Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

  He reads the first few pages.

  Are you kidding me? Henry asks, and Jerry is thinking the same thing.

  By the time he gets to the end of chapter one, his heart is pounding in his chest. He wants to scream. He wants to go back to where they left Eric and shake him from the collar and ask him why he would do this. He carries the manuscript through the house until he finds Hans in the garage, where he’s searching a set of shelves that are home to paint trays and brushes and sandpaper.

  “Jesus, you look like somebody just walked all over your grave,” Hans says.

  Jerry holds up the manuscript. “This opening chapter,” he says, struggling to keep his voice even, a struggle he loses, “is about a crime writer who has Alzheimer’s.” He waits for the appropriate reaction from Hans, which he doesn’t get, because he thinks Hans should be throwing things across the garage. He carries on. “This guy, this guy starts confessing to crimes that he thinks he’s committed.”

  “So you inspired him.”

  “I more than just inspired him!” Jerry says, and starts shaking his head, annoyed Hans is acting like it’s no big deal. Dropping Eric on his head doesn’t make him feel as bad as it did a few minutes ago. “He’s taken all the bad shit that’s happening to me and used it to try and get a book contract.”

  “There anything in there about sneaking into people’s houses and framing the author?”

  It’s a good point. Jerry’s anger subsides as he thinks about it, then his heart starts to race with the possibility. There could be some answers in here. “I’ll keep reading,” he says, then looks at the beginning of chapter two. He reads a couple of paragraphs while leaning against the doorframe. Hans watches him.

  “Oh no,” Jerry says.

  “What?”

  “Give me a minute,” Jerry says.

  “Jerry—”

  “A minute.”

  He reads the chapter. Hans moves to the next shelf along. A few minutes later Jerry turns the manuscript towards his friend. “Look,” he says. “Look!”

  “What am I looking at?” Hans asks, coming over.

  Jerry points to the chapter heading. It says “Day Who Knows.” He’s looking at a chapter entry set in a nursing home. The entry is in the form of a diary. The main character is keeping a Madness Journal. The main character’s name is Gerald Black, and Gerald has no idea how long he’s been in the home. However, Gerald’s words sound exactly like Jerry’s. In fact so much like Jerry’s own words that he knows they are his own. He has written them, but he doesn’t remember when. The sense of betrayal is so strong he feels like tossing Eric out the window all over again.

  Hans takes the manuscript and reads. “This is you,” he says.

  Jerry starts pacing the garage. “Eric has my journal.”

  Hans looks up from the pages. “What?”

  “Those are my words. I recognize them. Somehow he got hold of my journal, and he’s been using it to create that,” he says, nodding towards the manuscript.

  Hans reads for a few more seconds, then looks back up at Jerry. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s the ultimate Write what you know,” Jerry says. “It must be here somewhere.” He closes his eyes and puts his fist against his forehead. He taps it lightly a few times. “I must have had the journal all along at the home. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. But those are my words,” Jerry says, pointing at the manuscript. “Not all of them, not whatever is stringing the plot together, but some of them. Somehow Eric got hold of it.”

  “How? If the police couldn’t find it, how did he?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he has it.”

  Hans hands him back the manuscript. “Okay, so the orderly took your journal and used it for his story, and if it’s here we need to find it.”

  “And proof that he’s a killer,” Jerry says.

  “That’s what we’re looking for. But we really need that journal. If he’s taking it back and forth from the nursing home,” Hans says, “it could be in his car. I’ll give it a thorough search.”

  Hans opens the car and starts going through it. Jerry heads back down to the study. He sits behind Eric’s desk. He switches on the computer. While it’s booting up, he goes through the closet where there are some clothes hanging and some boxes on the ground. He starts pulling them out. He hears Hans walking down the hallway back towards him. He opens one of the boxes to find a bunch of bank and mortgage statements.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  It’s a woman’s voice, and it startles him, and he turns towards it. He’s never seen her before, but he knows it has to be Eric’s wife. Before he can answer, Hans steps in behind her and pushes a needle into the side of her neck. She doesn’t even have time to struggle. It only takes a couple of seconds, and then she’s asleep, Hans lowering her gently to the ground.

