by Ronald Malfi
“Yeah…”
“You passed out damn quick last night. You get drunk?”
“I don’t think so. Just been a long while since I got any sleep. What happened to Tabitha?”
“Did you bang her, d’you mean?” Clarence laughs, slapping his knee like it’s the funniest thing in the world. “Did you get with her, d’you mean?”
“I guess that’s what I’m asking, yeah.”
“You really do have a memory problem, bro.”
“I think that was just an exhaustion problem.”
“You fell asleep on the couch,” Clarence says. “You kissed a little, she said, but then fell asleep.”
“I hope I didn’t upset her.”
“Tabitha? Shit! Probably thought you’s the most gentlemanest white boy she ever met. Shit. No, dog, she’s cool. Don’t worry ’bout it. She ain’t a saint anyhow. You know we used to go together?”
“She mentioned something, yeah. I hope you’re not, you know, uh…”
“I’m cool, bro.” Again, Clarence laughs. “Hell, Mozart! I ain’t branded her. She can do whatever she wants. Whoever she wants.”
“Well, hey, thanks for everything.”
“No problem. So where you headed now?”
“Home, I guess.”
“You remember who you are yet?”
“No.”
“Must make you feel free,” Clarence says. “Must be like parole. I mean, you can do whatever you want. You can start all over. You can be anybody you wants to be.”
“Sure.”
“That’s a good deal. I’d take it in a heartbeat, man. You know it? You know what I’d do for it? To start over like that? Man, I’d be a whole different mother. You was born with no family, you was brought up with no choices, you got no God you pray to and, most of all, you got no regrets.” This last part seems to resonate most with Clarence Wilcox. “Man, no regrets. You ain’t sorry for all the bad shit you done because you don’t know you done it.”
“Yeah,” I say, and wonder if Clarence realizes how poignant his statement is.
“Smoke?” Clarence offers me the pack.
“No, thanks.”
“I know a psychic. Name’s Fortune Cookie. She’s amazing, man. Swear to God. I can take you, if you want. Might be able to tell you a thing or two.”
“That’s okay.”
“She won’t charge, if that’s what you’re thinking. She owes me favors.”
“I don’t know if that’ll help.”
“So you’re a skeptic,” says Clarence. “See that? You’re piecing together bits of yourself as you go.”
“I guess I am,” I say. “Thanks, Clarence.”
“Listen,” says Clarence, crushing out the cigarette beneath the heel of his boot, “you need some work, come back in a few hours. I got a few stops to make for the business. You can help me load the truck, take it across town to the junkshops. You lend a hand, I’ll toss you a few bills. Sound good?”
“Yeah, it does. Thanks.”
“All right,” says Clarence. He’s already shaking a second cigarette out of the cellophane pack. “Take care of yourself, Mozart.”
The sun breaks over the horizon as I walk back toward the St. Paul complex. The sun surprises me. I have slept through the night after all; and in realizing this, I feel immediately refreshed. Along the street, coffee shops open and proprietors drag plastic chairs to the sidewalk. I have enough change left over from my theft of the bum’s Styrofoam cup yesterday to buy a newspaper. I slide the quarters into the box and remove a paper, glancing at the front page. A photograph of the President stares back at me. Folding the paper under one arm, I loiter outside a coffee shop, content to inhale the aroma of the percolating coffee inside. It isn’t until the proprietor makes numerous trips to the curb—eyeing me with mounting suspicion—that I decide to move on.
I am thinking of the woman at the apartment building’s office, the elderly woman who threatened to call the police. What lingers with me is her comment about a woman named Suzie, and how Suzie had called the police on me—or someone like me—a month ago. Had it been me? Had I visited the office a month earlier? Asking the same questions? And if so, was it for the same reason?
None of this makes any sense.
