Eating Memories (18 page)

Down the row Beaudreaux and Weidmeyer start their weekly battle of the cassette players. Beaudreaux’s playing 2 Live Crew and grunting like a rutting buffalo in time with the music. Weidmeyer’s got his shit-kicker stuff cranked up high.

FD gets up from his chair and walks to the bars. “SHUT UP! I’M READING!” His huge voice batters the raw concrete, resounds in the steel.

The music stops and for an instant the building is so silent that Jerry thinks he has gone deaf. It is breathlessly silent, as silent as the 7-Eleven after that third shot.

Then a clang
—
someone drops something on the concrete floor. A man gives a low, bass laugh, and the spell is broken. The background chatter of the cell block picks up where it left off. FD walks back to his chair and sits down.

“I dream I go walking into the 7-Eleven, you know?” Jerry tells the ceiling miserably. “Only this time before I shoot the guy, I reach out and get the keys, and there’s this one key on the ring that’s old and all rusted up. When I look down on the ground where this Cambodian’s bleeding, “I see that his chest has a built-in strongbox.”

Jerry glances over at FD. His cellmate has put the
Newsweek
across his lap and his gaze is intent and absorbed. “So what happens then?”

“And so inside this strongbox are rows and rows of what I think are baseballs .Only I take one out and
—”

DON’T THINK OF THAT,
Jerry tells himself. The act of thinking and describing what he recalls seems exhausting somehow, as though the memory is an eighty-pound sack on his back.

Suddenly Jerry, who quit smoking over three years ago, wishes he had a cigarette. He wants a cigarette so hard his hands have started to shake. If he weren’t slightly incarcerated he’d get in his car and go get a pack. He wants a smoke so bad he’d even go inside a 7-Eleven to buy some.

“PD?” Jerry whispers. “What would happen if you just keep remembering that traumatic shit over and over and the pathway thing in your brain got bigger and bigger? What would happen then?”

“I don’t know, man. What Dunlap’s doing to you is scary. It ain’t natural. Anyway. Don’t leave me sitting here with my dick in my hand. My arm’s getting tired. What’d you take out of the Cambodian’s strong box?”

The air leaves Jerry’s chest in a long sobbing sigh, a sigh that makes him feel empty and very, very ashamed.

DON’T REMEMBER THAT,
he tells himself, but he can’t help it. He recalls the end of his dream as clearly as if Dunlap had shot one of those electrical impulses into his brain and it’s speeding down that eight-lane memory superhighway.

“Skulls. Oh, Christ, FD. He had hundreds and hundreds of skulls in his chest.”

* * *

That night Jerry dreams he is in the back room of the 7-Eleven. In a little clearing amid the boxes of cereal, the cartons of Coke, the Cambodian is having tea.

The Cambodian glances up and Jerry gets lost in the jungle of darkness behind his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Jerry says.

Then the Cambodian shrugs and picks up the white, skull-shaped tea pot, his movements so slow, so graceful, that his whole damned body looks like a dance. “We choose our own paths.”

Paths.

Sun sparkles off the gravel at the side of the road, making Jerry squint. A big wind pushes off the desert, blowing ghostly patterns of sand across the empty highway. Beside Jerry the Cambodian walks, head down as though in thought.

“Why aren’t there any people here?” Jerry asks.

The Cambodian laughs with a sound like a bird. “I killed them all,” he says.

* * *

The next morning at breakfast Jerry thinks he sees the Cambodian sitting down at the end of the table, and so when the guards come to get him to take him in to see Dunlap, he sort of goes ape shit.

The guards aren’t bad guys, but it’s pretty clear they want to get the job over and done with, so they drag him, kicking and screaming, down to the infirmary.

“You volunteered for this,” Leo’s telling him as he’s muscling him towards the clinic door. “The prison shrink says it’ll be good for you.”

Jerry’s crying and snatching at Leo’s blue uniform shirt. “Listen to me. I feel like Dunlap’s woke up something in my brain, man. Like they woke up a monster in there or something. You got to get me to a doctor, Leo. Okay? Get me the prison counselor. Promise me you’ll get somebody to help.”

Looking properly sympathetic, Leo drags Jerry into the clinic and then helps the other guard strap him down.

When Jerry’s all cozy and belted in, Dunlap comes to the side of the bed and starts the IV.

“He thinks something’s wrong,” Leo tells Dunlap. “Should we have a doctor examine him?”

Dunlap looks up with a near-sighted, geek expression and says simply, “No.”

