The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  “Fine with me,” I said.

  “Get an early start on the day.”

  “Early start for what?” Selberg asked. “We have no idea what we’re doing here.”

  “We’re remaining calm,” Clayton replied. “We’re not going into a panic. And we are finding a way out of here.”

  “What if something happens during the night?” Nasir asked.

  “We wait in our rooms,” Clayton said. “That way we all know where everyone else is. Nobody goes running around the hotel getting lost.”

  Selberg tapped his key nervously on the counter. “Wait in our rooms and then what?”

  “I’ll come find you,” Clayton said.

  The elevator doors opened onto the dark hallway of the seventeenth floor. Each of us went to our own room, key in hand, then one by one we disappeared behind the doors.

  My room was small and generic. King-sized bed. Television on a cheap wooden bureau. Bathroom in the corner. The sort of depressing place people ended up in the downspin of life. I drew the curtains and looked down onto Madison Square Garden below.

  Empty streets.

  I laid my pack on the bed, then went into the bathroom. The faucets turned in my hands, but no water came out. I looked at myself in the mirror. By lantern light, I looked ghoulish. My skin was pale. Dark circles hung beneath my eyes. I wondered if this was still my face. How long had I been in the machine? What if I got out and found myself an old man? All youth gone, my body broken down and feeble.

  These were not constructive thoughts.

  I left the bathroom and listened at the door. The hallway was quiet. As much as I didn’t want to creep around the dark hotel in the middle of the night by myself, I had to get to room 1612.

  Slowly, I opened the door.

  The hall was silent. From behind one of the closed doors, someone was talking. A male voice, unrecognizable, but it sounded deep in argument. I crept to the stairwell and made my way down one floor below. The sixteenth floor was exactly the same as the seventeenth. The carpet was threadbare from years of use, but at one point had been a deep burgundy. The wallpaper was faded, peeling. I turned the key in the lock for 1612, heard a click, and quickly entered.

  The room was identical to upstairs. I set my lantern on top of the television and surveyed my surroundings. A card was on the bed. I picked it up. On the front, elaborate script read:

  You are cordially invited to the hotel bar.

  I returned to the lobby.

  I heard music from behind the closed doors of the hotel bar. Cautiously, lantern in hand, I pushed open the doors and stood on the threshold. Sets of tables and chairs each hosted a flickering candle inside a glass globe, their wood polished and shining, ready for guests. Two large ferns in clay pots stood by windows. Along the back wall, a full bar. Bottles lined glass shelves fronted by a mahogany wood bar and red upholstered stools. Standing behind the bar was Nasir. He wore a white tuxedo and was carefully polishing a glass with a white bar towel. He placed the glass on the bar and nodded at me.

  “I’ve saved a place for you,” Nasir said.

  Carefully, I approached. The rest of the room was empty. I took a seat on the barstool, catching a glimpse of my reflection in the glass behind the bar. I looked afraid.

  I studied the man before me. “What’s going on, Nasir?”

  “Ah, first, would you like a drink, sir?” Nasir turned to the shelves behind me. He ran his hand over the bottles, then selected one and turned back toward me. “I imagine you must have many questions right now.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening here,” I said. “I received this invitation in my room,” I lied.

  “Yes,” Nasir bowed. “I wanted to be able to speak to you alone.”

  Nasir spoke in perfect English. The slight trace of an accent he used to carry was gone. Even the tone of his voice was different. Slightly deeper, softer somehow. But his movement seemed strangely jerky.

  “Speak about what?”

  Nasir blinked. His mind seemed to reset. “Would you like a drink, sir?”

  “Nasir, you asked me that already.”

  Nasir nodded, spun back to the left and walked to the end of the bar. He stood for a moment, stared vacantly across the room, blinked again, spun to the right and strode back before me.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked.

  “Very fine, sir,” Nasir said. “Why do you ask?”

  “You’re acting very strangely.”

  “Ah, yes, well, I am afraid I do not have much time left with you,” Nasir said. His mouth moved as he spoke, but somewhere the voice no longer seemed to line up with the movement of his lips.

