“Oh, sweetie, stop that. Nobody blames you for anything. We want to help you, that’s all. Now, go put on your coat like a dear boy, I have a cab waiting.”
“I’ll have to change my clothes, I’ve got these old things on.”
She made a show of looking to Heaven for understanding and aid. “Then,” she said, “all I can do is sit here and wait. Do hurry dear, won’t you?”
“All right. I’ll be right back.”
There was no graceful way to leave the room. He left by fits and starts, in an excess of awkwardness, finally backing out like a chastised student leaving the principal’s office. In the bedroom, he hurriedly changed to a suit and white shirt and tie, and put on his overcoat, then hurried back to the living room.
She greeted him with, “Pots in the bookcase? Is this another manifestation, sweetie, or shouldn’t I mention it?”
He looked helplessly at the bookcase, full of odds and ends, everything but books. He could see how odd it looked to anyone else, but how in the world could he explain it? He shrugged helplessly, and said nothing.
She waved a hand negligently. “It hardly matters. Come along, I can hear the meter ticking all the way up here.”
On the way downstairs, she took his arm and smiled brilliantly at him.
Two days had elapsed since the storm. Though the sun was shining today, it was a weak and pallid brightness, and there was now a permanent clamminess in the air. The sidewalks had been cleared of snow, but were wet with puddles and gray slush, and flanked by the low dirty ramparts of snow that had been pushed aside. Grime streaked every passing vehicle, and the buildings seemed darker in color, and older, and smaller. The interior of the cab smelled of wet leather.
This was the first time Cole had ridden in a cab since the night he’d come back to New York. This time, he was plagued by feelings of discomfort. Helen Arndt, seated so close beside him, made him uncomfortable to begin with, but also there was the ticking meter, which read over a dollar when Cole entered the cab and which seemed intent on reaching two dollars before they reached their destination. It seemed to him that he should pay for this ride, but he couldn’t really afford the money, and in a way it wasn’t fair to ask him to pay. Left to his own devices, he would have taken the subway.
No. Left to his own devices, he wouldn’t have gotten to the doctor’s office at all. So maybe it was fair to ask him to pay, whether he could afford it or not.
Still, when at the end of the trip Helen insisted on paying, Cole didn’t try particularly hard to dissuade her.
The doctor’s office was on East 67th Street, between Park and Lexington. It was a broad tall old apartment building, with four separate doctors’ offices on the first floor, each with its own entrance. When they went in, Helen motioned him to sit down while she went over to the glass hole in the wall to talk with the nurse. Cole sat on a green leatherette sofa and looked around at the hunting prints on the paneled walls. He’d been here once before, a little more than two weeks ago, but he hardly remembered the place. Through the door in the opposite wall must be the doctor’s office, but Cole couldn’t visualize it. He must have gone through that door last time.
Generally, he’d grown used to such signs of his malady, and didn’t brood on them. But here in this waiting room he did brood, like a patient in a dentist’s outer office prodding with his tongue his aching tooth.
At least there were no other patients waiting.
Helen came over and sat down beside him, saying, “She says in just a minute.” Even though they were alone, she spoke just barely above a whisper.
Cole roused himself, in an effort to be polite. “Thank you for bringing me. I would have gone on forgetting.”
She petted his hand and gave him again the brilliant smile. “I take a special interest in you, Paul, you know that.”
There was nothing to say. Cole smiled awkwardly, and looked away from Helen’s bright eyes.
The nurse leaned out of her cubicle across the way to say, “You may go in now.” She had a harsh British accent, as though she’d lost her original accent and was trying to recreate it from memory.
Helen took his hand again, saying, “I’ll come in with you for just a minute.”
“All right.”
She continued to hold his hand as they crossed the room, but let go just as they entered the doctor’s office.
Doctor Edgarton was again behind his desk, behind his tortoiseshell glasses, behind his faint and secret smile. He hesitated, then rose behind the desk and said, “Helen. How nice to see you again.”
“Well, I brought him for you.”
“So you have.” He directed the smile at Cole. “You forgot me, I see.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“There’s really nothing to apologize for, Paul. I know that, if anyone does. Sit down, why don’t you? Take this chair here.”
Helen said, “Shall I wait outside?” Clearly, she wanted to stay.
Cole didn’t want her around now; the thought of her presence while he talked with the doctor made him tense. So he felt relief when the doctor said, “Really, Helen, you’d do better not to wait at all. This session may take some little time.”
“Oh.” She glanced at Cole, and away. “Well. I’ll get back to the office, then.”
Smiling his secretive smile, the doctor said, “Good idea, very good.”
To Cole, Helen said, “You must call me. Promise?”
He nodded. “All right. I will.”
“And do not forget the job on Monday.”
