Gun, with Occasional Music

by Jonathan Lethem

  And then it all came back, and I almost started weeping over her shoulder, into her black hair. Everything hit me at once. I knew suddenly that what I was after wasn't something lost in the past. I swear it came to me in those exact words.

  I knew all at once that I didn't care about the woman who'd left me like this, that I didn't want her back and I didn't want revenge, and I didn't want Celeste, or anybody else, only the woman moving under me right now. I wanted Catherine, I wanted her with everything I had—except I didn't have it anymore. What I had to offer, or should have had to offer, was missing, and I'm not talking about my penis. I wanted Catherine, but I wanted to take her with a different self, a self that wasn't available. The thing I wanted wasn't lost in the past at all, and it never had been. It was lost in the future. A self I should have been, but wasn't. A thread I'd let go of in myself, thinking I could live without it, not seeing what it meant.

  Then the physical aspect overwhelmed introspection. I held her and I fucked her for all I was worth. My fervor probably resembled anger. Actually it was longing, and fear, in roughly equal measure. When I felt I could, I looked in her eyes, and held her head in place to make sure she looked in mine. The finish took a long time, and I didn't rush it, and I didn't let her rush it. We ended crushed in a heap together at the top of the bed, her knees up against my chest, my head in the crook of her neck.

  She fell asleep, but I didn't. When I thought it wouldn't wake her, I disentangled myself and went to the bathroom, and spent a while looking in the mirror. My penis was glistening, and I didn't wipe it off. In the dark I looked okay, my form outlined in the street light coming through the pebbled glass of the bathroom window, but I knew better than to turn on the light. I'd joined the ever-growing category of things that look better when you leave the light off. I didn't need to see the veins in my eyes and the red rings around my nostrils and the bruises and welts on my hands to know they were there.

  When I got tired of looking at myself, I went and peeled the covers back and had a look at Catherine, just because I was in the mood. I looked at her up close, my face a few inches from her skin, and then dropped the covers and stepped back to see her in the context of my room. She looked fine at any distance. I covered her up again, put on a robe, and went out into the living room.

  Our glasses and the bottle were still on the table, and her coat was slung across my chair. Otherwise it was just my apartment, with nothing to reveal the fact of a woman asleep in my bed for the first time in years. Hell, I've been known to drink out of two glasses when I get confused. It was easy to imagine I was alone. I got the vial of make from the kitchen and spread what was left of it, which wasn't much, onto the table.

  The sky outside my window was warming up at the edges, and the stars were being bleached out of the picture. It was morning. I watched the night slip away from the buildings while I sucked up the last of my make and thought about my next move.

  My hope didn't lie with the Office, despite the inquisitor sleeping in my bed. Catherine didn't swing enough weight, and anyway, she wasn't necessarily all that sold on my theories. If Morgenlander was still on the scene, I might be able to cajole him past his distaste for me and my profession, but that was a long shot. I had a funny idea about going back to confront Phoneblum with what I knew, but in the unlikely event he capitulated I didn't know what to ask for. If I got him to clear up my karma trouble, I'd be yet another grub squirming under his thumb, like Pansy, and Stanhunt, and Testafer, and so many others. Including, most likely, Kornfeld.

  I was sure now I could solve this case. The question was who to go to once I solved it. I'd had a client once—a couple, if I counted Celeste—but they were out of the picture. I could solve the case, but for the sake of my own neck I might be better off if I didn't.

  Kornfeld entered while I was wiping up the table. He didn't knock. He looked like he'd been up all night, but then I'd been up all night too. At least the guy was fully dressed, including a gun. I was in my robe.

  "Get your clothes," he said.

  I did what he told me to do. He didn't look in my bedroom, and if he recognized Catherine's coat or her lipstick on my glass, he didn't say anything, just stood and watched while I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt. The sun came in the window and glinted off his gun. When I had my shoes on, he asked me for my card and my license.

  I handed them over. He put my license in his pocket and ran his decoder over my card. I held out my hand to get it back but he put it in the pocket with the license, and smiled.

