We Are Here
Authors: Michael Marshall
| We Are Here (The Forgotten) |
| Michael Marshall |
| UK, USA (2013) |
York, wife by his side, to visit his new publisher. Finally, after years
of lonely struggle it looks as though the gods of fate are on his side.
But on the way back to Penn station, a chance encounter changes all of
that. David bumps into a man who covertly follows him and, just before
he boards the train, passes by him close enough to whisper: 'Remember
me.'
When the stranger turns up in his home town, David begins to
understand that this man wants something from him...something very
personal that he may have no choice but to surrender.
Meanwhile,
back in New York, ex-lawyer John Henderson does his girlfriend Kristina a
favour and agrees to talk to Catherine Warren, an acquaintance of hers
who believes she's being stalked by an ex-lover. But soon John realises
that Catherine's problem is far more complex and terrifying than he
could ever have imagined...
There are people out there in the shadows, watching, waiting. They are the forgotten. And they're about to turn.
In memory of Ralph Vicinanza,
Agent, mentor, friend.
Michael Marshall
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jon Wood, Malcolm Edwards and Chris Schelling for advice and direction; to Lisa Milton and Susan Lamb for their support; to Jacks Thomas and Midas, and Jemima Forrester; to my father and sister and Stephen Jones and Patrick Goss for bolstering; to Kim Cupp for providing a home while I wrote, and to her and to Karen Hovecamp and Lisa Jenson for making us feel at home – and as always to Paula and Nate. Most of all thank you this time to Uncle Ralph, for getting me where I am now, before going on to wherever it is he has gone.
In the realm of the emotions,
the real is no different to the imaginary.
André Gide
He drove. There were times when he stopped for gas or to empty his bladder or buy cups of poor coffee out of machines, selecting isolated and windswept gas stations where no one was doing anything except filling up and staring vacantly at their cold hand on the pump as they waited, wanting to be back in their warm car and on the road to wherever it was they had to be. Nobody was looking or watching or caring about anyone who might happen to be doing the same thing. Nobody saw anything except another guy in bulky clothing getting into a big car and pulling back out onto the highway.
Sometimes it was raining. Sometimes there was sleet. Sometimes merely the wind coming across the great flatness. He did not listen to the radio. He did not consult a map. He didn’t know where he was going and so he did not care where he was.
He just drove.
He had barely slept beyond nodding out for short stretches in the driver’s seat, the car stashed behind abandoned farmhouses or in the parking lots of small-town businesses that would not open for several hours after he was back on the road. Other than bags of potato chips or dusty gas station trail mix, he hadn’t eaten since he left what used to be his home. He already knew he wasn’t going back there. He was light-headed with hunger but he could not eat. He was exhausted but he could not sleep. He was a single thought in a mind no longer capable of maintaining order. A thought needs somewhere to go, but flight does not provide a destination. Flight merely shrieks that you have to be somewhere other than where you are.
He had to stop. He had to keep going, too, but first he had to stop.
A little after four o’clock on the third day he passed a sign for a motel farther up the road. As is common practice in parts of the country where you can drive mile after mile without seeing anything of consequence, the business had given travelers plenty of warning to think about it and check their watches and decide yes, maybe it was time to call it a day. He had driven past several such signs without registering them. This one looked like it had been there forty years or more, from when drives cross-country were everybody’s best hope of a vacation. It showed a basic-looking mom-and-pop motel with a foreign-sounding name. It was still thirty miles ahead at that point.
He shook his head and looked back at the road, but he already knew he was going to stop. He’d said no to a lot of things in his life, especially in the last month.
He’d gone ahead and done them anyway.
Half an hour later he pulled up outside a single-story L-shaped building down a short road off the highway. There were no cars outside the guest rooms, but a dim light showed in the office. When he went in, an old man came from the room out back. The old man looked him up and down and saw the kind of person who arrives alone at out-of-the-way motels in the back end of nowhere; he had never been a curious person and had stopped giving a shit about anything at all when his wife died three years before. The man paid him in cash for one night and got a key in return. A metal key, not one of those credit card swipers found everywhere else these days. A real key, one that opened a particular door and no other. The man looked at it, becalmed, trying to remember if he’d locked the door to his house when he left. He wasn’t sure. It was too late to do anything about it. He asked the owner for the nearest place to get something to eat. The old man pointed up the road. The driver took a handful of matchbooks from the counter and went back out and got in his car.
