—A few minutes.
—Yeah. I wasn’t timing it, sorry.
—No, that’s fine. Go on.
—It was like before. I didn’t recognize any of the buildings. I was in a foreign city and couldn’t remember what I was doing there. Someone tried to talk to me, to help me—an old lady. But I ran from her instead. Danni swallowed the faint bitterness, the dumb memory of nausea and terror.
—Why? Why did you run?
—Because when the fugue comes, when I get confused and forget where I am, people frighten me. Their faces don’t seem real. Their faces are rubbery and inhuman. I thought the old lady was wearing a mask, that she was hiding something. So I ran. By the time I regained my senses, I was near the park. Kids were staring at me.
—Then?
—Then what? I yelled at them for staring at me. They took off.
—What did you want at Yang’s?
—What?
—You said you were shopping. For what?
—I don’t recall. Beets. Grapes. A giant zucchini. I don’t know.
—You’ve been taking your medication, I presume. Drugs, alcohol?
—No drugs. Okay, a joint occasionally. A few shots here and there. Merrill wants to unwind on the weekends. She drinks me under the table—Johnnie Walker and Manhattans. Tequila if she’s seducing one of the rugged types. Depends where we are. She’d known Merrill since forever. Historically, Danni was the strong one, the one who saw Merrill through two bad marriages, a career collapse, and bouts of deep clinical depression. Funny how life tended to put the shoe on the other foot when one least expected.
—Do you visit many different places?
Danni shrugged.—I don’t—oh, the Candy Apple. Harpo’s. That hole-in-the-wall on Decker and Gedding, the Red Jack. All sorts of places. Merrill picks; says it’s therapy.
—Sex?
Danni shook her head.—That doesn’t mean I’m loyal.
—Loyal to whom?
—I’ve been noticing men and…I feel like I’m betraying Virgil. Soiling our memories. It’s stupid, sure. Merrill thinks I’m crazy.
—What do you think?
—I try not to, Doc.
—Yet the past is with you. You carry it everywhere. Like a millstone, if you’ll pardon the cliché.
Danni frowned.
—I’m not sure what you mean—
—Yes, you are.
She smoked and looked away from his eyes. She’d arranged a mini gallery of snapshots of Virgil and Keith on the bureau in her bedroom, stuffed more photos in her wallet, and fixed one of Keith as a baby on a keychain. She’d built a modest shrine of baseball ticket stubs, Virgil’s moldy fishing hat, his car keys, though the car was long gone, business cards, canceled checks, and torn-up Christmas wrapping. It was sick.
—Memories have their place, of course, Dr. Green said.—But you’ve got to be careful. Live in the past too long and it consumes you. You can’t use fidelity as a crutch. Not forever.
—I’m not planning on forever, Danni said.
August 2, 2006
Color and symmetry were among Danni’s current preoccupations. Yellow squash, orange baby carrots, an axis of green peas on a china plate; the alignment of complementary elements surgically precise upon the starched white tablecloth—cloth white and neat as the hard white fabric of a hospital sheet.
Their apartment was a narrow box stacked high in a cylinder of similar boxes. The window sashes were blue. All of them a filmy, ephemeral blue like the dust on the wings of a blue emperor butterfly; blue over every window in every cramped room. Blue as dead salmon, blue as ice. Blue shadows darkened the edge of the table, rippled over Danni’s untouched meal, its meticulously arrayed components. The vegetables glowed with subdued radioactivity. Her fingers curled around the fork; the veins in her hand ran like blue-black tributaries to her fingertips, ran like cold iron wires. Balanced on a windowsill was her ant farm, its inhabitants scurrying about the business of industry in microcosm of the looming cityscape. Merrill hated the ants and Danni expected her friend to poison them in a fit of revulsion and pique. Merrill wasn’t naturally maternal and her scant reservoir of kindly nurture was already exhausted on her housemate.
Danni set the fork upon a napkin, red gone black as sackcloth in the beautiful gloom, and moved to the terrace door, reaching automatically for her cigarettes as she went. She kept them in the left breast pocket of her jacket alongside a pack of matches from the Candy Apple.
