Amnesia Moon (15 page)

Chaos remembered. They'd walked the tracks to the end of the line, to the yard where the trains sat overnight, with spray cans for painting graffiti. They'd covered one car with paint from top to bottom, then gone uptown to wait for it to roll through the station, except they'd fallen asleep on the bench on the platform and missed it. Cale had been his best friend. The question was obviously meant to trigger the memory, and it had worked.

Clearly Chaos was going to have to get used to the name Everett.

“I want to see you,” Cale went on. “I'm glad you're coming back. There's something I think you can help me with.”

He paused, looked away from the camera, and Chaos felt that he ought to say something, answer. The face and voice on the tape were in some way more real than anyone or anything he'd encountered in a long time. Through them he could almost taste his life before the break.

“You were right, Everett,” continued Cale. “All the stuff you used to say about what mattered, you were right. Everything else is just what you have to work through to get back to what you know matters when you're twelve or thirteen.” Cale paused. “The change is weird. When you're young, you'd like to remake everything, you want the world to be growing up with you. Now it's sort of true.”

Chaos wanted to believe that this dark-eyed man was his friend. He wanted it to be true that Cale needed him, missed him. Knew him. Chaos wanted to be known, known in a way that would help him know himself.

“We'll talk when you get here,” said Cale. “I don't want to overwhelm you. I'm just worried that you might not remember enough to know to come back. That you'll get this close and then wander away again.”

Cale looked away from the camera, and the screen went blank. Then there was another clip, this one very short. A woman stood against a black backdrop, wearing a black suit, so she was barely more than face and hands floating in a mist of static. She pushed her hair back, and the camera moved in closer. She was beautiful.

It was Gwen, and the neutral space she inhabited on the television screen was just like the darkened room where Chaos had met with her in his dreams.

“Everett.” She blinked and looked down. “Cale says you're really there. He says he knows from his dreams—but I don't dream anymore.” She looked up and laughed softly at whoever was behind the camera. “I don't know what to say. Uh, come and see me, okay, Ev? I'd like to see you. That's all, I guess.”

The camera held her for a few seconds more, and then the screen went black.

Edie had shown Chaos how to use the VCR, then sat back in a chair and watched the tape in silence. But when Gwen appeared on the screen, she got up and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Melinda just sat on the floor and fidgeted. When Chaos switched the television off, she made a sour face and said, “Where'd you get that?”

“A guy gave it to me,” he said absently. “Guy I used to know.”

“The motorcycle man?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know.” He got up and knocked on the bedroom door, and when Edie didn't answer, he went in. She was sitting on the edge of the bed beside a pile of clothes.

“Somebody left some old clothes here,” she said. “They might fit you. You have to wash the ones you're wearing.”

“I thought you couldn't take anything.”

“Clothes are up for grabs. You're supposed to take them with you. So if they're left behind, you can have them.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll try them on. Thanks.”

She got up nervously. “When you change, put your old clothes in the bathroom. I'll wash them and hang them up.”

“I think I'm going to San Francisco tomorrow.”

“So?”

“They probably wouldn't dry in time.”

“They smell,” she said. “Either wash them or throw them out.” She turned away from him and left the room. He followed her out, past Melinda, who'd switched the television back on, and into the kitchen.

Edie began to inventory and rearrange the items in the refrigerator and cabinets, but from her manner Chaos suspected she'd done this once already. Neither of them spoke. After a few minutes she pulled out a box of crackers and a hand-labeled plastic container of peanut butter and began jamming roughly smeared crackers into her mouth.

“What's the matter?” said Chaos.

“I don't like your new friends,” she said thickly, through a mouthful of crackers.

“They're not my new friends, they're my old friends.”

“Well, I don't like them, especially the one this morning, the only real one. Mr. Leather Jacket. He's awful, Chaos. And he's getting you in trouble already.”

