He wasn’t merely in a jungle. He was sitting in front of an old abandoned stone temple. It was three stories tall and covered in vines that looked as ancient as the stone they climbed. A rectangular pool of clear water stood in front of the temple. As the sun rose from behind the temple, it shone down onto the still pool, and the sunlight reflected off the water and shot back up toward the temple and the sky. For a few moments he could remember being in the midst of two suns and two temples and two worlds. Where was he? Carter didn’t know. Someplace not many other people from Carter’s world had ever been, that’s for sure. Someplace that took more than money to get to. That’s why his legs were sore.
How long could it have taken for the sun to rise over the temple in the jungle? Ten minutes? Fifteen? The memory seemed to take only a second and, at the same time, hours. The memory ended when the sun was high above his head and the jungle was screaming, full of wild chaos. Carter had expected more memories about surfing and sex. Those were the items advertised in the brochure. This memory was different. He liked it. He wasn’t sure if he liked it as much as the others, but he liked it all the same. Not knowing what was going to come next was part of it. When the memory was over, he stood up. He walked into the bathroom to relieve himself. Then he came back into the main room and lay back down on the bed. Once on the bed again, he closed his eyes and waited for another memory.
Chapter 22
Cole woke the next morning to the feeling of another person’s warm, bare skin against his own. He hadn’t awoken to that feeling in a long time. He rolled over without opening his eyes and laid a hand on the middle of Allie’s naked back. He ran his fingers across her skin, down the valley of her back, to where her body began to curve upward again. Allie moved slightly under his touch, but she didn’t appear to wake. Then, suddenly and entirely outside of Cole’s control, he began to fall into another immersion. He could still see a naked body next to him, but it wasn’t Allie’s. It was Sam’s. She was lying next to him. He was naked too, only the body he was inhabiting wasn’t his body. It was Meg’s, and it was young and soft and full of curves.
A light sheet covered both of them. It was warm under the sheet, more than twice as warm as being alone. Sam was sleeping on her stomach, and he remembered reaching out and touching her neck, running a single finger down its side, tracing a line all the way to the end of her shoulder. Sam didn’t move, apparently lost in a deep sleep. Her head was on her pillow, facing away from Meg. Her hair exploded like a giant ball of beautiful chaos. The sheet was pulled all the way up to her shoulders. They were in Sam’s apartment, in her tiny bedroom. It must have been summer. The windows were open, but the white floral curtains were pulled across them, so no breeze came in. The curtains didn’t stop the light, though. They only softened it so that the whole room seemed to glow.
Cole felt the urge to kiss Sam’s shoulder and the base of her neck. Cole couldn’t tell if he was remembering Meg’s urge or if the urge was actually arising from him. Sam’s dark skin was a beautiful contrast to the white sheets and pale glow of the room. Her skin looked so soft and so smooth. It was perfect. Meg didn’t move in to kiss Sam. Instead, she pushed the sheet covering her body down a little farther, uncovering the top half of Sam’s naked back.
Cole could see the curves now and the lines. He stared, intoxicated, at the shine of Sam’s skin as it curved down from her shoulder blades to the small valleys on either side of her upper back, only to rise up again at her spine. Meg reached over to touch her as softly as she could. She didn’t want to wake Sam up. She wanted this moment to herself. She ran her fingertips over the top of Sam’s back, starting on one side and grazing them gently across to the other. Meg rolled onto her side and inched closer to Sam so that she could reach all the way across her back, so that she could truly trace her finger all the way from one side of her to the other. Cole could remember the heat emanating from Sam’s body even as Meg kept her own an inch or two away.
Then Meg pushed the sheet down even farther. She was teasing herself, revealing Sam’s body piece by piece. Cole could see Sam’s whole back now, from the widest part at her shoulders to the narrowest point just above her hips. The urge to kiss her skin, any part of her skin now, came back and, this time, Cole was sure he was remembering Meg’s desire even if it was being reinforced by his own. God, how he wanted her to lean over and kiss her, to know, at that precise moment, what Sam’s skin would feel like against Meg’s lips.
Meg inched closer to Sam again, closing what little gap was left between them so that her bare skin touched Sam’s. Still Sam didn’t move. Cole could feel Meg’s heart beginning to race with nervous excitement, that magical mixture of lust and possibility. She wanted to be entangled in her. She wanted to look down and only know where her own skin stopped and Sam’s skin began because of the contrast in the colors. She wanted miracles, and she believed that with Sam they could actually happen.
Meg pushed the sheets all the way down, past the high arc of Sam’s buttocks, letting it rest again on the tops of Sam’s thighs. Cole only got a short glimpse before Sam began to turn her head. Meg looked back up toward the top of the bed. Sam had turned her head and rested it back down, facing Meg now. She smiled as the soft light hit her face. “What are you doing?” she asked Meg, playing coy, pretending not to know.
“I’m just looking at you,” Meg answered her. Meg reached out again, tracing the same lines on Sam’s back that she had traced before, but less lightly now. Now she pressed her fingers into Sam’s skin, feeling the woman beneath the skin. Sam closed her eyes to concentrate on the sensations of being touched. She let out a small sigh as Meg moved her hand from the top of Sam’s back toward the bottom.
