A Cry In The Night
This is a short story that asks the question: How much of what you are is what you remember?
By David Grace (DavidGraceAuthor.com)
He awoke sprawled on a weathered bench in the shade of an ancient sycamore with leaves the size of salad plates. His first images were of a child chasing a dog and a group of boys laughing as they tussled over a ball, but all he could think about was, “Where am I?” a question that was quickly replaced by a more disturbing one, “Who am I?”
Running his hand across his head he felt thick, soft hair, an unlined face. The back of his hand was pale and unblemished, the skin of a young Caucasian male. A rubber band encircled his wrist. Turning it over he saw that it secured a three-by-five card covered in precise writing.
“Though you have lost your memory,” it began. “Do not be afraid. Everything will be fine. You have an important job to do, and your memories would only make that job more difficult. You will remember one thing, a password, when you need to.
“There is money and identification in your pocket. Your name is Martin Ames. You have a very important job and only three days to do it. After that, without treatment, you will lose your memory again. Call this number, 555–0964, for further information. Tell no one about this. No doctor can restore your memory in the three days available, and official inquires will only complicate your situation. Destroy this card as soon as you have memorized the phone number.
“Good luck.
— A Friend”
Ames blinked wildly, then read the card a second time. None of it made any sense. An important job? Was he a policeman? A spy? Had the government or some organization taken his memory so that they could turn him into a killer or a terrorist or a patsy? Fanciful scenarios raced through his head.
Had Sirhan Sirhan wakened one day without a memory only to be told to go to Robert Kennedy’s victory party at the Ambassador Hotel? Was there now some boy in Jerusalem carrying a suicide bomb because he had awakened at a bus stop with no memory and a cryptic note taped to his hand?
Ames shook his head at his ridiculous musings and uttered a sharp, high-pitched laugh.
Slapping his pockets he found the outline of a wallet. Inside were twenty one-hundred dollar bills, a Visa card, a pre-paid phone card, a social security card and a driver’s license, all in the name of Martin Ames. The address on the license was meaningless to him.
Where was he anyway? The other pockets yielded only a handkerchief, a small black comb, and a brown case containing three keys, one apparently to an industrial lock like that to an office or a factory, the second to a residence, and the third to a General Motors vehicle. He returned the items to his pockets and glanced around the park.
Again, he scanned his memory, but it was like trying to search an empty room. A birthday party? A football game? His first kiss? A pet? A car? A school? — nothing. As far as his past was concerned, his mind was an empty, gray wilderness without boundary or landmark. But he knew some things, about the car key, for example. And other things. Guns, he seemed to know a great deal about guns, and human anatomy. With a critical eye, Ames noticed how well developed his arms were. His hands felt strong, his body charged.
He glanced at the card one last time and realized that he had already memorized the phone number, as if his damaged mind had seized upon it, desperate for some information to fill its yawning emptiness. He tore the card into pieces and scattered them in the bin next to the water fountain.
Ames picked a random direction and headed out of the park. As far as he could tell no one paid him the slightest notice. Passing through a line of trees he emerged at the edge of a busy street. Two and three story apartment houses lined the far curb. Across the street to his left rose the steel sign of a Chevron gas station. Ames headed for the payphone at the western side near the compressed air dispenser. He looked over his shoulder, uneasy for reasons he couldn’t identify. He dialed the 800 number on the phone card, then entered the activation code.
The phone rang twice, then an electronic voice answered: “Enter password, then press pound.” Ames opened his mouth but he had no idea what the password was. Trying to remember it was like trying to lift a piano with some imagined psychic energy. He hung up.
The life of the city swirled around him. Cars ground their way down the street. Joggers and young men on roller skates headed to and from the park. A gray van sat quietly at the curb a hundred yards down the block. Something about the van pulled at his gaze.
It was, as far as he could tell, empty, unwashed, mildly dented, unremarkable, except for the small antenna mounted just above the windshield. A radio dispatched vehicle? There was no plumber’s logo or appliance-repair company’s name on the side, no name or markings at all. Cell phones didn’t use antennas like that. It was for a satellite uplink, though how he knew that he had no idea. He looked back at the payphone and recoiled. Without conscious thought, he headed into the gas station.
