It had his new business on it and the address was in Driftwood.
“No!” he cried. “Not these cards, too. This can’t be happening.”
“Listen, Mr. . . .”
“Clifford. Aaron Clifford.”
“Mr. Clifford. The associates and my one partner who are here now have been here for more than ten years. Even if you had worked here before my father’s death, I think I would know that. What exactly is this about?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron said staring blankly at the window and the skyscrapers in view. He seemed to fall into a daze, and it was a few moments before he heard the man speaking.
“Excuse me? Mr. Clifford?”
“What?” Aaron looked at him. “Oh. I’m sorry. I’m very confused. Recently, I suffered a cerebral stroke and lost much of my memory. I’ve been trying to track back, restore my past so to speak.”
“Well, that might explain it. I’m afraid you’ve confused this firm with another.”
“Didn’t I do a project here, Sandburg Village? A mall in upstate New York?”
Clovis shook his head. “Sorry. We’ve never done a mall anywhere.”
“Never?”
“I can’t help you,” he emphasized. “Are you under a doctor’s care?”
“Yes, yes, I am.”
“Perhaps you should go back to see him.”
“My doctor’s a woman, a renown neurologist.”
“Fine. You should speak to her again about all this.”
“Yes. Yes, I guess I should. I’m sorry I bothered you. Thank you. Sorry,” he said and backed up to the door.
Clovis stared at him, shaking his head gently.
“Thank you,” Aaron repeated and stepped out of the office. He felt as if he had stepped into a sauna. He could feel the sweat running down the back of his neck and over his spine. He tried to swallow and take a deep breath.
I can’t faint in here, he told himself. Got to get outside. Got to get some air.
He hurried down the hallway, barely glancing at the receptionist, who was ignoring him anyway as he left the offices. The elevator was stifling. Everyone in it seemed to be watching him suspiciously. He could feel eyes on the back of his head, the sideward glances. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead like pimples. He wiped them off with his jacket sleeve to keep them from running into his eyes. The moment the door opened in the lobby, he shot out and into the street, where he stopped, closed his eyes, and took deep breaths of air. Car horns blared. People brushed against him. The city was exploding all around him.
I’ve got to get out of here, he thought. I’ve got to get home.
He practically ran up the street, knocking into people, pushing through clumps of pedestrians until he reached the parking lot. After he got into his car and paid his fee, he tore into the street nearly rear-ending a delivery truck. People on both sides stopped to look at the sound of his brakes screaming. He gazed around at them all.
The whole city was watching him now, he thought. They could see; they could tell he was a man without a mind, a man without an identity, a man without a soul. Some grimaced; some shook their heads in disgustand turned away. No one smiled. No one looked sympathetic or compassionate. He was back amongst the same people who had sat with him on that train when it all had begun. He was back amongst the indifferent citizens in the country of the dead.
He made a number of wrong turns, got lost repeatedly, and was finally forced to pull over and ask a taxi driver for directions. The man spoke a poor English. He was a Seek and was hard to understand. Aaron struggled with the instructions and finally found his way into the heavy line of rush-hour traffic leaving New York. He had entered the arteries of hell, flowing slowly, painfully toward the promise of relief if one would just suffer the penance. In the meantime the stop-and-go movement intensified his headache. It felt like a vise had been put over his head and was tightening at the temples. He tried to keep himself calm.
Stress is a killer. I’m surely about to have another stroke, he warned himself, but the warning only created more and more anxiety. Soon he began to sound his horn the same way other frustrated drivers around him were doing. In minutes he was indistinguishable from the maddened people, his face contorted, his eyes bulging with rage at construction, hesitant drivers, and aggressive taxi cab drivers who cut him off.
His clothes felt sopping wet. When he glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, he looked distorted, the veins in his temples embossed, his complexion crimson, his nostrils flared. What he wanted the most was to crawl, claw, pull himself up and out of his skin and leave this grotesque shell of a body beside him,discarded like a banana peel, fodder for garbage compactors.
