Dermaphoria (16 page)

I
NEED TO FORGET EVERYTHING ALL OVER AGAIN
. T
HE STASH OF SKIN BACK IN
my room could have me time-traveling inside my skull for weeks, but I want it nowhere near me. There is a very real possibility that every second I’ve reconstructed has been a prolonged and vivid dream, but a dream nonetheless. There is a very real possibility that I was, in fact, alone at the lab from the very beginning, that Skin was my brainchild and if I wanted to sell out everyone I ever came into contact with, I couldn’t because there was no everyone. There is an equally real possibility that I was standing too close when Oz blew, though I had nothing to do with it myself. That Anslinger simply collected the evidence, found the name attached to the Galaxie and decided whoever I was, I would become Eric Ashworth, is not out of the question. I could have been in a car wreck on the way back from church, or taken a stray brick to the head on a construction site, and it’s my own bad luck that I have no memory, insurance or next of kin, my own bad luck that Anslinger has a high-profile case he needs sewn shut, water-tight. That White and Anslinger know each other is not unlikely. Anything is possible and nothing is possible. They’re the same thing.

Lou hasn’t moved. He’s behind the bar wiping a glass, the same one for all I know. Like the Glass Stripper never leaves her pink room and Jack and the Beanstalk never venture forth from the Firebird, Lou stands in the same spot, with the same expression, polishing the same
glass with the same towel, each time I enter the bar. The universe is stuck and I’m the monkey wrench in God’s gears. Lou asks if I’m having the usual and I say yeah, but hold the Coke.

“Throw in a Scotch and soda.” Manhattan White takes the barstool beside mine, opens his wallet.

“And a Scotch and soda.” I wave his money away. “No, I got it.” The closest to feeling anything good today is not feeling either horror or hatred in the presence of White.

“Mind if I join you?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Do I see a glimmer of recognition?” He smiles, punching me on the shoulder like a Little League coach. I nod. More than a glimmer.

“You here to snuff me,” Lou sets our drinks down and I take a stiff swallow of whiskey. “Now’s your chance. You won’t get a fight out of me.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.” White smiles. He doesn’t touch his drink. “First things first. How are you doing? You get your brain plugged back in or do we need to do the whole song and dance from the beginning?” I’m having a bad day, and his jocular attitude is making it worse. “We had ice cream a few days ago, remember?”

“I remember,” I say. “And before that I met you at a house out near Littlerock, off Highway 138. And I called you for help another time because somebody got hurt and that somebody disappeared.”

“This is good news.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It sounds as though your memory’s returned,” he says. “You got hit on the head but you’re all better now.”

“I was not hit on the head. I overdosed. I was brain dead for eight seconds.”

“Your mind seems pretty clear to me.”

“That’s a relief, assuming what I remember about you is correct,
because everything else is a blank. I thought my memory was coming back but I was wrong.”

“Then it’s none of my concern, your other business. My immediate concern is our compensation, and that you relinquish the intellectual property we spoke of last week.”

“I can’t help you.” I drain my glass and ask Lou for a refill.

“Wrong answer. You owe us money and a chemistry lesson. Or you have a play date with my son.”

“The chemistry lesson you’re looking for was lost in those eight seconds.” I can see pieces of the model in my mind, pieces that could as easily belong to a vitamin or a molecule of plastic, as likely as anything else. “If you’re looking for a sample, I can provide it.”

“We’ve got samples. That’s not the problem.”

“Then there is no problem. You have someone break it down, isolate and analyze the active alkaloid, then do a reverse synthesis. Someone with the time and equipment. I’d love to help but my laboratory’s in a billion tiny pieces sealed up in an evidence locker and I seem to have forgotten my higher education while undergoing CPR.”

“‘Someone.’ Like we put an ad in the paper for this someone?”

“Sure. Qualifications include an extensive background in organic chemistry as well as large-scale production and operations. Must have no brain damage or life-threatening enemies. Accused felons need not apply.”

White laughs, as though he’s genuinely enjoying my company.

“You’re irreplaceable, Eric,” he says. “Among the things you forgot was just how unique you were. You could have cured cancer but, lucky for us, we found you first. I’m going to miss you. Never thought I’d say that.”

“Get it over with.”

“Would you slow it down? You’re really paranoid.”

“You have no idea.”

“What about the money?” White asks.

“What about it?”

“The money to cover the damage you caused. This will allow us to hire your mysterious someone.”

“There is no money.”

White says nothing, his face blank, waiting for me to continue, to fill in the rest.

“There’s no punch line either. I’ve got some cash and some science projects back in my room. You’re welcome to them.”

“Don’t force my hand, Eric. The joke’s over.”

“It never began. The money is gone. All of it.”

