The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time

by Samuel Ben White

  Of course, to ask such questions was to admit to possibilities she was not ready to accept. The possibility that this stranger really was who he said he was was unacceptable, for the moment.

  But yet, he didn't seem a stranger. He seemed like Garison. Mannerisms and even little facial twitches that he had had been Garison's also. Even a certain turn of phrase had echoed back to her Garison, though she couldn't remember exactly what it had been. What was going on? she asked herself—hesitant of what the reply might be if it weren't "simple" amnesia.

  He looked at her strangely, but corrected, "The machines I put in here" [motioning to the laboratory] "Were manufactured by Tesla. These say...I am not familiar with that company."

  "Sony," she told him, pointing to where the nameplate was on the nearest machine. "They're manufactured in Japan. Well, they may be manufactured over here, but it's a Japanese corporation."

  "Japan?" he asked with shock. Was that where she was a spy from? She must be from the Japanese Americas, he thought, for she obviously had no Asian blood in her. But surely the Japanese wouldn't have sent in a spy with such a wild story and mode of operation. They operated differently, from what he had always understood; being more ruthless than cunning.

  "Yeah," she shrugged, "Almost all electronics come from Japan. You know how you always complained about that? You wondered why Americans couldn't make equipment that was just as good. You spoke about it a lot."

  "Americans?" he asked. "What of the Japanese Americas? Do they produce these electronics, too?"

  She looked at him strangely, then smiled, trying to keep a good face on it all, "Boy, that went right over my head. What are you talking about, 'Japanese Americas'? You mean Japanese Americans, maybe? I imagine some of them make electronics."

  He started to reply, but didn't know what to say. Finally, he said, "You seem to know everything about me—or so you think. Do I have anything to drink in the house?"

  "Yeah, lots. Do you want to go in and get something cold to drink?"

  "Yes," he told her. "I could use something to drink." He wondered why it would be cold, though. The only drink he ever kept cold was milk—and that was only to prevent spoiling. He had heard that some of the Texans often drank their drinks cold, so maybe she was from there. She had said the word "ya'll", which he thought was used pretty much exclusively in Texas. Her spy trainer should have cautioned her against such obvious slip-ups. He was oblivious to the fact that—in less than five minutes—he had attributed her actions to the KGB, the Japanese and the Texans.

  "You could also use a change of clothes," she laughed. He looked down at his clothes then looked back at her and shrugged.

  In a rare moment of humor, he smiled weakly and said, "They were the height of fashion this morning. Uh, yesterday morning. Whenever."

  "You haven't been to bed yet, have you?"

  "No. I wandered around the house for a bit. You probably heard me bumping into things. They, uh, weren't where I remembered them being. Then I came out here. I've been out here ever since, well, ever since I talked to you last night."

  "How come?" she asked, finding herself genuinely interested.

  "I-I felt funny in there," he told her. A part of him said he ought to tell her any and every thing about himself, but another part was saying he needed to keep quiet. Oh well, he rationalized, I've heard the best cover story is one founded basically on the truth.

  "Funny? Why?"

  "Well, it was my house, but it wasn't. Things are different. Some of the doors are off—not where they're supposed to be. A few inches to the left or right of where they should be. There was stuff in there that wasn't mine, and other stuff that was. But it was all changed just slightly. Even the fountain pens were made different. It was, well, unsettling.

  He stopped and looked at her with what was supposed to be a stern countenance. Heather thought, though, that behind it she was seeing something like the fear she had been feeling. He told her, "I don't know who you work for or who set this up, but you did a good job. This whole place is like a haunted house version of my life. If your goal is to scare me, you're doing a good job. I'll admit that. I don't know what it is you want out of me, but you're not getting it. At least not until I get some straight answers."

  With a sad look on her face, Heather merely nodded and started for the door. She opened it and looked back to make sure he was following, then went on out and across the yard. Her shoulders were hunched, but it struck Garison that she looked more like someone carrying an unbearable load than like someone who was cold. Or, maybe, she was hunched like someone expecting a blow from behind. The thought of shoving her to the floor the previous night leaped to his mind and he immediately felt guilty.

  Outside, La Plata Canyon looked the same as it had the day he left. Each tree looked the same and even his house looked the same—from the outside, anyway. He paused on the driveway and looked through the trees at the road. He knew something was amiss, but it took him a moment to spot the anomaly. He suddenly exclaimed, "The road is paved!"

  Heather laughed, the first genuine one he had seen or heard from her since she welcomed him back. "Of course it is. It's been paved since before we moved up here. I think they said it was done in the '70s—and they've hardly repaired it since. You know how you always complain when the county doesn't maintain it. This year we're going to have chug-holes the size of bushel baskets, I'm afraid."

  "Paved?" he muttered again, shaking his head. If his idea about being drugged were right, he would have had to have been out of it for quite a while for all the work that had been done to have been done.

  The house was drastically different on the inside from the day he had left—and yet it wasn't. The walls were still in the same place—and most of the doors were pretty close to where they had been—but only pretty close and it had the touch of a woman. The furniture matched much better than the furniture he had picked out or built and there were little odds and ends lying about that made the house look like a home. If Heather were a spy (and he admitted that the ifs grew bigger each moment) it must have taken an efficient crew to fashion the changes that had come about. They almost looked like they were done by someone who cared, and not just a "prop man."

