One of Us

by Michael Marshall Smith

  When Laura first realized her father had committed suicide, she felt a guilt so intense it was like someone had pulled out her heart. It was too much to bear and she turned it to hatred, despising his weakness, the selfishness which had left her to face things alone. The final stage was pretending that he had done something heroic, started a family tradition.

  So she started reaching for the button herself, but she never tried quite hard enough, because some part of her was still alive. She didn’t want to throw the machine away. She just wanted to start again. All the pills and the razor blades got her was waking up in hospitals surrounded by people who didn’t care. They did the first time, but compassion has to be given freely. Once you start demanding it, the well dries up pretty fast. The luckiest of us only have a few people who will keep on trying, even after it’s obvious that their love will not work as a spell. Laura didn’t have anyone at all.

  A year ago, after her third such attempt, Laura tried to straighten out. Suicide wasn’t working out as an option. It was embarrassing, it was stupid, and it hurt. She started giving up smoking at regular intervals, fixing on that first because everybody knows it’s bad. This is a time for scapegoats, and smoking’s in pole position. Never mind that what we eat and drink does as much damage, and that our cars pump shit into the atmosphere which just isn’t going to go away: we like our burgers and beers and automobiles, so let’s pick on something else. Let’s ban smoking in public places and planes and bars, and then the whole world will become perfect and sunny and bright: let’s blame our problems for our unhappiness, so we don’t have to face it ourselves. When people make a horror film these days it’s not the promiscuous kids who die first—it’s the ones with the pack of Marlboro in their bag.

  She stopped letting people screw her unless she had no choice, tried to make do without that validation: but someone who only wants to laugh at jokes you don’t care about is never going to be enough to distract you for long. She struggled with the drinking too, sometimes winning, sometimes not. Not drinking is hard; it’s very, very hard. People who’ve never tried not drinking have no idea just how hard not drinking can be. Some days you succeed, win a white-knuckled battle against yourself. On others you don’t, and it’s those days which feel like the victory. Fuck it, a voice says. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, fuck it all. You’ve no idea whose voice it is any more, but it seems to speak sense and truth. The problem is that alcohol lies: it’s happy to be your drinking buddy, but it will never be your friend. It suckers you in, makes you feel better for a while, like the acquaintance who doesn’t want you to give up smoking because then he’ll be left alone with his bad habits. Its voice talks fun, and release, and you trust it even though you know it will go quiet of a sudden, as it always does, and that it won’t have anything helpful to say when the terror kicks in and you stand alone on a cold planet spinning through empty space.

  None of it helped. Whenever she tried to see a future her mind insisted on slipping backwards, to the original fracture. Depression isn’t merely a dirty window on the world. It’s a place where all windows are shuttered, and all you can see and believe in is what has already been. Death is like love, and when it is your own self that is dying, you yearn for magic once more. You fasten on events, on erasures that might make everything all right again. When everybody else has failed, you have to be your own witch and cast your own spells. Once a month you push away the memory of your mother, in the second before she tells you she’s sleeping with Ray.

  It doesn’t work. It doesn’t help.

  What do you do then?

  You realize it was never words which made the difference, not your mother’s or anyone else’s. It was a fact. It was a man, whose presence in your life has inverted to become a black hole around which you orbit helplessly. However much you try to blank him out, the years do not help to break the hold. It’s not love, or hatred, merely a psychological binary star.

  His existence has tainted your life. It may not even be his fault, but something has to give for the circling to end.

  I felt a tugging, something trying not to be taken from me.

  A grinding sound, like a failed mechanism.

  A momentary glimpse of something like a corridor, everything so white you could barely see it; a hospital the size of infinity, fresh-minted every second as something new was locked behind a door. The banging of countless fists, the flapping wings of moments of time pinned to the wall so they cannot fly away.

  Then I could see again.

