Faces in the Fire (2 page)

“And where were you before?”

Kurt smiled grimly. “You tell me.”

“So you have no memories before . . .”

“Before truck driving school.”

“What about your childhood? Where you grew up, went to school, that kind of thing?”

“Nothing.”

“But you're able to form new memories.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, during your trucking school, for instance. You remember what you learned there without any problems, who you met.”

“Oh. Sure.”

Todd seemed to be considering a deep question.

“I know it's crazy,” Kurt said. “But that's why I'm here, huh?” He nervously took another sip of his Diet Pepsi. “Because I'm crazy.”

“I'd like to send you to a friend—an MD—for some scans and other tests to start with, Kurt. But the answer to your question is: it's not crazy at all.” He cleared his throat. “Most people have no idea who they are.”

40.

Bright and early in the morning, Kurt opened his workshop. He'd been plagued by dreams during the night, dreams of his old sessions with Todd. Not nightmares, really, because the sessions with Todd had never been nightmarish. But uncomfortable. Thoughts of
those sessions still made something inside him twist in fear, even after seven or eight years.

He shook off the dust of his dreams, concentrated instead on the locked door at the back of his workshop. Instantly the shoes began transmitting the catfish bathed in orange, but Kurt ignored the image. The shoes hadn't been properly amplified yet, hadn't been kept in storage to distill their message.

Instead he focused on a woman's thin wail emanating from a storage container on the bottom level. He slid away the four containers stacked on top of it, then removed the lid. The smell of mothballs assaulted his nostrils. Not uncommon with clothing picked up at estate sales; often the clothes were packed away in steamer trunks, sprinkled with ancient mothballs.

The wail sounded louder, unfiltered now. Kurt paused, as if gathering his energy, then began to dig through the carefully folded clothing, eventually coming to the silk dress he knew was the source of the wail.

He pulled the dress from the container, placed it carefully on a wall hook, took his time replacing the clothing in the receptacle, resealing it, and restacking the other containers on top.

All the while, the dress continued its lament, even as he gingerly picked it up, brought it into his main workshop, and set it down on a small folding table.

“Find my sister,” the dress whispered inside his mind between sobs. “Just find her and let her know . . . I'm . . .” The voice haunting the silk dissolved into a series of sobs again and finally went quiet for a few moments.

This whispered pleading was what he typically heard from ghost clothing: voices in search of lost loves, families longing to be reunited.

Kurt didn't respond. Instead he closed his eyes, letting this heartache, this sorrow, fuel his new project. He was picturing an arm rising from the ground, bony fingers outstretched as it reached for a face.

Yes, that seemed to capture something of the sorrow inside this dress.

He'd been working on this image in his mind since first touching the dress, getting a sense of the loss inhabiting it, examining it from every angle.

Kurt kneeled to the concrete floor, took stock of the plates of iron stacked there, running his fingers along the rough-cut edges. He selected one large, flat piece and carried it to his workbench, then placed it in the vise and tightened the arm to hold it steady.

Satisfied, he retrieved his welding hood from a shelf above the workbench and fitted the band around his forehead, keeping the black mask tipped away from his face for now.

He turned to his left, opened the valve on the acetylene tank, heard the gas hiss as it raced through the tubing to the cutting tip. He picked up the igniter, held it to the torch, and sparked it. Immediately, blue flame leaped to life with a dull roar.

The dress, as if disturbed by the blue flame and black smoke erupting from his cutting torch, began its sobbing once again from behind him.

Kurt closed his eyes for a few seconds, gave his head a quick jerk to let the welder's hood drop over his face, and opened his eyes.

Somewhere inside his stack, a large piece of iron would become that outstretched arm. This particular piece, he felt, contained the face. He would cut the iron, reveal the true face inside, just as the screams behind him were cutting him.

Revealing his own true face inside.

16.

“You said it to me the first time you came here, Kurt. You're an amnesiac.”

Kurt looked at the floor, wishing for a Diet Pepsi from Todd's fridge. Probably not the best time to ask for it. “Yeah,” he said, sensing that Todd was waiting for an answer of some kind.

