One of Us (6 page)

I sympathized just for a moment. I felt pretty much the same way.

"That's her, isn't it?" said the clock, who was standing on the counter, next to my cooling cup. I'd let him ride back with me in the car to LA. It seemed only fair.

I nodded. "I owe you one." The clock had refused to tell me how he'd known where the woman was, saying it was a timepiece secret. I'd get it out of him sooner or later, but for the time being it didn't really matter. I'd found Laura Reynolds.

I stayed put for a while, in case the flunky I'd talked to in the Nirvana forgot the fifty I'd laid on him and told the woman someone was looking for her. When five minutes had passed without incident, I slipped off my stool, stumbling slightly. I leaned on the counter for a moment, blinking and waiting for my brain to clear.

The clock looked up at me dubiously, still dabbing the mud off itself with a napkin and glass of water I'd acquired for it. "What are you going to do?"

"Just watch me," I said, not really knowing. My first plan was simply to talk to her. Tell her that what she'd done was bad, and get her to take her memory back. I'm an eternal optimist. If that didn't work, then it was going back into her head by force. Either way, Laura Reynolds was coming with me. I had to get her in the same room as my receiver, and get hold of a transmitter from somewhere—hence my call to Quat. If Laura Reynolds needed persuading, I'd use the gun, but I wasn't going to pull it out in this diner. The homeboys holding up the counter all looked far tougher than me: One flash of my piece and my guess was they'd be packing bazookas. If they were on contract, I'd probably be okay, but if they were freelance they might just whack me speculatively and see if anyone was interested in paying after the fact. The sad thing about my life is that some people might well be. I slipped the clock in my pocket, slid a couple of dollars under my cup, and left.

It was cold outside, and I took a second to lay a perfunctory curse on the head of a certain production company. A couple of years ago they were shooting northern Maine on the Mitsubishi lot, and couldn't be bothered with all the sprinklers and wind machines and stuff. So they got permission to change the microclimate for the afternoon instead. It got fucked up, naturally, and now you can never tell what the weather's going to be like. It's even more like living inside a madman's head than it used to be, but the movie went over big in Europe, so nobody likes to complain.

I jogged across the street, keeping my hands in my pockets and my head down, just part of the scenery, someone wanting to get someplace out of the rain. Up at the next corner I saw a car had been pulled over, a police vehicle angled just ahead of it. Two guys stood with their hands on the hood, legs spread. One of the cops was methodically stamping on something on the ground, and I relaxed. Just a routine cigarette bust.

The hotel's foyer was hushed and dimly lit. A few plants lolled listlessly in pots around the walls, and the carpet seemed fairly clean. It was one of those places where you wonder what the point of it is: not expensive enough to be worth going to on purpose, nor sufficiently cheap to be the only place you could afford. Just part of the string of islands that salesmen and other salaried itinerants hop between, every room sanitized and Bible-positive for their protection and comfort. I've stayed in a million such places myself, and they're like their own little country. Drab, anonymous suites; staff bored out of their tiny minds, the restaurant populated each night only by a scattering of men of uncertain ages, sitting at tables by themselves. Hair damp from a shower after a long day's drive, jeans with a crease ironed in, staring into the middle distance as they chew, their eyes dull from a preliminary check on what will be on the porno channels later on. I was always somehow surprised that such hotels didn't have their own graveyards out back, that their customers were evidently allowed to rejoin normal society after they'd finally had their coronaries.

The flunky I'd leaned on was nowhere to be seen, but that was okay. If I had to come back this way with a struggling woman in tow, I needed as little external input as possible. Laura Reynolds had a room on the second floor, so I took the stairs. It doesn't do to make elevators feel too important. More plants lurked at each bend in the staircase, suspiciously motionless, as if they had been gossiping with each other only seconds before.