Leo hangs around for a split second to make sure Jerry’s going to be okay. Then he turns on his heel and walks off.

Jerry’s trying his best to tell Dunlap not to put him under, that he’s going crazy, that any more remembering is going to make that Cambodian and the 7-Eleven so big it’s going to push everything else out of his mind.

But he can’t get the words in order. They’re stumbling out of his mouth, tumbling over each other like kittens playing chase across the floor Then Jerry sees the syringe plunge into the IV tube and the fireworks start going off in his brain and he feels Dunlap sliding needles into his scalp.

“Please don’t,” Jerry’s saying. His appeals have come down to basics. “Please.”

Dunlap, child genius director, winner of the fucking Academy Award, is back at the keyboard and the monitor, programming the instructions and acting like
no habla
the language of desperation.

“Please,” Jerry says as his nails dig into the mattress. And then he’s back in the 7-Eleven.

The Cambodian is seated at a table in a clearing he’s made for himself among the boxes of cereal, the cartons of Cokes. Jerry glances around the dim room. The back of the 7-Eleven smells of ground coffee and sugar and the spicy tea the Cambodian is drinking.

“It wasn’t like this,” Jerry says.

The Cambodian seems to have the patience of a slow-growing tree. Movements deliberate, he picks up the tea pot and pours it tiny, thimble-sized cup just for Jerry.

What Jerry has worried about has happened. He’s finally gone round the bend. He’s lost a couple of cards out of his deck. His elevator doesn’t go to the top floor any more.

“It never happened this way,” he says.

“Neural pathways,” the Cambodian says. “That is where it is at. Please sit down. Have some tea.”

But Jerry doesn’t want to sit. Jerry wants to get back to where things, even if they weren’ t very happy, made some sense. “Dunlap’s going to see this and he’s going to wake me up
,
right?” he asks hopefully. “He’s going to see this and know something’s wrong.”

The Cambodian tips his head to the side and regards the tea pot. “Dunlap will see what he expects to see. He will film what he expects to film. Dunlap has no imagination. To him, the shortest distance between synapses will always be a straight line.”

Jerry walks around the room, searching for the way out, thinking that if he could just get back to the main part of the store he could catch Dunlap’s attention. Maybe Dunlap will come and help him or something.

“There is no door,” the Cambodian tells him.

And after a while Jerry discovers the guy’s right.

“Please sit.”

There’s not much else to do, so Jerry sits down and sips his tea. The tea’s strong and hot and sweet.

“This never happened,” Jerry tells him. “When the electricity hits my brain, I’m supposed to remember real stuff.”

The Cambodian nods agreeably. “Yes, indeed. What is reality? Neurons fire an electro-chemical burst and subjective time is frozen. A river, when it floods, builds new banks. Time is more like water than fire.” He opens his chest to expose the neat rows of skulls. “Choose one,” he says, as if he is offering Jerry a cookie to go with his beverage.

Not wanting to be impolite
—
Jerry figures murdering the guy has been uncouth enough
—
he takes a skull.

With the empty eye sockets staring balefully at him, Jerry naturally starts thinking of death. He starts remembering how the Cambodian seeped foamy blood onto the bone-colored linoleum.

Then a funny thing happens. He realizes with a shock that the memory is just plain boring, like a bad movie he’s seen once too many times.

“Hey, man,” Jerry says as gently as possible. “Look, I’m sorry for everything, but enough’s enough, okay?” Jerry
does
feel sorry. He is sincerely sorry. Has been remorseful now for so long that his apology-transmitters have started building calluses. And suddenly the spark’s just not there. Yeah, he’s still sorry for killing the Cambodian, but he’s getting fucking tired of wallowing in it.

“When I was ten years old,” the Cambodian tells him, “the government put a gun in my hand and made me a soldier against capitalism. I was a very brave soldier and I shot many capitalists: elementary school teachers who did not know how to harvest rice; surgeons who did not clean latrines well. When I was ten years old I planted many fields with dead capitalists.”

Jerry turns the skull over in his hands. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Jerry says. There is something in the back of the skull that looks like a small eye-socket. He runs his finger around the edges and after a moment realizes what he is fondling is a bullet hole.

“I became tired of apologizing, too.”

Jerking his head up, Jerry stares across the plain board table to the Cambodian. The guy’s childlike hands are spread on the wood.

“Paths,” the Cambodian says sadly.