“Just looking?” Sam asked without opening her eyes.
Meg pressed even closer to Sam. There was less than no space now. “Should I do more?” Meg whispered into Sam’s ear.
Sam opened her eyes. Her eyes were big and brown with specks of gold inside them that seemed to dance when the light hit them the right way. She arched her back, pushing her ass into the air. “Yes,” she answered. “I want more.”
The memory didn’t have to end there. Cole chose to stop it there. It had already gone too far. Cole literally had to shake his head to pull himself out. When he did, he found himself back in his apartment, lying in his bed next to Allie, his hand moving along her back. His heart was thumping inside his chest and he was throbbing with desire, but it wasn’t desire for Allie. He pulled his hand away from her. It wasn’t right. He looked down at Allie’s skin, but he knew that if he touched her again, he would slip right back into Meg’s memories of Sam. Part of him wanted to simply go for it, to not care, to believe that the memories wanted to be remembered and who was he to deny them. Even if he could accept that, though, he couldn’t do that to Allie. He owed her more than that. So he turned away and stepped out of bed.
Cole didn’t realize Allie was awake, had been awake. She woke up with his first touch. She was awake when his hand stopped moving across her back. She was awake when he suddenly pulled his hand away, as if jerking it from a hot stove. And she was awake when he slipped out of bed. She was awake and she knew. Despite everything Cole had said the night before, she knew that she was still competing with all the long-lost lovers living inside more than a dozen other people’s memories. She waited, pretending to be asleep, until he left the room. Then she stood up and started getting dressed.
Cole was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee, when Allie walked out of the bedroom. “I made coffee,” Cole said when he saw her standing outside the doorway.
“That’s okay,” Allie said to him. “I’m going to go home.”
“You don’t have to leave,” Cole said to her, trying his best to actually mean it.
“It’s okay, Cole.” Cole didn’t even notice that she hadn’t called him Nick. Allie began to walk to the door leading out of the apartment. She knew the way. “Last night wasn’t for you anyway,” she told him as she stood near the
door. “It was for me. I knew what I was doing.”
“What does that mean?” Cole was honestly confused.
“I was giving myself one last memory,” Allie said, “one last memory of us, one final memory that I’ll be able to reminisce over when I’m old. That’s how normal people do it, Cole. They reminisce about their own memories.”
Cole could hear the finality in Allie’s voice. “You were awake this morning?”
“Yes,” Allie answered him.
“You know you’re the only person in the world who would know why I pulled away from you.”
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t know,” Allie said.
“You know that I meant everything I said last night,” Cole assured her. “Every word.”
“I know you did,” Allie replied, “and I’m glad our memories mean something to you, but I don’t want to rely on you being on the verge of death to remember me.”
“I can’t stop doing what I do, Allie. I just can’t.”
Allie was about to say something else when Cole’s cell phone rang. Cole knew by the ringtone that the call was from the station. He worried that something had happened to the super, that they’d been forced to let him go for some reason. He reached reflexively for his phone and lifted it to his ear, but before answering, he tried looking up at Allie, to ask her one more time to stay, but she was already gone. The door to the apartment was still open, but the hallway outside was empty.
Seeing the empty space that Allie had left behind, Cole answered his phone. “This is Cole.”
“Cole.” It was the captain. “I know that you don’t like to do cases too close together. I know your doctors in Boston think it might not be good for your mental health. But we’ve got a special case here with no leads, and we need your help.”
“What makes the case so special?” Cole asked. He never would have even considered doing two memory transfers this close together if Allie hadn’t just walked out his door, seemingly forever.
The captain paused for a moment before answering him. “Why don’t you just come in? I can explain it to you at the station.”
Chapter 23
Cole’s superiors didn’t give him much time to think about whether or not he was willing to take the case. Because they’d pulled the body out of the water, it was hard to determine the time of death with any real precision. Making a determination was made even more difficult by the fact that the coroner couldn’t figure out how the man had died. All they knew for sure was that there were others, others with too many similarities to ignore. All the alleged victims seemed to be in their early thirties, give or take a couple years. They were all in extremely good physical condition—too young and too healthy to be dying for no reason. They were all John or Jane Does. The number was now up to six, five men and one woman, and still not a single one had been identified. Nobody had come forward for any of them. No family, no friends. Each was found completely shaved and completely naked, floating in a body of water. Finally, and perhaps most strangely, none of them showed any signs of trauma of any kind. As far as the coroner could tell, they didn’t die so much as they simply stopped living.
The only reason the press hadn’t jumped on this yet was the fact that the bodies were spread so far apart. Two were found in California, one in Northern California and one just north of the Mexican border. That one might have even been thrown in the water in Mexico and dragged across the border. One was found in the swamps outside New Orleans. One was found in Puerto Rico. One was found in France, outside Paris. Finally, the latest one was found floating in the Hudson River. The connections that had been made so far were based on a combination of luck, hard work, and diligent databasing. They were made by people digging deeper than they might have otherwise, because their own case was so strange. The more they dug, the more similar cases appeared. Everybody knew that if they’d already connected this many cases, there had to be dozens of others they hadn’t found yet. Still, the police couldn’t be sure the cases were actually connected. A lot of people would have been happy to find out that they weren’t connected because if they were, some strange shit was going down.