Fifteen miles away he found a small store attached to a two-pump gas station that had nothing he wanted to eat but did sell things he could drink and smoke. He drove back to the motel and parked in front of Number 9. The rest of the lot remained empty. It was full dark now.
In the room he found a frigid rectangular space with two double beds and an ancient television. He locked and bolted the door. He shoved the closest bed over until it blocked entry. Years ago the bed had been retrofitted with a vibrating function—no longer working—and was extremely heavy. It took him ten minutes and used up the last of his strength. He turned the rusty heater on. It made a lot of noise but gradually started to make inroads on the cold.
In the meantime he lay on the other bed. He did not take off his coat. He stared up at the ceiling. He opened the bottle he’d bought. He smoked cigarette after cigarette as he drank, lighting them with matches from matchbooks. His face was wet.
He wept with exhaustion. He wept because his head hurt. He wept with the self-disgust that permeated every cell of his body, like the imaginary mites that plague habitual users of crystal meth, nerve misfirings that feel so much like burrowing insects that sufferers will scratch and scratch and scratch at them until their arms and faces are a mass of bloody scabs, writing their affliction for all to see.
His affliction was not thus written, however. His was a text only he could read, for now. He still appeared normal. To anyone else he would have looked like a chubby man in his early thirties, lying on a motel bed, very drunk now, sniveling by himself.
In his mind, however, he wept. There was majesty to it. A hero, lost and alone.
Sometime later he started from a dream that had not been a dream. He’d been getting a lot of these since he left home, waking possessed by shadows he wished were dreams but that he knew very well to be memory. The wall in the back of his head was breaking down, wearing out like something rubbed with sweaty fingers too hard for too long. His mind wasn’t trying to mediate through dramatization any longer. It was feeding up the things it had seen through his eyes or felt through his fingertips. His mind was thinking about what had happened even when he was not.
He didn’t lie to himself. He knew he wasn’t innocent, and could never be again. He knew what he’d done. He wouldn’t have done it alone, maybe, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been done. By him.
The other man had suggested things, but he had done them. That was how it had always been.
He’d waited and watched down alleys and outside bars and in the late-night parking lots of the town he’d called home. He’d made the muscles in his face perform movements that looked like smiles. He’d selected forms of words that sounded helpful and charming. The other man planned the sentences, but it was he who’d spoken them aloud. The other had researched what would work best, but he’d been the one who slipped the ground-up pill into the wine he’d made available, offered casually, as if it was no big deal, and oh, what a coincidence—it just happens to be your favorite kind.
The other man invented the games he and his guest had played until she suddenly got scared, despite how drunk and confused she had become. Who had then raised his hand for the first blow? Impossible to tell. It didn’t matter, when so many others had followed.
All he’d ever done was follow, but he’d wound up at the destination anyhow, and of course it’s true that when you submit to someone’s will then it’s you who gives them power. You follow from in front. You can follow a long way like that. You can follow too far.
You can follow all the way to hell.
He rubbed his eyes against the last shards of the memory and sat up to see the other man was sitting in the armchair. He looked smart and trim and presentable as always. He looked strong. He was holding one of the motel matchbooks, turning it over in his fingers.
“I don’t want to do it again,” the man on the bed said.
“You do,” the other man said. “You just don’t like that you do. That’s why you’ve got me. We’re a team.”
“Not anymore. You’re not my friend.”
“Why don’t you have another drink? It’ll make you feel better.”
Despite himself, the man on the bed groped blearily for the vodka and raised it to his lips. He’d almost always done what the other man said. He saw two necks to the bottle. The alcohol had caught up with him while he dozed, and he was far drunker than he’d realized. Might as well keep drinking, then.
