Walking Shadow

by Clifford Royal Johns

  The waiter, who didn’t have any apparent way to record our requests, began to squint halfway through her order and had his mouth hanging open in concentration by the end. He walked off, still concentrating, into the kitchen where I was sure he promptly wrote the whole thing down. It wasn’t that complicated of an order, but I figured he must be new or he’d have known the breed of cattle.

  “I thought cognac was an after-dinner drink,” I said.

  “Oh, well then I’ll have to have one after dinner as well. With my dessert, perhaps.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, resisting the urge to pull out my swipe cards to make sure I had enough fake money in them to cover Carla’s tastes. My cards didn’t have the amount displayed on the outside anyway. How much was really on them was a mystery even to me. It had taken months of careful experimentation, but I’d figured out how to modify the amount by some random quantity by putting them in the oven with a magnet on top and the temperature set at a hundred C, but it destroyed the display. I hoped that the three empty cards I had found and baked that morning would cover the meal.

  I tried not to look nervous while I glanced around to find the emergency exit, just in case the cards wouldn’t cover the bill. “How long have you worked for Forget What?”

  “Three years,” she said too quickly. “What do you do?”

  “Retired.”

  She leaned back in her chair so the waiter could place the cognac in front of her. When he was gone, she said, “You’re a little young to be retired, aren’t you? Or are you just well-preserved? I’ve heard they can do that now.” She was teasing me. I assumed Paulo told her enough about me for her to know I was on the dole.

  “No more preserved than a beer now and then will make you,” I said. “Were you in on my session? Did you watch?”

  “I’m in marketing. I don’t know anything about the actual forgetting stuff. I just know a few of the people who do it.”

  She tilted her head to the right, leaned forward, and clasped her hands together on the table. “If you’re retired,” she said, “what do you do in your spare time? Or, I guess it’s all spare, isn’t it?”

  She wasn’t really interested. Leaning forward and acting attentive was a ruse. When people are actually listening and interested they aren’t that obvious about it. You can always tell when someone is faking by how perfectly they portray the part. A drunk will act so elaborately normal that his drunkenness is obvious to everyone.

  I could take a hint. I said, “Maybe all my time is spare time, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.”

  Carla didn’t want the conversation to be about her. I figured she just wanted to get her meal, so I waited quietly for the food while I looked around the restaurant. The walls were adorned with paintings of bowls of fruit, vases of flowers and somber gold-shaded portraits of frowning people staring down at us under the tasteful pink-cast light—still-lifes and lifeless stills. The two people at the next table over were having some kind of Mongolian beef dish that contained big lumps of fat. They were both enormous men in dark suits. They were sharing a bottle of vodka and were talking loudly in some language that seemed to be composed entirely of “s” and “sh” sounds.

  Carla kept glancing at me. She seemed to expect me to say more, but I’d decided I wasn’t going to blab on about inconsequential things. I didn’t want to become inconsequential by association.

  I found Carla’s attitude a little annoying, but in a pleasant, familiar sort of way, like an old friend whose customary habits irritate you more and more as your friendship grows. It’s interesting that those very same habits are what you miss about the person when they’re gone.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to ridicule. I’m just a little anxious—and hungry. Can we try again?”

  “Sure,” I said. I looked over the edge of the table and down at her foot which was still waving the tablecloth up and down. I could feel the breeze on my legs. “Are those your dancing shoes?”

  She looked down. Her foot stopped kicking. “Okay, I deserved that.”

  “I like your earrings. They accent your ears,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s so much better. And I think your forehead makes you look smart. It’s just the right size. It goes all the way down to your eyebrows.”

  The waiter brought the salads. Carla found a smudge on the salad fork and made him take it back. “He’ll probably lick off the dirt and hand the same one back in a minute,” she said, leaning forward and observing him carefully. We watched him together as he stared at the fork for a moment, presumably not believing there could actually be a smudge on it, then he dropped it in a plastic bus tray and picked up another. As he turned to come back to the table, Carla and I looked at each other and shrugged in unison, then laughed as co-conspirators.

