Erased From Memory (4 page)

Susie supplies an anecdote about Cherie and somebody accused of growing pot in the chancellor’s garden. Susie’s stories tend to meander.

Suddenly our miles of sand-colored grass are interrupted by a razor-wire fence with a gate and a guard. Cherie offers him a plastic card; we get waved onward. In the hazed distance, buildings begin appearing, the same color as the fields, low except for four towers with light flashing back from their windows. We slow down; Cherie sticks her chin out at the prospect. She says, “Mordor.”

Innocente Prison was a tradition around Berkeley. By the time I got to high school, the arrests had slowed down and none of us got sent to Innocente, but we knew that that was where you could end up. The Guerrilla Girls tried hard to get there.

Closer to the prison is more razor wire and a new guard with a red label pasted to his helmet. He bends to peer in the car window. “Hey, for God’s sake. Hey. Is that Cherie?”

Cherie agrees, “Uh-huh.”

“Well, baby, hi. Long time no see. Where in hell ya been?”

Cherie inches the car forward. “You miss me, huh, Ron?”

“Hey, sweetie, bet yer sweet ass. Damn right. Got a new kinda clientele these days.”

Cherie turns her face; she seems to be giving him a mean stare. “New clientele. Latinos and old men, Ron, right? Incarcerate the helpless, right? No more pretty college protesters. Brand new
demographic
.” She emphasizes the word, makes it sound dirty.

Ron shakes his head as if he’s caught a mosquito. He gestures. “Park your car over there.”

At the barrier to the prison entrance we negotiate three sets of sensors. Susie surrenders her silver jewelry; Rob is told he can’t come in; he’s wearing a blue denim shirt. Cherie says, “Oh, shit, I forgot.

“The prisoners wear blue denim,” she explains. “Jesus, am I dumb.”

I tell Rob just to take his shirt off; he has a T-shirt underneath, doesn’t he?

He looks at me. “Are you scared?” I agree, “Yes.”

 
 
Cherie disappears into a steel-barred booth, where I can hear her arguing about something. Not about Rob’s shirt. About what they will do with my father, who left his victim dead in the middle of a museum floor. My father the murderer. “No, I don’t,” I hear Cherie say. And, “No, we don’t.” And, “Well, just make that telephone call then. That’s your job.” And later, “Well, I am going in there to see him and it is all going to be real simple.”

She’s in the booth a long time.

She sits straight in her chair and looks forceful. I alternate feeling scared and feeling hopeful. Rob draws cartoon pictures of the guard on the back of his prescription pad. “I can’t believe this crap,” we hear Cherie say loudly; she turns and mouths “Crap, crap” at us from behind the row of steel bars.

The official she’s with keeps his back and his bald spot to us and writes.

And finally Cherie emerges. She looks smug and is clutching a wad of papers. “Come on, kids, we are going on in. Follow along, all you ducks.”

The holding room at Innocente greets us with noise—music of all kinds: Latin, country, hip-hop, overlaid with multilingual announcements, outcries, arguments against a background of TV car sounds, explosions, all this resonating across a vast wooden space with a metal-strutted arched roof. I dimly remember that there’s a World War II aircraft hangar in this building’s past. Men in all stages of sleeping, sitting, lying are propped on the floor, against each other, against the wall. Somebody may be playing a guitar somewhere. Somebody invokes Jesus.

The guard who’s leading us in yells, “You that old gent’s family?”

Susie, Rob, and I agree. Yes. Family. Rob puts his arm around my waist.

The guard gestures. “Over there.”

And yes, over there. It’s my father.

He looks all right. In fact, he looks pretty good. He has one of the few chairs in the place. It’s a metal chair left over from the aircraft hangar days; Daddy sits on it, knees together, body half bent forward in a concentrating posture, head cocked intently; he’s saying something to a small crowd of people grouped on the floor around him. It looks as if he’s telling a story. He gestures and they nod. He lifts an arm; they also lift arms. A story circle. They had story circles in Egypt; they happened late at night in the coffeehouses. I never got to see those, of course; no ladies admitted, but I knew what they looked like. Sometimes the workers at a dig would group together like that at lunchtime.

