by Greg Egan
“Every hair on the bear-skin rug,” Adam assured him.
Auster hesitated. Adam said, “There’s no three-question limit. We can keep going all day if you want to.”
“Do you have much to do with the others?” Auster asked.
“The other side-loads? No. I never knew any of them before, so there’s no reason for them to be in touch with me now.”
Auster was surprised. “I’d have thought you’d all be making common cause. Trying to improve the legal situation.”
“We probably should be. But if there’s some secret cabal of immortals trying to get re-enfranchised, they haven’t invited me into their inner circle yet.”
Adam waited as Auster stirred his coffee meditatively. “That’s it,” he decided.
“OK. You know, I’m sorry if I was brusque at the funeral,” Adam said. “I was trying to keep a low profile; I was worried about how people would react.”
“Forget it.”
“So, you knew me in New York?” Adam wasn’t going to use the third person; it would make the conversation far too awkward. Besides, if he’d come here to claim the missing memories as his own, the last thing he wanted to do was distance himself from them.
“Yes.”
“Was it business, or were we friends?” All he’d been able to find out online was that Auster had written a couple of independent movies. There was no record of the two of them ever working on the same project; their official Bacon number was three, which put Adam no closer to Auster than he was to Angelina Jolie.
“Both, I hope.” Auster hesitated, then angrily recanted the last part. “No, we were friends. Sorry, it’s hard not to resent being blanked, even if it’s not deliberate.”
Adam tried to judge just how deeply the insult had cut him. “Were we lovers?”
Auster almost choked on his coffee. “God, no! I’ve always been straight, and you were already with Carlos when I met you.” He frowned suddenly. “You didn’t cheat on him, did you?” He sounded more incredulous than reproving.
“Not as far as I know.” During the drive down to Gardena, Adam had wondered if the old man might have been trying to airbrush out his infidelities. That would have been a bizarre form of vanity, or hypocrisy, or some other sin the world didn’t yet have a name for, but it would still have been easier to forgive than a deliberate attempt to sabotage his successor.
“We met around two thousand and ten,” Auster continued. “When I first approached you about adapting Sadlands.”
“OK.”
“You do remember Sadlands, don’t you?”
“My second novel,” Adam replied. For a moment nothing more came to him, then he said, “There’s an epidemic of suicides spreading across the country, apparently at random, affecting people equally regardless of demographics.”
“That sounds like the version a reviewer would write,” Auster teased him. “I spent six years, on and off, trying to make it happen.”
Adam dredged his mind for any trace of these events that might have merely been submerged for lack of currency, but he found nothing. “So should I be thanking you, or apologizing? Did I give you a hard time about the script?”
“Not at all. I showed you drafts now and then, and if you had a strong opinion you let me know, but you didn’t cross any lines.”
“The book itself didn’t do that well,” Adam recalled.
Auster didn’t argue. “Even the publishers stopped using the phrase ‘slow-burning cult hit,’ though I’m sure the studio would have put that in the press release, if it had ever gone ahead.”
Adam hesitated. “So, what else was going on?” The old man hadn’t published much in that decade; just a few pieces in magazines. His book sales had dried up, and he’d been working odd jobs to make ends meet. But at least back then there’d still been golden opportunities like valet parking. “Did we socialize much? Did I talk about things?”
Auster scrutinized him. “This isn’t just smoothing over the business at the funeral, is it? You’ve lost something that you think might be important, and now you’re going all Dashiell Hammett on yourself.”
“Yes,” Adam admitted.
Auster shrugged. “OK, why not? That worked out so well in Angel Heart.” He thought for a while. “When we weren’t discussing Sadlands, you talked about your money problems, and you talked about Carlos.”
“What about Carlos?”
“His money problems.”
Adam laughed. “Sorry. I must have been fucking awful company.”
Auster said, “I think Carlos was working three or four jobs, all for minimum wage, and you were working two, with a few hours a week set aside for writing. I remember you sold a story to the New Yorker, but the celebration was pretty muted, because the whole fee was gone, instantly, to pay off debts.”
“Debts?” Adam had no memory of it ever being that bad. “Did I try to borrow money from you?”
“You wouldn’t have been so stupid; you knew I was almost as skint. Just before we gave up, I got twenty grand in development money to spend a year trying to whip Sadlands into something that Sundance or AMC might buy – and believe me, it all went on rent and food.”
“So what did I get out of that?” Adam asked, mock-jealously.
“Two grand, for the option. If it had gone to a pilot, I think you would have gotten twenty, and double that if the series was picked up.” Auster smiled. “That must sound like small change to you now, but at the time it would have been the difference between night and day – especially for Carlos’s sister.”
“Yeah, she could be a real hard-ass,” Adam sighed. Auster’s face drained, as if Adam had just maligned a woman that everyone else had judged worthy of beatification. “What did I say?”
“You don’t even remember that?”
“Remember what?”
“She was dying of cancer! Where did you think the money was going? You and Carlos weren’t living in the Ritz, or shooting it up.”
