“Did she ever stay here?” Cole asked.
“No.” Tony shook his head. “She hung out, though. I let her have her mail sent here, but she never stayed.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Tony thought about it. “I don’t know. Two weeks ago, maybe. She came by because I texted her that I had a letter from her sister. In the circles we run in, people drop in and drop out all the time. You can see someone every day for a month and then not see them again for a year. Some people go back home. She always seemed a little bit homesick to me.”
“What about a job? Did she have a job?”
“Yeah,” Tony said with a laugh. “I know that. She was a bike messenger. She was fucking crazy for bikes.” An image flashed into Cole’s brain. He was on a tiny bike, pedaling quickly down a small tree-lined street. Meg’s father was running behind him, holding on to the back of the bike seat to keep it upright. Okay, Meg, he said, I’m going to let go. Just keep pedaling, sweetie. You can do it. Then, suddenly, Cole felt like he was flying. “I actually lent her the bike she used,” Tony continued. “It was an old Schwinn ten-speed, but it was in really good shape. The first time she saw it, I could almost see the eyes pop out of her head. I barely ever used it, so I told her she could borrow it as long as she brought it back in good shape. Guess I’m probably out a bike, huh?”
“Do you know which messenger service she worked for?”
Tony shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue.”
“What about you two?” Cole asked the duo on the couch.
“Can’t you just remember this stuff?” the one who recognized Cole asked.
“No,” Cole said. “It doesn’t work that way. So do either of you know where she worked?” They both shook their heads.
“Who would know? Who can we talk to that can tell us these things?”
“Matt would probably know,” one of them said. “Her and Matt definitely stayed in touch. I think he felt kind of responsible for her.”
“Oh, and what about that Sam?” the other one said. “Weren’t the two of them dating for a while?”
“Sam?” Cole asked. The name sent a tingle down his spine. “Who is Sam?”
“She’s just another girl that hangs out here sometimes. I think Matt introduced the two of them. She works at a coffee shop up on Avenue B.”
Cole’s pulse grew quicker with each word. “What does Sam look like?” Cole asked.
The man who was speaking shrugged. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“Describe her!” Cole shouted. It was a need now. A memory was percolating, maybe more than one. He needed to free it.
Everyone in the room flinched when Cole yelled, even Ed. “I don’t know,” the man mumbled again. “She’s black. Natural hair, you know, like a combed-out afro look.” He put his hands around his head estimating the size of her hair. “She’s kind of short but pretty. Does that sound right to you guys?”
Cole didn’t hear their response. He didn’t need anyone to confirm what Sam looked like, anyway. He could see her in his mind now, as clear as if she were standing in front of him. She was small, maybe five foot two or three. She had smooth dark brown skin. Her light brown eyes were surrounded by long, curling eyelashes and her hair was natural, picked out into a giant halo of tight curls, all the light from behind her getting caught in her hair. “Hello, Meg,” she said to Cole in his memory. “It’s nice to meet you.” She reached her hand out and Meg met Sam’s hand with her own. Their skin touched and Meg’s whole body erupted in goose pimples. Sam was the most beautiful thing that Meg had ever seen, so confident and calm. “Should we get a drink?” Sam asked. “I’m only eighteen,” Meg answered, nearly overwhelmed by a fear that her age might scare Sam away. Sam just shook her head. “They’re not going to care. Nobody’s going to card a pretty white girl like you.” Sam smiled at Meg and all Meg could think about was the fact that Sam had just called her pretty. Sam was four years older than Meg, though in Meg’s memories Sam was infinitely wiser and more worldly. Meg followed Sam to the door of a bar. Sam opened it. It was dark inside. Sam walked in first, and Meg followed her. Then the darkness hit them and out of that darkness, Cole suddenly saw the head of the rusty silver hammer swinging straight for his head. Everything else was gone. Sam was gone. The bar was gone. All that was there was the blackness and the hammer. It came so fast.
“Do you know where she lives?” Cole asked once he’d regained his bearings. Everyone in the room was staring at him again.
