Memory (Hard Case Crime) (25 page)

“And I’ll back you up on it,” she said. “Just tell them you’ve been to your agent again, and I’m out looking for work for you. And you’re completely healthy, baby, remember that. If they ask you if you’re still sick at all, you tell them no.”

“All right.”

The red-haired girl brought in the folder then, put it on the messy desk, and smiled and winked at Cole on the way out. Cole gave her a weak smile in return.

When he left five minutes later, he had a list of his acting jobs for the last year, and he had promised to call Helen Arndt to tell her if he could go to her place for dinner Friday night.

Now he had exposed himself to someone from his past, and it surprised him how much relief he had felt in doing it. Still, he wasn’t sure it had been the best thing to do; something dark and sly had opened behind Helen Arndt’s eyes after he’d told her, when she was talking about him being a virgin again. His original plan might have been best all along; hide from the old friends, the old ties, and if forced into contact with them avoid letting them learn the truth.

He walked crosstown through the rain to the unemployment insurance office.

The voice said, “Look at this. This is your life.”

Hands were holding out to him a square of shiny metal, very thin and about a foot square. He said, “I never saw it before,” but in his heart he knew he had seen it somewhere.

The voice said, “You
must
remember, or you will die.”

“But I can’t remember,” he said. The square of metal began to grow, getting larger and larger but never any thicker, always staying just as thin, getting larger and larger till it was a mammoth wall, stretching away on either side to infinity and looming up into incredible heights of darkness over his head.

The voice said, “If you don’t remember, you’ll never get on the other side.”

As the huge square of metal began very slowly to topple over on him, he cowered, and then he turned and tried to run away, but the slab of metal was too huge, it was miles long and toppling so slowly over onto him, he couldn’t even run halfway to safety before it would land on him. He ran and screamed, and ran and screamed, and the slab of metal lowered with a grinding rushing noise like horses’ hoofs.

He sat up in bed, terrified, gasping for breath. The sheets and blankets were twined around his legs, imprisoning him. He kicked himself free, as though life itself depended on his speed now, and lunged up onto hands and knees on the disheveled bed, looking wildly around. But even as he was doing all this, the terror was fading, and the dream was fading with it.

When he lifted his hands to rub his face, he saw that they were shaking. He looked around, disoriented for a second, and then found the night table, containing his cigarettes. He crawled across the bed, got a harsh-tasting cigarette going, and then, too late, tried to remember the dream. He frowned, furrowing his forehead, but couldn’t remember a single image of it, though he had the feeling one of the characters in it had been the girl back in that town. After a minute the name came to him: Edna. He thought Edna had had something to do with the dream.

“What am I dreaming about her for?” He said it with a kind of impatient irritation, not only because of the fact, but because he was talking to himself out loud again, a habit he was trying with no success to break.

He sat up in bed, frowning and smoking, trying to ignore the uneasiness that still remained with him even though the details of the dream had vanished, and trying also to keep from vocalizing his thoughts. The electric clock he’d bought the day before yesterday—forgetting to read all the notes strewn around the room before going to bed at night, he would also forget to wind the clock—read twenty minutes past ten, which meant he had slept too long. His head was thick, and his nerves stayed jumpy from the terror with which he’d awakened.

Hunger pangs forced him to put out the half-smoked cigarette and get up from the bed. He padded nude to the living room, where he put water on for coffee, and thence into the bathroom for his morning toilet. He was brushing his teeth when the kettle started whistling, and he walked out with the toothbrush stuck at an angle into his mouth. He made the coffee, and then went back and finished in the bathroom.

The mornings were developing forms of habit now, and what bothered him was that these habits, this routine that was developing, might differ in significant respects from whatever his routine had been here in the old days. Any new habit that was a departure from old habits would only interfere with his struggle to return to that old self. Still, routines and habits developed naturally, and there was nothing he could do about them.

For instance. He always started the record player going immediately after coming out of the bathroom, and this was only natural. He was trying to fill himself with those records, readapt himself to the person who had bought those records, so the earlier in the day he started listening to them the better. So he started them playing right after he came out of the bathroom, then carried his cup of instant coffee into the bedroom and got dressed.