A young Asian man operated the cash register in between flipping toggles on the bank of switches that controlled the pumps. Ames grabbed a bottle of orange juice from the cooler and handed it to the clerk together with a hundred dollar bill.
“We don’t take large bills,” the clerk said, shoving it back across the counter.
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Sorry.” The boy pushed the bill away a second time.
“I’ll pay you ten dollars to break it for me,” Ames said, his eyes boring into the boy’s. The clerk hesitated, then pulled a thick pencil from a drawer and drew a mark near Franklin’s face.
“Okay,” he said a moment later, his face expressionless as he counted out the change, then removed a ten from the pile and slipped it into his pocket. Ames went outside and watched the commuters filling their tanks while he slowly drank his juice. A minute later a young Filipino woman in a Mazda Protégé pulled in, swiped her credit card, and raised her cell phone even before the gas began to flow. Ames pulled a twenty from the pile of bills the clerk had given him.
“Excuse me,” he said, approaching the woman with the twenty showing in his outstretched hand. She looked him over suspiciously and cupped her palm over the phone.
“Yes?”
“I need to make a local call and the pay phone doesn’t work. Could I use your phone for just a minute for $20?”
The girl turned back to her phone, “Cyn, hang on a sec. . . . A short local call?”
“Only take a minute, I promise.”
The woman studied Ames a moment longer then raised the phone to her ear. “Cyn, I gotta do something. I’ll call you right back.” Pressing the off button, she traded the cell for the twenty.
Ames pressed a series of buttons and a moment later the recorded voice asked again for the password. This time a series of numbers raced through his mind and he punched them into the keypad.
“Go to 1347 Decker, apartment 325. Turn on the computer, enter the password, and follow the instructions.” The line went dead.
Ames handed the phone back and gave one final glance to the gray van before heading for the intersection. He waited until the light turned green then crossed the other way, against the red, and ran up the block.
An Indian restaurant next to a bike shop advertised a buffet lunch and Ames hurried inside. At the end of the back corridor a well worn door bore a stylized male outline. Ames pushed through and entered the cubicle, but didn’t latch the dented toilet door. Feet on top of the seat he squatted on the side closest to the door’s hinge. Half a minute passed, then the men’s room door banged open. Ames held his breath and imagined a man looking at the empty stall’s half open door. Two seconds later the door banged closed. Ames waited and listened. Two muted thumps sounded from the hallway — the women’s room door and the manager’s office. Finally, he heard the back door being pulled shut.
Was someone after him? Maybe the owner was merely looking for an absent waiter. Perhaps he was crazy. Maybe he had lost his mind and he himself had set up this paranoid scenario. For a moment he considered simply walking out the front door, but something told him that they would be circling the block, quartering the neighborhood. They? Who?
Ames slipped from the bathroom and knocked on a door marked “Private” halfway down the hall. There was no answer. Slipping back to the edge of the dining room he noticed a dark, slender man with smooth black hair standing near the end of the buffet line. The man glanced toward the hallway and Ames waved to him. The man’s eyebrows raised slightly, and he came over.
“Are you the manager?” Ames asked in a confidential tone.
“Yes, sir. Is there a problem?”
“May I speak to you in your office about a business matter?”
“Sir, it is our busy time — ”
Ames slipped a twenty into the manager’s palm. “It won’t take long.” The manager glanced at the bill, then, uneasily, led them down the hall.
“May I ask,” Ames began once the door was closed, “do you have a car here?”
“What does my car have to do with this?”
Ames removed a hundred dollar bill from his wallet and held it out to the manager. “I have a personal problem, a woman, her family, the details aren’t important. Her brother wants to talk with me, and I don’t want to talk with him. I need a discrete way to get to a friend’s house.” Ames wagged the bill.
“But sir, this is our busy time. I can’t become a taxi service–” Ames held out a second hundred dollar bill.