  "That's just a souvenir," he said. "You'll get a new one when you've done your time."

  I must have stared.

  "Welcome to the world of the karma-defunct, Metcalf. Get your coat."

  We went downstairs to his car. I'll never know for sure, of course, but I don't think Catherine so much as tossed in her sleep.

  PART II

  SIX YEARS LATER

  CHAPTER 1

  IT WAS SHORT, BUT IT WASN'T SWEET. I WOKE UP FEELING like I still needed the night's sleep I'd missed when Kornfeld took me in. They had me in a set of ugly pajamas in a room that was blank and square and white, a room a whole lot like the one I'd been in what felt only minutes ago, with the doctors who'd readied me for the freeze.

  An orderly sat in a chair in the corner, looking at a magazine. I got off the table, peeved, about to squawk about the thing not even working. Then the guy noticed that I'd come around and handed me my street clothes, all clean and folded, and I realized with a jolt that I'd done my time. The funny taste in my mouth was six years old.

  I got dressed, slowly. The orderly didn't rush me. After a while he asked me if I was ready, and I said yes, and we went out into the corridor and took the elevator up to ground level. Inside the elevator the orderly looked me over and smiled. I tried to smile back, but I was pretty confused. I wanted to feel intuitively that six years had passed, but the feeling wasn't there.

  He led me to an office where an inquisitor sat tapping something idly into a desktop console. He kept going for a minute after we came in, then he stopped and folded the screen back into the desk and smiled. I sat in a chair and waited, and while the orderly and the inquisitor initialed some paperwork and mumbled something to each other, I looked out the window at the sun glinting off the glass of the building across the street.

  It was probably just a function of my newly defrosted eyes, but I swear it looked all wrong to me, the colors too bright, the outlines blurred. Like a badly retouched photo. It occurred to me that I was about to walk out the doors of the Office into that badly retouched photo forever. This was my world now, and the rest was gone. I realized that I was still all wound up inside about the case, and I had to laugh. It was pretty goddamned funny. As if there was still something to call a case.

  The orderly left, and the inquisitor opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a little metal locker about the size of a shoe box, and put it on the desk in front of me. Inside was the stuff they'd taken out of my pockets six years ago, all carefully tagged and wrapped in plastic. It wasn't much. The keys to my car and apartment, each of which had disappeared about five years and eleven months ago, when I stopped making the payments. The keys made a reassuring lump in my back pocket—I could use them to clean under my fingernails.

  The rest was the ripped halves of six different hundred-dollar bills, and the anti-grav pen. I played with the money for a minute, trying to assemble something that looked like I could pass it through a bank teller's window, or at least across a counter in a darkened bar, but apparently I'd been in the habit of pocketing the same half of each bill. Until I ran into some other guy with the opposite habit, the paper was useless. I folded it and put it into my pocket anyway.

  I was pulling the tags off the keys and the pen when I noticed the inquisitor leaning across the desk and staring at me, not a little intently. I looked at him, and he grinned. He was probably in his twenties, but I got the feeling he'd already seen a lot of karmic flotsam like myself coming and
going out of the freeze, and that it made him feel smug to watch me struggling with my pathetic little array of possessions.

  He got up suddenly and closed the door to the hallway. "I've been waiting for you."

  "Oh, good," I said, bewildered.

  "I'll give you fifty dollars for that pen," he said, moving around again to behind the desk. "That's the first of its kind." He spoke the way you spoke to children, back when there had been children. "It's a collector's item," he explained.

  I had to smile. "That pen saved my life," I said.

  He took it for a bargaining position. "Okay," he said. "A hundred."

  "It's not for sale."

  He looked at me funny. "I'm trying to do you a favor, old-timer. Your money doesn't look so good."

  He had a point. "Hundred fifty," I said.

  He leaned back in his chair and smiled without opening his mouth, then chuckled and took out his wallet. "I could have just taken it, you know."

  "No, you couldn't," I said, a little miffed. "If you could have, you would have."

