He collected Burnell from the Hotel Ashkhabad just as night was falling and the intense heat of the day promising to abate. The back of his small car was loaded with tennis racquets and sports gear.
“You’re sure you want to do this, Roy?” Without pausing for an answer, he went on, “Your friend Dr. Assaad came to see me as soon as he dropped you this morning. He knows his way round the city okay, poor bugger. His survival depends on it. We do him a favour, stretch a point now and then. After all, Syria is rather popular in Britain just now, can’t think why. Seems Britain’s popular in Syria too—again, can’t think why.”
“They read Thomas Hardy.”
As he steered into the heavy evening traffic, past the camel-coloured Russian tour buses lined up outside the hotel, Murray-Johnson explained that it was impossible for any foreigner, apart from heads of state, to have audience with the President. Certainly, no matter as personal as a stolen memory could be broached, even through intermediaries.
However, Dr. Assaad knew someone who owed him a favour who kept a Nostovision shop in the back streets of Ashkhabad. NV had been banned in most of Central Asia because of its high pornographic content; but, as with most things—said Murray-Johnson with a sly smile—there was a way round that. Assaad had arranged that they could look the stock over.
Chinese-built trams rattled along the centre of the avenue as they eased their way down the long Ulitza Engleska. Murray-Johnson cheerfully put a gloss on the street name by explaining to Burnell that the British Army had defeated the Red Army near Ashkhabad in 1918, and occupied the area. As they passed a busy market, where the fruit stalls outside its portals were illuminated by small kerosene lamps, the street grew more drab.
“About here,” Murray-Johnson muttered. “Dog’s Piss Alley…”
He turned down a side street, to pull up next to a ramshackle chaykhana from which loud music boomed. The day had turned as purple as a bruise. Assuring Burnell he had been here many times before, he led the way down an alley beside the teahouse, and banged on the door of a large building constructed of breeze blocks. Fruit bats poured from an enormous quercus tree overshadowing the building. The door was promptly unlocked from inside and Burnell and Murray-Johnson were admitted.
A beefy man standing inside held out his hand. Murray-Johnson passed over some cash.
They had entered a large store. Racks filled with diverse goods formed narrow aisles. Murray-Johnson moved down the aisles without hesitation. In a glass-fronted office on the far side sat a small wizened man with oriental features, introduced to Burnell as Mr. Khan.
Mr. Khan put aside a cigarette, coughed, and led them to the Nostovision department. NV bullets were piled everywhere, each in its plastic pack. Large signs above the racks indicated categories: MURDER, LOVE, SEX, ADVENTURE, CHILDHOOD, and so on. All the stock was second- and third-hand.
Here were stored true memories, some legitimately obtained—for many people were ready to sell exceptional parts of their life memories to NV studios—and some stolen, as Burnell’s had been in Budapest. These thousands of memories represented fragments of real lives—happy, sad, crazy. Memories of mad people had enjoyed a vogue in the West a year earlier.
Khan shuffled among his wares in silk slippers, pointing vaguely here and there, explaining in broken German. While the legitimate bullets were labelled correctly, stolen memories were deliberately mislabelled, as a provision against prosecution. Seeing Burnell’s expression of despair, Khan winked, raised a knowing finger and took him to a side table.
Following Murray-Johnson’s instructions, the storekeeper had set aside six NV bullets sorted from his stock. All their plastic cases bore the legend “Fabriqué en San Marino.” This, Khan assured them, meant the bullets originated in an illegal studio in Budapest. It was the studio’s way of covering its tracks.
“Do you buy these from the President when he’s finished with them?” Burnell asked.
Half-closing his rheumy eyes, Khan gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Mein herr, I am a poor trader, ask no more. Die Welt zerfällt in Tatsachen. But there are no facts here, illusions only.”
“What’s he on about?” Murray-Johnson asked.
“Believe it or not, I think he’s quoting Wittgenstein: ‘The world divides into facts’… Let’s have a look at these bullets.”