“It won’t take long. Surely you could spare one of your busboys for a few minutes.” The manager gave the bills a long stare, then nodded and poked his head out of his door.
“Sanji,” he called down the hallway, “come into the office. I have an errand for you.” Turning back to Ames he took the bills and slipped them into his pocket.
Sanji drove a black 2001 Taurus with a dented bumper. Ames slipped into the back seat while the car paused briefly near the restaurant’s back door. For the next fifteen minutes Ames huddled on the floor until Sanji called out: “You said 1347 Decker?”
“Yes.” The car pulled to the curb. Decker was a two-lane street with block after block of two and four-story apartment building in various shades of beige, pink, blue and pale green. No one seemed to be paying any attention to him.
“Thanks,” Ames said and bolted from the car. Sanji was already halfway down the block by the time Ames reached the aluminum mesh security gate. He slipped the largest key into the lock and the gate swung free. A stairway led past a bank of copper-colored mail boxes and up to the third floor.
The door to unit 325 yielded to Ames’ second key. The apartment was musty and beams of sunlight glittered off clouds of dust. The living room was furnished with a couple of Motel 6 pictures and a sagging vinyl couch. The place was as devoid of human personality as a prison cell.
The bedroom contained a single narrow bed straight out of a fifties TV show, a scarred dresser, and a card table fronted by a folding chair. Ames opened a few drawers and found an unopened packet of Fruit of the Loom jockey shorts, three pairs of white, cotton socks, a box of handkerchiefs, two shirts, one white and one yellow, each identical in style to the blue one he now wore, and a new pair of blue jeans. In the center of the card table was a generic, gray computer, a keyboard and a mouse.
After one more glance around Ames pressed the power switch. The machine seemed ancient, its hard drive wheezing for half a minute before a password screen appeared.
Ames started to type, then after three digits, paused and pulled his hands away. Somehow the numbers looked wrong, like a reading a word and knowing it was misspelled.
Ames backspaced and began again. Finally, a string of numbers, slightly different from the password he had punched into the phone pad, seemed right. After a final hesitation, Ames pressed the Enter key and the screen cleared and was replaced with a page of text:
“You are a highly trained operative. For your protection and for security reasons, your memories have been suppressed. Upon successful completion of your assignment your memories of the last few days will be removed and your normal memories will be returned to you.
“A deep-cover sleeper agent for a hostile government has been attempting to purchase a modified, airborne communicable strain of a lethal virus. He has hired a University biophysicist to modify the genetic structure of a nonlethal virus which is currently under study in the University labs as a host for genes from the Hemeragic Fever virus.
“You have two jobs: destroy the virus samples and all of the researcher’s laboratory records and obtain a video-taped confession by the researcher and the man who hired him by any means necessary. If you cannot obtain the confession then you must kill the subjects in as inconspicuous a manner as possible.
“All of the information you need will appear on screen when you click the ‘Proceed’ button at the bottom of this page. When you have completed your task, call the following number, 555–9623, and enter your password. You will be picked up and your memory restored.
“When this computer is turned off, all of the files it contains will be destroyed. If you do not complete your assignment for any reason, your memory will not be restored and another agent will be assigned to perform your job. In three days your current memories will also disappear. Your car, a white Chevrolet Impala, is parked around the corner on the south side of Park Forest.”
Ames stared at the screen and wondered if he had completely lost his mind. Could paranoid schizophrenics tell when they were having hallucinations? Was this someone’s idea of a practical joke? All the message lacked was the phrase, “Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it . . . .”
Ames stared at the screen, his eyes drawn to the red and white “Proceed” button at the bottom. What was there to stop him from pulling the plug, opening the computer’s case and using another machine to suck every byte off this hard disk?
None of this made any sense. Well, if he were suffering from some kind of hallucination there would be no useful information on the next page. Did he know any biophysicists? No. What university? He had no idea.
He clicked “Proceed”. Names and photographs appeared. Each picture was followed by a detailed biography including home and work addresses, phone numbers, burglar alarm codes, pin numbers, and safe combinations.
