In My Memory Locked

by Jim Nelson

  "That's why I called you here," he said. "Max discovered you were in Clift's employ and Cassandra did a background check. Everything they've told me about you squares with what I've seen from you today."

  "Which is?"

  Drake leaned forward in his fishing chair, the padding scrunching under his weight.

  "Stay away from my son," he said. "He's got nothing to do with this. Clift is playing a game against me. It's our game to play. Not yours. Not Gannon's."

  He retracted from me with that final statement and returned to his whisky. He was marinating in his bitterness for Clift and soaking in the remorse of a lifetime away from his only son. I added a blade of ice to my mug and poured more Scotch. There wasn't much more to say. I doubted I'd get a straightforward answer from Drake for any of my questions.

  Standing at the stern with my back to the Pacific, I stretched and enjoyed the view of Golden Gate Park down the coast. The Dutch windmill at the end of the park stood still among the kudzu-encumbered trees and lush palms swaying in the sterile breeze. I’d had enough of the lightning show off the coast. It was reassuring to see the city once more.

  The tide and breeze had drawn us toward Lands End. As the boat glided across the water, I realized we were not far from where I’d been two nights before, after meeting Leigh at the blue lounge. I could even make out the tree where I’d come to after the blue-out. The gray cliffs were cut in crinkled jags. The sea lazily lapped against their base. Along the coastline, driftwood and kelp filled the empty spaces between the rocks and boulders on shore.

  “Some people think the city’s best viewed from the bay,” Drake said. “I say the city is best seen from the coast.”

  I leaned forward, one hand on the railing, to make sure the detritus of the driftwood and seaweed was not deceiving me.

  “On the shore,” I said. “Isn’t that a human body?”

  Drake took a long moment to twist around in his chair. "What body?” An hour of Scotch and a lifetime of bile had thickened his tongue. After a moment of looking, his face drew long. He rose and came to my side.

  “Max!” he yelled to the bridge. “What do you see on shore?”

  With sharp reflexes, Max trained a pair of binoculars toward the coast. “I see nothing.”

  “There!” Drake wagged his hand at the base of the cliffs. “Just a little north of us!”

  Max set down the field glasses and worked the wheel. “It’s seaweed,” he called back, disinterested. "A mermaid.”

  Drake hesitated and nodded. “I suppose so.” He returned to his fishing chair.

  I climbed up the ladder to the bridge. Max did not offer me the binoculars, instead remaining focused on manning the wheel.

  I trained the glasses out to the cliffs. Through them, I found the tree I’d passed out beneath. Scanning straight down, I found the portion of the coastline where I thought I’d seen a body.

  “I see an arm!” I yelled down to Drake. “And a leg!”

  Drake went wide-eyed. He climbed to the bridge and used the glasses. He only needed a moment to begin barking orders to Max.

  “Can you radio in the Coast Guard?” I asked.

  “Not out here,” Drake said. “Most electronics are useless past the Golden Gate.”

  “Then take me the shore,” I said. “Someone needs to stay with the body,” I contrived. “You two get the Coast Guard.”

  Max argued against it, but weakly. Drake overruled him. The two of them unfastened an orange inflatable raft stored against the aft of the boat. When it was in the water, Drake turned to me.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I did not relish stepping into my third watercraft of the day, each of lessening stability and reliability. “You’re staying here?”

  “Max is the fittest one on this crew,” Drake said.

  Boarding the raft, I almost fell backwards into the drink. Who the hell thought rubber was for good for making boats.

  Little was said as we paddled. I was ever mindful of the pistol on Max’s belt. As shore approached, I peered back at the Thomas Edison. Drake stood atop the bridge with the field glasses pressed to his face monitoring our progress.

  “Can you get back to the boat on your own?” I said.

  “I’ll stay with you,” he said.

  “Drake can sail back by himself?”

  Max, stymied, cursed under his breath. “No, he can’t.”

