Fifteen Minutes to Live

by Phoef Sutton

  She had no memory of what had happened when he tried to take her to the house. Once he’d gotten her into the bedroom, she’d wanted to make love again, forgetting all about their previous encounter and wanting to take advantage of the empty house. He’d had to beg off, pleading fatigue. She’d been hurt but he promised her the morning would be something special. Then she drifted off to sleep, peaceful and contented, not a bit concerned about her vanishing house and family.

  What was he to do with her? She carried no I.D. with her, nothing to give him a clue as to her address. There was no listing for her in the phone book, or for her parents or brother. He’d noticed a white tan line on her ring finger, so she was married or divorced. She was in good health as near as he could see, clean and well taken care of. She obviously hadn’t been wandering the streets. Unless this was some sort of temporary attack, he found it hard to believe she could function in the world on her own. People must be looking after her. But how was he supposed to find them? Put notices on telephone poles, like a child who’s found a stray dog? The responsible thing to do would be to call the police.

  He crawled into bed next to her and fell asleep.

  She began to move restlessly next to him and he knew she’d wake up before long. He didn’t think he’d slept at all, but he tried to convince himself he’d dozed off for a few minutes at least. Maybe she’d be better now. Maybe it was all the result of a drunken stupor and she’d wake up clear as a bell.

  She sat up in shock. She looked around her in confusion, but seemed to feel better once she saw him.

  “Carl? What am I doing here?”

  He explained it all again, emphasizing that it was okay with her mom. He hoped against hope that she’d say, “My mom?” What the hell does my mom have to do with it? She’s living in Florida and I’ve got give kids.” But she didn’t. She just nodded her head and said, “Oh, right,” a little uncertain, but grateful all the same. Then she asked about his mustache.

  He went down to make breakfast, keeping her with him all the time, keeping her talking to him, hoping that if she never broke her train of thought she might retain some information. It seemed to work for a while, until she interrupted the gossip about their twelfth grade history teacher to ask if she should set a place for his parents. Then she wanted to know about his stupid mustache.

  While they were eating he tried an experiment. He took his car keys and put them in a drawer of the sideboard, telling her to please remember where they were since he was always losing them. She assured him she would, a little sarcastically. They talked. He waited exactly one minute, then asked where his keys were.

  “How should I know?” she said, “They’re your keys.”

  She didn’t remember where they were, or even that she’d been asked to remember.

  In the fifteen minutes it took them to eat breakfast he tried the same experiment five times, always with the same result. She didn’t get tired of it. The last time he asked her to write him a note so he’d be sure to remember. She thought he was nuts, but she did it, probably thinking it was a set up to a gag.

  He looked at the note. “Your keys are in the sideboard with the napkins, you idiot. Love, Jesse.” They talked for a minute. He asked where his keys were and as usual got no help. Then he pretended to find the note in his pocket. He was puzzled. When did she write this?

  She looked at it genuinely confused. Yes, she agreed it was her writing, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember writing it. She must have done it last night, she decided. “What the hell were we drinking anyway?” she asked.

  She finished breakfast. She had no trouble with that. She didn’t stop every minute, wondering how the food got on her plate or how to eat it. Some things were automatic, he decided.

  She spent the morning in a lawn chair in the backyard. He watched her from the living room. If he went out there she’d ask him where the avocado tree went for the fifth time and he was tired of telling her. He saw her try to read a book. She’d spend a long time on one page and then give up. Then she sat and watched the birds clustering around the feeders, in seeming contentment. After a bit she looked down and was surprised to find the book at her side. She picked it up and tried to read it. She’d spend a long time on one page and then give up.

  She’s lost, he thought. Set adrift in time. With every passing second she was building a new reality from the clues around her, only to have it washed away as the second passed.

  He’d seen enough TV to know about amnesia. He remembered Shenandoah and Coronet Blue, with Robert Horton and Frank Converse searching for their forgotten identities through series that were always cancelled before they could be found.

  This was different though. Jesse knew who she was, remembered every detail of her teen-age life as if it were yesterday, indeed believed it was yesterday, but everything since then seemed to have been erased.

  Worse than that, she had clearly forgotten everything since they had met last night, had lost the ability to remember anything at all for more than a few minutes. He shuddered at the thought. Thus was a loss of memory in a total, literal, horrifying sense. It was as if she were trapped in a tiny pocket of time, lost in an eternal now. And does she even know that she’s lost? Does she know what a huge piece of her is missing? How can she, when she forgets even that she is forgetting?

  At least here she knows where she is, he thought. She knows my face, aged though it may be, and the house, even with new furniture. What happens to her when she’s somewhere else, with someone she doesn’t know, or didn’t know eighteen years ago? How terrifying to every second find yourself dropped in the midst of strangers in a world you’ve never seen.

  She looked up at him and smiled. “Carl, what happened to the avocado tree?”

  “It died,” he told her.

  “All of a sudden?”

  “It might have been sick for a while. Who knows with trees?”

  Carl sat down in the lawn chair next to her.

  “It’s beautiful out here,” she said. The yard smelled sweet and peaceful and you could barely hear the highway.

