Amnesiascope

by Steve Erickson

  Any minute now Shale was going to call. I kept turning the telephone off and back on, figuring I might as well get it over with. This is the last straw, he would say, except—being Shale—he wouldn’t say it like that; he’d be tactful about it, sensitive to the deeper personal despair that had led me to this moment, his heart heavy with journalistic responsibility. Finally the phone rang. It was an odd conversation. He talked about trimming the second paragraph and rewriting the first sentence of the third; he argued that the middle section of the last graph was unnecessary. “Good piece,” he concluded.

  “Uhm. …”

  “Coming into the office tomorrow?”

  “No, I. … Shale?”

  What? he said; and Nothing, I said; and we hung up. For a while I sat there trying to figure out what was going on, and then it hit me: of course he was going to shame me into confessing. He was going to see how far I would let things go before I stopped them myself. Or. … Or it was a joke, I thought. He was turning the whole thing back on me, and there was no way it would get that far anyway, once it went to copy editors and fact-checkers and the art department. Was there a chance in hell that one of those anal-retentive twenty-year-olds in fact-checking would let this get by? So for the next forty-eight hours I jumped at the phone every time someone called, half mortified and half relieved I’d been discovered. When I didn’t hear from the copy editors at all, I actually relaxed, because that had to mean Shale killed the piece; the copy editors always had some complaint. But then one of the fact-checkers phoned, a particularly constipated kid who was constantly trying to argue with me over things he knew nothing about: “I want to ask you about your film review,” he mumbled, timorously since I’ve always made it a rule to take an especially nasty tone with fact-checkers. “Our reference book says he was twenty-four.”

  “Who?”

  “Adolphe Sarre.”

  “Reference book. …”

  “He was twenty-four when he made The Death of Marat.”

  At first I went blank. Then suddenly I understood: “Sure,” I answered, laughing, “twenty-four, huh? I don’t know how I missed that one. Anything else?”

  “Uh, no, everything else checks out. …”

  “Oh good. That’s fine. I like it when everything checks out,” I went on, congratulating the hell out of him.

  “OK,” he hung up, baffled. For half an hour I laughed about it, and then an hour later the art department called to ask if I had a still shot from the film they could run with the piece, and now I knew it was a joke; Shale even had the fact-checker and art director in on it. “Twenty-four in the reference book”—very funny. “A still shot to run with the piece”—hilarious. But after I was through laughing I started steeling myself again for the inevitable; sooner or later, once I had my fun and he had his fun, Shale would insist on a serious life-questioning discussion about whatever corroding inner rot was driving me to write about spiritual strip joints and non-existent movies. It wasn’t that he’d fire me, of course; like I’ve said before, Shale’s the kind of boss who gives you every chance before it comes to that. And in a way that made me feel all the more sheepish, because I’d taken advantage of his reasonableness, the way I always thought other people took advantage of it. I had indulged my boredom at his expense and the newspaper’s, and felt infantile about it; and over the next few days I kept meaning to telephone him and beg forgiveness, like a school kid whose teacher is waiting for him to own up to his transgression. For a week I dialed his number and hung up before he answered, increasingly tortured right up to the morning I picked up the new issue of the paper on the street and there it was on page thirteen, no photo but otherwise big as life: ADOLPHE SARRE’S HEROIC RESURRECTION was the headline.

  I just stood there on the sidewalk staring at it in horror and disbelief. Shale would never have taken it this far; his editorial integrity was such that he might make a joke out of me or himself, but not the newspaper. That stupid “fact-checker” obviously looked up the wrong entry. He got my made-up movie completely mixed up with some other movie, and now the thing was in black-and-white in a hundred thousand newspapers. Before the day was out studios and theaters would be screaming, maybe threatening lawsuits; now it was entirely possible I could lose my job or, worse, Freud N. Johnson would demand it and Shale would once again throw his body in front of me like he’s done for half the other people at the newspaper, knowing it could lose him his job. I had precipitated a spectacularly foolish crisis, and I rushed back to the Hamblin and down the hall to Ventura’s apartment where I rapped desperately on the door. But he wasn’t there, so I went back to my suite and called Dr. Billy, but he didn’t answer either.

