Amnesia Moon

by Jonathan Lethem

  Everett went past him to the door, pausing only to check that the motorcycle keys were safe in his pocket.

  He led the televangelist out of the rain, into the shelter of an abandoned storefront on a sidestreet off Submission. The onscreen face looked bewildered.

  “I have something for you,” he said, and took out the vial from Fault’s refrigerator.

  The video face stared. “What is it?”

  “What you’ve been looking for, I think. God.” He pressed it into the televangelist’s ferroplastic palm. “Be careful with it. Store in a cool, dry place.”

  “What kind of God is it?” asked the robot.

  “The world-making kind,” Everett said. “The kind you’re missing. It knows about wanting to be real instead of programmed, things you want to know. This is the first time it’s been available in this form.”

  The face frowned. “The first time?”

  “Yes. There’s a lot of bogus God going around. But this is the real thing.”

  “How can I—access this God?”

  “A problem,” he admitted. “You and your friends will have to figure that out. You have to take it in somehow. Let it alter your program.”

  He looked at the televised face and imagined Cale there instead. Like the face from the videotape he’d watched in Vacaville. Full circle. Only now Edie would be right. Cale would exist only on television.

  He wondered if the robots would go up the hill and kill Ilford, when Cale got inside them.

  “Thank you,” said the televangelist.

  “You’re welcome.”

  The robot strode purposefully into the rain. Everett watched it walk away, then he went back to the motorcycle.

  Ten minutes later he crossed the hump of the bridge over the bay, and the tall buildings dropped out of sight behind him. In the Oakland hills he rode out of the rain. The highway was empty, and he didn’t have to stop until the bike ran out of gas a few miles short of Vacaville.

  He junked it and, for the second time, walked in.

  Things were different. He noticed that from the first. Nobody he passed on the street seemed right. As in the mirror room of a funhouse, everyone was taller or shorter or wider than they should be, or else they were missing a limb or two. He saw an albino and a dwarf and a man with a footlong nose, but he didn’t see anyone he recognized. Nobody was proportioned right. It gave him a headache. And they all slinked along the sidewalks like they barely had a right to be there, avoiding one another’s eyes, and his.

  It was nearly sundown. He found his way downtown, where he made an immensely fat woman on a park bench look up from the comic book she was reading—it featured svelte, well-proportioned government stars—and give him directions to the luck-testing offices. She blinked out at him through her mask of flesh and pointed the way.

  He found Cooley’s office, but Cooley wasn’t there. His secretary was a woman with a set of complicated braces supporting spindly, withered legs. She looked at him suspiciously, but when he gave the name Chaos, her eyes widened.

  “I need to know where Edie Bitter moved,” he said. “Where she’s living now.”

  “Mr. Cooley needs to talk to you,” she said. “He’ll want to know you’re here.”

  “I’ll talk to Ian later. He’ll be able to find me.”

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Please wait outside.”

  He went out into the hallway, to be stared at by a shrunken man who sat waiting perched on the edge of a bench. Everett nodded, and the man nodded back, smiling.

  “You’re pretty, but I’m not in love with you,” said the man.

  “What?” said Everett.

  “You’re pretty, but I’m not in love with you. I don’t even know you. Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You must be here because they’re going to make you famous now. Is that right?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be modest. I probably ought to get your autograph. You’ll be on TV. The girls will love you. We’ll all love you.”

  “No, really.”

  “Then you must be in trouble. It’s got to be against the law to be so good-looking if you’re not one of them.”

  The conversation was interrupted by the clatter of the secretary appearing on her ungainly, stiltlike braces. She glared at Everett and the dwarf angrily.

  “Here.” She handed Everett a slip of paper. “I called Mr. Cooley. You can go now. That’s the address. He says he’ll see you tomorrow. After you get adjusted.”

  “Adjusted?”

  She frowned. “Look, I don’t know who you think you are, Mr. Chaos. But you’re showing very little respect for—the way we do things around here.”

  “I’ve been away.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I’ve got questions—”

  “Save them for Ian. Please go.” She turned and hobbled back into the office.

  He walked to the eastern edge of town, the windows ahead reflecting flashes of the low orange sun behind him. The streets he passed were increasingly residential and quiet. He found the address on the note, a two-story apartment building, the upper floor cantilevered out over a parking space. Edie’s station wagon was in the lot.

  The woman who came to the door presented a problem. She was Edie, but she also wasn’t. She was about four feet tall, taller than the man at Cooley’s office but not by much. Her body wasn’t disproportionate, though. A midget, he thought, not a dwarf, remembering the distinction.

  She had Edie’s features drawn in precise miniature on her face.

  “Chaos?” she said, her voice high but recognizable.

  “Yes,” he said, and then didn’t know what else to say.

  “Do you want to come in?” she said.

  He nodded and followed her inside.

  The scene there was a bizarre analogue of the one he’d left: two boys watching television. But Ray was enormously fat. As wide as he was tall, he took up half the couch. Dave sat on one of the arms. At first Everett assumed he was just making room for his brother. Then he spotted Dave’s tail, protruding through a gap in the back of his pants and hanging down the side of the couch.

