The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  As Parker and Clayton crossed the floor, the man smiled. It was a beautiful smile, the kind of smile actors dreamed of having. But there was nothing welcoming about his expression, and Parker grew wary.

  “You brought a friend,” the man said. He spoke with a vague accent. The words had a nasal tone, the sound of some lost East Coast American dialect long ago smoothed out.

  “My partner,” Parker said.

  “The partner of the legendary Parker is always welcome here.” The man indicated the decrepit warehouse.

  “You know me?” Parker asked.

  “You need no introduction,” the man said. “I, however, do. My name is Dunbar. I am the representative of the organization that has employed you for various projects. And we have marveled at your success.”

  “I’ve been lucky.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with our success in life. Our destiny is in our own hands. Believe anything but that and you’ll become a prisoner yourself.”

  “What did you want to see me about?”

  Dunbar smiled his actor’s smile again. “Your last job, how did you feel?”

  “Like a blank space.”

  “We have a contract for you.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “What the job has always been.”

  “Escape.”

  “Bingo,” Dunbar said, the term sounding strange as it sprung from his Victorian era mouth. Dunbar indicated a map stretched out on a work table near one of the industrial machines. The paper was faded to a burned yellow. It was a map of New York City. “I think you know this place.”

  Parker studied the map. Manhattan and Brooklyn were meshes of streets and parks and subway lines. Queens was still filled with the open farmland. Parker had become something of an expert in maps. The physical lines and spaces helped ground him in reality, which was good, because losing grip on reality was always a danger in his profession.

  “What is it, early 1950s?”

  “1953,” Dunbar said. “This is the mindprint for a New York State max secure mind penitentiary.”

  “How secure?”

  “Very,” said Dunbar. “Lots of guards. Lots of drones.”

  Parker studied the map. The 1950s were a dangerous time. Lots of weaponry had made it back from the war. Lots of guns. Lots of anger. People were quick to fight, even the ones who weren’t guards or drones. He preferred an earlier time, when settling things with a fist rather than a loaded gun was a more likely option.

  Parker looked up. “Who’s the mark?”

  “The only son of New York State Senator Ted Scott.”

  “What’d he do?” Parker asked, still studying the map.

  “Does it matter?”

  Parker studied Dunbar. “Of course it matters.”

  “Ah, yes, I’ve heard of your moral reservations. Well, this one’s different. You’re being paid for it not to matter.”

  Parker shook his head, then wiped his hands together. He suddenly felt very dirty. This had always been a dirty game, but there were rules. Bankers. Fraudsters. Tax evaders. Money launderers. These were guys he could bust out. They weren’t clean exactly, but they weren’t violent. He didn’t have to worry that six weeks later he’d read about some ten-year-old they found dead in a ditch somewhere with a Parker escapee’s fingerprints all over the bloody knife that cut the kid’s throat. No thank you. This life was bad enough without serving time in hell in the next one.

  “Can’t do it,” Parker said. “But thank you for your time.”

  Parker turned to leave. Clayton took the hint and followed him. They had almost made the elevator when Dunbar called out, “The mark is in the same system as your wife.”

  Parker froze, felt the world around him begin to close in. His wife. His wife who he hadn’t seen in sixteen months. His wife who’d had too much to drink one night, drove off, and crushed a kid with her Volvo. His wife, now doing ten years in the system.

  All Parker’s fault.

  He turned slowly around. “How do you know?”

  “We know,” Dunbar said. “We don’t know her virtual identity, but we know she’s there. And we know the senator’s son will have that information.”

  “How?”

  “He has money. Money buys information. He has a guard who has been helping him.”

  Even if Parker found her, she wouldn’t know him. She wouldn’t remember him. She would be so wrapped up in her world, there would be no convincing her of the truth, of their love. But he knew he had to find her. And somehow, a deeper part of him, the part of him that wasn’t rational, that didn’t listen to just reason, felt that when he found her, she would know him. And maybe he could bring her back.

  “I’ll go,” Parker said. “I’ll get your man. I’ll break him out. And then you leave me in there until I get done what I need to. Deal?”

  “What you do on your own time is no concern of mine,” Dunbar said. “But this is time sensitive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our man has to get broken out in the next forty-eight hours.”

  Parker’s stomach contracted in a laugh, but the sound died before it ever reached his lips. Dunbar’s face was expressionless. No hint of a smile. The man was serious. Clayton kept quiet. He had no idea what went into a mission, but Parker did.

  “That’s impossible,” Parker said. “We need weeks to plan. I need to know my Navigator, my Archivist.”

  “Pick your team. There’s money in this operation. Anyone you want to work with.”

  “The history of the era. I need to study. I don’t know the weapons, the lingo . . . I’ll get made in the first five minutes.”

  “Forty-eight hours from now, the Panopticon owners shut the system down for good. Nobody in or out. You want to wait, you lose your wife. It’s a reach, sure. But sometimes the reach is worth the reward. Or did I overestimate your feelings?”

  “What about guards?”

