Memory (Hard Case Crime) (21 page)

He opened his eyes, and he wasn’t home; he was in a strange room with bare walls.

He sat up, so startled that the backs of his hands started to tingle, that his throat closed, and then in a wash of relief he recognized the room, and remembered the journey, and knew he was home.

Had Benny gone? He cocked his head and listened; nothing, no sound.

He got up from the bed, noticing in the pale daylight that the sheets were really very dirty, gray and limp looking. What kind of person was Benny, anyway? He’d even brought a girl in here, with sheets like that.

Cole’s body itched; he went into the bathroom and ran water for a shower. Standing under the water, he let himself relax. All the doings of yesterday had left him passive this morning; he filled his attention with physical details of the present, the feeling of the lukewarm water in the shower, the look of the narrow white bathroom, the sound of the water spraying on his back and into the tub.

Gradually, a curiosity began to grow in him, an almost impersonal desire to know about his past. What sort of person was he, that he called this place home, that he knew such people as Benny, that he lived and worked in New York? What work did he do, for that matter? He knew he was a warehouseman back in that town, but was he a warehouseman in New York? It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem to fit what he had seen and what he felt.

After his shower, he went back to the bedroom and dressed. He would have to explore in here—and in the living room, too—but only after he was sure Benny was gone. He wanted to learn about himself, but privately, without observers; particularly without Benny.

Was Benny still in the apartment? Had he guessed Cole’s weakness?

Cole hesitated a minute or two after he finished dressing, not wanting to go into the living room, afraid Benny hadn’t left yet. But it was silly to wait here, he’d have to leave this room sometime. Besides, it was his place, it was home.

He went into the living room and Benny was there, on the far side of the room, next to the crumbling sofa. He was dressed just as he’d been last night, and he was packing a suitcase in a slow and surly manner. He looked over his shoulder at Cole and said, “Well? You still bein’ a bastard?”

Cole was surprised. He didn’t mind Benny at all this morning, didn’t care one way or the other about him. Maybe it was because Benny was packing a suitcase. Cole said, meaning it, “I’m sorry. I was tired last night.”

Benny muttered, but didn’t say anything out loud, and went back to his slow packing. While he kept up his mumbling and muttering, Cole walked over to the kitchenette, found a jar of instant coffee, and put some water on to boil. Cole understood that Benny craved an argument, perhaps a fight, but was unable to bring himself to do it, was waiting for Cole to make the first aggressive move. This pleased Cole, and reassured him; whoever he had been in the past, he had been dominant over such as Benny. All he had to do was keep Benny from finding out how defenseless he was now, and he’d be all right.

“Hey.”

Cole turned, and Benny was standing by the door, wearing an overcoat and a cap, carrying two suitcases and a blue canvas laundry bag. Cole waited; there was nothing for them to say to one another.

But Benny said, “Just remember. You owe me twenty-five bucks.”

Oh, that. Cole nodded, and said, “I’ll pay you when I get some money.”

“You can leave it with Jim. You remember Jim?”

Immediately Cole was afraid of a trap. Did Benny have suspicions after all? Was this somehow a test question? Anything Benny or anyone else might say about Cole’s memory would make him instantly alert and wary.

What should he answer? Yes? No? If he remembered everything, would the everything include Jim?

He couldn’t chance an answer either way. More brusquely than he’d intended, he said, “I’ll get the money to you, don’t worry.”

“I won’t worry,” said Benny angrily, but it was hollow defiance. He pulled open the door, picked up his luggage, and stamped out and down the hall, leaving the door open.

Cole closed it, and turned, and looked at what was finally his.

Here was the world: A long narrow living room, a long narrow bathroom, a small square bedroom, a shallow kitchenette. There were closets to be opened, drawers to be looked into, a medicine cabinet to be seen in the bathroom, and high-hung kitchen cabinets to be mapped. There was a whole day of exploration ahead.

