Mr. Was (19 page)

I shrugged. I didn't trust this doctor. I vividly remembered the drugs and the ice.

“I understand that you had a visit from our Mr. Tran.”

“You mean Freddie?”

“Yes. Mr. Tran.”

“I'd like to see him again,” I said.

Dr. Berringer's face plunged into one of those offended doctor frowns, flared nostrils and all. “Mr. Tran has been relieved of his responsibilities here at Salisbury,” he said.

I stared back at him.

He cleared his throat. “What do you remember?”

“I remember Hawaii. I remember Washington.”

“Do you remember your name?”

I did not. I remembered nothing of my life before waking up in the naval hospital in Hawaii. I shook my head.

“You have a tag on your file,” he said. “I doubt they still have much interest in your case after all these years, but I've notified the proper authorities that you have regained your powers of speech. I hope you'll cooperate with them should they choose to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course,” I said.

That was when I knew I'd have to leave Salisbury Acres, and the sooner the better. That night I let myself out of my room, slipping the lock with a piece of wire from my bedsprings. For some reason, I knew how to get through doors.

I had been at Salisbury for so long, I knew the orderlies' routines. It was a simple matter to make my way undetected through the hospital up to the fourth floor, where I broke into Dr. Berringer's office, again using the bedspring wire as a key.

My file still sat on his desk, a sheaf of officiallooking papers and this notebook filled with writing I recognized as my own. I also found a shirt, suit, and tie hanging in a closet in his office. My hospital slippers didn't exactly go with the tie, and the jacket was a bit large, but it was no time to be picky.

One hour later I was sitting in Bobby Dennison's
Olds, heading for New Orleans.

The big question in my mind now is, What next?

I turn again to the yellowed letter I'd found tucked into the back of the notebook.

TOP SECRET

From:  COLONEL CHARLES FREEMAN
           Office of Strategic Services Washington, D.C.

To:      CALVIN CAPSTONE
           Director, U.S. Institute of Psychopharmacological Research

Date:   May 2, 1946

Re:      #MZ-54764-8:

Subject has been identified as Corporal John R. “Jack” Lund of Memory, Minnesota. He has been determined to be of no further interest to OSS. However, it is our feeling that further confinement is indicated. Please transfer subject to Salisbury effective immediately and instruct an indefinite course of sedation. Subject is not to be informed of his identity until such time as the OSS deems it advisable.

(signed)

Colonel Charles Freeman

Deputy Director

So who am I?

I do not remember being Corporal John R. “Jack” Lund.

For nearly fifty years I have thought of myself as Mr. Was, while the nurses and orderlies have thought of me as MZ-54764-8. Only a select few Washington bureaucrats—probably dead or retired by now— knew me to be this John Lund person.

I look in the warped mirror of this cheap motel room. My skin is still smooth from years spent indoors and expressionless, but the white hair, the yellow teeth, and the bristly eyebrows reveal a man in his late sixties or early seventies. That means I have been Mr. Was for much, much longer than I had been John Lund.

Nevertheless, I feel I must journey to this place called Memory.

How ironic.

February 17, 1993

Memory, Minnesota

I bought a '75 Chevy for three hundred dollars in New Orleans. The thing burned a quart of oil every hundred miles, but it got me here, to Memory.

I pulled in late last night. The only business in town that was open was a little joint called Ole's Quick Stop, a sort of convenience store with a little liquor bar at one end. Even before I stepped in through the door, I knew I'd been there before. I
remembered
the man behind the bar, a sour-faced man in his forties. I knew his name was Ole, but I didn't know how or why or when the knowledge had come to be in my mind. I felt as if I were in a dream, as though none of what I was seeing was real. At the same time, I knew it was.

At the other end of the room, a pair of aging, grossly overweight men wearing identical plaid flannel shirts were shooting pool. They paused long enough to give me the once-over. I had the feeling they didn't get many strangers in this town. I smiled and nodded. They looked at one another, then back at me, then returned to their game.