Like gray fingers on a dun table, the eight-lane highway divides and spreads across the desert. Jerry blinks his eyes against the glare. He hears the
click-click
of the Cambodian’s shoes on the gravel and smells the dusty, metallic odor of noon.

“It is time to choose your path,” the Cambodian says.

So that’s what happens when the highway gets too big, Jerry thinks. Nature abhors unwieldy things, so when memory gets too big, it just sort of breaks up and goes in different directions. In his hands the skull feels pleasant: cool and smooth.

Jerry glances at the eight different choices before him. “Well, I guess it’s time to get back, huh? Which one takes me to Dunlap?”

The Cambodian stares at him with those wise, dark eyes and says, “Returning to Dunlap is your fate, so anyone of the roads will take you.”

“Thanks,” Jerry says, sticking his hand out. “Hey. It was nice meeting you.” The pleasantries his mom taught him don’t seem so fussy or hollow as they did when he was a kid.

In fact, that Tuesday night in the 7-Eleven has always seemed incomplete because it lacked the usual have-a-nice-days, the good-to-see-yous, and the y’all-come-back-nows.

The Cambodian’s hand in his is dainty; the handshake is as firm and righteous as destiny. “It was a pleasure meeting you, too,” he says.

Jerry turns to study the choice of paths again. When he turns back the Cambodian, of course, is gone.

The middle road looks like a comfortable choice for Jerry. Except for trying to knock over the 7-Eleven, he’s always been a man of middle-ground; of moderation.

As he hikes down the sun-hammered asphalt to the place where Dunlap waits, Jerry unlocks his chest and puts the skull on its shelf where it belongs.

Author’s Note:
I’ve taught creative writing in Plano for a number of years, and on the way home from one of those evening classes I realized that I needed to come up with a short story idea for the next weekend. I first imagined noise
—
the small sharp sound of needles being dropped onto polished stone
—
then I thought, “What the hell does that mean?” It was a thirty-minute drive from the college in Plano to my house in Dallas, and by the time I was pulling up into my parking spot, I had the plot of this story.

Although the tense was changed from present to past, the story otherwise appears in its entirety in my first novel Cold Allies; and, yes, the short story was written first. Odd how the protagonist changed from the wounded young boy of the story to the rather unlikable but wounded young man of the novel.

The trajectory of needles in fog. Sleet falling through a dense methane atmosphere.

He snaps awake from the dream, and, disoriented, finds himself curled in a high-backed seat, a blanket rumpled about him. Except for the faint growl of the engine, the bus’s interior is burdened with silence, the sort of sticky, late-night silence in which nothing moves.

Beyond the night in the window, a bloated moon coats the desert with fish-belly light. He stares out, wondering where he is. Arizona. Maybe New Mexico, he thinks. Then the rocking of the bus and the musty smell of long-enclosed and heavily air-conditioned spaces lulls him to sleep.

He shuts his eyes and dreams of the persistent tap-tap of cold fingernails against his bedroom window, a sound like the dead wanting in.

Shit, he thinks, jerking himself out of his light doze and jackknifing his body forward. It seems that he’s had this dream before, and it seems that he can never quite awaken from it. His heart’s doing a heavy metal rock number in his chest and his breath’s coming hard and fast and painful. Panicky, he blinks into the magazine and potato-chip-bag-littered darkness.

On the aisle near the front of the bus, an elderly man snores softly, mouth ajar, hand curled by a bent-spined paperback. Reading lights halo the heads of the sleeping passengers, as though the small group is dozing away the miracle of Pentecost.

The sight is so normal that his heart finally slows. The ache in his chest subsides. Peering over his shoulder, he is relieved to see someone else awake. His gaze locks with the girl’s, and they exchange co-conspirator’s smiles. The girl has brown hair and bonbon brown eyes, and she reminds him so much of home that he is confused by the deluge of pain the nostalgia causes him.

An American girl, he thinks. As his mind forms the words, he sees her smile flicker and die.

He hears pellets of ice rattle against rocky ground, a sound so loud that he wants to cover his ears with his hands. Instead, he yanks the blanket up and shifts his gaze to the window in time to see a shooting star flash orange across the dark.

“Hello. My name
—”

He jerks his head around. The girl is sitting next to him in the neighboring seat, and for the life of him he can’t remember moving over to let her sit down. But I must have, right? he asks himself. I just moved over and forgot about it, that’s all.

Her brows furrow and then clear. “Ann,” she says as though she has just now decided on the name, and finds her decision charming. “My name’s Ann,” She cocks her head. A pretty gesture for a pretty girl.