Wondering where to start, his eye fell on the record player on the big scarred table in the living room. Music would be good; it would help to fill the empty spaces. The two main rooms of the apartment were badly underfurnished, barren and familiar.

He went over and looked through the records, searching for the kind of music he had always liked on the radio at the Malloys’—soft lushness of strings, ballads hesitantly exposed—but instead he found album after album of aural brass knuckles; shrill-trumpeted big bands, hard cold self-confident male singers with booze-harshened voices, mechanically seductive female singers who seemed to be threatening the microphone with fellatio.

Were these Benny’s records? They seemed to suit Benny’s personality better than Cole’s. Still, he knew in a way too tenuous to be called memory that these were his own records, bought by himself.

“Did I like these?” He asked the question aloud, startling himself. But the records were even more startling.
How much have I changed?
he wondered, and felt a stirring of apprehension. Who had he been?

He selected an instrumental album at last and put it on, turning the bass control full on and the treble control full off. What came out sounded like music from another apartment on another floor; it pleased him.

Now to begin. He picked up his cup of coffee, and went on into the bedroom. The desk in the far corner seemed the best place to begin. It was very small, made of metal, about a yard wide and fifteen inches deep. On its top were a calendar from a liquor store, a coffee cup full of pencils and ballpoint pens, and a telephone. It all seemed very official; looking at it, he wondered if he had operated some sort of business in the past, something from his home. Maybe he’d been an insurance agent or something like that.

He felt almost frightened when he sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Here is where he would begin to learn about himself, begin to find out who Paul Cole was and had been, who he was supposed to be.

He kept hesitating. Would it all be like Benny, and like the phonograph records? His old self had liked those records enough to buy them and to own a phonograph on which to play them. His old self had called Benny friend. Would the things he’d find now be more of the same? And if it was, what could he do then? If the Paul Cole from the past was someone he could no longer like or respect or emulate, what on earth could he do next?

A part of him wanted not to find out, wanted to get up from this desk right now and clear out of here, take a bus back to that town or somewhere else, it didn’t matter, anywhere, not worry about any of this, not know about it or care about it or even remember it existed. But his curiosity was too strong. Having found this place, he couldn’t leave it without knowing. If it turned out to be all like Benny and the records, there was nothing he could do about it. Time enough then to leave here and take that bus.

So here was the desk. On the left were three shallow drawers and on the right a fairly deep storage well. He started with the drawers first, and in the top left he struck paydirt right away; three thick brown envelopes marked
Income Tax
in pencil. He opened them, and they contained carbon copies of his tax forms for the last three years, and employee’s copies of his W-2 forms, and sheafs of receipts.

Here it all was, right here! The first thing to hand, and it was the whole answer at once. He touched the forms with new excitement, all hesitancy gone, going through his find like a detective caught up in the fascination of a complex case, looking for clues to himself.

He was an
actor
.

Was that possible? He frowned, starting at the wall directly in front of him, thinking back to the afternoons in the Malloy living room, watching the soap operas on television.
They
were actors. And was he one of them, after all?

An actor. He didn’t know; it seemed neither right nor wrong. In actors on the tiny television screen he had always sensed some inner spark, some magnification from within, like the light of a glowworm; he sensed none of that in himself. And yet, it didn’t seem impossible that he
had been
one of these, and the proof of it was here in these papers.

Reading them, he saw that Paul Cole had been in fact moderately successful. Three years ago he had earned just over two thousand dollars from his profession, with an additional fifteen hundred from a temporary office help firm and a furniture moving company. Two years ago his acting income had increased to thirty-two hundred dollars, with a further thousand dollars from the temporary office help firm. And last year he had earned fifty-six hundred dollars from acting, and had needed to do no other work at all.