“She lives down here somewhere, I think,” Tony said. “Somewhere on the Lower East Side.”
“I need an address,” Cole said to Tony. “Who can you call right now that would know where she lives?”
“Matt might,” offered the guy on the couch who had brought Sam up in the first place.
“Call him,” Cole ordered. “Call him now and get her address.” Cole was getting closer, but some things still didn’t make sense. He needed more memories.
Tony took out his phone and walked to one corner of the apartment. He came back two minutes later. “Matt said she lives in the building on the southeast corner of Orchard and Stanton. Apartment 2B.” Tony still had the phone held up to his ear. “He wants to know what happened to Meg. Can I tell him?”
Cole began walking toward the door. “Yeah,” Cole said with a wave of his hand. “Tell him whatever you want.”
“Where are you going?” Ed shouted.
“To Sam’s apartment,” Cole told him.
“What did you remember, Cole?” Ed called back to Cole as Cole neared the apartment door.
The hammer, Cole thought as he walked, but he didn’t tell that to Ed. He didn’t say anything. He needed to figure out what it all meant. He couldn’t wait. The memories were coming quickly now, and Cole didn’t want to get in their way.
Chapter 14
Once the transplant was over and they had successfully removed the equipment from Carter’s brain, they wheeled him into the recovery room. At the same time, they wheeled Pierce’s body away for disposal. The doctor’s focus now was on waking Carter up slowly. They would ease the drugs down at a deliberate pace so Carter’s brain would be active before he actually awoke. They’d had the most success that way. Success for them meant satisfied customers. They knew about the research demonstrating that allowing patients to dream before they woke up had a detrimental impact on the transplanted memories’ accuracy. They didn’t care about accuracy, though. Accuracy wasn’t their goal. Their goal was happy customers, and their customers were more satisfied when they came out of surgery having already experienced a new memory. Complaints came when people paid millions of dollars for these new memories and then went days before experiencing anything. So they eased Carter back into consciousness, monitoring his brain activity as they did so. The doctors had gotten so proficient that they could actually pinpoint the exact moment when the first new memory hit. At first, the patient’s brain activity would increase in proportion to the decrease in the anesthesia. Then, suddenly, the monitor would explode like fireworks and they’d know. They wouldn’t know what the memory was or what the patient was feeling, but they could sit back and watch as the memory almost literally blew the patient’s mind.
So the two surgeons and the anesthesiologist watched Carter’s brain monitor as the anesthesiologist slowly reduced the amount of drugs he was administering to Carter’s unconscious body. They’d place side bets, trying to predict the exact dosage where the fireworks would begin. In Carter’s case, the earlier picks paid off. Carter’s brain began springing to life almost as soon as his brain activity resumed. It was like the memories had simply been waiting. A second later, watching the screen was like watching the brain activity of a person in the middle of a battlefield or in the midst of one holy mother of an orgasm. The three doctors, even the two who had to pay ten dollars each to the winner, let out a cheer when Carter’s brain activity spiked. They knew that he was in it now, experiencing a new memory. One that, until a f
ew moments ago, belonged to someone else. That didn’t matter anymore, though, because the memory belonged to Carter now. After all, he had paid for it.
Carter, still asleep on an operating table, felt his body rise into the air. He felt it in his stomach, like he’d just stepped onto a high-speed elevator or was sitting on the slow, initial rise of a roller coaster. His feet were wet. He looked down. He was straddling a surfboard. The swaying sensation was caused by waves passing beneath him, heading toward the shore. The water was warm and clear. He could look past his feet into the water and see the fish swimming beneath him along the reef. Another wave came, lifting him into the air. They were enormous, each wave pushing him up at least twenty feet into the sky. From the top of the wave, he could see far down the beach. It was a gorgeous white-sand beach that ran for miles in either direction. He spotted a few people here and there, but the beach was mostly deserted, except for the surfers. Everyone had a surfboard. A few other surfers were bobbing up and down over the waves about fifty meters away on each side of him.
