Amnesia Moon (12 page)

On the other hand, the effect was milder here. The Vacaville equivalents to Kellogg and Elaine—the government stars—lived in the media instead of invading dreams. And you could always turn the television off. So maybe his ability to hold onto his old self was just a part of local conditions.

Edie came back downstairs. “You want to meet Gerald?” she asked.

“Well, sure . . .”

“I have to drop the boys off,” she said. “For the weekend. You don't have to come.”

“No, I'd like to. It's just . . .”

“What?”

“Melinda will miss them.”

She smiled but didn't say anything.

“Gerald lives in the Eastman-Merrill building,” explained Edie during the drive. “He used to work there, before. When we separated, he had a kind of breakdown and went and hid there. He thought he could go back to the way it was before, or something. Cooley helped get him special permission to live there all the time. Otherwise Gerald would have had to go to a bad luck camp.”

“What was it Cooley was saying about an elevator?” Chaos asked.

“Well, of course Gerald still feels the urge to move every Wednesday and Saturday. But he's afraid to leave the Eastman-Merrill building. So he keeps his bed and clothes and stuff in the elevator—”

“On Moving Day he changes floors,” said Ray from the backseat.

Edie nodded, looking glum.

“It's fun,” added Dave hopefully.

The Eastman-Merrill building was an abandoned office block in the middle of Vacaville's old downtown section. The neighborhood consisted of boarded-up storefronts, everything the mall had put out of business. Compared to the residential areas it was a ghost town. Edie had the key to a side door, and she led them inside, through the big empty lobby to the elevator. Ray ran forward and pressed the button marked
UP.

The elevator doors opened to reveal a thin, pale man, Edie's age but with graying hair, sitting upright in a bed in the elevator, reading. He wore pajamas and heavy black wingtip shoes, and he had an array of pencils and toothbrushes sticking out of the pocket of his pajama shirt. The elevator was filled with ramshackle shelving, and the shelves were loaded with clothes, books, and empty bottles and cans.

“Gerald, this is Chaos and Melinda. Friends of mine.”

“Hello,” said Gerald amiably. “Do I remember you?”

“They're visiting,” said Edie.

“Oh.” Gerald smiled mildly. “From?”

Chaos opened his mouth to speak, but Edie quickly said, “Back east.”

“Well. Nice, nice. I'd offer you a drink—”

The boys were already scrambling up onto their father's bed. The space that remained for standing was hopelessly narrow.

“We're not staying long,” said Edie. The bag of groceries she'd brought she put onto the end of the bed. The elevator door started to close, but she nudged it back by pressing the safety bar.

“I saw Mr. Cooley,” said Gerald. “He came to see how I was doing. We talked about the boys.”

“Yes?” said Edie impatiently.

“He's very worried about you, Edie. He says that you're in trouble with your luck . . .”

“He's my trouble,” said Edie.

“I think he cares for you,” said Gerald. “He's certainly interested in the boys.”

“I know,” said Edie. “Listen, Gerald, I'll see you on Sunday. Have a good time.”

“Yes, of course.” Gerald's eyes seemed to mist over. “Edie, are you going to marry Mr. Cooley?”

“No, Gerald.”

“I'm not saying I would object,” said Gerald quickly. “I wouldn't want you to think that.”

“No, Gerald. But I wouldn't anyway. Goodbye.”

“He's a very important man,” said Gerald. “He's done quite a bit for you, hasn't he?”

“That doesn't matter. Goodbye, Gerald.”

“Edie—”

“Yes?”

“I haven't gotten any mail?”

“No.”

From the way she said it Chaos suspected there hadn't been any mail delivered in Vacaville for a long time.

“Of course,” said Gerald vaguely. “Well . . .” He waved his hand. The boys waved too. Edie let the elevator door close.

“God, he makes me angry,” she said the minute they were back out on the street. She clattered ahead of them, towards the car.