I took a seat at the bar and asked for a Coca-Cola. The bartender popped open a can of Coke and set it before me. I took a sip and wondered what I should do next. On the one hand, I thought I should dive right into it and start asking questions. On the other hand, I wanted to lay low and get a feel for the town, see what would happen.

“Slow night?” I asked.

“Just like always,” growled the bartender.

“How many people live in this town?”

“Not enough,” he said.

The door opened, and a man wearing a long wool coat and a gray felt fedora entered.

“Or maybe too many,” the bartender added, frowning at the newcomer. “Depends on your point a view.”

“A bottle of Gordon's gin, if you please,” said the man in the hat, stopping a few feet short of the bar. His creaky voice had a nasty, demanding edge to it. I turned my head to look at him. He was old, like me. Deep lines framed his wide, downturned mouth. His neck sagged with wrinkled flesh.

The bartender took a bottle from the wall behind the bar and slid it into a paper bag.

“That'll be twelve fifty.”

“Put it on my account,” the man snapped. He stepped up to the bar then, took the bottle, then turned his face directly toward me. A livid scar running along his jaw jumped out at me, and suddenly it hit me. I couldn't recall his name, but I
knew
him. I not only knew him but, for some reason, I was afraid of him.

He locked his eyes on my face. I could feel my heart beating in my throat.

He said, “You in the war? That how you got all banged up? Your face?” He pointed at his scarred jaw. “Me, I got this.”

I forced myself to nod. My heartbeat slowed. I said,
“I don't remember what happened to me.”

He nodded and rubbed his forefinger along his jaw. “Which ocean you cross?”

“I think the Pacific.”

“Me, too. What's your name?”

I hesitated, then decided to go for it. “Lund,” I said. “John Lund.”

The effect on the old man would have been funny if it wasn't so all-out eerie. For two or three seconds his expression froze as if someone had stopped time.

“No, you aren't,” he said. His eyes darted back and forth across my features. “You can't be.” He blinked and took a step back. He must have seen something in my face then, something that made him believe me. His mouth fell open and he went dead white except for a purple swelling around his eyes, which bulged out of his head so far, I thought they might explode.

“You're dead,” he croaked. He stood up, staggered back a few steps, then dropped to his knees clutching his chest and making a whistling noise in his throat. I stayed on my stool, too astonished to move.

The bartender shouted, “Mr. Skoro! Mr. Skoro? You okay there?”

As the old man fell face-first to the grimy floor, I thought, so that's his name.
Skoro.

I knew that name, but I hadn't a clue what it had to do with me.

The bartender rushed around the end of the bar and turned him over. He shouted at one of the pool players, who were staring slack-jawed at the man on
the floor. “Hermie, get your van around front here. We gotta get him to a doctor. Hurry up! He could be dying.”

Hermie—I remembered his name, too—set his pool cue on the table.

“I s'pose I could do that,” he said. “Only I got to tell you, Ole, I ain't gonna be too terrible sad if he don't make it.” He turned toward the other pool player. “How 'bout you, Harry?”

Harry shrugged.

I remembered Harry now, too.

Ole said, “Doggone it, you boys let him die on my floor, you'll be driving all the way to Red Wing every time you want a drink. You understand me?”

Once Hermie and Harry got moving, they had Skoro into the back of the van within two minutes. Ole and I stood in front of the Quick Stop and watched their taillights disappear up the road.

Ole shook his head. “Those boys ain't got the sense of a dead dog between 'em,” he muttered. “How they got to be that old being that stupid, I'll never know.”

“You think he'll be all right?” I asked.

“Skoro? Couldn't say. He's a tough old bird.”

“He lives in town here?”

Ole gestured with a thumb. “Up atop the bluff. Big old place. Boggs's End, we call it.”

I looked up the bluff and saw the shape of a big house backlit by a half-moon. A closeup of its weathered gray clapboard siding swam into my mind's eye. I was sure I had been there before.

“Does he live alone?” I asked.

“You kidding? Who else would want to live in a spookhole like that?”

“I was wondering if we should notify someone.”

“Well. . . he's got a daughter, lives down in Illinois. I don't imagine there's much she could do from down there, but I'm sure folks at the hospital will call her.”