  Parker thought of his wife. The last time he saw her. She had smiled. Her eyes filled with tears. Then she hung up the intercom phone and pressed her hand against the Plexiglas window. Right before a guard came and led her away. And he never saw her again. But she was out there somewhere. Living a new life in the system.

  Dunbar extended his hand. Cold to the touch. Parker gripped it tight.

  “We have a deal,” Parker said. “Tell me when we go.”

  The precinct locker room looked like a German bunker at the end of the war. Low ceilings, flickering lights, cracked concrete walls. The showers crawled with roaches flitting in and out between loose tiles. Lockers were rusted out boxes, stacked like old refrigerators along the walls. The fronts were covered with the requisite “Police, Don’t Move” stickers, reminding cops what to say in gun encounters. The only sacred space was occupied by a pair of posters, one of Don Mattingly, the other, Cindy Crawford. Everything else, pure government shit.

  Parker changed quickly. Jeans, sweatshirt. He tucked his gun into an ankle holster. His shield he slid into his wallet.

  “So what happens now?” Clayton said.

  “Now we go get the team,” Parker said. He slammed shut his locker.

  They took Clayton’s car, a maroon sedan the size of an ocean liner. The Navigator lived in uptown, and they headed north on the FDR, the East River flashing by. Traffic was light. Clayton drove with the windows down. The air smelled of cigarettes and wet concrete.

  “You’ve never been inside before?” Parker asked.

  “No, buddy. I just lock them up. I don’t really know what happens after. How many times you been in?”

  “I’m not really sure.”

  He could always remember little bits of things. Immense skyscrapers that stretched so high, you could barely see the top. Streets crowded with people and cars, everyone jostling each other, moving about their lives with purpose. He thought of the German. And the bodies he’d been inside, used up like candle wicks. “It’s unbelievable. Unless you knew it wasn’t real. You feel hunger. Fear. Pain.”


  “Pain? What happens if you die inside?”

  Parker had died plenty of times. Most he hadn’t even seen coming. Kick down a door, a man inside with a revolver. You’re gone in a flash of smoke. Eyes suddenly open in another place. Another time. Those were the disorienting cases. But dying wasn’t the problem. Dying was how you came back.

  “You die, you wake up,” Parker said. “Living is the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You get captured, you don’t wake up. Ever,” Parker said. “They’ll throw you in prison and keep you there in the system. That’s the danger. The only way to leave the system is to die. That’s how we break out the prisoners.”

  “Dying doesn’t hurt?”

  Dying was the worst pain Parker had ever experienced. Excruciating. Like his mind was being ripped from his skull through his ears and nose. “Just try to get it over with. Die fast.”

  The Navigator lived in one of those beautiful doorman buildings on the east side of Central Park. A marked police car was parked with its lights on, rotating strobes of blue and red flashing across the stone face of the building. Seated inside, two uniforms made entries in their memo books. The driver looked up, startled, when Parker tapped the window with his shield.

  “Everything all right?” Parker asked.

  The uniform shrugged. The smell of hamburger wafted up from inside the car. Two patrol guys about to park somewhere and eat when they got called out on a job. The aggravation wafting from the police car was almost palpable.

  “Emotionally disturbed person job,” the uniform said. “Some lady took a shitload of pills, changed her mind, called 911.”

  “Get her name?”

  “Yeah,” the uniform checked the Aided hospital card. “Charlotte Gonzales. Female, white, 35 years old.”

  Charlotte Gonzales. Even before he heard the name, Parker knew it would have been Charlotte. She was a ship lost in the night, far from land, surrounded by fog and taking in water.

  “Where’d they take her?” Parker asked.

  “Bellevue,” the cop replied.

  A minute later, Parker collapsed back into Clayton’s car.

  “Problem?” Clayton asked as the big engine rumbled to life.

  “Slight,” Parker said. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about our Navigator.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A few years back, her son drowned in some kind of boating accident. After that, she sort of lost it. Now she’s mentally unstable.”

  “Aren’t we all a little mentally unstable?” Clayton pulled off from the curb. “But she’s good at what she does?”

  “She’s the best Navigator I’ve ever worked with.”

  “Let’s take a ride to the psych hospital.”

  Bellevue clung like a barnacle to the edge of the highway, overlooking the East River. Streetlights flashed by overhead in a blur. Across the water, Roosevelt Island stretched out, the ruin of an old mental hospital barely visible through the trees.

  “What is a Navigator anyway?” Clayton asked.

  “A Navigator is like a guide. She accesses historical archives. Maps of the city through different time periods. She gives you routes, street names, building numbers. After Charlotte’s son drowned, her whole life fell apart. Since then, she’s been in and out of psych hospitals.”

  “Can’t you get someone else?”

  “I could always get someone else. But there’s nobody I trust. She’s the best. And the work steadies her,” Parker said. “You’re my partner out here. She’s my partner in there.”

  “So what do we do to get her out? She’s in psych. We can’t get near her if she’s been committed.”

  “I know the doctor at Bellevue. He released her to me before,” Parker said. “Hopefully he will again.”

