by Paula Guran
Now I think I’ve given you the impression that I’m rather better at my job than I really am. I’ve let you think that I go in, get precisely what I want, and get out again, completely unaware of and unaffected by anything else that might be in there. If only. True, I only read—well, the titles of the scrolls, the list of contents, the index. That’s bad enough. Each entry in the ledger (I’m beginning to realize how inadequate my library metaphor is; sorry) embodies a minuscule but intensely compressed summary. Your eye rests on it for a split second, and immediately you get the gist of it. I can skim down the average man’s lifetime of memories in the time it takes you to read a page of your household accounts. But every entry is like a tiny, incredibly detailed picture, and I have (so to speak) exceptional eyesight.
Furthermore, some memories leak. They’re so bright and sharp and vivid that they stand out, your eye’s drawn to them, you can’t help looking at them. I try and mind my own business, of course I do, but some things—
Like the men who murder their wives and the women who murder their children, the men who poison wells and kill whole towns, the rapists and the sadists and the broad rainbow spectrum of human maladjustment; and they go to their priests to get rid of it, and the priests take away the sins of the world and file them in their archives, and then I come along. I really don’t like doing priests. It’s like walking barefoot through a dark room with broken glass on the floor. Oh, and I did that once, or someone did. No fun at all.
I went to where I was supposed to be meeting them. The young man was there; no sign of the old man. He was sitting on a bench in front of the Blue Star Temple, reading a book. He looked up as my shadow fell across the page. “Well?” he said.
“All done.”
He frowned at me, as though I were a spelling mistake. “How do I know that?”
I get tired sometimes. “You don’t. Instead, you trust me and my colossal reputation among respected leaders of the community.”
“You’ll be wanting your money.”
“Yes.”
He moved his feet, and I saw a fat leather satchel. “You lunatic,” I said. “I can’t walk home carrying that. I wouldn’t get a hundred yards.”
“I got here just fine.”
“You don’t live where I do.”
He shrugged. “Your problem,” he said. “Well? Do you want to count it?”
I smiled at him. “People don’t double-cross me,” I said. “They simply wouldn’t dare.”
An unpleasant thought must have crossed his mind just then. “No, I don’t suppose they would. Anyway, it’s all there.”
I leaned forward to take hold of the strap but he shifted his feet again. “We can trust you, can’t we?”
“Of course.”
“I mean,” he went on, “we’re not killers, my dad and I, or we’d have had that old fool’s head bashed in. But there comes a point where you have to look beyond your principles, don’t you know. I just thought I’d mention that.”
I put the back of my hand against his calf and moved it sideways. Then I pulled the satchel out. It was reassuringly heavy. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m an honorable man.”
“Really.”
I stood up. I remember thinking: no, don’t do it, there’s no call for that sort of behavior. “And I do try to give value for money,” I said. “I want my customers to think they’ve got what they paid for. It’s good for business.”
“Right. Well, goodbye.”
“So if I sense that a customer isn’t satisfied,” I went on, “I throw in something extra, for goodwill. He’s not your father.”
His eyes were very wide. “You what? What did you say?”
“Goodbye.”
Actually, I was lying, though of course he had no way of knowing that. So what? He asked for it. The truly splendid, insidious thing about it is, when his father and mother eventually die and only he is left, the last surviving witness to those events, it will be true—in his mind, the only archive. So you see, I can create truth as well as delete it. Clever old me.
Several of my clients, misguided souls who thought they wanted to get to know me better, have asked me how I got into this line of work in the first place. I tell them I can’t remember.
There was this spot of trouble when I was seventeen. As I my have mentioned, I’m no angel. There was a small difficulty, and I had to leave home in rather a hurry. Luckily, it was a dark night and the people looking for me didn’t know the countryside around our place as well as I did; their dogs were rubbish, too. I took the precaution of bringing along the clothes I’d been wearing the previous day and stuffing them inside a hollow tree I knew I’d be passing on the way out, so to speak. Fortuitously, it stood on the banks of the river. Stupid dogs all crowded round the tree, jumping up and yelling their heads off, while I swam upstream a bit, hopped out, and went on my way rejoicing. The men who were after me were livid, as you can imagine—I wasn’t there to see, of course, but I remember the looks on their faces quite clearly. Gave me the best laugh I’d had in ages.
Still, once the warm inner glow of profound cleverness had worn off, I reflected on my position and found it largely unsatisfactory. There I was, sopping wet, one angel thirty to my name, no place to go, no friends, no identity. Naturally, I wasn’t the first person in history to find himself in that state. After all, that’s how cities came about in the first place; it’s what they’re for.
The nearest city was only twenty miles away. I knew it quite well, so it was useless; somebody would recognize me, and word would get about. My angel thirty would’ve been just enough to buy me a seat on the stage to the next city down the coast, but I decided not to risk it, since coachmen sometimes remember names and faces. As things had turned out, I’d left home in a pair of wooden-soled hemp slippers, the kind you wear for slopping about the house in. There wasn’t much left of them by the time I dared risk stopping and thinking. They certainly weren’t in a fit state to carry me eighty miles on bad roads, assuming I was prepared to take the chance of staying on the road, which I wasn’t. Remember when you could buy a decent pair of boots for an angel thirty? You could back then, but first you have to find a shoemaker, for which you need a city. One damn thing after another.