  He opened his wallet, and there was music in the air, a little fanfare of horns that lasted until he gave me the money and put the wallet back in his pocket. It made my skin crawl. I hoped the music was in the wallet, not in the money.

  He opened up another drawer in his desk and took out a little envelope, sealed with a plastic ripcord, and a fresh card with my name on it.

  "Seventy-five points," he said. "Best of luck." He flashed me his idiot grin. My exit interview was over, apparently. When I pulled the little cord, the envelope turned out to be full of generic make. A touching gesture.

  I put the stuff in my pockets. I had an urge to wipe that smile-colored stain off the lower part of his face, but I held it back. I flipped him his pen, and he made the adjustment in his calculation of its trajectory and grabbed it before it soared over his head. But only just. "So long," I said, and got up and went out.

  I passed through the empty lobby and into the sun. I didn't have my next move figured out, but my feet knew enough to create some distance between myself and the Office, and they got right to it.

  When I got to the corner, I felt someone come up behind me and tug on my arm. It was Surface. The ape looked small and hobbled over, but then six years had passed, and anyway I'd never seen him out of his bed before. He was wearing a dirty gray suit and a red tie with little embroidered polo ponies on it. He had a pretty nice pair of shoes, but they were buried under a couple of centuries' worth of scuff marks.

  He looked up at me. The leather of his face was wrinkled like foil. His expression was surprisingly gentle. "I saw in the paper you were listed as coming out," he said. "I thought you might need somebody to buy you a drink."

  I was touched. I wasn't sure I liked having someone who looked as bad as Surface feeling sorry for me, but I was still touched.

  "Sure," I said. "Lead the way."

  The old ape turned his rounded shoulders and walked up the block. I went after him. I didn't know what time it was, but the sun was high, and it occurred to me that Surface must have gotten out of bed early to catch me. It made me feel like a stray picked up at the pound, and it made me wonder if he thought maybe I needed more than just a drink to get me on my feet.

  We went around the back of the building into the big parking lot. There were just a couple of people on the pavement, apart from the inquisitors coming in and going out to their black cars. When I tried to meet their eyes, the people turned to look at their watches, or the sky, or the gutter. My paranoia was functioning as usual; at the drop of a hat, it told me that my time in the freeze had left some mark, some indefinable tattoo on my aura, which would trigger recognition until I found a way to conceal it. Then I laughed at myself. What I needed was a drink, and a line of make.

  I tapped Surface on the shoulder. "Where do I go to get my license?"

  He looked at me and winced. I didn't think a face could get any more wrinkled than his already was, but it did. The wrinkles doubled in on themselves. His face practically collapsed.

  "Hold off on the questions," he said through his teeth.

  CHAPTER 2

  WE GOT IN HIS CAR AND HE DROVE ME TO HIS APARTMENT and poured me a drink in his kitchen. The place was even more squalid than the house I'd found him recuperating in six years ago. I also didn't see any sign of his girlfriend, and maybe one was the cause of the other, though in which direction I didn't want to guess. The world he had built up around him then seemed to be gone. Once upon a time he'd been an ape P.I., with trimmings. Now he was just an old ape.

  We didn't talk for a while. It seemed to suit us both. The bottle he produced was half empty to begin with, and we didn't have to struggle to finish the job. It hit my empty stomach pretty hard, but that was fine with me. I didn't really want to see what kind of food he'd provide.

  I decided to find out what make was in the envelope. It was another buffer to put between me and this new world. I was afraid that when I started asking questions, I wouldn't like the answers I got. I wanted the make to help me forget all my questions.

  I dumped the whole packet out on the table. It wasn't enough to divvy into portions. It was hardly enough for now, whatever the ingredients. I crashed it with my thumb and rolled up the envelope to snort with.

  "I wouldn't do that if I were you," said Surface.

  "I'm way past that lecture," I said.

  He gritted his teeth and pushed away his empty glass. "Slow down, Metcalf. I'm trying to tell you you don't want it."

  "Not want," I said. "Need."

