The Last Thing I Remember

by Andrew Klavan

  He jabbed at me with the knife again. Jabbed and slashed, making me dance backward. He laughed at that. He crooked his hand at me, beckoning.

  “What’s the matter, punk?” he said. “You afraid? Come and get it. Come on, come on and I’ll show you what I . . .”

  In the middle of his sentence, I brought my right foot swinging up from the ground in an arc. It’s called a crescent kick. Even though you’re standing in front of a guy, it comes looping around at him from the side. The drunk didn’t see it until it hit him. Then the edge of my foot struck him in the wrist. The impact knocked the knife right out of his hand. The knife hit the brick wall and fell to the sidewalk with a metallic clatter.

  The drunk went for the knife, but I was there first. I let the force of my kick carry me forward and brought my foot stomping down on the weapon where it had fallen. At the same time, I grabbed the front of the drunk’s shirt with my right hand and drew my left hand back, ready to strike at his eyes or throat.

  All the gleam was gone out of those eyes now, and his snarling laughter was gone too. His mouth was open in surprise and his hands were up in fear, and I could feel him shaking, waiting helplessly for me to strike. Yeah, he was a big man when he was roughing up a woman, when he was pulling a knife on an unarmed man. But he was just a bully—a drunk and a bully and a coward.

  I shoved him away from me.

  “Get out of here,” I told him.

  For another second, he stood there, staring at me with that same frightened look on his face. Then he frowned—a sulky, little-boy frown as if he were being sent to bed without his supper.

  “What about my knife?” he said.

  I laughed. You have to laugh. People are nuts sometimes. “Go on,” I said. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  Frowning, sulking, he began to edge away from me. Weakly, he muttered, “Punk. Why couldn’t you just mind your own business?”

  I didn’t even bother to answer. I stood where I was, my foot on the knife. He kept edging away, edging away. He edged into the light again—the circle of light from the streetlamp.

  Then, with a last scowl, he turned and slunk off, out of the light into the darkness, and he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Crazy Jane

  I turned around, looking for the woman. She was gone as well. I figured she’d run off while I was dealing with the drunk. So here I was alone on the street again and still with no idea where to go, or what to do next.

  I bent down and picked up the knife the drunk had dropped. I looked at it. It was a crummy old thing, a switchblade, good for nothing but stabbing people. I drew back my arm and hurled it into the night. I heard it give a distant chuck as it hit the gravel on the train tracks.

  I started walking again along the line of warehouses. I got about ten steps before a hand shot out of the darkness and grabbed my arm.

  I turned. It was the woman, the woman who’d been attacked. She was hiding in a recessed doorway. As she took hold of me, she stepped out, peering up at me intently.

  I looked down at her. She was small. Her torn gray overcoat dwarfed her. She had a large, round face with a strangely innocent, even childlike expression. Her cheeks and forehead were covered in grime and red sores. Her brown hair was so filthy it was matted into dreadlocks. She was so dirty I couldn’t tell how old she was—not very old, I thought, maybe thirty or something. She had large, almond-shaped green eyes that moved over me quickly and nervously.

  Her voice was a low murmur. “I know you,” she said. She said it dreamily, in this kind of distant, eerie tone.

  I felt my arm go tense in her hand. “Oh yeah?”

  She nodded, a quick, squirrel-like motion. Then, glancing this way and that, she said, “Come with me.”

  She took me to the corner and down a street, then to another corner and down another street. The whole time she was talking to herself—or maybe she was talking to me, I couldn’t be sure. She was talking very fast in that dreamy, low murmur, saying stuff like, “Jane knows . . . they sent the knife-man to keep her quiet . . . about the impulses . . . they’re electric, you understand . . . mind control . . . but they can’t get Jane . . .” She kept hold of my arm, moving along beside me with small, swift steps. She kept her eyes moving, too, scanning this way and that. Once, suddenly, she drew me into the alcove of a warehouse bay and we hid there. “They’re coming. They’re coming. Jane knows . . . ” she murmured. I figured she was crazy. There was nothing to hide from. I didn’t hear or see anything to be afraid of, anyway. But the woman said again: “They’re coming. Jane knows.” And it turned out she was right: a few moments later, some hulking thugs went by, a small gang of them. We waited in the alcove till they were gone.

