Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  Another man called to her and then another, and a car pulled up alongside her. Somebody from the car whistled for her. She didn’t answer, she didn’t hear, she only heard Jason saying, over and over, It’s my child, I should be with her. She kept nodding to this, and the more she knew it was an outrage, the more she kept nodding. Only in the midst of this did she hear the whistle. The car moved slowly alongside her down the street. She passed another man; steps followed her. It’s my child, I should be with her, she kept hearing, and she kept nodding, until finally she felt sick. She suddenly knew she felt very sick, and stopped at a streetlight, and looked around her in a daze. The car stopped, waiting.

  She fell to her knees there on the street. When she was finished, she became utterly cold; she tried to move away from where she had been sick, and instead stumbled. In the periphery of her vision she was aware the car was still there, waiting, as though the driver couldn’t decide what he wanted to do with her. She knew if he got out of the car and walked up to her, she wouldn’t be able to get away from him; but she didn’t particularly care about this. She didn’t care about anything. She didn’t care about the hem of the long blue coat she saw in the corner of her eye. She didn’t know how long this man in the long blue coat had been standing there; she didn’t care about the ominous stillness of the hem of the coat, or its nearness. When she heard the door of the car open and shut, and heard someone coming toward her, she didn’t care about that. Nor about the intensity of the voices between the two men, when she realized they were arguing over her.

  An arm in the blue coat reached down and held her by the wrist, roughly pulling her up. The blue coat’s other arm reached around her shoulder. He started taking her further up the Strip, walking faster than she could keep up; when she tripped, she was snapped back into step. The driver of the car was left behind. She didn’t have it in her to pull away, or to question where she was being taken, or what was going to be done to her. She didn’t have it in her to look at him, or to talk to him. He said nothing.

  She thought the police would come along soon; she could occasionally see a black-and-white glide past her down the boulevard. But no one stopped.

  At some point she was in a car, slumped against the door. Each time the car stopped at a light, she realized she could easily open the door and step out and get away, but she didn’t. She was, through all of it, still hearing Jason’s voice.

  The car turned up off Sunset and went higher into the hills, up a winding road. The lights of the hills vanished. It became darker and, as she had hoped, more foreign, until even the moment was no longer familiar to her. And as each moment became unfamiliar even unto itself, she hoped the voice on the telephone would become a stranger’s, and that it would speak to her in a language she didn’t understand.

  In a little dirt cove off the road, in the middle of nowhere, the car stopped. His arm reached across and locked her door. She felt his hands on her shoulders and his fingers across her face. In the darkness beyond the window she could see the Kansas fields blowing back and forth, as though the entire earth was rocking. On the horizon was the house where she grew up; a small figure darted from its shadow, running toward the hills. The wind purred in the grass, and just past her house, before the hills, surrounding the fields, there seemed to stretch a long obstruction, as though it might be a wall lining the distance. His body shifted in his coat and he pressed against her. He was still running his fingers over her face and looking at her; she continued staring out into the dark, never turning to face him. The shadow of his coat enveloped her, until she was lying across the seat beneath him, and she said, somewhat foolishly she imagined, but as a verbal reflex nonetheless, “It hurts.” She never expected it to mean anything. She had, in fact, wondered only if he would kill her afterwards. So she was astonished when the small sound of her voice seemed to trigger a realization and fracture a trance—and the shadow lifted, altered position, dissipated.

  He backed away, over to his side of the seat. She heard him catch his own breath and could see him, from the corner of her eye, raise his hand to his brow and turn to something outside the window. He started the car again, and something between them changed; he was not quite the same person. He pulled the car out of the dirt and started further along the road, into the dark.

  After a while the car stopped again. She heard steps circle around the back. She looked around, with no idea where she was; the door opened and she was pulled out.

  She realized she was being taken up some stairs, and she heard the jangling of keys.

  Inside a light went on. She looked up at the walls. There were film posters, and everything was a blinding glare. She was led by the long blue coat into the bedroom. She was led past a large bed, and then into the bathroom.

  She started at the sink, and at the toilet bowl. She heard his voice now, low and tight. “Are y-y-y-y—” It stopped and took a deep breath. “Are y-y-you going to be s-sick again?” She would not have heard it at all, not over Jason’s voice, except for the stammer, like an emergency message in code intercepting her frequency. She saw the arm of the blue coat slowly reach over to the sink and turn on the water. She watched the long blue arm reach to her face, and she stared at the water, waiting. She felt something around her mouth, wet, and realized he was wiping her lips with a cloth. He rinsed the cloth in the sink, and wiped her mouth again, and then her face.

  “Are y-y-y—” Again he stopped, gasping.

  “I’m not going to be sick,” she said.