  "That'll give you what you're looking for and then some," he said. He licked his lips and spoke carefully and slowly, the second person in an hour to treat me like a child. I didn't like it. "You haven't got any memories to wipe out yet," he said.

  "I've got plenty, from the first time around," I said. "Trust me. I can spare a few."

  "The make is different," he said. His voice was low and insistent. "Do me a favor and skip it."

  I sighed, unrolled the envelope, and used it to scoop the make into a little pile to one side of the table. My good feeling was gone. The alcohol was already going sour in my stomach.

  "Okay, Surface. I'll do you a favor." I looked as deep as I could into the black of his eyes, but he didn't blink. "And you do me a favor back. Tell me what turned you into a pussy. You had more backbone lying in bed watching Muzak." I made myself laugh to cover my fear. "If I'm about to get like you, let me know so I can put a bullet through my head while I still have the guts."

  His gaze fell, finally, and he reached for his glass, but it was empty. "You'll have to make some adjustments, Metcalf. That's not my fault. You just don't walk around spouting questions anymore."

  "I mean to get a license."

  "There's no license anymore," he said.

  "There's inquisitors," I said.

  "No private."

  "Well, there is now," I said, feeling full of bluster. "Here I am. There's no other name for what I do."

  "Your role is obsolete," he said, too firmly, his voice heavy and dead. "You were walking that line before and you knew it. It's finished now, Metcalf. Let it go."

  "Look who's talking," I said, and then stopped. It was supposed to be the beginning of something snappy, but my heart wasn't in it.

  His lips peeled back in a grim smile.

  "I consist solely of my role," I said, half to myself. "There's nothing else. I've looked."

  "Look again," he said. "The role is gone. You can't even go around talking this much. Forget questions."

  "Forget questions," I repeated. "I'll keep it in mind."

  I ran my finger through the pile of white powder and drew a little path of it across the table. I wanted some up my nose. "What's wrong with the make?"

  "There are no individual blends anymore. Just standard issue."

  "What's standard issue?"

  "Time-release Forgettol, mostly. It's all the rage. Snort it if you like—just make sure you write your name and ad
dress on a matchbook cover first. In big letters."

  "I think I'll pass."

  "Whatever." He sighed. "I might as well clue you in, Metcalf. Don't go around talking about the past. Memory is rude. That's what this stuff is for, and everyone uses it. In Los Angeles it's illegal to know what you do for a living. If you don't use it, pretend you do. And if you see people talking into their shirtsleeves, they aren't talking to you. Don't gape."

  I waited for the rest, but his lecture was finished. He got up and went to the cupboard to rummage around, presumably for another bottle. I just sat there and let what he'd told me sink in, or tried to. It kept getting jammed about halfway down.

  He located another bottle, less empty than the one we'd just polished off, but not by much, and dribbled what there was evenly into our two glasses. Then he sat down and drank his. I wondered how much alcohol it took to make his little body cry uncle, and then I figured he must have worked his tolerance up pretty high by now. When you don't know how many bottles you've got, it isn't because you haven't been drinking.

  My drug of choice was different, of course, and my eye was still on the pile of make. My bloodstream was crying for some addictol, the one ingredient no blend left out. And maybe, too, there was a part of me that wanted, finally, to let go and buy into the generic reality.

  I swept the little pile of standard-issue Forgettol back into the envelope, folded the flap over, and put it in my pocket. I'd need it to bluff with, like Surface said. If the shakes got too bad, I might need it to snort, and to hell with the consequences.

  Surface put down his glass. "Goddamn, Metcalf," he said. "You know, I haven't talked this much in years."

  "We weren't talking, just now."

  He waved my sarcasm away. "I mean today, since picking you up."

  I felt a surge of impatience. I wanted to tell him he'd talked just fine two days ago. But of course that was irrational. Surface had been gentle with me, but I had to be just as gentle with him. Because in effect I'd escaped the decline that hit while I was in the freezer. I'd have to take care not to remind people of how much was missing now as compared to before.