  I was in the airplane. The attendant was still talking to the couple a few rows in front, and I could hear what she was saying. The cabin looked normal, and I could hear the reassuring rumble of air passing over and under the wings, and the sound of someone pouring a mixer into a plastic glass behind me.

  The seat next to me was empty apart from three guns, a watch and a ring, which lay where they had fallen. The ring was Helena’s wedding band. It hadn’t been on her hand—I know, I looked—but she must have had it on her somewhere. I picked it up. As I sat there with it in my hand, mind stalled, I heard the voice of a male steward at my shoulder.

  ‘Would those be your weapons, sir?’ he said.

  The cops were waiting for me when we landed at LAX. Two uniforms came and fetched me off the plane, marching me past the other passengers. Another followed behind, carrying all the guns. The stewardess who’d given us the miniatures averted her eyes, wondering what kind of psycho they’d had in their midst.

  Nobody seemed to notice anything unusual. Nobody was checking their watch and realizing that it was ten minutes off local time. When they did they’d all be dispersed into a hundred hotels and homes, and no-one would think anything of it.

  Nobody noticed that the flight landed with one less passenger than when it started.

  I didn’t ask the cops any questions. They wouldn’t have answered, and there was nothing I needed to know. I was driven to the Hollywood precinct, where they didn’t even bother to check me in. Straight down the hall, and into the same room as before.

  They locked the door and I sat and waited.

  Seventeen

  ‘We have a deal, Travis.’

  ‘Which you broke by leaving the state and then getting caught on a plane with enough armoury to start a war. What was going through your head? You really needed four guns? You got that many hands?’

  ‘I told you. They weren’t all mine.’

  ‘Hap, don’t start with the abduction shit again, because I just don’t think I could bear it.’

  ‘You don’t believe Helena was with me?’

  ‘Not for a minute.’ Travis leaned back in his chair, stared at me across the table. ‘I don’t believe you’d work with her again after what she did to you.’

  ‘So who do you think knocked Romer out when he followed you to Venice?’

  Travis paused. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Speaking of which—you seen Romer around much today?’

  ‘No I haven’t. Why?’

  ‘When Helena and I were in Cresota we were attacked by two guys with guns. Somebody must have tipped their boss off that we were around. They even implied as much.’

  ‘Yeah, go on, Hap. Tell me you’re accusing a police officer of being an accessory to attempted murder.’

  ‘Well you put it together some other way, Travis.’

  ‘Better still, why don’t I send someone to Florida to talk to these alleged guys, who allegedly attacked you and your allegedly dematerializing ex-wife? See what they have to say?’

  I breathed out heavily. ‘That’s not really an option.’ I already felt bad about shooting my guy, even after the threat to my parents. Travis looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘It was self-defence,’ I added, petulantly.

  ‘Hey, and you know what, Hap? I’ve got your gun collection. Ballistics match them with the shells I assume we’re going to be pulling out of these Florida guys, and you’ve just dug your pit so deep you won’t even be able to see the sky.’

&
nbsp; ‘They were scumbags.’ You may think you know about killing, but you don’t. Until you’ve seen the mess, heard the scream and understood how irrevocable the deed you’ve just wrought, you don’t know anything about it at all. It’s one of those actions that no amount of magic is going to be able to extricate you from.

  ‘Uh-huh? And you’re what, exactly?’

  ‘They were trying to kill me.’

  ‘And they didn’t know there was a queue? You should have given them a number. They might have waited.’

  ‘You have to let me go, Travis.’

  Travis barked laughter. ‘Oh, I will. Just there are a few serial killers ahead of you in the line.’

  ‘You owe me a night and a day.’

  ‘Give it up, Hap. It’s not like it’s going so well, according to you. You go looking for these friends of ours and what happens? You lose someone else.’

  I glared at him. ‘I’m going to tell you something, and then you’re going to let me go.’

  ‘Hap…’

  ‘Just fucking listen. Did you get any other names from Hammond’s study?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Did you or not, Travis? I put you onto this in the first place.’