Ames read the text once and found that he had committed it to memory. That wasn’t normal. Had he been trained to do that in some way or was it a byproduct of his memory being erased?
Ames thought for a moment, then began to search the apartment. He found a phone book in a drawer in the kitchen. Leafing through the pages he found one of the men, a Doctor Emile Merchant, listed at the phone number contained in the computer file. He couldn’t have invented that. At least that much was real. But was the man actually building a terrorist weapon or was this all an elaborate hoax to convince Ames to commit a murder?
The instructions were only to kill if he couldn’t get a confession. Certainly, destroying a bio-weapon and stopping a terrorist were admirable goals. If this were true, he was working for the government to fight terrorism and save lives. Nothing wrong with that, so long as he didn’t go off the deep end and actually kill anybody.
A thrill passed through him. He was a secret agent with cash in his pocket and a secret mission to perform. Certainly he hadn’t imagined the $2,000 in his wallet or the apartment in which he now sat.
What kind of a person am I? Ames wondered. Do I have a wife, a family?
They would know nothing of his real job. Neither would he. He would leave home on a business trip, wake up without any memories, perform his mission, then wake up, again with no memories, maybe on the plane heading back home or in a motel near the airport. Perhaps they implanted false memories of half a dozen business calls where he sold industrial solvents or commercial paper products.
In spite of the fact that he had eaten nothing all day, Ames felt excited, energized. A secret world had opened before him.
Ames re-read the dossiers a second time, just to be sure he had missed nothing, then clicked the ‘Proceed’ button. The hard disk wheezed and clicked for three seconds then made a high pitched screech and the screen dissolved in a confetti of static. “Head’s crashed into the platter,” Ames mumbled, then again wondered how he knew that.
The file had probably been overwritten with zeros and the partition table wiped out before the head crashed. Somehow Ames doubted that pulling the plug would have had any effect on the disk’s erasure. There had to be a backup battery wired into the case. He pulled the plug anyway.
He found a package of English muffins in the refrigerator along with a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, and a jar of freeze dried coffee. It might have been there for days or weeks. No milk, no sugar. Did he like his coffee black? He couldn’t remember.
When he was done he washed everything, then took a shower. The medicine cabinet held the normal toiletries, shampoo, toothpaste, dental floss, a disposable razor, a can of generic shaving cream. Standing in front of the mirror he studied himself. Strip-by-strip the lather revealed an ordinary face that raised no twinges of recognition. The face of a stranger.
Lastly he brushed his teeth, then flossed. Had his unknown parents tutored him especially well on hygiene?
Something seemed to be stuck between his left rear molars, a minor irritation like a feathery itch on the tip of your nose. Ames sawed the floss back and forth then spit into the sink expecting to see a tiny chunk of half-chewed bacon. Instead he found an egg-shaped tangle of white fibers, like a spindle of cotton thread. Ames prodded it with the tip of his comb.
On any other day Ames would have turned on the faucet and washed it down the drain. Today he was past being surprised by anything and plodded back to the kitchen on bare feet. One of the drawers held scissors, cellophane tape, double A batteries, rubber bands and a magnifying glass.
Ames returned to the bathroom and peered at bundle of thread through the glass, a tangle of narrow white stripes with black marks on one side. Slowly, Ames unwound it into a three inch length of dental tape with minute printed characters that might have been made by the same hand that had lettered the card that had been affixed to his hand when he awoke.
After much squinting and flattening, he was able to read a string of characters: www.862-8498669210.com. A web address? Ames memorized the digits and flushed the tape, then, dressed in clean clothes, checked the phone book and abandoned the apartment.
He found the Chevy where it was supposed to be and the last key turned effortlessly in the ingition. Five minutes later he was parked down the block from a Kinko’s and had paid five dollars for twenty minutes access to the Internet.
The site appeared as a plain blue screen with a password box at the bottom. Ames entered the string he had punched into the telephone and a page of text appeared:
“I was you. They told me that my memories would be restored when I finished my assignment. Have they? Do you remember me? I think there’s something wrong with me, with us. I think our brain doesn’t work right any more. When your memories die, all that you are dies with them. Here is everything I know.”
