Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

In many ways, the work was pretty much the same. I could still go anywhere, do anything – though I took a lot more trouble to cover my tracks. I ditched my old credit cards, got some new ones under fake ids, and started shifting money out of the country. I was a lot more cautious about who I woke up next to. I worked maybe one, two nights on dreams, just to keep my hand in. Then a couple of times a week I'd get a call and be told to be somewhere secluded, with my new machine, at a particular time.

  A tickle in the back of the mind, a momentary blackout, and then someone else's memory was mine. I kept it for an hour, a couple of days, a week at the most, and then a similar session would take it away again.

  Most of the memories were straightforward. Once a week a woman would lose the fact she was married, so she'd feel less guilty about spending the afternoon with her lover. An executive would forget what his mother taught him about right and wrong, so as to make screwing over a colleague a little easier. Another woman would pass me a memory of being touched up by her father when she was a kid, to make a Christmas spent with her folks more bearable.

  Others were stranger.

  Fragments, like a cat walking along a wall, jumping safely to the ground, and then turning a corner and disappearing. A girl's face, laughing. The sound of a stream gurgling past an open window in a bedroom at night. I never got any context, just those little pieces of remembrance, and had no way of working out why someone might pay ten thousand for a vacation from them.

  It didn't matter. After the allotted time the client got them back, and they were gone from my head. I could remember what it was that I briefly had a memory of, but there was no confusion. I could tell, once it had gone, what was my experience and what had been someone else's.

  It was kind of weird to spend an afternoon, once a week, convinced I could remember getting married to someone called David. But most of the memories were already used to being shunted to the side, and didn't really fuck me up. I could generally hem them in with enough self-awareness to cope with the truths they purported to tell. I don't know if there were any side effects. Maybe a few. I found myself getting tired more easily, and misbehaving less, but that could have been down to a number of factors. I was nearing forty, and had been on the road all my life. Maybe the time was coming when I needed to buy somewhere and settle down. But doing that would mean giving up the memory work, because a still target would be easy for the police to find. I knew what I did was harmless, but they'd be prone to see it another way. I didn't know if I was ready to stop earning yet, and I didn't know whether Rabutni would let me.

  So I carried on, caretaking moments of other people's lives, and wishing that once in a while someone would lend me a good memory. I toyed with a little heroin every now and then, just to dull the noise of other people's bad times in my head, but only ever used stuff of good quality and in very small quantities. I got occasional headaches. But for the most part it was okay, and if I needed a reason, I just watched the money flowing into my account. This went on for nearly a year.

  Until about a month ago, in fact.

  * * * * *

  The guy's name was Chet Williams, and he was a regular client. Four or five times since I'd been doing memory work I'd held a particular one of his for a couple of days. The memory was of his mother, many years ago, when he was very small. He'd been standing in the back yard of the house where he grew up, a yard which faded into a small patch of forest. The day was hot and it was late afternoon, and little Chet had come out of the forest knowing it was going to be supper time soon.

  Then suddenly there'd been a shadow over him, and he'd looked up to see his mom standing there, saying his name slowly and softly. She was a tall woman, thin, with a lot of reddish brown hair. In the memory Chet had looked slowly up until he'd found his mother's face. What he needed a break from every now and then was the expression he saw there. A look of fury, hate and disgust – mixed in with a little glee.

  The memory always ended abruptly at that moment, and I don't know what the look meant, or what had happened afterwards. I'd always been kind of glad I didn't. Mr. Williams' memory was one of the ones I could understand someone wanting to get away from once in a while.

  I came back from lounging round a hotel pool one morning to find I had an email message from an address I didn't recognize. Before I even read it I ran a check on the source. The domain code didn't set any alarm bells ringing with my software, but even so I got the console to hardcopy it without technically opening it.

  The mail was from Mr. Williams.

  We'd never been in contact before – all transactions were brokered through REMtemps on a double-blind principle – and the only reason I even knew his first name was because it was contained in the memory itself. The message said he wanted to meet with me. He had something he wanted me to carry, and he would make it worth my while.

  I stared at the piece of paper for a few moments, then set fire to it and let it burn out in an ashtray. I spent the rest of the day round the pool, and the evening in a bar playing pool and talking shit with the locals.

  When I got back I had another message. I went through the same procedure and found it was from Mr. Williams again. It sounded a little more desperate and listed a phone number. It also mentioned a figure.

  One hundred thousand dollars.

  I watched a movie on the in-house system for a while, but you know how it is. The back brain makes a decision instantly, and no matter how long you put it off, you know what you're going to do.

  At about midnight I left the hotel room and went back to the bar. There was a phone box round the back, out of sight, and I called the number from the message.

  A nervous-sounding man answered the phone. He took a while to settle down, and had me describe in detail the memory he usually left with me, to make sure I was who I said I was. Then he started sounding more confident, and told me what he wanted.