White helps himself to a cocktail napkin, removes a pen from his pocket and slides them both to me.

“Jot the account number down,” he says. “Right here. Write it down, I’ll cover your bar tab and room rent for the rest of the month and you’ll never see me again.”

“The money was at the house.” Everything’s quiet. “Now you get it. It’s gone.”

“It’s burned.” White says.

“It was in a floor safe.”

“The Feds seized it.”

“Otto seized it.”

“One more time.” He forces a smile, like a car salesman who’s been kicked in the shin.

“Otto,” I repeat. “He introduced us, remember? The gambling freak. He’s been skimming from the beginning. If I were you, I’d recount every bag he ever dropped off to you. He vanished a couple of weeks before the fire. Got to Oz first and cleaned me out. Haven’t seen him since. You find him, your boy can be my guest, and make sure to give him my regards.”

“I have business to take care of.” White slips his pen back into his
pocket and stands. “Let’s reconvene in three days, right here. Same time. You’ve had your fun. I realize it might take time, but I trust you’ll be carrying a very large canvas bag when we next meet.”

I’m deciding on some flavor of “you haven’t been listening to me,” or “you must be more brain damaged than I am,” but White stops me.

“Don’t. I’ve lost my sense of humor about this. Good afternoon, Eric.”

I finish my drink, then dial Anslinger. It’s after hours, so I’m once more dumped to his voice mail.

“For what it’s worth,” I tell him, “I was left holding the bag. I had a partner, Otto, who let me take the fall. I don’t know his last name. But he was there for everything, right up until he ripped me off and jumped ship. I doubt that’s helpful to you right now, and I know it’s too late as far as my case is concerned. But if you ever get your hands on him, I’ll say or sign anything you want, if it will help you to bury him.”

L
IKE WAKING UP SICK FROM A DRUNKEN FEVER, WEARING CLOTHES YOU
don’t recognize and a stranger’s blood on your shirt, the chaos follows a trail you don’t remember leaving, right to your feet. I step into my room and it’s putrid, my own stink out-stinking that of the previous occupants. The acrid smell of boric acid hangs in the air, mixing with the chemical sweat print from my body on the bed like a burial cloth, the smell sealed inside by the paper stuffed into window cracks and the steel wool in the baseboards. My collage, cardboard box flaps and pieces of torn paper, covers my walls, a floor-to-ceiling display of dead and dissected roaches, diagrams labeled with bits of string pointing to for theoretical placement of tracking chips, signal boosters and recording devices. The
Blattella transmitus
. It made sense at the time.

I was wrong about the bugs, but not about being followed. Someone powerful saw to it that my bail was too low and too easy to make for the charges against me. Someone saw to it that the role of cash I’d been arrested with was returned. It should have been seized, skimmed down to a quarter of the real amount and then booked as evidence, but they handed back every last dollar. Neither White nor Anslinger have that much pull, but Hoyle does. I need to get out of here, and they know that. When anyone refers to they, they’re referring to Hoyle, whether they know it or not.

On my way in, a couple of new guys in the lobby asked where the
rehab group was meeting. Big guys with muscles and work boots claiming they’d hit bottom, that the court had ordered them into a program. Either one of them was healthier than a whole floor of Firebird residents. Then another guy came to check the plumbing. He was running back and forth to his van but his hands weren’t dirty and his clothes weren’t wet. He was lugging a pipe wrench without fixing anything. The wrench was pristine, without a trace of lime or rust, an underused prop collecting dust in storage.

The warden seemed too friendly.

“Hey,” he’d said. “Guy dropped this off for you.” He handed me a white envelope with my name typed on the outside. My hands were shaking but I took it, then ran to my room before the plumber could follow me.

The whisper says, “jump,” only louder this time and when I hear it again, it’s no longer whispering. I step away from the window, pull the cards from the desk and spread a game in front of me. On cue, there’s a knock at the door but I’m not startled this time. I know that knock.

“Nice of you gentlemen to drop by.”

Jack and the Beanstalk step into my room once more, as though someone’s waiting to take their hats and offer them a brandy.

“Good afternoon, sir,” says Jack, spooky cordial. “It’s a change to see you so engaged. I take it from your wardrobe that your trial has begun.” My trial has begun in the same sense an airplane has begun flying toward a mountain.

“And it’s not going well, I gather.”

“Jack, I’m not up for it today. What do you want? Or are you just here to say that you warned me?”

“I’d say you’ve been salting your own wounds quite well, on your own.”

“Something like that.”

Beanstalk examines my diagrams and dissections, writing down his observations on my elusive species in his black notebook, his headphones clamped to his ears.

“How much longer do you have left?”