At his desk, Todd picked up his file folder, now thick with papers and reports from their several sessions together. “At first I would have said hysterical amnesia, but now I don't think so. You ever hear that term?”

“No.”

“It's what we call people who have been through an overwhelming emotional trauma of some kind—something that's made them block out their past because they're afraid to confront it. There's no physical explanation for their amnesia, but there's a very real emotional explanation.”

Kurt tapped his foot on the hard surface of the floor a few times. “But you said I'm not that.”

Todd looked at him. “No. In fact, you have . . . well, you have a ton of physical trauma. You're an organic case. Your MRI scans show a considerable amount of brain damage, to be blunt. So I have to say you have traumatic retrograde amnesia—you've forgotten your past because of very real, physical damage to the brain.”

Kurt swallowed, unsure how to respond.

“Not just brain trauma, though. Your whole body. It looks like you've had several broken bones—a couple ribs, an arm, both of your femurs.” Todd cleared his throat, leaned back. “You know how painful, how serious, a broken femur is, Kurt?”

Kurt fidgeted, felt his foot tapping on the floor. “No.”

Todd smiled. “That's just it. You
do
know. You obviously do. You just don't remember it. I've discussed your case with more than one physician, and they're frankly amazed you're alive. Amazed anyone was even able to put you back together, because it looks as if all your injuries happened at the same time. Except—”

“Except what?”

“Well, when someone has major injuries—a cracked skull, a fractured femur—you would find an indication of repair. Surgical scars, titanium screws in the leg, that kind of thing.”

Kurt nodded slowly. “I don't have any of those things.” And he didn't. So far as he knew, he didn't have a single scar anywhere on his body.

“You don't,” Todd confirmed. “Further complicated by the fact that we don't have access to your medical records. One doctor said he'd seen injuries similar to yours before, a rather miraculous case herself—except, of course, she recovered with the help of many surgeries, lots of physical therapy.”

“What kind of accident?” Kurt heard himself ask quietly.

“A skydiving accident. Her chute failed.” Todd leaned across his desk, smiling. “So what do you think, Kurt? Maybe you just dropped out of the sky.”

43.

A dull ringing brought Kurt out of his trancelike state. He blinked his eyes behind the welding hood, obviously for the first time in a while; they were dry, cakey.

The ring again. His cell phone in his pocket, he realized. Kurt was old school when it came to phones; he still preferred a plain old ring to any song or tune or ringtone. Phones in his childhood rang; phones should always ring.

He spun the valve on the cutting torch closed, pulled off his gloves, tipped up his mask, and dug into his pocket. He managed to pull the phone out and answer it midring.

“Hello?” he said, his voice thick and scratchy. He swallowed, trying to moisten his throat; like his eyes, it was dry and parched.

“Kurt, Kurt,” a woman's voice said. “How are you?”

Macy. His agent. His business manager. His whatever. The person who worked with the outside world so he didn't have to. He swallowed again, cleared his throat.

“Macy. I'm good.” He didn't return the pleasantries.

“Listen, I bet you're working right now, so I'm sorry to interrupt you.”

“Yeah,” he said, sniffing, taking in the acrid, sharp tang of the acetylene inside his shop. He hadn't turned on his fans, but at least he'd left open the front overhead doors to ventilate the area.

(A catfish in a pool of orange)

He closed his eyes, pushed the thought from his mind with some effort. Odd, to have that image working its way into his mind while he was in the midst of this
project with the silk dress. The hands and face.

“Listen,” Macy said. “How many complete pieces do you have on hand right now?”

He looked around his workshop, taking stock of the various welded sculptures. Some looked like trees, some like multilegged creatures, some like giant stalks of plants. Most—okay, maybe all—had a melting face of some kind hidden inside the iron leaves or branches or legs. It was what Macy liked to call his “overriding theme.”

He cleared his throat, tasting the bitter smoke of the welding torch. “I don't know,” he said. “Maybe eight or so right now. Working on another.”

