Trust No One (11 page)

You will have to keep an eye on her.

By the time Saturday has rolled around, Jerry has come to understand the fundamentals behind his disease. His conversation with Nurse Hamilton is proof he killed somebody, and reading passages from his books over the last few days have shown him the way the world works. It’s about balance. There is, he believes, a reason he has Alzheimer’s, and understanding that reason is the first step on the path to being cured.

He steps into the hallway. He’s been told he woke up this morning a little confused, but this afternoon he knows who he is—fifty-year-old Jerry Grey, killer of one, at least one. He heads to the more common areas of the home, where others are watching TV or playing cards or comparing stories about grandchildren. TV has lost interest for him. It’s impossible to follow a show when you don’t know what happened the week before. There are couches and coffee tables and some people are talking, some are reading books, others are just staring ahead, lost in a thought either real or imagined, confused or not, chasing down a memory they can’t quite grab. There are wheelchairs parked against walls and crutches parked against couches. The TV is muted. There’s a show on about auctions and antiques, only they aren’t really antiques to the core demographic of this show, but items they grew up with.

Eric is busy, so Jerry waits. On a couch. By a window.
Fifty-
year-old Jerry Grey, killer of one,
those words going around in his mind like a skipping record, until Eric is free and comes over.

“I need your help,” Jerry tells him.

“Whatever you need.”

“I need to get out of here.”

Eric doesn’t answer. He just gives Jerry one of those sad smiles everybody who works here knows how to deliver, a smile Jerry is getting pretty sick of seeing.

“Please, it’s important.”

“It doesn’t seem like you need my help to get out of here, Jerry—you’ve done it three times by yourself now.”

Three times, Jerry thinks, where he’s functioned enough to walk twenty miles but not functioned well enough to create the memory. Three times where he’s essentially been sleepwalking. Only it should be called
wake-walking.
He is Jerry Grey, fifty-year-old crime writer, killer of one. He is the resident wake-walker. Maybe more than three times, he thinks, if he’s snuck his way back in.

“What do you need to get out for?” Eric asks.

He’s been wondering how much to reveal, and has decided the best way forward is to tell Eric everything. There is no shame in needing help.

“I know why I have Alzheimer’s. It’s because the Universe is punishing me for the bad things I’ve done. I hurt somebody, maybe even more than just one person. The only hope I have of the Universe returning my memories is if I confess to my crimes. I have to go to the police.”

Eric’s smile has turned into a frown. Jerry remembers somebody telling him once that a frown uses more muscles. The guy who told him that got shot in the back of the head during a drug deal in the back room of a furniture factory. Jerry can remember his face going through all kinds of frowning as he knelt there as a gunman stood over him, telling him he had a number in mind that he was counting to, and when he got there he was going to pull the trigger. The number was twenty-nine, only the gunman didn’t say that, he just counted silently as the guy knelt in front of him shaking. Then there was the gunshot. The echo. There was little blood. How does Jerry know this? Is that who he killed?

“Is this about Suzan?” Eric asks.

Suzan. She was the first. “How do you know about Suzan?”

“We’ve had this conversation before, do you remember?”

Jerry shakes his head. If he remembered, he wouldn’t be here.

“It never happened,” Eric says, and he leans forward and puts his hand on Jerry’s arm. “These people you think you killed, it just didn’t happen. Nobody in your street was murdered. You never snuck into anybody’s house and killed them. There is no Suzan with a
z.
”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because we checked. Where you grew up, nobody was murdered. Not in your neighborhood, hell, not even in your suburb.”

Jerry knows the words are true, they feel true, and his body floods with relief. The fear inside him settles. The same way learning he was a crime writer fit like a glove, so does learning he’s not a killer. There is no Suzan. There was no drug deal where he watched some guy get shot in the back of the head after the shooter counted to twenty-nine. They were in his books. He may not remember the details, but he knows he created these people.

Then it hits him. If he’s been a good guy all these years, then why the disease? If he didn’t kill anybody, then how can he repent? His future is as bleak as ever. “Then why am I being punished?”

“There is no
why,
” Eric says. “It’s just bad luck.”

“So I never killed anybody?”