Normally, the coffee was finished by the time he was dressed, and next he would go carefully around the room, reading all the notes, and checking off one more day on the desk calendar. Then he would go back to the living room and put on the bacon. Bacon and scrambled eggs, toast, and a second cup of coffee, this was his inevitable breakfast, every morning.

But this morning his pattern was disrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

He looked at the phone with dislike. It had only rung twice before, both times being Helen Arndt inviting him to her apartment for dinner. Something dark and greedy in her manner repelled him, and he made up excuses both times.

If this were her again, what would he say this time? Not yet knowing, and trying already to find a sensible-sounding excuse, he picked up the phone and said hello.

It wasn’t Helen Arndt. A male voice said, “Merry Christmas, you son of a bitch. Why didn’t you call?”

Oh, God. A friend. But the voice meant nothing to him, rang no bells at all. He said, noncommittally, “Hello.”

“Don’t you know who this is, you silly bastard?”

“No, I don’t. I’m sorry...”

“It’s Nick, you clown. Where the hell you been keeping yourself?”

Nick. He got an image, a piece of paper and written on it NICK ↔ CARICATURE. His mind slithered off, away from the problem of
who is Nick
, wasting itself on the problem of
What is that piece of paper
, and he said, “Oh. Hi. I’ve just been around, I guess. Around the apartment.”

“You know who’s pissed off at you, you silly bastard? Benny is, that’s who. That’s the only way I knew you were back, I heard him pissing and moaning.”

“Oh, yeah? Because I made him leave here, I guess.”

“Threw him out in the street, the son of a bitch. The best thing that ever happened to him. What are you doing?”

“Eating breakfast.”

“You gonna be in today?”

Cole knew what the question meant. This stranger/friend, this Nick, wanted to come over and see him. He thought desperately for a way out, and his eye fell on the unemployment insurance payment book on his desk. He said, “No, I’ve got to go up to the unemployment insurance office.”

“On Christmas Day? You gone loco, you silly bastard?”

“Oh. I forgot. It—it must be tomorrow.”

“What’d I, wake you up?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, look alert. Today’s Thursday, clown, the twenty-fifth day of December. If you’ll hark a minute, you’ll hear the herald angels singing. Hear them?”

“I just forgot, that’s all.”

“Make me a cup of coffee, I’ll be right over.”

The phone went dead, and Cole said into it, reluctantly, “All right.” Then he cradled it, finished his coffee, and put on his shirt. He went on with his routine, but distractedly, thinking about his impending visitor. Nick. Caricature.

Meaningless.

He was eating breakfast, fifteen minutes later, when there was a sharp paradiddle of knuckles on the hall door. He went over reluctantly, and opened it, and felt an overwhelming sense of relief when he recognized the face smiling there. Nick, of
course
!

This was even stranger than the recognition of Helen Arndt the other day. He looked at Nick and immediately felt he knew him the way he’d know somebody like Little Jack Flynn. Not with the details, the memories of specific incidents and occurrences with this person, but just as surely and confidently as though those memories were there.

“Hello there, you silly bastard,” said Nick, and lunged into the apartment, looking around. “What the hell you been doing with yourself?”

“I set you a place,” Cole told him. “You want some eggs?”

Nick spun around to frown worriedly at Cole. “What’s the matter, clown? Somebody die?”

“No. I’ll tell you about it. Sit down there. You want some eggs?”

In a garbled Cockney accent, Nick said, “Ye fair gi’ me the creeps. Ye’r fey, ye’r.”

Cole went over to the kitchenette and got a second cup of instant coffee. He repeated his question about the eggs and this time Nick shook his head, but continued to watch Cole worriedly. He seemed to be wanting to make some sort of joke, but not sure he should.