  Maybe it wasn't really 2005, he thought to himself. Maybe he had really been gone a long time and all this had been created for his benefit in case he ever came back. Why?

  And, if so, he suddenly remembered, they were even monitoring his television. He had turned on the TV in the living room for a moment the night before and everything he could find on the dozen or so channels seemed to point to the idea that it was March 15, 2005. Although, the fact that there had been a dozen channels, each with a different program displayed, was a minor miracle in itself. He had had a TV before, but it had depended on the wind and other atmospheric conditions whether he even got one channel or not. On rare occasions he had received three fuzzy stations, but never a dozen—and certainly never with the picture quality he had seen the night before. Not out here in the canyon. Even in the cities, there were rarely more than three channels, all state-controlled and all boring. He often went weeks without turning on his TV and then it was usually just to check the news.

  He went to the kitchen and saw that it showed the touch of a woman even more so than the living room. He hadn't gone through the kitchen the night before because it had smelled like fresh-baked bread; and that had reminded him too much of Sarah. He had gone out of his way to go through the living room and across the yard to get to the laboratory, almost falling in the snow more than once for that path was not as well trodden. He looked at the refrigerator and noticed that it was different from the one he had installed. It was still just a box, but somehow much more attractive and modern-looking that the one he remembered. He looked from it to Heather and asked, "Kenmore? Is that another Japanese company?"

  "No," she laughed, "That's one of the last of the American-made products. That's why you bought it. That and the fact that it was on sale."

&n
bsp; "Sale? Aren't all items for sale?"

  "Um, 'on sale' means an item is being sold for a lower than normal price."

  "Ah." He thought about commenting that the Japanese were, technically, Americans, too, but did not know what good the statement would do. Unbeknownst to him, he was trying the same tack she was in hopes of gaining ground: play along with whatever the other says. It was not a foreign game to him as it was a lot like the "dance" he used to have with Tex.

  He was about to open the refrigerator when something caught his eye. He turned to look and saw what it was. He asked, "When did we get a telephone out here?"

  "Before we moved in," Heather replied. Why would a telephone be a big deal? It seemed to her that it should have been one of those "given" things in his memory—like his name. On the other hand, a little light went off inside her at his use of the word "we." He hadn't made that admission before. Maybe things were looking up. "Remember? we had an awful time getting the telephone company to put it in. But, you kept your promise and had it here before your blushing bride moved in."

  "Blushing? You were embarrassed about being my wife?"

  She laughed out loud and told him, "That's just an expression, Silly. You've heard that before, haven't you?"

  "No, I have not." He opened the refrigerator and gasped at what he saw. In a near panic, he asked, "Where did this come from?"

  "What?" she asked, coming close quickly. She was afraid something had gone bad. She was not, she readily admitted, the world's best homemaker, but she did try to remove things from the refrigerator before they returned to life.

  "This!" he asked, producing a bottle of Dr Pepper. And it was in an oddly shaped plastic bottle claiming to be a full two liters of the illegal drink!

  "The store," she told him, becoming confused again. "Don't tell me you don't remember Dr Pepper! It's your favorite drink! You not remembering Dr Pepper would be like you not remembering which direction was up."

  "I know it's my favorite drink—before, anyway," he told her. "But it's illegal to have it here! You can't take it out of Texas!"

  "Since when?" She had suddenly forgotten her plan to go with anything he said as the current conversation seemed nothing less than absurd.

  "The war! When the Party took over, they outlawed the import of all products from Texas."

  "Import?" she asked with a smile. "Since when can you not transport things between Texas and Colorado?"

  "What is a Colorado?" he asked. "You have used that word before. Is it a place? A country? What?" Surely the machine had not transported him to another location again. No, that could not be. He had seen his laboratory and the La Plata. To reconstruct the La Plata Canyon would be far more trouble than even the KGB would go to.

  "Colorado," she said. "You know, one of the fifty states—like Texas. You know, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida: the lower forty-eight and all?"

  He shook his head, "I know none of these names, except Texas. You say they are states—states of what country?"

  "The United States of America!" she exclaimed, finding it hard to believe that he had never heard of the U.S.A. It was an odd selective amnesia, if that were what it was. She still hated to even entertain any other explanations.

  "The United...They're still around? You're saying that in the year 2005, the United States of America are still around?"

  "The United States of America is around. We're no longer a plurality. Unfortunately, some say. But, yes! We're still here."

  "And we are a part of them? La Plata Canyon and Durango?"

  "Yes! Of course we are!"

  "Colorado," he mumbled at the map. To her, he asked, "How far west do these United States of America go? Are we still near the Japanese border?"

  She laughed and told him, "We aren't near the border in any direction, especially not the Japanese border. They're an island on the other side of the Pacific. The U.S., though, stretches all the way to California."

  "The Spanish lands?" he asked with awe. No single country had ever stretched from sea to sea on this continent that he knew of. If she were making this up, he asked himself again, why was she being so outlandish? Why make up an entirely new world? He, too, quelled from the possible answer.