  We walked on, Jane holding my elbow, murmuring the whole way. Finally, we came to an old brick apartment building, its walls practically black with graffiti. Some of the windows were broken, but there were lights on in some of the others. I caught glimpses of shadows moving inside, so I knew the place wasn’t deserted.

  “They haven’t found this . . . my hideaway . . . my secret place . . . they don’t know about it . . . the impulses can’t come here . . .”

  She pushed the front door open. There was no lock. Murmuring crazily, holding on to my arm, she drew me up the stairway. The second floor was destroyed, abandoned, the same as the building I’d hidden in before. But on the third floor there were walls and doors. Some of the doors were shut, and light came out from underneath them. I heard some low music coming from behind one of the others.

  We climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. Then she drew me down the hallway to her door. It was locked with a padlock. The woman—Jane—finally let go of my arm in order to fish the key out of her huge overcoat.

  “It’s the door, that’s why,” she murmured. “It’s special. The electricity can’t get through. It’s blocked.”

  She unlocked the padlock and pushed inside. I followed her.

  The air in the apartment was dense and gnarly. It smelled bad, like a litter box that hadn’t been emptied in a long time. Sure enough, as soon as I stepped over the threshold, I heard cats mewing. Jane pressed a switch. A dim yellow light came on in the ceiling. And there they were: three cats—one black, one orange, one gray. The gray one took an exploratory pass through my legs, then all three of them clustered around Jane’s feet. Jane went on murmuring, but she was murmuring to the cats now, her tone more tender than before. She rigged an iron bar across the door as a makeshift lock. She was talking to the cats the whole time. “There they are, safe and sound, my darlings . . . the impulses can’t touch them here . . . none of that nasty mind control for my beautiful darlings . . . Jane will protect you . . .”

  The cats, meanwhile, wove in and out between her feet, tumbling over one another and meowing. She had to step carefully not to fall over them as she moved away from the door. The cats continued to follow her as she stooped down and turned on a small electric space heater sitting in one corner. Then she moved on into the kitchenette, murmuring to the cats as the cats mewed back at her.

  I looked around. The apartment was one room, and it was an unholy mess. The walls were all cracked and chipped. Some of them even had holes broken through the plaster so you could see the beams and wires underneath. There were great big black plastic bags everywhere—in the corners, against the wall, up on a counter in the kitchenette. The bags were stuffed full of what looked like junk as far as I could see: old clothes and broken appliances and cans and bottles and stuff like that.

  There was an old dirty mattress lying on the floor and a lamp standing next to it with no lampshade. There was a chair, too, a dirty old canvas chair, set low to the ground like a beach chair.

  And then there were the newspapers. They were all over the place. They were everywhere. They were taped to the wall like wallpaper. They covered the floor like a carpet. They were stacked between the plastic bags. They lay littering the bed and the chair. Newspapers on top of newspapers. The place was practicall
y stuffed with them.

  I looked over to the kitchenette. There was a microwave oven on the counter in there, and some stacks of food cans and some spotty bowls and glasses. There were no kitchen cabinets, but you could see the marks on the wall where they’d been torn down. There were more newspapers there too—on the wall, on the counter, and on the floor.

  Jane stood in the kitchenette with the cats twining around her ankles. She was cranking a can opener around a can of cat food.

  “Have to eat to keep your strength . . . for the big fight when they come . . . they sent a knife-man after Jane tonight, my babies . . . but then he came . . . mm-hmm . . .

  because he knows . . . because they’re after him, too, just like Jane . . .”

  The cats fell over one another as she spooned some cat food out into a bowl for them and set it on the floor. They took their places around the bowl and ate hungrily.

  “Just like Jane . . . mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You hungry?”

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. “Oh,” I said. “No. Thank you, ma’am. I’m fine. I ate a little while ago.” Even before I finished, she had gone off muttering again, chattering softly in that same dreamy, eerie tone.