  The hours passed. The phone didn’t ring, Dr. Billy didn’t answer, Ventura wasn’t home. Evening came, darkness fell, and still nothing happened; and then the night passed and the dawn came and the day passed again, and still nothing. And then the weekend passed and the beginning of the new week arrived and there was still only silence, except that at one point I could hear Ventura back in his apartment playing bebop on his stereo. But now I didn’t know what to say to him, since four days had passed without a word from anyone; I felt too stupid about the whole thing to even tell Viv. So I said nothing. …

  But that first night after the Marat review hit the streets, as I was still waiting for the angry telephone to ring and my fraud to catch up with me, I had a thought I hadn’t had in years. For some reason or another, perhaps for no more reason than the fact that if I lost my job I wouldn’t have anything better to do, I began to think about actually writing another book, one last book I had reconciled myself long ago to never writing. Up out of the sea of my psyche ripped the glacier of my conscience, beneath the sky of memory; and in my mind I began to record the story of that traveler who is always trying to get across that glacier, scale its walls one more time as I had tried to do so many times before, before the exhaustion of passion, faith, energy and courage led me to give up. Lying on my bed in the dark I followed the traveler’s journey in my mind’s eye until he was out of sight. I followed him into my sleep, to the horizon where the white of the ice becomes the white of the sky and he disappears from view: “He disappears from view,” I think I muttered to myself before drifting off. But that doesn’t mean, a dream answered, he isn’t still there.

  Woke up a few days ago with one of my headaches, the first I’ve had in a long time. At first it isn’t so bad but then it comes over my brain like a swarm, for two days, then three, then a week. … I went to see my acupuncturist in Little Tokyo; in a tiny dark room with the shades pulled I lie on a table and she sticks me with pins from the top of my skull to the toes on my feet. Since I always keep my eyes closed I can’t be sure what it is she uses to tap the needles in, but tap them she does, in my legs and my arms, in my shoulders and my face. I picture her with a tiny little hammer pounding the needle into my forehead: tap tap tap. Then she sets all the needles on fire. I hear her lighting them and I feel the heat. She leaves the room and I lie anxiously awaiting her return, my eyes closed tightly, twenty little torches blazing from my body, like an albino porcupine on fire.

  As I anticipated, Abdul has been sacked. Rather, the jihad for whom Abdul works, the other Palestinian terrorists, have been sacked, by whatever bank or lending institution holds the mortgage on the building. Everything is thrown into chaos, which alarms the other tenants. I just go on like a man blithely walking through a battle, bodies and bullets flying all around him. My guess is that financially Abdul ran the Hamblin into the ground with his grand designs. He had big plans for redecorating the hotel entryway, putting hardwood floors in all the apartments, garbage disposals in all the kitchen sinks. Given enough time he would have installed a swimming pool on the roof, with a tennis court. Of course it also took him six months to get the elevator and the plumbing fixed—but Abdul isn’t the kind of man to waste time on plumbing. What’s plumbing next to hardwood floors? Abdul is a landlord of vision, he can’t be bothered with mere repairs. He ac
tually did lay a new hardwood floor in my old single apartment I just moved out of, which he then rented to a pretty girl from Indiana. Or, more likely, he laid the floor after he rented it to her, just so she wouldn’t have any doubts as to what a smooth character he is. Now Abdul is out as manager, figuratively if not literally out of his palatial apartment where he schemes his inevitable comeback, waiting for the financial and legal problems to be resolved and control of the building once again to be within his grasp. “It’s all bullshit,” he says with a sniff, contemptuously waving away the recent events. “Tactics.”