A couple of paragraphs followed detailing his previous self’s assignment, the theft of files containing technical information about a research project the government wanted stopped.
Was this true? Had someone followed him here from the safe house? His last self had helpfully programmed an erase sequence into the page. Ames clicked the Delete button and the site disappeared in a digital storm.
Ames wandered toward the door, his mind spinning. What should he do? Slip his watchers? Create a new site and upload a copy of the new assignment? Create a new message for his future self? Try to find someone who could restore his memory? All in the next two days?
He needed to think. Where? The apartment? No, the thought of the sterile, anonymous rooms repelled him, besides, it was probably being watched.
What time was it? He didn’t have a watch, but it seemed like late afternoon. He found a Walgreens and purchased a Timex, two Hershey bars, a Bic pen, a steno pad, and a city map.
A green blotch on the map marked a small a park a few blocks away.
It was dusk when Ames reached the park. Nestled in a fold in the land between blocks of aged apartment buildings with sagging balconies, the park itself seemed worn and threadbare. Chains were broken on two of the swings and the net was missing from the basketball hoop. A half-hearted attempt had been made to remove red and black gang symbols spray-painted on the handball court. Half a dozen children clambered over the jungle gym and spun on a wobbly whirl-a-gig.
Ames settled into a worn bench and tried to organize his thoughts. For a long moment he considered doing the job they had given him, but was any of what they claimed really true? Or, he could sit in the apartment and wait for them to collect him. What would that solve? If the website message was true, in a few days his new memory-wiped self would be back right where he was now. He couldn’t go to the police. After all, what did he really know? What could he prove?
What if he managed to escape, to disappear? If he really would lose his memory in a couple more days he could write an account of what he knew so that when he woke up in some anonymous motel he would have a clue about who he was. But then what? A man with no long-term memory couldn’t hold a job. He had no skills unless you counted apparent abilities as an assassin, burglar, and surveillance agent. No police department would hire him.
Perhaps he could become a private detective like the heroes in the paperback novels. Sure, if his cases only lasted three days. But at least he could promise his clients discretion. Or should he find a high bridge and end it all, but why bother? In two more days his consciousness would disappear all on its own.
What was the Zen teaching, something about letting life come to you? There had to be a purpose to his life. He had to be good for something, didn’t he? Ames lazily watched the scene around him, letting his senses drift.
The shadows lengthened and the park slowly changed. The children drifted away until there was only a teen-age girl left, shepherding a much younger boy and girl. Ames could hear her words drifting on the breeze.
“Jack, come on. We gotta get home.”
“Just one more spin!”
Jack jumped off the platform, raced forward, pushing it to higher speed, then, with his sister in pursuit, jumped back on, laughing. From the edge of his vision Ames noticed two young men enter the park. They reminded him of a pair of animals on the hunt. They gave him a brief glance, then turned back toward the girl. The park was deserted. If he were wise, he would leave now.
“Hey, girl, you’re lookin’ fine,” the taller boy called. “Why don’t we go somewhere and party.”
The girl had dragged her brother off the platform and was reaching out for her little sister’s hand.
“I’ve got to get them home.”
“They can take of themselves. You all know the way back to your house, don’t you?”
The boy and girl stared dumbly at the taller boy, then nodded.
“Well, go on them. Your mama’s waiting for you.”
“What about Carrie?” the boy asked.
“Carrie and me are gonna have a little party, aren’t we?”
Carrie took a step back, then released her brother and sister’s hands. “Go on home!”
“But, Carrie — ”
”Go on, I said. Run. Run!”
The shorter boy had a close-shaved head with a pale, zigzag scar running across the top of his skull. Suddenly, he made a growling sound and lunged toward the children. Panicked, they fled. Both boys laughed and turned back to Carrie.
“Look what I got,” the tall boy said, holding up a plastic crack vial. “We’re gonna have us a nice party.”
The boy with the scar grabbed Carrie’s hand and began to drag her toward a line of oleander bushes.