I find that when you’re in a deep pit of doubt and perplexity, Fate jumps in and provides you with an answer, almost invariably the wrong one. As in this case. First thing I saw when the sun rose was a farmhouse, practically rearing up on its hind legs at me out of the early morning mist. I thought: there’ll be boots in there. I’ll walk up to the door and offer to buy a pair. Easy as that.
Idiot. A stranger hobbling up out of nowhere wanting to buy footwear would tend to snag in the memory, particularly out in the wild, where nothing ever happens. I had good reason to wish not to be memorable. The hell with it, I thought. I was by now more or less resigned to the fact that I’m no angel; what’s one more minor transgression? Be a man. Steal the stupid boots.
Sad fact. It’s not enough to be a thief. You need to be a good thief. I’m not. My problem is, I don’t look where I’m going. I try, ever so hard; but sooner or later there’ll be a chair or a table or a tin plate or a bowl of apples that I somehow contrive to overlook. Crash it goes on the hard flagstone floor, and that’s that. Here we go again.
The farmer was an old man, feeble, with a bad leg. I could’ve taken him easily. His son and his four grandsons were a different matter. What they were doing, hanging around the house when the sun was well up and they should’ve been out grafting, I have no idea. They didn’t approve of thieves. There was an apple tree just outside the back door, with a low branch sticking out practically at a right angle. They had, they assured me, plenty of rope, not to mention a dung heap. And besides, they said, who’d miss me?
The human memory is a wonderful thing. They say that when you die, at the moment of departure, your entire life flashes past your eyes in a fraction of a second. This isn’t actually true; but all sorts of stuff crowds into your mind
when you’re standing on the bed of a cart with a rope round your neck; among them, in my case, the circumstances of my sister’s accident. To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought in the intervening time—tried to put it out of my mind, I guess, and who can blame me?—but it came right back to me at that precise moment, and I remember thinking, I wish I could do that trick where I went into her mind and pulled the memory out, it’d be really useful right now if I could do that. And suddenly I found I could.
False modesty aside, it was a tour de force. Six men and five women, one after the other, in a matter of seconds. I’ve done bigger jobs since, but that’s with the benefit of considerable experience. For what was only my second go at it, I did remarkably well. Incentive helps, of course. It wasn’t the neatest work I ever did, I had to hurt them quite a lot—like I cared—the pain kept them off balance and sort of woozy, which helped considerably. When I’d finished, we were left with this tableau; a kid standing on a cart under the apple tree, with six men and five women crowded round. No rope, I’d chucked that into the nettles. How we all got there, a total mystery to everybody except me.
I cleared my throat. I think my voice must’ve been a bit high and croaky, but I did my best. “Well, thanks for that,” I remember saying. “I’d better be getting along.”
One of the grandsons helped me down off the cart. He had a sort of dazed look. I took a long stride, and felt the dewy wet grass under my feet. “I almost forgot,” I said. “The boots.”
The old man looked at me. “What?”
“The boots,” I repeated. “Really kind of you.” He was still holding them in his hand; evidence, I guess. I reached out, took them, and pulled them on. Lousy fit, but what can you do? “Thanks again,” I said, and walked quickly away. You learn not to look back. It takes some doing, but it’s worth the effort.
I’m not the sort of man that people tend to remember. Just look at me and you’ll agree. I’m about five seven, thickset, small nose, small ears, low forehead, leg-of-pork forearms, the typical farm boy up from the country. I slip out of people’s minds as easily as a wriggling fish. People hardly notice me, in the street, in a crowded room. Most of the time, I might as well not be there.
Remember what I told you about why I don’t like doing priests? For three days afterwards, I wandered around feeling useless and stupid, like having a headache but without the pain. I knew there was something on my mind, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I filled the time in with chores. I bought a new (to me) pair of boots. I fixed the leak in the roof—at that time I was living in the roofspace above a grain store; one wall had cracked and was bulging out in a disturbing fashion, so it was empty until the owners raised the money to repair it; the rats had the ground floor, I had the penthouse. I mended both my shirts where they’d started to fray. Stuff like that.
And then, on my way to the market early, to see if I could buy some windfall apples cheap, I met a man I knew slightly. I pretended I hadn’t seen him. He called out my name. I stopped.
“Long time no see,” he said.
“I’ve been busy,” I told him.
He nodded. “Working?”
“Yes.”
“Splendid. Get paid?”
“Yes.”
“In funds, then.”
I sighed a little sigh. “Yes.”
“Destiny,” he said, and grinned. “Back of the Sincerity & Trust, one hour after sunset. Be there.”
I walked away without saying a word.