“He's weird,” said Melinda sympathetically. “That's all.” She ran up and took Edie's hand, as though to fill the gap left by the boys. “There's a lot of weird people.”

Chaos lagged behind. He got into the passenger seat without saying anything. Gerald and his elevator had made him think, for the first time since coming to Vacaville, of his candlelit projection booth back in Hatfork. His little world. Also, he was jealous of Cooley. He didn't understand what there was between Edie and the government man, but he knew enough to feel jealous. They drove back to the house in silence.

That evening nothing went right. Melinda was bored without the boys. When she switched on the television, Chaos tried to watch, but it wasn't the same without Ray's running commentary, Dave's wide-eyed engagement. Edie and he sat side by side on the couch, but he felt a million miles away, separated from her by the muddle of his jealousy and his shame about the dream of Gwen. Edie seemed tense, as though worrying over where Chaos would be sleeping tonight.

Chaos wanted time with her alone.

What he got instead was an unexpected visit from Cooley.

“I'm goin' upstairs,” said Melinda, the minute Cooley walked into the living room.

“Can't you give me a break?” asked Edie.

“How's this for a break?” said Cooley, taking off his jacket and laying it across the back of the couch, their couch. “I came here to talk to Chaos.”

“Well, I don't feel like seeing you tonight,” she said. “You weren't invited.”

“Come on, Edie.” His voice was soft. “You know I don't need an invitation. Why make me say it?”

“You're the one who likes to pretend you're my
friend
said Edie bitterly.

Cooley looked pained or compromised, but only for a moment. He turned to Chaos. “It's my job to keep track of Edie's progress, whether she wants to admit it or not.” He sighed. “And that makes it my responsibility to try and help you understand what you're getting into here.”

“Getting
into
—” Edie began.

“Shacking up with Edie here,” said Cooley, ignoring her. “I don't know where you come from, but you aren't anybody's cousin. If you want to get set up in Vacaville, we can talk about that. But you're picking one ass-backwards way of getting started.”

“He's going to tell you that bad luck is catching,” said Edie in a rush, as though she could take Cooley's point away from him by stating it first. “He'll try to scare you. Everything he says is calculated to convince you you're in mortal danger just by being in the same house with me. It's meant to divide us.”

“Edie,” said Cooley warningly.

“I need a drink,” Edie announced. “Anyone else?”

“I'll have a beer,” said Cooley, his cops-and-robbers manner absurdly vanished. Chaos could see that all the man wanted was to be welcome in this house.

“A beer,” echoed Chaos. “Sure.”

“Let's sit down,” said Cooley. He sat on the couch. Edie went into the kitchen. “I don't know how much you know about Edie's situation, Chaos, but it's not good. She scored in the lowest percentile—which is to say, really, that our tests don't even apply. We can't say just
how
bad your friend's luck actually is, only that eighty-five percent of the folks who score as low as she did end up in one of our resettlement centers. Not because we force them to go, which is what she's going to tell you in a minute. But because they run out of options.”

Edie came in and handed them beer, in glasses. Before, she'd given it to Chaos in the bottle. Was she trying to impress Cooley? A bad sign.

Cooley sipped his beer, then went on. “What's more, the mess they make on their way down costs this county millions each year in damages, lost wages, that sort of thing. Which is why we have to track them.”

“You drive people into the camps,” said Edie fiercely, “and then you call it a statistic.” She turned to Chaos. “Look what he's doing. Ever since I took the test, he's been hounding me. And he admits himself that they don't even know what the results mean!”

“It's a scientific test,” said Cooley, smiling. “It tells us what we need to know about your probable future.”

“You're making up my future as you go along,” she said. “It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You talk about luck, but you're the worst thing that's happened to me.”

“You know that's not true, Edie.”

“He wants me to feel sorry for Gerald,” said Edie. “Gerald's craziness is supposed to be the fault of
my
bad luck.”

“Edie's got the worst strain of bad luck,” Cooley explained. “Fortunately it's fairly rare. She exposes the latency in the people around her, while maintaining a reasonable level of function for herself. She's always at the eye of the storm.”