The light that came through the glass and blue gauze was muted and heavy even at midday. Outside the sliding door was a terrace and a rail; beyond the rail, a gulf. Damp breaths of air were coarse with smog, tar, and pigeon shit. Eight stories yawned below the wobbly terrace to the dark brick square. Ninety-six feet to the fountain, the flagpole, two rusty benches, and Piccolo Street where winos with homemade drums, harmonicas, and flutes composed their symphonies and dirges.
Danni smoked on the terrace to keep the peace with Merrill, straight-edge Merrill, whose poison of choice was Zinfandel and fast men in nice suits, rather than tobacco. Danni smoked Turkish cigarettes that came in a tin she bought at the wharf market from a Nepalese expat named Mahan. Mahan sold coffee, too, in shiny black packages, and decorative knives with tassels depending from brass handles.
Danni leaned on the swaying rail and lighted the next to the last cigarette in her tin and smoked as the sky clotted between the gaps of rooftops, the copses of wires and antennas, the static snarl of uprooted birds like black bits of paper ash turning in the Pacific breeze. A man stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. He craned his neck to seek her out from amid the jigsaw of fire escapes and balconies. He waved and then turned away and crossed the street with an unmistakably familiar stride, and was gone.
When her cigarette was done, she flicked the butt into the empty planter, one of several terra-cotta pots piled around the corroding barbecue. She lighted her remaining cigarette and smoked it slowly, made it last until the sky went opaque and the city lights began to float here and there in the murk, bubbles of iridescent gas rising against the leaden tide of night. Then she went inside and sat very still while her colony of ants scrabbled in the dark.
May 6, 2006
(D. L. Session 33)
Danni’s cigarette was out; the tin empty. She began to fidget.—Do you believe in ghosts, Doctor?
—Absolutely. Dr. Green knocked his ring on the table and gestured at the hoary walls.—Look around. Haunted, I’d say.
—Really?
Dr. Green seemed quite serious. He set aside the clipboard, distancing himself from the record.—Why not. My grandfather was a missionary. He lived in the Congo for several years, set up a clinic out there. Everybody believed in ghosts—including my grandfather. There was no choice.
Danni laughed.—Well, it’s settled. I’m a faithless bitch. And I’m being haunted as just desserts.
—Why do you say that?
—I went home with this guy a few weeks ago. Nice guy, a graphic designer. I was pretty drunk and he was pretty persuasive.
Dr. Green plucked a pack of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his white coat, shook one loose, and handed it to her. They leaned toward each other, across the table, and he lighted her cigarette with a silvery Zippo.
—Nothing happened, she said.—It was very innocent, actually.
But that was a lie by omission, was it not? What would the good doctor think of her if she confessed her impulses to grasp a man, any man, as a point of fact, and throw him down and fuck him senseless, and refrained only because she was too frightened of the possibilities? Her cheeks stung and she exhaled fiercely to conceal her shame.
—We had some drinks and called it a night. I still felt bad, dirty, somehow. Riding the bus home, I saw Virgil. It wasn’t him; he had Virgil’s build and kind of slouched, holding on to one of those straps. Didn’t even come close once I got a decent look at him. But for a second, my heart froze. Danni lifted her gaze from the ashtray.—Time for more pill
s, huh?
—Well, a case of mistaken identity doesn’t qualify as a delusion.
Danni smiled darkly.
—You didn’t get on the plane and you lived. Simple. Dr. Green spoke with supreme confidence.
—Is it? Simple, I mean.
—Have you experienced more of these episodes—mistaking strangers for Virgil? Or your son?
—Yeah. The man on the bus, that tepid phantom of her husband, had been the fifth incident of mistaken identity during the previous three weeks. The incidents were growing frequent; each apparition more convincing than the last. Then there were the items she’d occasionally found around the apartment—Virgil’s lost wedding ring gleaming at the bottom of a pitcher of water; a trail of dried rose petals leading from the bathroom to her bed; one of Keith’s crayon masterpieces fixed by magnet on the refrigerator; each of these artifacts ephemeral as dew, transitory as drifting spider thread; they dissolved and left no traces of their existence. That very morning she’d glimpsed Virgil’s bomber jacket slung over the back of a chair. A sunbeam illuminated it momentarily, dispersed it among the moving shadows of clouds and undulating curtains.