  Melinda came out of the bedroom. She hadn’t changed. She looked from Everett to Edie to Everett, then ran up and threw her arms around him.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” she said, her face pressed against his side.

  “It took longer than I thought.” He met Edie’s eyes as he said this.

  Melinda backed away. “I saw you in Hatfork. You’remember that?”

  “Yes,” he said, surprised.

  “Thought I was going crazy.”

  Edie left, walking on her tiny legs into the kitchen. Ray and Dave just sat and stared at Everett, the television blaring behind them.

  “Melinda,” said Everett. “Would you take Ray and Dave outside? The sun’s nice.”

  She made a wry face, but turned and said with exaggerated weariness, “C’mon, guys.” She waved her hand, and Ray and Dave hurried after her, Ray wobbling like jello.

  He went into the kitchen. Edie, characteristically, had busied herself washing dishes. But now she had to stand on a chair to do it.

  He wanted to rush to her, embrace her unhesitatingly, the way Melinda had embraced him, but it seemed clumsy. impossible. Would he lift her like a child? He wanted her to be as she was before, and at the same time he wanted, desperately, to make her know this didn’t matter. The two impulses fought in him, one shaming the other.

  She finally turned, her eyes full of fear and confusion.

  “What happened, Edie?”

  “You went away,” she said with sudden bitterness.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said, very softly. “I wish I hadn’t. But what happened here?”

  “Nothing,” she said defensively. She pulled off the rubber gloves and sat down on the chair. “We moved a few times, of course. I’m working in a cardboard recycling factory this week. Melinda ha
d her luck tested—did she tell you? No, of course not. Well, it was very good, Ian was very impressed . . .”

  “What about—what happened to this place? To Ray and Dave?” He avoided saying: You’re a midget.

  “What’s wrong with Ray and Dave?” she said angrily.

  “Forget it. Just come sit with me on the couch.”

  They went back to the living room and sat. He still couldn’t bring himself to touch her, didn’t feel he knew how. Yet it was what he was here for, what he wanted most.

  “Did you come to take Melinda away?” said Edie. “Is that what this is all about? You know I can’t stop you. It’s not my choice. But that girl needs—”

  He held up a hand. “Edie, listen. I came back because of you. Not Melinda. I mean, Melinda too, both of you together. I want to live with you. Here or away from here. If it’s okay.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I love you, Edie.”

  “Please don’t,” she said quickly.

  “What?”

  “I don’t need talk like that. It doesn’t make sense. I know who you love. You’re just like everyone else. You love the girl on the television.”

  “No—”

  “Yes. I saw her, before. In your dreams, over and over. And then on television, when you got that tape.”

  “That was a mistake, Edie.”

  “No.” She shook her head and smiled sadly. “Don’t feel bad. That’s how it is. The people on television are better. You don’t have to be ashamed. Did you find her?”

  “Sort of. It wasn’t right.”

  “You shouldn’t say that. It’s a very lucky thing if someone famous—from the government or television—cares about you. That’s a very special thing. I have that, it’s the only kind of luck I have.”

  Everett felt a blur of confusion. Did she mean Cooley?

  “Edie,” he said, and then he leaned over and put his lips to hers, felt her tiny nose against his, felt her eyelashes brush his cheek. At first her mouth was still, and all he felt was a trace of startled breath against his lips. Then she closed her eyes and kissed him, the force of all her passion behind it for a tantalizing moment. Just as quickly, she drew back.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she sighed.

  “Edie, it’s me. Please say you remember—”

  “I remember, Chaos, but this isn’t right. You went away, and I understood. You could never love me.” She pointed to herself. “I don’t understand why Ian does.”

  “You weren’t like this,” he blurted out. “You’re a beautiful woman. Something they did changed it, made everybody here look different.”

  “That’s silly,” she said, nervously. “This is me. Please, Chaos, go away now. Don’t torture me. Love the girl on television. She’s the one who’s beautiful.”

  “I want you,” he said. “You were beautiful. You still are. Lots of people are beautiful, not just the ones on television.”

  “Ordinary people are ugly. Look around, Chaos.” She looked away.

  “I remember,” he said. “You were like a woman in a magazine. You loved showing your body to me.”

  “You’re being hateful. Why can’t you face the truth? I’m ugly, Chaos.” She choked back tears.

  “Something happened here, the dreamers in charge of Vacaville, they went overboard. They want you to think they’re the only—”

  “Shut up!” Her tiny voice was ragged with fury. “This is my life! I live here! I don’t need you coming here and telling me about how you think it ought to be. You came here once and I listened to you, and you screwed everything up and then you left. Don’t do this to me again! If you want to stay, then go get your luck tested. Maybe you belong on television, Chaos. Maybe you’re special. But I’m not! Leave me alone!”

  “This is crazy.” He wanted to pick up where he’d left off, wanted reality to sit still for him for once. “There aren’t just fifteen or twenty attractive human beings in the world. I mean, if you aren’t special, then what does Ian want with you, anyway?”

  “That’s private,” she hissed.

  Agitated with jealousy, he jumped up from the couch. He needed room to think. “Where are the keys to your car?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to prove it to you. How late is the mall open?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s still open . . .”