  They pulled into the ER lot outside the hospital. Bellevue was the collection center for most of the psych cases in the city and for the entire population of male psych prisoners. The ward itself was part Rikers, part One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  The waiting room was filled with men handcuffed to hard metal chairs. It was feeding time. Some of the prisoners were drinking orange juice from plastic cups or eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Their uniformed escorts looked bored or tired. Prisoners and patients shuffled about together, most of them in pale blue hospital gowns. A television bolted to the ceiling played Murder, She Wrote.

  Doctor Chandler was in his late 50s, salt-and-pepper hair and a car dealer’s smile. He wore a white coat, his nametag fixed to the pocket. His office was physician bland, diplomas on the wall, a framed photograph of two kids in braces, a shelf of medical reference guides.

  Chandler leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together. Nothing but all the time in the world.

  “Sure, Charlotte Gonzales,” the doctor replied after Parker explained the reason for their visit. “I can’t discuss the details of her case with you. But I’ll tell you what you already know. Just brought her in an hour ago. Acute stress disorder. Depression. Suicidal thoughts and actions.”

  “She lost a child,” Parker said.

  “I know. Terrible. Depression is the inability to imagine a future. And since one never truly gets over the loss of a child, one is always fighting depression, fighting to imagine a future, if you will.”

  “I need you to release her to my care,” Parker said.

  “And why is that?”

  Because she’s my Navigator. I need her to enter another world and break someone out of prison.

  Parker tried to keep his face neutral. “She’s a friend.”

  Chandler sighed, rocked back in his chair. “I don’t know if that’s going to be possible. She made a legitimate suicidal attempt.”

  “I know she did. But I can help her. Better than being in this place. Zombies walking into walls. Murder, She Wrote on loop. Any sense of normalcy she might have had before will just evaporate in this shithole.”

  Chandler considered this. “I might be inclined to be insulted. But the care and safety of a patient is more important to me than my ego. And I admit you may have a point. With her consent, I will interview her with you in the room. And then make a decision. Agreed?”

  Parker hoped Charlotte was lucid enough to hold a conversation. If she wasn’t, it would be a very short interview. But no matter what happened, Parker was not leaving this place without her.

  “Agreed.”

  Charlotte looked terrible. Her hair hung in greasy vines from her head. Dark circles floated under her eyes like pools of dirty water. She stared sullenly at the ground. Her lower jaw hung open slightly, a pearl of saliva caught on the corner of her mouth.

  Even through the mask of sadness, Parker could see she had been a formidable woman once. But more than just her child had been lost in that water. Her future, her reason for being, her soul had also slipped beneath the surface on that day.

  That was her in the real world.

  As a Navigator, she was the best Parker had ever seen. Her damaged mind accepted and understood the world of the system and she could move through its imagined intricacies without the blocks of a strictly rational brain.

  Chandler, Parker, and Charlotte sat in the doctor’s office. Clayton paced the intake waiting room outside.

  The doctor leaned forward, a yellow writing pad balanced on his knee. “Charlotte, can you hear me?”

  Charlotte nodded slowly, not taking her eyes from the floor. She’s almost gone, Parker thought. There’s nothing here but the shell of a human. The skin. The hair. The clothes. But whatever existed once inside was lost.

  The doctor indicated Parker. “Do you know who this man is?”

  Charlotte glanced up momentarily and Parker had the frightening feeling that she looked right through him. Not recognizing who he was. But then she nodded, almost imperceptibly, before she dropped her eyes back to the ground.

  “Who is he, Charlotte?”

  “Parker. He’s my friend. I look out for him.”r />
  “You look out for him? What do you mean?”

  “I protect him. I help him find his way home,” Charlotte said. “Can I have some water?”

  “In a minute. But first, tell me, how are you feeling?”

  “Sad. I feel sad. And lonely.”

  “Why do you feel sad and lonely?”

  Charlotte sighed, some of the life coming back into her. She twisted her fingers together. “You know why.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  “Because I lost my son.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Charlotte looked past the doctor toward some invisible point on the wall. “I was on vacation, at the beach with my son. He swam out too far, away from me, and this riptide . . . just carried him out.”

  Parker had heard this story before. Each time it was recited with the same rote consistency of an actor reading lines, as if she had no emotions left to give.

  “And does this make you want to hurt yourself?”

  “I did,” Charlotte said. She looked up finally and met the doctor’s eye. “I didn’t want to live anymore.”

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  Charlotte glanced at Parker. “Why are you here?”

  Parker said nothing. He only nodded slightly.

  Charlotte pushed matted hair from her face. “A job?”

  The doctor waved his hand and turned toward Parker. “It’s easier if I conduct the interview.”

  Charlotte looked at the doctor, a spark of life in her eye. She frowned, then sat up straight in her chair. “I did want to hurt myself. But now I don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I feel much better now,” Charlotte straightened her clothes. “Now I have a reason to live again.”

  They had released her after Charlotte made a bunch of promises about long-term therapy. She and Parker had both signed various forms. Some other doctors had come in to look things over. But in the end, she was like a fish no one wanted, thrown back into the water.