Strangers (40 page)

“Like I said, I relaxed. Just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple of books. Watched some TV. They have good TV even way out there on the plains because they’ve got their own little satellite receiver dish on the roof.” Her manner of speech was now entirely altered, and she sounded as if she were reading from a script. “After two intense years at Stanford, I needed a few days of doing absolutely nothing.”

“What books did you read while at the motel?”

“I…I don’t remember.” Her hands were still fisted, and she was still rigid. Fine pearly beads of sweat popped out along her hairline.

“Ginger, you’re there now, in the motel room, reading. Understand?
You are reading whatever you were reading then. Now look at the title of the book and tell me what it is.”

“I…no…no title.”

“Every book has a title.”

“No title.”

“Because there really is no book—is there?” he said.

“Yes. I just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple of books. Watched some TV,” she said in a soft, dead, emotionless voice. “They have good TV even way out there on the plains because they’ve got their own little satellite receiver dish on the roof.”

“What TV shows did you watch?” Pablo asked.

“News. Movies.”

“What movies?”

She flinched. “I…don’t remember.”

Pablo was quite sure that the reason she did not remember these things was precisely because she had never done them. She had been at that motel, all right, because she could describe it in minute detail, but she could not recall the books and the TV programs because she had never passed any of that time in those pursuits. Through clever post-hypnotic suggestions, she had been instructed to say that she had done those things, and she had actually been made to remember vaguely having done them, but they were merely artificial memories designed to cover what had really transpired at that motel. A specialist in brainwashing could insert false memories in a subject’s mind, but even if he worked very hard at it and built an intricate web of interlocking details, he could not make the phony memories as convincing as real ones.

Pablo said, “Where did you eat dinner each night?”

“The Tranquility Grille. It’s a small place, and it doesn’t have much of a menu, but the food is reasonably good.” That response was, once again, delivered in a flat and hollow voice.

Pablo said, “What did you eat at the Tranquility Grille?”

She hesitated. “I…I don’t remember.”

“But you told me the food was good. How could you make that judgment if you don’t remember what you ate?”

“Uhhh…it’s a small place, and it doesn’t have much of a menu.”

The more insistently he pressed for details, the more tense she became. Her voice remained emotionless as she spewed out her programmed responses, but her face twisted and hardened with anxiety.

Pablo could have told her that her apparent memories of those four days at the Tranquility Motel were false. He could have ordered her to blow them out of her mind the way one might blow dust from an old book, and she would have done it. Then he could have told her that her
true memories were locked behind an Azrael Block, and that she must hammer it into more dust. But if he had done so, she would have plunged, as programmed, into a coma—or worse. He would have to spend many days, possibly weeks, looking for tiny cracks to exploit cautiously.

For today, he contented himself with identifying the precise number of hours of her life that had been stolen from her. He took her back to Friday, July 6, of the summer before last, and asked exactly when she signed the register at the Tranquility Motel.

“A little after eight o’clock.” She no longer spoke in a wooden voice because these were real memories. “It was still an hour before sunset, but I was exhausted. All I wanted was dinner, a shower, and bed.” She described the man and woman behind the check-in counter in detail. She even recalled their names: Faye and Ernie.

Pablo said, “Once you had checked in, you ate at the Tranquility Grille next to the motel. So describe the place.”

She did so, and in convincing detail. But when he jumped her ahead to the moment at which she left the restaurant, her recollections were phony again, thin and without color. Clearly, her memories had been altered from some point after she had gone into the Tranquility Grille on that Friday evening until she had left the motel and had headed toward Utah the following Tuesday morning.

Pablo backtracked, returning Ginger to the small restaurant once more, searching for the exact moment at which the genuine memories ended and the false began. “Tell me about your dinner from the moment you went into the Tranquility Grille that Friday evening. Minute by minute.”

Ginger sat up straight in her chair. Her eyes were still closed, but under the shuttered lids, they moved visibly, as if she were looking left and right upon entering the Tranquility Grille. She unfisted her hands and got up, much to Pablo’s surprise. She walked away from her chair, toward the center of the room. He walked beside her to prevent her from bumping into furniture. She did not know she was in his apartment but imagined herself to be making her way between the tables in the restaurant. As she moved, the tension and fear left her, for now she was wholly in that time, prior to all her trouble, when she had had nothing about which to be tense or afraid.