“OK.” Adam recalled none of this. He’d known that Adelina had died long before Carlos, but he’d never even tried to summon up the details. “So Carlos and I were working eighty-hour weeks to pay her medical bills … and I was bitching and moaning to you about it, as if that might make the magic Hollywood money fall into my lap a little faster?”
“That’s putting it harshly,” Auster replied. “You needed someone to vent to, and I had enough distance from it that it didn’t weigh me down. I could commiserate and walk away.”
Adam thought for a while. “Do you know if I ever took it out on Carlos?”
“Not that you told me. Would you have stayed together if you had?”
“I don’t know,” Adam said numbly. Could this be the whole point of the occlusions? When their relationship was tested, the old man had buckled, and he was so ashamed of himself that he’d tried to erase every trace of the event? Whatever he’d done, Carlos must have forgiven him in the end, but maybe that just made his own weakness more painful to contemplate.
“So I never pulled the pin?” he asked. “I didn’t wash my hands of Adelina, and tell Carlos to fuck off and pay for it all himself?”
Auster said, “Not unless you were lying to me to save face. The version I heard was that every spare dollar you had was going to her, up until the day she died. Which is where forty grand might have made all the difference – bought her more time, or even a cure. I never got the medico-logistic details, but both of you took it hard when the Colman thing happened.”
Adam moved his half-empty plate aside and asked wearily, “So what was ‘the Colman thing’?”
Auster nodded apologetically. “I was getting to that. Sundance had shown a lot of interest in Sadlands, but then they heard that some Brit called Nathan Colman had sold a story to Netflix about, well … an epidemic of suicides spreading across the country, apparently at random, affecting people equally regardless of demographics.”
“And we didn’t sue the brazen fuck into penury?”
Auster snorte
d. “Who’s this ‘we’ with money for lawyers? The production company that held the option did a cost-benefit analysis and decided to cut their losses; twenty-two grand down the toilet, but it wasn’t as if they’d been cheated out of the next Game of Thrones. All you and I could do was suck it up, and take a few moments of solace whenever a Sadlands fan posted an acerbic comment in some obscure chat-room.”
Adam’s visceral sense of outrage was undiminished, but on any sober assessment this outcome was pretty much what he would have expected.
“Of course, my faith in karma was restored, eventually,” Auster added enigmatically.
“You’ve lost me again.” The old man’s success, once he cut out all the middlemen and plagiarists, must have been balm to his wounds – but Auster’s online footprint suggested that his own third act had been less lucrative.
“Before they’d finished shooting the second season, a burglar broke into Colman’s house and cracked open his skull with a statuette.”
“An Emmy?”
“No, just a BAFTA.”
Adam tried hard not to smile. “And once Sadlands fell through, did we stay in touch?”
“Not really,” Auster replied. “I moved here a long time after you did; I wasted five years trying to get something up on Broadway before I swallowed my pride and settled for playing script doctor. And by then, you’d done so well that I was embarrassed to turn up asking you for work.”
Adam was genuinely ashamed now. “You should have. I owed it to you.”
Auster shook his head. “I wasn’t living on the streets. I’ve done all right here. I can’t afford what you’ve got …” He gestured at Adam’s imperishable chassis. “But then, I’m not sure I could handle the lacunae.”
Adam called for a car. Auster insisted on splitting the bill.
The service cart rattled over and began clearing the table. Auster said, “I’m glad I could help you fill in the blanks, but maybe those answers should have come with a warning.”
“Now a warning?”
“The Colman thing. Don’t let it get to you.”
Adam was baffled. “Why would I? I’m not going to sue his family for whatever pittance is still trickling down to them.” In fact, he couldn’t sue anyone for anything, but it was the thought that counted.
“OK.” Auster was ready to drop it, but now Adam needed to be clear.
“How badly did I take it the first time?”
Auster gestured with one finger, drilling into his temple. “Like a fucking parasitic worm in your brain. He’d stolen your precious novel and murdered your lover’s sister. He’d kicked you to the ground when you had nothing, and taken your only hope away.”
Adam could understand now why they hadn’t stayed in touch. Solidarity in hard times was one thing, but an obsessive grievance like that would soon get old. Auster had taken his own kicks and decided to move on.
“That was more than thirty years ago,” Adam replied. “I’m a different person now.”
“Aren’t we all?”
Auster’s ride came first. Adam stood outside the diner and watched him depart: sitting confidently behind the wheel, even if he didn’t need to lay a finger on it.
8
Adam changed his car’s destination to downtown Gardena. He disembarked beside a row of fast-food outlets and went looking for a public web kiosk. He’d been fretting about the best way of paying without leaving too obvious a trail, but then he discovered that in this municipality the things were as free as public water fountains.
There was no speck of entertainment industry trivia that the net had failed to immortalize. Colman had moved from London to Los Angeles to shoot the series, and he’d been living just a few miles south of Adam’s current home when the break-in happened. But the old man had still been in New York at the time; he hadn’t even set foot in California until the following year, as far as Adam recalled. The laptop that he’d started excavating had files on it dating back to the ’90s, but they would have been copied from machine to machine; there was no chance that the computer itself was old enough to be carrying deleted emails for flights booked three decades ago, even if the old man had been foolish enough to make his journey so easy to trace.