  The long blue coat led her back into the bedroom and sat her down on the bed. She was there alone for several minutes. When he returned he pushed her back against the pillow. He put a tray in front of her. “C-Can you drink this?” he said. She took the cup and sipped at it.

  Silence filled the room, except for the sound of the cup against her lips and the wind against the roof. She was now absolutely certain that she wasn’t in Kansas at all, that there was no tall grass beyond the window, that if she was to step from the door and call the cats, none would come to her. There was a face on the wall staring at her; not Jason’s, or her father’s, or her mother’s, but an old face with large white eyebrows and piercing eyes that might have been the very black of the black-and-white poster the face was staring from. She might have liked to imagine the eyes were looking at her, but like Jason’s voice on the telephone the eyes seemed directed past her, to some place above her. Their glare was penetrating, and whatever they watched was focused clearly in the old man’s mind; there was no ambivalence about the vision. Under the face was the name Adolphe Sarre. She had no idea who he was. The steam of the tea drifted up past her gaze, and his white hair seemed to float away.

  Everything inside her felt depleted except for her chest, which was full of milk. In an exceptional moment of lucidity and concern she thought about Jules. She thought about Martha in the hall. She said to herself, I should not be wherever it is I am now. I should not be in a stranger’s room, in a stranger’s bed.

  The Morse code came through again. “W-W-Would you l-l-l-l-l—” The voice stopped again, as it had before, breathing heavily. After a moment it resumed. “T-T-T-Tea. Would you c-c-care for more tea?”

  She shook her head. She looked at the old man’s eyes.

  She put her hands on her breasts, holding them because they hurt. She lay there supporting them for several moments until she could feel him standing over her, and then she dropped her arms to her sides. She sank back in the pillow. “A-A-A-Are you all right?” she heard him say, never opening her eyes; and she could neither nod nor shake her head. She felt him sit on the bed beside her. He went on talking then, and she felt nothing but her full breasts and the warmth of the teacup through the tray on her lap; and the white flash of the walls seeped through her lids less and less. It flooded across her, in her moment of least resistance, the possibilities of the situation she was in—now when it was too late for her to leave, when she couldn’t have lifted herself from the bed for even Jason, for even Jules. She d
idn’t hear what he said, because the sound of his voice evened to a hum, the stammers smoothing to slurs and his tone dropping. She supposed he might be trying to hypnotize her. She was a pool of shifting currents: confusion and anxiety and, too late, fear that she might slip away and never wake; and beneath it the devastation of the phone call, and finally the resignation to where she was and whatever might happen. She listened and image after image spun before her; and his voice became calmer and slower, lulling her, threading through her like celluloid. She became too deeply lost in something else to understand what he was saying, and too deeply lost to hear in his voice the sadness. It was reasonable that she wouldn’t hear that, that she wouldn’t assume that of him—that would have been assuming so much.

  She felt him unbutton her shirt, and she felt her large unmilked breasts fall free of the material; and she felt him unsnap her jeans and pull them from her legs. The palm of his hand brushed her thigh, and his own breath, which didn’t stutter at all, was on her neck.

  She knew he was there several seconds looking at her, and then she felt his mouth on hers. Then she felt him pull the blanket up over her.

  She didn’t think of him again. She didn’t sleep but struggled fitfully with a dream that never quite arrived. When, early in the morning, just before dawn, she walked quietly from the apartment, past his sleeping form on the floor with a pillow beneath his black hair and his blue coat over his shoulders, she looked at him only once, his back to her and his face still unseen.

  He woke nine years later remembering nothing. Not his name, nor what he was doing in a room in Paris, nor whatever it was that had occurred before he went to sleep that blotted out his identity. That was what it was, the obliteration of self-sense more than of mere memory; it wasn’t so much that he couldn’t remember, but rather as though it was gone, his life before that morning. He lay there quite a while looking around the room, his eyes traveling the ceiling to the corners, and listening to the traffic outside. Water dripped in the sink. The walls were pale and unadorned. There was a book by the side of the bed, Les grands auteurs du cinéma. He finally stumbled to the window and looked onto the street below.

  He did hold on to one memory, going over and over it. He did this not out of any real panic or confusion; he was amazed, instead, by the sense of relief he felt, though of course he had no idea what it was that so relieved him, unless it was the obliteration itself. What he saw in his mind were twin boys, blond, standing on a stage before an auditorium of people. Lights were cast across their figures, and their hair shone. Their mouths were small and their eyes wide, and their hands, held before them, were shaking. Seated to the rear were several men and women, watching the two children and waiting. The audience was waiting.