  “Look at that,” she said. Two hawks circled high over the hills to the North. They always came out this time of day, to soar and play games and occasionally drop as fast as a stone to earth in search of pray. Carl loved to watch them. They were part of his back yard family, along with the raccoon and the dove that just sat in the birdbath on hot days and the escaped canary that spent most of his time near the feeder. He liked to imagine that the hawks were sparring, wisecracking lovers – a feathered Nick and Nora Charles. Jesse was the only other person who’d ever noticed them.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said.

  “You ever think about what’s going to happen?” she asked. “I mean, after school and everything.”

  I could tell you what will happen, he thought. I could tell you the future, but that would be too cruel. “I suppose we’ll get along,” he said.

  “No, I mean, like are you thinking of going to college?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And do you think we should go to the same college?”

  He stood up and walked over to the fence, not answering, not saying a word.

  “Hey,” she said, “don’t get scared. I’m just asking.”

  Carl walked back to her and took her hands. Should he answer as he wished he’d answered? As he’d answer now? What did it matter? He could answer with any lie in the world and she’d never remember what he said. “We could think about going to the same school,” he said.

  She looked at him a little puzzled, but happy and he wondered if he’d taken too long to answer and she’d forgotten she’d asked the question. He kissed her.

  “Where’d you get the mustache?” she asked.

  They made love again. All the time he wondered if he was being evil. He knew he was taking advantage, but he told himself it wasn’t entirely selfish. When they made love she seemed so totally at ease, her ‘now’ seemed whole and complete. There were no anachr
onisms to give her frightening glimpses of all that she’d lost. There were just their bodies and if they looked slightly older, in the dark they felt the same. So, even if only for a few minutes, someone joined her back there in 1976.

  Or was he making excuses? Was it just that sex, like eating, was a process that didn’t need memory?

  He watched her sleeping again. Eighteen years. Had she grown since he’d known her? She must have changed, become a woman. Was all that erased too? Was she a woman now, or a girl? He brushed the hair from her eyes and wondered if they should go to the same college.

  THREE

  In her dream she was deaf and blind and her world was nothing but scent. Night blooming jasmine by her window, hot asphalt from the street, cinnamon and syrup on French toast, the milky smell of her mother’s rose water, acrid smoke from her father’s cigarettes, the sweet flower of her baby brother’s newly washed head, the musk of Carl from his sweater she kept hidden under her mattress, someone’s cigar she should know but could not place, a pervasive aroma of mint and lemon, again, maddeningly allusive, and wafting through it all, like a hot wind, the salt water scent of blood.

  “Maybe you think that doesn’t give me a lot to go on.” Kit wanted to be impressive, so Carl let him, “But just the name, you’d be surprised how much you can find out from just the name. For instance, nobody ever thinks of something as simple as checking the phone book.”

  Carl told him he’d checked the phone book.

  “Yeah well, you would, you always take the fun out of everything. No luck?”

  “Not listed,” Carl said.

  “How ‘bout your high school alumni organization?”

  “Didn’t think of that.”

  “Thank God for small favors. I’ll start there.”

  Kit stretched his lanky body across the sofa and pulled out a leather embossed notebook, one of his many affectations. Carl’s eyes kept drifting to the new color of his partner’s hair – Jean Harlow platinum blonde. Kit was a homosexual of the old school, far too flamboyant to be acceptable in today’s politically charged gay community. Once or twice they’d even cast him in episodes of the show, playing a gay character, and their gay casting director had objected that Kit was too much of a stereotype. But he’d been through the wars, Kit maintained, and he’d earned the right to be a queen.

  He was in great shape, thin and improbably tall, with only his oddly bulbous nose betraying the fact that he was ten years Carl’s senior. They’d met at Paramount, when Carl was delivering sandwiches and Kit was running the research department. They shared no interests and couldn’t have been more different temperamentally, so they decided they were ideally suited to be writing partners. For nine months, they worked after hours at Nickodell’s, scribbling on legal pads in a booth in the corner. After eleven spec scripts they started getting work and they hadn’t looked back since. They didn’t resent each other half as much as most partners, though of course, each secretly knew the other was dragging him down.

  It was Kit’s expertise in the research department that had prompted Carl to call him now. Kit had always bragged that he could find the answer to any question within an hour. Carl had decided to put him to the test.

  There really wasn’t much to go on here. Jesse’s dad had been in real estate, but Carl didn’t know what firm. Her mother had been a grade school teacher. “Would they be retired now?” Kit asked. “How old were they?”

  Carl shrugged. “You know how it is when you’re a kid, grown ups are just old.”

  “How about the brother? Any ideas what line of work he might have gone into?”

  “He was ten. He wanted to be a fireman.” Carl thought about Jeff. Always tagging along, especially when Carl wanted Jesse to himself. But even as a teen-ager, when one dislikes children so intensely because one is afraid of being mistaken for one, Carl liked Jeff. The kid knew how to laugh at Carl’s jokes. And he was such pals with his sister. Jesse didn’t play with him out of an embarrassed sense of duty, but for the sheer fun of it. It looked like so much fun that Carl couldn’t help but join in, relaxing his constant effort to appear world-weary in the exhilaration of a wild game of capture-the-flag.