—Why didn’t you mention this sooner?
—It didn’t scare me before.
—There are many possibilities. I hazard what we’re dealing with is survivor’s guilt, Dr. Green said.—This guilt is a perfectly normal aspect of the grieving process.
Dr. Green had never brought up the guilt association before, but she always knew it lurked in the wings, waiting to be sprung in the third act. The books all talked about it. Danni made a noise of disgust and rolled her eyes to hide the sudden urge to cry.
—Go on, Dr. Green said.
Danni pretended to rub smoke from her eye.—There isn’t any more.
—Certainly there is. There’s always another rock to look beneath. Why don’t you tell me about the vineyards. Does this have anything to do with the Lagerstätte?
She opened her mouth and closed it. She stared, her fear and anger tightening screws within the pit of her stomach.—You’ve spoken to Merrill? Goddamn her.
—She hoped you’d get around to it, eventually. But you haven’t and it seems important. Don’t worry—she volunteered the information. Of course I would never reveal the nature of our conversations. Trust in that.
—It’s not a good thing to talk about, Danni said.—I stopped thinking about it.
—Why?
She regarded her cigarette. Norma, poor departed Norma whispered in her ear, Do you want to press your eye against the keyhole of a secret room? Do you want to see where the elephants have gone to die?
—Because there are some things you can’t take back. Shake hands with an ineffable enigma and it knows you. It has you, if it wants.
Dr. Green waited, his hand poised over a brown folder she hadn’t noticed before. The folder was stamped in red block letters she couldn’t quite read, although she suspected ASYLUM was at least a portion.
—I wish to understand, he said.—We’re not going anywhere.
—Fuck it, she said. A sense of terrible satisfaction and relief caused her to smile again.—Confession is good for the soul, right?
August 9, 2006
In the middle of dressing to meet Merrill at the market by the wharf when she got off work, Danni opened the closet and inhaled a whiff of damp, moldering air and then screamed into her fist. Several withered corpses hung from the rack amid her cheery blouses and conservative suit jackets. They were scarcely more than yellowed sacks of skin. None of the desiccated, sagging faces was recognizable; the shade and texture of cured squash, each was further distorted by warps and wrinkles of dry-cleaning bags. She recoiled and sat on the bed and chewed her fingers until a passing cloud blocked the sun and the closet went dark.
Eventually she washed her hands and face in the bathroom sink, staring into the mirror at her pale, maniacal simulacrum. She skipped makeup and stumbled from the apartment to the cramped, dingy lift that dropped her into a shabby foyer with its rows of tarnished mailbox slots checkering the walls, its low, grubby light fixtures, a stained carpet, and the sweet-and-sour odor of sweat and stagnant air. She stumbled through the security doors into the brighter world.
And the fugue descended.
Danni was walking from somewhere to somewhere else; she’d closed her eyes against the glare and her insides turned upside down. Her eyes flew open and she reeled, utterly lost. Shadow people moved around her, bumped her with their hard elbows and swinging hips; an angry man in brown tweed lectured his daughter and the girl protested. They buzzed like flies. Their miserable faces blurred together, lit by some internal phosphorus. Danni swallowed, crushed into herself with a force akin to claustrophobia, and focused on her watch, a cheap windup model that glowed in the dark. Its numerals meant nothing, but she tracked the needle as it swept a perfect circle while the world spun around her. The passage, an indoor–outdoor avenue of sorts. Market stalls flanked the causeway, shelves and timber beams twined with streamers and beads, hemp rope and tie-dye shirts and pennants. Light fell through cracks in the overhead pavilion. The enclosure reeked of fresh salmon, salt water, sawdust, and the compacted scent of perfumed flesh.
—Danni. Here was an intelligible voice amid the squeal and squelch. Danni lifted her head and tried to focus.
—We miss you, Virgil said. He stood several feet away, gleaming like polished ivory.
—What? Danni said, thinking his face was the only face not changing shape like the flowery crystals in a kaleidoscope.—What did you say?