Adam turned away from the kiosk’s chipped projection screen, wondering if any passersby had been staring over his shoulder. He was losing his grip on reality. The occlusions might easily have been targeted at nothing more than the old man’s lingering resentment: if he couldn’t let go of what had happened – even after Colman’s death, even after his own career had blossomed – he might have wished to spare Adam all that pointless, fermented rage.
That was the simplest explanation. Unless Auster had been holding back, the thought of the old man murdering Colman didn’t seem to have crossed his mind, and if the police had come knocking he would surely have mentioned that. If nobody else thought the old man was guilty, who was Adam to start accusing him – on the basis of nothing but the shape and location of one dark pit of missing memories, among the thirty percent of everything that he didn’t recall?
He turned to the screen again, trying to think of a more discriminating test of his hypothesis. Though the flow into the side-load itself would have been protected by a massive firewall of privacy laws, Adam doubted that any instructions to the technicians at Loadstone were subject to privilege. Which meant that, even if he found them on the laptop, they were unlikely to be incriminatory. The only way the old man could have phrased a request to forget that he’d bashed Colman’s brains out would have been to excise all of the more innocent events that were connected to it in any way, like a cancer surgeon choosing the widest possible sacrificial margin. But he might also have issued the same instructions merely in order to forget as much as possible of that whole bleak decade – when Hollywood had fucked him over, Carlos had been grieving for the woman who raised him, and he’d somehow, just barely, kept it together, long enough to make a new start in the ’20s.
Adam logged off the kiosk. Auster had warned him not to become obsessed – and the man was the closest thing to a friend that he had right now. If everyone in the industry really staved in the skulls of everyone who’d crossed them, there’d be no one left to run the place.
He called a car and headed home.
9
Under protest, at Adam’s request, Sandra spread the three sturdy boxes out on the floor, and opened them up to reveal the foam, straps, and recesses within. They reminded Adam of the utility trunks that the old man’s crews had used for stowing their gear.
“Don’t freak out on me,” she pleaded.
“I won’t,” Adam promised. “I just want a clear picture in my mind of what’s about to happen.”
“Really? I don’t even let my dentist show me his planning videos.”
“I trust you to do a better job than any dentist.”
“You’re too kind.” She gestured at the trunks like a proud magician, bowing her head for applause.
Adam said, “Now you have no choice, El Dissecto: you’ve got to take a picture for me once it’s done.”
“I hope your Spanish is better than you’re making it sound.”
“I was aiming for vaudevillian, not voseo.” Adam had some memories of the old man being prepared for surgery, but he wasn’t sure that it was possible to rid them of survivor’s hindsight and understand exactly how afraid he’d been that he might never wake up.
Sandra glanced at her watch. “No more clowning around. You need to undress and lie down on the bed, then repeat the code phrase aloud, four times. I’ll wait outside.”
Adam didn’t care if she saw him naked while he was still conscious, but it might have made her uncomfortable. “OK.” Once she left, he stopped stalling; he removed his clothes quickly, and began the chant.
“Red lentils, yellow lentils. Red lentils, yellow lentils. Red lentils, yellow lentils.” He glanced past the row of cases to Sandra’s toolbox; he’d seen inside it before, and there were no cleavers, machetes or chainsaws. Ju
st magnetic screwdrivers that could loosen bolts within him without even penetrating his skin. He lay back and stared at the ceiling. “Red lentils, yellow lentils.”
The ceiling stayed white but sprouted new shadows, a ventilation grille and a light fitting, while the texture of the bedspread beneath his skin went from silken to beaded. Adam turned his head; the same clothes as he’d removed were folded neatly beside him. He dressed quickly, walked over to the connecting door between the suites, and knocked.
Sandra opened the door. She’d changed her clothes since he’d last seen her, and she looked exhausted. His watch showed 11:20 pm local time, 9:20 back home.
“I just wanted to let you know that I’m still in here,” he said, pointing to his skull.
She smiled. “OK, Adam.”
“Thank you for doing this,” he added.
“Are you kidding? They’re paying me all kinds of allowances and overtime, and it’s not even that long a flight. Feel free to come back here as often as you like.”
He hesitated. “You didn’t take the photo, did you?”
Sandra was unapologetic. “No. It could have gotten me sacked, and not all of the company’s rules are stupid.”
“OK. I’ll let you sleep. See you in the morning.”
“Yeah.”
Adam lay awake for an hour before he could bring himself to mutter his code word for the milder form of sleep. If he’d wished, Loadstone could have given him a passable simulation of the whole journey – albeit with a lot of cheating to mask the time it took to shuffle him back and forth between their servers and his body. But the airlines didn’t recognize any kind of safe “flight mode” for his kind of machine, even when he was in pieces and locked inside three separate boxes. The way he’d experienced it was the most honest choice: a jump-cut, and thirteen hours lost to the gaps.
#
In the morning, Sandra had arranged to join an organized tour of the sights of San Salvador. Her employer’s insurance company was more concerned about her safety than Adam’s, and in any case it would have been awkward for both of them to have her following him around with her toolbox.