gwen,” Everett said. “I remembered her. That’s what brought me back.”
“I know.”
“She was on the tape that Fault—”
“You can see her in a minute.”
Cale said this casually, but it wasn’t a casual thing to Everett. The idea that Gwen could be a minute away, whatever kind of minute that might be, was disturbing.
“First tell me about Hatfork,” Cale went on. “I know some of it from your dreams, and from Fault. But I want to hear it from you. Tell me about Kellogg.”
So Everett laid it all out. Kellogg and Little America, the cars, the hoards of cans, then Melinda, the trip west, and Edie. He was amazed at the flow of words, the sound of his own voice; it was the most he’d said aloud for as long as he could remember. He realized, reaching the end, that he was trying to strike a bargain, one where he’d get back as much as he gave.
Afterwards, however, they sat in silence. Cale looked preoccupied, staring off into the blankness of the space they shared, as though he saw something there.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Cale finally. “I should get you to Gwen before the dose wears off.”
“I told you what I know,” said Everett.
“I’m sure you did,” said Cale. He seemed dissipated. “It’s funny, though. You have a way of leaving yourself out of the story.” He reached into the void at his left and turned an invisible door handle, which clicked audibly.
“What do you mean?” said Everett, watching as a doorway swung open. Beyond it lay a greater darkness. He craned his neck, tried to focus, but couldn’t see anything. Staring only made the gloom dance with illusory swirls of static.
“You deserve more credit, that’s all.” Cale’s voice had grown dim. “You had a lot to do with the things you saw.” He pointed. “Go inside.”
Without intending to move, Everett fell forward and through the doorway.
The white outlines of a room were sketched into the black space. He turned back, to see Cale still seated in his nothingness. “Go,” Cale croaked.
Everett turned and swam forward.
She sat on the edge of a white-outlined bed. She was dressed in something black that merged with the background, so that her face and hands were radiant, afloat. It was the image from the tape, and from his dreams. Gwen.
“Everett.” She moved the hair from her face and smiled shyly. “I’ve been waiting . . .” She looked down, her hair falling again. When she looked up a moment later, her eyes were shiny with tears. “Is it really you?”
“Yes,” he blurted.
“Cale said you were coming. From the dreams. I couldn’t believe it. Even Fault, everybody dreaming about you. Except me.”
“I can’t control it, the dreaming—”
“I know. It doesn’t matter.” She looked into his eyes, then away. “Come here.”
He went and sat beside her on the bed. He felt her weight as her hip slid against his. He touched her shoulder. She reached up and took his hand, brought it to her lap. Their fingers curled together.
“I haven’t been the same without you,” she said. “I’m only half a thing. I don’t know how to begin to tell you—”
“It’s the same for me,” he said. He thought it might be. “I was—lost. I wasn’t myself.”
“Lost where?”
“In—forgetting.” Their words went in circles, unmoored in reality. But it didn’t matter. Their words weren’t the point.
“You forgot me?” she said.
“I forgot everything. Until yesterday I was somebody else. I don’t even remember how we got—apart.”
She looked down.
“You didn’t forget me?” he said. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“No. Something else happened to me. But I never forgot you, Everett. I think I came closer to forgetting myself.”
“But I forgot myself, too,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened to me. And I remembered you again before anything else. In my dreams, I mean.”
She smiled. “You didn’t forget yourself the way I did.”
“What—”
She touched his cheek. “It’s hard to explain. All that was left was memories of you, of us together. I had to re-create myself from that. That’s why it hurt, just now, when you said you forgot me.”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Everything is very strange here. Cale—was he so angry before?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“There’s still stuff missing. A time in between. The house I lived in, by the water.”
“Your house, you mean. When you left the city.”
“When I left the city,” he echoed. “How long ago was that?”
She shook her head.
“What?”
“Don’t ask me that.” She turned away.
“Is something the matter?” he asked, confused. Something was definitely the matter for him: a grainy inconsistency at the edges of his vision, as though his eyes were shut too tight. Fault’s injection, its hold on him, was beginning to fail.
“No, just—”
She kissed him. First on the side of his mouth, a flash of skin and breath he rushed to meet, only to have it gone. Then she leaned forward again, her lips parted, her tongue visible between them, and when he met her lips, she didn’t disappear, but pressed to him instead. He tasted her, felt his body flush instantly.
“Gwen—”
Then she was gone, and Everett was back with Fault, in the basement apartment, seated at the long window. The rain was still coming down.