In a quiet, anxiety-free voice she said, “Took me a while to freshen up and get over here, so it’s almost twilight. Outside, the plains are orange in the late sunlight, and the inside of the diner is full of that glow. I think I’ll take that booth over in the corner by the window.”

Pablo went with her, guiding her past the Picasso painting toward one of the sofas that was decorated with colorful pastel accent pillows.

She said, “Mmmm. Smells good. Onions…spices…french fries…”

“How many people in the diner, Ginger?”

She paused and turned her head, surveying the room with closed eyes. “The cook behind the counter and a waitress. Three men…truck drivers, I guess…on stools at the counter. And…three at that table…and the chubby priest…another guy over at that booth…” Ginger continued pointing and counting. “Oh, eleven in all, plus me.”

“All right,” Pablo said, “let’s go to that booth by the windows.”

She began walking again, smiled vaguely at someone, sidestepped an obstacle that only she could see, then suddenly twitched in surprise, jerked one hand to her face. “Oh!” She stopped.

“What is it?” Pablo asked. “What’s happened?”

She blinked furiously for a moment, smiled, and spoke to someone in the Tranquility Grille back there on July 6 of last year. “No, no, I’m all right. It’s nothing. I’ve already brushed it off.” She wiped her face with one hand. “See?” She had been looking down, as if the other person was seated, and now she raised her eyes as he got up.

Pablo waited for her to continue the conversation.

She said, “Well, when you spill salt you’d
better
throw some over your shoulder, or God knows what’ll happen. My father used to throw it three times, so if you’d been him, you’d have buried me in the stuff.”

She started walking again, and Pablo said, “Stop. Wait, Ginger. The man who threw salt over his shoulder—tell me what he looks like.”

“Young,” she said. “Thirty-two or thirty-three. About five-ten. Lean. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sort of handsome. Seems shy, sweet.”

Dominick Corvaisis. No doubt about it.

She began to move again. Pablo stayed at her side until, realizing she was about to sit in the restaurant booth, he guided her gently to the sofa. She sat back on it and looked out a window, smiling at her private panorama of Nevada plains washed in the light of a dying sun.

Pablo watched and listened while Ginger exchanged pleasantries with the waitress and ordered a bottle of Coors. The beer was served, and Ginger pantomimed sipping it while she watched the sun fade. Seconds ticked past, but Pablo didn’t speed her through the scene because he knew they were approaching the crucial moment when her real memories gave way to phony ones. The event—the thing that she saw and should not have seen—had transpired around this time, and Pablo wanted to learn everything he could about the minutes leading up to it.

Twilight arrived back there in the past.

When the waitress returned, Ginger ordered a bowl of the homemade vegetable soup and a cheeseburger with all the trimmings.

Night fell out there in Nevada.

Abruptly, before her food had been served, Ginger frowned and said, “What’s that?” She looked out the imagined window, scowling.

“What do you see?” Pablo asked, chained to his inconvenient vantage point in present-day Boston.

A worried look came over her face, and she stood up. “What the devil
is
that noise?” She looked toward other people in the restaurant with a puzzled expression, and she spoke to them: “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.” She suddenly tottered sideways and nearly fell.
“Gevalt!”
She reached out as if supporting herself against the side of a booth or table. “Shaking. Why’s everything shaking?” She jumped in surprise. “It’s knocked over my beer glass. Is it an earthquake? What’s happening? What
is
that sound?” She stumbled again. Now she was frightened. “The door!” She started to run across the living room, though in her mind she was heading toward the exit from the restaurant that, in reality, she had long ago departed. “The door,” she cried again, but then she stopped abruptly, swaying, gasping, shuddering.

When Pablo caught up with her, she dropped to her knees and hung her head. “What’s happening, Ginger?”

“Nothing.” She had changed in an instant.

“What’s that noise?”

“What noise?” The robot voice again.

“Ginger, damn it, what’s happening in the Tranquility Grille?”

Horror was on her face, but she merely said, “I’m having dinner.”

“That’s a false memory.”