The corridor was long and quiet. I stood outside her room for a few moments, but couldn't hear anything inside. I realized then that I should have cornered the flunky after all, got a copy of the key to her room in case she refused to let me in. Probably he would have raised some footling objection, but I'm an old hand at dealing with that kind of thing. Used to be, anyhow. The fact that I was out of practice was demonstrated by my forgetting about the whole issue of entry to the room. Sure, you can kick the door down, but it's not as easy as it looks and tends to be hard on the feet. Also, it makes a shitload of noise, which is seldom desirable. Muttering irritably, I turned the handle anyway, already reconciled to tramping back down the stairs and making a nuisance of myself.

The door was unlocked.

I stood very still for a moment, waiting for the shouting to start. It didn't. So I carefully pushed the door open.

Inside was the usual stuff, the unnatural flora of mid-range hotel rooms. The corner of a bed. A battered dresser with an old-looking teleputer squatting on it. Beyond, a circular table with a lamp, and a pile of pamphlets that could only be invitations to the local attractions. Whatever the hell they were supposed to be. I still couldn't hear anything, not even the tuneless humming or occasional sighs most people feel obliged to undertake when alone, to smooth the quietness out.

I stepped into the little entryway and closed the door quietly behind me. On my right was an open closet with a few dresses on those hangers designed not to be stolen, presumably on the assumption that people paying seventy dollars a night for a room make a point of stealing a dollar's worth of coat hangers everywhere they go. Why would they do that? The next hotel's going to have its own stock, isn't it? And you can't even use them to hang a shirt in the bathroom while you shower, which is as close to ironing as I ever get.

I took a cautious step into the main room area. The door to the bathroom was shut, and I heard a faint splashing sound.

I let go of the gun in my pocket and took a look around the room. A small suitcase lay open on the second bed, the interior a jumble of good underwear. A bottle of vodka stood on the bedside table, already missing about a third of its contents. Other than that, she had made as little dent on the room as a ghost that walked especially lightly and tidied up as it went. A bedside clock-and-teamaker was staring at me with wide eyes, but I held my finger up to my lips and it remained silent.

I padded back to the door and locked it. Then turned to the closet, took the dresses off their hangers with hardly any struggle at all, and folded them fairly neatly into her suitcase. I zipped it up, poured myself a smallish drink, and sat in the armchair to wait. Chances were she'd come out wrapped in a towel—most people do even when they're alone. If not, I'd avert my eyes. I wasn't going to just charge straight into the bathroom. I try to be polite, and anyway, a few minutes' grace would help ensure the cops were gone from the corner outside.

I beguiled the time reading the hotel's literature, learning at some length of the management and staff's yearning to fulfill my every need. Probably they actually meant the person who was paying for the room, but I scrawled a note on the suggestions sheet anyway, asking for some proper coat hangers. I also discovered that the cost of the room included a complimentary continental breakfast, which annoyed me, as usual. Continental breakfast? Continental shit, more like. You sleep for eight hours, traverse great Jungian gulfs of unconsciousness, and what do they offer you on reentry to our dread prison-world?

A croissant.

I mean,
what?
 No sausage? No eggs, no fucking hash browns even? What use is a croissant to anyone, especially first thing in the morning? And yet everybody sits there picking at it, pretending it's food, despite the fact that they would never eat it at home. Hotels around the world have seized on the continental breakfast not because it has any value, or because it's what anyone wants, but because it's cheap and requires no effort. If a hotel offers a complimentary continental breakfast, what they're really saying is "There is no proper breakfast" or "There is, but you have to pay for it."

When I realized I was on the verge of shouting, I put the menu to one side and just waited.

AFTER STRAITEN hired me to receive memories, life carried on pretty much the same, superficially at least. I could still go more or less where I wanted, though I took more care to cover my tracks. I gave up the one-night stands, with very little regret. If the only way you can feel alive is with a novel breast in your hand, you're not doing either of you any good. I closed out all my old credit cards, and got new ones under fake IDs. I worked maybe one, two nights on dreams, just to keep my hand in, then a couple of times a week I'd get a call and be told to be somewhere secluded, with my new machine, at a particular time. I had to let them know exactly where I was, because memories have greater weight than dreams and can be transmitted only somewhere specific, but I made sure I was on the road again an hour later. I also made sure I was alone at the moment of transferral, because when you're giving or receiving memories, your mind's wide open, and it wouldn't take much for someone to implant a little suggestion there.