  “What do you mean?”

  Nasir’s head cocked down like a piston, then came back up. “I am finding the connection very difficult down here. The further we go. I find it hard to control my behavior.”

  “What are . . .” I began to speak, but then in a flash it came to me. Nasir, sleeping with his eyes open. Nasir, always ready to help. “My God. You’re not real. You’re not human. You’re a drone.”

  I thought of the AI drones I had met in my past memory in 1880s New York. They had been so lifelike initially, until something broke down inside of them.

  Nasir nodded, his face trembling spasmodically. “You are correct, sir.”

  “Sent by who?”

  Nasir opened the bottle of whiskey and attempted to pour it into the glass in front of me. His arm jerked and twitched, most of the liquid spilling out across the bar. “I am terribly sorry, sir. I seem to be rapidly losing control.”

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Oh no, sir. I feel no pain,” Nasir said. “You should drink your drink, sir.”

  I stared at the glass, half-filled.

  “What happens when I do?”

  “You will learn new things,” Nasir said. He swiveled away from me, looked out through the window. “I wonder what happens when I go away. Where . . .”

  Nasir’s voice trickled down, like a radio running out of battery power. His head swiveled away from the window and slowly sagged down toward his chest. He was gone. I picked up the glass from the bar, held it up to Nasir’s expended body, and drank it all.

  4

  Parker awoke in his own bed. His heart pounded, his hands ice cold. The sound of gunshots still rang in his ear, his nose still tingled with the sweet burn of gunpowder. He breathed deeply, tried to slow the painful contraction in his chest. He pulled himself up and glanced around the room. Photographs hung on the wall, him and Clayton in police uniform standing before an unmarked police sedan. A bonsai plant, as brown and brittle as a Christmas tree in April, sat on a wooden writing desk with one cracked leg boosted up by a dozen National Geographic magazines. He stood, stretched. A headache lingered just above his eyes.

  Lately he’d begun to suspect the world around him was not real. Or perhaps he wasn’t real. Although he felt solid enough. He rapped his knuckle against the wood of the table. Solid. He looked around his kitchen, opened the refrigerator, smelled the sour, expired milk, tasted the kung pao shrimp from Panda House. Those things felt believable. But for the past few days, he couldn’t shake the nagging doubts.

  He placed his gun on the kitchen table and looked out the window at the Malone kids playing stickball in the street near the furniture factory. In the distance, across the river, rose the spires of Manhattan. A brown sedan slowly circled the block on a squeaky suspension. The Malone kids, all four of them, stopped their game long enough to watch the car slide by and disappear around the corner of the factory.

  Everything in Parker’s neighborhood was a factory. Cabinet factory. Glass factory. Jacket factory. The air always smelled deliciously sweet from the bread factory across the street. Even his apartment was located in a factory. An old ceramics place, the large column of a kiln still visible in the rear yard, various rusted pieces of machinery bolted to the floors near the perennially broken service elevator.

  Everything seemed so nor
mal, but the mistakes were always in the details. He looked down at the white Chinese takeout carton in his hand. Why was he always eating this crap?

  A menu was stapled to the side. Panda House. 13-20 Queens Boulevard. All his food seemed to come from there. Funny. He had never been.

  The menu was crowded with those generic photos of Chinese food dishes. Everything labeled and priced. Nothing out of the ordinary. A rotary phone hung on the wall over the refrigerator. He picked up the handset and dialed the Panda House number. The line was busy. He dialed a random series of numbers. Another busy tone. Always busy. He hung up the phone. Looked like he wouldn’t be ordering Chinese.

  In the distance to the north, the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge stretched out across Roosevelt Island to Queens. The bridge carried no traffic. A blinking LED sign flashed BRIDGE CLOSED DUE TO CONSTRUCTION. Beneath Parker, one of the Malone kids hit a solid shot with his broomstick bat. The rubber ball bounced off the metal-gated window of the cabinet place and ricocheted down the street. The brown sedan circled the block once more.