The car itself, once a wonderfully engineered work of luxury, now seemed to be a metallic coffin, closing in on him, shrinking. Soon he would be crushed to death between the steel and glass. They’d find his body stamped on the highway, his eyes wide, hysterical, ghastly.
But no one would care. They’d shovel him up and dump him along with the rest of the litter that grew on city streets. What value was there to the remnants of someone who had no name, no place in time, no reason to be? He couldn’t even cry about it because he didn’t know what he had lost.
Suddenly the traffic lightened up, and he discovered he was able to drive faster and with less tension. The tension seeped out of his body. He settled more comfortably in his seat and felt himself breathing easier. He had no idea how he had found his way, had made the right choices, and had headed in the right direction, but what after was literally over two and a half hours later, he saw that familiar sign beckoning him ahead, the sign welcoming the oncoming traffic to Driftwood.
A community where everyone does his best work.
. . . eighteen
it was late in the afternoon when he returned from New York. His house had an abandoned look. Shadows cast by a retreating sun sliding below and between streams of lazily flowing, soiled-looking gray clouds deepened and stretched over the arched windows and the full-length porch. Some of the windows gleamed like mirrors. It was as if the inhabitants wanted to prevent even the birds from gazing into their lives. Curtains were drawn closed, and no lit lamps glowed behind them. When the garage door went up, Aaron saw that Megan’s car was not there.He drove in, sat there a moment listening for sounds from the house after he turned off the engine. Hearing nothing, he got out and entered the house. Weakly illuminated by the late-afternoon light, the inside was no less gloomy. It had more of a sense of desertion. It had the feel of a home from which the residents had made a very quick and frantic flight. His footsteps actually echoed as he moved through it.
“Hello?” he called in case Megan was there or someone was there with Sophie. His voice died in the entryway hall. He flicked on a light, gazed around, and then hurried to the stairway. He had something he wanted to check, one last vestige of hope that he prayed would connect him with the events that had brought him here, that would help him make some concrete sense out of what he was able to remember. Without looking at anything else, he went directly to his closet in the bedroom after turning on the light and sifted through the garments until he located the jacket he had worn the evening of madness when he had returned on the train from Grand Central.
He searched so frantically, he ripped one of the pockets. When his fingers touched the slip of paper within the right inside pocket, he took a deep breath and slowly brought it out.
In his palm he held the receipt of the ticket to Westport he had purchased at the suggestion of that young, blond-haired man in the gray pin-stripe suit. He wasn’t going mad after all. These events had occurred. He had the ticket to prove it. Still, seeing this proof, this reality before him, left him cold and even more frightened. If he had been there and he had gone to his home there, why was it all gone now?
The ringing of the phone shook him out of his musings abruptly and made his heart pound. He looked at the telephone on the nightstand by the bed and listened to it ring again and again before he ap
proached it and slowly lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Aaron.”
“Megan, where are you? Where’s Sophie? What’s going on?” he asked in quick succession.
“We’ve been waiting for you to return. We’re at Mrs. Masters’s house, Aaron. You have to come here now,” she said. She sounded drugged, her voice listless, distant.
“What is it? Why are we meeting there?”
“It will all be explained when you arrive, Aaron. When you go out, you’ll see Mrs. Masters’s Town Car waiting for you. Just get in.”
“Why?”
“Please, Aaron.” He heard her take a deep breath. “You’ve embarrassed me enough.”
“Embarrassed you? I don’t understand.”
“The car’s waiting for you, Aaron.”
“I’m the one who’s been embarrassed, Megan. I’m the one with all the questions that have to be answered.”
He heard only silence.
“Where’s Sophie? Is she with you?”
“The car’s waiting,” Megan repeated and hung up.
