Amnesia Moon (16 page)

“Cale's dad. He's been waiting for you,” said Fault, slurping. “He wants to see you, welcome you back.”

“You told him I was coming here?”

“Didn't have to tell him. Your dreams get around, Everett.” The nursing sounds accelerated until Fault had reduced his beer to a bottle of suds. He set it on the floor and said, “Let's go.”

Everett followed him outside, up the flagstone steps to the front entrance of the main house. Fault left the door to the basement apartment ajar. With his beer and test tubes secure, there was nothing else in the apartment worth protecting, apparently. The fog had tucked in closer, now veiling even the gate where Fault had parked the motorcycle. At the door he turned and took the half-full beer from Everett's hand and hid it in the bushes at the side of the doorway. “Get that later,” he said, as if it was an explanation.

They went into the house, and Everett felt his senses immediately overwhelmed. The living room was like a museum, the walls covered with paintings, the antique furniture polished to a creamy glow. The glass coffee table held an ornamented golden clock with a pendulum that clacked softly and sent a shivery golden reflection running back and forth across the glass. Everett was hypnotized by the room, so dazzled and drunk that he wanted to lie down. After the apartment downstairs, not to mention the homes in Vacaville, it was like stepping onto a movie set. Fault immediately seemed froglike and compromising; Everett wanted to step away from him, not be associated.

As strange as the room was, it carried the same charge as Cale Hotchkiss's face on the videotape: Everett
remembered
it. Then Ilford Hotchkiss stepped into the room, and Everett had to wonder if he really remembered anything at all.

He was too young to be the father of the man on the tape. He was exactly Everett's size, but so upright and hard, his hair and eyes each like glossy stone, like marble, that he seemed immense, a portion of the room that had broken off to offer a handshake. At the same time he was so groomed and fine that he seemed miniaturized, a jewel-like mechanism like the golden clock or one of the bonsai trees that lined the mantel. His hair was gray at the temples, but the gray seemed just a polite touch, a ruse. Like the room, he looked better than anyone Everett—or Chaos—had ever seen.

He also looked too much like his own son. A part of Everett was sure this
was
the one on the videotape, altered just enough to impersonate his own father, and he almost blurted “Cale—” as the man stepped up and took his hand.

“Billy,” Ilford said, looking straight into Everett's eyes, “why don't you fix us a drink? Scotch all right, Everett?”

Everett nodded absently, and Fault scurried over to the bar. Ilford led Everett to a chair and seated himself on the couch on the other side of the glass table and shimmering clock. Fault handed them each a drink in a square, beveled glass, a sharp contrast to the recycled beer bottle Everett had just surrendered. The glass weighed so much, it felt magnetized to the floor, and the liquor smelled so rich and intense, it didn't seem to need drinking.

“It's extraordinary to see you, Everett.” Ilford's smile was waxen, and his eyes bored into Everett's, searching—for what? Recognition? Complicity?

Everett took a sip of the whiskey, stared into the glass.

“I heard you've been in Vacaville,” said Ilford evenly.

“Yes.”

“Quite a scene.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, what did you think of it?”

“Like you say, quite a scene.” Everett wanted to grab the man and scream, Who are you? Where's Cale? Where's Gwen?

“Well, compared to that scene I think we've got something pretty good here.”

“You mean San Francisco?”

“More specifically the Alley. It's very local. I'm sure you've noticed how local things can get nowadays.”

“You don't have . . .” Everett waved his hand, wanting it to be understood without his having to say it. “You don't have someone in charge here? You know, that way?”

Ilford laughed without opening his mouth, then said, “Not that way.”

Fault came back with his own drink, a glass almost level to the top with brown liquor. “Everett doesn't need convincing,” he said, grinning. “He came halfway across the fucking country to find us.”