Ames stood, his mind ablaze with conflicting emotions.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doin’?” The first boy called to his friend.
“I’m just–”
“You’re just gonna wait your turn, like always.”
“Bobby, you said I–”
“I said you gonna wait your turn, Teddy.”
Ames had wondered what good was a man without a memory. Maybe now, he realized with a shiver of excitement, he was about to find out.
Bobby slipped his arm around Carrie’s shoulder and began to propel her toward the bushes. “Now, don’t be like that,” Bobby said as the girl began to cry. “We’re just gonna have some fun. You’ll like it. You’ll see.”
Ames’ footsteps were as soundless as the evening breeze.
“Please!” Carrie cried, trying to pull away.
“That’s right, beg for it.” Both boys laughed.
“Let her go.” Ames said quietly, appearing as if by magic a few feet behind the boy with the scar. Teddy spun around and took a step forward. Ames’ left hand lashed out, the heel of his palm striking him across the bridge of his nose. Teddy collapsed like a steer in a slaughterhouse.
Bobby turned and clutched the girl’s neck in his left hand as his right pulled a nine-millimeter pistol from beneath his shirt. Ames glided forward and lashed out, kicking the gun invisibly off into the night.
“Who the Hell are you, Jackie Chan’s cousin or something?” Bobby held the girl tightly in front of him.
“You ever see the movie, D.O.A.?”
“Man, are you crazy?”
“It’s about a man who’s been poisoned and has only one day to live. He looks normal, but he’s really just a dead man walking.”
“Hey, man, you–”
“That’s what I am, just a dead man walking. I’ve got nothing to lose. I could kill you, or not, it wouldn’t matter. In two more days my life, everything I was, or am, or will be, is over, gone forever. I won’t exist anymore. The way I figure it, I may as well make whatever time I have left count for something.”
Dragging Carrie with him, Bobby glanced over his shoulder, gauging the distance to the gate. “You want her so bad, man, you got her!” He threw Carrie toward Ames then whirled, but before he could take two steps, a sharp crack echoed and Bobby collapsed like a pile of stuffed rags.
Carrie stumbled to her feet and looked at Ames through terrified eyes.
“You’d better go home,” he said, softly. “Your mother will worry.”
“Are they dead?”
“I don’t know.”
Carrie stared at the shadows that marked Teddy and Bobby’s forms, face down in the grass.
“Are you a cop or something?”
“Or something. I’m not sure yet.”
“Was that true, what you said about you dying?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Go home now.”
Carrie lunged forward, hugged Ames fiercely, then just as quickly released him.
“I hope they are,” she said looking at the still bodies, then raced for the distant lights. A peculiar emotion filled Ames. Joy? Satisfaction? He didn’t know. He stood there silently and watched Carrie until she disappeared, a faint shadow floating through the moonless night. Finally he returned to the car.
A man was sitting in the front seat. About forty, thin nose, pale eyes, his cheeks were skin-cancer pink. For a moment they stared at each other, then Ames slipped behind the wheel and closed the door.
“Did you kill them?’
“I don’t know.”
“We shouldn’t stay here too long, just in case.”
“Now what?”
“So, my guess is that you have no intention of fulfilling your assignment.”
“I guess not.”
The thin man’s lips twisted into a sour smile.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Do you want to explain things to me or is that just a waste of time?”
“Because you’ll forget it all in a couple of days anyway? No, I guess you’re entitled. It wasn’t deliberate, you know,” he waved his hand at Ames, “all of this. You had an accident.”
“I would guess that in my line of work there were a lot of accidents.”
“In a way. To be more precise, you were shot in the head. We figured you’d end up a vegetable, but you surprised us.”
“Who’s us?”
The thin man tightened his lips in what Ames guessed passed for a smile. “You can call me, Jerry.”
Ames stuck out his hand.
“Anyway, you woke up and except for the memory loss, you seemed fine. The doctors were calling it a miracle, then you had a relapse, couldn’t remember anything again. You seemed to recover, then three days later . . . well, you get the picture. We tried everything. No good. No more long term memory. Three days and out.”