  "Not for about two hundred years," Heather replied, amazed at Garison's lack of knowledge of all this. If he had forgotten so much of this, how was it that he still remembered English, or how to walk? "I think we bought California from Mexico—or Spain. I really don't know that part of history very well. I don't think it was a war, though." She laughed, "It may have had something to do with Zorro."

  He just shrugged at her joke and sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of Dr Pepper in his hand. He sipped it and said, "Cold. I have never tried it this way." It was quite good, he admitted. After a long pause, as he tried to sort the information he was being bombarded with, he asked, "You say there is open trade between these United States and Texas?"

  "Texas is a state of the United States. Again, unfortunately, some might say. But that's where I'm from. Surely you remember that."

  "You said that, didn't you? You said Texas was one of the fifty." He thought for another long moment, then asked with something like awe, "You are from Texas? Really?"

  She nodded, "Don't you remember? My father is a law partner with your uncle Virgil."

  "I have no uncle Virgil," he told her, beginning to quell in the face of someone who either hadn't done their research or was telling a terrible truth. "I have no relatives at all. My parents died in a plane crash...twenty—no, fifteen years ago—depending on how you look at it."

  "No they didn't," Heather told him, her brow creased with confusion. Surely, she had thought, he would remember his parents. Of course, he hadn't remembered so many other things—including his wife. He also had some sort of skewed view of reality. What was wrong with her Garison?

  He looked up in surprise and asked, "What did you say?"

  "Your parents didn't die in a plane crash. They live in Denver."

  He look a long sip of his drink, then asked, "My parents are alive? And living in—where is this Denver?"

  "It's the state capitol. You've heard of Texas and Durango and Japan, but not Denver?"

  He shook his head. "In my day," he said, falling into the form of speech he used to use when telling Sarah of the twenty-first century, "The capitol of this region was called...Cherry Creek. It has been so long since I thought about this region that I had almost forgotten that name. But I don't remember a Denver."

  "Cherry Creek," Heather repeated. "You mentioned something about that yesterday but didn't respond when I asked you if you meant your uncle's store by that name. You were thinking of a city. I wonder where that was located in your mind?" She hadn't intended to say the last part out loud, but she did and he answered, apparently taking no offense.

  "On the other side of the mountains," he said. "You follow along the mountains, going north, until you come to Cherry Creek. It lies where the Platte River and the plains meet up with the Rocky Mountains."

  "That sounds like Denver to me," she told him. "In fact, that's got to be the same Cherry Creek as where your uncle has his store. They tell me it used to be way out in the boondocks, but now it's almost in downtown Denver."

  "Perhaps Cherry Creek is now Denver. But why the name change?" Garison hadn't intended, himself, to say all he had said outloud. He reminded himself just how lousy he would have been at counter-espionage. Tex had probably learned a lot more from him than Garison was willing to admit.

  He paused and thought for a long time. Heather, knowing how he liked to be undisturbed in such moods, kept quiet while she waited for him to speak. Finally, he looked up and told her, "If you can take me to my parents, I can start to believe many of the wonders you tell me of." In his mind he thought: because all these things can be created by clever people; the house, the lab, and even you. But no one could recreate my parents or make substitutes good enough to fool me. He also had a flashback of identifying their charred and broken bodies
. It had been a horrible sight, but there had also been no doubt as to who he was seeing. The original moment had made him vomit and the memories sometimes did, too. This time, however, the surge was quelled by the idea that they might, possibly, be alive.

  "Let's go first thing in the morning," she said. "Maybe it will jog your memory."

  "How will we get there? If Denver is Cherry Creek, the distance is quite far, isn't it?"

  "We can get there in a couple hours by plane."

  "Do you think I know how to pilot an airplane?" he asked disbelievingly.

  "No, but I do," she told him.

  "You do?"

  "I've been flying since before we met," she told him. "In fact, that's kind of how we met—not counting that first phone call. You probably don't remember that flight down to Gallup with Bat, do you?"

  "We flew with a bat?" he asked, wondering why some of her lies—if they were lies—were so poorly conceived.

  "No, Bat is a person's name. Bat Garrett. His wife Jody is my best friend, apart from you."

  Garison shrugged at the explanation, still thinking it was an odd name for a person, but asked, "If you can fly us up there, why don't we go now?"

  "I think you might want to get a haircut before we see your parents. You know what your father would say."

  "You're right," he told her, reaching for his pony tail and actually liking the thought of being rid of it. But did she really know his father that well?

  "But, you know," she added, "I kind of like you with long hair. Maybe if you got it styled..."

  They slept in separate rooms again that night, after a long day of conversation. They spoke mostly of trivial things when they talked, for each of them was afraid to broach the really deep questions that they were both wondering about. For herself, Heather wondered why Garison weren’t more anxious to see his parents, if he really believed them to have been dead for almost two decades. For Garison, he wondered the same thing, but realized that—deep down inside—he was afraid of meeting his parents for what that would say about his memory or even his whole life up to this point. Could it have been a dream? Could he have made up even Sarah?