Everett took another gulp of his whiskey, then raised his eyes and considered again the man seated on the other side of the table. Ilford Hotchkiss appeared to waver in and out of focus, as though struggling unsuccessfully to cohere, but when his eyes met Everett's, he reassembled his tense smile, and the rest of him gelled around it. Am I drunk? Everett wondered. He set the tumbler down with a too-loud thwack on the glass and leaned back in his chair, shutting his eyes. He wanted to squeeze away the shimmer of the room, the overprecise details in the paintings and bonsai trees and Ilford's confusing face, but they remained etched into his vision, as though printed on the inside of his eyelids. And his ears couldn't shut out the racket of the clock.

“Something the matter?” said Ilford.

“He's beat,” said Fault.

Fault and Ilford, the hovering pair of them, were absurd and horrible. They were gargoyles at the rim of a void, a void consisting of the absence of Cale and Gwen. Cale and Gwen were his true destination, the lure that brought him here and held him.

But he was stuck instead with Fault and Ilford.

What kind of deal had been struck in this house?

He was suddenly desperately weak. A straight line ran from Chaos's argument with Edie the night before to Everett's pouring whiskey on top of beer just now. It was too much, he was too many people, one too many at least. And so was Ilford Hotchkiss.

 

 

 

 

It was raining when he woke very early the next morning. The house was silent. He'd been put to bed in a spare, clean room whose windowpane was gently raked by wet eucalyptus leaves. He slipped out from under the covers, dressed in new clothes from the dresser, and tiptoed downstairs. The rain had failed to disperse the fog; the house was still isolated, like a figurine in a milky fishbowl. He went outside, still in his bare feet, and stood in the cold wet wind and breathed the morning air. The water spilled off the roof in a line of drops onto the flagstones that led around the corner of the house and down to the basement apartment. He tiptoed back through the house and upstairs to put on his shoes, then went through the rain down the steps.

There in the squalor of what had been Cale's apartment sat Fault, slumped in a chair by the window, watching the rain. He turned and smiled vaguely at Everett, and said, “Up early.”

Everett felt voiceless, as though he'd wandered from his bed only in a dream.

Fault waved carelessly. “Sit down.”

Everett sat in the free chair where it stood, rather than pulling it up closer to Fault.

“You can't tell Ilford,” said Fault warningly.

“Tell Ilford what?”

“That Cale's here.”

“That shouldn't be a problem, Billy. Because Cale's not here.”

“Oh, he's here, all right.”

“What do you mean?”

“I visit with Cale every morning when it rains. Lately it rains every morning.”

Fault was insane, Everett saw now. But, then, where did the video come from?

“I mean, he's not here
now.
” Fault jumped up from his seat, suddenly animated. “He wore off just before you came in. But there's more.”

“More where?” Everett didn't mind playing along.

“In the fridge.”

“There's more Cale in the fridge.”

“Right. My stash.”

Everett sighed. “Well, then, break some out. Don't be selfish.”

“But you can't tell Ilford.” Fault began digging in his pocket for the padlock key.

“I won't.”

Fault opened the lock and leaned into the refrigerator. He emerged with one of the stoppered test tubes in one hand, a syringe in the other, and nudged the door shut again with his foot.

“Here you go,” he said musingly, then uncorked the vial with his teeth. “Gib me an arb,” he said around the cork as he deftly plunged the syringe so that it filled with the contents of the tube.

“What?”

Fault spat out the little cork and said:
“Arm.”

Everett stared dumbly.

“C'mon, roll up your sleeve.”

The rain clattered on the stones outside, heavy and inevitable. Beyond that there was only fog. Everett could feel the weight of the house above them, the gleaming living room, the golden clock, the cabinet full of amber whiskey, all pressing down on the squalid apartment. Fault loomed towards him, smiling raggedly, the ready syringe held softly at his waist. Everett imagined that his entire journey from Hatfork had led to this moment, to this phantom house in what should have been a city but was only an island in fog, and that his destination had been condensed to a pinprick point. He rolled up his sleeve and held out his arm.

 

“Everett.”

Cale was sitting across from him, on an invisible chair in a featureless expanse of blank space. It was the Cale from before, the Cale from the videotape he had viewed as Chaos back in Vacaville. The friend he remembered. But, actually, couldn't remember, not in any way that held together or matched what he'd found here.