“No, I won’t. I’ve got notes up.”
“Fine. Well, I must be off. Goodbye, Doctor.”
Behind the desk, he smiled and bowed. “A pleasure to have seen you again.”
Helen seemed to hesitate, her smile doubtful, then left, closing the door behind her. The doctor sat down behind his desk and turned his smile on Cole, saying, “A fine woman, Helen. A trifle...acquisitive. But a good friend, a good friend.”
“Yes.”
The doctor picked up a long slender yellow pencil and tapped it against a cream-colored folder on his desk. “Your X-rays,” he said.
Cole looked at the folder. In there were photographs of the inside of his head, photographs of the city in which he used to live and at the gates of which he now was camped.
“The X-rays,” the doctor went on, “were helpful, somewhat helpful. But more is needed.”
“Whatever you say, Doctor.”
“Yes.” He reached for a slip of paper. “I have some questions first, this won’t take long. I’m going to ask you about symptoms, current symptoms. Do you have frequent headaches?”
“No.”
“Any headaches at all?”
“No. None at all.”
“Fainting spells?”
“No.”
“Do you get drunk easily? More easily than normal?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know for sure.”
“Do you find you are very irritable at times, excitable, prone to sudden rages?”
“I get irritable sometimes, because I can’t remember things.”
“Of course. Do you have trouble getting sleep at night?”
“Not much.”
“Is your sleep untroubled?”
“I have bad dreams. But I can’t remember them when I wake up.”
“I see. Do you really want to remember your past?”
“What? I’ve got to.”
“Of course, but do you want to?”
“Yes.”
The doctor paused, tapping his pencil on the desk, and then said, “Would you take a truth serum?”
“A what?”
“I want to try narcoanalysis on you. Sodium amytal. It may open your memory a bit, at least temporarily, and it may tell us how much of your memory loss is physical and how much is subconsciously desired. If any. Will you do it?”
“If it’s going to help...”
“I don’t know if anything is going to help. What has happened to
you is something called concussion. I can’t tell you, no one can tell you, if the condition is going to improve at all, or if so when. Since the concussion must have taken place a few months ago at least, I can tell you for sure that you won’t die from it, but that’s all we can be sure of. Your memory may come back, or it may get worse, or it may remain just as it is now. I can’t be sure, or even advise you to any great extent, except to caution you to get enough sleep always and to limit your intake of alcohol, and of course to tell me of any change in your physical condition. In the meantime, all I can do is observe you and try to find out if there are any other factors at work in your memory loss in addition to the concussion.”
“It may never get better.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that, but it is a possibility.”
Cole sat shaking his head, trying to fit this new fact in with everything he’d done in the last few months, the possibility that he had been struggling all along for an unattainable goal.
The doctor took off his glasses. Without then he seemed more human, more compassionate, but also more fallible. He said, “If the thought of self-destruction is occurring to you now, or if it occurs to you in the future, cast it firmly aside. You are far from totally disabled. If your memory doesn’t improve, you will always have to make special provisions for it, leaving notes in conspicuous places and so on, avoiding any occupation which demands a lot of travel, but other than that your life can be full and productive as anyone’s.”
Cole touched his fingers to his temple, and said, “But I’m an actor.”
The doctor shook his head. “No, you’re not. Not now. I’m sorry to be this blunt with you, but these are facts you’ll have to face sooner or later anyway. Memory is the actor’s one basic tool. He needs it to learn his role, for one thing. For another, from what I understand of the acting method popular today, it requires the actor to simulate a particular emotion by recalling an actual incident in his own past in which he felt that emotion in reality. In essence, you have no past to draw upon.”
“But—they said...”
“Who said? What did they say?”
“All the people I’ve met since I came back. They said I was an actor, a real actor. I had a, a vocation, to be an actor. It’s what I’m supposed to be.”
“If your memory comes back, it’s most likely what you will be. But only if, and I wouldn’t depend on it too heavily if I were you.”
Cole shook his head, rejecting the words.
The doctor got to his feet. “Will you take the truth serum? That’s a misnomer, truth serum, but we won’t go into that. Will you take it?”
“Yes. All right.”
“Then come along.”
The doctor took him to another room, where there was a high gray leather cot. Cole lay on this, suitcoat off and left shirtsleeve rolled up, and the doctor injected the needle into his arm. A plastic tube led from the needle to an inverted bottle, like a blood plasma bottle, but the fluid in this was almost colorless, with only a faint rose cast to it.
The doctor talked all the time now, explaining what he was doing every step of the way, a complete reversal of his earlier role as silent listener. Cole wondered at it, trying to understand, and the doctor’s voice droned on, and drowsiness came down on Cole’s mind, like green shutters slowly closing, leaving only the thinnest crack of light, in which the doctor’s voice throbbed like the sea.