  Ahead of us, the outline of a lifeless arm and leg grew definite among the flotsam littering the shore. When the water looked two feet deep, I dropped down from the raft. Ice cold Pacific water numbed me to my belt. I’d misjudged the depth.

  “Get back to the bay and radio the Coast Guard,” I told Max. “Radio the cops too."

  He resigned himself and began paddling back toward the Edison. His first strokes back to the Edison were disdainful, his eyes on me as though I’d just swindled from him a fortune. As the distance widened between us, his strokes grew stronger until he was practically an Olympian delivering the raft back to the Edison. Drake watched it all from the bridge.

  With the wacky climate out there, the tide was faint, waves lapping the beach like a cat drinking from a glass of water. I emerged from the water shivering. My brogues were filled with seawater and squished with each step. I tromped over driftwood and slick leafy seaweed to the body.

  I don’t have to tell you it was Gannon Chancellor. I knew before I climbed into the raft whose body lay at the foot of the cliffs. Gannon’s waxy face was bloated from saltwater and exposure. His clothes were wrenched about his body like he’d been through the washing machine wearing them. Steel-gray eyes and wide-gummed teeth peered up at me with the tense expression of a man who’d seen Death moments before meeting him.

  A mechanical horn blared across the water. Drake stood atop the bridge waving both arms. I waved back, crossing and uncrossing my arms. He and Max hurried their preparations.

  From the shore, I watched a silent choreographed dance happen aboard the Thomas Edison. Drake and Max connected cables and passed tools between one another. They dug through cabinets and boxes mounted around the sailboat. They were assembling some contraption on the aft deck, a flagpole topped by an oversized brass sphere. Together, they cranked a ratchet to extend the collapsible pole until the sphere was thirty feet in the air. They lowered the mainsail and headsail and made them fast against their masts. They retreated to the bridge and sealed all hatches.

  The first jagged bolt of lightning struck the brass orb with a craa-aack that cut the air in half. The second bolt of lightning struck a few seconds later. From the depths of the sailboat came the sound of an engine roaring to life. The boat kicked forward once and then twice more like a boy learning the foxtrot for the first time. Slack-jawed, I watched another bolt send the Edison northward at a fair clip. Drake—unaware of whose body I stood over—bleated the proud boat horn once more as they scurried off for the Farallons.

  24.

  I was a man with a purpose and I worked like one. Who knew how long it would take for Drake to reach the authorities. Who knew how long it would take for them to get out to Lands End. If the police came down the face of the cliff, they could be at my side in under two hours.

  First thing I did was feel around the back of Gannon’s neck. His skin was clammy and slick as a slug’s back. My numb fingers located what I sought, the fleshy button-top of his memex. Using my thumbnail, I pried it free. It slid into my palm with ease, almost eager for release. The fibrous tendrils were limp from lack of contact with a charged nervous system. It was sheer luck it had not worked free when the tidewater covered him. The only question was whether the device had been damaged in the fall or from exposure. I wrapped the button in a damp handkerchief and pocketed it.

  Shivering and using all the strength I could muster, I rolled him up on his side. His shirt and trousers were ragged now. Royal purple hematomas blotched his shoulders and his back. His right shoulder appeared dislocated and was frozen into a sickening angle. His left femur pro
truded from his ripped kneehole. The exposed end of the compound fracture looked like a broken baseball bat bleached white from the sun. Gannon’s body had been scrubbed clean by the tide, a tasty meal for the sand fleas dancing over him.

  Saltwater had damaged the Italian leather of his billfold. The business cards and paper inside were in various degrees of deterioration. He carried over eight hundred dollars in assorted bills, mostly hundreds. Identification cards proved this was Gannon Chancellor, although I didn’t need any documentary evidence for my purposes. He carried membership cards entitling him access to two exclusive social clubs, one on Russian Hill and another in the Financial District. Everything else in the billfold was either irrelevant or destroyed beyond discernment. I reassembled the contents of his billfold as I’d found them and returned it to his pocket.