On a bench in a small park, I sit and read the day’s paper. The morning is warming up around me as the city comes awake. Helmeted cyclists in neon spandex stream down the bike paths while flocks of birds light onto the lawns to frolic and bathe in murky puddles. I read the entire newspaper, searching for some incident that may lend a clue toward my predicament—city-sponsored lobotomies, neighborhood muggings, car accidents, a soldier gone AWOL, anything at all no matter how ridiculous. But, of course, there is nothing. I read about a tanker truck that turned over in the Harbor Tunnel just two days ago. The article says nothing about injuries associated with the overturned tanker, but I wonder. Is it possible I was involved somehow? What sort of stuff do they carry in tanker trucks, anyway? Mind-erasing stuff?
Frustrated with the newspaper, I decide to spend the morning walking around the city, hoping the sights and sounds may jar my memory. Two hours go by and I am still blind to everything. And while the city does not seem completely foreign to me, I have no specific memory of this place.
* * *
The Light Street branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library sits at the intersection of Light and Ostend, three blocks from the crowded Cross Street Market. The library itself is unassuming and, on this late afternoon, quiet and empty.
Inside, I sit at a computer terminal toward the rear of the library and summon the Internet. What I type in the search box is the single phrase, “spontaneous amnesia,” and I watch as the Web pages accumulate. I search through a half dozen sites, but find nothing of substance. I cannot even tell if it is a legitimate medical condition.
Alone in the library, I think about what Clarence said—about having a clean slate and having no regrets. Regrets are what make us who we are, I think now. Regrets are the reason we are constantly changing. Does my lack of regret make me stagnant? Am I frozen in time? I wonder, From here on in, what choices will I make? Because my choices thus far have been poor. I think of Patrice and her saggy, married breasts, of the swirling lava city and the sobbing behind a locked bathroom door. People spread themselves thin, like beard stubble clogging drains. Swirling in inevitable infinity.
I also read up on the CIA and government spies. Because I could very well be a spy.
I could very well be anyone on the planet.
Because I do not have any identification, I cannot get a library card. So instead I smuggle a number of textbooks out under my coat, and no one is the wiser. These are textbooks I feel may enlighten me on my condition. They have enigmatic titles like Sleep the Mind and I Dream Awake and The Overactive Inactive. I steal a paperback copy of Homer’s The Odyssey as well. Because, in a way, I am on my own odyssey.
Despite the cold, I am sweating through my clothes by the time I walk halfway across the city back to Clarence’s apartment. I have no real desire to help Clarence work today but feel some nexus to real life in my commitment to do so. In the face of manual labor, I may find some self-worth, some personal substance. Ripened fruit to be picked. So I wait on the front stoop until an old pickup truck, leprous with rust and belching black plumes of exhaust, chugs around the side of the building and shudders to a standstill out front. Two bleats on the horn summon me to my feet. Without expression, I climb into the cab and am immediately overwhelmed by the aroma of marijuana and Slim Jims. Clarence, grinning behind the wheel, punches the pickup into gear and pushes the shuddering vehicle through the intersection.
“You look sick,” says Clarence.
“Maybe I am,” I say. “Maybe I’ve got some terminal disease. Maybe I’m dying right now.”
“Man, that’s a downer. You think? No, dog. Have a smoke.”
Clarence passes me a joint. I examine the smoldering twist of white paper and smell the sweet scent of the
burning weed before bringing it to my lips. I inhale and erupt in a series of coughs that causes Clarence to chuckle and retrieve the joint from my pinched fingers.
“Maybe you never been high,” says Clarence. “Maybe you even a cop. That’d be something, huh? Old Clarence chillin’ with the police.”
“I’m not the police.”
“How you know?”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Or maybe you the meanest mother around. Maybe you done shit make me turn white. Maybe you the worst kind of white boy. You know what I’m saying? Like, black dudes, they bad, they fuck you up. But white dudes—I mean, you ever see a black dude choppin’ people up and sticking ’em in the freezer, eating they skin and shit? That Jeffrey Dahmer psycho shit, I’m talking ’bout.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t have it in me.”
“Maybe not now,” says Clarence, “but maybe you did before. Maybe right now you just can’t remember all the horrible fucking things in your life that made you a people-eating psycho.”
“Jesus, Clarence…”
“Well,” he says, burning through a red light, “it don’t matter now. You can be whoever you want now. You gets to start over. You lucky.”