  ‘Yes. We found another thirty sheets. They’re being decoded now.’

  ‘Bullshit. You already know who the people are. Put them under immediate police protection.’

  Travis squinted at me suspiciously. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s not the guys in the suits who’ve taken over Hammond’s racket. It’s his original partner.’

  ‘Which is who?’

  ‘Stratten.’

  Travis opened his mouth, closed it again.

  ‘Hammond was given his initial wedges by Stratten,’ I said, ‘who leached them out of transcripts from memory-dumping sessions. He set Hammond to do more research on blackmailable aspects of these people’s lives, and then to lean on them. Hammond started to go flaky at the end. He had to be forced to continue—probably because at heart he wasn’t too bad a guy.’

  ‘And what makes you think that?’ I could see the wheels turning in Travis’ head. Any good cop knows intuitively when he’s hearing something that might be true. They deal with lies so much of the time they begin to smell their absence.

  ‘I have new information,’ I said, thinking of the experience I’d had on the plane. ‘I think aspects of his life started to go a little weird. The guys in the suits were after him, but not because they wanted to kill him. He knew about them, and was getting scared. Come on, Travis: a blackmailer using a book code based on the bible? This is kind of an ambivalent attitude here.’

  ‘Which you can explain?’

  ‘Hammond was lapsed religious. Maybe Catholic. He’s doing something he knows is bad, largely because he needs the money to keep someone in a life to which they have become accustomed. Monica Hammond is a hardcase, and you’ve seen her taste in clothes. Some people are upgrade fanatics—software, car, partner, life. Keeping them happy is expensive. Hammond doesn’t feel great about working for Stratten, but he does it. Then he starts to get visitations.’

  Travis shook his head. ‘From the aliens, right?’

  ‘But he doesn’t interpret them that way, because like you he can’t believe they’re what they so obviously are. So he finds something else to hang his fear on, and some other way of explaining it. In the front of a bible I found at Hammond’s apartment there’s a quote he’s copied out by hand. Something about a lamb with seven eyes, “which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth”. It just so happens we have six guys in suits, plus the man I met in Hammond’s study, who I also saw again in Florida.’ I wasn’t going to tell Travis about my long-term relationship to that man. Something told me he wouldn’t be a sympathetic audience.

  ‘That’s kind of tenuous, Hap.’

  ‘Hammond starts to get a kind of religious mania, partly fuelled by the guilt he’s already feeling, and then gets killed. So Stratten comes to LA to pick up the reins, aided and abetted by Quat.’

  ‘Any evidence for this? At all?’

  ‘I visited REMtemps. Stratten left Jacksonville last week, flew here. Why? And check the translations. I’ll bet you find at least one entry in every single record which can’t have come from Hammond just watching them. Something that happened too long ago, or too privately. Something Stratten fed him from his voyeur kick of invading other people’s pasts. Also, by all means get in touch with the cops in Florida—they’ll tell you that at least one of the dead guys worked for REMtemps Security.’

  ‘Big deal. I already know Stratten wants you dead.’

  ‘Yeah—and he really does, doesn’t he? A contract plus these two goons, plus trying to set me up at the Prose Café. I mean, this is quite a hobby he’s got here, despite the fact that he already knows you’ve got me by the balls. At the very least, for Christ’s sake, I have rights too. This guy is trying to get me whacked.’

  Travis looked at me hard. ‘And I just figured out why. You know something else about Hammond’s death. Something you’re not telling me. So tell me.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Admitting it was a risk, but I was running out of time.

  ‘You don’t believe it’s the guys in the suits, do you?’

  I shook my head. ‘I know it isn’t.’

  ‘But you won’t hand over who did it.’

  ‘Again: not yet.’

  ‘Withholding evidence pertaining to a homicide investigation is a very serious offence.’

  ‘Big deal. Add it to the list. In the meantime, you can either keep me locked up here, in which case you get nothing from me ever—or you let me out and I’ll tell you tomorrow night.’