  In the months after I left Sally and returned to Los Angeles, I had many unusual dreams. I wrote some of them down. In one I had the distinct and certain sense that the only option left to me in my life was suicide. This sounds more melodramatic than it felt. In my dream I wasn’t conscious of any unbearable pain, just that my identity was irrevocably dead, that my life was over even as my body went on living, out of sync with the reality of my life. Killing myself was the only way to get myself in sync. It wasn’t an emotional decision but a practical one. I remember saying to myself, I wish this were a dream; but I knew it wasn’t. It was like the dream I had about my father after he died, in which we met and, knowing he was dead, I argued with him over whether it was a dream, and he kept telling me it wasn’t. Now, in this dream, I was looking through a window on a large yard, trying to read a notebook with words written close together in blue ink; a fleeting memory says Sally was in one of the rooms of the house. … A murdered woman, lying in the corner of my apartment, who I had the vague sense of having known. … There was an instant, however, when she seemed to turn her head; and when I looked again she was gone, and in her place on my apartment floor was my desk lamp, lying on its side, the tall metal one that Viv says looks like the kind used in gynecological examinations. For a moment I was elated by the possibility that this murder hadn’t happened after all, but part of me wouldn’t accept this; and in the months after Sally, I constantly had dreams like this, that questioned themselves and their own dream-nature, dreams built on memories rather than visions—not a vision of a woman being murdered but the memory of it. Memories, in other words, of things that not only never actually happened but that I had never even dreamed before; and yet in these dreams the memories were already there, delivered from some place that was neither consciousness nor unconsciousness.

  In a little gallery in Baghdadville not so long ago, I found these silver balls. About four inches in diameter, and breathtaking in their uselessness. You can’t look inside them to see colors, like in a kaleidoscope; you can’t put them to your ear and hear the sound of the sky, like shells on the beach that hold the sound of the ocean. As artifacts they’re distinctly uninteresting except for how uninteresting they are: round in shape, and nothing but round; silver in color, and nothing but silver. They don’t stay in one place but roll maddeningly back and forth from one end of my shelves to the other. I bought half a dozen. It was only later that Viv read to me an ancient Chinese legend from the Tsui Dynasty, about winged dragons that flew over China snatching white mares up into the sky and mounting them. Drops of the dragons’ semen spilled to earth, freezing into silver balls that littered the hillsides. Now, after hearing this story, when I put the silver balls to my ear, I hear the sky after all. Now when I gaze into their reflection, I see the embryos of little dragons swirling in a sea of sulfur. At night, when I’m in bed between Viv’s legs, they drop from the shelves to the floor and roll into the moonlight, waiting for its cold gleam to evaporate them homeward. …

  Sally is married. I found out a couple of nights ago in a bar from someone who, like everyone else, had been waiting for someone else to break the news to me, and assumed that by now someone had; thus, given the half-life of a rumor between the time it is rumor and the time it is truth, one can calculate it must have happened a while ago, perhaps as far as last spring. I gather that Los Angeles is full of people who have known about Sally’s marriage for some time, and wondered how long it would be before I found out. She called a couple of months back, right after bumping into Ventura on one of his trips to Austin. When he got back to L.A. he told me he’d seen her, but not much else; maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t. She left a couple of messages and I called back and left a message with whoever it was that answered the telephone; then I didn’t hear from her again. Then I ran into this woman in a bar, a good friend of ours when Sally and I were together, and we were talking and she let slip about having been Sally’s bridesmaid. “Bridesmaid?” I said, not sure I heard right over the clatter; but even in the dark I could see her face go from one shade of white to one of red and back again.

  I’m not really so angry that no one told me sooner. I’m the world’s biggest coward myself in such situations, and figure it isn’t my responsibility to bring the news that someone else should have brought, just because I happened to have had the bad luck of being in the time and place to have heard it. I’m not even so angry that Sally didn’t tell me. The truth is that, even though Sally should have been the one to tell me, I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it from her. I would have felt the need, for either her sake or mine, to find an eloquent or graceful way of expressing my feelings, when I wouldn’t have felt particularly eloquent or gracious. My rage about the whole thing—and it is a rage, no one should have any doubt about that—my rage about it isn’t that I’ve been waiting for Sally to come back to me, because I haven’t, or waiting to go back to her, because I wouldn’t, but that this marriage is a lie; and while in a world of liars I’m a liar too, this lie is too profound for even me. I last saw her a year ago. She was in town and came by to leave off some things that were mine that she had never gotten around to returning, or that I had never gotten around to wanting back; when I answered the door her face was still that mix of anger and guilt and sadness it had been since I left—or was she the one who left? Down at the corner café, as the flames of the third ring began rising over the hill, she asked, “But why is it I mess everything up? And how is it that I messed us up?” and when she said it, it was with the same deathly sadness that was on her face almost five years before, when we were at the beginning rather than the end, sitting in a little bar on La Cienega and staring out the window. “Another man,” she said quietly then, meaning me, naturally, “that I’m going to make miserable.” I laughed it off, not having a better response. I didn’t have a response this time either. The part of me that could never be unkind to her wanted to give her an answer: “Well, you did the best you could”—that sort of thing. Take her off the hook. But I don’t take anyone off the hook anymore. So I had no answer for Sally. Guess the silence must have been devastating. Maybe it was in that silent moment that Sally’s marriage became inevitable. We finished the coffee and left, before the heat of the backfires in the distance became too unbearable.