  He found an American passport in the drawer. He opened it and looked at the picture, and then looked at the face in the mirror. They were the same face, the same black hair. The name on the passport was Michel Sarasan. This surprised him, because a second before opening the passport the name Adrien ran across his mind. Even now, after reading Michel Sarasan, the name Adrien resounded. It felt familiar to him, as though it should have been written on the passport. Sex: M. Wife/husband: XXX. Age: 29. Birthplace: France. Bearer’s address: Los Angeles.

  A week later Jack Sarasan, a film producer in California, received a phone call. He immediately left the studio, got in his limousine and went home. At this moment, always conscious of those things that were his, he realized that one of the reasons he had never liked his nephew was that Michel wasn’t his—not the way the chauffeur, or the limousine, or the house were his. Jack Sarasan drew the line on how far people could go and still be his, and the ones who slipped over the line he cut loose; but his nephew had cut himself loose long before. Jack was trying to calculate exactly how long by the time he got to the house. “Eight,” he concluded aloud, to the stairs, lighting a cigar.

  “Eight what?”

  Jack looked up at the doctor coming toward him. He never liked the doctor either, but his wife claimed to trust him.

  “Eight what,” the doctor said again, taking his coat from the chair.

  “Eight years,” said Jack, after studying the doctor. “Since Michel disappeared.”

  “Well, he’s back,” said the doctor, glancing upstairs.

  “I know he’s back. What I want to know is why.”

  Michel had shown up at the door, which the maid answered. The maid had stood gawking at him until Judith Sarasan came up behind, who in turn gawked at the eyepatch Michel was wearing. He had gotten it that first day in Paris, after waking, and put it on so the anonymity of his face would match the anonymity of his memory. He had worn the patch in the streets, along the boulevard Saint-Michel, in restaurants and cafés, in shops and in the Métro, on the trains and on the airplane coming back; and somehow came to feel more and more assured when no one seemed to know him. To the recurring vision of the twin boys in the auditorium, he switched the patch from eye to eye, first watching one boy and then the other, dividing everything he saw in half. It was on the plane that a stewardess, more alert than the others, noted the patch covering the left eye when sometime earlier it had covered the right. She notified the pilot, who notified officials at LAX when the plane landed, who questioned Michel for three hours before allowing him to go. When he walked up the long drive from the taxi at the bottom of the hill, he stood at the door asking tentatively of his aunt, Do I know you? And do you know me?

  Why are you wearing that patch? she wanted to know, and called the doctor.

  “Why is he wearing a patch?” said Jack. “Is there something wrong with his eye?”

  “No,” the doctor said. He mulled it for a while, there in the entryway.

  “Well?”

  The doctor put his hand to his chin. “Nothing physically wrong with him at all,” he said, shaking his head.

  “What’s that mean? Has he finally gone completely crazy?”

  “He seems to have amnesia.”

  “Amnesia!”

  The doctor put on his coat.

  “Did somebody bump him on the head?”

  “That happens in the movies.”

  “I know what happens in the movies,” Jack said tersely.

  “More likely to be emotional trauma,” said the doctor. “A confrontation, a startling revelation. Something that makes the mind wipe everything out.”

  “He doesn’t remember anything?”

  “He talks about twins. You know anything about that?”

  Jack was visibly stunned. He took the cigar from his mouth.

  “You know anything about that?” the doctor repeated, peering at him.

  Jack shrugged, and now he too looked upstairs. He shrugged again. “It’s nothing, I suppose—”

  “Of course it’s not nothing. Of course it’s something. So what is it?”

  “Well, he had two older twin brothers,” said Jack, “who drowned in France when Michel was very small. That was when his mother—my sister—sent Michel here to the States. I would have thought Michel was too young to remember any of that.”

  The doctor started for the door. “Well, I told your wife that my guess is it will all come back to him if and when he uncovers the trauma. I’m not an expert. You may want to get some help.”

  “Is your guess the best you can do?” Jack said.

  “I know he’s not physically affected. That’s what I know,” the doctor said. “Except the stuttering.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your wife said he used to stutter.”

  Jack recalled this with distaste.

  “Well, I’ve been talking with him for an hour, and Mrs. Sarasan has talked with him several hours, since he arrived. And neither of us has heard him stutter once.”

  Michel stood on the balcony upstairs looking over the grounds in back of his uncle’s house. Since the doctor left he had been alone, and now he put the patch back on. He knew, of course, that nothing was wrong with his eyes; but he didn’t suppose anything was w
rong with his mind either. When the patch covered one eye he saw people all over the lawn: a nude woman on a huge turtle riding into the swimming pool, and horses on the far knoll screaming past in a herd. When he changed the patch over to the other eye no one was to be seen except the nude woman lying at the bottom of the pool and the turtle by the side, and a bloodied white horse lying dead beneath a tree. He kept changing the patch back and forth, watching the progression or, as it were, the deterioration.