  Parker glanced around his apartment as if for the first time. A secondhand-looking flower patterned sofa sat opposite a Zenith black and white television. A few Hummel figurines lined the window sill. The carpet was a deep burgundy color and from the wall hung a Norman Rockwell knockoff of some American village. This crap couldn’t be his stuff. Knickknacks and country kitsch. Parker never felt like this could be his life.

  A shoebox sat on the kitchen table. On a whim, he opened the lid. Inside, stacks of hundred dollar bills. He pulled out the bundles, flipped through them, and tossed them back in the box. A sticky note was glued to one of the bills.

  “Welcome back.”

  His wife had left Parker sixteen months ago. His wife, snatched from his arms by a judge and jury and sent away. He still remembered that moment. The bang of the gavel. The handing out of prison time. Ten years inside. Work was the only thing that made him forget. He’d turned into one of those guys who had always depressed him. Working nonstop so they didn’t have to sit at home alone, staring at the walls. Those were the sad sacks you’d see hanging around the precinct all the time. Sleeping in the lounge. Showering in the locker room. Picking up as many overtime tours as they could.

  Parker sighed, holstered his Smith & Wesson, and left for work.

  The man had been dead for a week. A crackhead found him in the basement of an abandoned building on Avenue D. He was tucked in the far corner behind a rusted boiler, curled into a fetal position, a dark stain of dried blood on the concrete floor beneath his head, his only recognizable feature, the twisted upper lip of a cleft palate. Dirty heroin syringes littered the floor like pine needles. Parker drank more coffee and tried to think of something else.

  Clayton rubbed vanilla lotion on his hands, then palmed his nose. The dead body smell was clichéd for a reason. Clayton looked like he’d been dredged up from a swamp as a solid block of granite and chiseled into the shape of a man. Everything was squared off angles and solid mass, except for his nose, which hung at a crooked angle between the promontories of his cheek bones. His eyes were set back beneath the overhang of thin, almost hairless eyebrows. His ears looked like coiled roots clinging to the side of a cliff.

  “Overdose?” Clayton asked.

  Parker frowned. “Pretty big pool of blood for a simple OD.”

  “Maybe he OD’d, fell over, hit his head?”

  “Possible.”

  Footsteps and the squelch of radios sounded from upstairs. The uniform sector who found the body waited around on the first floor to be relieved. Down below was just Clayton and Parker. And the dead guy. Bodies were always turning up in these kind of shooting galleries. Junkies filtered in and out of abandoned buildings all over the Lower East Side, getting high, passing out. Sometimes they got too high and that was that.

  Clayton bent over the body of the dead man. He frowned, looked closer. The man wore a filthy T-shirt and jeans. Parker knew that face from somewhere. He reached back into memory, trying to place the man, but came back with nothing.

  The rest of the basement was empty. Graffiti-covered filthy walls. Urban detritus lay scattered across the floor, parchment-colored fast food wrappers, rusty spoons, puddles of urine, and shitty wads of toilet paper. A single bowl was half-buried upside down in the dirt.

  Clayton moved slowly around the room, bent over at the waist, inspecting the edges of the floor. Swirl marks could be seen in the dust, and small spatters of blood trickled toward the stairs. As a crime scene, the room was a disaster. A hundred people had probably come and gone in this basement in the last week, probably many of them with yardstick-long priors. Whatever prints the officers got could match up with half the prior population of Rikers.

  The part of Parker that wanted to feel sad about the death of another human being had been spirited away years ago in the war. He had seen what one man could do to another. Take a boy and send him off to war, and whatever man he might have become simply vanishes. Instead, you’re left with anger and hatred wrapped in skin. If we each had a conscience, Parker’s had long since burned away.

  Parker and Clayton circled the neighborhood for the next hour, drinking coffee and looking out the window of the unmarked sedan as the crumbling East Village slid by. Block after block of abandoned buildings, shadowy figures moving in and out through broken doorways. The radio crackled with 911 jobs. A marked patrol car flew by, lights flashing blue and red across the dying trees of Thompkins Square Park.