“What’s yours?”

“I
—”
He can’t remember. He can’t remember his own name! “I think there’s something’s wrong,” he hisses.

The clatter of frozen rain is so intrusive, so loud, that the noise makes him forget what he was about to say. It is so thunderous that he begins to wonder if in the morning, he will find the inside of his skull coated with ice.

Swiveling, he stares out the window again, and sees a fiery orange smudge moving through the night sky.

No. He’s mistaken. That burning thing. It’s not a falling star at all. It’s an F-14 crashing.

“Read me your book,” Ann says.

Her voice startles him. He looks down at his hands and sees that he is holding a Navy manual with the words TOP SECRET emblazoned in white across the dark blue cover.

“Read it to me aloud,” she tells him, leaning over intimately.

He opens the first page.

CHAPTER ONE, it says in huge sans serif type.

And under that is printed:

MAYDAY

MAYDAY

MAYDAY

With a spasm of fear, he slams the book shut. The girl is staring at him. “What’s the matter?” she asks. Suddenly, her face begins sagging, the features drooping, as though the underlying meat is boneless as a snail’s.

“Let me up,” he gasps. He’s trying to get out of his chair, but the strong clasp of the blankets is holding him down. “Let me out of here. I
—”

There is a mushy, arctic feel to her hand, “In a moment. I want you to read me the book now.”

He moans and twists, dropping the book out of his lap.

“Don’t be afraid,” she says. “We won’t hurt you.”

The bus is rolling side-to-side, like a ship on a heavy sea. Down the aisle the bus driver comes, steadying himself by the tops of the seats.

“What’s the matter, boy?” he asks angrily. The bus driver is jowly and his face is running to pallid fat. The armature of his skull is nearly buried under the weight; and the boy knows that if he dared touch the driver’s cheek, his hand would sink through that gummy flesh.

“Don’t you want to fuck her?” the driver asks.

The fat driver, the boneless girl, have him trapped against the window. He turns to look out, to see if there is some escape.

The sight of the crashing F-14 shocks him motionless. The fighter is going down in the desert, falling in a quiet blaze of glory. Behind it trail dandelion fluffs blown by the wind: two parachutes.

“Take her to the back,” the driver’s saying. “There’s empty mats in the back, and no one’s looking. You can fuck her all you want. You can fuck her brains out.”

He tears his gaze from the crashing plane, the drifting chutes, to look at the girl. Behind her blank eyes he can sense the chill weatherhead of her thoughts.

They are in the very back of the bus, on the long bench seat. He’s using the blankets as a pillow and she’s on top of him, already moaning toward climax. He’s coming, too. He’s coming. The bucking of his hips is frenzied. His breathing is fast. He grabs her at the bunched skirt and squeezes tight, sensing the cold sponginess of her waist underneath.

The next instant there is a throb, a spurt of release. He’s climaxed, but there’s no pleasure in it at all.

“I want to go home,” he says, and, to his shame, he begins to cry. “Can I please go home now?”

Ann, ignoring both his tears and his question, crawls off him and lowers her skirt. “Will you read me your book now?” she asks politely.

Dazed, he sits up, and notices that his zipper is undone. It seems to him that he should have been wearing his speed jeans, and helmet, but they’ve disappeared somehow. He zips up his flight suit, while, outside the window, an F-14 is crashing in the desert and two men are ’chuting down over the twisted skeletons of burnt Arab tanks.

“My plane crashed,” he whispers to her.

“Read me your book,” she says.

“My name is Justin Morris. Lieutenant Justin Morris. And I ejected from my F-14.”

“Read me your book now, Justin.”

Rage and terror exploded in his belly. He shoves at her. “You captured me!”

The Arab National Army must have captured him, and have started feeding him drugs. Justin’s pounding on the window now, trying to get out, and the bus driver’s back, wanting to know what’s happening.

“Come on, boy,” the driver’s saying.

Outside the window, the desert is flashing by. A burning oil field blossoms on the horizon like a night flower.

“Come on, boy. Don’t you want to fuck her again?”

Ann leans over and grabs his groin. Justin elbows her hard in the chest. His arm plunges into her, dives right through her pink sweater, chill blood and putty-soft bone, until it fetches up against the bus’s seat.

He starts to scream.

“Now you’ve gone and done it,” the bus driver’s saying.

He’s gone and done it. God! He’s gone and done it. There’s something he should remember now, he knows, but the terrible din of the sleet batters all thought out of his brain.