He stood there holding the phone, feeling it go limp in his hand like a taut fishing line that had ripped. A wave of abject fear rose up his body, followed by a chill that made him think of himself falling through thin ice. He started out of the bedroom, pausing at the top of the stairway. A heavier cloud glided over the declining sun, casting the house in more darkness and gloom.
Suddenly a tiny voice could be heard. It seemed to be coming from someplace below. At first he thought it was Sophie. She was calling for him.
“Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.”
He started down, the voice growing louder with each step taken, but midway he realized that it wasn’t Sophie’s voice. It was a different voice, thinner, younger.
The name returned, emerging from the deepest dark corner of his blotted memory. . . . Tammy.
He cried out, calling for her.
The voice grew louder. He turned at the foot of the stairway and rushed to the rear of the house, past his office, past the dining room, to the back door. She was calling from outside. He unlocked the door and nearly ripped it off its hinges to open it quickly. The dark cloud above stalled over the sun. Trees denuded of their leaves looked forlorn, stripped by violent storms and left behind like stakes placed above the graves of soldiers in a great routing and defeat. A small pile of red, orange, and yellow leaves stirred and then settled.
The voice he had heard dwindled and died as if it was being carried off in the wind.
“Tammy?” he called and then stood there wondering why he was doing that. Why would he call to a dead child, a child who had lived only five days?
Nevertheless, he screamed for her again and listened. The world was suddenly so silent, so very, very still. It was as though a great hand had seized it and held it from spinning on its axis. All life had been put on pause, everything frozen in place. Only he had the power of any movement. Slowly he closed the door. For a long moment he stood there listening, waiting. He heard nothing now so he turned and walked to the front of the house.
When he opened the front door and stepped out on the porch, he saw the black automobile in the driveway. The engine was running. It purred, hovering, looking more like a big black cat than a car, the headlights resembling tiger eyes gleaming with the animalistic pleasure of hunting prey. Tinted windows kept him from seeing the driver from the side, but when Aaron stepped down, he recognized him through the windshield . . . Mrs. Masters’s driver, bartender, Ule, a man with such emptiness in his glassy orbs, he made Aaron feel he was looking at someone whose head had been completely hollowed out like some pumpkin for Halloween.
He didn’t look at Aaron and he didn’t get out to open the door. He had been sent here to wait and that was all. Aaron hesitated, looked back at the house as if for the last time, and then reached for the rear door handle. Even before his fingers touched it, the door clicked and swung open. Aaron jumped back, surprised.
“Hi, Daddy,” he heard Sophie say. She was sitting within, her schoolbooks in her lap, smiling out at him.
“Sophie? What are you doing in this car?”
“Mommy said I could come get you and ride back with you,” she replied.
“I asked her about you, but she didn’t say you were in the car.”
“We didn’t finish my book for school,” she continued, ignoring his remarks.
“Yes, we did.”
“No, Daddy. Look,” she said, holding up the book. He took it as he got into the vehicle.
Instantly the door slammed shut and the automobilewas being backed out of the driveway. He looked up sharply toward the driver, but the partition window was closed and that, too, was tinted, looking like dark steel. They were practically locked in a metallic cell, he thought.
“See, Daddy,” Sophie emphasized.
He gazed down at the book. It was thicker. When he perused the pages following her bookmark, he realized the rest of Jason’s story had been added.
“No,” he said. “This part isn’t good for you to read.”
She laughed. “Don’t be silly, Daddy. I have to read it. It’s all right. I won’t be upset.”
He shook his head and thumbed through the pages. There were even illustrations. After Jason had deserted Medea, she had sought revenge and sent his new bride a gift of a robe. When she put it on, she burst into flames. That was illustrated. Following that were Medea’s words describing her determination to kill her own children. “‘ . . . I who gave them life will give them death.’”
“I’ve got to speak with your teacher,” Aaron said. “You shouldn’t be reading this.”
“Silly, Daddy. Silly, silly, Daddy,” Sophie chanted.