He stood with Ilford and Fault on the rocks at the far end of Alcatraz Island, just above the lappin
g edge of the water. The sky was sensationally blue and clear, the air cold. The abandoned prison made Everett think of the Vacaville maze. And the ocean, visible through the bracket of the Golden Gape Bridge, marked the end of his journey west. It was another desert, but not one he could cross in a stolen car.
After the rain Fault and Ilford had driven him across the city and then taken him in a boat to the island, not explaining why. Everett felt that they both wanted to leave Cale, the memory or the fact of him, behind at the house. But Cale was alive in his father’s features, so much that Everett flinched at the sight of it. Couldn’t Fault see this too?
A seagull wheeled over the rocks and foam and into the middle of their view, then flew in place there against the wind, wings straining, feathers flattened, making no particular progress.
“How long were you in Hatfork?” Ilford asked suddenly.
Everett was surprised at the question, but he knew the answer. “At least five years.”
“It’s been less than two years since the break,” said Ilford.
“I was in Hatfork five years.”
Ilford and Fault exchanged a look. The seagull turned in the direction of the wind and disappeared. “You said the cars there ran on gas?” said Ilford.
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it have broken down chemically in the tanks?”
“He’s right, Everett,” said Fault. “Gas doesn’t stay good that long.”
What did it matter if more holes were poked in his reality? Yet he felt Chaos’s five years in Hatfork as a part of him, a limb. Those years had happened to someone, somewhere.
“Okay,” he said. “Two years. Two years since what?”
“Sorry?”
“When you say the break, what do you mean?”
“There’s no one explanation, Everett. People remember some kind of disaster. But there’s no agreement on what it was. You’ve seen that firsthand, more than any of us have.”
How did Ilford know? Everett wondered. He’d told his story to Cale, no one else. Not Fault, and certainly not Ilford. Do my dreams reveal that much?
Or was he talking to Cale now?
Everett stole another glance at Ilford, who stood staring off at the sea. But trying to sort out the blurred features of father and son only gave him a headache. Fault saw him looking and grinned ruefully, as if to say, Don’t bother.
“You’re like Kellogg, you know,” said Ilford.
“What does that mean?” Everett blurted, though the accusation was all too familiar. Melinda. Kellogg himself.
Maybe Ilford got his information direct from Kellogg, thought Everett sourly. That would account for a lot.
“You’re one of the ones that make things happen, make things the way they are. Hatfork, Little America, that was as much your work as Kellogg’s.”
“I’m the opposite,” protested Everett. “I’m a universal antenna. Whatever the local concept, I fall for it.”
“You’re receiving, but you’re also sending. Warping the local concept.”
Everett recalled the food in Hatfork, the soup made from dogs and cats. The idea that he might have been responsible for the way people lived there made him feel physically ill.
“Nuclear fear was Kellogg’s obsession. That wasn’t my disaster.”
“Your influence is subtle.”
“Weak is the word for it.”
“You’ve been unaware of your ability. That’s the only limitation.”
“I’d rather stay unaware of it.”
They fell silent, staring together out over the ocean.
“Why did you come here, Everett?” Ilford asked.
Everett didn’t reply.
“He’s looking for a girl, Ilford,” said Billy Fault. “A particular girl.”
“A girl,” Ilford repeated skeptically.
Everett wanted to ask Ilford if he knew Gwen, but stopped himself, remembering his promise to Fault not to speak of the vials in the refrigerator, of Cale.
“You’re too fixated on the past,” said Ilford. “You can’t go back. Especially when you’re changing things as you go along. You can’t reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.”
Everett wanted to ask: What about Cale? Who touched him and made him change? Because it wasn’t me.
He turned away from the water, towards the massive, ruined prison. It loomed against the bright sky like a gnarled face. He began picking his way up across the rocks to the concrete embankment that bordered the island. Ilford and Fault went after him.
Back at the pier, they got back in the boat and cruised out into the bay in silence. Everett felt tiny and vulnerable in the boat, chafed by the wind and sun, the water beneath them a bottomless mystery. He thought of Kellogg’s dream of the ocean, of the desert’s reversion to water. A dream of longing, it seem to him now. The earth itself was unchangeable, the endless tracts of sand and water and pavement. It was the people, the perturbable madmen who roamed its surface, who viewed the world as transient and broken. Everett wished the earth could somehow reach up and still them, the crazy people, and invest them with its silence and permanence and depth.
“I’d like to go in the opposite direction,” he said suddenly to Ilford. “I’d rather find a way to stop the dreams.”
“You don’t have to choose. You could make the world and your dreams fit together.”