  She had gone to work opening another can now, a can of soup. She poured it into a bowl and set the bowl in the microwave, chattering softly all the while it cooked. Finally, she brought it out and carried the bowl over to the mattress. Newspapers on the mattress crumpled as she sat down on them. She huddled there, blowing on the soup, still talking softly.

  “If they think so, they don’t know Jane . . . not me, not Jane . . . electric rays, impulses, connections . . . that’s what they know, that’s what they think . . . but not Jane . . . Take a seat, Charlie . . . I’m not afraid of them . . . I’m not going to let them in . . . we know, don’t we?”

  I stood staring at her. She had called me by my name. Take a seat, Charlie. Out in the street, when she said, “I know you,” she was telling the truth. She had recognized me. She knew who I was.

  “Go on, go on,” she said. “Take a seat.”

  I hesitated another moment, unsure what to do. Should I run away? Would she turn me in? Then I just said, “Thank you, ma’am.” And I moved to the canvas chair and lowered myself into it. I watched as she lifted the bowl of soup to her lips. She sipped at it noisily, her dreadlocks falling around her face.

  “You know my name,” I said.

  She came out of the soup and murmured, “Charlie West. Mm-hmm. Jane knows. It’s in the papers.”

  She patted the space around herself on the mattress. She found the page she wanted and handed it to me. I took it. Fugitive Killer Caught, said the headline. There was my picture underneath it, right on the front page. I was staring into the camera with wide, frightened eyes. It was a mug shot. They must’ve taken it when I was arrested for Alex’s murder.

  “They got ahold of you, didn’t they?” the lady said. “They got hold of you and put out the word, oh yes. Electricity, that’s how they do it. Impulses. Mind control. Oh, they can make you believe anything. They put it in the papers and everyone goes along. Jane knows how it works.”

  I actually smiled a little at that. It felt like I hadn’t smiled in a long time, not really. But it was funny: it was obvious that Jane was crazy, but at the same time, what she was saying made a certain amount of sense too.

  “You’re not afraid of me, then?” I asked her. “You don’t think I’m a killer, like the paper says.”

  “Oh.” She gave a laugh and blew on her soup, leaning into it for warmth. “Oh no, Jane knows you’re not a killer. Jane knows. It doesn’t make sense, does it? If you were a killer, you wouldn’t have saved Jane from the knife-man, would you? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  I scratched my head at that, wondering. Because again, she was right, wasn’t she? It didn’t make sense. Maybe I was just as crazy as she was, but, strange as it may sound, the thought kind of touched me. Here I’d been worrying about whether maybe I really was a bad guy—maybe I was a killer like Detective Rose said. But Jane—Crazy Jane—had come up with the answer. If I was a bad guy, I wouldn’t have helped her. If I was a killer, I wouldn’t be the person I was. I was grateful to Jane for understanding that and for explaining it to me. I was grateful to her for believing in me—even if she was crazy.

  Unfortunately, the next thing I knew she was babbling pure nonsense again. “They try to put those things in my head, you know, make me believe them. With electricity. Impulses. But not Jane. They can’t get Jane. That’s why they sent the knife-man. Because I won’t believe the voices. The impulses don’t work on me. I know what they’re up to. I know.” She lifted the bowl and slurped some more soup from it.

  I was confused now. If some of what she said was true, how did I know the rest wasn’t? “Uh . . . who sent the knife-man?” I asked her. “Who sends the impulses?”

  She looked this way and that, as if she was afraid someone was listening in. Then she leaned toward me and whispered, “The people from the hospital. They’re the ones. It’s mind control, that’s what it is. They say, no, no, no, no, no, no, but . . .” She shook her finger in the air and laughed at that idea. “Jane knows.”

  I shivered, but I don’t think it was because of the cold. In fact, the little space heater was beginning to warm the place up pretty nicely. It was just kind of spooky being here with her, listening to her weaving between craziness and good sense. So many insane things had happened to me in the last couple of days, it was getting hard to tell which was which.