“So how long has Skoro lived around here?”

“He ain't never lived anyplace else, far as I know.”

Although I could see Boggs's End from Ole's, it was still a long way off, and the roads in this part of the country are twisted up like a pail of worms. I was prepared to get lost, but it seemed like as soon as I started the car, I just knew which way to go. Ten minutes later I was parked in front of the wide, sagging veranda. The feeling that I was walking backward through my life overwhelmed me. I remembered everything I saw, but nothing else.

I didn't bother to knock. The doors were unlocked. I stepped into Boggs's End, each step echoed in my mind.

The foyer with the cold marble floor. The cracked leather sofa. The smell of old wood. The chandelier.

My hunger to recover my early years grew with each shred of recaptured past. I had been there before, many times. My hands were shaking. I stood beneath the chandelier and closed my eyes and listened to my pulse throbbing in my ears. Was I excited, or afraid?

I must see it all, I told myself. I must remember everything.

Then I heard a soft, repeated clicking sound. I turned my head from side to side, trying to locate the noise. It was coming from the back of the house. I moved toward it, past the white marble staircase, down the short hallway, into the library that looked out over the bluff.

I remembered the room, and the books.

But I did not remember the big man in overalls sitting at the desk working at the computer.

Too surprised to move, I stood in the doorway and watched his thick fingers rattling the keyboard. He was a large man, broad across the back, with black curly hair tumbling from beneath a wide-brimmed black hat. A matching beard sprouted from his weathered face and spilled over his chest. As I watched, he peered intently at the numbers on the computer screen, frowned, and muttered to himself. “Primitive, it was. I will be glad when it hasn't been invented yet, I was!” He typed furiously for several seconds. Rows and columns of digits flickered. “Will be too many parts. Those blasted doors. Too complicated. Too complicated.” He continued to type, muttering all the while.

I cleared my throat.

He turned his big bearded face toward me and fixed me with a pair of eyes so dark they looked like holes. “Good day, sir,” he said, grinning. He had one of those voices that you can feel in your chest. “You
don't remember me, I see. It had been a long time.”

“Been a long time since what?” I asked.

“Know you what tomorrow is?”

I shook my head.

The man laughed. “Tomorrow was the day you became.”

“I don't understand.”

“You'll have to write it down,” he said, “to read it.”

“Write what down? Who are you?”

“I was nobody yet. But you can call me Pinky.” He returned his attention to the computer.

Even if I knew what was going on here, I thought, it wouldn't make sense.

“This man Skoro, he cheats.” Pinky pointed at a square of wrinkled, yellowed paper taped to the wall beside the desk. “Have you seen?”

I stepped closer and looked. It was a piece of newspaper covered with tiny print. Some kind of statistics. Stock tables.

“You will have looked at the date,” Pinky said.

I looked. The paper was dated 1996. Three years in the future.

“A misprint?” I asked.

“A cheat sheet,” he said. “An anachronism. Out of place, out of time. A very bad thing, very bad indeed. He makes much money using this paper. Stocks and bonds are not for knowing, they are for guessing. But he knows for years and years which companies will still exist, which little investments will grow. You call
it something in this time. You call it insider trading. This is what I am saying. Your grandfather cannot do this thing. He cannot steal time yet to come.”

“My grandfather,” I said. “Skoro is my grandfather. I remember now.”

“You will remember more, though you may think it too late. Still, you will have what life I could allow you. Your role must have been played out.” He hit several keys, and the numbers on the computer screen jumped. “Neither he nor his offspring may profit,” he said under his breath.

I was getting irritated by Pinky's weird way of talking.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“This is where the disruption began,” he said. “My fault, my fault, a door without locks is a fool's door. A good thing your grandfather feared what he does not know. He fears the door so much he was never able to pass through, though he tried. His body stops itself from taking the necessary step. Had he passed, I might never have been able to bring the passageways back into balance. He was a coward, afraid of both the was and the will be. This was why he changed his name. He could not abide his past. He thought he could not stand to be his father's son. But it was himself he could not stand to be. Like you, Jack Lund.”