  She pointed behind me to a portrait of a gray haired man in a brown suit whose pinched visage regarded us disdainfully. “We shouldn’t be having fun in front of him, should we? I think he might not have had any fun in his entire life.” She pushed out her lower lip a little and tilted her head down and to the left, then she slowly lifted her gaze up to look at me; pouting, bashful, and repentant all at the same time.

  “If you keep that act up any longer, I think he’ll be out of that portrait and inside your dress.”

  She kept up the act. “Would you be jealous?”

  “Of a two-dimensional old man wearing a scowl? Yes.”

  She batted her lashes and smiled, then tilted her head back and laughed a loud honest laugh that made people turn in their chairs and stare. Their expressions matched the expression on the portrait.

  Carla surveyed the room. “Why do you think the people in the portraits all have such sour expressions?”

  “Because all they can do is watch others eat?”

  Carla thought about that for a moment as though the question were important. “Maybe. It makes you wonder what their pasts were like that made them so unhappy.”

  “Look not mournfully into the past. It comes not back again,” I said, quoting Longfellow, who was quoting someone else.

  OK, it sounds like a dreary aphorism, but I’d always thought of it as an enlightened view of what’s important, the future. Carla’s eyes widened then she scrunched her face in consternation. She seemed to have discovered something hidden in that quote that quieted her.

  It took Carla twenty minutes to eat a real prime rib that looked bigger than her head. When she sat back, apparently satisfied and back to her flirtatious self, I asked her again for my transcript. She pulled from her purse a crumpled copy of the red end-of-the-earth flier the urban Jesus had been distributing and handed it to me. “Maybe you should read this instead.”

  I took the flier. “Are you concerned for my salvation?”

  “I don’t know. Do you need saving?”

  “I’m hoping God has a sense of humor.”

  “What about after He stops laughing?”

  I pictured myself standing at the gate with God, Him bent over, hands on knees, incapacitated with laughter at the idea of me getting into heaven.

  Looking at Carla, I somehow knew she was imagining the same scene. I could see it in her eyes. She smiled her bright light smile, and I gave her a goofy smile back. We sat there for a moment, lost in a mutual awareness of how easy and relaxed we were together.

  Someone took our plates away. Carla ordered flan and another cognac for dessert. I passed; my stomach felt tight.

  Carla reached in her purse and came out with a sealed envelope. “Well, I guess I can give you this now.”

  It was the transcript for my forget session. I took the envelope and held it in front of me, but I suddenly dreaded reading it. I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what I saw, heard, or did that forced me to such a drastic measure. “Thanks,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it.

  Before I had the transcript, I’d thought getting a copy and reading it would answer all my nagging questions and the issue would be resolved. Now that I had the
transcript in my hand, I worried that nothing would be resolved and all I’d get by reading it would be more information about myself than I really wanted to know. Maybe Longfellow was right.

  I realized I had been gazing at Carla’s eyes while I was thinking. She stared back at me, waiting. She expected a reaction. Her eyes felt good on my face. I smiled. “I think I’ll read this later.”

  The waiter delivered the flan. I settled back and watched while Carla ate it and took sips from her second cognac. “I appreciate you going to all this trouble for me,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it. That was a nice dinner. I can’t remember the last time I had a prime rib of that quality and that perfectly prepared. It was almost creamy.”

  “Maybe next time I feel like going out to dinner someplace nice, maybe I’ll give you a call.”

  “If you do, maybe I’ll go with you.” She looked at her wrist. “But right now I’m afraid I have to go.”

  Carla stood, so I stood. She said good-bye and wove her way through the now crowded tables toward the foyer. I sat back down and wondered if she was aware of me watching her as she walked. I told myself again she was not my type. I liked her anyway. At the door, she glanced over her shoulder at me and smiled. I couldn’t help but grin back. OK, maybe she was my type. I couldn’t really remember what my type was anyway.