He sorted through the cases, conscious that hope was making his heart beat faster. Their titles suggested an arbitrary knowledge of the English language: “Not in the Tree Ran any Lake,” “In the Hat Warfare a Sky Tooth Jumper,” “Animals Sequestered with a Green,” and others, equally oblique.
Four of the familiar Nostovision receivers stood against one wall. Burnell seated himself in one of the chairs and adjusted the plastic helmet over his head before switching on. He inserted one of the bullets into the system unit and touched a couple of keys.
His eyes closed. Almost at once, he lost a clear perception of his surroundings—an instance of how quickly short-term memory decayed. Peculiar lassitude overcame him. In what felt like the fibre of his being, electric current was stimulating the amacrine cells of his brain. Next second, the synaptic transfer was made: the memory data stored in the bullet flooded his cortex with mnemons.
* * *
The interior of the hut was dim. Its details had not registered. The floor—he could see that clearly enough—was bare earth. An animal of some kind was there. A bed of a sort with a blanket on filled one side of the room. A barefoot woman crouched by the bed. Some details were sharp: the big blue flowers on her dress, crawling round the outline of a buttock, ascending across the broad back to the neck. She wept into her large hands, spatulate fingers pressed to forehead.
Burnell too was making noises, sobs part-stifled. He moved nearer to the woman, putting a gnarled hand on her shoulder. Hand and shoulder smudged into dimness, lost by the distortions of a tear.
He looked down as she did at a child lying on the blanket. He knew it had died of a variety of ills, mainly pneumonia, brought on by near-starvation. It was a boy. The boy’s lips were drawn back, revealing pale gums in a horrifying grimace. Burnell reached out and closed the mouth and eyes. The woman rose, beginning to shriek, beating her head with clenched fists in her pain.
Feeling his own weakness, Burnell stooped, tenderly lifting the dead child. Probably he was the father of the weeping woman; probably she was the mother of the boy. He had other people in his mind, dark, concerned, slow-moving.
Slow-moving himself, he carried the boy from the shack. The woman remained behind, standing against a wall. Again the blue flowers on the dress, drooping.
The world outside was dung-coloured. He felt the sun at zenith weighing on his shoulders, a familiar burden. Other people arrived, walking as if in a fog. They spoke an incomprehensible language—yet Burnell understood it. They shared his grief. All suffered alike. A sense of community was strong.
He settled himself under a tree, easing himself down against its slender trunk, still clutching the dead child. The boy was as light as a toy in his arms. Cross-legged in the shade, he also wept. Old men squatted by him, prodding grey fingers abstractedly in the dust.
Burnell said to them, “We have not long before we follow him.”
A leaf fell from the branches above. It floated down to the forehead of the dead boy. All the world was lost in concentration on the leaf. It settled green on the puzzled black forehead. It turned yellow, altering its living shape as it did so. Within minutes, heat withered it and turned it brown. It became nothing, and blew away on the lightest breeze. The boy’s cheek too had already begun to wither …
* * *
“It’s not mine, it’s not mine!” He was speaking the foreign tongue as he switched off. Though Khan and Murray-Johnson came into view, and the warehouse, his sense of bereavement remained. He removed the cap and had to walk about. Khan, used to such reactions in his memory-store, grinned and proffered a cigarette, which Burnell accepted. Murray-Johnson, in one of the other chairs, was smil
ing, eyes closed.
Pacing up and down, puffing inexpertly, Burnell could imagine the old man—the old man he had briefly been—going to the nearest city to sell his memories to an NV agent for almost nothing, to gain a few pence for the funeral of his grandson. Then he would be free of all memory, and presumably would no longer grieve.
He might, however, suffer a sense of loss similar to that which Burnell felt, having been robbed of some of his memories of life with Stephanie.
