Authors: Ronald Malfi
Passenger (22 page)
TWENTY-SIX
I leave a note for Nicole at the post office the next day, asking her to meet me after work at the Walters Art Museum café. Twenty after five, Nicole arrives. I am seated at a table by myself, my hands clasping a paper coffee cup. I look up as she approaches and she smiles at me. I can’t bring myself to smile back. She is not the first Nicole I’ve met in the past year and a half. There have been plenty of Nicoles—plenty of Clarences and Patrices and ceramic tile floor salesmen—and I have forgotten them all. Over and over. Only to remember them again.
“Hi.” She sits and, for the first time, I see she is wearing makeup. It is a new experience for her, the application crude and overindulgent, the way a ten-year-old girl might do it. “I’ve been doing more research on amnesia. I had some stuff to tell you but, well, I—”
“Say my name,” I tell her.
Her near-adolescent eyes search mine. “What do you mean?”
“You know it,” I say. “My name. I’ve told you before.”
“I don’t—”
“It’s Palmer,” I say. “My name is Palmer Troy. You know this because I told you once before.”
She can only stare at me, her mouth still frozen in the shape of her last word. She has been caught. She has been called out. Around her, the first floor of the museum granulates and turns black and white.
“I’m not angry,” I say. “I don’t even care why you pretended not to know me. Here.”
I turn one of her hands over and spool the dog tag into her palm. She does not even take her eyes from me to look at it.
“Palmer,” she begins. There is moisture collecting in her eyes.
“I walked in front of that bus on purpose, Nicole. It wasn’t an accident. I never told you that, but it’s true. Some physical therapy and some metal plates in my body and now I’ve been shown a different way. If I can’t die, then I can at least forget.”
From my coat, I produce a bus pass for the Madison stop. I place it on the table, my fingers resting on one corner.
“It doesn’t matter how many times you do it,” she says, a single tear spilling down her cheek. She is trying her best to fight it. “It doesn’t matter, Palmer, because you always remember. In the end, it always comes back to you. You can’t escape it.”
“Not this time. I left too much room for memory in the past, but this time I will start over with nothing.” And I turn my hand over on the bus pass, my left hand, the palm facing up. It is a blank, unmarred, perfectly pink palm. I have washed the address off completely. “This time it’s all or nothing.”
I stand and move away from the table. Nicole does not move, the dog tag still cupped in her palm. Again, she does not face me.
“Please don’t try to find me,” I tell her, then leave.
* * *
Life is drifting by in shadows, in pillars of black salt. The city is enveloped in the burning fog of molten lava, pools of lava, swirling in electrical tornadoes. Outwardly, the world is dead, is blue-black-green, is smoldering and frozen like a distant plant’s distant moon. We are making love in a whirlwind; we are freefalling from the ground up. And all of it equates to nothing more than an invisible man’s quiet thinking.
In the streets, the alleys, all the darkened corners of the city, a young mother and child huddle together on a stoop and say,
You can be anyone you want.
They say,
Anyone in the world.
* * *
The bus shudders to a stop, the moan of its brakes like the melancholic mating call of humpback whales.
You sit up, awake.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ronald Malfi is an award-winning novelist and short fiction writer whose most notable works include
Via Dolorosa
,
The Nature of Monsters
, and the critically acclaimed modern gothic novel,
The Fall of Never
. His short fiction has appeared in countless magazines and collections throughout the U.S. and abroad. Most recognized for his haunting literary style and quirky, memorable characters, Malfi’s fiction has transcended genres to gain wider acceptance among readers of quality American literature. He resides in Maryland with his wife, Debra, where he is currently at work on his next book.