“Old gentleman,” the guard mouths at us. He leads us on a circuitous path through the room. Rob clutches my hand and squeezes.

Daddy has reached the crunch-line of his story. His voice wavers at us through the other din. “So when they finished chipping the hole in the door . . . you’ve seen pictures of that?”

A couple of heads in his class bob.

“And a light was held up to the hole . . .” He’s telling them the tale of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. He looks up and sees us. He holds his arms wide. I think he says, “Some other members of my party.”

“I guess he was a famous old guy, huh?” the guard asks in my ear.

Daddy scrambles to his feet and one of the floor sitters grabs his chair.

Cherie doesn’t bother to be introduced. She fights her way through to him and kisses him on the cheek. She says, “Let’s get outta here, Crocodile Dundee.”

Daddy smiles at her. He seems to think Crocodile Dundee is a perfectly good name.

 
 
Outside, Cherie looks at us and says, “Damndest thing I ever heard of.”

I start out with, “Well, I thought it was pretty bad, arresting him,” and I’m warming up for a speech about my eighty-six-year-old handicapped father, but Cherie puts her hand on my arm.

“Honey-pie, you don’t know. You don’t understand; I don’t understand; they don’t even have a clue; damndest case; I just can’t believe . . . Crocodile, you been sayin’ Egyptian spells at ’em?”

“No.”

Rob says, “What’re you talking about; what’s up?”

Cherie switches gears and becomes professionally reassuring. “Everything’s fine. Jus’ fine. They’re not charging Edward here with any crime. What’d he do? He insulted the sheriff. That sheriff is an insecure creep. He doesn’t want the story circulating about how he was insulted. And your dad didn’t exactly resist arrest. Too many people saw; he didn’t resist arrest.”

She adds, “I guess that rich guy—the museum owner one—put some pressure on, too.”

“But . . .” I say. I don’t really want to ask outright:
There was this man on the floor. I thought he was dead. I thought that my father . . . well, that my father . . .
“Somebody died,” I say.

“Listen, honey”—Cherie is forceful—“there aren’t any charges. Not any at all. And that man—he’s a museum trustee; his name is Marcus Broussard—he wasn’t dead.

“And, well, this is the part that’s so fucking weird—you’re not gonna believe it—they brought this Marcus Broussard to the hospital, stretched flat on a gurney, in a coma, half the time breathing, half not, cold as a fish; they turn their backs, and guess what—he
disappears.
”

I stare at Cherie, probably with my mouth open, but Rob interprets: “Somebody stole the body.” He and I saw a lot of old movie videos when we lived together in Santa Cruz.

Late afternoon sun slams down on the four of us where we are stopped in the middle of the gravel walk, halfway up to the parking lot. Faint chaotic musical noise travels from the prison. Cherie’s admirer, the guard on the upper road, starts sauntering our way.

Cherie says, “Nobody stole the body. He wasn’t a
body
. He wasn’t dead. He’d had some kind of attack. An
episode
, is what they call it. He was comatose, but not, what they say is, expired. They dumped him and this gurney in a private room and went off to get their machines—they’re real upset about this; they keep trying to explain it—and when they came back, he was gone. But they say they’re sure. He wasn’t dead.”

My father hasn’t seemed to be listening at all to this conversation. His attention has been occupied with attempting to scrape a blob of prison detritus off the sleeve of his tweed jacket. He looks up now and says, “Not dead? Oh, yes. Of course he was dead.”

“Crocodile, darlin’,” says Cherie, “that man was alive. They’re taking oaths on it.”

“No,” my father says firmly. “He’s dead. He was trying to eat life, but that won’t work. Maybe works for today, maybe for tomorrow, but that’s all. After that he’s dead.”

He smiles at Cherie, his little boy smile, as if he’s sharing a secret. “It’s a mug’s game, my dear, trying to eat life.”

