I had Carla’s phone address, so I went into a coffee shop, picked up a used cup, so it would look like I had purchased something and used one of their PALs to back up her phone address to her street address. It’s not as hard as it sounds if you have the right database codes. It turned out she lived in the Unapartments just like Chen and Paulo. Not a big surprise since Paulo met her somewhere and where they lived seemed as likely as most places. She lived near the top floor. It wasn’t as noisy up there, if you could afford it.
I went to her apartment building, a trip I’d made many times before while visiting Chen, but everything along the way was suddenly more interesting. I looked at every detail and found it distinct and unique rather than just another store or window display or protruding hydrant pipe. There was a lot of stuff between the alley and the Unapartments that I’d never noticed before, but nothing as big as an alley.
Even my way of finding her apartment felt unusual. I just went up the vator and walked to her door. I didn’t need to take detours as I usually did at the Unapartments when going to Chen’s.
I knocked. Carla opened the door a moment later. Without thinking, I breezed in past her as though I went there every day. She had a tiny apartment, even compared to mine. The kitchen and the bed were right there together. There were only two doors, one to the hall I’d come through, and one presumably leading to a bathroom. The couch lay opened into a bed, taking up almost the whole room, and the blankets were in disarray. She’d painted the apartment in shades of blue like old German plates. The small table that held her PAL was white plastic with a blue stripe around the edge. A matching plastic chair was tucked under it.
“I heard about Chen,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry.”
I suddenly realized it was Monday afternoon. “Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be at work, or did you forget to set your alarm clock?”
She looked at me, dark brown hair, mussed up, and light gray eyes. Her face a little wrinkled from sleeping. “I don’t have a job. I got fired from the grocery,” she said as though it were true. “Do you want something?”
She wasn’t trying to hurry me up. She went over to the sink and drew a glass of water. “I’m afraid it’s all I have at the moment.”
“No, thanks. You don’t work for Forget What?”
“No. I’ve never worked for them, why?”
Carla seemed a different person from the one who had met me at the Tucuman. At dinner she had been lively and clever, now she was subdued and reticent. “How did you know Chen died?” I asked, changing the subject temporarily. “Have you seen Paulo?”
Carla sat down on the only stuffed chair. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for her to say something.
“I heard at the front door, from his neighbor, that the police are saying Chen killed himself after he killed Paulo. I am sorry. I guess they found a lot of derpal in the apartment. The police think they were drinking it through their noses and overdosed on it enough to make them crazy. The neighbor heard a lot of yelling and breaking things. He called the police.”
She said some more I didn’t catch; my mind had wandered. I hadn’t known Paulo was dead too. The police hadn’t let me in on that. It explained why the detective had thought it funny when he suggested that Paulo had killed Chen. I didn’t especially like Paulo. He worried a lot and nagged Chen about going out, but his death still took me aback.
Carla sat with her knees together and the glass of water held tightly in both hands resting on her knees. I watched her gently swirl the water while I thought about Paulo and Chen yelling and throwing things at each other. I knew they nosed derpal sometimes. It could well have gotten out of hand. Much as I wanted the police to be hiding something or making stuff up, their answer really seemed reasonable, even probable. But if they already knew who killed Chen, why had they interrogated me about it later?
“You have a marketing job at Forget What, remember?”
“No I don’t.”
“You got me some transcripts from there. Transcripts from my memory forgetting session.” She looked at me with her head tilted to one side, like a dog that hears an unusual, but unworrysome sound. “We had dinner,” I said.
“Oh, yes. I remember dinner. We should do that again sometime,” she said, and she smiled. She was real pretty when she smiled. I smiled back. Someone had given her a forget session too, but hers was recent and probably gratis. I hoped her change in personality was temporary disorientation from the forget.
Instead of focusing on the problem at hand, I noticed that she was wearing a nightgown that didn’t hide much. She had a friendly body and her just-awakened sleepiness made her appear especially warm and soft. I wanted to run my fingertips over the cloth that covered her breasts and feel that warmth and softness.
I stood and went to the door. She stood up and followed when I opened it, as though she were walking me out, but it was just a step. Like an idiot, I reached out and touched her hair. Her eyes opened wide for a second, then she looked down. I took a deep breath for no apparent reason, then left.
Walking home, I stopped by the VRcade and played a walk through a gang infested neighborhood, saved the pretty girl and shot the female gang leader in the head, but I was playing by rote. I wasn’t in the mood. Carla had made me think, and I couldn’t get her off my mind. Why had I pointed myself toward her in my forget session? Who was she? Why was she important? She didn’t seem to remember, and that was either because she wanted to forget me, or because someone else wanted her to forget me. Paulo hadn’t wanted her to be the one to give me my transcript. He’d balked when Chen suggested it, so Paulo probably knew why she was important to me, but he was dead. Chen probably knew, but he was dead too.
I went home shaking my head and stomping along in frustration, coat open, not feeling the cold and trying to forget the whole thing by focusing on the fall mist on my face.