Chaos didn't want to argue Fault's merits. He wasn't sure Fault had any. “What do you mean, the only real one?”

“The other two are just pictures,” she said. “On television. They're like your dreams. I don't believe they're real. They're from inside you.”

“That doesn't make sense. It's a tape, Edie.”

“Well, a lot of things don't make sense. I've learned not to trust what I see on television, that's all. People telling you they're your friends, looking all charismatic. I thought you knew better.”

“This isn't television like you have here. It's a tape. It's images of people I know talking to me on a tape.”

“Well, it sure looked like television to me.”

“You're not being reasonable, Edie. Besides, that's not the point. That's not why I have to go. Ian says I have to take his test. He won't leave us alone, Edie. He'll do whatever it takes to split us apart.”

Her eyes grew wide and hopeful. “That's not important, Chaos. We can deal with Ian—”

“He's from the government, he can do anything he wants. He's only holding back because he thinks he can have you. If I stay, he'll ruin your life and call it luck. He'll take you away from your kids.”

She was quiet for a minute, and then said, half to herself, “You're only trying to make it seem like it's for me that you're going away.”

“No . . .”

“Yes. You tell me it's for my own good. And then Ian will come and tell me it's more proof of my bad luck. You'll just make him right if you go. Everything happens to me. Ian's right.”

“No. If I stay and take his test, then we'll both have to do what he says. I'm leaving because I don't believe in luck.”

“Why can't you be honest? You're leaving because you want to see that woman.”

The word
woman
sat there between them, ringing in the silence. Chaos couldn't think of anything to say to displace it.

“It's okay,” said Edie. “You have to find out. You can't just keep wondering. I understand. You have to go.” She hesitated, and added, “I can't live with your dreams anymore anyway. I feel like I'm sleeping with
her.
”

“It's not just about her,” said Chaos. “It's about me. Who I was before.”

“Okay.” She ate another cracker. “I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

He felt beaten, despite getting what he wanted.

“What about Melinda?” she asked.

“Can she stay here with you?” He didn't want Melinda along. And Edie might see it as a promise that he'd come back. He didn't know if it was.

She hesitated, then said, “All right.”

But Melinda was standing in the kitchen doorway. The television played unwatched in the other room.

“You jerk,” she said. “You're going to see that girl.”

“I'll be gone a day or two,” he said, fumbling.

“What, you think I want to go with you?” Her eyes were wet, but her scowl didn't allow any weakness. “You jerk. You're just like Kellogg with your stupid dreams. I hate it.”

Melinda and Edie slept in the two bedrooms that night, and Chaos sat in the living room watching the television until he fell asleep with it on. He woke to sunlight, a test pattern, and the sound of Fault's motorcycle revving down in the street.

 

 

 

 

Everett remembered San Francisco.

Fault took him through it the long way, through the Submission District, before climbing the hill into No Alley. The streets of the Submission were alive, teeming, the solar neon glowing, the sidewalks hectic with peddlers, the roads clotted with traffic, animal, mechanical, and pedestrian. Steambath proprietors stood beside their cubicles hawking quarter-hour sessions to the street people. Customers squirmed into taquerias past drunks and children and pickpockets and drunken pickpockets and child pickpockets and drunken children. Half-completed sex-changes leaned out of the windows above the shops and shrieked to one another across the street. The stream of traffic parted, scooting dogs, vendors, and Fault's motorcycle up onto the sidewalk to make way for a gigantic two-wheeled RVcycle, its bloated kitchenette body aloft with antigrav.

It was just as Everett remembered, but it was changed, too. Or maybe it was Everett who had changed. The city had always been in ruins, a place that had never cohered. There were probably people living here who thought that there had been no rift. Everett suspected that if he stayed in the city, he might eventually come to agree with them.