  Clayton chewed the nub of a cigar and tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. Finally, he turned toward Parker. “The next time you go out, I want in.”

  Parker shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. It’s illegal. They find out, you go to jail,” Parker said. “Me. I got a reason. The risk is worth the reward. My wife is out there somewhere, rotting in a prison. But for you, you’ve got a family . . .”

  “I got a daughter who hasn’t spoken to me in four years. I got an ex-wife who I give half my paycheck to every month so she can buy her boyfriend a new motorcycle. I can’t sleep, I have these dreams. My head’s all fucked up. So, what do I got that’s so great here?”

  “But at least you’re here. You’re living. You cross that line, you might not come back,” Parker said. “You know what these jobs do to you. Last three days of my life. Gone. I can’t remember a damn thing. Wake up this morning in my own bed. Box of money on the table. No idea where I’ve been or what I’ve done. That shakes your reality.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Parker thought of the sound of gunfire. The smell of burnt metal in the air. Someone screaming just on the horizon between wake and sleep. “It’s like coming out of a bad dream. You can feel it in your body. Your heart is racing. Your adrenaline is pumping. And you can almost . . . almost remember why. And then it all just kind of fades. And you’re in a room. And you don’t know how you got there. And there’s this, like, terrible moment where everything is gone. All your memory. And you can’t even remember who you are.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “Part of the job. Erase all your memory of what you’ve done. Of who you escaped with.”

  Clayton pushed his cigar to the corner of his mouth, his fingers clenched on the wheel as we drove down Avenue D. Someone had painted an enormous Minotaur on the side of an abandoned building. The Minotaur stretched out his giant bull’s head, sharp horns rising up from its skull, plumes of smoke billowing from flared nostrils.

  Parker checked his watch. They would be expecting his call. They pulled over near a dented pay phone. Outside the car, Parker retrieved a business card from his wallet. It was a plain, bone colored card, no images, with Muninn, Inc. printed on the front, a phone number on the back.

  Parker deposited a quarter into the pay phone and dialed the number.

  “Muninn Incorporated,” a woman answered after the second ring, her voice cheerful, her accent neutral.
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  “Just checking on job openings,” Parker said.

  Parker heard her fingers clatter on a keyboard, then she said, “We do have an opening.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “This requires a personal meeting. Twenty minutes. Avenue D and Tenth Street.”

  Parker hung up the phone and went back to the car. Clayton’s face was still caught in a frown. He turned away from Parker and stared glumly out the window.

  “What are you, mad?” Parker asked as he started the engine.

  “I need this, brother. I need the money. I don’t sleep. I got to get out of here. Get away from all this.”

  Parker pulled away from the curb and headed north. “I’ve got a meeting with these people now. You want to sit in and decide, be my guest. Just don’t pout about it like a six-year-old.”

  Clayton turned back toward Parker and slapped him hard on the shoulder. “My man.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  The meeting took place inside an abandoned biscuit factory, a grand old structure from the glory days of the neighborhood. The building was a half-block in length, with ornate wheat sheaves carved into the side. Most of the windows were now broken, the elaborate cornices over the loading doors covered in graffiti, the stonework crumbling into ruin. The officers parked and entered through a creaking metal door inside the loading dock. Beyond the door was an industrial elevator that carried them to the factory floor.

  “Who are we meeting?” Clayton looked nervous. He straightened his suit jacket, smoothed down his hair, prepared himself like a man before a job interview.

  “Don’t know. Never met with them in person before. Always farmed out jobs over the phone.”

  The elevator ground to a halt and the duo stepped out onto an expansive, empty floor. Light filtered in through the dirty glass. Silt and broken needles littered the ground. Industrial machines rusted in the far corners of the floor, dust-covered and long forgotten. A man leaned against a thick support column, waiting. He wore an elegant suit with a vaguely vintage feel. His face was partially obscured by scraggly muttonchops that advanced down each of his cheeks, framing a thick nose and mustache. On his head, a large black stovepipe hat. He was a complete anachronism, like someone who just stepped out of a black and white Victorian-era photograph.