“Eight? Hmmm. We'll need more.”

He paused, waiting for her to continue, but she obviously required an acknowledgment. She was excited, he could tell; she always liked to play this kind of cat-and-mouse game when she had some kind of big news to share.

“We'll need more for what?” he asked, playing along. It was the easiest, quickest way to get back to his work.

“For a show. A gallery show.”

“A gallery show?” he asked, hoping his tone sounded interested, knowing it didn't.

“Yeah. No more sending lackeys around on the arts-and-crafts circuit, selling your work for a thousand bucks. We're gonna get you in with people who will spend ten times that much. Just need—oh, I don't know—a dozen pieces anyway. And something big. Something grand, to serve as a centerpiece. A big wow, you know? Do you have something that might work for that?”

Kurt took stock of the sculptures again. None of those. Not really. Maybe the new piece with the arm. He turned to look at the giant plate of iron he'd been cutting, felt his breath stop for a few moments.

“You there, Kurt?” Macy asked. She laughed, mistaking his silence for surprise. Not a bad thing, really. “I know, this is big. I mean really
big
. But don't get caught up on the main piece right now. You'll come up with something, and we have a couple months.”

Kurt continued to stare at the image he'd been cutting from the piece of iron. “Yeah,” he said, his throat clicking, drier than ever. “I think maybe I can come up with something.”

“I just wanted to call, let you know, so you can start thinking about it.”

“Sure, sure. Thanks, Macy,” he said, continuing to stare.

“Oh, thank
you
, Kurt,” she said before hanging up.

Kurt let his arm drop, still clutching the phone. In front of him, he knew, instinctively, what he'd been wrestling from the thick plate of iron with his cutting torch. And it wasn't one of his “overriding theme” melting faces.

It was a triangular pattern with an irregular back side on it. A dorsal fin.

A dorsal fin for a catfish.

Behind him, the ghost in the silk dress sniffled, then went quiet again. Maybe sensing it wasn't connecting with him. Not right now, anyway.

The phone rang again. Evidently Macy had forgotten to tell him something.

He hit the talk button and placed the receiver to his ear again.

“Kurt?” a man's voice asked. Not Macy at all. It was John Cross from Cross Trucking.

“John. How are you doing?” Kurt continued to stare at the dorsal fin he'd been cutting out of the iron.

“Well, not so good,” John answered. “I'm running short right now. Hoping you could maybe deadhead it out to Seattle for me, pull back a load to Chicago.”

John Cross called once a month or so, asking him to do some OTR trucking. Kurt had driven for Cross Trucking for a few years until he'd stumbled into his iron art. Truth was, the art was doing well—upcoming gallery show or not—and he didn't need to do anything else for money.

But he still liked to get out on the road every now and then. Think about upcoming projects. Bring along a few items from his wardrobe of wearable ghosts, listen to the stories they told.

Kurt thought of the dead man's shoes from lot 159 and smiled. “Sure, John,” he said. “I think I can make a quick trip for you.”

17.

After several sessions with Todd, Kurt decided to call the other name Marcus had given him. Jenny Lewis, the private detective.

He didn't really want to. But not knowing was like an infection, and if you ignored an infection, it created more problems. Maybe even killed you, eventually. So he dialed her number, set up a meeting, gave her what little information he had about his own past, and waited.

Now here she was, at the bar where they'd agreed to meet, looking nervous. She sat, ordered a Diet Coke, and shook Kurt's hand. They waited quietly for the barmaid to bring her drink before they got around to the business of discussing what she'd found.

The detective nodded to the barmaid when she returned. She took a sip, looked at Kurt, seemed unsure how to start the conversation.

Kurt offered a smile. “I see you drink the hard stuff,” he said, nodding at her glass.

“Diet Coke. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner of champions. You?”

He smiled. “Same. More of a Diet Pepsi guy, but I suppose it isn't my bar.”

She seemed to relax. “We shoulda met at a soda fountain. The barmaid's in the back snickering at us.”