  He had another memory, one which wasn't usually a problem. In fact, it was one of his favorites. Ten years ago he'd gone on vacation with a woman he'd just met, to some place on the beach he'd known for years. They stayed there for a while, hanging out, eating seafood, having a good time. Then he'd come back.

  "That's it?" I asked.

  "That's it," he said. "But now it's got a little more complicated."

  He'd recently met another woman. He liked her a lot. In fact, he was thinking of getting married to her. But before he asked the question, they were going to go away together, just to make sure. He wanted to go to the same town he'd taken the other woman all that time ago.

  I still didn't see the problem, and said so. He said they had to go to this exact same place, because it was his favorite in all the world. His special place. But he didn't want to go back there remembering what it had been like with the other woman, the one from a decade before. He thought it wouldn't be fair on the new one, that it might make him see things differently, maybe screw things up. He really loved this new person, didn't want to take the risk of soiling what could be a make or break vacation.

  Okay, I said. I could understand what he was saying: many clients had far weirder reasons for wanting to forget something for a spell. In a way I sort of respected his attitude, and wished I had a woman who made me feel that serious. But why couldn't he go through the normal channels?

  Because he wanted me specifically, he said. I was the only person he'd used who could soak up every little bit of memory, blank it utterly, like it had never happened. He'd tried using other REMtemps on little things, as an experiment, and they always left something – however tiny – behind.

  I still didn't see why we were doing the cloak and dagger stuff. All he had to do was specify me when he booked the storage.

  Then he told me.

  He was going to be away for ten days.

  Rabutni wouldn't accept a booking for more than a week, I kne
w that. I suspected he was paying off someone in government somewhere. If they heard he was extending the time limit, all bets would be off. Also, the memory Mr. Williams wanted to leave wasn't a fragment. It was for the whole period, from the moment he and the other woman had got on the plane, to when the vacation was over. A whole week.

  No one had ever tried to hold anything remotely that long before.

  I thought I was going to say no, but instead I found myself telling him the money wasn't enough. I would have to go on leave from REMtemps for a week and a half. If I wanted to I could earn a hundred in that time anyway, without risking pissing Rabutni off.

  "Two hundred," he said.

  I thought for a moment.

  "Two-fifty," he said.

  "This means a lot to you, doesn't it?" I asked.

  "It means everything."

  * * * * *

  Three days later I sat in a chair in my hotel room in the mid-afternoon and waited for the transmission. Williams had found some hacker with a lashed-up transmitter, who'd somehow been able to acquire the code of my receiver. I made a mental note to find some way of hinting to Rabutni, when this job was done, that the receivers weren't as impregnable as he thought. If he wasn't careful then the black market was going to start cutting into his business. Worse than that, memory temps could find themselves stuffed with of all kinds of shit they weren't expecting, or being paid for. The money for this job was already in my hands, however, and on its way to three different accounts.

  We spoke on the phone and arranged a time for him to take the memory back. It was a different number to the one he'd originally given me: presumably the home of the freelance. Then I closed my eyes and got myself ready to receive.

  It came moments afterwards. A pulse of noise and smell that filled my mind like the worst headache you've ever had, magnified a million-fold.

  I grunted, unable even to shout, and pitched forward onto the carpet, hands and legs going into spasm. I seemed to go deaf and partly blind for a time, but that was the least of my problems.

  I thought I was going to die.

  After a few minutes the shaking lessened – enough that I could crawl to the bedside table and light a cigarette. I hauled myself up onto the bed and lay face down, waiting for the pain to go away.

  It started to, eventually. Half an hour later I was sitting up and drinking scotch, which helped. My sight was clearing and I could once more hear the sound of people horsing around by the pool below my window. I still felt like shit, but had started to believe I was going to be alright.

  I simply hadn't considered the difference between getting a quick, single fragment of someone's life, and taking over week's worth of experience in one hit. The brain is designed to accept life piece-meal, moment by moment – not to get a week full of sounds, sights, feelings and tactile impressions condensed into a single bullet of remembrance. If I hadn't already spent years exercising my mind then I'd probably have been slumped in a corner, drooling and staring into nothingness.

  As it was, my head was still humming and thudding, trying to wade through what it had received, to sort it into chronology and pattern and sensory types. I could feel countless threads of sensory information squirming over each other, like worms, trying to find some kind of order, some mental box to call home. Sunburn on my shoulder; salt on my lips from a Margarita; someone else's tongue in my mouth; a flash of sunlight on a car window; the sound of water rolling up sand; coolness; a shout. A thousand sentences all at once, some of them leaving my head, others coming in. My brain was lurching under the weight, miss-firing like a heart on the verge of arrest.

  I reached unsteadily for the phone. Large amounts of room service was what was on my mind, but first I had to call Williams and let him know the transmission had gone okay. I'm professional about these things.

  I dialed the number and waited as it rang, holding the cold glass of my drink up against my forehead and panting slightly. There was no answer.

  I tapped the pips and redialed. This time I gave it thirty rings before putting the phone back again. I knew he wasn't going away for two days, so it was no big deal. Probably he was out, making arrangements – or maybe he'd gone home. By then it was forty minutes since the hit.