Fault tried to swing back into the street, but a corroded televangelist robot staggered into their path, blocking the motorcycle. Its ferroplastic limbs creaked with every movement, and when it knelt to bless the ground, Everett saw that strips of shredded rubber hung from its soles. Fault honked his horn. The televangelist looked up. The computer graphic face of its television head babbled and ranted quietly as its video eye stared, taking them in.

Everett remembered the machines, though he'd never before seen one in such disrepair. Ordinarily, they'd launch into street-corner sermons at every opportunity, trying to convert unbelievers to a variety of faiths. This one was preaching to no one but itself.

Fault honked again. The face on the screen, a corpulent, middle-aged country preacher, wrinkled its chin and frowned. “Lost sheep,” it muttered. “In need perhaps of a shepherd?”

“Get out of the way,” said Fault.

The televangelist only planted itself more firmly and lifted an accusing finger. “Or devils, perhaps . . .”

“Oh, Christ,” said Fault, and he began backing up, pushing with his heels on the pavement, to get clear of the robot.

“You speak the name of your master, devil,” fumed the televangelist. Pamphlets spilled out of the pockets of its ragged tunic, littering the sidewalk.

Fault rolled clear and then sped away around the robot, back into the crowded street. Soon they were out of the Submission and into the hills.

Everett remembered Fault now. It was with as much contempt as affection. Everett and Cale had been friends. Fault a third who dogged their steps, the last to get any joke. That was how the memory went. Everett felt stupid that Fault had herded Chaos blindly around Vacaville, getting him into trouble at the mall. Everett could have avoided it easily, but Chaos hadn't known any better.

Stupid Chaos, Everett thought. But he got me through.

No Alley was shrouded in mist. As they rode into it, Everett thought suddenly of the green. He shook it off. A seamless green fog in the mountains was something quite different from the bank of white that covered the hills of the Alley. San Francisco was supposed to be foggy.

Still, they seemed to have ridden out of the city into a zone of erasures. An occasional rooftop broke through the cloud, and the street was visible at either side. But while the streets of the Submission had been full of parked or junked cars, here the curb was empty, and past it gates and stairways led up into the haze.

When Fault stopped at the gate of the Hotchkiss house, Everett felt a shock of recognition. The house loomed behind a veil of cypress trees, aloof and protected. The upper story was mostly glass, the Victorian architecture ripped out and replaced with a modern greenhouse window. It seemed to reflect glints of sunlight, though there was no sun, and Everett's eyes hurt when he looked up at it. Fault parked the motorcycle just inside the gate, and they walked up the driveway to the house together in silence.

Fault went down the concrete steps to the basement apartment. Everett looked at the upstairs doorway, remembering more. “Cale still lives with his father?”

“You'll see.”

The basement had been headquarters for Everett and Cale, the place where they'd told the jokes that Fault got last. Now it had reverted to some primal hideout. The floor was littered with laundry and bedclothes, and Cale's books and computers were gone.

“Where's Cale?” asked Everett.

“This is my place now,” said Fault. “Want a beer?”

Everett shrugged.

“Here.” Fault went to the refrigerator, a giant, battered, eggshell-colored antique patched with glue spots from scraped-away decals. Its door was padlocked. Fault dug in his pocket for a key and undid the lock. When he opened the door, Everett caught sight of the contents: six-packs were jammed in sideways to fill the lower shelves, and the top shelf and door racks were filled with stoppered test tubes.

Fault handed Everett a beer, took one for himself, and carefully repadlocked the door. Everett examined the bottle. The cap had been screwed back on with a tool, pliers maybe, that had sheared away the metal ridges as well as parts of the glass threading. The label, pasted on over the bleached remains of a previous one, read:
WALT'S REGULAR ALE.
He tasted it: homemade. A step above the bathtub gin he'd been drinking in Hatfork, but only a step.

“Where's Cale?” asked Everett again. He thought, too. Where's Gwen? but didn't say it.

“Relax,” said Fault, pausing to chug at his beer. “You ought to see Ilford first.”

“Ilford?” Everett was unsure of the name.