Cole wasted more time at the kitchenette, stalling the moment when he would have to sit down and begin to talk with this new person. He understood that Nick was his friend—much more than that Benny, much more sensibly the sort of person he could conceive of as a friend—and he knew that meant he was going to have to tell Nick the truth. He had promised himself after the interview with Helen Arndt he wouldn’t weaken again, and he had thought at the time it was a promise he could keep.

But he couldn’t continue alone indefinitely. If he was going to tread carefully back into his old footsteps, he would need an ally, someone to tell him when he was on or off the path. Nick didn’t seem to have the self-centered impatience of Benny, nor the greedy self-interest of Helen Arndt. Besides, Cole felt easy in his mind about this one, sure they could still be friends in this altered present. So maybe this was the ally he’d been needing.

Nick sipped at his coffee and said, “If you’re putting me on, you son of a bitch, I’ll kill you. If you’re trying some goddamn characterization out on me, I’ll break your silly neck.”

Cole shook his head. “I’ll tell you everything I remember,” he said.

He told the story again, and Nick listened silently, squinting a bit as though he could see Cole better that way, and as though in seeing Cole better he would be able to hear and understand his words better. When Cole was finished—with the little bit he remembered, it didn’t take long to tell—Nick asked a few questions which didn’t get very helpful answers, the way everybody did at this point, and then for a minute or two they sat in silence at the table, Nick nibbling monkey-like at his coffee.

Cole got up and started clearing the dishes from table to sink, and Nick said, “You ought to see a doctor.” His tone and facial range were completely different now; with solemnity, his voice deepened and his thin face became hollowed and large-eyed.

Cole shrugged. “It should get better,” he said. “In fact, I think it has. I didn’t remember you until just now, when you came in.”

“Do you remember what happened to start it?”

Cole shook his head. “Only what Helen Arndt said, about me being in a hospital. But I don’t remember it.”

Nick said, “So maybe it isn’t getting better, maybe it’s getting worse. If it got worse, how could you tell?”

Cole smiled wanly. “If it got worse, I wouldn’t know my own name.”

“Then you better see a doctor.”

“I suppose so.”

Nick lit himself a cigarette, and said, “Why didn’t you come around? You’ve been home almost a week now.”

“I didn’t remember anybody. I told you, I didn’t even remember you until you walked in here.”

Nick shook his head. “No good,” he said. “You could of gone out and walked around the street. Walked into a few coffee shops. You would of run into somebody you knew, sooner or later. Don’t you have my telephone number around here someplace?”

“I guess so,” Cole said, guiltily thinking of the little blue book of phone numbers.

“You could of used it, just to see what would happen. You could of asked Helen to put you in touch with me, or some of your other friends. Hell, when I called up this morning, you tried to give me some phony excuse you weren’t going to be here.”

“I forgot it was Christmas.”

“Sure. You’ve been hiding out, that’s what you’ve been doing. The only reason you went to see Helen was because you had to, you told me so yourself. You’re a silly ass bastard, you know that?”

Cole shrugged, not knowing what to say.

But Nick persisted. “Why, Paul?” he asked. “What silly ass idea you got in your head?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to see anybody till I was better, I guess.”

“Brilliant. Old go-it-alone Cole, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“Won’t see a doctor, won’t see your friends, won’t do anything but sit around here and wait for your idiot mind to go out like a candle.”

“I’ll see a doctor,” Cole promised. He was embarrassed now, with an obscure feeling of having been ungrateful about something, of having hurt Nick’s feelings some way.

Nick said, “Tomorrow. Go tomorrow.”

“I can’t tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t have enough money. I don’t even have enough to pay the rent next week, and the unemployment insurance people don’t pay any money for the first week you’re out of work.” That had been another unpleasant interview. He had asked the woman in the unemployment insurance office how they expected him to survive for the two weeks until his thirty-seven dollars a week started being paid to him, and she told him flatly that was none of her concern, had him sign the yellow form, and dismissed him simply by turning her attention to the next person in line.

Nick shook his head with mock sadness that seemed to cover real irritation. “You’re a lulu, you silly bastard,” he said. “You go away, and you tell him to bill you. Helen’ll give you a recommendation, won’t she?”