Carter remembered watching as a wave big enough to crush a house came barreling toward one of the other surfers. Instead of cowering, the surfer began to paddle with the wave until it caught up to him. Carter’s last view of the surfer was the tail end of his board and the tip of his head, sliding down the face of the wave as it crashed into itself. The sound was devastating, like sitting inside a jet engine. Carter’s pulse raced, and he wasn’t sure if it was his pulse or the pulse from the memory. They blended together. At the time, he didn’t know what immersion meant, but he knew how it felt. God, did he know.
He looked down again at his surfboard. It was long and thick, its nose sticking out of the water like the fin of a sea monster. There was so much in that moment to fear. Were there sharks in the water, swimming beneath him? How sharp was the coral? How fierce was the undercurrent? Then another wave barreled by and he realized that he really only had one thing to be afraid of. The waves.
He turned his board and faced out toward the open ocean. The waves came in even sets, three or four at a time, spaced only a few seconds apart. He could feel the muscles in his back ripple as he readied himself to paddle directly into one of these liquid giants. The muscles, developed from hours upon hours of swimming and paddling, felt strange, like they were pushing his shoulders apart. He felt broad and powerful. The sun beat down upon his broad shoulders, and he rolled them once or twice to loosen them up. Those weren’t the only muscles new to Carter. His chest was packed tight with muscles, and beneath them, Carter could see clear ridges of abdominal muscles. He wanted to run his hand over them, to caress the six-pack with his fingers, but he couldn’t change the memory. It would take time to get used to that, to get used to not being in charge. More than just those muscles fascinated Carter. His skin was tanned golden brown. Carter felt like a god. He wished the memory would go on like that forever, simply sitting on that surfboard under the sun, drifting up and down over the giant waves before they broke toward the beach.
It wouldn’t go on forever, though. It couldn’t. Out in the distance, almost all the way at the horizon, he remembered seeing a set of waves begin to form that made the others that had passed beneath him seem small. The first wave in the set was ridiculous, an unstoppable, moving mountain of water. The fear that Carter felt at the sight of that wave was intense, and yet he knew he was going to ride it. The wave continued to grow as it got closer and, as it grew, it sped up. The memories are safe, he thought, right?
He didn’t wait to see what was coming next. He was going after that first wave. The wave was still a good distance away when the surfer turned toward the beach, laid his hard stomach on top of the surfboard, and began to paddle through the water, taking powerful strokes from his broad shoulders. At first, it was almost shocking how quickly the surfboard cut through the water. Then, even though he kept moving his arms at the same speed and with the same power, the surfboard began to slow down until it wasn’t moving at all. Instead of going forward, even as he thrust his hands into the water, the water kept trying to pull it backward. The wave was pulling him in. They were moving, though. Not forward, not backward, but up. The surfboard began to rise as the giant wave caught them from behind. They rose, high above the sea on the back of this monstrous beast. The wave was going so fast now, he was certain that it was going to pass them. Surely it was going to move under them and speed on toward the beach where it would crash with the sound of a hundred lightning bolts. Carter didn’t realize that the surfer had a plan, and letting the wave almost escape was all part of that plan. Just as the giant wave seemed to be moving past them, the surfer sped up his arms, pulling each stroke like a train piston, paddling faster, almost faster even than the wave, catching up from behind it.
They paddled into the back of the wave, the nose of the surfboard dangling perilously over the wave’s edge. Carter knew that it was too steep. Nobody could ride a wave like that. It had to be close to thirty feet high, and the face of it seemed to drop straight down into the reef below them, but one more stroke tipped the surfboard onto the wave and there was no going back.