A momentary blackout, and then a part of someone else's life was in my head. Sometimes the fragments were as long as a few hours, but generally they were much shorter. I kept them for an afternoon, a couple of days, a week at the most, and then a similar session would take them away again.

Most of the memories were straightforward. I was never told why the client was leaving them with me, but it was pretty easy to guess. Once a week a guy would lose the fact he was married, so he'd feel less guilty while he was spending the afternoon with his mistress. An executive would obscure an object lesson his mother had given him about morality, so as to make fucking over a colleague a little easier. A woman would forget something harsh she said to her little brother minutes before a car mounted the curb and killed him, just so as to find a little peace.

Adolescent experiments with people of the same sex. Financial indiscretions. Sticky afternoons with borderline-legal prostitutes. The usual trivia of sin.

Other memories were stranger. Fragments, like a cat walking along a wall, leaping safely to the ground, and then turning a corner and disappearing. A girl's face, laughing, with branches moving gracefully in the wind overhead. The sound at night of a stream gurgling past an open window in a bedroom. I never got any context, just those little garments of remembrance, and had no way of working out why someone might pay five large ones for a holiday from them.

It was kind of weird to spend an afternoon, once a week, convinced I'd married someone named David, but I'm a fairly together guy and realized it wasn't likely I would forget something like that if it had really happened. Some of the memory dumps contained strong elements of their owners' more general personality: little parallel universes, sideways glimpses of other possible lives and fates. But most of the memories were already used to being shunted to the side, and didn't really mess me up. I hemmed them in with enough self-awareness to undermine the truths they purported to tell, and after the allotted time the client took them back, and they vanished from my head. I could remember what it was that I briefly held a memory of, but I could easily tell, once it had gone, what was my experience and what had been someone else's.

I don't know if there were any side effects. Maybe a few. I found myself getting tired more easily, and misbehaving less, but that could have been any number of things. I'd been on the road too long. Maybe the time was coming when I needed to settle down again. Doing that would mean giving up the memory and dream work, because a stationary target would be easy for the feds to find. I knew that what I did was harmless, but the authorities would be likely to see it another way. I didn't know if I was ready to stop earning this kind of money yet, and I didn't know whether Stratten would let me. Also there was the small question of who I'd settle down with. I had good friends in LA, like Deck, but nobody significant of the opposite sex. There hadn't been anyone like that, if the truth be known, for over three years. Most men, in their heart of hearts, believe that there's something that they can do, some change that can be made in their lives that will help them find that special person. Find as many of them as possible, in fact, especially ones with cute bisexual friends. For me it was traveling around, but I was looking for only one. The one for me. I guess I believed that if I kept on moving, sooner or later, in some unregarded burg in the middle of nowhere I'd turn a corner and find her—that person who'd always been looking for me, too. It was my version of the trail that must start somewhere, I suppose. I also suspected that I'd already had that person, and that the trail had stopped there.

So I carried on, caretaking pieces of other people's lives, and wishing that once in a while someone would lend me a good memory for a change. I toyed with a little smack every now and then, just to dull the noise in my head of other people's bad times. I discovered what it was like to be someone else, and found myself even less inclined to own a gun. I got occasional headaches, bad enough to put me on the bench for a few days.

But for the most part it was okay, and if I needed a reason, I just watched the money flowing into my account.

Until three days ago, it had all been going fine.

I SHOULD HAVE WORKED it out a lot sooner. The unlocked door was a big clue, if nothing else, and I knew better than anyone what it was like inside her head. But I had no reason to expect her to do something stupid—had good evidence to think otherwise, in fact.