This time Doorway and the detective with the yellow goatee, whose name I still didn’t know, were waiting for me at my apartment.
Chapter 8
The detective pushed me against the wall. “So you thought Chen was dead a month ago, huh? The forget you never paid for says otherwise. Let’s go to the station and talk about it.” He nodded to Doorway, who handcuffed me again.
“Couldn’t we just talk about it here? We could relax and have a beer and discuss the whole thing without having to make the trip.” I didn’t have any beer, but I didn’t really expect them to accept my offer.
The detective didn’t bother to respond, he just nodded to Doorway and off we went, back to the ceramic cat house. My neighbors didn’t even give me a send-off this time.
In the car, on the way to the police station, I decided that the transcript I was given must have been made up, or the police wouldn’t be taking me in again. If they’d read the same version of the transcript I had, it would not have elicited any more questions from the police than I’d already answered. I hadn’t put it together until then. It seemed that someone else had used North and Quaker instead of Morph and Quacker. I’d thought I had been very clever to have found a way to help my post-forget self track down the woman I loved, even after forgetting all about her. How annoying that the alley being named Carla was just a coincidence. That especially bothered me because now it appeared I was just making a sap of myself. I hadn’t left a clue for myself after all. Someone else had messed up, and I’d been out-thinking myself. Not that I was surprised by that.
We went past the sniffers and down the hall. Doorway showed me to the same back room again while the detective ducked into a side room.
I sat down in my usual chair. “Haven’t we been here before?” I said.
Doorway removed my left handcuff and attached it to the table. “Detective Kumar will be back in a minute,” he said. He left me alone in the silence with nothing to do but think. I decided I didn’t like the name Kumar. The guy himself didn’t do much for me either.
A few minutes later, a guard entered with the detective close behind. Kumar
walked in rubbing his yellow goatee as though in deep thought. “Benny, why did you think you could get away with lying about your forget?”
I looked at him, but didn’t answer. It was one of those questions you couldn’t answer without incriminating yourself, like, “Have you stopped kicking your dog, yet?”
Kumar continued, “The company must have told you they were going to report you. Are you remembering anything you should tell me? Are there any memories coming back to you?” He sat down in the other chair. He was doing his chummy act again.
I showed Kumar the transcript I’d been given. “It’s all I had to go on. You can’t blame me for not remembering what I forgot. No one does. And anyway, who’s to say which transcript is the real session and which one was faked?”
Like an idiot, I smiled. I saw the anger build in his eyes, but he didn’t hit me, or the table. He just smoldered for a while, thinking.
I was mixed up in something. He knew it, and I knew it, but neither of us knew what it was. I found that amusing. He didn’t.
“Are you playing a game with me, Benny?”
“I like games,” I said. “But the police don’t generally play fair.”
He leaned in close. He’d eaten curry. “Well, maybe I’ll change the rules. Police are allowed to do that, you know. You’ve shown me your transcript, now I’ll show you mine.” “Go get it,” he said to the guard while keeping his eyes on me.
The guard came back a minute later with a video headset and a memstick. Kumar had a video transcript of the session. He knew which transcript was the real one. This game was no fun.
I knew he would be watching my body language. Respiration and other indicators would be watched electronically in the next room. I tried to settle into the chair and watch objectively, but, to be honest, I was scared.
I put on the headset and watched myself talk through the memory I wanted forgotten. It wasn’t related to Chen or Paulo at all, but it was related to the alley and there was a dead person with his head bashed in. In fact, the transcript Carla had given me matched this one very closely but for one important detail. The dead person was not Chen, but someone apparently unknown to me. I told the doctors I wanted to forget I saw the body, just as my version of the transcript reported, but here, watching myself, I could tell there was some other memory I was hoping would vanish along with the memory of the body: the real thing I wanted to forget. I watched myself telling the doctor that I wanted to forget all about that alley, and I kept saying that over and over. The description of the body and the bone sticking out and all the other details were the same.
When the film ended, I reached up to hit the replay button, but the guard yanked the viewer off my head.
Kumar was in my face again. I decided it was a north Indian curry he’d eaten, maybe Pakistan. “Do you admit this is you?”
How could I not? The video could have been doctored, but it didn’t seem likely. The person on the screen sure acted like me. “Yes,” I said. “That certainly seems to be me.”
He climbed out of his chair and glanced at the wall to my right. “Was there anything surprising, anything different that you think might give us a clue about who the dead person was?” He looked at me closely now, expecting a reaction.
“I can’t think of anything. I obviously don’t remember things as happening differently.” We stared at each other for a while.
I had hoped to see Carla in the video of my forget session, but she wasn’t there. I didn’t recognize anyone in the room.
There were dubious things about this police interrogation, though. I had always been told that the police were not allowed to show the forgetter any written transcripts of their sessions without a court order, that way the integrity of the forget wouldn’t be compromised. In this case, Kumar had shown me actual video and hadn’t even bothered to mask the employees’ faces. I also thought the forget companies weren’t allowed to abet a crime, and allowing me to forget the dead body should have gotten their license revoked. What’s more, I should have been under arrest for having the forget done in the first place, or at least for not paying for it. There was something else collateral to the whole situation which I didn’t know about, a missing angle. “Let me watch it again.” I said. “Maybe I’ll notice something new the second time.”