“What do you want?” Ann asks. “What will make you happy?”

He grabs onto the nubby material of the seat in front of him and holds on for dear life. “Take me home! Please let me go home!” he’s shouting over and over, even though somehow he knows that he’ll never be allowed to go home again.

A calm voice says, “Go ahead. Call your mother.”

It is suddenly very, very quiet. Justin drops his hand from his eyes. He’s standing in one of those bus station rest stops, a place of fluorescent lights and bad food and Formica. To his right side is a pay phone. To his front is a long bar where passengers hunch over their coffee, motionless as stuffed animals. The place smells of onions and grease.

“Call your mother,” Ann says.

Justin turns to the pay phone, and realizes that there is a quarter clasped between his forefinger and his thumb. He puts the coin in and dials the old number.

“Hello, Justin,” a voice in the receiver says.

The voice is female. It’s not his mother’s.

“Mom,” he says anyway. He’s not feeling much like a fighter jock any more. His confidence is no longer high, and he’s so scared that his voice is cracking under the strain just like a little kid’s. “Mom. Where am I?”

The woman sighs. “You’re very near. Just picture home in your mind. Picture it very, very hard.”

He thinks of Florida, the squat, blocky pink house. The mango tree in the front yard and the orange tree in the back. The thick, sweet, green grass and the gray thunderheads in the humid sky.

“Now they’ll let you come home,” the woman says kindly. “If you’ll just read them the book.”

He slams the receiver down on the hook and stares in horror at the phone.

Oh Jesus Christ. The Arabs have him, and he’s never going to go home again. The Arabs have him by the short hairs, and all he’s allowed to tell them is his name and rank and serial number, and he can only remember two thirds of that.

He glances out the plate glass window. In the night sky, an F-14 is going down in flames. The cool blue light of woofers surround the pale, wispy mushrooms of parachutes.

“Good thinking,” a familiar voice says.

He turns to see Lieutenant Commander Harding.

“Name, rank, and serial number,” the exec nods. He’s dressed in his whites, and there are huge rings of sweat under his arms. It was always hard to get cool in the desert. “Tell you what, lieutenant,” he tells him. “You’ve come through this test admirably. Let’s go have a cup of coffee.”

Harding puts his huge hand out and Justin takes it. The man’s palm is firm and dry. Light winks off the exec’s balding dome and the embossed anchors on his brass buttons.

“A test, sir?” Justin asks, afraid not to believe it.

The XO claps him on the back. “Sure, kid,” he says, so gently that the concern in his voice makes Justin want to weep. “Don’t you remember the test? Well, I guess the drugs are still working on you. Let’s have a cup of coffee and wipe those cobwebs out.”

There aren’t any cobwebs in Justin’s mind. There is only that scatter-shot ice so slick that his thoughts just kind of slide off it.

He sits down on a stool next to a glass container of donuts. The waitress pushes a white cup and saucer in front of him.

Saucers. He stares at the saucer. Something nibbles and frets at his memory.

“You run into many woofers, son?” the lieutenant commander asks, taking a cautious sip from his steaming cup.

“Always run into woofers,” Justin answers, dragging his eyes up from his intense scrutiny of the dish. The waitress is staring at him. Something in her cold eyes, her pulpy face, reminds him of Ann.

“Tell me your story. Everyone’s got a woofer story, don’t they?” Clink clink. The XO’s spoon makes a musical, frosty sound against the thick sides of the cup.

“The first time Tyler, my Radar Intercept Officer, saw one in his screen, it scared the shit out of him,” Justin laughs into the sudden, vacuous silence. “Then he got where he could recognize their fuzzy return and they didn’t worry him any more. I’ve seen ’em fly off my wingtip and follow me like a dog, like they’re curious or something.”

“Oh?” the exec asks with a strange, flaccid smile “Do you think they’re curious?”

“I guess so, sir. They’re just like big, friendly dogs.” Justin’s coffee is strong and hot. The sip he takes bums the roof of his mouth. “When we hit the deck, my wingman makes a joke of it. ‘Hey Justin, my man,’ he says. ‘You got a blue woofer sniffing your tail. A woofer with a twenty-foot hard-on.’”

Abruptly he has the jarring thought that his wingman has been downed over fifteen minutes ago. Behind him in the pit, Tyler is screaming, “Approaching woofers!” but Justin, who’s preoccupied by the missile they took up the port engine a minute ago, is fighting the stiffness of the stick and the crazed, bumpy-road feel of the stalling plane.