It was all he could do to force himself back to the apparatus and to try another bullet labelled “Fabriqué en San Marino.” Fortunately, the next bolts of memory were less harrowing. A trip in a powerboat over a great reef, with a huge party on a small island. A frivolous life in a Patagonian town, lived by a woman who ran a successful milliner’s. An apartment in a bleak township where snow always lay thick, with drunken fights and an excursion to hunt reindeer. An uneventful week in a small dusty village, where a married couple lived in fear of their mentally deficient son …
All these invasions were as real to Burnell as his own life. He escaped from each of them exhausted, awed by the rigours of human existence, entranced by the people he had been. Their joys, their sorrows, became fairly quickly eradicated, since no transference was made in the NV projector from the short-term to the long-term memory. Already the poor old man with his dead grandson was beginning to sink from mind, though a fading leaf of sadness remained.
“Shirts in a Cupboard” opened in an outdoor setting. He was aware of this new mnemonic person as little more than a pair of boots and a pair of hands, one of which clutched a sickle. Heat made the hands and arms glisten. He saw that the hands were those of a youth. He felt himself to be young and lusty. The sickle swung and swung, almost without cease. It was early summer. He was cutting down cow parsley and goosegrass.
Burnell worked his way along steadily, from right to left, avoiding a camellia which had finished flowering. Every now and then, he caught glimpses of a garden, a smoothly mown lawn. Tantalizingly, he saw a woman walking beside an ornamental pond, tall and dark. But he bent his back and continued with the work.
It was finished. Burnell wiped the sickle on his jeans and laid it on an oak bench. He entered a house, ascending a narrow stair to the bathroom. By contrast with the sunshine, the interior was dark. Pictures framed and glazed on the walls yielded not their true subjects but reflections of distant doors and windows.
In the bathroom, Burnell pulled off his shirt and washed his face and torso, drying them on a blue towel. He caught a mere glimpse of himself in the mirror above the basin. Fair, sharp-featured, possibly early twenties …
Leaving the sweaty shirt on the floor, he trod over it and went across to find a clean one in the airing cupboard. He pulled the door open.
Inside the cupboard, newly laundered clothes were in immaculate array. Ironed sheets were stored on a high shelf, together with duvet covers. Burnell’s shirts were hanging in orderly fashion. He saw a pile of his clean handkerchiefs, his socks rolled into balls. Her dresses were there too, crisp, creaseless.
Without a further glance, Burnell reached forward towards the shirts and—
—without a pause was running down the right wing with the ball at his feet. Green field, brown blur of crowd in stadium. The Italian mid-fielder Raniero charging towards him. The roar of the spectators went unnoticed in his heightened state. Burnell swerved at the last moment, tapping the ball round to the left of his opponent’s boots, instantly recapturing it. Ahead lay the goalmouth and—
He squeezed the on/off bulb in his fist. The memory died. He was gasping with shock. Bootleg memory bullets so often contained no credits, no fade-ins or editorial matter; they simply switched from one fragment of one person’s memory to another, unrelated. In a composite bullet, snatches of various memories were frequently incorporated, as here, perhaps lopped from longer sequences.
Leaning back with his eyes closed, Burnell let his pulse rate sink to a more normal level. Damn the footballer! He concentrated on the airing-cupboard episode with a pained solicitude. The main question was, had he stumbled on a fragment of his own memory or not? The answer was less simple than it appeared.
While suspecting it might be a true Burnell memory, he recognized a strong desire that it should be. It was baffling not to be sure. But memory—he recalled the old saying—“played strange tricks” …
A trivial hour in a summer afternoon … the passage of twenty years … youth’s happy habit of inattention …
In the early days of their association, Stephanie and he had bought a large derelict country mansion, assisted by money from his father. It had been done for its challenge; also in part to try to please his father as well as Stephanie. They had worked on the restoration of house and garden. He had not thought of that period of his life for years. But was it that house and garden in the bullet? Why had he felt no immediate stab of recognition?
Well … weeds were weeds, wherever found. He had managed no clear look at the woman by the fish pool, being unable to see anything the memorizer did not see. And the rear of the house, the stairs, the landing … they were common to thousands of houses, with only minor variations. Again, the memorizer was taking no particular notice of his surroundings, being familiar with them. Detail had been scanty …
It was on the airing cupboard that Burnell concentrated his thought. The memorizer had looked into the cupboard merely to find a clean shirt, taking for granted its orderliness.