“I think once is enough Mr. Khan. Perhaps you noticed the difference between what you really had forgotten and what your transcript showed.”
I worried that he would ask me how I acquired the transcript in the first place. I didn’t think I would be able to lie my way out of that. How would he react if I told him I wanted to talk to a lawyer? He didn’t ask about the source of the transcript though. Maybe he thought Forget What sent it to me to prove I’d had a forget done. The other possibility was that he already knew how I got the transcript from looking through Chen and Paulo’s apartment. That scenario I didn’t like at all. Maybe Carla wasn’t someone I’d loved before, but I still didn’t want to see her get into trouble.
I thought about the differences between my transcript and his video. “The only difference I could detect was the obvious one. I didn’t recognize the dead guy in your version.”
“Why do you think that is?” Kumar acted like he was sharing his job with me, letting me in on his analytic process.
“I have no idea. You’re the policeman. You’re the one with the training.” I meant that to sound encouraging, but it came across cynical and snide. The guard grunted.
Kumar ignored me. “Why would someone go to the trouble of replacing an unknown, someone you didn’t know, with Chen in your transcript? Who would go to that trouble?” He posed the question as though it were as much to himself as to me. He gazed at the wall.
I had spent some time thinking about why myself. “I really don’t know. Perhaps it was Chen?” Certainly Chen couldn’t disagree with me, and he seemed as likely a suspect as any. I figured blaming a dead guy would be a good strategy.
Kumar looked at me for a moment longer. He seemed to make up his mind to tell me something, but then he hesitated and finally decided not to. He was hiding something. I had the feeling he knew details about me I didn’t know myself, details I’d lost with my forget. But he wasn’t going to tell me. At least not yet.
“You can go, Mr. Khan,” he said. “Keep your head low and stay in the area.” The guard took back the handcuffs and he and Kumar left me sitting there alone in the room as though it were my place and they had just been visiting.
I went home, a twenty minute walk. I was hungry, so I leaned back against the sink, ate an apple with peanut butter and reran the video transcript on the back of my eyelids, trying to remember my body language and every word I spoke. Kumar had kept my paper transcript, so I couldn’t consult that anymore, but by now, I’d read it often enough to remember it pretty well.
With a shock, I realized I had named Morph and Quacker by their correct names even on the video. I smiled at that. I still wasn’t sure if the names were a clue to myself or not, but I felt better about having believed there was some meaning behind it.
Mostly though, the video was the same as the paper. I kept saying I wanted to forget everything about the alley. I could see myself saying that several times.
It dawned on me that if the video the police showed me was real, the only reason they would show it to me would be because it was already public knowledge. They already knew all about me finding a dead guy in that alley. That was why I wasn’t still at the police station. They had been testing me, seeing how much I remembered of events they knew more about than I did.
Perhaps the dead guy could help me catch up a little. I decided to search the public databases for murders and figure out whose body I’d actually seen.
Chapter 9
If the murder I’d seen was already known to the police, I figured it must have been in the news. The major news companies had inside people who leaked everything of interest to the public—a public who willingly paid for first gossip rights to the newest inform
ation.
The library, a huge brick building with gargoyles on the corners down on Incongruous, is about a half hour walk. I decided to do my searching there. My own PAL could have handled the retrieval, albeit somewhat slowly and with an enormous quantity of ads, but that would have left my machine’s fingerprint on the database search engine and you never knew who had a sniffer running. It’s not that I was paranoid, just that I was cautious and practical.
The library didn’t loan books anymore because changes to fair-use laws made lending impractical. However, they kept up a solid collection of reference books, and still bought magazines, and newspapers that you could read while sitting in their stiff-backed wooden chairs. They also had PALs, ugly art, and rest rooms that were open to the public. The library was only open during regular working hours, so if you had a job and paid the taxes to support it, you couldn’t use it, but I didn’t have that problem.
I followed a vile smelling woman with enormous matted hair and dirt caked clothing through the revolving door. She headed for the rest rooms, and I went to the main desk and took a wait card off the stack. They would buzz me when a PAL became available. If the number of waiting patrons was high enough, they gave out the cards to avoid a long, curving, quarrelsome line.
I wandered around waiting for my card to buzz, studying ceiling panels and other artwork. A ceramic wall mural depicting dramatic details of the Pittsburgh cave-in completely covered the north wall of the atrium. The coal under the mountains ignited by miners and left smoldering for a hundred years had sucked in oxygen and burst into yellow flame after the burnt out coal deposits and old mines collapsed under large parts of suburban Pittsburgh. The mural showed housetops sticking up through what used to be the ground level, sprouting long flaming tendrils in the semidarkness. People with anguished, tear streaked faces pulled themselves out of the burning earth like so many dead drawing themselves up from hell. The wall was called Suburbia.
Walking Shadow Page 6