  Jeff would be twenty-two now and Jesse wouldn’t recognize him if she saw him. “She was real concerned about him last night,” Carl said.

  “Okay, I’ll find them or him or whoever. You could do it yourself, but it’ll be good for my ego. You going to work today?”

  Carl checked his watch. It was nine-thirty, and he was due at the office by eleven. Ordinarily, Kit would be at his gym now and his skipping that ritual was a true testament to their well disguised affection for each other.

  “I don’t see how I can leave her alone,” Carl answered.

  Kit nodded. “I’ll cover for you, I’ll tell everybody you’re drunk.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kit looked out the window, thoughtfully. “You’re going to have to leave her alone eventually, you know.”

  “But this won’t take long will it?”

  “Naw,” Kit said and his tone was so openly false it could hardly be called a lie. “But you know, the police could do it faster.”

  Carl shook his head. “I can’t do that to her.” Where would they put her? He couldn’t bear to think of her in a county medical ward. She wouldn’t know why she was there, and no matter how many times they explained it to her, she’d never remember. Every second she would spend there would be that first awful second of discovering she was imprisoned. “She’d be terrified. I can’t put her through that. Not when there’s no reason. Somebody has to be looking for her. Her husband, her parents. All we have to do is find them and take her home. Don’t you think that’s a much more human way to do it?”

  Kit looked through the back window and watched her water the flowers. “She’s beautiful,” he said. He flipped his notebook shut and slipped it into the pocket of his polo pants. “Introduce me to her again. Tell her my name’s Nicholas this time. I always liked that name.”

  Carl thought he ought to be off ended by Kit’s flippancy, but he understood it perfectly. There was something exhilarating about being able to start over from scratch with her at any given moment. “No need to worry about that bad first impression,” Kit had said.

  “Hi, Jessie,” Kit said walking up to her, his hand extended. “I’m Carl’s cousin Nick. Carl’s told me all about you.”

  “Oh, hi.” She was open and friendly and nothing about her suggested that the same man had been introduced to her as Carl’s friend Kit, Carl’s friend Jack, and Carl’s younger uncle Tod, all in the last hour.

  Kit said goodbye, hoped they’d meet again, and they headed off to the door.

  “Carl,” she called after him. There was a pitch of fear in her voice. “You’re not going, are you?”

  He laughed and reassured her that he was only walking his cousin to the door. She smiled then and kissed him. It was a warm loving kiss and Carl was embarrassed for Kit to see it. She released Carl and he walked Kit out to the door.

  “She…thinks we’re still in high school,” Carl muttered to Kit by way of explanation.

  Kit just smiled. “Now I know why you want to handle this personally,” he said.

  “That’s a stupid thing to say.” Carl was surprised by his own anger.

  Kit held up his hand in insincere defense. “Sorry, bad joke.” He opened the door and glanced back at Carl. “Oh, by the way, good idea to lose the mustache, takes years off you.”

  Carl automatically stroked the huge expanse of his bald upper lip. “Thanks.”

  Kit hesitated, still not walking out the door. “You guys were real close, huh?”

  Carl shrugged. “Well, you’re always serious when you’re a teen-ager.”

  “I wasn’t. Why’d you break up?”

  Another shrug. “Just the usual. You grow apart. Who remembers?”

  “If you don’t, nobody does.” Then he reached out and touched Carl’s arm and Carl flinched instinctively. “Take car
e of yourself.” Carl watched him to, wondering what that was all about. He turned to see Jesse behind him.

  “Who was that?” she asked.

  He told her it was just somebody selling something.

  She looked around in annoyed confusion. “Did you guys move the phone? It’s not on the table and I need to call Mom.”

  Carl’s throat tightened. “Why?”

  “Cause I want to talk to her.”

  “But you just did. You just talked to her about a half an hour ago.”

  “I did?”

  “Sure. She said she was going to the mall and she’d be gone most of the day.”

  She sat down on the sofa. “Oh yeah, right.” She looked around the room, trying to place things. “When did you get all this new furniture?”

  “It was an anniversary present from Dad to Mom. Like it?” He was getting better at making the explanations shorter.

  “I didn’t even notice it.” She shook her head, trying to clear it. “Carl, this probably sounds crazy, but I think I’m having trouble remembering things. Like, I honestly don’t remember calling Mom, and I know I must have seen all this stuff before, but…Do you think maybe I smoked too much pot and fried my brain or something,” she said with a laugh that didn’t take the fear out of her voice.

  “No, no, it happens to everybody.” As if that was supposed to mean anything.

  “I mean, this sounds stupid, but I don’t even know if I have homework tonight, or what books I’m supposed to be reading, or if I have class tomorrow, or…oh God!”

  She looked up at him, not even trying to hide her fear now, as if the great hunk of nothingness in her life was suddenly being revealed to her. Carl reached out and held her. He heard her whispering but the only word he could make out was ‘remember.’ Then she kissed him long and hard, with a desperation that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with survival.