“I don’t know. It could be tomorrow or a week. They’re still arguing the admissibility of evidence. There’s a lot of it.”

“And you have no disposition on the outcome?” Jack cocks his head, like someone placating a wounded child.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Are you guilty?”

Straight away, I know Jack’s looking for me to spill while Beanstalk digs for evidence. Hoyle needs to know what I know. Hoyle had me cut loose. Hoyle sent me to the same hotel where Jack and the Beanstalk live who, in turn, introduced me to the Glass Stripper, who gave me back my memory.

In the next instant, my house-of-cards conspiracy theory collapses beneath a feather of doubt, and I know I’m wrong.

“I’m clean, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Jack says. “I can show you.”

“That’s not it. It doesn’t matter now anyway,” I say. Then the words leave my mouth, “Yes, I’m guilty.” No weight lifts from my shoulders, I feel no sense of relief. It’s as though I’d confessed to murdering Snow White. “I thought I remembered all of the things that made me guilty, but I don’t.”

“Desiree isn’t always reliable, that way.”

“Please,” I say, holding my hand up to stop Jack from saying anything else. Until the reality sinks in on its own, I want to savor the bliss of your illusion for as long as I can.

“I did projects with my dad when I was younger.” I sit down on the edge of my bed and piece together what I think I know. “I learned
about the way the universe works because of him. But he and my mom taught me to believe in God and those things didn’t…” I’m not sure how to continue, not sure whether the Mom and Dad I remember ever existed. The white envelope from the warden sits on my bed. I’d forgotten about it, so I pick it up and I tear it open while I talk to Jack. “What I learned about God and what I learned about science didn’t match. I figured out that the one place where the two ideas touch is in chemistry, in the brain.”

“So, now we know what you’re on trial for.”

“Right. I guess you do. Only now I don’t even know if I’m remembering my reasons, whether I did anything at all with my father. I think he died when I was young, but I can’t be certain. I think I was hit by lightning, but I don’t know.” I’m talking to a polite, well-spoken junky covered in festering sores and who talks like the killer computer from that space movie, and his semiopaque, walking stick, mute, jazz-fiend friend. “Why am I telling you all of this?”

“I already told you. The two of us,” he gestures to Beanstalk with his outstretched arm and upturned palm, like he’s a museum guide, “we’re the only friends you’ve got.”

I unfold the note, expecting a veiled threat composed of cut-out magazine letters, but instead find a message written in perfect block capitals:

Recovered near the burn site. Maybe it will help. Coyotes at the rest
.

–N. Anslinger

There’s a second sheet behind the note. It’s a photocopy of a dog collar, the page rubber-stamped as evidence and marked with my case number. It’s dark and blurry, its details lost in the bloated shadows of a second-generation copy, but the tag is crisp and unblemished. It’s a medallion the size of a watch face and it reads, O
TTO.

“I really have hit bottom, then,” I say.

“Please. That’s uncalled for.”

“I’m sorry.” I’m starting to believe him, about the two of them being my only friends. “I never questioned the accusations. I just tried to remember what I did to bring those charges on, instead of whether or not I actually did them. And I thought maybe, just maybe, I had an idea why. I’m not a bad person. I wasn’t after the money.

“But you still believe you’re guilty?”

“Yes. But everything I remembered is wrong. Everything leading up to my arrival here never happened. You said I was in love. You were right. But that never happened, either.”

“I know,” Jack says. “Desiree. It’s like falling in love every night and having your heart broken every morning. Forever, like Prometheus. Only everyone forgets how seldom our memory is accurate. Having more memory is just a way of distorting a greater amount of the past.” Jack pauses, looks at his feet, and for a moment the only sound is Beanstalk scribbling into his notebook. “I’m preaching. I apologize. This isn’t the time or place.”

“Forget it.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Get me out of here.” I’m joking and serious at the same time.

“You can’t leave on your own?”

“They’re watching me. I’m a flight risk.”

Jack’s face is blank.

“You can believe me or not,” I say.

“Suppose we believe you? Where would you go?”

I hadn’t given it any thought, but the answer leaps to mind in a blink. “Back to the lab,” I tell him. “Oz. What’s left of it.”

“You know where it is? For certain?”

“Positive. They gave the location at the trial.”

“And why go there?”

“Just to see if it’s like I remember it. To see if there’s one thing I can recall correctly.”

“So then, go.”

“I can’t skip out on my trial. I’ll make things worse.”

“They can be worse?”

Jack is not only right, but on my side for certain, this time.

“I’d just like to see the place for myself,” I tell him. “Just to know I’ve got some details right.”

“You’ve explained that. And I’ve already said it: Go.”

“I can’t. They’re watching me. I know it.”