  The work was eye-watering and gruesome, made arduous by my seawater-numb hands. The smell of green beef was especially ripe when I rolled over his body. Finished with my task, I stumbled away, my hard-soled shoes slipping on the slick rocks, and found a place to sit with my back against the cliff face. Clift told me my first day on Alcatraz I was the sort of man who was alien to our culture. Perhaps I was, but I was not numb to it.

  Peering upon his bluish death mask, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy for all the advantages lavished on Gannon: born rich, born handsome, born the child of powerful people who could ensure every door he approached swung open wide inviting him to enter. Even looking upon him dead, I wanted what he had.

  Two nights earlier, I’d emerged from a blue-out under a tree just a few feet from where Gannon had fallen to his death. I’d been up there with Leigh Blessing, his live-in girlfriend who sounded like she was one step removed from being his fiancée. She was also a woman I would’ve given anything to have as my own. He’d treated her like a cut of supermarket brisket on even-numbered days and possessed her like a family deed on odd-numbered days. Someone had hit me square in the face at the top of the cliff. Gannon was the obvious suspect for my bruises. I was the obvious suspect for his death.

  Cold and wet and nauseous, I hugged myself against the side of the cliff. My teeth chattered like a death rattle. I waited for the authorities to arrive. I spent my time sketching out what truths I would offer them, what facts I would withhold, and what lies I would—

  *

  My memories between sitting with my back to the cliff and standing with Talley Whitcomb are gone—wiped clean by a decade of compulsively abusing Blue Pharjé. I recall not a moment of my time waiting for the police to arrive. One moment I’m shivering against the cliff wall devising my tall tales, the next I’m covered in an emergency blanket answering Whitcomb’s questions. This is the price of neuroliqueur abuse.

  I'm sure I had a story for the police prepared. I can feel the story in my memories, but I cannot recite it. My story's absence is strongly felt, like the fading echo of a door slammed shut in a far-off room. The story exonerated me and swung responsibility clear of Clift and the search for the missing data brick. Then—like a strong wave hitting me across the chest—the tale I’d devised smashed to pieces and the remaining bits floated away.

  “Go on,” Talley prompted me. “You were sailboating with George Drake when you spotted the body on shore.”

  It wasn’t a blue-out. I wasn’t drinking Blue Pharjé while sitting on the rocks. Those blank two hours are different. My time there is pure static, a great blank of white noise in my memory.

  “That’s right, I was boating with Drake and his pilot,” I said. I was the fledgling actor whose stage fright has thieved away every memorized line. “I was looking out toward the shore when—”

  “You spotted Gannon first?” Talley asked. “Not Drake? Not his first mate, Maximilian something-or-another?” She checked her notes. “Dorsett? Max Dorsett?”

  “I saw Gannon first,” I said.

  “From the bow of the ship?”

  “That’s right. But we were far enough that I had to use binoculars to be certain.”

  Blue Pharjé is not alcohol. That’s one of its selling points—no alcohol, no liver damage, no deterioration of the organs. After ten years on the market, it’d grown clear Blue Pharjé had its own attendant problems, namely short-term memory loss and the blurring of self-identity. In hindsight, it seems stupid for us to think a neuroliqueur designed to suppress memories temporarily would have no deleterious side-effects. Of course, for hundreds of years, man believed inhaling burnt particulate matter into the lungs was a healthy habit. We told ourselves watching certain kinds of television made us smarter and reading certain newspapers made us better informed. Blue Pharjé was new. Optimistic excuse-making is ancient.

  “Why didn’t Max see the corpse?” Whitcomb asked. “He was on the bridge steering. He was standing at least twenty feet higher than you.” She peered across the water. The Thomas Edison was anchored among a flotilla of police boats and Coast Guard craft. All were specialized craft modified for operating beyond the Golden Gate.

  The once-desolate shore was now busy with police, deputies from the Sheriff’s office, and Coast Guard crew. Powerboats taxied personnel back and forth from the anchored watercraft. Talley and I had to shout over the constant whine of engines and the rumble of thunder off the coast.