What now impressed Burnell was precisely that orderliness. He saw in it a clue to his separation from his wife.
Suppose he had just seen himself, almost been himself, as he was twenty and more years ago … Then the woman by the fish pool had been Stephanie, Stephanie when young, Stephanie when they were first in love, when they had high hopes of each other, when magic still played about their relationship …
It followed that the airing cupboard was in Stephanie’s domain.
That small room, large enough to walk into, was almost a secret compartment in the old house; yes, Stephanie’s domain, kept for the most part in darkness. She controlled it, she stocked it with the clothes she had washed and ironed. Not a sock there but knew her caring touch …
* * *
Murray-Johnson was shaking his shoulder. “Wake up, old cocker.”
Reluctantly, Burnell removed his helmet and got out of the chair. While Murray-Johnson enthused about an absolutely disgusting memory he had lived through, Burnell bought the airing-cupboard memory from Mr. Khan for an extortionate price.
On the way back to the hotel in Murray-Johnson’s car, he puzzled over the question of whether he had actually stumbled across a fragment of his own memory—in which case, back in Frankfurt, he could have an expert reinsert it in his long-term memory; it would be life reclaimed. But he had to be sure. The ascetic side of his nature was repelled by the idea of having false memories inserted, though many people thought nothing of doing so, in order to look back on lives they had never lived.
Thanking Murray-Johnson profusely for a helpful evening, Burnell refused the offer of a drink and retired to his hotel room to consider matters.
These days, he lived out of his suitcase. Samsonite was his home. He had forgotten to lock the suitcase when in the room at midday. Clothes, both laundered and dirty, lay about the room. His books and papers had been left strewn here and there. A half-eaten melon attracted flies on the windowsill. His alarm clock lay face-down beside the bed. He perceived newly the disorder. So this was the kind of man he was, or had become …
And perhaps the clue to the break between him and Stephanie lay within that airing cupboard, along those sweet-smelling ledges. The orderliness of her mind was demonstrated, for those who cared to look and understand, in that snug little hot closet of hers, where all was stowed neatly away, cared for, made pristine, tended. Tended … Had he not tended things? Had he failed to tend their relationship? Had he not been tender? His mind too much on his career? Had he not been apprecia
tive enough of her qualities, simply because they did not match with his?
“Oh, Stephanie…” The airing cupboard served as a revelation. And yet … he could still in no way be certain that it was his house, their cupboard, her care …
Once again he found himself up against the brick wall of the question: how does a man manage to get through his life? How can he learn to swim through the sea of circumstance which confronts him?
He stood in the middle of his untidy room—motionless, but in a storm of conflicting thought which found no exterior expression.
The phone rang. He went to it with relief. Dr. Assaad spoke, reminding him of their appointment the following noon.
“Did you have luck with my friend Mr. Khan?” he asked.
Burnell looked down at the bullet in his hand. “Mr. Khan was very helpful,” he said.
3. The Storm
Noon, under a leaden sky and a temperature of 95 degrees. Even with the air-conditioning working, it was hot in the car of Dr. Assaad’s brother.
“Is not too many kilometres to the Friendship Bridge,” Assaad said, as Burnell mopped under his collar.
They reached the roundabout where on the previous day the roadblock had been in operation. Today, the site was deserted. The road ahead lay empty. A beggar woman sat under a tree, a small child crawling on hands and knees beside her. Before them lay open country.
The asphalt soon gave out and they were travelling over a dirt road. The straggling outskirts of the city disappeared in an amber smog behind. A wind was rising, stirring the dust. Mountains lay distantly ahead, their crusty ridges no more than a blue outline against the hazy blue of the sky, as if they delineated a country without material substance.
Dr. Assaad whistled cheerfully. “Land of Hope and Glory.” Burnell shrank from joining in.
* * *
The River Garakhs was fast, icy and grey. For a short distance, the Garakhs marked a division between two distinct worlds: Turkmenistan and Iran. This was where, for over half of the previous century, the great world of the Soviet Union had expired and the more enduring world of Islam had commenced.
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 35