“I don’t feel lucky.”
“Sure,” says Clarence. “See, I had some opportunities to make something of myself. You know what I’m sayin’? Maybe I’d have a better job now. Maybe I wouldn’t have to move junk from one part of the city to the other. But now that’s what I do. But, see, you get to do it all over, start fresh. Man, that’s something!” He laughs. “Hey,” he says, “you think I can forget all my shit, too? How’d you do it, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Seriously,” Clarence says, “you think you’re really a governmental spy?”
“Sure,” I say, watching the row homes shuttle past the window, “why not?”
“Then we best be careful. You dig? Keep a lookout.”
“A lookout for what?”
“For the peoples who might be out there looking to kill you, dog.”
We spend the afternoon loading junk from different porches into the bed of Clarence’s pickup. The porches are all residential and they are scattered throughout the city. Often, there are people outside while we load the truck, and they offer us some coffee and, once, a plastic bag of potatoes. They all seem to know Clarence. Clarence works hard, whistling while he loads the truck, and we are both sweating and sore by the time we arrive at the Charles Street Salvation Depot and Auction Center. It is an eclectic little shop with headless mannequins dressed in sequined harem garb and an old-fashioned bicycle with an oversized front tire in the front window. Clarence winks and pulls the pickup down a brick alley that runs alongside the shop. Someone has sprayed the phrase nigel sweeny lives along the brick in bright orange letters. The pickup truck bucks and sputters and dies. We climb out and begin the arduous task of relocating the junk from the bed of the truck into the store.
Inside, the place is like a schizophrenic’s nightmare—a narrow corridor cluttered with relics of times forgotten, with papier-mâché parrots lazily twirling by lengths of catgut tacked to the ceiling tiles, with ceramic cats placed strategically about the floor like landmines, their eye sockets aglitter with emerald jewels. Crossing through the corridor, I pass into the store itself, and I am immediately overcome by the mustiness of the place. I get the feeling I’m breathing in the dust from an Egyptian tomb. An enormous rainbow-colored parachute covers the ceiling, bowing slightly at its center. Bric-a-brac gnomes patrol various shelves. The hide of an alligator or crocodile—I cannot tell which—is splayed and pinned to one wall, directly below the mounted head of a rabbit with antlers. A desk crowded with papers, books, a skateboard, a gold-leaf lamp in the shape of a nude woman, and a coonskin cap is shoved against one wall. Behind it stirs a parchment-faced man in his seventies with great tufts of white hair sprouting like kudzu over his ears and large, roaming blue eyes. A pair of suspenders is draped over his shoulders, but they hang loose, flapping against his ample belly and not affixed to his pants. Much like everything else in the place, those suspenders serve no purpose. Clarence sets down a bookcase he has carried from the bed of the pickup truck and introduces the proprietor to me as Wiley Jum.
“Jum,” says Clarence, “this here’s Moe. Short for Mozart.”
“H’do,” Wiley Jum growls, bobbing his head like a marionette.
“Moe here, he’s a governmental spy, Jum. Had his mind wiped clean after his las’ mission and now he’s workin’ for me.”
“Hmmm,” says Wiley Jum.
“How ’bout that, Jum? Got me a governmental spy on the payroll.”
“Hmmm.”
As we continue stacking items toward the rear of the shop, Clarence elbows me in the ribs and says, in a half-whisper, “This some racket, eh, Moe? I got fools payin’ me in cash to haul their crap away and Wiley Jum here payin’ me to stock his showroom. You can’t beat a deal like that with a stick, Moe.”
“Who buys this stuff, anyway?”
“People who prob’ly make more money selling it somewhere else. Making more money than me. I ain’t sayin’ I’m the smartest cat on the food chain, you dig?” Clarence wipes his nose on his sleeve. “But even if they buy it, they’ll put it out on the curb eventually, and old Clarence will come and haul it away all over again. See this lamp? I done hauled this lamp three times already. Some goddamn lamp.” He smiled like someone who’d figured out the secret of life. “Now that’s the racket, boy.”