I sometimes wonder if I’m like that hero in the old legends whose strength was as the strength of ten, but only as long as the sun was in the sky. In my case, strength of will. All that day, while the Invincible Sun rode the heavens, blessing us poor mortals with the sacrament of His light, I was utterly determined. I wasn’t going. No force on Earth would get me within a mile of the Sincerity until noon tomorrow. Throughout the morning I felt the power within me grow; at midday, I was solid as a rock. I stayed that way till halfway through the afternoon, and as the shadows began to lengthen I kept checking up on myself, to see if my strength of purpose was going to hold out—and it did, right up till the first red streaks began to show in the sky. I don’t know, maybe I’m more like a werewolf or something like that. Maybe it’s the darkness that affects me, or more precisely the yellow glow of lighted windows. They call to me; come inside, they say, where it’s warm and friendly. I noticed to my surprise that I was only two blocks from the Sincerity. The light was fading rapidly. I quickened my pace and walked the other way.
I believe it happens a lot in deserts. You walk and walk and keep on walking, and suddenly you realize you’ve gone in a circle and you’re back where you started from. In this case, just across the street from the back door of the Sincerity at one hour after sunset.
About half of them I knew, if only slightly. The usual crowd. They’d already started. A tall, thin elderly man I didn’t know had the dice. He was trying to make six. A man I knew well tapped me on the shoulder, nodded, and said, “Bet?”
I shook my head. “Just here to watch.”
He laughed. “Ten angels. I’ll give you five to one.”
“Bet.”
The thin old man made his six. My ten angels had become fifty. I nearly always start off with a win.
So there I was, at dawn the next day, considerably poorer than the day I was born, but blessed with a useful skill with which I could earn money. Just as well, really.
I remembered that I had an appointment to see a prospective customer. I headed back home, washed, shaved, put on my clean shirt and my new boots. I’ll say this for myself, I’ve got this gambling thing well under control now. As soon as I run out of money, I stop; I never ever play with markers or get into debt. Someone once told me I gamble so as to get rid of all the money I make. There may be something in that. If I’d kept what I’ve made over the years, right now I’d have more money than the government.
Disgustingly bright and early (I’m not a morning person) I walked out into Cornmarket, heading west. On the corner of Sheep Street and Coppergate I realized someone was following me. I didn’t look ’round. I guess I’d detected him by the way his footsteps kept perfect time with my own—it sounds a bit paranoid, but I have experience in these matters, believe me. I did my best not to do anything that would let him know I’d noticed him.
I had two options. Either I could keep to the main streets, where there were plenty of people, or I could lead him off the beaten track down into the little dark alleys between Coppergate and Lower Town, where I stood a reasonable chance of losing him or jumping him. Like a fool, I chose the latter. In my defense, I would like to point out that I have the memories of God only knows how many fights, together comprising a better combat education that you’d get in any military academy anywhere. I know about that sort of thing.
Rather too much, in fact. Out back of the carpet warehouse in Tanners Yard there’s an old gateway with two massive pillars; I’d noticed it a long time ago, with just such a contingency in mind. I led him there, ducked in between the pillars, and vanished. He stopped and looked round to see where I’d gone. As soon as his back was turned, I was on him like the proverbial snake.
The law in these parts disapproves of carrying weapons of any sort in public places, but since when is three feet of waxed string a weapon? Answer: when you slip it over a man’s head, cross the ends over at the base of his neck, and pull hard. My trouble is, I don’t know my own strength.
I was so stunned and disgusted with myself that I was almost too late to get inside his head before all the lights went out. It was a scramble. I know from experience, it’s not pleasant to be in there when someone dies. I had just enough time to grab what I wanted and run.
Sure enough (I stood over him, looking down); he’d been hired by one of my satisfied customers, for five angels. I ask you, five angels. It’s about time the hired killers in this town got organized.
Well, it’s inevitable. When I consume the memory of the last surv
iving witness, I become the last surviving witness, and there’s nobody to clear out my head cleanly and humanely. You can’t blame them; I don’t. My set scale of fees includes a levy, to cover the inconvenience and mental trauma of monotonously regular attempts on my life.
But I don’t hold it against my clients. I can’t afford to.
When you’ve been inside someone’s head, you know him, intimately; what he looks like is substantially irrelevant and uninteresting. I turned him over with my foot. Age thirty-five (I already knew that), the big, hollow frame of an ex-soldier who hasn’t been eating too well lately. He had red hair and blue eyes. So what?
I always reckon that you gain something from pretty well every experience, however bad it may be. From him (whoever he was) I took away a picture of dawn in the Claygess Mountains, a rapturous explosion of light, blue skies, green fir trees, and snow. Just thinking of it makes me feel clean. That and a move whereby, when someone’s behind you and strangling you, a slight rearrangement of the feet and shift of your center of balance enables you to throw them over your shoulder like a sack of feathers. If he’d remembered it a trifle earlier, he’d probably have made it. Ah, well.
By a curious coincidence, the man who’d hired him to kill me was the man I was on my way to meet. He was surprised to see me.
“You said you had a job for me,” I said.
“Changed my mind.”
“Ah.” I nodded slowly. “In that case, there’s just the matter of my consultancy fee.”
He looked at me. Sometimes I think I’m not the only one who can see inside people’s heads. “Fine,” he said. “How much?”
“Five hundred angels.”
He licked his lips. “Five hundred.”