Fault, the room, the window, were all gone.

“You're here,” said Cale. He smiled, leaned forward, but didn't extend his hand.

“I guess I am,” Everett heard himself say.

Anyway I'm
somewhere
, he thought. And you're in it, this somewhere I'm at. We're in it together.

“There's a lot we have to talk about.”

There was a staggering understatement. “Your father—” Everett began.

“Fuck Ilford. He's not important. Leave him out of this.”

“Okay,” said Everett.

It made a kind of symmetry, at least, with Fault's injunction against telling Ilford about Cale.

Everett turned his head, wanting to grasp the nature of this null-zone that had replaced the world. Behind him lay only depthless gloom, a gray that might be as near as his eyelids, as far as the stars. Staring at it produced a sensation at once vertiginous and claustrophobic.

He turned back. Cale was seated at a comfortable distance. He was the only point of reference, the only marker of scale.

“Cale—”

“Yes?”

“There's a lot I don't remember. Or understand.”

“You remember me?”

You as a drug in a test tube, or as a ghost lurking behind your father's features? Everett wanted to ask.

No, the one he should remember was a man living in a basement apartment, a friend.

With all he'd reclaimed when he rode on Fault's motorcycle out of Vacaville and into San Francisco, Everett was still adrift. And here, in a city of erasures, things had narrowed to him and Cale.

Ask me the question again about the train yard, he thought, wanting to relive the tangibility of that moment.

“I remember you from before,” he said simply.

“And then what?”

“And then I remember Hatfork. A town in Wyoming. Being a man named Chaos.”

“You don't remember the break?”

“No.”

“Don't worry about it. It's like a jump cut in a movie. Everyone is missing something.”

Like you, for instance, Everett wanted to say. Missing a body.

Then he wondered: Was that better or worse than what he was missing?

“I came to see Gwen,” Everett said. “I remembered her. That's what brought me back.”

“I know.”

“She was on the tape that Fault—”

“You can see her in a minute.”

Cale said this casually, but it wasn't a casual thing to Everett. The idea that Gwen could be a minute away, whatever kind of minute that might be, was disturbing.

“First tell me about Hatfork,” Cale went on. “I know some of it from your dreams, and from Fault. But I want to hear it from you. Tell me about Kellogg.”

So Everett laid it all out. Kellogg and Little America, the cars, the hoards of cans, then Melinda, the trip west, and Edie. He was amazed at the flow of words, the sound of his own voice; it was the most he'd said aloud for as long as he could remember. He realized, reaching the end, that he was trying to strike a bargain, one where he'd get back as much as he gave.

Afterwards, however, they sat in silence. Cale looked preoccupied, staring off into the blankness of the space they shared, as though he saw something there.

“It doesn't matter,” said Cale finally. “I should get you to Gwen before the dose wears off.”

“I told you what I know,” said Everett.

“I'm sure you did,” said Cale. He seemed dissipated. “It's funny, though. You have a way of leaving yourself out of the story.” He reached into the void at his left and turned an invisible door handle, which clicked audibly.

“What do you mean?” said Everett, watching as a doorway swung open. Beyond it lay a greater darkness. He craned his neck, tried to focus, but couldn't see anything. Staring only made the gloom dance with illusory swirls of static.

“You deserve more credit, that's all.” Cale's voice had grown dim. “You had a lot to do with the things you saw.” He pointed. “Go inside.”

Without intending to move, Everett fell forward and through the doorway.

The white outlines of a room were sketched into the black space. He turned back, to see Cale still seated in his nothingness. “Go,” Cale croaked.

Everett turned and swam forward.

She sat on the edge of a white-outlined bed. She was dressed in something black that merged with the background, so that her face and hands were radiant, afloat. It was the image from the tape, and from his dreams. Gwen.

“Everett.” She moved the hair from her face and smiled shyly. “I've been waiting . . .” She looked down, her hair falling again. When she looked up a moment later, her eyes were shiny with tears. “Is it really you?”