“I can’t use this,” Jamie said. “I mean, I’m just here trying to get some lunch money.”
“The world is flat. It’s two hundred and fifty-six square miles in area, sixteen by sixteen. When you go someplace on a plane, what they do is, they just use their powers inside your mind to make you think like the time is passing To make you think you’re getting somewhere.”
The nurse came back wheeling a cart piled high with plastic sacks of blood. She read the label on Jamie’s and said, “Name please?”
“They do things inside your mind,” the man whispered to Jamie.
“My name is Jamie Mays,” she told the nurse.
The nurse showed her the name on the label—Jamie Mays— and Jamie nodded, and the old man whispered, “They’re putting new memories into us right now.”
The nurse hung the blood up next to the saline solution and adjusted the tubes and stoppers, and one tube turned bright crimson as it fed Jamie’s own blood, minus plasma, back into her. “New memories is what’s inside that bag,” the man announced calmly.
“Great,” Jamie said. “I was sick of the old ones.”
“In Malaya, I killed a little Chink. Supposedly Malaya. I broke his head apart,” the man said.
“Jesus Christ,” Jamie told the ceiling.
“There were machines inside his head,” the man said quietly.
“Everybody in this town — they’re all the same,” Jamie told the ceiling.
“That’s what I mean!”
“No — I mean — oh, forget it.”
“There was machine stuff inside his head. He wasn’t a real person.”
“Why don’t you quit? I can’t use that baloney right now.”
“Everywhere you go, it’s the same people. Don’t you see what’s happening to your life, woman?”
“Not exactly,” Jamie said.
“You’re going to see, all right. Something is happening to your life, and you’re going to see what it is.”
“I was afraid of that,” Jamie said.
“If you think you’re afraid now,” the man said.
2
Bill Houston’s elbows on the bar were numb. He couldn’t feel his mouth in his face. Respectfully he held his injured hand aloft, as if ready for some arm-wrestling. It was bandaged and sewn up like a teddy bear’s, but its throbbing was distant and nothing like pain. From the high place that was his head he looked down at the drink in front of him and saw that its ice was melted, a sign he was slowing down, because when he was drinking seriously he wasted no time and there was always plenty of ice banging around inside the glass when he was finished. “Hey — what is this place, anyways?” he asked the bartender. “What’s the name of this place?”
The bartender was very rapidly washing beer glasses two at a time, sticking them down into the suds and then into the rinse water, and then setting them in neat rows on a towel laid out by the sink. The bartender said, “Say what?”
“I says what is the name of this place?”
The bartender puffed a sigh upward, as if trying to blow his hair away from his eyes. But he was bald. “This bar has the electrifying name of Joe’s Bar,” he said.
“No — but what town is it, I mean to say. What town.”
“Don’t ask,” the bartender said. “You don’t want to know.”
“Fair enough. Okay,” Bill Houston said.
He watched the bartender wash glasses. He was always fascinated by small, deft movements of the hands and arms. His own arms were wrecked. His elbows made popping noises when he flexed them, and his fingers were blunt and misshapen. High living had worked some kind of bad influence on his nerves and caused his hands to quake and rattle when spooning sugar into coffee or raising a glass to his mouth. But he could lift the rear wheels of a V-8 Ford entirely off the ground. “I can’t feel my face,” he told the bartender. It took him a long time to say words.
“That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?”
“Can’t exactly feel the rest of my body, neither.”
“So? You complaining?”
Bill Houston knew that way of talking. “I’ll make you a bet,” he said. “Bet I can ask just one more question, and then I’ll know what town you got here.”
The bartender seemed to be ignoring him.
“Hey — does a bus stop out front there every now and then?”
“Well,” the bartender said, “it ain’t gonna come in here for you.”
Bill Houston guffawed, thumped the bar, pointed a triumphant finger at the bartender like the barrel of a gun: “Chicago!”
He was in the back of a spacious, empty establishment trying to woo a large woman named Gail Ann, for whom he was experiencing a tender fascination. They danced. Bill Houston was clumsy, and when they danced nearer the bowling game, he put in a quarter and began flinging the metal puck at the plastic pins hanging down from above the board. David Allan Coe sang on the jukebox as they traded glances across the width of the bowling game, alternately bold and shy glances. They sat at a small round table in the back, talking low, head-to-head. It was an orange table that made him think of things from outer space.
Now Hank Williams, Jr., began singing out of the jukebox like a swan, and Bill Houston’s heart grew large and embraced the universe. He wondered if the jukeboxes of all cafes and barrooms were owned by the Mafia, like they told you, and he wondered at all the juke-joints he’d walked into, marvelled at the number of them, saw every narrow dance floor stretched out end to end in a panorama not of what he’d traversed, but of what lay before him, as if it were his past he must start living now and not his future; and he asked Gail Ann, “Gail Ann, what time is it?” It was a question weighted with desperation, because he was seized suddenly with the idea there was not very much time. He grasped his drink more firmly. It was cold to the touch.
Gail Ann told him she didn’t have the slightest idea what time it was. She would get herself another beer maybe and find that out. She went in the direction of the bar, but walked right on past it to the coatrack, grabbed her coat, and strolled out the door into Chicago. The door had one of those vacuum devices on it that prevent slamming, and Bill Houston watched it shut quietly and slowly. He caught a glimpse of Gail Ann’s coat unfurling behind her as she threw it around her shoulders and the door closed. There was a wall-poster on this side of the door, an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra over the legend, “Old Blue-Eyes Is Back.” Bill Houston nodded goodbye to Frank Sinatra.
The wind was coming down from the North Pole, travelling across the flat of Canada for a thousand miles to slap him in the face as if he were a child. Wilson Street was covered with innumerable bits of trash that picked up and set down in flocks like paper birds feeding alongside the buildings. Bill Houston went, “Oooooooh!”—meaning to launch into a song, like a drunken sailor, but he faded off, forgetting what to sing. He wasn’t a sailor any more anyway. He was just a fool on the move, no less bitter than the wind. He was an ex-sailor, and an ex-offender — though he couldn’t, for the life of him, say who it was he had offended — and he was an ex-husband — three ex-husbands, actually — and he’d been parted from his money and from Jamie in Pittsburgh, spending like the sailor he no longer was, slapping Jamie’s little darling Miranda — who would almost certainly grow up to become a cheap sleaze — and spending fifty percent of their time together in an alcoholic blackout. Where had Chicago come from? It frightened him in his mind to wake up in unexpected towns with great holes in his recollection, particularly to understand that he’d been doing things, maybe committing things: his body mobilizing itself, perhaps changing his life all around, making raw deals he would someday have to pay the ticket for.