“It’s not silly!” he nearly shouted. Raising his voice was enough to wipe the smile from her face. She looked as if she was on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, closing the book, “but it’s not for you. It’s not for a little girl your age.”
“Mommy said we should read it.”
“Mommy didn’t read it carefully, or she wouldn’t have said that,” he insisted.
“Yes, she did,” Sophie countered.
“Okay, honey. After I speak to her, we’ll look at the book. I promise.”
He set the book aside.
Was this meant to be some veiled threat? Did Megan seriously believe he had a lover? Was she trying to tell him she could be ruthless if he hurt her?
“What’s going on? Why is Mommy at Mrs. Masters’s house?”
Sophie began to cry, the tears streaming down her face.
“Sophie, honey?”
He started to get up to sit beside her when suddenly the car veered abruptly to the right and then snapped back to the left, tossing him against the door and dropping him to his knees.
“Hey!” he cried. “What the hell is . . .”
When he turned around, Sophie was gone. He stared in disbelief at the empty black leather seats.
“Huh?” he said. “Sophie? How can . . .”
Had he simply imagined her? Was it part of all the hallucinations he had been suffering?
He answered his questions by looking to his left and seeing the book where he had left it beside him on the seat. The realization made him shudder. He practically lunged at the partition window and pounded on it.
“Stop the car. Stop it. What’s going on here? Stop the car!” he screamed.
Over the speakers he heard a tape recording of Sophie singing, “Kisses roll up, kisses roll down. Kisses keep love all around.”
“Stop that. Stop playing that. Pull over. Do you hear me? I said, pull this car over now.”
The automobile continued until it reached the grand entrance of Mrs. Masters’s estate. Frustrated and helpless, Aaron sat and gazed out the side window. He saw the gate open and watched as they drove into the compound. The gate closed behind them. They continued up the drive. The statues of animals came alive again, just as they had in what he had thought was an illus
ion the first time he had been brought here. They turned, stood, stepped forward.
“What’s happening?” he muttered.
“Where am I going?”
He wiped his forehead and shook his head.
“Where have I been?”
The automobile stopped at the foot of the steps to the portico. The door swung open. Slowly Aaron stepped out. The door shut behind him and the engine was turned off, but the driver did not get out. Aaron looked at the front entrance and then started up the steps, glancing back at the car, looking out at the grounds. There was still barely a breeze, still the feeling of being stuck in time. The statuary was all still and in place again.The front doors opened. He heard some laughter over some harp music. Mrs. Masters, still laughing at something, emerged from her eclectic living room. She was wearing a turquoise peasant skirt and blouse with gold ring slave bracelets from her wrist to her left elbow. Her hair was down, loose, and although she wore no makeup, she looked radiant, her eyes asbright and electric as ever, her lips richly ruby, her cheeks highlighted by the rush of blood that had come from either a few glasses of wine or some very recent excitement.
“Aaron!” she cried as if she was really surprised to see him. “You’re just in time. Everyone’s here now and everyone’s been asking for you.”
“Where’s Megan? What’s going on?” he demanded.
“Oh, don’t be upset, Aaron,” she said, approaching and taking his arm. “Everything is fine. Things aren’t always turning out the way we want, but even we understand that we have to take the good with the bad sometimes. The main thing is there should always be more good, don’t you think?”
She laughed and urged him forward.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he muttered.
They turned into the room. Truly everyone was there, everyone with whom he had had any real contact in Driftwood, that is. Megan’s friends and their husbands were on the right, sipping from glasses of champagne. Adya, the Wonder Woman car salesgirl, and her husband were at the bar talking with Harlan Noel and his wife as well as David Carpenter and his. Grandma Morris and her third husband Aubrey sat at a small table. The waitress Arlene was standing behind them, dressed in her waitress uniform, but she, too, had a glass of champagne and her garage mechanic husband, still in his uniform and looking as if he had just been pulled off a job, stood next to her.
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