  “Holy shit,” Jerry says, jumping to his feet.

  “She’ll be fine,” Hans says. “But look what I found,” he adds, and he tosses a book towards him. Jerry catches it and opens it up. It’s a journal, but not his Madness Journal. Only in some ways it is. There are no eyes on the cover.

  “It starts from your time in the nursing home,” Hans says. “Which means the original is still out there, and we still really need to find it.”

  DAY WHO KNOWS

  Some days I know who I am, I wake up and I know where I am and what’s going on, and the nurses here call that a good day. The irony is the good days are full of bad memories. I think I prefer the bad days. When everybody is a stranger, when I forget my family, then I forget what brought me in here. I can forget what I have done.

  Today I know. Today is a good day. My name is Jerry Grey and this is my journal. The nursing home, this disease, they are my penance.

  There’s an orderly here by the name of Eric. He suggested a journal might help with my condition. I have Alzheimer’s and it’s been advancing quickly. They tell me when I first got here six months ago I would know who I was six days a week and on the seventh my mind would take a rest and all would be lost. Since then the ratios have been changing. They tell me I spend half the week not knowing anything at all now. I spend periods of being Jerry Knows Everything, and equal periods of being Jerry Knows Nothing. Sometimes I’ll have an entire good day, sometimes an entire bad day. Because of the Alzheimer’s, I can never be sure what is real.

  Except there is one thing I am very sure of. I killed my wife. Of all the things to forget, that’s the one thing I pray that I can.

  The diary came about because I’ve been writing things down on scrap bits of paper, I’ve been writing about my days and finally Eric had the idea of giving me a proper diary I could write in. It’s going to remind me of the man I used to be, and most of all it will remind me of my loss. Aside from those two things, it’s also going to document how crazy I’ve been and how much more crazy there is to go. I’m going to call it my Crazy Diary. I’m going to write in it when I remember to, which . . .

  Wait. Not Crazy Diary. Madness Diary. I’ve done this before. I was keeping a diary back before . . .

  Before I murdered Sandra.

  Where that diary is now, who took it, I have no idea.

  Eric says keeping the diary will be useful, and that I should put everything in here that I can think of, which is why I’m doing this. He says I should think of it as therapy. He said it might help me get back to where I was, but if the memory of my Sandra lying dead and bloody on my office floor is true, then I don’t want to get my life back. Then he said something that encouraged me, something hopeful, and in a place like this hope and encouragement are the only things to stop one from curling up in a corner and waiting to die. He said the way technology advances, it’s impossible to know what the future holds. If that’s true, if there is a chance of getting better, then I need to do what I can to make that happen. Eva must hate me. She must. And it will be a painful journey getting back to the man I used to be, painful to relive the bad things I’ve done, but I must do t
his if there is any chance of saving my relationship with her. Eric also thinks I should jot down other ideas I have for books. He said it’s a way of exercising the brain, that I need to keep my mind active. Medical technology might bring the old Jerry back, but it won’t bring back Sandra. I will do anything if it will help me reach out to Eva, anything to tell her how sorry I am.

  The memory I have of Sandra is as strong as some of the memories I have of my characters. Sometimes the only proof I have she ever existed is the wedding ring on my finger and the photograph I have of her and Eva in my room. Sometimes I get confused between shooting her and having one of my bad guys shooting one of my good guys. I don’t remember it, but I have enough imaginative tools to be able to picture the scene. I do remember the blood, and holding her hand. I remember calling the police and asking them to come and help. I remember them arriving and a while later taking her away and me away—Sandra to the morgue, me to the police station. I know there were a number of days between my wife dying and me calling for help, days in which I wanted Eva to have some semblance of a honeymoon, but I don’t know how many. Two or three. Maybe four. I don’t think there was a trial, but I don’t know for sure. I think between the defense and the prosecution a deal was made. I was sick, nobody doubted that, sick and better off in a care facility than a prison.