“Then I would be like Kellogg,” said Everett. “Or one of the others. The ones who run Vacaville. You don’t want that here.” He didn’t say that he thought No Alley was already under some subtle control, that things in San Francisco were oddly wrong.
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” said Ilford. He sat at the wheel, steering carelessly, bumping the boat over the waves towards the glittering margin of the city. “There’ll be a little party at the house tonight. Talk to my friends.”
He went into the kitchen first, avoiding the party, and lost himself in the splendor of Ilford’s food. After five years of starvation—at least he remembered five years of starvation—the bounty was intoxicating. He blundered past the spread on the counter, into the cupboard, looking for dishes. Instead he found stores that would have fed the Little Americans for a month: shelves loaded with cans, not raw staples like beans or soup stock but delicacies; pimentos, tiny fish in mustard, pickled asparagus and hearts of palm. He forgot to eat, began exploring out of fascination. One cabinet was loaded with bottles of the scotch Ilford had served the night before, another with flasks of balsamic vinegar, jars of roasted red peppers, and bags of macadamia nuts. A freezer on the floor was squeezed full of enormous cuts of beef and lamb.
He moved back through the kitchen in a daze, piled up a cartoonish plate of cold meats and salad at the counter, and took it out to the living room.
The small knot of people seemed dwarfed in the glow of Ilford’s house, and the murmur of their conversation echoed softly as though it were being absorbed into the furnishings of the room. Outside, the fog had closed up to the windows again. How had they gotten here? Everett wondered. Where had they come from? It was as if Ilford had stocked his place with guests from some storage area and stuck them into place around the chairs and sofa like candles into a holder.
“Dawn Crash,” said a woman, inserting herself in front of him and sticking out her hand. She was Ilford’s age, and Ilford’s type: well preserved, too fit for her years, the flesh of her face seamless and well tanned, her posture unnaturally upright, her eyes threateningly bright and eager. Everett found her incredibly attractive.
“Hey, Dawn,” said Billy Fault, slipping between them.
“Hello, Billy. Introduce me to your friend.”
Everett set his plate on the coffee table, shook her hand, and told her his name. He had the feeling it wasn’t a surprise. The woman pressed closer, her stance excluding Fault. “I thought it was you. Ilford says you’re staying for a while.”
“Maybe.”
“Good. Perhaps we’ll be working together—” She was interrupted by the arriva
l of Ilford and another man, who with his shaved head and heavy black glasses reminded Everett of the mad doctor in a movie he’d seen on Edie’s television. The doctor in the movie had been apprehended by President Kentman himself, in a thrilling shoot-out at a gas station.
“Harriman, this is Everett Moon,” said Ilford. “Everett, meet Harriman Crash.”
“Hello,” said Everett, disconcerted. Was Moon his last name? He’d heard it before—and then remembered where. The green, at White Walnut. Moon was his name in fog, apparently. “I’m sorry. Your name is—Harriman?”
“Right,” grinned the bald man. “Harriman Crash. But you can call me Harry.” The woman glowered now. Everett and Harriman shook hands.
Everyone paused to sip at drinks. Everett took the chance to tear off a corner of a roast-beef sandwich from his plate and cram it into his mouth. Nobody else was eating.
“Excuse me,” said Ilford. “I should play host.” He leaned in close to Everett. “We’ll talk later,” he said in a tone of reassurance. “Harry knows a lot about your situation.” He patted Everett on the elbow and moved away. Fault trailed after him.
“So,” said Harriman, still smiling, lifting his glass, “you’re our new star around here. How do you like it?”
Everett was baffled. Dawn rescued him from having to answer. “Don’t be an ass, Harry,” she said. “Everett doesn’t know the first thing about it. He doesn’t even know if he’s staying.”
“But you’re considering working with us,” Harry went on, intent. “Isn’t that right?”
He managed to find his voice, but only to say, “I’m not sure what that would mean.”
“Very good. Neither are we. But it would be interesting to explore the possibilities. This is a time of possibilities, don’t you agree?”
Everett couldn’t argue with that. He said, “I guess so far I’d been worrying more about, uh, personal possibilities.”
Harriman Crash shook his head. “Same thing. Especially for someone with your particular talents. Exploring one is going to mean exploring the other.”
“You’re being pretentious, Harry,” said Dawn. “And moralistic.” She lit a cigarette, and Everett felt a pang. Did he smoke? Chaos had, anyway. He hoped that Dawn would offer him one. “Everett’s idea of personal possibilities is much more interesting to him, I’m sure.”
Amnesia Moon Page 13