“So, you could either stick me in some mental hospital, or . . . .”
“You know the old line about lemons and lemonade.”
“For some reason, homilies have managed to escape my delete function.”
“Anyway, we figured, some people figured, that since you still had all your skills, your condition might be a benefit–”
“To you.”
“Yeah, to us. You could never talk about what you did because you could never remember. You should have been the perfect agent.”
“But I wasn’t.”
Jerry laughed. “You can say that again. Too damn paranoid. The first couple of times we briefed you, you didn’t trusted us, never believed us. You were always breaking surveillance, trying to catch us for Christ’s sake. For you, everything was a scene out of an Oliver Stone movie, you remember him, right?”
Ames nodded.
“Crap, the stuff you remembered used to drive me crazy. If you can remember how to field strip an MP5 why the Hell can’t you remember what college you went to?”
“The doctors never figured it out?”
“They sure wanted to try. If we had left it up to them you’d be a research subject for the rest of your life.”
“I guess I owe you one for saving me from that.” Ames glanced up and down the street.
“It’s just us,” Jerry said softly.
“Okay. So, now what?”
Jerry sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Like I said, we tried it six ways from Sunday — briefing you, not briefing you, explaining everything, explaining nothing. It didn’t matter. I tried to tell them. Without your memories, without everything that makes you, you, you’re a different guy. You’ll never function as an agent again, can’t. You’re a different person.” Jerry stared at Ames, then turned away and shrugged.
“So, now what?”
“Now we stop.”
“Stop? You’re just going to cut me lose? So in two days I’ll be wandering around bumland, another crackpot mental case?”
“No, not like that. You’re entitled to, well, call it a disability pension, four grand a month, tax free. You won’t be living at the Ritz but it should be enough to keep body and soul together.”
Ames laughed.
“What?”
“I was just wondering if I have a soul any more. So that’s it?”
Jerry shrugged. “You have any idea about what you’re going to do?”
“First off, I’m going to start a diary so that, you know, when it all goes away, I’ll have something to explain all this.”
“If you don’t mind some advice . . . .”
“I know, don’t mention what I did for a living.”
“That too. Obviously, we’ll check on you from time to time, but what I was going to say is, make a video tape. You’re one paranoid son of a bitch. If you type your journal into a computer, you’ll start wondering if you really wrote it or if some spymaster set it all up. As long as it’s in your own face on the screen, you’ll probably be willing to believe that it’s true. Beyond that, any ideas?”
“There has to be a reason I survived that bullet, something more for me to do than just fade away every three days. I’m thinking that maybe some people might need my help.”
“Like that girl?”
“Who knows. Maybe. I have my limitations,” Ames dipped his chin, “but there are still things I can do, things that need doing. And video discs are cheap if some project looks like it’ll take longer than three days. I think there are some people out there I can do right by.” Ames sighed and turned away. “Maybe things happen for a reason,” he said softly, talking to himself.
Jerry paused for a moment, then held out his hand.
“That’s it, then? You don’t want me to sign anything or . . . .” Ames shrugged.
“You signed it all a long time ago. You know, Martin, we were really good friends, once. You were a great guy. I hate to let you go, but I have tell you, I can’t take this shit any more. It’s like seeing you die over and over again. There’s an emergency number in the apartment. Write it in your diary, just in case, you know.”
Jerry paused for a long moment, studying Ames’s face in the faint glow of a distant street lamp, gripped his shoulder, then slipped from the car and disappeared as if he had never existed.
In the distance, a diesel’s horn sounded and Ames lay back trying to fill his head with the night’s sights and sounds, with memories, the smell of star jasmine and auto exhaust, the caress of the night breeze, the hollow distant rattle of steel wheels against steel rails, the fleeting memory of Jerry’s hand on his shoulder, the fragrance of cedar and bubble gum from Carrie’s thick hair, a bird’s call, a howl, a distant cry in the night. And then he smiled.
Life was beautiful, and he still had two days yet to live.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