  I munched slowly through a burger delivered by an offensively self-confident bellboy, keeping half an eye on what was going on in my head. It felt like a hard drive desperately running optimization software, without enough slack to swap all the data around. I seemed to be having real trouble ordering the mass of impressions which I'd been given. Parts from the start of Williams' golden vacation were lodging into place, but other sections were still missing, making the recollection hazy and fragmented and impossible to rationalize.

  When I was done with the food I called Williams' number again. I let it ring for a long time and was about to put it down when someone answered.

  "Mr. Williams," I said.

  "Hello," said a voice I didn't recognize. "Who is this?" There was a weird sound in the background.

  "It's Mr. Stone," I answered, slightly taken aback. "Is Mr. Williams there?"

  "How the fuck do you expect me to know?" snarled the voice, and the connection was severed.

  Sudden very bad feeling.

  I tried the number again, immediately. No answer.

  Then I called the operator. She told me there was no fault on the line but wouldn't give me the address.

  I called the guy who'd set up my bank account daemons. He said he could check some sources and would call me back. I stumbled around the room for ten minutes, gobbling weapons-grade painkillers. The optimization process in my head felt like it was crashing out now, as if it was beginning to unravel out of control, unable to find places to put back the things it had moved: as if the juggler in there was starting to drop a few balls, and beginning to panic.

  The phone call came. My hacker friend told me the number was that of a courtesy phone in the first class departure lounge of Miami airport.

  I called the other number I had for Williams. The line was dead. I stared at the handset.

  Then I blacked out.

  * * * * *

  It had been very hot that week, and humid, each rare breeze as welcome as the brush of cool, slim fingers across the back of your neck. It was clear he had been happy, and excited, but I was still surprised at how much he remembered. Conversations, her laugh, the smell of the sea through the window she insisted on keeping open in the car despite the fact the air-conditioning was on. The sound of her thighs moving across the hot car seat. Some old song playing on the car radio, and hands tapping against the steering wheel in ragged time.

  That's the bit I return to, when I can. The very beginning.

  When I regained consciousness after the blackout, the first couple of hours of the memory were more or less in order. The woman was in her mid-twenties, very slim, with long black hair. From the moment the plane landed, and all the way through the drive to the hotel, you could feel the joy coming off her in waves. When the car turned into the drive of motel she squealed, as if she'd never seen the sea before. You knew that everything she ever experienced would be like that, time after time: a constant surprise, a discovering. Her name was Rebecca.

  She was... she was nice.

  The rest of the memory unraveled into the white noise of all the data my mind was still trying to process.

  I spent ten minutes in the bathroom washing off the blood which had tipped out of my nose as I lay passed out on the hotel room floor. Then I checked out and drove to Miami, where I bullied and lied flight registers out of the airlines. Williams wasn't listed on any of them.

  I traced the first number Williams gave me, flew to Gainesville and kicked the door down.

  The house was empty, unfurnished – the cupboards and wardrobe bare. The phone sat in
the middle of the floor. It was obvious no one had lived there in a while, because there was no food anywhere and no sheets on the bed so you couldn't lie down and rest your head.

  Three days had passed by then, and the first half of Williams' memory was in order in my mind. Even through the haze of a headache that no amount of Tylenol would budge, I came to look forward to remembering more about what they'd done. I envied Williams the time he'd had with Rebecca. I could understand how she'd be difficult to forget.

  Another week went by. I'm not sure where I was during that time. I wrote some of it down in a book but I didn't put enough letters in some of the words, and then I forgot where I'd put the book. Williams didn't come back. After two weeks I went to Rabutni.

  I had to. I'd tried going back to work, because I knew I couldn't keep stalling him forever: but a run of the mill memory job had left me unconscious for twelve hours. When I woke I'd forgotten a whole slew of new words. They're still gone. I don't know whether they got overwritten, or if part of my brain simply blew out. Probably the latter, because one of my hands shakes a lot of the time now.

  Rabutni let me trace back through the records to find who'd fed me the memories of a young boy confronted by his mother in a back yard. Williams didn't seem to be his real name, and no, he didn't live where he said he did. Rabutni was actually pretty kind. After this, he let me throw up in the office toilet, too.

  But then he fired me.

  * * * * *

  Most days I drive around, up and down, trying to find the town where they went ten years ago. Twice I've thought I've found it. I know it's somewhere on the Gulf Coast of Florida, but that's an awfully long stretch of sand, with lots of people and places and motels and towns. It could take me all year at this rate. It could take forever and a day. The headaches get worse and worse and worse, and I keep losing things. Ways of using words, to say things like "Look, there is a boat" or something. The ability to think about anything for more than moments at a tie. I mean, "time". It comes and goes like that water you find at the edge of land. Some days it's a little better, but in general it's getting much worse. I'm just too full, I suppose, over-loaded, or perhaps something happened when the bullet hit my brain.