  When no one was looking, I swiped my first pay card at the table reader. It didn’t register at all. Sometimes that happened. The second one paid a quarter of the bill. I ate the after dinner mint then tried the last card which luckily had enough for the rest of dinner including a generous tip. It would take the restaurant a couple days to figure out I hadn’t paid them in real money. I wouldn’t be able to come back, but there were other good restaurants.

  I walked out the door of Beef Tucuman and into a Chicago slanting mist. The transcript burned in my pocket, hot as an unopened love letter.

  Chapter 4

  There are some things I just don’t want to know. For instance, I don’t want to know when I will die, but I’m sure, if someone wrote it on a piece of paper and laid it face down on the table in front of me, I couldn’t resist looking. I also know I would regret knowing as soon as I looked.

  I didn’t really want to know what was in the transcript either, but I felt like I had a gun in my pocket, and it was about to go off.

  I’d planned to go home and read the transcript there, but my curiosity overcame my need for privacy. I stopped in the lobby of the Cuban Hotel. Only the rich could travel now that air travel was mostly gone, so the Cuban was one of the few hotels left in Chicago. They built their reputation on luxury and a sense of insulation from the real world.

  I sat down in one of their big stuffed chairs and pulled out the envelope. I stared at it. Opening it was like opening my front door: It might be a friend just stopping by, it might be someone selling their religion, it might be the police, or it might be a big guy with a knife who wants your PAL to sell for parts and all your food and toilet paper and who gets mad when you only have half a tube of peanut butter and ten sheets of toilet paper and tells you that you should get a job.

  I looked up at the mural on the ceiling, a few cherubs and a rosebush, steeled myself against the worst possibilities the transcript might reveal, and finally peeled the flap and pulled the transcript out of the envelope.

  The transcript was of me talking about the memory I wanted forgotten so they could get a good fix on the brain locations. The transcript had details because the memory had to be focused for erasure to be accurate, complete, and not destroy too many unrelated memories.

  It seems I went back to Quaker Street where Chen liked to thatch people. It’s brightly lit, so it’s easy to get good video of the victim. I’d looked for him, finally finding him in a darker alley where he liked to wait for the right prey. He was dead on the ground. I said I checked his neck for a pulse, but saw an ivory sliver of bone from his broken head sticking out above his left ear. The moment in my life I had chosen to forget was when I found Chen dead, his head bashed in, but his face recognizable.

  I had repeatedly told them I wanted everything about the alley erased from my mind. Apparently seeing Chen dead was quite traumatic for me.

  I carefully refolded the paper and put it back in the envelope. I slouched down in my chair. So I’d seen Chen dead, but of course, he wasn’t. I’d just gone thatching with him the night before, and the forget was done back in early September. Still I had to review this fact to convince myself of something I already knew because I’d been so immersed in imagining the forgotten scene.

  There were two possibilities. Someone might have faked the transcript, but I couldn’t think who would misdirect me like that or why. Or, I’d described a fake memory, and why would I describe a fake memory in such detail? The picture created by the transcript of Chen’s broken head was firmly set in my brain, and even though it was a created memory, it felt real.

  The Cuban was a polished place. The brass trash cans reflected the grain from the waxed wood floor and the chandelier’s lights left no shadows. A swarthy, sweaty man in a blue linen suit and white shoes stood talking to a woman behind the desk. He pointed at me and asked her a question. She squinted at me, tapping a cardkey on the mahogany surface.

  They didn’t want me there. I wasn’t dressed in proper attire. They couldn’t let just anyone sit in their chairs. Could they just throw me out, or was I meeting a guest? Someone important might come in or go out, and I would be a distraction. The woman fidgeted and whispered to the man. I stood, briefly bowed and left. I didn’t want any trouble at that particular moment, though I noted to myself that some fun could be had at the Cuban if I ever felt like teasing the staff.