  As the Alzheimer’s continues to evolve, I will remember less and less of what happened. This illness is like having a hard drive full of photographs and videos and contacts being deleted. By the end of the year the ratio might be one good day to ten off days. With that in mind, let me get down what I remember and tell you who you were and what’s been happening.

  Let’s start with the nursing home. It’s a good distance out of the city, making me feel like me and my fellow patients are all in the out of sight out of mind category. It’s a pretty big place, two stories and maybe thirty rooms or so, the staff all warm and caring and always wanting the best for everybody here. The grounds are pretty big too, lots of flowers and trees and some of the patients hang about outside pulling weeds or sitting in the sun, while others remain in one of the common areas, watching TV or reading books or chatting. There are a couple of people in cots, aware of nothing, just banging their heads all day long while they soil themselves. Some of us can feed ourselves, and in that small act we can at least take some enjoyment from our food, but others have to be fed, the nurses with barely enough time to feed one patient before moving on to the next, mealtime a chore, and it’s heartbreaking. Absolutely heartbreaking, and whatever the staff are being paid here it isn’t enough.

  I often think about escaping, about finding my way back to Eva and begging her to forgive me—two things I think are impossible. However, I have been stopped on the edge of the grounds a few times, getting ready to wander into the woods. I think that if I could make it back home to where I used to live I would do better there. Surely there I would be able to keep more of myself intact, rather than in this unfamiliar place where my memory is being split into smaller pieces every day, fragments being cast into the great beyond. Surely I could use my crime-writing money to buy my house back and for home care. But the courts . . . the law . . . they won’t allow it. That’s the man telling me what I can’t do. The man frowning on me because I shot Sandra. How much money does the man pump into war, and tourism, and sport, compared to Alzheimer’s research?

  As far as first entries go, I think that covers it. There’s more to explain. If I can remember any of it, I’ll carry on later. I’m not sure how to finish a diary entry. My instinct is to finish it on a cliff-hanger, and I guess that’s the crime writer in me. Oh, by the way, there is a crime writer living inside me—his name is Henry Cutter. On a good day, Henry is nothing more than a pen name, but on a bad day I sometimes wonder if he’s the one who takes over. If so, then it must have been Henry that killed Sandra, because I have no memory of it.

  Cliff-hanger time. I’m not so sure Sandra is the only person Henry has killed.

  It’s a journal, not a diary Jerry thinks, as he puts the journal down after reading the first entry. He can remember it now—not what he wrote, but the act of writing. He can picture himself sitting in his room in the chair by the window and filling the pages. He can even remember the first entry, can remember Eric giving him the journal to write in, Eric’s advice about putting in plot ideas to keep his mind active. Of course it was all a lie. Eric was an ideas thief. A stealer of words. There never would be a pill to cure Alzheimer’s—not in Jerry’s lifetime.

  He’s sitting in Eric’s chair behind Eric’s desk with Eric’s wife asleep a few rooms away. He and Hans picked her up to make her more comfortable. He’s getting used to hauling unconscious people around. Hans suggested laying her down in one of the bedrooms, but in the end they settled for a couch in the lounge, as Jerry didn’t want her waking and getting any ideas—such as the fact they killed her husband. She will be asleep for at least a few hours, Hans has assured him. Then she’ll wake up and her journey as a widow will begin, from pain and sorrow to disgust after she learns the kind of man her husband really was. A word thief. A killer. This woman would shoot Jerry now if given the chance, but within the week she will be thanking him.