It was sometimes difficult, with just the employer’s name, to figure out exactly what kind of acting job each one had been, but with the help of the deductions page and the receipts he finally filled in most of the blanks. Three years ago he had worked in three off-Broadway plays, none of them lasting more than two months, and had been an extra for two filmed television commercials, and an extra on one live television show. Two years ago there had been another trio of off-Broadway plays, three more filmed television commercials in which he had been an extra, an industrial film for an oil company, and more work on live television; possibly soap opera itself. Wouldn’t that be odd, if he had actually played a role in one of those soap operas? But wouldn’t Mrs. Malloy have recognized him, then? No; you don’t expect to see actors in real life, and unless they’re really famous you won’t recognize them.

So it was possible he’d acted in soap operas two years ago. And last year; more live television that might be soap operas, and more television commercials, and two months with the national touring company of a Broadway play. And all three years he had spent his summers at the Barn Theater in Cartier Isle, Maine.

When he was finished with all the tax papers, he stopped a while, not searching any farther just yet. This was something to get used to, this idea that he was—had been—an actor.
Was
an actor, still? He couldn’t even begin to guess.

That was something he hadn’t thought of, that he might no longer work at his occupation of the past. It had never occurred to him that a change in him might mean a change in his suitability to a particular job, because he had been assuming all jobs to be like the one he had handled most recently. But now he didn’t know. Maybe it
was
all like Benny and the records, only with the job it wasn’t work he didn’t like but work he couldn’t do.

Still, how did he know, how could he be sure? He was Paul Cole, wasn’t he? Something had happened to him—was this what they called amnesia?—something had happened somewhere, and he couldn’t remember things any more. But he was still Paul Cole, just the same.

Then the thing to do was learn about himself, learn everything. He shouldn’t jump to conclusions from just knowing these few things, he should wait until he knew everything.

He gathered the tax papers into a little pile at one side, and delved into the top drawer of the desk again, looking for more, and came up with another goldmine, the blue address book the telephone company gives its subscribers. He turned the pages and they were full, names and phone numbers, names and phone numbers. Mostly it was just a first name, but now and again there was a full name and even an occasional address, most of the addresses people living outside the New York area, three in California and one in Washington and one in Miami and one at some overseas Army post with only an APO number.

He had known a lot of people.

In the next room, the record ended. He went in and picked another record at random and put it on the turntable. Then he readjusted the base and treble controls till the music sounded the way it was supposed to, and raised the volume so he’d be able to hear it better in the bedroom, If he was going to learn about himself, it included this music. He would have the record player going all the time, till he found out why he had once liked this music.

He spent the next quarter hour practice-dialing. He would pick a phone number from the blue book he’d found, and dial it, leaving the receiver on so he wasn’t actually making a call. But in dialing the number, and in thinking about the name that went with that number in his book, he was trying to force his memory to start working. These were numbers he must have dialed often in the past, and names he must have spoken often, people he must have known well. The association of the act of dialing with the knowledge of the person’s first name might, he thought, help give him a memory of the voice that went with that name, or some fact or incident about that person.

It did seem to work, just slightly, after a while, but there was no way to be sure. The vague impressions he had of faces and voices might have been real or might just have been his own imaginings, prompted by his desire for memories. After a while he gave it up and went back to searching the desk.

He found a typewritten letter, addressed to “Paul, baby,” and full of comment about things that made no sense to him. It was signed “Ray,” and seemed to be from one of the people with a California address. There was no date on it, but he got the impression it had been written in the summer. Maybe it was still here because he’d never answered it.

He could see himself answering it now:

“Dear Ray,

Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter, but I’ve been lost. If you find me, send me to this address.

Paul, baby”

The middle drawer produced the biggest find yet; a stack of large-size glossy photographs of himself, with a mimeographed resume of his acting credits scotch-taped to the back of each. He read it aloud to himself, lingering over the names of the plays and the theaters and the characters he had portrayed, and then he compared it with his tax forms, going over that ground all over again, seeing it all in a slightly different light now, more pleased than ever at this additional proof of his past existence. And finally he looked at the photo, seeing reflected back at him a face that was his own and yet was not.