As his board pointed nearly straight down the face of the giant wave, the surfer pushed his body up and swung his feet under him in one quick, fluid motion, until he was standing on top of a wave bigger than any he had ever seen before. Then, they dropped in. It was like riding a roller coaster standing up with no safety gear while being chased by an earthquake. The speed of the drop was nearly heart-stopping. The surfer needed every one of those beautiful muscles to simply stay on his board. Every muscle tensed as he tried to keep the nose from dropping under the water. They careened down the thirty-foot wall of water, bouncing off each ripple, in what felt like both an eternity and the split second that it was. It was nearly a free fall. Then the sound came, an immense rumble as if the earth itself was cracking open behind them. But the earth was fine. The sound was the wave.
He could feel the mist from the crashing wave on his back and on the backs of his legs. It was so close, barreling down on him as if it was trying to eat him alive. Just go, he thought. Get away. Head straight for the beach. Yet even as these thoughts reverberated in his head, his muscles began to turn the surfboard. It was a subtle movement. If Carter wasn’t so afraid, he might not have noticed it at all, but it was enough. The surfboard slowed down, and the wave caught up to them again. It wasn’t as tall anymore, but it was just as powerful, a deadly mix of unbroken wave and churning white water. Carter wasn’t as experienced as Cole at inhabiting the memory. He couldn’t lose himself in it entirely. Instead, he remembered it as if he were there with the surfer, as if they were both inside the same body. They turned the surfboard back up so that they were now actually moving up the open face of the wave. When they were near the top again, just as its lip began to curve menacingly over them like a giant maw, they turned around and slid back down almost as quickly as they had the first time. After that, the surfer’s thrilling dance with liquid death was almost over. The once-giant wave had become little more than a bump in the sea. The beach stood in front of them, only a few strokes away. It would have been easy to pull the surfboard up onto the beach, to rest in the soft white sand. Instead, they fell back down onto their knees on the surfboard, pointed the board toward the channel between the waves, and began to pull themselves through the water again. They were heading back out to dance on the face of another giant wave.
It went on like that for what seemed like hours. The fear never subsided. Neither did the excitement. Carter lay there, still unconscious, immersed in the memories. The doctors could actually see the moments when Carter’s unconscious body stopped to catch its breath. The doctors were excited. They knew that when Carter finally awoke, they would have another satisfied customer.
Chapter 15
It was a relatively short walk from Tony’s apartment to Sam’s building. Without a bike, walking was the fastest way to go, faster than driving and parking. Cole needed the time on his feet, anyway. Meg’s
memories were pouring out of him now. They were different memories, though. Now they were all memories of Sam, and they all ended with the vision of a hammer hurtling through the darkness.
Cole took a few steps, staring around at the odd mishmash of a neighborhood, housing projects next to upscale restaurants; fancy flower shops facing cheap dollar stores. And somewhere, only a few blocks away, was Sam’s apartment. Cole was almost overwhelmed by the sheer number of memories Meg had collected in her one short year in New York. He understood how it happened. New places and new experiences made for strong memories. They were coming so quickly now. Cole remembered words and then images and then the hammer and nothing made any sense to him. He just tried to keep on walking, but even that was difficult. Cole had to stop more than once because he could barely see through the fog of new memories clouding his brain.
“Is it weird?” Cole remembered Matt asking Meg. Cole was standing on a street corner, holding on to a traffic light for balance.
“Is what weird?” Meg answered.
“Is it weird for me to set you up with the only other gay woman I know?”
Meg shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m kind of new at this,” she told him. “What is she like?”
“She’s cute,” Matt said. “She’s black.” He thought for a moment. “She’s tough. She’s smart. She’s really cool.”
“You wish she was straight, don’t you?” Meg said, playfully poking Matt’s thigh as they walked side by side down the street.
“No,” Matt said with a laugh. “If she was straight, we wouldn’t even be friends. She’s way too far out of my league.”
Then they stopped walking. “What’s that?” Matt said, pointing up into the sky. Cole didn’t want to look. He knew what was coming. The memory was turning on him, but he couldn’t stop it. It was already too late. Meg looked up into the sky, following Matt’s finger. The sky was dark. Out of the sky, like a meteor, came the hammer, full of violence and force.
The Memory Detective Page 8