“Can you hear me, Paul?”
The question was abrupt, and louder than the droning that had come before it, but Cole didn’t mind. He said, “Yes.”
“Will you tell me your name?”
“Paul Edwin Cole.”
“You were hit on the head, weren’t you?”
A twinge of nervousness came and went. “Yes.”
“What hit you?”
Cole thought about that. The question intrigued him, and he searched around in his mind for the answer. He was surprised when he didn’t find it. “I don’t know,” he said, the surprise in his voice.
“Were you in an automobile?”
“I don’t—I don’t know.”
“Did someone hit you? Were you hit by a person, Paul?”
The twinge of nervousness flickered again, and his hands moved slightly.
“Lie perfectly still, Paul. Don’t move your hands.”
“All right.” He didn’t mind at all; it was easier to lie still anyway.
“Were you hit by a person?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. That whole compartment was blank; he was still surprised that it was. He knew he’d been hit on the head, but nothing about it at all.
“Are your parents living, Paul?”
“No, they’re not.”
“Neither of them?”
“No.”
“When did they die?”
Another surprised “I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember their funerals?”
“A little bit.”
“Which funeral do you remember, your mother or your father?”
“I don’t know which one. It was in the spring, and the grass was wet.”
“Did you get along with your parents?”
“I guess so.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Were you happy in the sixth grade?”
“The sixth grade?”
“Do you remember the sixth grade? What was your teacher’s name?”
“No, I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?”
“No.”
“What about high school? Were you happy in high school?”
“I guess so.”
“Tell me what you remember about high school.”
“Long corridors. Books with shiny paper.”
“What was the name of your high school?”
This time, it was frightening. He reached for the name and it wasn’t there. He reached and reached, and picked up a different fact instead: “The colors were garnet and gray.”
“What colors?”
“The school colors. Garnet and gray. Garnet is dark red, like maroon.”
“Do you want to remember high school, Paul?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Do you want to remember your mother and father.”
“Yes, I don’t know—I don’t know why I can’t.”
“Because you were hit on the head.”
“But I can’t remember!” He was becoming agitated, more frightened. He felt as though he were sinking.
“All right, now, Paul, take it easy. Just rest a minute.”
There was silence for a while, and the agitation went away, and left him feeling relaxed and pleasant. His eyes were open, and he could see the ceiling and a window. The room was dim; it was like being underwater. He found himself smiling.
The doctor’s voice came back: “What did you do this morning, Paul?”
“I cleaned the apartment.”
“What did you do yesterday afternoon?”
“I went for a walk.”
“What did you do New Year’s Eve?”
“I went to a party. In Brooklyn.”
“What was your host’s name?”
“Crawford.”
“What was Crawford’s first name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever know?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to know again?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Crawford’s first name is Harry. Now you know it. Is that right, is it Harry?”
“Harry? Is it?”
“I asked you, Paul.”
“I don’t know. Harry? I don’t think it’s Harry.”
“All right. Where were you Christmas Eve?”
“Nick came over, and we went out to meet people, and I met Rita.”
“Is Rita your girl?”
“She used to be.”
“She isn’t any more?”
“I ma
de her feel bad. Because I couldn’t remember her.”
“Did you want to remember her?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to marry her?”
“No.”
“Does she want to marry you?”
“No.”
“Where were you two months ago, Paul?”
“In the town.”
“What town?”
“Where I was working to get the money to come to New York.”
“You were stranded in a town?”
“Yes.”
“This is after you were hit on the head.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Where did you work?”
“In a tannery.”
“What did you do there?”
“I loaded and unloaded freight cars.”
“Did you like that?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like it better than acting?”
He felt a slight tension again, and frowned. “It’s a different thing,” he said.
“In what way, a different thing?”
“I liked it because it filled the day.”
“Then why do you like acting?”
“It’s what I do.” The tension was resolved; he relaxed again.
“You still want to be an actor?”
“I am an actor.”
“But do you want to be an actor?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“What was the name of the town where you were stranded?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You have bad dreams, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What are they about?”
“Sometimes, Edna. Sometimes, the square of shiny metal.”
“Just a minute. Edna. The square of shiny metal. What square of shiny metal?”
“They want to know if I ever saw it before.”
“Who?”
“They.” He shook his head. “I’m getting cold.”
“I’ll turn the heat up. How large is this square of shiny metal?”
“All sizes. Sometimes it’s little and I can hold it in my hands. Sometimes it’s a wall and I can’t climb over it.”
“But you want to climb over it?”
“Yes.”
“And someone wants to know if you ever saw it before. Did you ever see it before?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“Paul! Stop that!”
Memory (Hard Case Crime) Page 29