Chapter 4

Egon Rothskellar, the director of Egypt Regained, is waiting for us at the gate of Innocente Prison.

Egon waits in style in a Lincoln limousine with bud vases and a bar and a chauffeur in a turban. He is quaffing something bubbly from his bar, and he holds up a bottle in salute. “You must,” he says to us, “must, must come back with me to my house. So distressing. Climb in.” The padded, gray-leather-lined door of the limousine is held open in invitation.

Daddy is thrilled. He is completely ready, once again, for Egypt Regained. He says he needs to look at his coffin lid. No arguments from me that he saw it five hours ago make any difference. “That man,” he says, “is gone; I know he is. Oh, I need to see.”

Cherie is fulsomely invited, but she declines. She announces that she has to get back to file a brief, and she and Susie drive off, hair flying.

So Daddy and I are buckled into Egon’s plushy vehicle, supplied with pillows, bottles of water. “A green drink,” says my parent. “I appreciate that.”

“
So
glad to have you,” Egon tells him. “Because today was regrettable, totally regrettable.” He punches some buttons on his cell phone and has a discussion about dinner. “Aram sandwiches. Plenty of pâté. Moroccan chicken.

“And now,” he says. “Oh, what a terrible day you have had, Dr. Day. If only I can make up for it just a little.

“Dr. Day is one of our most outstanding scholars,” Egon continues, addressing me. “We are so proud to have his coffin lid. So history-making.”

The coffin lid has been in Egon’s museum ever since Daddy managed to wangle it away from Cairo on an indefinite loan. My father preferred Egypt Regained over other, more prestigious museums because of Egon’s expensive climate control.

“I have a wonderful treat,” Egon says now. “Dear Dr. Day, are you all right?”

My father says that
all right
is a relative term, but Egon goes on talking. “Scott Dillard is staying with us. So intelligent, so fine. You know him, of course you do . . . So prestigious. You know, Scott has new publications and a new appointment to Yale and—rumor has it—the Hartdale.” He half whispers this name; it’s a magic one, that of a famous grant. “And he is here! At our just-established Scholars’ Institute!”

He pauses for emphasis, to which Daddy says, “The past is encroaching.”

“Oh, not at all.” Egon sounds defensive. “If you mean this terrible event today. Or the thefts. The disappearances of artifacts. I told you about them. So distressing. We have been so troubled. Artifacts disappearing, when we are sure they are well guarded. But we are taking steps.”

My father says he is worried about the artifacts, and Egon says, No, no, he should not worry. After which Daddy says he is concerned about his coffin lid, and Egon says, “No, no, completely attended to.”

Meanwhile I sit caressing my cold drink-bottle and wondering what Egon’s house will look like. I’ve been to the museum several times and was involved in a scary confrontation there once. But I’ve never seen the house itself, never been asked to a meal.

 
 
Egon’s mansion is low-riding and is latched on to one side of the museum. We enter through the museum’s Great Hall with Egon preceding triumphally, like Pharaoh leading a procession.

“And now,” he intones as a new person appears from some distant marble depths, “you’ve been waiting for this, I know, Dr. Day. Here is your wonderful colleague, someone you know of old. Dr. Scott Dillard, Yale University’s newest shining star.”

Egon stands aside and beams, as if he has produced an especially sleek rabbit out of his hat.

Scott Dillard looks reluctant.

He’s one of those handsome, sturdy men, about forty, stocky and energetic, with watchful gray eyes. He wears blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater and a gold chain. Right away he bothers me. He looks familiar. He looks like one of my old boyfriends.

This boyfriend and I parted badly. I abandoned him back in Baker’s Landing, Tennessee, where he was the head of a Habitat for Humanity project I worked on.

Scott Dillard and I stare at each other. The atmosphere seems tense. Of course, today is an uncomfortable day, but maybe I also remind Scott of somebody. He holds a hand stiffly out to my dad and says “Oh, yes,” and “Hello.” Finally he projects a hand at me.

He has a surprisingly wiry handshake.