“The thing is, Jerry, it’s all in the way you created these worlds—they all seem so real. People would read your books and they would become the main characters, they would see the world through their eyes, they would feel their thoughts. It’s no wonder it all seems real to you—it sure seems real to those who read you. It sure seemed real to me. Your books are amazing,” he says. “I’ve been a huge fan since book one.”

“It can’t just be bad luck,” Jerry says. “The Universe is balancing the scales for something.”

“Jerry—”

“I need to think about it,” he says. He stands up. “I think I’ll go rest a while.”

Eric stands up too. They start walking back towards Jerry’s room.

“Do you remember me telling you that I wanted to be a writer?” Eric asks.

Jerry shakes his head.

“I asked you for one piece of advice, and you said write what you know. I said that wasn’t always possible. Do you remember what you said?”

“No.”

“You said fake it. You said, did I really think Gene Roddenberry had been to Mars? Did I really think that Stephen King had been spooked by a vampire when he was a kid? Did I really think Bill and Ted knew how to travel in time? You said write what you know and fake the rest. You said throw some research in there too.”

“And how’s that working out for you?” Jerry asks.

“I’m still working here, aren’t I?” Eric says, then laughs. “The thing about Suzan is exactly that. You didn’t kill her, you just faked it, but she feels as real to you as she does to your readers. Now, you’re not going to try and sneak out again today, are you?”

“No.”

When Jerry gets into his room he sits down by the window. If he isn’t being punished, then what is it? A memory comes to him then, one so strong it could have happened yesterday. He’s sixteen years old, he’s at school and it’s career day and they’re all trying to figure what they want to do with their lives, as if a sixteen-year-old can possibly know. Only he did know. He’s having a conversation with a teacher, telling her he wants to be a writer. The teacher is telling him he needs to plan for a real future first, and to consider writing as a hobby. Jerry says he will do whatever it takes to make it happen. Is that what this is? The Universe taking his remaining years because it gave him the ones he wanted? Did he sell his soul?

“That’s not it,” he says, as much to himself as to the boy from nearly thirty-five years ago. It’s about Suzan with a
z.
Perhaps not her specifically, but somebody just like her. The sense he has killed somebody is just far too real to ignore.

Hey, Future Jerry. How you been? Sorry you haven’t been in touch. You’ve been busy. You know how it is. Things to do. Places to be. People to forget. It’s been ten days since you last wrote. This whole thing, this whole Alzheimer’s hoopla, has been getting to you. Of course it has. You want to be super optimistic, and make light of it when you can, and fall into line with all the
Everything is going to be fine
ideology everybody is preaching, but you just can’t, so rather than face the world, you’ve been sleeping in every day, hardly ever getting up before lunchtime. It’s been a
Who gives a fuck
kind of week, whereas it should be a
Let’s do everything you can while you still can
kind of week. You should be out there hang gliding and visiting Egypt and going to rock concerts and bucket-listing your way through your final days, not sleeping in. Also, you’ve been drinking more. Don’t get the wrong idea—you’re not getting hammered every night—two or three drinks, enough to take the edge of. Sometimes four. Never more than five. Enough to help you sleep. You also like to take naps during the day too. There’s a couch in the office. The Thinking Couch. You’ll lie there sometimes and come up with ideas for the books, work on solutions, lie there and listen to Springsteen cranked so loud the pens will roll off the desk. The Thinking Couch has become your Napping Couch and the desk a coaster and the stereo hasn’t been on in over a week. Sandra keeps saying you shouldn’t mope so much, but hey, if you want to mope then you’ll mope. Grant a dying man his final wish, right? Because you’re dying. Of course you are. The mind will be gone ten or twenty or even thirty years before the body—and if that isn’t death, then what is? These days you also use the couch to hide the Madness Journal. You’re sure Sandra sneaks in here at night and looks for it, but you have no proof of that.

It hasn’t been all just lying on the couch in the office, though. You got the edit notes back from your editor a week ago. She’s a real sweetheart. What you want in an editor is the ability to give you bad news in a good way. It’s always in there, hidden in praise—if there was no praise you’d have given up long ago. But this one—this one was an effort for her, no doubt there. She’s suggested some changes, and wants you to fill in more of the blanks, some character background, stuff a few years ago you would have been chomping at the bit to change because, after all, editing is your favorite phase, partner. Why wouldn’t it be? You’ve built the house, and editing is picking the color scheme.