“Unfortunately,” said Edie sarcastically, “I haven't been able to bring down any bad luck on Ian here. Yet.”

Chaos sipped his beer and considered. There was a familiarity between them, as though their struggle was nothing more than a game. Flirting. Or was he failing to take it seriously enough? This is their world, he reminded himself.

“Okay,” said Cooley. “Let's forget about Edie's luck for the moment. Let's talk about yours.”

“Mine?” said Chaos.

“Yeah. Have you thought about coming in for the test? Sooner the better.”

“I don't have luck,” said Chaos. “Good or bad. I just go where I go, do what I do. No luck involved.”

Cooley laughed. “Charming. Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context.”

No, thought Chaos. I'm not surrendering to the local crap this easy.

Cooley went on. “I wonder whether you can afford to aggravate it the way you are by cozying up with Edie here.”

“Excuse me,” said Edie, standing. “I think I'm going to be sick.”

“What do you know about my history?” said Chaos.

“Well, let's see.” Cooley's smile was enormous. “First of all there's that car you left on the highway. Cool car, incidentally; where'd you come by it? Too bad about the way it stopped working, though. Bit of bad luck there, I'd say, losing a car like that, a scientific wonder. Then there's that poor girl of yours; that's quite a disfiguring condition, though I'd say she's bearing up pretty well under the circumstances. And then there's your name. Chaos. That's not your real name, is it?”

“I guess not.”

“But you can't remember your real name, can you?”

“No.”

“Can't remember your name—that's bad luck in my book. But there's a lot you can't remember, all that stuff in the dream. The woman you're worrying about.”

Chaos winced. Were the dreams leaking out that far? He avoided meeting Edie's eyes.

“Should I go on?” said Cooley. “My guess is you come from a place so fucked up that you think all your problems are normal. There are places like that out there.”

Chaos didn't say anything.

“I think I've made my point. Of course, one of your worst patches of luck in a long time, though you don't know it yet, is running into old Edie here. That's as bad as luck can be. You've got nothing to offer each other but trouble.”

“Puke, puke, puke,” said Edie. She turned and went into the kitchen.

“I'm not saying you can't make it around here. Come take the test. I have a feeling you'll do all right, well enough to get by, anyway. I sense that about you. It's just the combination that's deadly.”

You want Edie, Chaos was tempted to say. If that's bad luck, it's yours as well as mine.

Instead he said, “I don't believe in luck.”

“No?” Cooley got up and put on his jacket. He adopted a pained expression. “She tell you about Dave?”

“What?” Chaos was confused. “What about him?”

“Ask her.”

“What—”

“We'll talk more later. Take care.” Cooley hurried out. Chaos heard his car start, then roar into the night. When the sound died away, the house was very quiet.

He found Edie sitting at the kitchen table with her arms crossed and her head rolled back, staring at the ceiling. “There's something I ought to tell you,” she said after a while. “It might help you make up your mind about Ian.”

“Go ahead.”

“He's been coming on to me during this whole thing. He says that if I were with him . . . that things wouldn't be so bad for me.”

“I could tell,” said Chaos.

“He's so confident about his own luck. He says that what he's got in the luck department will more than make up for anything I lack. Those are his exact words. He says that every time he takes the test, he scores better and better.”

“But you haven't taken him up on it.”

“I hate him.”

Chaos could see that it was more complicated than that. She wanted to hate Cooley, but couldn't completely. It reminded Chaos of himself and Kellogg.

You have nothing to offer each other but trouble, Cooley had said. And it was probably true, but not because of luck. Chaos couldn't afford to stay here and let the local syndromes take root.

But then how could he help her in her struggle with luck? What could he offer a woman whose worst problem he couldn't even take seriously?

As for him, he wasn't even sure he had problems, not in that sense. His life was too full of gaps for that. The
world
had problems; he was just on the receiving end.