  “Here, then.” He held out his hand, and she passed him the keys. “I’ll be back.”

  “Chaos.” Her voice was small, her anger replaced by confusion. “I don’t like this.”

  “Well, you can write me a ticket, a summons, when I get back.”

  He went outside and found Melinda, and without explaining dragged her away from Ray and Dave and into Edie’s car.

  “Tell me what’s going on here,” he said.

  “Hey, I told you things were getting weird.”

  He started the car, pulled out into the street. “So you’remember talking to me in Hatfork?”

  “Yup. Saw my folks, and that guy Edge. Saw the messed-up place you live in, too. How’d you do that?”

  He shook his head. “Forget it. Listen, doesn’t anybody here remember two weeks ago?”

  “Yeah, sure. They remember it wrong. Everybody started changing, and I tried to say something to Edie, but it was like they thought they were always like that. They just started watching TV even harder.”

  “Changing? Getting ugly, you mean?”

  “Yup. Except for Cooley and his pals. They got everyone looking awful so they could look good. Only they left me alone.” She laughed. “Guess they thought I was strange enough to look at like I was.”

  “And it worked, didn’t it? Edie’s sleeping with Cooley now.” He had to know.

  “Yup. But it’s not her fault.”

  He kept his eyes on the road.

  “That’s what it’s like here now,” Melinda said. “Everybody’s in love with the government. She can’t help it. He’s been hittin’ on her for a long time, too.”

  He turned and saw she was squinting at him. “What?” he said.

  “You look funny,” she said. “You gain some weight?”

  “Funny?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said, too quickly. “You probably just been eating good, after all those cans. I been doing the same thing.” She lifted her shirt and ruffled the margin of fur at her waist. “Where’d you go, anyway?”

  “I saw some old friends. I’ll tell you about it later.” He parked the car in the mall lot. “Wait here.”

  He hurried through the mall, to the shop he’d seen before, where they sold comic books and magazines. He wanted to buy a copy of Playboy or Penthouse, to show Edie that beautiful bodies were everywhere, that the Vacaville cabal didn’t have the market cornered.

  He found the shop, but the rack with the adult magazines was missing.

  He asked the clerk, a normally proportioned man whose appearance was ruined by a raspberry birthmark that covered his face like a splayed-out octopus. “We keep those behind the counter now,” the clerk explained. “What’ll it be—endomorph?”

  “What?”

  “You know the new law, right?”

  “New law? I just want to buy a copy of Playboy.”

  “Fine. But the new law says you get the issue that corresponds to your body type. Midgets look at midgets, and so on.” He swept his arm back, indicating the rack behind the cabinet. Sure enough, there were ten or twelve different versions of Playboy, and the bodies Everett glimpsed on the covers were all distorted and wrong.

  The clerk gave him the once-over. “Looks like endomorph to me,” he said. He flopped a magazine onto the counter. The woman on the cover was leering and enormous.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Take a look, fella.”

  Everett caught sight of himself in the window of the shop. He was hideously soft and fat, his cheeks jowly, his hands like tufts of dough.

  “That’ll be four dollars,” said the clerk.
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  “That’s not what I want,” he said, a hopeless feeling settling over him. “I need to show someone something. I need a picture of a nice body. The way Playboy used to be.”

  “They still make it like that,” nodded the clerk. “But only government stars can buy it.”

  “Can’t you sell me one? Nobody will know. It’s important.”

  “Hey, fella, you think you’re the only one wants the good stuff? Cripes. I can’t sell it to you, can’t even look at it myself, and believe you me, I would. But they keep it locked up. Only the government stars have the keys.”

  “You expect me to believe the customers have the keys and you don’t?”

  The clerk looked rueful. “Well, they don’t actually pay, you know. In fact, we pay them to come and get it from us. Supposed to add prestige to the establishment.”

  “Shit.”

  “But if you want to look at them, you can,” said the clerk helpfully. “They just got their clothes on.” He indicated People, Rolling Stone, and TV Guide. The cover of Rolling Stone showed Palmer O’Brien, and People featured President Kentman with his arm around Ian Cooley. “They’re nicer to look at than this stuff anyway,” said the clerk confidentially.

  “I don’t want to look at them,” said Everett. “I want to look at other people who look nice.”

  “But that’s all the good Playboy is anyhow.” The clerk sounded confused. “Pictures of them without their clothes. Why would they want to look at anyone but themselves?”

  “Forget it,” said Everett. He stalked out, or tried to, but his increasingly heavy body made sudden movement impossible. Everything was buffered in layers of flesh. So he oozed out instead and slammed the door behind him.

  Moving back through the mall, he found that now he fit in. The people he passed weren’t made uncomfortable by his presence anymore. He belonged. Soon maybe he’d be in love with a government star too.

  He squeezed into the car, but it was work, and he had to move the seat back. Melinda looked him up and down and said, “You’re definitely putting on weight.”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “I was waiting for you to say that. Try telling Edie, though.”

  He started the car, marveling at the flesh of his fingers, how far the key and steering wheel seemed from the bones of his hand.