So yeah—that’s what you’ve been up to. Napping. Drinking. Editing. You finished the last of the three bottles of gin that Hans brought around. When you rang him he told you he brought around five, but you can’t find the other two. Sandra rang Doctor Goodstory today—you don’t know what she said to him, and don’t really care, to be honest, but she’s off picking up a prescription right now. She asked if you wanted to come along, as if you were her pet, and you just shook your head and lay down on the couch in the office instead. When she gets back she’ll try to cheer you up somehow, and you’ll do your best to pretend that it’s working. You’ll fake it. That’s something you tell people when they ask for advice on writing—people ask you all the time, you know, so be prepared for that. Even in your condition people will go rattling around in that brain of yours for some last nugget of hope, something that will make the difference between their manuscript hitting the bookshops or hitting the shredder. You usually say
Write what you know and fake the rest.
You might want to look out for people trying to pinch your ideas too—not that you’re going to care about that, but you should. After all, you wrote all those books and it made you crazy. All those worlds—all those people—the Universe is always expanding, that’s what the physicists say, all those worlds upon worlds as new ones are born, but one day all of that is going to change. One day the Universe will be as big as it can be, and then it will shrink. It will collapse. That’s what is happening to you. Your mind—those ideas—got as big as it could get, and now it’s collapsing.

Oh yeah, and your favorite nosy neighbor—Mrs. You Know Who (but in case you don’t, it’s Mrs. Smith—I’m not kidding, that really is her name)—came over yesterday. Sandra wasn’t home. She was out with Eva going
ooh
and
ahh
at napkins, and you were lying in your office staring at the ceiling. The house has a wireless doorbell that flashes a light that sits on your desk in your office, on account of you having the stereo dialed so loud you’d never hear the bell ring. In fact, because you always write with the stereo turned up, you had to have extra insulation installed in the walls so the music wouldn’t annoy Sandra or the neighbors. The entire room is soundproofed. You could shoot yourself in here and nobody would hear. So the doorbell light went off, and you went to the door in your robe and pajama bottoms and there she was, Mrs. Smith, and really have you ever seen her wearing something not saturated in pastel? Her clothes were in fashion sixty years ago and again thirty years ago, but are currently in the out-of-fashion stage of the cycle. Her lips were painted bright red in an attempt to distract from the many wrinkles lining her face, wrinkles deep enough to swallow a penny. She smells like cheap perfume, mixed in with a little bit of earth, as if she’s always out planting flowers in the garden or toiling through her husband’s grave.

She came over and she just wanted to have a quiet word, you know, just a brief in-your-ear mention that
some
of the neighbors—not her, mind you, not her at all, although she would have to agree with them, but
some
of the neighbors—have been talking. You live in a nice house, Jerry—and hopefully you’re still there now—a nice house on a nice street, an expensive street where people have expensive tastes and expensive cars and expensive lives, most of them working less than you or not at all, their working days behind them, retirement homes on the horizon
.
She came over to be polite, just to let you know
that some, that some people are, well, a little—not angry, no, not angry, or upset—more worried, yes, Jerry, I would say
worried, worried that your garden has gotten a little out of shape.
And she did have a point—the lawn hasn’t been mowed in three weeks, the garden is full of stinging nettle, the roses need trimming back, and the yard is starting to look like jungle animals could be hiding in there. Mrs. Smith hasn’t been the only one to mention it. Sandra has mentioned it too. She’s been so busy with the wedding that she’s had no time to do any weeding, and anyway, taking care of the garden is your thing. Sandra has mentioned hiring a gardener, but every time she does you tell her no, that you’ll get onto it tomorrow. You’ve been very insistent on the matter, and Sandra understood when you explained it was important because hiring a gardener felt like it was opening Pandora’s box. First the gardener, then a maid, then a nurse, then somebody to shower you, somebody to clean your teeth. Hiring a gardener is bringing that Dark Tomorrow you’ve been fighting to put off one day closer.