  Reading the first entry of this journal sparks his awareness of the original. He can remember sitting at his desk scribbling on the pages while Sandra’s body lay on the floor. It’s possible he wrote something that would help him understand all of this, which just confirms his theory that he needs to get hold of it, but it also suggests something else. It’s possible he wrote about that night in this second journal. The first entry he just read is almost identical to the one Eric pasted into his manuscript. He flicks to the end of the fledgling writer’s document, hoping there will be some answers, but there is no end. Eric must have been still working on it. Jerry remembers hitting that brick wall himself over the years, getting ninety percent of the way through and not knowing how to wrap things up, then realizing it was necessary to change that ninety percent in ninety different ways.

  He rolls the chair over to the computer. Stuck to the monitor is a Post-it note, the words Write what you know and fake the rest have been written on it. He finds the novel on the desktop, along with five others. He double-clicks Crime Writer Working Title and then starts scrolling through it. Right away he can see it’s longer. In this version Gerald Black, the crime writer in question, has found a way to sneak in and out of the nursing home so he can carry on his killing spree. Gerald sneaks into the back of a laundry truck, as if he’s escaping a prison from a 1960s movie. Jerry wonders if that’s how he’s been sneaking out, but can’t recall any laundry trucks.

  Gerald, it seems, is replicating the crimes from within his books, but nobody suspects him. The police believe an obsessed fan is responsible. Eddie, the orderly hero, believes Gerald may be responsible, and that Gerald has been faking his illness all along. To what end, Jerry can’t fathom. Living in a nursing home isn’t living the dream, and if you’re that good at faking an illness, then you may as well fake your innocence and find another way to not get caught. It’s something Eddie hasn’t been able to figure out either—or at least explain. Jerry’s diary entries are forced into the narrative, but they don’t quite work, because the entries are from a man who is genuinely losing his mind, not from a man making it all up. Seeing his words in these pages makes him feel even more violated and continues to blunt the edges of guilt he might have felt for dropping the orderly to his death.

  Jerry picks his journal back up. He reads the second entry and sees that it starts to divert from the entry that Eric has written in his book. Maybe the ratio is going to change the same way it does between his good days and off days.

  The third entry starts with the words Don’t trust Hans scrawled several times across the top of the page. His heart does that hammering thing it’s been doing lately, and he can sense Henry’s presence, his curiosity piqued. He looks up at the doorway to make sure his friend isn’t standing there watching him.
He isn’t.

  Jerry carries on reading.

  don’t trust Hans, don’t trust Hans, don’t trust Hans, don’t

  DAY ANOTHER SOMETHING

  The words at the top of the page here aren’t mine. I mean, they are mine, because it’s my handwriting, but I didn’t write them. I mean, okay, I wrote them, but I don’t remember writing them. The words are big and black, written with a marker, like a point being forced, and I can only assume Henry wrote them, Henry who would wear the author’s hat, Henry who sometimes occupies my thoughts and takes control of my life. I don’t know when he wrote them, or why. I’ve spent all morning thinking about it, and this is what I’ve come up with—nothing.

  Eric has been asking me questions about the diary, about my past. My life is like a jigsaw puzzle to him, and I’m not sure why he’s so interested, but he is. It turns out—and I don’t know if this is more sad or funny—that one of the reasons he asked me to keep a diary is because I confessed to a crime that never happened. I don’t even remember confessing—but he was telling me I’ve been getting a little mixed-up between what is real and what is make-believe. When he first told me, I thought it was the setup to some awful joke. The more he insisted, the madder I got at what felt like an accusation. Finally, another of the nurses confirmed it was true. I’ve been telling people—telling and really insisting—that I kept a woman locked in my basement for two weeks before killing her, which would be a really neat trick since I’ve never owned a house with a basement. Eric is trying to convince me to write in the diary every day, because he thinks it will help ground me to what is real. He’s asked to read it, but I won’t let him. I hide it in my drawer when I’m not writing in it. I used to have a couple of hiding places back in what I’m now calling Jerry’s Normal Life. I remember I had a floorboard under my desk that I could pry up, but I can’t remember where the second one is.