  I once loved a woman named Lauren. Now in retrospect there seems a very clear connection between Lauren and Sally, though they could not have been more different, and though there were ten years between my knowing them. Sally dark, Lauren light, one a singer and the other a child therapist, holding in common only their confusion. When Lauren finally went back to her husband, many things about me weren’t the same after that, and some things were dead a long time. For a long time after Lauren there was no believing in love, not the love that makes you a force of nature; for years after she went back to Jason, every now and then she would call to say hello, and I couldn’t hear her voice without turning inside out. I never blamed her. “Well, you did the best you could.” I knew, and still know, that nothing she did was out of malice, but rather turmoil: which of us always knows our heart so well, or follows it so bravely? And then, a full decade later, just after I had left my own wife and fallen in love with Sally, the phone rang one night and it was Lauren. I don’t think her husband had been out the door—or her life—all of five minutes before she called me. And I couldn’t see her then, not with my own marriage in shambles and a new love affair I hadn’
t even begun to decode yet. So over the next two years we talked, and finally I went to see her after things fell apart with Sally; she was living near the beach, and at the first sight of her in the doorway I knew someone can turn your world upside down and then enough time can pass that she can’t turn it right side up again. We had dinner. We didn’t make love. I held her and she slept in my arms. “I’m not expecting anything,” she lied when I left.

  That night after I got home I had one dream after another, each connecting into a long tunnel at the end of which I could see the past. It was an insane night, everything in turmoil, the turmoil of Lauren revisited in the midst of the turmoil of Sally. In the weeks that followed she left a number of messages, which I answered only after deliberate and growing delays. Leaving the country on a long-planned vacation, she phoned within hours of returning; it was a week before I called back, gracing her phone machine with an excuse so feeble it infuriated even me. Her reaction, on my machine the next day, was as startling as it was brief: “I’ve been thinking,” she said carefully, “we’ve had a long history together. A very long history.” And then she paused. “I don’t want you to ever call me again.” And then she hung up.

  I told you, I don’t let anyone off the hook anymore. The woman took eleven years to decide she wanted me back. I took a week to return her phone call—and she never wanted to hear from me again. So I didn’t call, as she had said not to, though I suspected she didn’t really mean it; and six months later I received yet another message on my machine, one she was obviously reading from something she had written out, an extraordinarily bitter piece about what a liar I was. And the love of years before, when I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone, when she changed forever how I loved people, exploded, its shrapnel still hurtling down the years of my life. I knew she was terrified now, alone and alienated from a past that was embodied by a husband to whom she had sacrificed everything. Now she was living with the horror of having made the wrong choice; when I couldn’t unmake it for her, she hated me. “It’s been a year since you asked me never to call you again” I finally wrote her. “I’ve often thought it was a mistake that I didn’t anyway. I’m not writing now to get in the last word on anything; if you really believe my love was a lie, I don’t think there’s much I could say that would change your mind. But after a year it’s become too much for me to live with and not answer it: though for the time being it may have become necessary for you to believe differently, I had to write and tell you that if there are ways in which time has changed or misled either of us, or if we both wound up letting each other’s love down, my love was real, and I always knew yours was as well, and I think deep down you know it too.”