  “They’re all around, you know,” she said.

  I licked my dry lips. “Oh yeah?”

  “Mm-hmm. The ones from the hospital. Trying to take me back. The ones who are trying to get you. They’re everywhere.”

  I nodded. Again, it was sort of crazy and sort of true at the same time.

  “You can’t know who to trust,” she said.

  “That’s right. I don’t,” I told her.

  “You don’t know how to escape.”

  “I don’t. They’re everywhere, looking for me.”

  “Mm-hmm. Jane knows. Every time you think you’ve figured out what’s what, they change the whole face of things, don’t they?”

  “Yes!”

  “Pretty soon you’re not even sure who you are anymore. You’re not even sure if their lies are really lies and your truth is really true.”

  I shook my head. “I just wish I could remember.”

  “Mm-hmm. Jane knows.” She looked at me hard with her big, quick, almond eyes. Her round, innocent face was very serious and intense beneath all the grime. It was as if she felt we had connected with each other, that we were on the same wavelength. It gave me a weird feeling, to understand her, to be in sympathy with her, and to know she was completely mad.

  “They want to take away your freedom,” she said.

  “They do,” I said. “They do.”

  “They want to kill you.”

  “I know it.”

  She looked back and forth, this way and that, as if they might burst in on us any minute. “They have plans. Big plans.”

  “I know! They want to kill Richard Yarrow!”

  I don’t know why I told her that. It just sort of came out of me. I mean, we were talking and she was describing things so exactly. I just sort of fell into the conversation as if I were chatting with a sane person. Well, why not, you know? I was all alone, after all. I had no one else to share things with. There was just me and Crazy Jane.

  “Richard Yarrow,” Jane answered in a hushed, awestruck voice. Her green eyes darted back and forth.

  I nodded. “He’s coming to visit the president tomorrow. They’re planning to kill him somehow, and I don’t know what to do. Everyone wants to arrest me and no one will believe me.”

  “They’ll never believe you,” Jane echoed.

  “I know. And I can’t just sit by and let Yarrow die.”

  “Yarrow,” she echoed. Then her mouth formed a circle. Her
big eyes got bigger still. “O-o-o-oh,” she said on a great long breath. “I know Yarrow.”

  As I sat in the canvas chair, watching, she set her soup bowl aside and came off the mattress. She started to crawl along the floor on her hands and knees, her eyes searching the newspapers lying under her. The newspapers crinkled and crunched as she moved over them. Soon, comically enough, the cats finished eating and came over and joined her. They rubbed up against her flanks. The four of them—the lady and the cats—crawled around the floor on all fours, Jane’s eyes scouring the newspapers the whole time. It was one of the strangest things I think I’d ever seen.

  Finally, she repeated, “Yarrow.” She picked another newspaper page up off the floor. Carrying the page, she crawled back to the mattress with the mewing cats crawling after her. When she’d sat down again, the cats climbed up on her and gathered in her lap. She handed the newspaper page over to me.

  153 Closed for Yarrow Visit, the headline read. There on the paper was a map very similar to the map I’d seen on TV earlier. It showed Richard Yarrow’s route from the airport to the president’s vacation home in the Green Hills. Underneath that was a photograph. It showed a whole bunch of state troopers in their khaki uniforms talking to four men in dark suits. The photograph’s caption said: “Secret Service agents brief state troopers on security arrangements for Yarrow’s 11 a.m. arrival.”

  I glanced over the news story. The lady sat on the mattress, watching me over the cats and murmuring to herself. The three cats stretched their faces up to her face and rubbed their bodies up against her.

  There was nothing much in the newspaper story that I didn’t know already. Yarrow had worked out a new plan to root out terrorism in the United States, and he was coming to present the plan to the president. In a recent speech, Yarrow had said that he felt the threat of terrorism here at home was increasing and had to be dealt with harshly.

  I was about to hand the newspaper back to the lady when something in it caught my eye. I wasn’t sure at first what it was. Something in that photograph of the Secret Service men with the troopers. I kept looking it over and it kept bothering me, but I couldn’t tell why.