The coroner’s best guess was that the body pulled from the Hudson River had been dead for about twenty-four hours when they found him, which meant the victim had been dead almost thirty-two hours by the time they reached out to Cole. That would normally have given Cole around six hours to think about whether or not he was willing to take the case, but since they were so unsure of the time of death and because of the potential ramifications of the case, the captain pushed Cole hard to make up his mind immediately.
Cole didn’t want to take the case. The memory transplants were too close together. He worried that the memories would bleed into each other. Without having had time to get used to Meg’s memories, he worried that he would have trouble distinguishing her memories from the new guy’s. There were still so many of Meg’s memories that he hadn’t had a chance to explore. There was the risk that Cole wouldn’t be able to trust his memories anymore, and if he couldn’t trust his memories, he couldn’t do his job. But he also wanted to have more time with Meg’s memories, more time to dwell inside them. The final argument was that it went against the advice of his doctors from the Combray Memorial Memory Clinic in Boston, one of the world’s leading memory clinics. The doctors there had been working with Cole, monitoring him and studying him, for years. Cole trusted them. They looked out for him. In return, they got to study one of the most unusual and interesting memory transplant specimens in the entire world. The doctors’ fears weren’t as practical as Cole’s. They didn’t worry simply that doing two memory transplants so close together might make the memories bleed together. They worried that it might drive Cole insane. There was no precedent for what the police were asking Cole to do, and his doctors weren’t sure that the human brain could handle it.
Despite all of this, Cole found himself once again lying on an operating table next to a dead body, waiting for memories that nobody else wanted. If there really was a serial killer out there, Cole wanted to catch him. He wanted to bring him to justice. Cole could always find memories to help him get his fix. The world was full of unwanted memories. Serial killers didn’t come around that often. All he could do was hope that Meg’s memories would stay true inside him so that he could come back to them when he had more time.
“Please count backward from the number twenty,” the anesthesiologist standing over Cole said.
So Cole started to count. “Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen.” He may have gone further than fifteen. If he did, he didn’t remember.
Chapter 24
Even before opening his eyes, Cole tried to remember being murdered. Everything else could wait. He lay still, trying not to think of anything, trying to let the new memories come to him. In each of Cole’s cases, he tried to keep what he knew about the victim to a minimum. Whenever possible, he wanted to remember the murder first. He wanted to come to that memory clean, to have the details be as pure as possible. He almost always knew something about the case, though, something about the murder. At the very least, he knew how the victim was killed—shot or stabbed or pushed in front of a subway car. Often he would know where they were killed. With Meg, he knew about the hammer. He had seen it. It wasn’t much, but it was something he could anchor his search to. With the amount of practice that he’d had, Cole only needed the thinnest of threads to be able to pull out that first memory. This time, he had no anchor. No murder weapon. No crime scene. He didn’t know how the victim had been killed. All he knew was that the victim’s fit, naked body was pulled out of the Hudson River. That, and the fact that the man’s murderer just might be an international serial killer, which in some ways was worse than not knowing anything at all. It wasn’t a fact Cole could use. It was sensationalist conjecture that made his mind race. He had to fight off preconceived stereotypes of a crazy serial killer roaming the globe. Any preconceptions could corrupt the very memories he was trying to find. S
o he tried not to think about anything. He tried to simply let the memories come. He lay in place, moving only as much as was necessary to keep breathing, and he waited. And he waited. He waited for a very long time, and the memories still didn’t come. Eventually Cole opened his eyes.
What Cole did was never as easy as people thought it should be. It took time and patience and an understanding of how memories worked. You needed all three in order to find the memories that were actually useful in solving a case. Often the memory of being murdered is buried beneath layers and layers of other memories. A final page, that’s all the murder is—a postscript to an epic story about life and love and struggle. Each person’s life is unique. Each person imbues their life and their memories with their own meaning. Death is ubiquitous. Death is void of meaning, so its memory rarely rushes to the front of the queue on its own.
At the same time, only once before had Cole opened his eyes without finding a single new memory. It was his seventh case. The victim was an eleven-year-old boy who’d been abused his whole life by his parents. They never came to claim his body because they were the ones who killed him. They thought they could hide in anonymity. They probably could have if it hadn’t been for Cole. It took Cole days before he remembered a single one of the boy’s memories. The first memory that finally came was of the neighbor’s cat, pushing up against the boy’s bare legs. The boy squatted down and reached out and the cat pushed his head into the boy’s hand. The boy could feel the cat purring beneath his touch. The boy was giving the cat joy and love, something he hadn’t known was even possible until that moment. That was it. That was the whole memory. From that, Cole was able to coax others out. The boy’s parents were arrested five days after Cole first remembered the cat. But that case had been different. Even though it took Cole four days to remember any of the boy’s memories, he could still feel them. He couldn’t describe how or what it felt like exactly, but he knew they were there. From the first moment after the procedure, they weighed him down. This time it was different. This time, Cole didn’t feel any weight. He felt nothing.
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