  As I walked down Bigbash, head bowed to the gritty wind, I imagined the dead Chen going up to the front desk at a forget place and asking them to make him forget he was dead. The idea amused me. Once he forgot, he could then go back to his regular life, only slightly the worse for having died, but having to wear a hat because of the bone sticking out of his head.

  I looked up into the wind to make sure I wasn’t about to walk into any posts or people and saw a woman approaching who wore a hat which looked remarkably like a headless duck. It was a bulb on top of her head covered with white feathers and red feathers on either side. She stumbled along with one hand on top of her bird to hold it down. Dead Chen would look dapper in a hat like that. I stopped and laughed out loud. She stopped and stared at me. I imagine she hoped to intimidate me into thinking she wasn’t goofy looking. I stared back, and she waddled off.

  It crossed my mind at this point that the police might have figured out I knew Chen. Chen was apparently always in trouble with the police, or at least he was always hiding from them. The police might have mocked this transcript, intending to force me to reveal his address to get myself out of trouble for not reporting a murder, or perhaps for murder itself. But the strategy was too complicated for the police. They were more blunt and tactless. If they wanted Chen, and knew I knew where he was, they’d shove a gun barrel in my ear and make me tell them. They’d probably enjoy it, seeing that I was on the dole and all. No, it wasn’t the police.

  A buzzcar gunned its turbo just as it passed overhead and blew a pebble up my nose. I shuddered at that gritty scrape getting the stone back out. It happened to me twice before and both times, I wished I could afford a buzzcar buzzer. Just press the button and the car dropped to the ground like the pebble that had been up my nose. They were special police gear, but you could buy buzzers Under The River if you knew who to ask, and if you had a pot of money.

  Perhaps Chen had tampered with the transcript. It would amuse him to put himself into my transcript as a dead guy. Chen’s sense of humor was a bit zapped. He liked to talk loudly in public about losing his penis in a badminton accident. Yet I couldn’t see why he would bother to falsify my transcript if he didn’t get to see me as I read it. He wouldn’t think it was fun unless he could watch. For a moment, I thought he migh
t have been in disguise as one of the big Mongolian men at the next table, but he wouldn’t have let the whole charade go by without revealing himself.

  It was also possible that the entire transcript was a fabrication. Either way, someone had to have enough interest in my memory to bother to fake it, and I was worried it wasn’t Chen. Chen’s reasons would be simple. He would want to get back at me for poking him in the nose after he thatched me, or he would be playing a little joke on me. If it wasn’t Chen, then the transcript might represent a shot across my bow. It could mean someone wanted my memory wiped for a reason I didn’t know.

  I decided to go back to Chen’s and ask him about it. This time I approached his apartment by going in the E’Clair Street entrance, through the service corridors, and walking up three flights. I was thinking about Carla’s ears and upswept hair and walked five or six steps down the hall before I looked up and saw police at the far end of the hall, outside Chen’s apartment. There were three of them, and two were looking at me. One was a uniform and the other was a suit wearing a hundred year old fedora and a blond goatee. Chen’s apartment door was open. A few of the other residents peered out their doorways down the hall, and one round man in a white undershirt, boxers and flip-flops talked animatedly to the third cop.

  I turned to the first apartment and knocked, trying to appear indifferent, but aware of the goatee man’s watchful eye. A woman opened the door. She had a bottle of derpal in her hand, obviously unaware of the police investigation underway just down the hall. I asked her if she’d found Jesus and handed her the end-of-the-earth flier Carla had given me. It was hard to resist glancing at the cops.

  “Look mister, if you’re selling something, I’m not buying, and if you’re trying to convert me, I’m already converted.” She slammed the door. I winced at the sound, trying to imagine what the cops were thinking. I turned back to the stairs without looking at the police again and walked home on the wide empty sidewalks of Fate Street.