—Come home. It was apparent that this man wasn’t Virgil, although in this particular light the eyes were similar, and he drawled. Virgil grew up in South Carolina, spent his adult life trying to bury that drawl, and eventually it emerged only when he was exhausted or angry. The stranger winked at her and continued along the boardwalk. Beneath an Egyptian cotton shirt, his back was almost as muscular as Virgil’s. But, no.
Danni turned away into the bright, jostling throng. Someone took her elbow. She yelped and wrenched away and nearly fell.
—Honey, you okay? The jumble of insectoid eyes, lips, and bouffant hair coalesced into Merrill’s stern face. Merrill wore white-rimmed sunglasses that complemented her vanilla dress with its wide shoulders and brass buttons, and her elegant vanilla gloves. Her thin nose peeled with sunburn.—Danni, are you all right?
—Yeah. Danni wiped her mouth.
—The hell you are. C’mon. Merrill led her away from the moving press to a small open square and seated her in a wooden chair in the shadow of a parasol. The square hosted a half dozen vendors and several tables of squawking children, overheated parents with flushed cheeks, and senior citizens in pastel running suits. Merrill bought soft ice cream in tiny plastic dishes and they sat in the shade and ate the ice cream while the sun dipped below the rooflines. The vendors began taking down the signs and packing it in for the day.
—Okay, okay. I feel better. Danni’s hands had stopped shaking.
—You do look a little better. Know where you are?
—The market. Danni wanted a cigarette.—Oh, damn it, she said.
—Here, sweetie. Merrill drew two containers of Mahan’s foreign cigarettes from her purse and slid them across the table, mimicking a spy in one of those 1970s thrillers.
—Thanks, Danni said as she got a cigarette burning. She dragged frantically, left hand cupped to her mouth so the escaping smoke boiled and foamed between her fingers like dry-ice vapors. Nobody said anything despite the NO SMOKING signs posted on the gate.
—Hey, what kind of bug is that? Merrill intently regarded a beetle hugging the warmth of a wooden plank near their feet.
—It’s a beetle.
—How observant. But what kind?
—I don’t know.
—What? You don’t know?
—I don’t know. I don’t really care, either.
—Oh, please.
—Fine. Danni leaned forward until her eyeballs were scan
t inches above the motionless insect.—Hmm. I’d say a Spurious exoticus minor, closely related to, but not to be confused with, the Spurious eroticus major. Yep.
Merrill stared at the beetle, then Danni. She took Danni’s hand and gently squeezed.—You fucking fraud. Let’s go get liquored up, hey?
—Hey-hey.
May 6, 2006
(D. L. Session 33)
Dr. Green’s glasses were opaque as quartz.
—The Lagerstätte. Elucidate, if you will.
—A naturalist’s wet dream. Ask Norma Fitzwater and Leslie Runyon, Danni said and chuckled wryly.—When Merrill originally brought me here to Cali, she made me join a support group. That was about, what? A year ago, give or take. Kind of a twelve-step program for wannabe suicides. I quit after a few visits—group therapy isn’t my style and the counselor was a royal prick. Before I left, I became friends with Norma, a drug addict and perennial houseguest of the state penitentiary before she snagged a wealthy husband. Marrying rich wasn’t a cure for everything, though. She claimed to have tried to off herself five or six times, made it sound like an extreme sport.
—A fascinating woman. She was pals with Leslie, a widow like me. Leslie’s husband and brother fell off a glacier in Alaska. I didn’t like her much. Too creepy for polite company. Unfortunately, Norma had a mother-hen complex, so there was no getting rid of her. Anyway, it wasn’t much to write home about. We went to lunch once a week, watched a couple of films, commiserated about our shitty luck. Summer camp stuff.
—You speak of Norma in the past tense. I gather she eventually ended her life, Dr. Green said.
—Oh, yes. She made good on that. Jumped off a hotel roof in the Tenderloin. Left a note to the effect that she and Leslie couldn’t face the music anymore. The cops, brilliant as they are, concluded Norma made a suicide pact with Leslie. Leslie’s corpse hasn’t surfaced yet. The cops figure she’s at the bottom of the bay, or moldering in a wooded gully. I doubt that’s what happened, though.
—You suspect she’s alive.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 26