  “I won’t speculate why Max didn’t spot the body,” I told her.

  “You’ve been out here waiting for, what, two hours now?”

  Biologically, I had no idea. My memex was all-but-useless in these electromagnetic storms. “Something like two hours, yeah.”

  Talley wore a clear slicker over her cop-blue trench coat. She crouched over Gannon’s body and surveyed it up and down. Three forensic investigators patiently waited off to one side with cases of equipment at their feet.

  With a blue medical glove over her right hand, she felt around the back of Gannon’s neck. He stared back with glassy eyes locked in a permanent expression of shock.

  “No memex,” she said to me.

  “Must’ve come loose. Probably washed out with the tide.”

  “You think he’s been down here long enough for the tide to come in and go out?” She nodded toward the storms over the Pacific. No lunar tide out there anymore. At Lands End, the ocean has its own mind.

  “Look at his state of decay. Isn’t it obvious he’s been submerged?”

  “Nothing’s obvious to me about this. I mean, what the hell was Gannon doing out here anyway?” She peered up to the cliff top. "Or was his body brought here after he was killed?"

  "Or dumped in the ocean and washed ashore."

  "That too." She rose to full height. “Never mind how you wound up here."

  "I told you, we were sailing."

  "Sure, just like you were meeting Aggaroy for breakfast the morning he was killed." She came close to me. "Michael Aggaroy’s office was broken into. Probably happened on Friday. You know anything about that?”

  “No,” I said, surprised.

  “It happened while we were waiting for a search warrant to be processed. Judge held us up over the list of particulars we were looking for—you know, ‘What exactly do you need this for? What exactly to you need to see that for?’ By the time we got into the office, it had been ransacked.”

  “What were they looking for?”

  “Well, I don’t know what they were looking for—” She spoke with professional disinterest as she peeled off the medical glove. “But I do know they wiped his memory-retention server. All of Aggaroy’s stored memories, gone. Which, of course, is exactly what we wanted to get our hands on when we filed the warrant. With his memex destroyed in the attack, that retention server was our best bet for—” Her jaded professional indifference broke. “Did I say something?”

  I would have been a pretty sad poker player if I’d followed that route in life. “Just thinking how much work it must have been breaking into his office safe,” I said, covering myself. “I worked with him for three years. Even I didn’t have the combination.”

 
“You knew he had a private retention server, though, right?”

  “Not only that, he was the one who advised me to set up my own private retention server. Years ago, when I was working for him.”

  A public memex retention server is easier, obviously, since you pay someone else to administer it. Almost everyone stores their memories on a public retention server, if they’re going to retain their memories at all. But a public retention server means risking a great deal of privacy. The police and the Feds have turn-key access to all your memories. If Aggaroy had used a public server, Whitcomb would have had access to his final memories as soon as they’d identified his body.

  No, the reason I kept my retention server stored in a cage beneath my office is the same reason Aggaroy kept his stored in an office safe. It’s the only way to be sure you’re in control of your recorded memories. But that security doesn’t mean a damn if someone can gain physical access to the machine.

  “How’d they get it out of his safe?” I asked her.

  “They didn’t,” she said. “They used a micro-drill bit to run a fiber inside the safe. Looks like they overwhelmed the Nexternet signal and created a mock feed. They fooled the server into thinking they were Aggaroy, pulled out all his memories, and then wiped the server clean.” She shrugged. “It was professional work.”

  Whitcomb had described the exact method my own retention server had been wiped the day before.

  “Something else,” she said. “Aggaroy was struck from behind when he was killed. Maybe with a club, maybe with two hands. This is what the M.E. is telling us. Then, with his back on the ground, they strangled him while smashing his head against the curb. The curb destroyed his memex, not the blow from behind.” Not slyly, she added, “Doesn’t Dr. Clift use a walking cane?”

  I was well ahead of her. “Clift uses a cane alright. In fact, there’s an orb on the end about the size of a tangerine.” I made a sphere in the air with my hands. “It’s an elephant curled like a fist, if I remember right."