There is a rocking horse, a grandfather clock, a collection of old bicycle tires hanging from a peg in the wall…
It takes a good twenty minutes to relocate all the junk from Clarence’s pickup truck to Wiley Jum’s shop. In all that time, no one enters the place. When we finish, Clarence slouches against the cluttered desk while Wiley Jum digs around in an antique cash register with stumpy fingers. Wiley Jum counts some money in a language that does not sound like English then fits Clarence’s hand with a fistful of bills.
“Right on,” mutters Clarence.
Through a labyrinth of junk, I see an old upright grand. It is slouched in one corner, bookended by an old Naugahyde sofa and a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo, and burdened with time-dulled knickknacks, busted lampshades, dusty hardcover books with frayed corners, and what appears to be the speaker horn from an old phonograph. I negotiate the labyrinth of junk, using the arms of coat-racks and the backs of dining room chairs as handholds, and arrive at the keyboard like a Sherpa at the crest of a Himalayan mountain. The keyboard is powdered with bone-colored dust and absent a number of important keys. I crouch and blow a stream of air over the keyboard, causing a sandstorm of yellow dust to billow and shimmer around my head. There is a circular stool on rolling casters off to one side. I roll it before the keyboard—it squeals and rattles—and settle down on it. My hands lift, poise, my fingers splayed and strong, and I begin to play.
I begin with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata then segue into the melody of Dave Brubeck’s “Once When I Was Very Young.” The higher keys refuse to cooperate (and some are just missing) but the melody is all there. I play it simply and professionally, yet I do not know how I know it. I cannot remember when I have learned these ballads—when I had first listened to them on a record or perhaps live in concert somewhere—but I know them as if they are my own.
After a few bars of the Brubeck number, I pause for a measure with my fingers holding down the low octaves, the deep-voiced resonance echoing in the cluttered little shop. Then I scale to middle-C and continue, this time playing the unknown, sad little melody I played that night at the Samjetta while Patrice watched from across the barroom. That sad yet happy number.
When I finish, the last of the notes seem to simmer and die down all around me. I can almost hear them fading into the floor.
Clarence is clapping at the other end of the room. Wiley Jum looks cockeyed and bored behind his counter, the flaps of his unhooked suspender
s bowing over the ample hillock of his gut.
“Check you out,” Clarence says as I get up and tread back through the maze of junk. “I didn’t know you could play like that.”
“Yeah,” I say, “I’m full of surprises.”
“He’s something, ain’t he, Jum?”
“Hmmmm,” says Jum.
“An’ he’s workin’ for me.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Hey, Mozart,” Clarence says. “Hey…”
But I am no longer paying attention to Clarence. I am focused on a single item tucked between a filthy-looking upholstered armchair and a highboy that could use a good refinishing. A small little thing, something I did not see until now…
Clarence comes up behind me, pokes me in the ribs. “What’s up, Moe? Find somethin’ else you like?”
“How much is this?” I ask, pointing to the item. It is a gumball machine—a glass fishbowl atop a two-foot-tall iron pedestal painted bright red. The fishbowl is only half-full of the small, colored gumballs.
“Hey, Jum!” Clarence yells. “How much you want for this thing?”
Wiley Jum says something that still does not sound like English, although Clarence apparently comprehends.
“Twelve bucks,” says Clarence. “You like gum, Moe?”
“Tell him to hold it for me. I’ll come back and get it when I have the money.”
“Get it now,” Clarence says, and stuffs a wad of bills into the breast pocket of my shirt. “Fifty clams. Thanks for the help, Moe. Some good biceps on them scrawny arms.”
I purchase the gumball machine and lug it back to Clarence’s pickup.
“You like gum, Mozart?”
“I don’t know, Clarence.”
Clarence laughs. “You sure a strange cat, Moe.”
We drive through Mount Vernon and negotiate around the Washington Monument toward a series of fire-scarred tenements farther up the block. We make a few more stops, depositing the last of the swill we collected all morning, and just when I think Clarence will drive me home, we pull up outside a Chinese restaurant on Calvert Street called Fung.