“We’ll help you.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask you,” Jack folds his hands behind him, the learned professor. “If you believe that everything you know of your life never happened, and you could verify at least one event, one place or detail to prove at least some small part of your memory was right, would you care at all about how you did it, or who wanted to help you or stop you?”

Anything to find you, Desiree.

“No.”

“Simple, isn’t it? Now gather your things and follow us.”

I haven’t touched my supply of painkillers from the doctor and, though I scarcely remember my final buy from the Glass Stripper, I’m still holding a formidable stash of Skin, the very last of it, by here account. I stuff them all into my pockets, along with what cash I’ve kept in my room, which I’d hidden behind one of my bug diagrams. I had the common sense to know that a thief wouldn’t be digging through those in my absence.

Beanstalk removes his headphones, presses his ear to the wall and a look of utter bliss comes over him, soothed by the same humming wires Jack had warned me against. He raises his hand and counts down with his fingers, five, four, three, two, one. The phone rings.

“Go ahead,” says Jack.

I pick up the receiver. “Go.” Old habit. I think.

“Uh, Mr. Ashworth”—it’s the warden—“I’m wondering if it’s possible to move you to another room. We’ve finally got an exterminator to take a look at the place.”

So, now I’m getting five-star courtesy at a cash-only dump. They think I’m stupid. I repeat the question, as though to make sure I heard him correctly. When Jack and the Beanstalk hear me, Beanstalk points to his wrist, then holds up one finger.

“No problem. Can you give me an hour?”

“Certainly,” says the warden. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Hoyle wants to know where I am. They’re going to keep a close, close eye on everything I do. I can’t ask for the rest of my money from the warden’s cage without tripping every alarm in the silent network of watchers cloaking me. A copy of the Hotel Firebird’s house rules is taped inside my door, the paper dull yellow and cracking with age. I peel it away, carefully, as it’s the closest thing to formal letterhead I’ll find here. On the empty, bottom third of the page, I write instructions that the remaining contents of my property envelope, currently secured in the warden’s lobby cage, should go to the bearer of this letter, minus any overdue rent, in the event of my absence.

The letter is not legally binding, the warden has no compelling reason to comply instead of keeping it for himself but, if Jack and the Beanstalk can get me out of the Firebird without Hoyle knowing, then at the very least I owe them my good intention and effort. I hand the paper to Jack, then throw a couple of clean shirts, some socks and my
toothbrush into a pillowcase. As I do all of this, Beanstalk is busy closing my window and drawing the curtains. He makes a twisting gesture with his wrist at my doorknob. I hand him my key, which he slides into the lock and, with shocking ease, snaps off the end, leaving its teeth lodged in the tumbler. The three of us leave room 621, Beanstalk closing the door as we step out.

“Follow me,” says Jack.

We take the stairs to the third floor, to a room at the very end of the hallway near the fire exit. A
LARM
W
ILL
S
OUND
, it says.

“There’s stairs out there, instead of a fire escape. Much easier and less conspicuous,” says Jack. “We need to wait.”

“For what?”

“They’ll be calling on you in an hour. They won’t have an exterminator in tow, if your suspicions are correct.”

“I know that.”

“They called your room to verify you’re there. They’ll see from the street that your window is closed, and find your door is locked from the inside.” Jack knocks on the door, near the fire exit.

“They’re going to think I’ve locked myself in there. That I’ve slit my wrists, or something.”

“Yes, they will. And as long as they think you’re in there bleeding to death, they won’t be looking for you at the bus station. But we need to wait until they come knocking.”

A woman opens the door, Beanstalk’s height but with Jack’s shoulders.

“There’s my baby,” she says. Beanstalk steps into her and they embrace like mother and son reuniting. She whispers into his ear and he strokes her back and arms tenderly. “I thought I heard you out here,” she says to Jack.

“Did we wake you?”

“I’ve had my beauty sleep, Jackie.” She takes his hands and bends to give Jack a soft, lingering kiss on the lips. I can see into her room. It’s the size of a large closet with barely enough space for her bed, a chair, a piece of wood propped on a pair of milk crates and a mirror leaning against the wall. The floor, bed and wood plank are littered with makeup, lingerie, shoes and broken hamster pipes stained black.

“You brought a friend,” she says.

Jack introduces her, “This is, Donna.”

“I’m Eric,” I say, hoping to avoid any greeting more intimate than giving her my name.

“My pleasure, Eric.” She takes my hand, her own larger than Jack’s and she smiles with teeth like new porcelain. “You must be 621.”

“Eric needs to stay here for a while. No more than an hour,” says Jack.

“Were you bad, Eric?” She strokes the back of my knuckles with her free hand.

I want Jack to stay with us, but think better of asking.