“Having dinner.”

He tried to make her continue with the crucial memory of the frightening thing that had been about to happen. But at last he had to accept that the Azrael Block, behind which her memories were repressed, took form when she had been running for the restaurant door, and it did not end until the following Tuesday morning, when she drove east toward Salt Lake City. In time, he might be able to chip it down to smaller dimensions, but enough had been accomplished for one day.

At last they were making real headway. They knew that on the night of Friday, July 6, the year before last, Ginger had seen something she had not been meant to see. Having seen it, she had almost certainly been detained in a room at the Tranquility Motel, where someone had used sophisticated brainwashing techniques to conceal the memory of that event from her and thereby prevent her from carrying word of it to the world. They had worked on her for three days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—releasing her, with sanitized recollections, on Tuesday.

But, in God’s name, who were these omnipotent strangers? And what had she seen?

2

Portland, Oregon

Sunday, January 5, Dominick Corvaisis flew to Portland and took a hotel room near the apartment house in which he had once lived. Rain was falling hard, and the air was cold.

Except for dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spent the remaining hours of Sunday afternoon and evening at a table by the window of his room, alternately staring out at the rain-lashed city and studying the roadmaps. Again and again, he mentally reviewed the trip he had taken the summer before last (and would take again starting tomorrow).

As he had told Parker Faine on Christmas, he was convinced that he had stumbled into a dangerous situation out there on the road, and that (paranoid as it sounded) the memory of it had been wiped from his mind. The mail from his unknown correspondent pointed to no other conclusion.

Two days ago, he had received a third envelope without a return address, postmarked New York. Now, when Dom tired of looking at the maps and staring thoughtfully out at the Oregon rain, he picked up that envelope, shook out the contents, and studied them. This time there had been no note, just two Polaroid photographs.

The first picture had the least effect on him, although it made him tense—unaccountably tense, considering that it was a photograph of someone who, as far as he knew, was a stranger to him. A young, pudgy priest with unruly auburn hair, freckles, and green eyes. He was facing the camera, sitting in a chair near a small writing desk, a suitcase at his side. He was very erect, head up and shoulders squared off, hands limp in his lap, knees together. The picture disturbed Dom because the expression on the priest’s face was only one step removed from the lifeless, sightless stare of a corpse. The man was alive; that much was evident from his rigid posture, yet his eyes were chillingly empty.

The second photograph hit Dom much harder than the first, and its powerful effect did not diminish with familiarity. A young woman was the subject of this snapshot, and she was no stranger. Although Dom could not recall where they had met, he knew they were acquainted. The sight of her made his heart quicken with a fear similar to that which filled him when he woke from one of his episodes of sleepwalking. She was in her late twenties. Blue eyes. Silver-blond hair. Exquisitely proportioned face. She would have been exceptionally beautiful if her expression had not been precisely that of the priest: slack, dead, empty-eyed. She had been photographed from the waist up, lying in a narrow bed, sheets pulled
up chastely to her neck. Restraining straps held her down. One arm was partially bared to allow clearance for an IV needle in her wrist vein. She looked small, helpless, oppressed.

The photograph instantly brought to mind his own nightmare in which unseen men were shouting at him and forcing his face into a sink. A couple of times, that bad dream had not begun at the sink itself but in a bed in a strange room, where his vision was blurred by a saffron mist. Looking at the young woman, Dom was convinced that somewhere there was a Polaroid shot of him in similar circumstances: strapped to a bed, an IV needle in his arm, his face without expression.

When he had shown the two photographs to Parker Faine on Friday, the day they came in the mail, the artist jumped to similar conclusions. “If I’m wrong, roast me in hell and make sandwiches for the devil, but I swear this is a snapshot of a woman in a trance or drug-induced stupor, undergoing the brainwashing that you evidently underwent. Christ, this situation gets more bizarre and fascinating day by day! It’s something you ought to be able to go to the cops about—but you can’t, because who’s to say which side
they’d
be on? It may have been a branch of our own government you ran afoul of out there on the road. Anyway, you weren’t the only one who got in trouble, good buddy. This priest and this woman also stumbled into it. Whoever went to this much trouble is hiding something damned big, a lot bigger than I thought before.”