  I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind Travis. I looked even worse than the last time I’d been sitting in this chair. Exhausted, dishevelled, wild-eyed. I looked like a spook, and I knew one thing for sure—I didn’t have enough to bargain with. I hadn’t put Travis in a position where he had to do what I asked—unless he chose to. It was down to him, and what he felt about me.

  ‘I just handed you half the truth on a plate, Travis. What’s it going to be?’

  He looked at me for a long, long time.

  All I wanted was to go straight to my apartment, but I knew I ought to go check Deck’s place was all right. It was the last thing I needed, but he would have done it for me. That’s the problem with having good people as friends: they make you feel insufficient the whole time. Next time around I’m going to consort solely with bastards. I called Woodley on the way, and arranged for him to meet me there. I also called my answering machine, which was extremely rude to me before confirming that no-one had called. My popularity had evidently slipped to an all-time low, possibly due to the fact that all of my friends had now been abducted by aliens and were thus not within reach of a phone.

  I let myself in Deck’s back door. The interior looked as it had, and the temporary front door was still in place. The apartment seemed so empty I would even have welcomed my alarm clock’s presence. I looked in Laura’s bag, but it wasn’t there. So I poured myself a drink, sat down on the sofa and waited.

  I don’t know how much Travis believed of what I’d told him. The Stratten stuff, probably—but as I’d said to Helena, it was going to take a lot more than my word for him to try to bring down someone with that much juice. Without a lever on Stratten, Hammond’s involvement in the blackmail scam would be covered up to stop it reflecting badly on the LAPD. It was too big a can of worms for Travis to open up, unless he already had a show bad guy in a cage—which would never happen. I didn’t have to work within the law, but I couldn’t see how I could do anything either. In the real world Stratten had more guns and money; in the Net he had Quat, who was more than a match for just about anything I might try to set on him. There was one thing I could try, out of pure vindictiveness, but I couldn’t see how it would help. At some point Quat was going to pay, but it would have to wait.

  Travis sure as hell didn’t bel
ieve that Helena had been abducted, but then nobody ever does. It’s much easier to assume that the person is off their head or lying—because most of the time that’s the truth. I wondered in how many informal support groups around the country, full of mad people barking and gushing about how devil aliens wanted to spawn with them, there was one person who really had been taken—and who just sat there quietly, knowing that the whackos around them were going to be no help whatsoever. Because I’ll tell you this: if you really have been abducted, you won’t remember anything about it. I can work my memory better, I believe, than virtually anyone else alive—yet, like the man said, it’s not something you can write down or even put into words. You’ll know that something happened—and either store it privately or blank it out altogether—but you can’t recall being away.

  I tried to bludgeon some sense out of what had happened on the plane. I tried to work out if time could have anything to do with it—stopped clocks and lost hours are a common feature of abductions, I knew. Maybe the reason you can’t recall what has occurred is that time really has stopped, and everything happens at once. You’d have no way of sorting it into chronological order—like when I accepted Laura’s three-day memory in one punch, but far worse, because there was no order to find.

  Maybe I’d been wrong in assuming that time always ran forward. Perhaps it didn’t have to be that way.

  And the more I thought, the more I wondered if memory also had something to do with it. I could evidently tap into Laura’s mind somehow, even though she was over there, and the second time it had happened was immediately after—or indeed, almost part of—accessing a buried memory of my own. The guy in the dark suit had said we were linked because of what I carried into my head. Perhaps that also explained why I was the only person who’d had any idea of what had happened on the flight. Plus two more things:

  When Deck and Laura had disappeared, that weird thing had happened with their faces—almost as if I was forgetting them. And on that afternoon long ago, I’d seen two people who were dead. Not just felt their presence, but actually seen them. They were there. Perhaps that explained why I had blanked that portion of the event. I’d seen something which didn’t fit into the world.